We’ve reached a point with climate change that environmental experts are literally throwing ideas at the wall, desperately hoping one or more of them will stick.

Honestly, unless we figure something else soon, we might as well all get out our violins and get inspired by the fire.

This carbon vacuum is one such idea, and as it’s recently been switched on, environmentalists are crossing all of their fingers and toes.

Carbon capture facility “Mammoth” is owned by Swiss company Climeworks. They turned on their operation this week, sucking available carbon from the air and injecting it deep underground.

At ten times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, it’s living up to its name.

Mammoth claims a capacity of 36,000 tons of carbon a year, which is the equivalent of removing 7,800 cars off the road.

Based in Iceland, the plant is powered by geothermal energy, which means that it’s not compounding the issue in the process.

Some, though, aren’t convinced these direct air capture (DAC) plants are the best way forward in the fight against the inevitable climate catastrophe.

They argue it’s a distraction from addressing the root cause of the problem – a bandaid rather than a cure.

Others, though, argue that we’re at the point where we almost certainly could use both.

Another criticism is that the process isn’t cheap – around $1K for every 1 ton of carbon removed. They would need to reduce that to around $100 for every 1 ton to make it more palatable on a larger scale.

Big Oil is predictably making things worse, suggesting they could extract even more oil from the trapped carbon.

Nonprofit Carbon180 says this is obviously a step in the wrong direction.

“One of the concerns that we have is that folks are going to try and use this as an offset for continued fossil fuel production, when largely the role of carbon removal is to address legacy emissions.”

US startup Occidental announced plans to build an even bigger facility called STRATOS that could suck up 500,000 tons of CO2 a year.

The idea isn’t going away.

But whether or not it will be the answer to the planet’s prayers remains to be seen.

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