The New Yorker - Elizabeth Kolbert
CO2 could soon reach levels that, it’s widely agreed, will lead to catastrophe.
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| Carbon-dioxide removal could be a trillion-dollar enterprise, because it not only slows the rise in CO2 but reverses it. Photo-Illustration by Thomas Albdorf for The New Yorker |
Carbon
Engineering, a company owned in part by Bill Gates, has its
headquarters on a spit of land that juts into Howe Sound, an hour north
of Vancouver. Until recently, the land was a toxic-waste site, and the
company’s equipment occupies a long, barnlike building that, for many
years, was used to process contaminated water. The offices, inherited
from the business that poisoned the site, provide a spectacular view of
Mt. Garibaldi, which rises to a snow-covered point, and of the Chief, a
granite monolith that’s British Columbia’s answer to El Capitan. To
protect the spit against rising sea levels, the local government is
planning to cover it with a layer of fill six feet deep. When that’s
done, it’s hoping to sell the site for luxury condos.
Adrian
Corless, Carbon Engineering’s chief executive, who is fifty-one, is a
compact man with dark hair, a square jaw, and a concerned expression.
“Do you wear contacts?” he asked, as we were suiting up to enter the
barnlike building. If so, I’d have to take extra precautions, because
some of the chemicals used in the building could cause the lenses to
liquefy and fuse to my eyes.
Inside, pipes
snaked along the walls and overhead. The thrum of machinery made it hard
to hear. In one corner, what looked like oversized beach bags were
filled with what looked like white sand. This, Corless explained over
the noise, was limestone—pellets of pure calcium carbonate.
Corless
and his team are engaged in a project that falls somewhere between
toxic-waste cleanup and alchemy. They’ve devised a process that allows
them, in effect, to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Every day at the
plant, roughly a ton of CO
2 that had
previously floated over Mt. Garibaldi or the Chief is converted into
calcium carbonate. The pellets are subsequently heated, and the gas is
forced off, to be stored in cannisters. The calcium can then be
recovered, and the process run through all over again.
“If we’re successful at building a business around carbon removal, these are trillion-dollar markets,” Corless told me.
This
past April, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
reached a record four hundred and ten parts per million. The amount of
CO
2 in the air now is probably greater
than it’s been at any time since the mid-Pliocene, three and a half
million years ago, when there was a lot less ice at the poles and sea
levels were sixty feet higher. This year’s record will be surpassed next
year, and next year’s the year after that. Even if every country
fulfills the pledges made in the Paris climate accord—and the United
States has said that it doesn’t intend to—carbon dioxide could soon
reach levels that, it’s widely agreed, will lead to catastrophe,
assuming it hasn’t already done so.
Carbon-dioxide removal is, potentially, a trillion-dollar enterprise because it offers a way not just to slow the rise in CO
2
but to reverse it. The process is sometimes referred to as “negative
emissions”: instead of adding carbon to the air, it subtracts it.
Carbon-removal plants could be built anywhere, or everywhere. Construct
enough of them and, in theory at least, CO
2
emissions could continue unabated and still we could avert calamity.
Depending on how you look at things, the technology represents either
the ultimate insurance policy or the ultimate moral hazard.
Carbon
Engineering is one of a half-dozen companies vying to prove that carbon
removal is feasible. Others include Global Thermostat, which is based
in New York, and Climeworks, based near Zurich. Most of these owe their
origins to the ideas of a physicist named Klaus Lackner, who now works
at Arizona State University, in Tempe, so on my way home from British
Columbia I took a detour to visit him. It was July, and on the day I
arrived the temperature in the city reached a hundred and twelve
degrees. When I got to my hotel, one of the first things I noticed was a
dead starling lying, feet up, in the parking lot. I wondered if it had
died from heat exhaustion.
Lackner, who is
sixty-five, grew up in Germany. He is tall and lanky, with a fringe of
gray hair and a prominent forehead. I met him in his office at an
institute he runs, the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions. The office
was bare, except for a few
New Yorker
cartoons on the theme of nerd-dom, which, Lackner told me, his wife had
cut out for him. In one, a couple of scientists stand in front of an
enormous whiteboard covered in equations. “The math is right,” one of
them says. “It’s just in poor taste.”
