03/02/2019

Climate Change A Burning Issue (Again) In Voters' Minds

The Guardian - 

The Coalition has no choice but to try and fix the self-created disaster that is its climate policy
‘Climate change is not only a hot-button issue on its own terms. Some of the research suggests it has also become a proxy for political dysfunction.’ Photograph: Glenn Hunt/EPA 
This piece of backroom intelligence shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the summer we are all still enduring. Record high temperatures, the hottest January on record; storms; floods in some places, droughts in others; mass fish kills in ailing rivers.
Climate change is back as a vote-changing issue – top of mind for many Australian voters. Private polling conducted for the environment movement and for the major parties suggests community concern about climate change is currently sitting at levels not seen since the federal election cycle in 2007.
If you can remember the events of 2007, you’ll recall that John Howard was forced into a significant about-face on the issue. Within sight of the election that swept Kevin Rudd into power, Howard signed the Liberal party up to emissions trading, a “world’s best-practice” cap and trade scheme, and declared Australia must prepare for a “low-carbon future”.
The research doing the rounds as the major parties bed down their war rooms for the May contest puts climate change in the top-two issues of concern nationally. Women, particularly, are alarmed by the ongoing policy inaction, and that’s bad for the Liberals because the party’s standing among women is already depressed courtesy of the unhinged shenanigans of the past 12 months.
But there’s some nuance in the research. In marginal seats in outer suburban areas – the seats that often determine the outcome of federal elections – cost of living pressures still rank higher than climate change. But people insist that climate is registering in the top-three concerns in several outer suburban seats, where the issue is normally dormant.
The political consequence of all this is pretty obvious. The strength of community concern about climate change leaves the Morrison government vulnerable. The Coalition’s policy record on climate change is appalling. There is no other word for it. Absolutely, indefensibly, appalling.
The Liberals have opened the election year trying to put themselves back in contention. The government is desperately hoping that a full frontal, never mind the nuances, assault on Labor’s controversial tax measures is the pathway to a political fightback executed over the opening months of 2019.
During the summer the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has led a morale-boosting offensive on Labor’s negative gearing and dividend imputation policies on social media, with enthusiastic amplification from cooperative conservative media outlets hungry to sharpen their own “campaign journalism” spears, given the apparent likelihood of a Labor victory.
Frydenberg has endeared himself to colleagues for picking the tax fight. Nobody knows if all the thrashing about and train-crash gifs will resonate in the real world but two tangible things have been achieved.
Labor has been forced to defend its tax policies after a long period of dormancy in the debate, and the joust has delivered a shot of adrenalin to the moribund Liberal base. (As an aside, perhaps we can note that Frydenberg, with the frenzy of activity, might also be positioning himself for whatever fate awaits the Liberals post-election. Bit cheeky but doubtless true).
Coalition and Labor MPs report that the community backlash against dividend imputation is now a thing – a real and palpable thing rather than a febrile media confection – but Liberal and Labor MPs agree the anger is felt most keenly among Coalition supporters rather than people inclined to vote Labor.
Smart people on both sides of politics don’t yet know whether the government can leverage the current softening in the housing market to make negative gearing a point of serious political vulnerability for Labor or not. As they say in the classics, only time will tell.
While the tax fight has been good for internal morale, and may yet catch fire, smart people inside the government doubt it will be enough to turn negative sentiment, and believe it certainly won’t be enough if the government doesn’t try and fix its self-created disaster on climate change.
Internal discussions are under way about what to do. Moderates are sounding out what conservatives can live with.
