I have developed and updated 15 resources in my four years at Climate Generation. However, the 2025 update of Next Generation Climate for grades 6-8 (NGC) felt significantly more challenging. For the first time, I faced an atmosphere of federal pushback against the validity of climate change science and education. I struggled to find alternative sources for data sets and graphs that I would normally access from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Resources I wanted to share, like the 2024 Climate Literacy Principles, disappeared from websites as quickly as I found them. I wrote words like “climate justice” and “equity”, wondering how many educators would avoid downloading NGC due to anti-DEI policies. Honestly, the process was disheartening at times. The chaos sowed by the federal government created uncertainty, as intended.
However, amidst the uncertainty exists a more powerful feeling: a conviction that climate change curricula like NGC are more needed than ever.
As government agencies like NOAA and the EPA are dismantled, limiting their abilities to inform the public about climate adaptation strategies and protect us from environmental threats, it is crucial that our students have access at school to information about how climate change impacts their daily lives and futures. Education is a climate solution because an informed public is one that can make the necessary changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to local climate impacts.
Beyond climate science and data, the updated NGC builds on previous versions to bring a more human-centered approach. Our students need inspiration to take localized climate action to create safer, more equitable futures. In the 2025 edition, you will see:
- Discussions of the social, economic, and political causes of climate change;
- Examples of leaders in climate justice movements;
- More guidance for how to take climate action; and
- Opportunities for reflection and mindfulness to support students’ mental health.
Education is not only a climate solution; it is now an act of resistance.
Teaching concepts like climate change and climate justice can oppose the oppression and cruelty we’re witnessing at the federal level. Educating about what’s really happening, what people experience every day, is necessary for students to feel safe, secure, and supported, so that they don’t feel that they alone care about the crises facing our world. We need to show students that most people care, and that together we can leverage our efforts toward making the world a better place for all. We need educational resources that center our collective humanity; foster empathy for all of life; celebrate working for the common good, not individual gain; and give students opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills, confidence, and motivation to live into their values and take positive action.
We know that in some states, the reality of censoring words and concepts like climate change has existed for some time. It can be risky to teach directly about climate change in some places. For those whose states follow the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), remember that the standards directly mention human-caused climate change and offer foundational concepts for understanding it. NGC includes a table of the NGSS performance expectations most closely associated with the lessons. For others, we must remember that we are a collective. We can all contribute in some way; some of us can say climate change, and some of us can talk about the weather. Some of us can use the full NGC curriculum, and others may incorporate small ideas from it.
Restrictions in education aren’t really about specific words; they’re about controlling narratives, erasing truth, and amassing power against the people. It’s hard work, but in times of uncertainty, it can help to focus on what we can control.
As educators, we can influence what happens in our learning spaces:
- We can localize climate change so that our students see the personal effects and tangible opportunities for change.
- We can integrate community science so that students can participate in researching and communicating about climate issues and solutions.
- We can discuss the root causes of climate change (even without saying climate change) — how our global legacy of hurting the many to enrich the few has impacted everything from wars to housing stability to the air and water we need to live.
- We can facilitate civic engagement in everything from writing to legislators, to planting trees, to creating public art with a message.
- We can share stories with our students that inspire them to be kind, honest, fair, and brave.
We hope that NGC provides enough inroads that everyone can find a path to introduce their students to climate change, particularly the ways in which we can take action together to protect and nurture ourselves and our environment.
In the final week of editing NGC, I triple-checked a link to a graph from NOAA; one that depicts the data collected since the 1880s showing the substantial increase in land and ocean temperatures over the past century. Not surprisingly, the link no longer exists. I left the graph in Appendix B with the citation to a broken link; to me, this data tells an essential story that we cannot fully appreciate with another figure. This administration is trying to overwhelm us, to silence us, to exhaust us to the point of inaction. But they will not succeed; they cannot, for the sake of our planet and the next generations after us.
Moments of uncertainty are an invitation to determine what you are certain about.
What and whom do you value? What are you going to do about it? Climate Generation will continue to do this work as long as we are able. While we always advocate for rest and self-care, we also encourage you to find ways you can plug into everyday actions. We hope that, for many of you, it might look like downloading NGC and facilitating the activities with your students. Together, we can make a positive impact on our present and future. No matter your situation, Climate Generation’s staff and resources will support you along the way.
Marie grew up in Wisconsin on the ancestral and contemporary lands of the Menominee, Potowatomi, and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and the contemporary lands of the Oneida. Marie’s fascination with human relationships to the earth led her to study Environmental Education and Spanish Language at UW-Stevens Point and later earn her master’s degree in Environmental Studies and Environmental Education from Antioch University New England. She’s pursued her varied interests at multiple nature centers and an aquarium in Minnesota; community gardens in New Hampshire; and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua. At Climate Generation, Marie loves creating resources that encourage people to be curious, connect deeply, and work collaboratively. When she’s not writing curriculum, she enjoys hiking, cross country skiing, reading, and spending time with her husband and her dog, Merlin.
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When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological economist at Lund University, tells Carbon Brief.
Influential organisations relying on CCS in their net-zero scenarios range from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) through to the oil company Shell. The IEA has stated that n