http://www.npr.org/2013/06/27/189522647/this-climate-fix-might-be-decades-ahead-of-its-time



Every year, people add 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air, mostly by burning fossil fuels. That's contributing to climate change. A few scientists have been dreaming about ways to pull some of that CO2 out of the air, but face stiff skepticism and major hurdles. This is the story of one scientist who's pressing ahead.

Peter Eisenberger is a distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Earlier in his career, he ran the university's famed Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and founded Columbia's Earth Institute. He was never one of those scientists who tinkered into the night on inventions. But he realized he didn't need to be.

"If you looked at knowledge as a commodity, we had generated this enormous amount of knowledge and we hadn't even begun to think of the many ways we could apply it," Eisenberger says. He decided he'd settle on a problem he wanted to solve, and then dive into the pool of knowledge for existing technologies that could help him.

He started looking for a way to pull carbon dioxide right out of the air. "And it turned out the best device already exists," he says. "It's called a monolith. That is the same type of instrument that's in the catalytic converter in your car. It cleans up your exhaust."

Eisenberg's monoliths grab carbon dioxide from the air, and release it again when you heat them up.

He teamed up with a colleague at Columbia, , and formed a company to develop the idea. got seed money from Edgar Bronfman, Jr. — CEO of Warner Music Group and the former CEO of Seagram's, his family's business.

The company has built two pilot plants in Menlo Park, Calif. But of course there are big issues to solve: what do you do with the carbon dioxide once you've captured it, and how do you make money?