To quote the article's conclusion:"Negative-emission technologies are not an
insurance policy, but rather an unjust and high-stakes gamble. There is a real
risk they will be unable to deliver on the scale of their promise. If the
emphasis on equity and risk aversion embodied in the Paris Agreement are to
have traction, negative-emission technologies should not form the basis of the
mitigation agenda. This is not to say that they should be abandoned (14, 15).
They could very reasonably be the subject of research, development, and
potentially deployment, but the mitigation agenda should proceed on the premise
that they will not work at scale. The implications of failing to do otherwise
are a moral hazard par excellence."
GR - It's always great to wake up in the morning to read that my research and
that of my colleagues is an unjust, moral hazard and a threat to the planet
"par excellence". We are indeed in a very "high stakes gamble", especially if
we continue to rely exclusively on emissions reduction. This is the clear
conclusion of the IPCC, otherwise there would have been no need for them to
bet their reputations (and Earth) on unproven negative emissions. That we do
not yet know if or how we can do what the IPCC views as essential negative
emissions should be seen as clarion call for supportive policies and R&D to
find out what our options might be rather than framing any such action as
dangerous.
Curiously, the authors do state that research on such alternatives should not
be abandoned (how generous!), but then (cynically?) suggest that emissions
reduction should proceed under the assumption that alternate pathways "will not
work at scale". To the contrary, more than half of our emissions each year is
already removed from the atmosphere by natural CDR "at scale", while there is
little evidence that an equivalent amount of emissions mitigation/avoidance
will ever be implemented, including the "aspirations" of the Paris Accord. It
would therefore seem more realistic if not safer to assume that emissions
reduction will continue to seriously under-perfom and that now is the time for
high profile policy and R&D to foster and support the search for and evaluation
of possible additional CDR approaches or augmentations.
So, are the science and policy communities really prepared to let the perfect
solution, emissions reduction, be the enemy of all other possible solutions
without first open-mindedly searching for alternatives and carefully evaluating
their merits? Shouldn't the common goal here be to avert planetary meltdown by
whatever means that prove to be timely, safe and cost effective? Or is that
really too threatening to current, conventional (and limited) wisdom?
From: Andrew Lockley <andrew.lock...@gmail.com>
To: geoengineering <geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2016 4:09 PM
Subject: [geo] The trouble with negative emissions
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6309/182The trouble with negative
emissions
kevin.ander...@manchester.ac.uk; glen.pet...@cicero.oslo.no
Science 14 Oct 2016:
Vol. 354, Issue 6309, pp. 182-183
DOI: 10.1126/science.aah4567
Article
In December 2015, member states of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Paris Agreement, which aims to hold the
increase in the global average temperature to below 2°C and to pursue efforts
to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. The Paris Agreement requires that
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission sources and sinks are balanced by the
second half of this century. Because some nonzero sources are unavoidable, this
leads to the abstract concept of “negative emissions,” the removal of carbon
dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through technical means. The Integrated
Assessment Models (IAMs) informing policy-makers assume the large-scale use of
negative-emission technologies. If we rely on these and they are not deployed
or are unsuccessful at removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the levels assumed,
society will be locked into a high-temperature pathway--
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