It will take more conversations about the potential
for negative emission technologies to create the funding in research and development necessary to make carbon removal a serious player in the investment sector.
Peters co-authored a paper published last year warning that staking the future only
on negative emissions technologies presents a «moral hazard» because they're unproven, there is a substantial risk that the technology can't be scaled up, and it may allow policymakers to think that weaning humanity away from fossil fuels is not urgent.
Jeff Tollefson in Nature points to the 2C scenarios in the fifth IPCC report as a source of hope for policymakers, yet their unreasonable reliance upon
negative emissions technologies like BECCS — a systemic bias, as Chris Mooney in the Washington Post reports — suggest there's limited or distorted hope in models.
As the impacts of climate change become more pronounced in coming years, BECCS and
other negative emissions technologies are looked to as a means of avoiding dangerous future climate scenarios by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Tracy
discusses negative emissions technologies, and direct air capture technologies in specific, including what role they might play in climate policy, and how we should think about governing these efforts.
This # 9m scheme is looking at everything from how
feasible negative emissions technologies will be, to what might happen if we try to use them, as well as the «moral hazard» of assuming such options will become available instead of cutting emissions faster now.
The increase in emissions in 2017 makes it more challenging for the world to limit warming to «well below 2C», as per the Paris Agreement — at least in the absence of large - scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere from as - yet - unproven
negative emission technologies later in the century.
By accepting a mere 50 % probability of success, by
assuming negative emissions technologies will be invented, and by assuming unrealistically low non-energy emissions, the SDS significantly understates the degree of change in energy systems needed to achieve the goals.
Negative emission technologies assessed in the report Update on global greenhouse gas emissions This year, the Emissions Gap Report includes an assessment of the emissions associated with the Nationally Determined Contributions and current policies of each of the G20 members, including the European Union.
This piece, published in Nature Climate Change, explores the need for BECCS technology in accordance with IPCC projections and assesses the challenges that accompany large
scale negative emissions technology deployment.
Climate expert Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester recently reported in Nature Geoscience that, of the 400 IPCC emissions scenarios used in the 2014 Working Group report to keep warming below two degrees, some 344 require the deployment of
negative emissions technologies after 2050.
If action is delayed, total investment costs will rise, the chances of stranded assets will increase and
costly negative emission technologies will be needed to limit planetary warming.»
Van Vuuren, D. et al. (2018) Alternative pathways to the 1.5 C target reduce the need
for negative emission technologies, Nature Climate Change, doi: 10.1038 / s41558 -018-0119-8