Along with their latest dire predictions, the world’s leading climate scientists offered a new path forward—but will anyone take it?
"When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a new special report last week, it came with both good news and bad.
The good news is that the carbon budget for staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is larger than we thought, so we have a bit more time to act. The bad news is that the consequences of overshooting that threshold are very, very bad. The catastrophes that we once believed would be triggered by only 2 degrees of warming are likely to occur at this lower threshold, including widespread collapse of food yields and extreme levels of human displacement."
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"The plan the IPCC has in mind is called BECCS, which stands for “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.” The idea is to grow massive plantations around the world to absorb carbon dioxide, turn those crops into biofuel, burn it in power stations, capture the carbon dioxide that’s emitted from the smokestacks, and store it deep under the ground. Voila: negative emissions.
It sounds like an elegant solution. Politicians love it because it suggests that we can prevent climate catastrophe without having to make any major changes to the economic status quo. It’s a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.
But there are problems. First, we have no evidence that the technology will work at scale. If it doesn’t, we’ll be locked into a high-temperature pathway that’s impossible to escape. That’s why Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, two of the world’s leading climate scientists, have argued that relying on BECCS is “an unjust and high-stakes gamble”—a major moral hazard. It lulls us into postponing real action, with potentially disastrous consequences."
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