This unusual animation gives an architectural twist to the history and possible dark future of climate change.
A new visualization highlights areas where C02 has soared.PIK/FHP
If you want an unusual but punchy telling of the world’s explosion of
climate-warping gases, look no further than this visualization of CO2
levels over the past centuries soaring like skyscrapers into space.
“A Brief History of CO2 Emissions”
portrays the cumulative amount of this common greenhouse gas that
humans have produced since the mid-1700s. It also projects to the end of
the 21st century to show what might happen if the world disregards the Paris Agreement, an ambitious effort to limit warming that 200 countries signed onto in 2015. (President Donald Trump still wants to renege on it.)
At this point, the CO2-plagued atmosphere could see jumps in average
temperature as high as 6 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, the animation’s
narrator warns, displaying a model of Earth looking less like planet
than porcupine.
“We wanted to show where and when CO2 was emitted in the last 250
years—and might be emitted in the coming 80 years if no climate action
is taken,” emails Boris Mueller, a creator of the viz along with
designer Julian Braun and others at Germany’s University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“By visualizing the global distribution and the local amount of
cumulated CO2, we were able to create a strong image that demonstrates
very clearly the dominant CO2-emitting regions and time spans.”
The visualization begins with a small, white lump growing on London around 1760—the start of the Industrial Revolution.
More white dots quickly appear throughout Europe, rising prominently in
Paris and Brussels in the mid-1800s, then throughout Asia and the U.S.,
where in the early 1900s emissions skyrocket in the New York region,
Chicago, and Southern California.
By the time the present day rolls around, the world looks home to the
biggest construction project in existence, with spires that’d put the Burj Khalifa to shame ascending in the U.S., China, and Europe—currently the worst emitters in terms of volume of CO2.
For this project, the team pulled historical data from the U.S. Department of Energy-affiliated Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.
The “CO2 emission estimates are deduced from information on the amount
and location of fossil-fuel combustion and cement production over time,”
says Elmar Kriegler, the viz’s scientific lead. “Therefore, the
visualization also tells the history of the Industrial Revolution which
started in England, spread across Europe and the United States, and
finally across the world.”
Astute
observers will notice a couple of troubling things, such as the huge
amount of emissions pouring out of urban areas like London, New York,
and Tokyo. Cities and the power plants that keep them humming remain the
world’s largest source
of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Also notable: the relative absence
of emissions in some parts of the planet. That isn’t necessarily a good
thing. “Some regions, in particular Africa, still do not show a
significant cumulative CO2-emissions signal,” says Kriegler,
“highlighting that they are still in the beginning of industrialization
and may increase their emissions rapidly in the future, if they follow
the path of Europe, the U.S., Japan, and recently China and Southeast
Asia.”
How likely is it the worst-case scenario portrayed in this viz is
nearing our doorstep? The viz’s creators argue that some current damage
is here to stay. But they have some cause for optimism, too. “Reducing
CO2 emissions to zero in the second half of the century can be achieved
with decisive, global-scale emissions-reductions policies and efforts,”
Kriegler says. “The Paris Agreement can be an important [catalyst] for
this development if embraced fully by the world’s leading emitters and
powers. But as we say in the movie, the time to act is now.”
The race is on to prove that CO2 can be taken from the air and recycled into profitable, carbon neutral fuels. But cost and investment obstacles remain
Climeworks, the world’s first direct air capture plant, opened in June.
It hopes to sell its concentrated CO2 to companies producing fuels.
Photograph: Julia Dunlop
In
an industrial greenhouse about 30km from Zurich, plump aubergines and
juicy cherry tomatoes are ripening to perfection. Growing Mediterranean
crops in Switzerland would traditionally be energy intensive but these
vegetables are very nearly carbon-neutral. The greenhouse uses waste
energy from a nearby refuse plant, and carbon dioxide from the world’s
first commercial direct air capture plant.
The facility, designed by Zurich-based start-up Climeworks,
pumps the gas into greenhouses to boost the plants’ photosynthesis and
increase their yield, it hopes, by up to 20%. Climeworks says it will
extract around 900 tonnes of CO2 a year from the air.
