Some interesting results from my colleague’s research group.  I add some further context below the link…

Researchers at Waterloo Engineering have created a powder that could be used to reduce greenhouse gases at factories and power plants that burn fossil fuels. The advanced carbon powder, developed using a novel process in the lab of chemical engineering professor Zhongwei Chen, could filter and remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from emissions with almost twice the efficiency of conventional materials.

Source: New powder could reduce greenhouse gas emissions | Engineering | University of Waterloo

My Context/Analysis:   Some interesting work in materials science and chemistry.  From the published paper (sorry it’s behind a paywall, but I can read it through the university’s subscription), I can see that the amount of CO₂ captured is about 1.6 mmole of CO₂ per gram of powder, or about 70 mg/g, at flue gas conditions.  As the paper points out, this is pretty good for CO₂ adsorption, but it is not a miracle cure for all of our problems.  To put it in context, in 2016 the U.S. electricity sector emitted something like 1,800,000,000,000 kg of CO₂ (from the EPA website).  So, if the powder can capture 70 mg per g it would take about 26,000,000,000,000 kg of powder for one year of capture.  That’s a lot of powder!!  And that’s only for one sector in the U.S. alone (representing about 28% of U.S. CO₂ emissions).  So, it’s important to continue doing research, find new things and look at potential applications in a wide range of fields.  But carbon emissions and climate change is a huge problem and there aren’t any easy answers.  Reducing CO₂ emissions will generally be better than trying to capture them afterwards, like the three R’s hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle).