Klaus Lackner’s once wacky idea increasingly looks like an essential part of solving climate change. Lackner and his colleagues at Arizona State University’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions have built a simple machine with a grand purpose: capturing and recycling carbon dioxide to ease the effects of climate change. He envisions forests of them stretching across the countryside, sucking up billions of tons of it from the atmosphere. Lackner, 66, with receding silver hair, has now been working on the problem for two decades

Given the high early costs and limited markets, he believes the technology will need significant government funding or tight regulations to be widely adopted—and more government support to cover the cost of capturing and burying the majority of the carbon dioxide that can’t be used. He thinks we’ll need to treat carbon dioxide like sewage, requiring consumers or companies to pay for its collection and disposal, whether in taxes or fees.But after decades of relatively little political action on climate change, and fierce public resistance to carbon taxes, he fears the world isn’t going to come around to that way of thinking until the suffering from climate catastrophes becomes too horrible to ignore.

One man’s two-decade quest to suck greenhouse gas out of the sky