In July 2025, people on social media shared images of giant structures vaguely shaped like tuning forks with blinds in the middle. The structures, according to the captions, were "artificial trees" developed by Klaus Lackner and Columbia University scientists that could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere 1,000 times faster than real trees.
A post on X (archived) about the alleged invention received more than 26,000 likes, and multiple (archived) Facebook (archived) posts (archived) sharing the news gained thousands of reactions between them.
These posts got some of the details right, and other details wrong. A community note (archived) under the X post similarly had a mix of correct and incorrect details.
Let's start with where research and development of these "artificial trees" were at when people made the posts about them:
In 2022, Carbon Collect, a private company, worked with Klaus Lackner to develop the first prototype of what it called the MechanicalTree and installed it at the Arizona State University campus in Tempe, where Lackner taught.
The prototype looked nothing like the structures in the images posted to social media. The real artificial tree was a 9-foot tall-metal cylinder that could rise to 33 feet, revealing dozens of discs designed to collect carbon. Carbon Collect posted a video to its website of the cylinder rising to its full height
Carbon Collect claimed its MechanicalTree was 1,000 times more efficient than a natural tree of the same size at carbon removal.
The company said it developed the second-generation MechanicalTree in 2024 and hoped to begin its commercial deployment in 2025. In an
If the artificial tree based on the research of an Arizona State professor was installed at the aforementioned university, why did the social media posts credit Columbia? And why did they use pictures of something that looked nothing like the real thing? Well, that had to do with where news on the artificial tree's development began.
Lackner started developing the concept of the artificial tree while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1990s, according to a Columbia Magazine article from 2006. In 2001, he joined Columbia University, where he continued his work on the artificial tree.
A Columbia University profile of Lackner quoted him as saying, "The first sketch I made ended up looking like a tuning fork, or a goal post, with Venetian blinds." In fact, a computer-generated image of that particular design appeared in a 2004 article from Columbia's news archive. The social media posts appeared to be recreations of that image from 2004, possibly AI-generated.
During Lackner's time at Columbia, the university repeatedly reported that he hoped to turn the concept into reality soon. The 2006 Columbia Magazine article reported that Lackner and Global Research Technologies, the company he was working with at the time, were on schedule to build a working model by 2007. A 2010 Columbia Climate School article said that Global Research Technologies hoped to have units within two years.
In the end, however, Lackner never completed and installed a working prototype while with Columbia and Global Research Technologies.