An obvious course correction would be a cash injection for the emissions reduction fund, a vestige of the heavily criticised Direct Action scheme, and the environment minister has already flagged the ERF’s remit (which is currently paying for abatement) could be broadened to include the protection of threatened species.
Liberals who favour more climate action, and pronto, also point to the potential to increase funding for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Arena (the agencies the Coalition once campaigned to abolish), as well as providing handouts to households – a new package supporting the uptake of renewable energy.
But even if the Coalition manages to land some kind of repositioning without blowing the show sky-high (Hi Tony, happy new year), it’s unclear whether voters will buy it, given the gross stupidity of the past couple of terms, and given the Liberal party last year killed a prime minister in plain sight at least in part because he pursued a policy to reduce emissions in the electricity sector.
Also unclear is how any climate revamp would sit with the government’s aspiration to have taxpayers underwrite new coal-fired power plants, and potentially indemnify them against future carbon risk. Even if voters are forgiving enough to look past the policy car crash and the dumb and dumber intrigues that led to the third leadership change in two terms – that’s a split personality that’s hard to explain.
Climate change is not only a hot-button issue on its own terms. Some of the research suggests it has also become a proxy for political dysfunction, which is a lethal combination when voters are, as MPs report, viscerally angry at an incumbent government (although some Liberals will tell you Morrison isn’t loathed, according to their focus groups, and there’s some sentiment he should be given a chance).
At the moment, most of the political class is talking about Victoria. This is unusual. Normally before a federal election, a collective obsession descends about Queensland. “Whither Queensland?”. Why Queensland? Because the state has a swag of marginals.
Queensland remains front of mind, but Victoria is also turning up more often in dispatches. “Whither Victoria?” is on the agenda because of recent field evidence: the Liberals endured a rout in the state last year. Courtesy of that result, some in Labor think it’s possible Bill Shorten could take government with a southern states strategy, rather than embarking on the more typical mass genuflection to Queensland.
Not everyone buys that theory. Some think the anti-Liberal swing in the state contest won’t translate federally, for a couple of reasons.
The backlash in the Liberal heartland seen in last year’s state election was a cost-free protest vote. Liberals lost nothing by backing in Daniel Andrews, who had a concrete record to campaign on, and was a known quantity.
If Liberals vote for Bill Shorten, there will be a hip-pocket cost – the loss of negative gearing and capital gains concessions, cash rebates from dividend imputation – in other words, Labor’s policy offering federally puts a brake on the scale of the protest vote that might be lodged in May.
Liberals deeply depressed about the state of play in Victoria, and to a lesser degree in New South Wales, think Labor’s appetite to wind back tax concessions will be an automatic stabiliser on their heartland backlash to some degree – but they are conscious that a potent threat is coming from “small-l” liberal independents, which will require the diversion of scarce resources to supposedly safe seats.
Independents such as Zali Steggall and Oliver Yates are thumping the government on climate change, both as a thing in itself and as a proxy for dysfunction within the Liberal party which is imposing costs on the citizenry.
One live litmus test of whether Labor ultimately goes for broke with a southern states strategy – whether they think they can craft a pathway to victory without considering the parochial and materialist sensibilities of central Queenslanders – will be if Bill Shorten toughens Labor’s line on Adani. He went close to doing that last year but baulked at the last minute.
Environment groups and GetUp want Labor to stop the project, and they offer the party valuable campaign resources, strengthening an already formidable on-ground machine, in the event there can be a meeting of the minds.
Thus far Shorten hasn’t shifted and is remaining focused on hearts and minds in central Queensland, kicking off the election year campaigning in the state.
This suggests the Labor leader and the brains trust around him aren’t convinced – at least not currently – that writing off central Queensland is a political risk worth taking. But this is a space to watch.

