{"id":22162,"date":"2016-11-12T12:49:01","date_gmt":"2016-11-12T17:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22162"},"modified":"2016-11-12T12:49:01","modified_gmt":"2016-11-12T17:49:01","slug":"radical-realism-about-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22162","title":{"rendered":"Radical Realism About Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Radical Realism About Climate Change<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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BERLIN \u2013 Mainstream politics, by definition, is ill equipped to imagine fundamental change. But last December in Paris, 196 governments agreed on the need to limit global warming to 1.5\u00b0C above pre-industrial levels \u2013 an objective that\u00a0holds the promise of delivering precisely such a transformation<\/a>. Achieving it will require overcoming serious political challenges, reflected in the fact that some are advocating solutions that will end up doing more harm than good.<\/p>\n

One strategy that has gained a lot of momentum focuses on the need to develop large-scale technological interventions to control the global thermostat. Proponents of geo-engineering technologies\u00a0argue<\/a>\u00a0that conventional adaptation and mitigation measures are simply not reducing emissions fast enough to prevent dangerous warming. Technologies such as \u201ccarbon capture and storage\u201d (CCS), they argue, are necessary to limit damage and human suffering.<\/p>\n

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems to agree. In its\u00a0fifth assessment report<\/a>, it builds its scenarios for meeting the Paris climate goals around the concept of \u201cnegative emissions\u201d \u2013 that is, the ability to suck excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

But this approach ignores serious problems with the development and deployment of geo-engineering technologies. Consider CCS, which is the process of capturing waste CO2\u00a0from large sources like fossil-fuel power plants and depositing it in, say, an underground geological formation, thereby preventing it from entering the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

It sounds good. But what makes it economical is that it enables enhanced oil recovery. In other words, the only way to make CCS cost-effective is to use it to exacerbate the problem it is supposed to address.<\/p>\n

The supposed savior technology \u2013 bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) \u2013\u00a0is not much better<\/a>. BECCS begins by producing large amounts of biomass from, say, fast-growing trees which naturally capture CO2; those plants are then converted into fuel via burning or refining, with the resulting carbon emissions being captured and sequestered.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Radical Realism About Climate Change BERLIN \u2013 Mainstream politics, by definition, is ill equipped to imagine fundamental change. But last December in Paris, 196 governments agreed on the need to limit global warming to 1.5\u00b0C above pre-industrial levels \u2013 an objective that\u00a0holds the promise of delivering precisely such a transformation. Achieving it will require overcoming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[113,141,1004,5161,14552,11348,8402],"class_list":["post-22162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-climate-change","tag-co2","tag-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change","tag-lili-fuhr","tag-paris-climate-agreement","tag-project-syndicate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22163,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22162\/revisions\/22163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}