by Steven T. Corneliussen (Physics Today) To mitigate climate change, has the planet “gambled its future on the appearance in a puff of smoke of a carbon-sucking fairy godmother”? During the Paris climate summit late last year, European policy analyst Oliver Geden’s...
Geoengineering Technologies
Nature article confirms: IPCC assumptions about BECCS ignore environmental and wider climate impacts
In his recent article in Nature, Dr Philip Williamson highlights how the targets set out in the Paris Agreement mask an underlying assumption that they will be met through large-scale carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere and, in particular, through Bioenergy...
Seeds of doubt over iron boost for algae
by Alex Kirby (Climate News Network) New research suggests that fertilising oceans with iron to increase the growth of algae that absorb carbon dioxide is not the hoped-for answer to reducing global warming. LONDON, 28 January, 2016 – One keenly-argued possible way of...
The hidden agenda: how veiled techno – utopias shore up the Paris Agreement
by Kevin Anderson (kevinanderson.info) The Paris Agreement is a genuine triumph of international diplomacy and of how the French people brought an often fractious world together to see beyond national self interest. Moreover, the agreement is testament to how...
The dubious promise of bioenergy plus carbon capture
by Richard Martin (MIT Technology Review) Climate change agreements rest on negative emissions technologies that may be unachievable. While many scientists and climate change activists hailed December’s Paris agreement as a historic step forward for international...
Talks in the city of light generate more heat
Rather than relying on far-off negative-emissions technologies, Paris needed to deliver a low-carbon road map for today, argues Kevin Anderson in Nature. (A longer version of this article can be found here.) The climate agreement delivered earlier this month in Paris...
Sign-on letter: No to 1.5°C with geoengineering!
Paris, 11 December 2015 Seemingly out of the blue (or rather, out of the black smog of the UNFCCC process), some of the largest historical culprits for climate change, countries including the United States, Canada and the European Union, have decided to back an...
The Phantom of the COP21 Opera: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
by Oliver Munnion, Global Forest Coalition blog Yesterday I went to a briefing at the COP21 summit on how realistic achieving a 1.5 degree target as part of the Paris climate deal is, as opposed to the 2 degree target that was first proposed. At the end of the...
COP21’s climate technofix: spinning carbon into gold and the myth of ‘negative emissions’
by Rachel Smolker, The Ecologist Paris has been awash with hype about 'CO2 recycling' and 'carbon neutral' or even 'carbon negative' technologies based on burning millions of trees, writes Rachel Smolker. But the alchemical notion that waste carbon can be spun into...
Techno-Optimism and Bad Science in Paris: The Problem With Carbon Capture and Storage
by Almuth Ernsting, Truthout UN climate conferences provide a platform for advocating real solutions to the climate crisis - but also for selling and promoting false ones. At the climate conference this and next week in Paris, many civil society groups and social...
New Report: Last ditch climate option or wishful thinking? Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage
Biofuelwatch has released a new comprehensive report about Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). Full report Executive Summary (Full references for the report) BECCS is being proposed as a way of removing billions of tonnes of carbon every year from...
Blazing a trail of deception: the White Rose Project and “negative emissions” technologies
by Oliver Munnion, Our Kingdom In the UK, a new coal fired power station is being developed by Drax that, if built, would be the first new coal fired power station to be switched on since Drax’s existing power station opened in 1974. This is surprising given that...
The Paris Climate-Change Spectacular
by Neth Daño and Pat Mooney (Project Syndicate) OTTAWA – The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December will feature all the tightly choreographed production values of a Hollywood blockbuster. The cast will be huge: presidents and prime ministers at...
Net Zero is not Zero: Inside the G7’s dystopian decarbonization scheme
by Dru Oja Jay Last week in Germany the "Group of 7" countries (Canada, Japan, USA, Germany, United Kingdom, France, and Italy) declared that "deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of...
Recklessly playing God with the planet
A government-sponsored scientific panel called for more research on geoengineering — here’s why we shouldn’t even consider it by Shannon Hall (ScienceLine) Geoengineering — that wild and grandiose idea that suggests we could offset and even reverse the alarming...
False promise of ‘carbon capture’ exposed
The Ecologist The widely touted 'carbon capture and storage' technology is much more expensive than wind and solar, says a Greenpeace report. It also represents a perverse subsidy to the fossil fuel sector that will only boost coal and oil, and delay the transition to...
Turns out the world’s first “clean coal” plant is a backdoor subsidy to oil producers
by David Roberts (Grist) The world’s first “clean coal” plant — that is, the first full-size coal-fired power plant ever to capture and store the majority of its CO2 emissions — is located in, of all places, Saskatchewan. (They should change the name to “Of All...
Geoengineering Is Not a Solution to Climate Change
Using technofixes to tinker with global climate systems is an excuse to avoid unpopular but necessary measures to reduce carbon emissions by Clive Hamilton (Scientific American) The geoengineering juggernaut has shifted into higher gear with the release of a...
Should We Experiment With Climate Geoengineering?
by Rachel Smolker and Almuth Ernsting (Truthout) The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced its long-awaited reports on climate geoengineering in mid-February. The reports intelligently state at the outset that geoengineering is no substitute for reducing...
What If We Lost the Sky?
by Anna North (New York Times) What is the sky worth? This sounds like a philosophical question, but it might become a more concrete one. A report released last week by the National Research Council called for research into reversing climate changethrough a process...
Geoengineering is no place for corporate profit making
There is no shortage of ideas from business to save the environment – the problem is when they want to make a fast buck by Clive Hamilton (Guardian) “Save the world and make a little cash on the side.” That’s the motto of Russ George, the colourful entrepreneur behind...
Can the CIA weaponise the weather?
A leading climate-change scientist has warned that the US secret service’s interest in geoengineering technology may not be benign. But it’s not the first time a government has tried to control weather patterns by Patrick Barkham (Guardian) Using the weather as a...
Climate Hacking Is Barking Mad
You can’t fix the Earth with these geoengineering proposals, but you can sure make it worse. by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (Slate) Some years ago, in the question-and-answer session after a lecture at the American Geophysical Union, I described certain geoengineering...
Plan B? What Happened to Plan A?
Why we shouldn’t fund geoengineering experimentation, and what we still need to learn about the climate by Pat Mooney (ETC Group) The US National Academy of Sciences has released two reports on geoengineering that recommend investments in solar radiation management...