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Huge Cavity In Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay

NASA - Carol Rasmussen

Thwaites Glacier. Credit: NASA/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck
A gigantic cavity - two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall - growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier.
The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers' undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.
Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites' bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below.
The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It's big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.
"We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it," said Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Rignot is a co-author of the new study, which was published today in Science Advances. "Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the detail," he said.
The cavity was revealed by ice-penetrating radar in NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne campaign beginning in 2010 that studies connections between the polar regions and the global climate. The researchers also used data from a constellation of Italian and German spaceborne synthetic aperture radars. These very high-resolution data can be processed by a technique called radar interferometry to reveal how the ground surface below has moved between images.
"[The size of] a cavity under a glacier plays an important role in melting," said the study's lead author, Pietro Milillo of JPL. "As more heat and water get under the glacier, it melts faster."
Numerical models of ice sheets use a fixed shape to represent a cavity under the ice, rather than allowing the cavity to change and grow. The new discovery implies that this limitation most likely causes those models to underestimate how fast Thwaites is losing ice.
About the size of Florida, Thwaites Glacier is currently responsible for approximately 4 percent of global sea level rise. It holds enough ice to raise the world ocean a little over 2 feet (65 centimeters) and backstops neighboring glaciers that would raise sea levels an additional 8 feet (2.4 meters) if all the ice were lost.
Thwaites is one of the hardest places to reach on Earth, but it is about to become better known than ever before. The U.S. National Science Foundation and British National Environmental Research Council are mounting a five-year field project to answer the most critical questions about its processes and features. The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration will begin its field experiments in the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2019-20.
Ice thickness change of Thwaites Glacier: (A) Ice surface elevation from Airborne Topographic Mapper and ice bottom from MCoRDS radar depth sounder in 2011, 2014, and 2016, colour-coded green, blue, and brown, respectively, along profiles T1-T2 and (B) T3-T4 with bed elevation (brown) from (16). Grounding line positions deduced from the MCoRDS data are marked with arrows, with the same colour coding. (C) Change in TDX ice surface elevation, h, from June 2011 to 2017, with 50-m contour line in bed elevation and tick marks every 1km. Source: Science Advances
How scientists measure ice loss
There's no way to monitor Antarctic glaciers from ground level over the long term. Instead, scientists use satellite or airborne instrument data to observe features that change as a glacier melts, such as its flow speed and surface height.
Another changing feature is a glacier's grounding line - the place near the edge of the continent where it lifts off its bed and starts to float on seawater. Many Antarctic glaciers extend for miles beyond their grounding lines, floating out over the open ocean.
Just as a grounded boat can float again when the weight of its cargo is removed, a glacier that loses ice weight can float over land where it used to stick. When this happens, the grounding line retreats inland. That exposes more of a glacier's underside to sea water, increasing the likelihood its melt rate will accelerate.

An irregular retreat
For Thwaites, "We are discovering different mechanisms of retreat," Millilo said. Different processes at various parts of the 100-mile-long (160-kilometer-long) front of the glacier are putting the rates of grounding-line retreat and of ice loss out of sync.
The huge cavity is under the main trunk of the glacier on its western side - the side farther from the West Antarctic Peninsula. In this region, as the tide rises and falls, the grounding line retreats and advances across a zone of about 2 to 3 miles (3 to 5 kilometers). The glacier has been coming unstuck from a ridge in the bedrock at a steady rate of about 0.4 to 0.5 miles (0.6 to 0.8 kilometers) a year since 1992. Despite this stable rate of grounding-line retreat, the melt rate on this side of the glacier is extremely high.
"On the eastern side of the glacier, the grounding-line retreat proceeds through small channels, maybe a kilometer wide, like fingers reaching beneath the glacier to melt it from below," Milillo said. In that region, the rate of grounding-line retreat doubled from about 0.4 miles (0.6 kilometers) a year from 1992 to 2011 to 0.8 miles (1.2 kilometers) a year from 2011 to 2017. Even with this accelerating retreat, however, melt rates on this side of the glacier are lower than on the western side.
These results highlight that ice-ocean interactions are more complex than previously understood.
Milillo hopes the new results will be useful for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration researchers as they prepare for their fieldwork. "Such data is essential for field parties to focus on areas where the action is, because the grounding line is retreating rapidly with complex spatial patterns," he said.
"Understanding the details of how the ocean melts away this glacier is essential to project its impact on sea level rise in the coming decades," Rignot said.
The paper by Milillo and his co-authors in the journal Science Advances is titled "Heterogeneous retreat and ice melt of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica." Co-authors were from the University of California, Irvine; the German Aerospace Center in Munich, Germany; and the University Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France.

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U.S. Intelligence Officials Warn Climate Change Is A Worldwide Threat