The company’s end game is not plumper tomatoes but something far more
ambitious – proving that carbon dioxide can be recycled from the
atmosphere and turned into something useful. If this installation is a
success, Climeworks wants to sell its concentrated carbon dioxide to
companies producing carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels.
The greenhouse supplied by Climeworks. Photograph: Julia Dunlop/Climeworks
With concentrations of CO2 at their highest in the last 400,000 years,
the world needs to remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere – as
well as cut emissions – if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Of course, nature has been recycling carbon dioxide for millions of
years. Photosynthesis turns sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into
sugars which fuel plants, which provide us with food, wood and complex
sugars for fuel. But most plants turn less than 1% of the solar energy they receive into useful energy-rich compounds.
Scientists and entrepreneurs are working on technologies that they
hope will improve on nature and make recycling carbon dioxide a
profitable industry.
The World Economic Forum and Scientific American recently named an artificial leaf as one of the top emerging technologies of 2017. Dan Nocera, a chemist at Harvard University, is one of the scientists working on developing this “leaf”, which looks like a small, plain computer chip.
Nocera’s leaf has an energy efficiency of around 10%, according to his paper published last year in Science,
a peer-reviewed academic journal. It has two processes. The first is an
electrochemical system that uses metal catalysts and electricity from
solar panels to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then the hydrogen,
along with carbon dioxide, is fed to bacteria commonly found in soil
and water. The bacteria convert the gases into alcohols like methanol
and ethanol that are the precursors to liquid fuels.
Bionic Leaf Turns Sunlight Into Liquid Fuel
These “solar fuels” – so called because they are made from nothing more
than sunlight, water and air – could be a carbon neutral drop-in
replacement for today’s fossil fuels.
Nocera’s ultimate vision is a cheap, standalone solar-powered system
for developing countries to turn water into fuel for vehicles, cooking
or power generation. His initial target market is India, where he hopes
local scientists and entrepreneurs will help to commercialise the
system, although he admits that his technology is years from
commercialisation.
In the meantime, several start-ups are trying to beat Nocera to a
practical system to recycle CO2 into useful products. Like Nocera’s
leaf, all are designed to run on a trickle of electricity from solar
panels.
In 2015, Staff Sheehan left Yale University and founded Catalytic Innovations
to use metal catalysts like Nocera’s to turn carbon dioxide and water
into ethanol, a biofuel that is already added to petrol in many
countries to reduce its carbon footprint.
Another start-up, Opus 12, recently
spun out of Stanford University in Silicon Valley says it’s “recreating
photosynthesis, but at warp speed”. The company says its tech can be
used at any source of CO2 emissions to produce syngas. This mixture of
hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be burned like natural gas or used to
produce a range of industrial chemicals.
And at the annual American Chemical Society meeting in Washington DC last month, a small company called Dioxide Materials
said that it had developed electrolysis technology that could split
carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide – a precursor for
methanol – with twice the efficiency of previous systems.
In order for CO2 recycling systems to operate efficiently, however,
the gas has to be captured and concentrated from sources such as
factories and power stations – or extracted from the air using a system
like Climeworks’. And that isn’t cheap.
Capturing CO2 at a factory chimney could cost up to $80 per ton, according to research
from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Extracting from thin
air is pricier still. Climeworks says it currently costs around $600 to
extract a ton of CO2, although it expects that price to halve in its
second-generation plant.
“Technologies to capture CO2 from the air, like Climeworks’ units,
have the potential for the sort of steep price declines that we’ve seen
from solar, wind, and batteries, which are also factory manufactured
products,” says Matt Lucas of the Center for Carbon Removal, a
non-profit dedicated to curtailing climate change.
“But if we want to compete with gasoline,” says Sheehan, “that cost has to be practically nothing.”
There are a couple of dozen large-scale projects underway to capture
and store carbon dioxide from industrial facilities, including a pilot in India
turning CO2 into baking soda. However, the International Energy Agency
says they are not on track to meet its objective for more than 100
projects by 2020.
Another challenge is the swift change in the political climate.
