As our society goes about its everyday business, there is one thing that none of us can ignore. And that is our carbon signature. We have to become more carbon aware as time goes on, there is no getting around that fact.
We keep seeing our work on reducing planet warming emissions fall dramatically short of the mark. And now we are left with one important task. We desperately need very large scale projects that can literally suck the carbon dioxide right out of the air and the atmosphere. Experts say that these will need to be in place no later than the 2030s. This is the only to defend our world against climate change.
New Technologies are Forthcoming
The good news is that there are several brand new technologies that are aiming to retrieve and collect carbon emissions, which means they are delivering “negative emissions”. However they are expensive, they are controversial, and are only in the very earliest testing phase.
However “if you’re really concerned about coral reefs, biodiversity and food production in very poor regions, we’re going to have to deploy negative emission technology at scale,” stated Bill Hare from the group called Climate Analytics.
“I don’t think we can have confidence that anything else can do this,” this chief executive from Berlin informed a crowd in London at a climate change conference.
In 2015, several World leaders agreed to attempt to hold global warming to around 1.5C above historical pre-industrial periods. Researchers feel that this is the key in providing protection of small island nations from future dangerous rises in sea level, and will shore up the production of food while helping to prevent extreme weather.
Trying Prevent More Global Warming
These vital carbon sucking technologies will probably be needed just to hold the Earth to even a less aggressive 2 degrees of warming, scientists from Chatham House have said. Chatham House is a British thinktank. The world is already seeing around one degree of warming on average, they claim.
“It’s something you don’t want to talk about very much but it’s an unaccountable truth: we will need geoengineering by the mid-2030s to have a chance at the 1.5C goal,” Hare stated, as he referred to the efforts of cooling the Earth via engineering.
The most promising of these ideas include planting new forests across large regions that will absorb carbon, and then harvest that wood for its energy and then pump all those emissions underground – an interesting process which is likely to be featured in a future Climate Change.
There is also the idea of developing machines that can collect carbon dioxide right out of the air and direct it underground to be neutralized.
The only problem is that so far the effort to store carbon underground has not shown very much progress. In fact, some even claim they are taking backward steps. But the underground storage of carbon has been promoted as part of a push by the United States and other countries to develop “clean coal” technology.
Similarly, planting more forests – a technology known as Beccs, or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage – raises questions about food security and land rights, scientists said.
Le Quéré said Beccs is “probably essential to take us to zero emissions” although “it’s really difficult to imagine we can use land at the levels required in the models”.
She called for experts to focus on proven approaches, such as improving energy efficiency, promoting cleaner transport, eating less meat and scaling up renewable energies.
Many experts fear that launching costly “negative emissions” technologies could reduce the pressure to act swiftly to cut emissions now.