InsideCimate News - Neela Banerjee

Their annual assessment says climate hazards such as extreme weather, droughts, floods, wildfires and sea level rise threaten infrastructure, health and security.
National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and directors of the FBI, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency testify on the Worldwide Threat Assessment before a Senate committee. Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
The nation's intelligence community warned in its annual assessment of worldwide threats that climate change and other kinds of environmental degradation pose risks to global stability because they are "likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond."
Released Tuesday, the Worldwide Threat Assessment prepared by the Director of National Intelligence added to a swelling chorus of scientific and national security voices in pointing out the ways climate change fuels widespread insecurity and erodes America's ability to respond to it.
"Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security," said the report, which represents the consensus view among top intelligence officials. "Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution."
In just the past two weeks, the Pentagon sent a report to Congress describing extreme weather and climate risks to dozens of critical military installations. (House leaders on Wednesday asked for more details, including an assessment of the 10 bases in each service most vulnerable to climate change.) The Government Accountability Office also recommended the State Department resume providing guidance to U.S. diplomats about climate change and migration. Last week, a scientific paper concluded that drought driven by climate change and the subsequent fights over water resources increased the likelihood of armed conflict in the Middle East from 2011–2015, which in turn triggered waves refugees.
The United Nations Security Council also held a discussion on Friday devoted to understanding and responding to how climate change acts as a "threat multiplier" in countries where governance is already fragile and resources are sparse.
Robert Mardini, the permanent observer to the UN from the International Committee of the Red Cross, said his group's fieldwork confirms the "double impact" of climate change and war.
"Climate change exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequalities, especially in situations of armed conflict, where countries, communities and populations are the least prepared and the least able to protect themselves and adapt," Mardini told the Security Council, according to his published remarks. "Conflicts harm the structures and systems that are necessary to facilitate adaptation to climate change."

In Contrast with the U.S. President
The formal threat assessment is also the latest federal survey of climate change to clash with President Donald Trump's adamant denial of the established consensus. In late November, the administration issued the Fourth National Climate Assessment, based on the work of 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies, which concluded that climate change threatened human life, ecosystems and the American economy. Trump dismissed the report, saying he did not believe its central findings.
Trump has pushed the message of climate denial through federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, mainly by working to halt rules and research to address climate change. But so far, the White House has not reined in the national security community when its leaders have acknowledged climate change or its agencies have explored its implications.
Further, members of Congress from both parties have provided the Pentagon, at least, with cover, instructing it in late 2017 to analyze the threats climate change poses to American military readiness.

Regions to Watch for Climate-Related Risks
The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment echoes the findings of versions from previous years that highlight climate change as a threat to what's called "human security" in a list that includes terrorism, cyber crimes and weapons of mass destruction. Among the situations and places it cites as being of particular concern are:
  • Urban coastal areas of South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Western Hemisphere that could be battered by extreme weather and aggravated by rising sea levels. It says "damage to communication, energy, and transportation infrastructure could affect low-lying military bases, inflict economic costs, and cause human displacement and loss of life." (Last year, Hurricane Michael inflicted an estimated $5 billion in damage on Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.)
  • Countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan and Iraq, which are at increasing risk of social unrest and cross-border tension because "changes in the frequency and variability of heat waves, droughts, and floods—combined with poor governance practices—are increasing water and food insecurity."
  • The Arctic, where receding sea ice "may increase competition—particularly with Russia and China— over access to sea routes and natural resources."
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Extreme Weather Events Are Fueling ‘Food Shocks’ And Jeopardizing Global Security

