Less Than Zero

Most Americans used to think about climate change—to the extent that they thought about it at all—as an abstract threat in a distant future. But more and more are now seeing it for what it is: a costly, human-made disaster unfolding before their very eyes. A wave of increasingly destructive hurricanes, heat spells, and wildfires has ravaged communities across the United States, and both scientists and citizens are able to connect these extreme events to a warming earth. Seven in ten Americans agree that global warming is happening, according to a 2018 study conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. About six in ten think it is mostly caused by human activity and is already changing the weather. Four in ten say they have personally experienced its impact. And seven in ten say the United States should enact measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including prices and limits on carbon dioxide pollution, no matter what other countries do.

When it comes to generating support for climate policy, a warranted sense of alarm is only half the battle. And the other half—a shared belief that the problem is solvable—is lagging far behind. The newfound sense of urgency is at risk of being swamped by collective despair. A scant six percent of Americans, according to the Yale study, believe that the world “can and will” effectively address climate change. With carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels having risen by an estimated 2.7 percent in 2018 and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, which will determine the ultimate extent of warming, at their highest level in some three million years, such pessimism may seem justified—especially with a climate change denier in the White House. 

But it is not too late to solve the global climate crisis. A decade of extraordinary innovation has made the greening of the global economy not only feasible but also likely. The market now favors clean energy: in many U.S. states, it is cheaper to build new renewable energy plants than to run existing coal-fired power plants. By combining solar power with new, efficient batteries, Arizona and other sunny states will soon be able to provide electricity at a lower cost per megawatt-hour than new, efficient natural gas plants. Local, regional, and federal governments, as well as corporations, are making measurable progress on reducing carbon pollution. Since 2000, 21 countries have reduced their annual greenhouse gas emissions while growing their economies; China is expected to see emissions peak by 2025, five years earlier than it promised as part of the negotiations for the Paris climate agreement in 2015. At the UN climate talks held late last year in Poland, countries agreed on rules for how to report progress on meeting emission-reduction commitments, an important step in implementing the Paris accord.

What’s more, an entirely new arsenal is emerging in the fight against climate change: negative emission technologies, or NETs. NETs are different from conventional approaches to climate mitigation in that they seek not to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere but to remove carbon dioxide that’s already there. These technologies range from the old-fashioned practice of reforestation to high-tech machines that suck carbon out of the sky and store it underground. The window of opportunity to combat climate change has not closed—and with a push from policymakers, NETs can keep it propped open for longer. 

THE HEAT IS ON

How much time is left to avoid climate catastrophe? The truth is that it is impossible to answer the question with precision. Scientists know that human activity is warming the planet but still don’t fully understand the sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gases. Nor do they fully comprehend the link between average global warming and local repercussions. So far, however, most effects of climate change have been faster and more severe than the climate models predicted. The downside risks are enormous; the most recent predictions, ever more dire.

The Paris agreement aims to limit the increase in global average temperatures above preindustrial levels to well below two degrees Celsius, and ideally to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Going above those levels of warming would mean more disastrous impacts. Global average temperatures have already risen by about one degree Celsius since 1880, with two-thirds of that increase occurring after 1975. An October 2018 special report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of leading scientists and policymakers from around the world, found that unless the world implements “rapid and far-reaching” changes to its energy and industrial systems, the earth is likely to reach temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels sometime between 2030 and 2052. Limiting warming to that level, the IPCC found, would require immediate and dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide: roughly a 45 percent reduction in the next dozen years. Even meeting the less ambitious target of two degrees would require deep cuts in emissions by 2030 and sustained aggressive action far beyond then. 

The IPCC report also warns that seemingly small global temperature increases can have enormous consequences. For example, the half-degree difference between 1.5 degrees Celsius and two degrees Celsius of total warming could consign twice as many people to water scarcity, put ten million more at risk from rising sea levels, and plunge several hundred million more people into poverty as lower yields of key crops drive hunger across much of the developing world. At two degrees of warming, nearly all of the planet’s coral reefs are expected to be lost; at 1.5 degrees, ten to 30 percent could survive.

The deeper message of the IPCC report is that there is no risk-free level of climate change. Targets such as 1.5 degrees Celsius or two degrees Celsius are important political markers, but they shouldn’t fool anyone into thinking that nature works so precisely. Just as the risks are lower at 1.5 degrees Celsius than at two degrees Celsius, so are they lower at two degrees Celsius than at 2.5 degrees Celsius. Indeed, the latter difference would be far more destructive, since the damages mount exponentially as temperatures rise.

The world no longer has the luxury of waiting for emission-reduction strategies to do the job alone.

To manage the enormous risks of climate change, global emissions of greenhouse gases need to be cut sharply, and as soon as possible. That will require transforming energy, land, transport, and industrial systems so they emit less carbon dioxide. It will also require reducing short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, which stay in the atmosphere for only a fraction of the time that carbon dioxide does but have a disproportionate effect on near-term warming. 

Yet even that will not be enough. To stabilize the total atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the world will have to reach net negative emissions—that is, taking more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than are being pumped into it. Achieving that through emission reductions alone will be extremely difficult, since some emissions, such as of methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture, are nearly impossible to eliminate. Countering the emissions that are hardest to abate, and bring concentrations down to safer levels, requires technologies that actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

That’s where NETs come in—not as a substitute for aggressive efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but as a complement. By deploying technology that removes existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while accelerating cuts in emissions, the world can boost its chances of keeping warming below two degrees and reduce the risk of catastrophe. 

Scientists and activists have tended to regard these technologies as a fallback option, to be held in reserve in case other efforts fail. Many fear that jumping ahead to carbon dioxide removal will distract from the critical need to cut pollution. But the world no longer has the luxury of waiting for emission-reduction strategies to do the job alone. Far from being a Plan B, NETs must be a critical part of Plan A. What’s more, embracing NETs sooner rather than later makes economic sense. Because the marginal costs of emission reductions rise as more emissions are cut, it will be cheaper to deploy NETs at the same time as emission-reduction technologies rather than waiting to exhaust those options first. The wider the solution set, the lower the costs. And the lower the costs, the easier it is to raise ambitions and garner the necessary political support. 

THE FUTURE IS NOW

Even though removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere may sound like the stuff of science fiction, there are already NETs that could be deployed at scale today, according to a seminal report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in October 2018. One category involves taking advantage of carbon sinks—the earth’s forests and agricultural soils, which have soaked up more carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution than has been released from burning petroleum. To date, the growth of carbon sinks has been inadvertent: in the United States, for example, as agriculture shifted from the rocky soils of the Northeast to the fertile Midwest, forests reclaimed abandoned farmland, breathing in carbon dioxide in the process. But this natural process can be improved through better forest management—letting trees grow longer before they are harvested and helping degraded forests grow back more quickly. The large-scale planting of trees in suitable locations around the world could increase carbon sinks further, a process that must go hand in hand with efforts to curb tropical deforestation and thereby continue to contain the vast amounts of carbon already stored in the earth’s rainforests.

Farmland provides additional potential for negative emissions. Around the world, conventional agricultural practices have reduced the amount of carbon in soils, decreasing their fertility in the process. Smarter approaches can reverse the process. Small and large landholders alike could add agricultural waste to soil, maximize the time that the soil is covered by living plants or mulch, and reduce tilling, which releases carbon dioxide. All these steps would decrease the amount of carbon that is lost from soil and increase the amount of carbon that is stored in it. 

