Solutions or Smokescreens

 

The Planet On Green Life-Support

Net zero does not mean zero emissions but balancing out remaining greenhouse gas emissions with other actions. While countries and companies say they will cut emissions as much as possible, net zero means that some sectors are expected to still be releasing greenhouse gases in 2050.

To offset them, emitters count on projects that cut emissions elsewhere or on using natural solutions or technology to stop emissions reaching the atmosphere. Natural solutions include planting trees or restoring soil or wetlands, while technical projects include capturing and storing CO2 when it is emitted, or sucking carbon out of the air – all of which have yet to make a difference to the climate, given their use remains relatively small-scale.

Countless initiatives have sprung up offering offset certificates based on forestry projects and other nature-based solutions that individuals and corporates can buy. Critics say such offsets are a fig leaf for continued fossil fuel consumption. They point to a lack of common standards and hard-to-verify baselines determining the added climate value of projects underlying offset certificates. A report by Oxfam said using land alone to remove the world’s carbon emissions to achieve net zero by 2050 would require new forests at least five times the size of India or more than all the farmland on the planet.

Apart from much criticism of firms’ reliance on offsets that have yet to materialise, there is no standardised way to lay out net-zero strategies and emissions reporting, making holding companies to account difficult. Selling high-emitting assets – a move that can make a company’s emissions report card look better – makes no difference to the planet’s atmosphere if the buyer keeps operating the asset.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) refers to types of filter on industrial smokestacks and projects to store the filtered carbon underground, for example in disused oilfields. Most current CCS projects can decarbonise high-emitting industrial processes. They do not suck any carbon out of the atmosphere but just prevent new carbon from entering. While the technology is proven, global CCS capacity is at only about 40 million tonnes of CO2.

There is technology that results in negative emissions, for example, direct air capture (DAC). In Iceland there is the world’s biggest such complex and, according to its operators, will capture 4,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas per year in boxes the size of shipping containers.  Fans draw air into  ducts. There, CO2 builds up on a dense filter before being freed by 100C (212F) blasts of heat. The gas is then dissolved in water and pumped through pores and cracks of basalt rock as deep as 2,000 metres (6,600 feet) below ground. There, it cools, reacts with minerals and, within two years, changes from a climate-heating gas into harmless rock.

 Scientists are touting this cutting-edge yet costly technology as a key solution to the climate crisis, insisting that emissions reduction must go hand in hand with emissions removal.

Sandra Ó Snæbjörnsdóttir, a geologist at the Iceland plant, explains, “Firstly, we have to not emit CO2. We have to decarbonise.”

“Direct air capture is absolutely essential for achieving net zero,” said Professor Stuart Haszeldine, an expert in CO2 storage and climate engineering at the University of Edinburgh. “We have to have technological solutions to get ourselves out of this problem that technology has created. I’m all in favour of planting trees and rewilding, but none of those in themselves is enough. Direct air capture, together with using much less fossil fuel, is part of the remedy.” He continues,  “You’re going to need something like 10,000 of these around the world. That sounds like a big number but that’s just the same as the number of big power plants around the world."

Others warn its high price and voracious appetite for energy are obstacles to neutralising emissions on a global scale. Its fiercest critics brand it a naive and unproven tactic that offers the worst polluters a smokescreen.

Gyorgy Dallos, at Greenpeace International, argues that presenting carbon capture technology as a solution “is at best naive and at worst dangerously cynical” — describing it as “expensive, undeveloped and unproven to work at scale”.

“It serves as a smokescreen to distract from a continuing rise in emissions,” he said. “The real solution is immediate emissions reduction which means, among other things, an immediate stop to new fossil fuel projects.”

Net zero: Just patching over emissions or path to save planet? | Explainer News | Al Jazeera

Can carbon capture facilities reverse climate change? | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera