My monthly water bill is about £20. Half of it pays for the water that is piped into my London flat; the other half covers the cost of treating the wastewater from my property. That most unremarkable of facts about my ablutions has a climate lesson: we already pay to manage some of the waste generated by daily living.
Why don’t we have similar laws for managing carbon dioxide discharge? Researchers at the University of Oxford, lead by Myles Allen, argue that we should. They advocate for a “carbon takeback obligation” . They call those shares “stored fractions” that will increase slowly to reach 100% by midcentury, meeting the requirement set under the Paris Agreement to “balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases”.. That means scaling up the industry 100 times in less than a decade. But it is doable, especially if you start smaller, says Margriet Kuijper, an independent consultant on carbon management.