Carbon Dioxide Removal: The Why
In addition to my blog on the subject, you may have seen other headlines recently about carbon dioxide removal. In particular, the richest man on Earth, former richest man on Earth, and the world’s most powerful government have made news in the area.
- Elon Musk donated $100M to fund an XPrize competition to develop the best carbon capture technology.
- Bill Gates was featured on 60 Minutes and released a new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need” about innovative climate technologies, several of which revolve around carbon dioxide removal. He also is invested in several companies in the field.
- Finally, and perhaps, most consequentially, the Biden Administration announced the creation of a new agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency — Climate (ARPA-C) which will aim to accelerate research, development, and deployment of innovative climate technologies, including CDR. The agency is modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which you may remember from such inventions as the Internet, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E), which is developing game changing technologies in the energy space but has yet to enable any technology that can produce delightful GIFs such as the one below.
Ok cool, Jason. So you, some rich dudes, and Joe Biden have a new interest, what’s the big deal?
Well, like Rick and Ilsa’s relationship in Casablanca, it goes back to Paris. In 2015, nations established a target to keep warming “well below 2°C,” with an aspirational goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C. I want to make clear that neither 1.5°C nor 2°C is some magic number. Global warming is more like a slope than a cliff in that it will get worse with every marginal temperature increase, not that the world will spontaneous burst into flames at 2.01°C. That being said, scientists agree that things start getting very tenuous at warming greater than that level. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, temperatures have already increased by roughly 1°C since 1880. That 1°C has been responsible for all the climate disasters and disruptions we’ve recently experienced.
To hit the goal set by the Paris Agreement, each signatory nation would set “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs. In late February, the UN Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change released a synthesis report of updated NDCs and found that with these targets in place, global emissions would be just 0.5% lower in 2030 than in 2010. Scientists have said to keep warming below 1.5°C, there would need to be a 45% reduction by that time.
Now, even if nations were to drastically ratchet up emission reduction goals AND actually achieve them, it will still be nearly impossible to reach either the 1.5°C or 2°C threshold without “negative emissions,” or carbon dioxide removal. In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, which found carbon removal will be critical to meeting the international climate goal. In fact, the report states, “all pathways that limit global warming to 1.5C … project the use of CDR on the order of 100–1,000GtCO2 [billion tonnes] over the 21st century.” For context, humanity emitted 33Gt CO2 in 2019.
In 2019, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report on negative emissions technologies, affirming the conclusions of the IPCC 1.5 Report and providing this helpful graph to visualize the importance of negative emissions.
SOURCE: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019
Next week, we’ll learn about the many methods by which we can remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