In the
late nineteen-seventies, Lackner moved from Germany to California to
study with George Zweig, one of the discoverers of quarks. A few years
later, he got a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, he worked
on fusion. “Some of the work was classified,” he said, “some of it not.”
Fusion
is the process that powers the stars and, closer to home, thermonuclear
bombs. When Lackner was at Los Alamos, it was being touted as a
solution to the world’s energy problem; if fusion could be harnessed, it
could generate vast amounts of carbon-free power using isotopes of
hydrogen. Lackner became convinced that a fusion reactor was, at a
minimum, decades away. (Decades later, it’s generally agreed that a
workable reactor is still decades away.) Meanwhile, the globe’s growing
population would demand more and more energy, and this demand would be
met, for the most part, with fossil fuels.
“I
realized, probably earlier than most, that the claims of the demise of
fossil fuels were greatly exaggerated,” Lackner told me. (In fact,
fossil fuels currently provide about eighty per cent of the world’s
energy. Proportionally, this figure hasn’t changed much since the
mid-eighties, but, because global energy use has nearly doubled, the
amount of coal, oil, and natural gas being burned today is almost two
times greater.)
One evening in the early nineties, Lackner was having a beer with a friend,
Christopher Wendt, also a physicist. The two got to wondering why, as
Lackner put it to me, “nobody’s doing these really crazy, big things
anymore.” This led to more questions and more conversations (and
possibly more beers).
Eventually, the two
produced an equation-dense paper in which they argued that
self-replicating machines could solve the world’s energy problem and,
more or less at the same time, clean up the mess humans have made by
burning fossil fuels. The machines would be powered by solar panels, and
as they multiplied they’d produce more solar panels, which they’d
assemble using elements, like silicon and aluminum, extracted from
ordinary dirt. The expanding collection of panels would produce ever
more power, at a rate that would increase exponentially. An array
covering three hundred and eighty-six thousand square miles—an area
larger than Nigeria but, as Lackner and Wendt noted, “smaller than many
deserts”—could supply all the world’s electricity many times over.
This
same array could be put to use scrubbing carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere. According to Lackner and Wendt, the power generated by a
Nigeria-size solar farm would be enough to remove all the CO
2 emitted by humans up to that point within five years. Ideally, the CO
2
would be converted to rock, similar to the white sand produced by
Carbon Engineering; enough would be created to cover Venezuela in a
layer a foot and a half deep. (Where this rock would go the two did not
specify.)
Lackner let the idea of the
self-replicating machine slide, but he became more and more intrigued by
carbon-dioxide removal, particularly by what’s become known as “direct
air capture.”
“Sometimes by thinking through
this extreme end point you learn a lot,” he said. He began giving talks
and writing papers on the subject. Some scientists decided he was nuts,
others that he was a visionary. “Klaus is, in fact, a genius,” Julio
Friedmann, a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy and
an expert on carbon management, told me.
In
2000, Lackner received a job offer from Columbia University. Once in New
York, he pitched a plan for developing a carbon-sucking technology to
Gary Comer, a founder of Lands’ End. Comer brought to the meeting his
investment adviser, who quipped that Lackner wasn’t looking for venture
capital so much as “adventure capital.” Nevertheless, Comer offered to
put up five million dollars. The new company was called Global Research
Technologies, or G.R.T. It got as far as building a small prototype, but
just as it was looking for new investors the financial crisis hit.
“Our
timing was exquisite,” Lackner told me. Unable to raise more funds, the
company ceased operations. As the planet continued to warm, and
carbon-dioxide levels continued to climb, Lackner came to believe that,
unwittingly, humanity had already committed itself to negative
emissions.
“I think that we’re in a very uncomfortable situation,” he said. “I would argue that if technologies to pull CO
2 out of the environment fail then we’re in deep trouble.”
Lackner
founded the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at A.S.U. in 2014.
Most of the equipment he dreams up is put together in a workshop a few
blocks from his office. The day I was there, it was so hot outside that
even the five-minute walk to the workshop required staging. Lackner
delivered a short lecture on the dangers of dehydration and handed me a
bottle of water.
In the workshop, an engineer
was tinkering with what looked like the guts of a foldout couch. Where,
in the living-room version, there would have been a mattress, in this
one was an elaborate array of plastic ribbons. Embedded in each ribbon
was a powder made from thousands upon thousands of tiny amber-colored
beads. The beads, Lackner explained, could be purchased by the
truckload; they were composed of a resin normally used in water
treatment to remove chemicals like nitrates. More or less by accident,
Lackner had discovered that the beads could be repurposed. Dry, they’d
absorb carbon dioxide. Wet, they’d release it. The idea was to expose
the ribbons to Arizona’s thirsty air, and then fold the device into a
sealed container filled with water. The CO
2
that had been captured by the powder in the dry phase would be released
in the wet phase; it could then be piped out of the container, and the
whole process re-started, the couch folding and unfolding over and over
again.
Lackner has calculated that an apparatus
the size of a semi trailer could remove a ton of carbon dioxide per
day, or three hundred and sixty-five tons a
year. The world’s cars, planes, refineries, and power plants now produce about thirty-six billion tons of CO
2
annually, so, he told me, “if you built a hundred million trailer-size
units you could actually keep up with current emissions.” He
acknowledged that the figure sounded daunting. But, he noted, the iPhone
has been around for only a decade or so, and there are now seven
hundred million in use. “We are still very early in this game,” he said.
The
way Lackner sees things, the key to avoiding “deep trouble” is thinking
differently. “We need to change the paradigm,” he told me. Carbon
dioxide should be regarded the same way we view other waste products,
like sewage or garbage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste.
(“Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,”
Lackner has observed.) At the same time, we don’t let them shit on the
sidewalk or toss their empty yogurt containers into the street.
“If
I were to tell you that the garbage I’m dumping in front of your house
is twenty per cent less this year than it was last year, you would still
think I’m doing something intolerable,” Lackner said.
One
of the reasons we’ve made so little progress on climate change, he
contends, is that the issue has acquired an ethical charge, which has
polarized people. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters
become guilty. “Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner,
and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change
but still partake in the benefits of modernity,” he has written.
Changing the paradigm, Lackner believes, will change the conversation.
If CO
2 is treated as just another form of
waste, which has to be disposed of, then people can stop arguing about
whether it’s a problem and finally start doing something.
Carbon
dioxide was “discovered,” by a Scottish physician named Joseph Black,
in 1754. A decade later, another Scotsman, James Watt, invented a more
efficient steam engine, ushering in what is now called the age of
industrialization but which future generations may dub the age of
emissions. It is likely that by the end of the nineteenth century human
activity had raised the average temperature of the earth by a tenth of a
degree Celsius (or nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit).
As
the world warmed, it started to change, first gradually and then
suddenly. By now, the globe is at least one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in Black’s day, and the consequences are
becoming ever more apparent. Heat waves are hotter, rainstorms more
intense, and droughts drier. The wildfire season is growing longer, and
fires, like the ones that recently ravaged Northern California, more
numerous. Sea levels are rising, and the rate of rise is accelerating.
Higher sea levels exacerbated the damage from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma,
and Maria, and higher water temperatures probably also made the storms
more ferocious. “Harvey is what climate change looks like,” Eric
Holthaus, a meteorologist turned columnist, recently wrote.
Meanwhile,
still more warming is locked in. There’s so much inertia in the climate
system, which is as vast as the earth itself, that the globe has yet to
fully adjust to the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide that
have been added to the atmosphere in the past few decades. It’s been
calculated that to equilibrate to current CO
2
levels the planet still needs to warm by half a degree. And every ten
days another billion tons of carbon dioxide are released. Last month,
the World Meteorological Organization announced that the concentration
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by a record amount in 2016.
No
one can say exactly how warm the world can get before disaster—the
inundation of low-lying cities, say, or the collapse of crucial
ecosystems, like coral reefs—becomes inevitable. Officially, the
threshold is two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above
preindustrial levels. Virtually every nation signed on to this figure at
a round of climate negotiations held in Cancún in 2010.
