Scientists Warn On Moral Hazard Of "Someday, Somehow" Carbon Removal Technology

[hatrack]

Removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere to prevent global warming from becoming catastrophic may be a fool’s game amounting to a “moral hazard par excellence,” according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science. Nobody knows if atmospheric carbon removal — known as negative emissions — will work, and it could delay critical cuts to emissions while tacitly giving people license to pollute, the paper says.

“Negative-emission technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather an unjust and high-stakes gamble,” write the paper’s authors, Kevin Anderson and and Glen Peters. Anderson is deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and Peters is a researcher at CICERO, a climate research organization in Norway.

Leading negative emissions researchers fear the paper’s strong opposition to their work will serve to undermine research into a process they believe could prove critical to the future of the earth. “The moral hazard is in blocking this approach, which I see this paper as doing,” said Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University.

Both negative emissions and drastic greenhouse gas pollution cuts are necessary in order to keep climate change in check, Lackner said. “We have to do everything we can do minimize the damage,” he said. “One important ingredient is to have negative emissions, and get them online as fast as we can.”

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http://www.climatecentral.org/news/scientists-warn-negative-emissions-moral-hazard-20785

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. Do both. Science is good enough to do more than one t hing at a time.

[NNadir]

2. I would submit that the big bet on so called "renewable energy" was rather an unjust and high-stakes

...gamble.

It didn't work; it isn't working, and it won't work.

Regrettably, the people who pushed this bad bet as a "sure thing" had no interest in fighting climate change, but rather in stopping what was, and what remains, the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy.

That this bet was lost is clear from the "profit" by the "House" if we regard the "House" as the planetary atmosphere, and the "profit" as the accumulation of carbon dioxide in that atmosphere: We will never in our lifetimes see a carbon dioxide concentration lower than 400 ppm.

We just passed our annual minimum.

Speaking of House, a fellow named House wrote what I think is an outstanding paper on the thermodynamics and extreme difficulty of capturing carbon dioxide from the air. It goes back a few years, but it remains sobering: Economic and energetic analysis of capturing CO2 from ambient air (Kurt Zenz House, Antonio C. Baclig, Manya Ranjan, Ernst A. van Nierop, Jennifer Wilcox, and Howard J. Herzog, PNAS 20428–20433 December 20, 2011 ∣ vol. 108 ∣ no. 51)

I don't expect to live a long time, but I have a reasonable chance of living to see a time in which we will say that we will never again see 450 ppm.

That I'm extremely bitter about this is a function of the knowledge that it didn't have to be this way; but for fear and, especially, ignorance.

Still we have no yet sobered up yet from this drunken adventure of trying what failed 200 years ago, so called "renewable energy" and therefore, one hopes that scientists and engineers will not give up on approaches to removing carbon dioxide to save whatever is left to save.

[kristopher]

3. And I'd submit that you haven't got a clue about the topic.

Nuclear sucks and is nothing more than a way to support and perpetuate the economics of coal.