The most technologically sophisticated NET available in the near term is known as “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” or BECCs. It is also the riskiest. Broadly defined, BECCs involves burning or fermenting biomass, such as trees or crops, to generate electricity or make liquid fuel; capturing the carbon dioxide produced in the process; and sequestering it underground. It is considered a negative emission technology, and not a zero emission technology, because growing the biomass used in the process removes carbon from the atmosphere. What makes BECCs so exciting is its potential to remove significantly more carbon from the atmosphere than other approaches do. But it also brings challenges. For one, it is expensive: electricity generated from BECCs could cost twice as much as that generated with natural gas, because biomass is an inefficient fuel source and capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide is costly. The technology would also require careful monitoring to ensure that the carbon dioxide pumped underground stays there and clear rules for legal liability in the event of leaks. But the fact that private companies have been successfully injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil and gas reservoirs for decades offers good evidence that permanent storage is possible on a large scale. 

More worrying are the additional climate risks that BECCs poses. If BECCs drives demand for biomass and more of the carbon that is stored in the forest ecosystem is released as a result, it could end up raising the level of carbon in the atmosphere rather than reducing it. Another concern is competition for land: converting farms or forests to grow energy crops, something that the large-scale use of BECCs might require, could drive up the cost of food, reduce agricultural production, and threaten scarce habitats. These problems could be mitigated by using only biomass waste, such as residues from logging and agriculture, but that would reduce the potential scale. Although BECCs deserves consideration as part of the arsenal, these risks mean that its contribution will likely end up being smaller than some proponents claim. 

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere may sound like the stuff of science fiction.

Taking all these land-based NETs together, and factoring in the considerable economic, practical, and behavioral hurdles to bringing them to scale, the National Academies report concludes that by midcentury, NETs could remove as much as five billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. Given the significant risks involved, that estimate is probably too bullish. Even if it were not, that’s still only half of the ten billion tons of carbon dioxide that will likely need to be removed each year to zero out the remaining greenhouse gas emissions, even with aggressive cuts. 

CLOSING THE GAP

Removing from the atmosphere the balance of the carbon dioxide necessary will require perfecting technologies currently in development. Two deserve particular mention; both are full of promise, although neither is ready for widespread use. The first is called “direct air capture”—essentially, sucking carbon from the sky. The technology is already being tested in Canada, Iceland, Italy, and Switzerland at pilot plants where massive arrays of fans direct a stream of air toward a special substance that binds with the passing carbon dioxide. The substance is then either heated or forced into a vacuum to release the carbon dioxide, which is compressed and either stored or used as feedstocks for chemicals, fuels, or cement. 

These technologies are real—albeit prohibitively expensive in their current form. As a recent study led by David Sandalow of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy concludes, taking them to scale means solving a variety of technological challenges to bring down the costs. Above all, these processes are highly energy intensive, so scaling them would require enormous amounts of low-carbon electricity. (A direct-air-capture facility powered by coal-fired electricity, for example, would generate more new carbon dioxide than it would capture.) These obstacles are serious, but the surprising progress of the past decade suggests that they can be overcome in the next one. 

The second technology, enhanced carbon mineralization, is even further from being realized, but it is full of even more possibility. Geologists have long known that when rock from the earth’s mantle (the layer of the earth between its crust and its core) is exposed to the air, it binds with carbon dioxide to form carbon-containing minerals. The massive tectonic collisions that formed the Appalachian Mountains around 460 million years ago, for example, exposed subsurface rock to weathering that resulted in the absorption of substantial amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That took tens of millions of years; enhanced carbon mineralization seeks to fast-forward the process. Scientists are exploring two ways to do this. In one approach, rocks would be brought to the surface to bind with carbon from the air. Such natural weathering already occurs in mine tailings, the waste left over from certain mining operations. But mimicking this process on a large scale—by grinding up large quantities of rock containing reactive minerals and bringing it to the earth’s surface—would be highly energy intensive and thus costly, roughly on par with direct air capture.

