In a world where every delay in emissions reduction was accompanied by compensating investments in Carbon-dioxide removal designed to make sure the technology would be available at the appropriate scale by the time it was needed, that temporal trade off might make some sort of sense. This is not that world. It is, instead, a world with significant experience of imagined future solutions which, in practice, prolong the status quo. The realisation that carbon-dioxide removal (cdr) had been seriously neglected, say many of those in the field, dates back roughly five years: it was a reaction to a provision of the Paris agreement of 2015 which took a few years to sink in. Developed countries wanted the Paris agreement to set a limit on global warming of no more than 2°C above the pre-industrial temperature. To sweeten things for the 1.5°C brigade, the agreement also asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to go and work out how much better the lower target would be. How practical is the Paris agreement of 2015?

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