Meeting
in Paris in 2015, world leaders decided that the two-degree threshold
was too high; the stated aim of the climate accord is to hold “the
increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C” and to try
to limit it to 1.5°C. Since the planet has already warmed by one degree
and, for all practical purposes, is committed to another half a degree,
it would seem impossible to meet the latter goal and nearly impossible
to meet the former. And it
is nearly impossible, unless the world switches course and instead of just adding CO
2 to the atmosphere also starts to remove it.
The
extent to which the world is counting on negative emissions is
documented by the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which was published the year before Paris. To peer into
the future, the I.P.C.C. relies on computer models that represent the
world’s energy and climate systems as a tangle of equations, and which
can be programmed to play out different “scenarios.” Most of the
scenarios involve temperature increases of two, three, or even four
degrees Celsius—up to just over seven degrees Fahrenheit—by the end of
this century. (In a recent paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two climate scientists—Yangyang Xu, of Texas A. & M., and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, of
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography—proposed that warming greater
than three degrees Celsius be designated as “catastrophic” and warming
greater than five degrees as “unknown??” The “unknown??” designation,
they wrote, comes “with the understanding that changes of this
magnitude, not experienced in the last 20+ million years, pose
existential threats to a majority of the population.”)
When
the I.P.C.C. went looking for ways to hold the temperature increase
under two degrees Celsius, it found the math punishing. Global emissions
would have to fall rapidly and dramatically—pretty much down to zero by
the middle of this century. (This would entail, among other things,
replacing most of the world’s power plants, revamping its agricultural
systems, and eliminating gasoline-powered vehicles, all within the next
few decades.) Alternatively, humanity could, in effect, go into hock. It
could allow CO
2 levels temporarily to
exceed the two-degree threshold—a situation that’s become known as
“overshoot”—and then, via negative emissions, pull the excess CO
2 out of the air.
The
I.P.C.C. considered more than a thousand possible scenarios. Of these,
only a hundred and sixteen limit warming to below two degrees, and of
these a hundred and eight involve negative emissions. In many
below-two-degree scenarios, the quantity of negative emissions called
for reaches the same order of magnitude as the “positive” emissions
being produced today.
“The volumes are outright
crazy,” Oliver Geden, the head of the E.U. research division of the
German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me.
Lackner said, “I think what the I.P.C.C. really is saying is ‘We tried
lots and lots of scenarios, and, of the scenarios which stayed safe,
virtually every one needed some magic touch of a negative emissions. If
we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.’ ”
Pursued
on the scale envisioned by the I.P.C.C., carbon-dioxide removal would
yield at first tens of billions and soon hundreds of billions of tons of
CO
2, all of which would have to be dealt with. This represents its own supersized challenge. CO
2
can be combined with calcium to produce limestone, as it is in the
process at Carbon Engineering (and in Lackner’s self-replicating-machine
scheme). But the necessary form of calcium isn’t readily available, and
producing it generally yields CO
2, a self-defeating prospect. An alternative is to shove the carbon back where it came from, deep underground.
“If you are storing CO
2
and your only purpose is storage, then you’re looking for a package of
certain types of rock,” Sallie Greenberg, the associate director for
energy, research, and development at the Illinois State Geological
Survey, told me. It was a bright summer day, and we were driving through
the cornfields of Illinois’s midsection. A mile below us was a rock
formation known as the Eau Claire Shale, and below that a formation
known as the Mt. Simon Sandstone. Together with a team of drillers,
engineers, and geoscientists, Greenberg has spent the past decade
injecting carbon dioxide into this rock “package” and studying the
outcome. When I’d proposed over the phone that she show me the project,
in Decatur, she’d agreed, though not without hesitation.
“It isn’t sexy,” she’d warned me. “It’s a wellhead.”
Our
first stop was a building shaped like a ski chalet. This was the
National Sequestration Education Center, a joint venture of the Illinois
geological survey, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Richland
Community College. Inside were classrooms, occupied that morning by kids
making lanyards, and displays aimed at illuminating the very dark world
of carbon storage. One display was a sort of oversized barber pole,
nine feet tall and decorated in bands of tan and brown, representing the
various rock layers beneath us. A long arrow on the side of the pole
indicated how many had been drilled through for Greenberg’s
carbon-storage project; it pointed down, through the New Albany Shale,
the Maquoketa Shale, and so on, all the way to the floor.