“Traditionally, solar-fuelled artificial photosynthesis has been a
government-funded effort,” says Dick Co, director of the Solar Fuels Institute,
a global team of scientists working to recycle CO2 into fuels. “But
accelerated by the US election last year, we’re seeing a quick shift
from government money to philanthropists like Bill Gates and Tom
Steyer.” It’s unknown whether these philanthropists will be committed to
funding solar fuels over the years and decades they will need to reach
commercial reality.
For young companies like Catalytic Innovations, that means seeking
out every source of funding. Sheehan’s start-up has made it to the
semi-finals of the NRG Cosia Carbon XPrize,
a $20m competition to recycle waste carbon dioxide from power plants
into valuable fuel or building materials. He is now looking for money to
build a larger prototype in the hope of making it to the final round –
which would come with half a million dollars seed money.
A worker inspects solar panels at a solar farm in China. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
One of the ironies of fighting climate change is that developed
countries – which have benefited from decades or centuries of
industrialisation – are now asking developing countries to abandon
highly polluting technology.
But as developing countries work hard to grow their economies, there
are real opportunities to leapfrog the significant investment in fossil
fuel technology typically associated with economic development.
This week, researchers, practitioners and policy makers from around the world are gathered in New York city for the International Conference on Sustainable Development as part of Climate Week.
We at ClimateWorks will be putting the spotlight on how developing
countries can use low- or zero-emissions alternatives to traditional
infrastructure and technology. Developing nations are part of climate change
According to recent analysis, six of the top 10 emitters of greenhouse gases are now developing countries (this includes China). Developing countries as a bloc already account for about 60% of global annual emissions.
If we are are to achieve the global climate targets of the Paris
Agreement, these countries need an alternative path to prosperity. We
must decouple economic growth from carbon emissions. In doing so, these
nations may avoid many of the environmental, social and economic costs
that are the hallmarks of dependence on fossil fuels.
This goal is not as far-fetched as it might seem. ClimateWorks has been working as part of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project,
a global collaboration of researchers looking for practical ways
countries can radically reduce their carbon emissions – while sustaining
economic growth.
For example, in conjunction with the Australian National University,
we have modelled a deep decarbonisation pathway that shows how Australia
could achieve net zero emissions by 2050, while the economy grows by 150%.
Similarly, data compiled by the World Resources Institute shows that 21 countries have reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions
while simultaneously growing their economies since 2000. This includes
several eastern European countries that have experienced rapid economic
growth in the past two decades.
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Low Carbon Index
also found that several G20 countries have reduced the carbon intensity
of their economies while maintaining real GDP growth, including nations
classified as “developing”, such as China, India, South Africa and
Mexico.
‘Clean’ economic growth for sustainable development
If humankind is to live sustainably, future economic growth must
minimise environmental impact and maximise social development and
inclusion. That’s why in 2015, the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals: a set of common aims designed to balance human prosperity with protection of our planet by 2030.
These goals include a specific directive
to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”.
Likewise, language in the Paris Climate Agreement recognises the needs
of developing countries in balancing economic growth and climate change.
The Sustainable Development Goals are interconnected, and drawing
these links can provide a compelling rationale for strong climate
action. For example, a focus on achieving Goal 7 (Affordable and Clean
Energy) that also considers Goal 13 (Climate Action) will prioritise low
or zero-emissions energy technologies. This in turn delivers health
benefits and saves lives (Goal 3) through improved air quality, which also boosts economic productivity (Goal 8).
Therefore efforts to limit global temperature rise to below 2℃ must
be considered within the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.
These global goals are intrinsically linked to solving climate change.
But significant barriers prevent developing countries from adopting
low-emissions plans and ambitious climate action. Decarbonisation is
often not a priority for less developed countries, compared to key
issues such as economic growth and poverty alleviation. Many countries
struggle with gaps in technical and financial expertise, a lack of
resources and inconsistent energy data. More fundamentally, poor
governance and highly complex or fragmented decision-making also halt
progress.
It’s in the best interest of the entire world to help developing
countries navigate these problems. Creating long-term, lowest-emissions
strategies, shaped to each country’s unique circumstances, is crucial to
maintaining growth while reducing emissions. Addressing these problems
is the key to unlocking the financial flows required to move to a just,
equitable and environmentally responsible future.
*Meg Argyriou is Acting CEO of ClimateWorks, ClimateWorks Australia