ThinkProgress - E.A. Crunden

Climate change is driving more severe weather, which in turn is threatening food.
California vineyards post-wildfire. CREDIT: George Rose/Getty Images
Extreme weather is imperiling food security across the globe with greater frequency, according to new research released Monday highlighting the impact of worsening weather disasters on global markets and food systems.
A study by researchers at the University of Tasmania published January 28 in the journal Nature Sustainability found that food production is becoming increasingly susceptible to climate and weather volatility.
These “food shocks” — or, sudden losses to food production — are hitting local communities hard, in addition to impacting the global economy, with long-term implications.
“Critically, shock frequency has increased through time on land and sea at a global scale,” the study notes. “Geopolitical and extreme-weather events were the main shock drivers identified, but with considerable differences across sectors.”
Weather events including floods, droughts, hurricanes, and other shocks have taken a toll on agriculture and growing systems. Across 134 nations over a 53-year period from 1961 to 2013, researchers identified 226 food production shocks across all sectors, including crops, livestock, fisheries, and aquaculture.
Using data from marine and inland fisheries, crop and livestock production records, and other resources, the study’s authors pinpointed alarming trends over the course of the last half century.
In analyzing that time period, researchers found that shocks happened more frequently as time went on. Upticks were noted between the 1960s and 1970s, as well as during other periods, including between 2000 and 2010, in line with both weather events and major national crises that occurred at the time.
When any food sector is impacted, people risk going hungry, in addition to farmers and other food producers losing their livelihoods. That can create catastrophic unrest rippling across countries and regions, and, eventually, the world.
Fig.2 Drivers of food production shocks. Relative proportions for the drivers indicated in the legend are shown for the crop, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture sectors. Credit: Nature Sustainability
“A wide range of social and ecological pressures on food systems can drive shocks through direct or indirect mechanisms,” the study states. It goes on to note that “People’s vulnerability to shock events rests on their capacity to adapt, the scale and frequency of shocks, and their dependence on the affected sector.”
Strengthening resilience against food shocks is a key point of concern for the study’s authors, who emphasize urgency. Warming temperatures and a changing climate have come hand-in-hand with an uptick in the weather crises that cause food shocks.
“Increased investment in food systems research to improve resilience to shocks is urgently required under climate change,” the study warns. Resilience can include a number of shifts, including diversifying food sources, creating new climate-conscious infrastructure, and bolstering domestic food sources for areas dependent on international trade.
Not all regions have been impacted equally. South Asia, for example, is already among the regions most at risk, with floods and heat waves becoming more common across countries like India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Food shocks hitting crops were most common in that region, while Eastern Europe has seen major blows to its fisheries and South America’s aquaculture has suffered.
And while weather events take up much of the report, the impact of geopolitical events is also noted as a driver of food shocks, with the fall of communism in Soviet Russia and a series of wars in Afghanistan among the examples. Those two factors — weather and political crises — have combined to throw off food production, and, in turn, threaten people around the world.
“In recent decades we have become increasingly familiar with images in the media of disasters such as drought and famine around the world,” said lead author Richard Cottrell in a press release. “Our study confirms that food production shocks have become more frequent, posing a growing danger to global food production.”
Fig.4 Case studies of shock spillover, trade-offs and co-occurrence across terrestrial and aquatic sectors. a. Invasion of Kuwait during the Gulf War. b. Severe drought in Afghanistan. c. Land-sea switches following Hurricane David in Dominica. d. El Niño-driven floods on land followed by an outbreak of white-spot disease in shrimp farms in Ecuador. ENSO, El Niño Southern Oscillation. Credit: Nature Sustainability
The study comes after a brutal year that saw wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and other disasters play out across the world. In 2018, more than 100 people died in Greece amid raging wildfires, while heat waves devastated India and Pakistan. Flooding in Nigeria and Japan killed more than 400 people and the combination of two earthquakes and a tsunami left over 3,000 people dead in Indonesia.
In the United States, impacts also took a heavy toll. Wildfires in the West killed more than 100 people and cost California more than $3.5 billion in damages. And for the second year in a row, hurricanes pulverized the Gulf and East Coasts, drenching North Carolina in a record-shattering amount of rain and wreaking havoc in Florida and other states.
While no single event can be easily connected to climate change, scientists have consistently drawn connections between global warming and increasingly erratic, and more intense weather patterns. Drier and hotter temperatures are fueling more deadly fires in areas where wildfires are common, while warmer-than-average waters in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere are allowing hurricanes to become more damaging.
As those climate impacts worsen, Monday’s study indicates food production will continue to suffer as well. Wildfires and hurricanes alike destroy crops and set back growing seasons, in addition to harming the infrastructure used for future efforts. Preparing for that inevitability will be critical to mitigating such impacts.
“With extreme weather events predicted to increase into the future, potentially interacting with civil unrest, achieving food security in regions most exposed to shocks may hinge on successful social protection mechanisms to help people cope and recover,” the study warns.
“Fundamental shifts towards shock-resilient food systems will require considerable but achievable changes to how we grow and trade food.”

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Capturing Carbon To Fight Climate Change Is Dividing Environmentalists

The Conversation -  | 

Testing new ways to use this technology is underway in Japan. Reuters/Aaron Sheldrick
Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality. Not all of the activists agree on what those policies ought to be.
Some 626 environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity and 350, recently laid out their vision in a letter they sent to U.S. lawmakers. They warned that they “vigorously oppose” several strategies, including the use of carbon capture and storage – a process that can trap excess carbon pollution that’s already warming the Earth, and lock it away.
In our view, as a political philosopher who studies global justice and an environmental social scientist, this blanket opposition is an unfortunate mistake. Based on the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the risks in relying on land sinks like forests and soils alone to take up the excess carbon, we believe that carbon capture and storage could be a powerful tool for making the climate safer and even rectifying historical climate injustices.