The
center’s director, David Larrick, was on hand to serve as a guide. In
addition to schoolkids, he said, the center hosted lots of community
groups, like Kiwanis clubs. “This is very effective as a visual,” he
told me, gesturing toward the pole. Sometimes farmers were concerned
about the impact that the project could have on their water supply. The
pole showed that the CO
2 was being injected more than a mile below their wells.
“We
have had overwhelmingly positive support,” he said. While Greenberg and
Larrick chatted, I wandered off to play an educational video game. A
cartoon figure in a hard hat appeared on the screen to offer factoids
such as “The most efficient method of transport of CO
2 is by pipeline.”
“Transport CO
2 to earn points!” the cartoon man exhorted.
After
touring the center’s garden, which featured grasses, like big bluestem,
that would have been found in the area before it was plowed into
cornfields, Greenberg and I drove on. Soon we passed through the gates
of an enormous Archer Daniels Midland plant, which rose up out of the
fields like a small city.
Greenberg explained
that the project we were visiting was one of seven funded by the
Department of Energy to learn whether carbon injected underground would
stay there. In the earliest stage of the project, initiated under
President George W. Bush, Greenberg and her colleagues sifted through
geological records to find an appropriate test site. What they were
seeking was similar to what oil drillers
look for—porous stone capped by a layer of impermeable rock—only they
were looking not to extract fossil fuels but, in a manner of speaking,
to stuff them back in. The next step was locating a ready source of
carbon dioxide. This is where A.D.M. came in; the plant converts corn
into ethanol, and one of the by-products of this process is almost pure
CO
2. In a later stage of the project,
during the Obama Administration, a million tons of carbon dioxide from
the plant were pumped underground. Rigorous monitoring has shown that,
so far, the CO
2 has stayed put.
We
stopped to pick up hard hats and went to see some of the monitoring
equipment, which was being serviced by two engineers, Nick Malkewicz and
Jim Kirksey. It was now lunchtime, so we made another detour, to a
local barbecue place. Finally, Greenberg and I and the two men got to
the injection site. It was, indeed, not sexy—just a bunch of pipes and
valves sticking out of the dirt. I asked about the future of carbon
storage.
“I think the technology’s there and
it’s absolutely viable,” Malkewicz said. “It’s just a question of
whether people want to do it or not. It’s kind of an obvious thing.”
“We know we can meet the objective of storing CO
2,” Greenberg added. “Like Nick said, it’s just a matter of whether or not as a society we’re going to do it.”
When work began on the Decatur project, in 2003, few people besides Klaus Lackner were thinking about sucking CO
2
from the air. Instead, the goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of
an only slightly less revolutionary technology—carbon capture and
storage (or, as it is sometimes referred to, carbon capture and
sequestration).
With C.C.S., the CO
2
produced at a power station or a steel mill or a cement plant is drawn
off before it has a chance to disperse into the atmosphere. (This is
called “post-combustion capture.”) The gas, under very high pressure, is
then injected into the appropriate package of rock, where it is
supposed to remain permanently. The process has become popularly—and
euphemistically—known as “clean coal,” because, if all goes according to
plan, a plant equipped with C.C.S. produces only a fraction of the
emissions of a conventional coal-fired plant.
Over
the years, both Republicans and Democrats have touted clean coal as a
way to save mining jobs and protect the environment. The coal industry
has also, nominally at least, embraced the technology; one
industry-sponsored group calls itself the American Coalition for Clean
Coal Electricity. Donald Trump, too, has talked up clean coal, even if
he doesn’t seem to quite understand what the term means. “We’re going to
have clean coal, really clean coal,” he said in March.
Currently,
only one power plant in the U.S., the Petra Nova plant, near Houston,
uses post-combustion carbon capture on a large scale. Plans for other
plants to showcase the technology have been scrapped, including, most
recently, the Kemper County plant, in Mississippi. This past June, the
plant’s owner, Southern Company, announced that it was changing tacks.
Instead of burning coal and capturing the carbon, the plant would burn
natural gas and release the CO
2.
