Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)

The world needs to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources fast — but we're not moving nearly quickly enough. Even as solar and wind costs have plummeted, we're still adding more fossil fuel capacity than clean energy in many regions. The challenge isn't just building more renewable power plants. It's also storing that energy when the sun isn't shining, upgrading ancient electrical grids, speeding up painfully slow permitting processes, and dealing with the reality that we've already built trillions of dollars worth of coal and gas infrastructure that someone paid for and expects to keep running.

Meanwhile, nearly a billion people still lack electricity entirely, and even in wealthy countries, our energy systems are rigid and wasteful. We need technology solutions that make clean energy cheaper, faster to deploy, and more reliable than fossil fuels — not just sometimes, but always.

Atmospheric CO2 levels are already higher than they've been in millions of years, and they'll keep rising for years even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow. To limit warming to safe levels, we likely need to actively remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere — not just stop adding more.

This requires technologies that can capture CO2 directly from the air or oceans and store it permanently, at massive scale and reasonable cost.

Growing plants that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, using them for energy production, and then capturing and storing the resulting CO2 emissions. This creates a net-negative emissions process — more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere than is released. BECCS can use agricultural residues, dedicated energy crops, or forestry waste as feedstock.