Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?

Three startups, Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat and Climeworks, are making strides with technology that can directly remove carbon dioxide from the air. What they need now is a viable business model

In Squamish, British Columbia, a Canadian town halfway between Vancouver and Whistler where the ocean meets the mountains, a startup led by Harvard physicist David Keith - and funded in part by Bill Gates - is building an industrial plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon Engineering aims to eventually build enough plants to suck many millions of tons of CO2 out of the air to reduce climate change. Its technology could help capture dispersed emissions - that is, emissions from cars, trucks, ships, planes or farm equipment - or even to roll back atmospheric concentrations of CO2.