But carbon removal has become a sensitive topic. There are genuine concerns that an increased focus on greenhouse gas reduction could encourage governments and businesses to delay or even avoid the most obvious and direct way to tackle climate change. climate: prevent emissions from the atmosphere in the first place.
The convenient realization that we may continue to pump out large amounts of carbon dioxide and simply clean up the atmosphere in the future is an example of what is known as a “moral hazard.” It risks prolonging the use of fossil fuels and pushing the costs of dealing with climate change onto future generations.
this is a Legitimate concern. Some companies have wrong suggestion that removing carbon could allow us to continue emitting emissions at almost half of current global levels. But that requires capturing and storing carbon dioxide at levels that are almost certainly not technically, environmentally or economically feasible, or possibly all of the above.
However, there are also a real risk that stigmatizing decarbonization over moral hazard concerns poses a greater danger: delaying much-needed investment and hindering the ability to achieve climate goals in the future. our future. Unfortunately, after decades of delay, there are now only a handful of avenues to meet our climate goals that don’t entail cutting emissions today and building up the capacity to suck up some large amounts of carbon dioxide for decades to come.
Emission reduction is not enough
Why we need to remove carbon in the first place, and why we can’t stop climate change by “not absolute“Emissions? Recently UN report identifies four different roles for carbon removal in climate model scenarios that limit warming to less than 2 ˚C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
First, while fossil fuels can be replaced by clean energy alternatives across much of the economy, there will be some ongoing carbon dioxide emissions from industries. difficult to completely decarbonize. These are key industries, like aviation, cement and steelmaking, where we simply don’t have affordable and scalable carbon-free technologies available. While more work needs to be done to understand how low our carbon dioxide emissions can be, these types of sectors will likely continue to produce a few billion tons per year needs to be neutralized through carbon removal.
Second, carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas that is warming the planet. Others, including methane and nitrous oxide from sources such as livestock, livestock waste and fertilizer use, are much more difficult to remove completely.
The Recent United Nations report found that existing technologies could reduce these emissions by around 50%, with additional behavioral changes such as dietary changes pushing that number to 66%. However, the removal of carbon will have to counterbalance the quite a large amount of money left.
