[ad_1]
Rapidly reducing emissions that will require rapid transitions to new technologies and massive reductions in energy demand. Zeke Hausfather and climate research leader Zeke Hausfather, who contributed to an earlier working group for the latest UN climate report, say this will require unprecedented human behavior changes and productivity improvements, all of which will be “extremely difficult to achieve in the real world.” Strip.
Lowering the target to 2˚C would provide an additional decade, basically to halve climate pollution to 29 billion tonnes of emissions by 2040.
In both cases, the speed and scale of the cuts required is unrealistic, says Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, a research and investment firm focused on decarbonisation. He says nations will need to do “enormous” levels of decarbonisation.
Fundamental problems: The world has already spread too much. We haven’t done enough to move to cleaner ways of running our economies. We still do not have suitable and cost-effective ways to repair certain industries and products, such as aviation, shipping, fertilizers, cement and steel.
The promise of decarbonization is that it can give nations more time to move to sustainable practices and offset continued emissions from sources we don’t know how to change.
However …
2nd. We’re going to have to do a lot of things
Preventing the planet from warming by 2 ˚C or pulling the climate back from it could require extracting billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Models that limit warming to 2˚C relied on three main methods of decarbonisation: planting trees, restoring forests and adopting similar land management practices, developing and using carbon-absorbing machinery, and relying on plants to produce energy while capturing emissions. is is known as BECCS. Together, they will need to eliminate 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2050 and 35 billion tons by 2100, according to the report.
3. We need a portfolio of decarbonization options
The report highlights that different approaches to carbon removal have very different benefits and challenges.
For example, nature-based approaches such as planting trees and restoring forests are the most widely used today. But when plants die or are burned in fires, carbon can return to the atmosphere. Thus, these solutions are likely to be shorter-lived than other methods, such as geological storage, which traps carbon underground.
Direct air capture can permanently remove and store carbon, but machinery is currently limited in scale and expensive, and the technology consumes large amounts of energy and water, according to the report.
The IPCC report’s models are heavily based on BECCS, a mix of nature-based and technology-based approaches, each with some benefits. But BECCS requires enormous amounts of land to compete with the needs of food production. among other difficulties.
The report highlights a wide variety of other ways to capture carbon dioxide, including ocean-based approaches such as using minerals. increase alkalinity sea water. However, these are largely untested.
4. Scaling will require funding and policy decisions
The authors of the climate panel emphasize that achieving high levels of carbon removal will require significant research and development to identify the most effective methods, minimize environmental impacts, and rapidly develop large projects in the real world.
“Everyone needs help exploring the various options for both enacting deep decarbonization and removing carbon dioxide,” said Frances Wang, program manager for the ClimateWorks Foundation, which funds decarbonization research efforts, in response to an MIT Technology Review. investigation.
Cost is likely to be the biggest barrier to establishing a large decarbonisation industry. Who will pay the hundreds of billions of trillions of dollars to remove that much carbon dioxide each year?
The report states that accelerating research and development on decarbonization and ensuring that businesses actually do it will require a “political commitment” from governments. This means enacting policies to mandate or encourage carbon removal, as well as ways to ensure that practices achieve their claimed climate benefits.
If history is a guide, the dire findings of a new IPCC report will not radically change anything. The world is pumping out about 6 billion tons more annual emissions in 2014 than when the last major assessment was published. But as the importance of its role in tackling climate change becomes clearer, more and more work is being done on decarbonisation. .
[ad_2]
Source link