By Biofuelwatch In 2011 Biofuelwatch published Biochar: A Critical Review of Science and Policy. In that report we highlighted the uncertainties about biochar including the large land area that would be required to supply biomass for a global scale impact, the...
Carbon Dioxide Removal / Greenhouse Gas Removal
The False Premise of Desperate Measures
by Gabriel Levy A response to After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck (London: Verso Books, 2019). This post was originally published on the blog People and Nature. We need to talk about geoengineering. Badly. To do...
Artificial Upwelling: current efforts and anticipated impacts of intermingling the ocean
by Anja Chalmin The US-based Climate Foundation revealed plans to intermingle ocean water layers in Australian and Philippine coastal waters with the aim of sequestering atmospheric carbon as well as stimulating the growth of phytoplankton and macroalgae,...
Rotterdam’s Carbon Capture, India’s Cloud Seeding and other updates: August 2019
Delayed and expanding projects, new initiatives and revivals by Anja Chalmin Revived Geoengineering Projects The Port of Rotterdam announced the start of Porthos, a joint project with EBN and Gasunie. Porthos stands for “Port Of Rotterdam CO₂ Transport...
Policymakers Shouldn’t Trust Drax’s Bizarre Tree-Burning Climate Solution
If there were a prize for the most bizarre climate mitigation idea, power company Drax Plc’s latest “green innovation” project would be a strong candidate.
Direct Air Capture: Recent developments and future plans
by Anja Chalmin In the early 1990s, the European Space Agency launched a technology to extend space missions by filtering exhaled CO2 out of the air on board of shuttles and space stations. During the past two decades, the technology - known as Direct...
Ice on Fire makes dangerous concessions to techno-fix fantasies
By promoting high-risk technologies as “solutions”, DiCaprio’s new film contributes to derailing serious climate efforts
Geoengineering Developments: Carbon Capture, Venture Capital and Would-be Megaprojects
A great variety of climate geoengineering projects have been driven forward throughout the past months, while questions remain about their side effects and long-term impacts.
Distractors and Disruptors: Collision or Convergence?
Silicon Valley and Big Oil are heading in the same direction for different reasons: geoengineering as a climate technofix by Dru Jay The global response to the climate crisis is increasingly dominated by two forces – we’ll call them the disruptors and the distractors...
Against Geoengineering
by Silvia Ribeiro (This article originally appeared in Jacobin Magazine and on the Science for the People website.) According to the most recent IPCC report, we have only twelve years to drastically reduce emissions if we’re to keep the Earth’s temperature rise from...
Fire and Plantations in Portugal
by Oliver Munnion (This article was originally published by Science for the People.) Devastating wildfires are increasingly a feature of summers across the globe, and their intensity and scale have been linked directly to climate change in a number of recent...
Jacobin’s “Utopian” Geoengineering Leads to Dystopian Sun-blocking Technologies
by Pat Mooney In Jacobin Magazine ("The Need for Carbon Removal," July 24, 2018), Holly Jean Buck set out to convince readers that the left should develop a “utopian” political strategy favourable to Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technology. While I appreciate the...
Where is California’s Climate Summit Heading? Watch Arizona
by Dru Jay On climate issues, California governor Jerry Brown has been “hailed as the ‘anti-Trump’” for his efforts to keep the United States government committed to the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. So when California recently hosted the Global Climate Action Summit,...
Marine Geoengineering: a technofix for the climate? (video)
Large-scale technological interventions to “fix” the climate crisis are moving up on the political agenda. Some climate scientists are now proposing geoengineering interventions on land to halt global warming - most prominently BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture...
Land-based geoengineering: a technofix for the climate? (Video)
Large-scale technological interventions to “fix” the climate crisis are moving up on the political agenda. Some climate scientists are now proposing geoengineering interventions on land to halt global warming - most prominently BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture...
Negative CO2 emissions cannot replace rapid reductions
Conference report: An international conference on negative emissions highlights extent of trade-offs and reinforces urgency of near-term emission reductions. by Kate Dooley (this article was originally posted by HBF) From May 22nd to 24th, over 200 academics,...
Pirates of the Pacific
by Silvia Ribeiro The pirates of marine geoengineering are not giving up easily. Although there is a UN moratorium on ocean fertilisation, the company Oceaneos wants to experiment with this risky technology in Chile and Peru, despite not having permission from the...
The Big Bad Fix
ETC Group, BiofuelWatch and Heinrich Boell Foundation present a comprehensive argument against geoengineering in this report. Click here to download the full report (pdf) As a rapidly warming world manifests heat waves, floods, droughts and hurricanes, geoengineering...
Mapping Geogengineering Projects
Interactive map from ETC Group and Heinrich Boell Foundation shows growth of climate control efforts This interactive geoengineering map, prepared by ETC Group and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, is an attempt to shed light on the worldwide state of geoengineering by...
Governance for a ban on geoengineering
[Originally posted by Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative.] by Lili Fuhr All geoengineering approaches are by definition large-scale, intentional, and high-risk. Some have well-known negative impacts, threatening the achievement of the Sustainable...
Risks of large-scale biosequestration as a form of CO2 removal
Source: Global Forest Coalition Click here to view the report. At the start of a major Climate Engineering Conference [1] in Berlin, the Global Forest Coalition [2] has launched a Working Paper that highlights the risks of different proposals for large-scale Carbon...
Riding the geostorm: Is it possible to govern geoengineering?
The prospect of controlling global temperatures raises serious questions of power and justice: Who gets to control the Earth’s thermostat and adjust the climate for their own interests? Who will make the decision to deploy if such drastic measures are considered...
Failure of Kemper County “clean coal” plant casts more doubts on BECCS
After years of embarrassing delays and $5.3 billion in cost overruns, Southern Company has finally pulled the plug on its pioneering “clean coal” plant in Kemper County, Mississippi. The $7.5 billion Kemper County project would have been the world’s first Integrated...
Climate Change, Smoke and Mirrors
For the past decade, a small but growing group of governments and scientists, the majority from the most powerful and most climate-polluting countries in the world, has been pushing for political consideration of geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale...