The Climate Graph

February 21st, 2024 (8 months ago) • 1 minute

A marginal abatement cost (MAC) curve compares the costs and emissions impact of different technologies. It's hard to interpret at first, but bear with me; it's interesting.

The y-axis represents the amount of emissions reduced, and the x-axis represents the cost of reducing those emissions.

If we don't do anything now, we will be staring at 5 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, which will tend to increase in the future. With about $60 per ton of CO2 reduction technology invested, we can reduce it by about 1 gigaton by investing in renewable energy.

However, slowly at the $100 mark, the carbon emission reduction from renewable energy starts to plateau, and we have to explore other technologies which are not yet cost-effective to further reduce them. This makes sense because there's only so much that using renewable energy can do.

Direct Air Capture(DAC) is a very common topic where you build infrastructure to literally suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. But this is super expensive. There's only a few companies doing so and governments are working with universities on the research for this.