Innovation that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air seeks to be a climate-change solution

"This is like sewage," says Klaus Lackner. "This is like garbage. And you cannot just dump it in the atmosphere."That, of course, is exactly what we've been doing for a very long time: dumping it into the atmosphere. Lackner, the director of Arizona State University's Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, is talking about carbon dioxide. He and his fellow researchers at ASU have developed, in essence, a synthetic tree that sucks CO2 out of the air. The carbon that is vacuumed up can then be stored underground, released into greenhouses or even used to make carbon-based products. Many climatologists worried about a warming planet say the answer to climate change is to phase out the use of fossil fuels,but that goal is proving difficult to achieve. Which could open the door to the broad-based development of the work of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions. The center's innovation, Bloomberg News writes, "can collect roughly 1,000 times as much CO2 as a real tree of comparable size." Watch the business news outlet's video about the development: