Sobering news from the other side of the world: China is burning almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and projections put India on course for a similarly dramatic uptick in consumption. This is one of the consequences of globalization; as a larger proportion of the world is brought advanced technology, our energy needs will skyrocket. How would our atmosphere look today if all of Africa had, a hundred years ago, somehow vaulted into the first or even second world? How much more advanced might our climate crisis now be, with all those extra polluters?

If we really want to address world poverty, we need to accept that mass electricity is as fundamental to the modern experience as medicine or plumbing. If we aren’t ready to deal with the pollution this causes, all our humanitarian intentions might be for naught. We can’t ask the two most populous nations on the planet to politely refrain from adopting the electrical excesses that have only been supportable in the West for so long because so few people could previously afford them. Few are going to be willing to continue living like medieval peasants, just to save the world — think about how much power will be needed just to furnish an affluent India with air conditioning, let alone Netflix.

As a result, basically everyone agrees that carbon-reduced power sources are a necessity. Even China, which has recently seen an incredible spike in awareness of their urban air quality problems, is beginning to get the message. There are only two general sorts of solution possible: find cleaner sources of energy, or find a way to lower the impact of existing ones.

We’ve been making small steps toward the latter solution for decades, now, with every car now produced with a catalytic converter to filter emissions, and coal power plants doing at least some pre- and post-combustion scrubbing of the fuel and flue gasses. It’s not nearly enough. The percentage of pollutants extracted is just too low, or the expense is often prohibitive. So-called oxygen-fuel combustion (as though they aren’t all oxygen-fuel combustion) can reduce the majority of emissions, but remains expensive and uncompetitive.

A recent study from Newcastle University took one of the most effective forms of carbon capture — the conversion of carbon dioxide to harmless calcium carbonate, or chalk — and made it “a thousand times cheaper” by mimicking the shell-building chemistry of sea urchins and other shell-monsters. Where before an expensive enzyme called carbonic anhydrase was needed, this study claims that nickel nanoparticles like those found on living shells can grab and sequester CO2 just as effectively, and that the carbonate particles are easily condensed into an inert solid.

By far the biggest benefit to this sort of advance is that it allows us to retrofit existing infrastructure, maintaining power production while lowering emissions at a fraction of the cost of, say, a new nuclear reactor. Even if these efforts are wildly successful, however, most focus solely on extracting carbon dioxide, which still leaves many sulfur products and other harmful gasses intact. Worse, according to the International Energy Agency about half of new coal power plants use old, inefficient technologies. At the rates we will require new power plants, the negative impact of the old models still in production will more than outweigh the (relative) benefits of the newer ones. The fracking process can be almost comically harmful to local environments — but there’s some merit to the idea that localized damage is a small price to pay for cleaning up the atmosphere, especially since most of the carbon capture methods developed for coal are directly applicable to natural gas.

Next page: Treating the symptom, not the cause