Major Climate Fail: Climeworks Emits More CO2 Than It Captures

Climeworks, the Swiss poster child of “direct air capture,” is being exposed as nothing but a glorified PR stunt that burns more carbon than it sequesters.

According to reports, this climate-tech darling — heavily subsidized by governments and praised by environmental NGOs — fails to capture even its own operational emissions. The machines built to “clean the air” are often themselves net polluters.

The numbers are damning.

Climeworks’ flagship facilities in Iceland, including the much-hyped Mammoth and Orca plants, have captured less than 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, yet require massive amounts of energy to run.

The company’s total emissions — from machinery, construction, and operations — outpace what little CO2 they manage to suck out of the air.

This is the same company that promised to lead the charge toward net zero. The reality? A carbon shell game — shifting emissions from one column to another while gobbling up tax dollars.

Clearly, climeworks isn’t solving a climate crisis. It’s monetizing it.

It offers a feel-good fantasy to corporations desperate to greenwash their reputations. And governments, eager to check boxes on emissions pledges, throw money at these “solutions” with zero accountability for real-world results.

The climate-industrial complex keeps pushing this fantasy tech as a silver bullet — despite the fact that direct air capture remains one of the most energy-inefficient and cost-prohibitive climate solutions ever conceived.

The UK government has committed £21.7 billion over 25 years to carbon capture schemes. Whitehall is subsidizing industrial air scrubbers that can’t even offset their own emissions footprint as families struggle with already soaring energy bills.

At over $1,000 per ton of CO2 captured in some cases, this is a subsidy sinkhole — it’s making the wrong people a lot of money.