Global inequality
We think the U.S. and other rich countries should accelerate negative emissions research for two reasons.
First, they can afford it. Second, they have a historical responsibility as they burned a disproportionate amount of the carbon causing climate change today. Global warming is poised to hit the least-developed countries, including dozens that were colonized by these wealthier nations, the hardest.
Consider this: The entire African continent emits less carbon than the U.S., Russia or Japan.
Yet Africa is likely to experience climate change impacts sooner and more intensely than any other region. Some African regions are already experiencing warming increases at more than twice the global rate. Coastal and island nations like Bangladesh, Madagascar and the Marshall Islands face near or total destruction.
But the world’s richest nations have been slow to endorse and support the necessary research, development and governance for negative emissions technologies.

Bad track record with coal
What explains the objections from climate justice advocates?
The U.S. has heavily funded experiments with carbon capture and storage to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new coal-fired power plants since George W. Bush’s presidency.
Those efforts have not paid off, partly because of economics. Natural gas and renewable energy have become cheaper and more popular than coal for generating electricity.
Only a handful of coal-fired power plants are under construction in the U.S., where closures are routine. The industry is in trouble everywhere, with few exceptions.
In addition, carbon capture with coal has a bad track record. The biggest U.S. experiment is the US$7.5 billion Kemper power plant in Mississippi. It ended in failure in 2017 when state power authorities ordered the plant operator to give up on this technology and rely on natural gas instead.


Other uses
Carbon capture and storage, however, isn’t just for fossil-fuel-burning power plants. It can work with industrial carbon dioxide sources, such as steel, cement and chemical plants and incinerators.
Then, one of two things can happen. The carbon can be turned into new products, such as fuels, cement, soft drinks or even shoes.
Carbon can also be stored permanently if it is injected underground, where geologists believe it can stay put for centuries.
Until now, a common use for captured carbon is extracting oil out of old wells. Burning that petroleum, however, can make climate change worse.

Captured carbon has a variety of industrial uses, including oil extraction and fire extinguisher manufacturing. U.S. Energy Department's National Energy Technology Laboratory
Going carbon negative
This technology may potentially also remove more carbon than gets emitted – as long as it’s designed right.
One example is what’s called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, where farm residues or crops like trees or grasses are grown to be burned to generate electricity. Carbon is separated out and stored at the power plants where this happens.
If the supply chain is sustainable, with cultivation, harvesting and transport done in low-carbon or carbon-neutral ways, this process can produce what scientists call negative emissions, with more carbon removed than released. Another possibility involves directly capturing carbon from the air.
Scientists point out that bioenergy with carbon capture and storage could require vast amounts of land for growing biofuels to burn. And climate advocates are concerned that both approaches could pave the way for oil, gas and coal companies and big industries to simply continue with business as usual instead of phasing out fossil fuels.
Many experts agree that limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius will require reducing the volume of carbon emissions through energy efficiency and renewable-energy generation and CO₂ removal. MCC, CC BY-SA
 Natural solutions
Every pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the most recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected the use of carbon removal approaches.

Negative emissions technologies
Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: Howard Herzog, MIT Get the data
Planting more trees, composting and farming in ways that store carbon in soils and protecting wetlands can also reduce atmospheric carbon. We believe the natural solutions many environmentalists might prefer are crucial. But soaking up excess carbon through afforestation on a massive scale could encroach on farmland.
To be sure, not all environmentalists are writing off carbon capture and storage.
The Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, along with many other big green organizations, did not sign the letter, which objected not just to carbon capture and storage but also to nuclear power, emissions trading and converting trash into energy through incineration.
Rather than leave carbon removal technologies out of the Green New Deal, we suggest that more environmentalists consider their potential for removing carbon that has already been emitted. We believe these approaches could potentially create jobs, foster economic development and reduce inequality on a global scale – as long as they are meaningfully accountable to people in the world’s poorest nations.

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