Experts I spoke to said that the main reason C.C.S. hasn’t caught on is that there’s no inducement to use it. Capturing the CO
2
from a smokestack consumes a lot of power—up to twenty-five per cent of
the total produced at a typical coal-burning plant. And this, of
course, translates into costs. What company is going to assume such
costs when it can dump CO
2 into the air for free?
“If you’re running a steel mill or a power plant and you’re putting the CO
2
into the atmosphere, people might say, ‘Why aren’t you using carbon
capture and storage?’ ” Howard Herzog, an engineer at M.I.T. who for
many years ran a research program on C.C.S., told me. “And you say,
‘What’s my financial incentive? No one’s saying I
can’t put it in the atmosphere.’ In fact, we’ve gone backwards in terms of sending signals that you’re going to have to restrict it.”
But,
although C.C.S. has stalled in practice, it has become ever more
essential on paper. Practically all below-two-degree warming scenarios
assume that it will be widely deployed. And even this isn’t enough. To
avoid catastrophe, most models rely on a yet to be realized variation of
C.C.S., known as
BECCS.
BECCS,
which stands for “bio-energy with carbon capture and storage,” takes
advantage of the original form of carbon engineering: photosynthesis.
Trees and grasses and shrubs, as they grow, soak up CO
2
from the air. (Replanting forests is a low-tech form of carbon
removal.) Later, when the plants rot or are combusted, the carbon they
have absorbed is released back into the atmosphere. If a power station
were to burn wood, say, or cornstalks, and use C.C.S. to sequester the
resulting CO
2, this cycle would be broken. Carbon would be sucked from the air by the green plants and then forced underground.
BECCS
represents a way to generate negative emissions and, at the same time,
electricity. The arrangement, at least as far as the models are
concerned, could hardly be more convenient.
“
BECCS is unique in that it removes carbon
and produces energy,” Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research, in Oslo, told me. “So the
more you consume the more you remove.” He went on, “In a sense, it’s a
dream technology. It’s solving one problem while solving the other
problem. What more could you want?”
The
Center for Carbon Removal doesn’t really have an office; it operates
out of a co-working space in downtown Oakland. On the day I visited, not
long after my trip to Decatur, someone had recently stopped at Trader
Joe’s, and much of the center’s limited real estate was taken up by tubs
of treats.
“Open anything you want,” the center’s executive director, Noah Deich, urged me, with a wave of his hand.
Deich,
who is thirty-one, has a broad face, a brown beard, and a knowing sort
of earnestness. After graduating from the University of Virginia, in
2009, he went to work for a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., that
was advising power companies about how to prepare for a time when they’d
no longer be able to release carbon into the atmosphere cost-free. It
was the start of the Obama Administration, and that time seemed
imminent. The House of Representatives had recently approved legislation
to limit emissions. But the bill later died in the Senate, and, as
Deich put it, “It’s no fun to model the impacts of climate policies
nobody believes are going to happen.” He switched consulting firms, then
headed to business school, at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I
came into school with this vision of working for a clean-tech startup,”
he told me. “But I also had this idea floating around in the back of my
head that we’re moving too slowly to actually stop emissions in time.
So what do we do with all the carbon that’s in the air?” He started
talking to scientists and policy experts at Berkeley. What he learned
shocked him.
“People told me, ‘The models show
this major need for negative emissions,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘But we don’t
really know how to do that, nor is anyone really thinking about it.’ I
was someone who’d been in the business and policy world, and I was,
like, wait a minute—
what?”
Business
school taught Deich to think in terms of case studies. One that seemed
to him relevant was solar power. Photovoltaic cells have been around
since the nineteen-fifties, but for decades they were prohibitively
expensive. Then the price started to drop, which increased demand, which
led to further price drops, to the point where today, in many parts of
the world, the cost of solar power is competitive with the cost of power
from new coal plants.
“And
the reason that it’s now competitive is that governments decided to do
lots and lots of research,” Deich said. “And some countries, like
Germany, decided to pay a lot for solar, to create a first market. And
China paid a lot to manufacture the stuff, and states in the U.S. said,
‘You must consume renewable energy,’ and then consumers said, ‘Hey, how
can I buy renewable energy?’ ”
As far as he
could see, none of this—neither the research nor the creation of first
markets nor the spurring of consumer demand—was being done for carbon
removal, so he decided to try to change that. Together with a Berkeley
undergraduate, Giana Amador, he founded the center in 2015, with a
hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar grant from the university. It now has
an annual budget of about a million dollars, raised from private donors
and foundations, and a staff of seven. Deich described it as a
“think-and-do tank.”
