Will Technology Save Us?

“We can choose to keep shooting up the curve of exponential growth, bringing us ever closer to irreversible tipping points in ecological collapse, and hope that technology will save us. But if for some reason it doesn’t work, then we’re in trouble.” (Jason Hickel)

Gambling in Paris

“Here’s how the [2015] Paris Agreement works. Each country submits a pledge on how much they will reduce their annual emissions. The pledges – known as Nationally Determined Contributions – are supposed to be set in line with the goal of keeping warming to 1.5°C. But if you add up all the pledges that have been made by signatory nations as of 2020, you’ll notice something rather strange: they don’t come anywhere close to keeping us under 1.5°C. In fact, they don’t even keep us under 2°C. Even if all the countries in the world fulfill their pledges – which are voluntary and non-binding, so there’s certainly no guarantee of this – global emissions will keep rising. We’ll still be hurtling towards 3.3°C of global warming by the end of the century. In other words, even with the Paris Agreement in place, we’re on track for catastrophe.” (Jason Hickel)

Here is the explanation. In the early 2000s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) modelers realized that it would be impossible to keep climate change to 1.5°C by operating a complete transition to renewable energies if our energy needs keep increasing at the rate they do. In the growth-as-usual scenario, fossil fuels have to remain in the mix. And since growth is embedded in our economic system, the Paris Agreement could only be about something other than growth trade-offs. It then relied on “negative emissions.” What are they, and why are they insufficient to reach the goal set in Paris in 2015?

In 2001, an Austrian Academic named Michael Obersteiner published a paper explaining how to achieve negative emissions at the planetary level. His idea was to dedicate vast tracts of land to grow biomass, recycle that biomass for energy production, and sequester underground the CO2 it initially pulled out of the atmosphere. The technology involved came to be known as BECCS: Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage.¹

Here is how the Institute for Carbon Responsible Removal defines it: “Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a carbon removal technique that depends on two technologies. Biomass (organic material) is converted into heat, electricity, or liquid or gas fuels (the “bioenergy” step), and the carbon emissions from this bioenergy conversion are captured and stored in geological formations or embedded in long-lasting products (the “carbon capture and storage” step). Because the biomass draws carbon from the atmosphere as it grows, BECCS can be a negative emissions technology when it is implemented well. That is, BECCS could serve to draw down the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. However, care must be taken to ensure that emissions from the growing, harvesting, transporting, and processing of the biomass do not outweigh the captured carbon, and that the storage of captured carbon is reliable over long timescales.”²

The IPCC endorsed BECCS in its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the document upon which the Paris Agreement is built. Consequently, says Jason Hickel, “BECCS sits right at the centre of our big plan to save the world, even though most people have never even heard of it.”

Jumping off a cliff

Climate scientists have long had objections to the BECCS.³ The author of Less is More joins them.

• First, BECCS has never been proven to be scalable. The CSS system would have to suck up 15 billion tons of CO2 annually, making it one of the biggest structural feats ever attempted in human history.

• Moreover, “It will only become viable,” says Jason Hickel, “if governments around the world agree to put a price on carbon at least ten times higher than it is presently priced in the European Union.”

• Even if the technical and economic obstacles were overcome, the biomass to be created would require “to create biofuel plantations covering an area two to three times the size of India, gobbling up about two-thirds of the planet’s arable land.”

• The ecological consequences would be of enormous proportions, too. “Vast tracts of forest would have to be destroyed, slashing global forest cover by 10% from its already-precarious levels. This would drive an additional 7% loss in biodiversity, further exacerbating mass extinction.”⁴

• Besides, “the use of chemical fertilizers for monoculture on such an unprecedented scale would decimate insect populations, pollute water systems, exacerbate soil depletion and worsen coastal dead zones.”⁵

• In addition, “BECCS plantations would require twice as much water as we already use for farming, placing communities and ecosystems around the world under significant stress.”⁶

• Last but not least, giving ourselves license to overshoot the carbon budget thanks to the supposed retroactive virtue of BECCS “means triggering possible tipping points and feedback loops that could push temperatures completely out of our control. And if that happens, the whole [BECCS] exercise would have been in vain.”

In 2018, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council published a report condemning the reliance on BECCS and other negative emission technologies.⁷ The latest scientific assessments show that the safe use of BECCS will reduce global emissions by at most 1%. Better than nothing but a far cry from the savior technology that the Paris Agreement hoped it to be and which, to be fair, Michael Obersteiner himself never pretended it could.

1. The History of BECCS, by Leo Hickman, Carbon Brief 2016.
2. What is BECCS? at https://www.american.edu
3. Sabine Fuss et al., Betting on negative emissions, Nature Climate Change 4(10), 2014, pp. 850–853. Pete Smith et al., Biophysical and economic limits to negative CO2 emissions, Nature Climate Change 6(1), 2016, pp. 42–50. 6 Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, The trouble with negative emissions, Science 354(6309), 2016, pp. 182–183.
4. Vera Heck, Biomass-based negative emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries, Nature Climate Change 8(2), 2018, pp. 151–155.
5. Pete Smith et al., Biophysical and economic limits to negative CO2 emissions, Nature Climate Change 6(1), 2016, pp. 42–50.
6. Six problems with BECCS, FERN briefing, 2018.
7. Negative emission technologies: What role in meeting Paris Agreement targets? See also, “Look before you Leap”: European Science Academies Caution against Subsidies for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS); Daisy Dunne, Geo-engineering carries ‘large risks’ for the natural world, studies show, Carbon Brief, 2018.