“We’re trying to figure out: how do we actually get this on the agenda?” he said.
A
compelling reason for putting carbon removal on “the agenda” is that we
are already counting on it. Negative emissions are built into the
I.P.C.C. scenarios and the climate agreements that rest on them.
But
everyone I spoke with, including the most fervent advocates for carbon
removal, stressed the huge challenges of the work, some of them
technological, others political and economic. Done on a scale
significant enough to make a difference, direct air capture of the sort
pursued by Carbon Engineering, in British Columbia, would require an
enormous infrastructure, as well as huge supplies of power. (Because CO
2
is more dilute in the air than it is in the exhaust of a power plant,
direct air capture demands even more energy than C.C.S.) The power would
have to be generated emissions-free, or the whole enterprise wouldn’t
make much sense.
“You might say it’s against my
self-interest to say it, but I think that, in the near term, talking
about carbon removal is silly,” David Keith, the founder of Carbon
Engineering, who teaches energy and public policy at Harvard, told me.
“Because it almost certainly is cheaper to cut emissions now than to do
large-scale carbon removal.”
BECCS
doesn’t make big energy demands; instead, it requires vast tracts of
arable land. Much of this land would, presumably, have to be diverted
from food production, and at a time when the global population—and
therefore global food demand—is projected to be growing. (It’s estimated
that to do
BECCS on the scale
envisioned by some below-two-degrees scenarios would require an area
larger than India.) Two researchers in Britain, Naomi Vaughan and Clair
Gough, who recently conducted a workshop on
BECCS, concluded that “assumptions regarding the extent of bioenergy deployment that is possible” are generally “unrealistic.”
For
these reasons, many experts argue that even talking (or writing
articles) about negative emissions is dangerous. Such talk fosters the
impression that it’s possible to put off action and still avoid a
crisis, when it is far more likely that continued inaction will just
produce a larger crisis. In “The Trouble with Negative Emissions,” an
essay that ran last year in
Science, Kevin
Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in England,
and Glen Peters, of the climate-research center in Oslo, described
negative-emissions technologies as a “high-stakes gamble” and relying on
them as a “moral hazard par excellence.”
We should, they wrote, “proceed on the premise that they will not work at scale.”
Others counter that the moment for fretting about the hazards of negative emissions—moral or otherwise—has passed.
“The
punch line is, it doesn’t matter,” Julio Friedmann, the former
Principal Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary, told me. “We actually need
to do direct air capture, so we need to create technologies that do
that. Whether it’s smart or not, whether it’s optimized or not, whether
it’s the lowest-cost pathway or not, we know we need to do it.”
“If
you tell me that we don’t know whether our stuff will work, I will
admit that is true,” Klaus Lackner said. “But I also would argue that
nobody else has a good option.”
One of the
peculiarities of climate discussions is that the strongest argument for
any given strategy is usually based on the hopelessness of the
alternatives: this approach
must work,
because clearly the others aren’t going to. This sort of reasoning rests
on a fragile premise—what might be called solution bias. There has to
be an answer out there somewhere, since the contrary is too horrible to
contemplate.
Early last month, the Trump
Administration announced its intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a
set of rules aimed at cutting power plants’ emissions. The plan, which
had been approved by the Obama Administration, was eminently achievable.
Still, according to the current Administration, the cuts were too
onerous. The repeal of the plan is likely to result in hundreds of
millions of tons of additional emissions.
A few
weeks later, the United Nations Environment Programme released its
annual Emissions Gap Report. The report labelled the difference between
the emissions reductions needed to avoid dangerous climate change and
those which countries have pledged to achieve as “alarmingly high.” For
the first time, this year’s report contains a chapter on negative
emissions. “In order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement,” it
notes, “carbon dioxide removal is likely a necessary step.”
As
a technology of last resort, carbon removal is, almost by its nature,
paradoxical. It has become vital without necessarily being viable. It
may be impossible to manage and it may also be impossible to manage
without.
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