Another potential approach is pumping the carbon dioxide underground to meet the rock. As the National Academies report explains, carbon-dioxide–rich fluids injected into basalt or peridotite formations (two kinds of igneous rock that make up much of the earth’s mantle) react with the rock, converting the dissolved carbon dioxide into solid carbon-containing minerals. Pilot projects in Iceland and the United States have demonstrated that this is possible. There is also evidence for how this could work in the natural world. Peridotite usually lies deep inside the earth, but some rock formations around the globe contain pockets of it on the surface. For example, scientists are studying how the surface-level peridotite in Oman’s rock formations reacts with the air and absorbs large amounts of carbon. In theory, this approach offers nearly unlimited scale, because suitable rock formations are widespread and readily accessible. It would also be cheap, because it takes advantage of chemical potential energy in the rock instead of costly energy sources. And since the carbon dioxide is converted to solid rock, the effect is permanent, and it carries few of the side effects that other NETs could bring.

GETTING TO LESS

These technologies do not come cheap. The National Academy of Sciences recommends as much as $1 billion annually in U.S. government funding for research on NETs. And indeed, such funding should be an urgent priority. But to make these technologies economically viable and scale them rapidly, policymakers will also have to tap into a much more powerful force: the profit motive. Putting a price on carbon emissions creates an economic incentive for entrepreneurs to find cheaper, faster ways to cut pollution. Valuing negative emissions—for example, through an emission-trading system that awards credits for carbon removal or a carbon tax that provides rebates for them—would create an incentive for them to join the hunt for NETs. 

Forty-five countries, along with ten U.S. states, have put in place some mechanism to price carbon. But only a handful of them offer rewards for converting land into forest, managing existing forests better, or increasing the amount of carbon stored in agricultural soils, and none offers incentives for other NETs. What’s needed is a carbon-pricing system that not only charges those who emit carbon but also pays those who remove it. Such a system would provide new revenue streams for landowners who restored forest cover to their land and for farmers and ranchers who increased the amount of carbon stored in their soils. It would also reward the inventors and entrepreneurs who developed new, better technologies to capture carbon from the air and the investors and businesses that took them to scale. Without these incentives, those players will stay on the sidelines. By spurring innovation in lower-cost NETs, incentives would also ease the way politically for an ambitious pollution limit—which, ultimately, is necessary for ensuring that the world meets it climate goals. Simply put, humanity’s best hope is to promise that the next crop of billionaires will be those who figure out low-cost ways to remove carbon from the sky.

The biggest hurdle for such incentives is the lack of a global market for carbon credits. Hope on that front, however, is emerging from an unlikely place: aviation. Currently responsible for roughly two percent of global greenhouse gases, aviation’s emissions are expected to triple or quadruple by midcentury in the absence of effective policies to limit them. But in 2016, faced with the prospect that the EU would start capping the emissions of flights landing in and taking off from member states, the UN body that governs worldwide air travel, the International Civil Aviation Organization, agreed to cap emissions from international flights at 2020 levels. The airline industry supported the agreement, hoping to avoid the messy regulatory patchwork that might result if the EU went ahead and states beyond the EU followed suit with their own approaches.

The resulting program, called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), requires all airlines to start reporting emissions this year, and it will begin enforcing a cap in 2021. Once in full swing, at least 100 countries are expected to participate, covering at least three-quarters of the forecast increase in international aviation emissions. Airlines flying between participating countries will have two ways to comply: they can lower their emissions (for example, by burning less fuel or switching to alternative fuels), or they can buy emission-reduction credits from companies. Because the technologies for reducing airline emissions at scale are still a long way off, the industry will mostly choose the second option, relying on carbon credits from reductions in other sectors. It is estimated that over the first 15 years of CORSIA, demand for these credits will reach between 2.5 billion and 3.0 billion tons—roughly equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power and manufacturing sectors. With this new option to sell emission-reduction credits to airlines, there is a good possibility that a pot of gold will await companies that cut or offset their carbon emissions. In short, CORSIA could catalyze a global carbon market that drives investment in low-carbon fuels and technologies—including NETs. 

Humanity’s best hope is to promise that the next crop of billionaires will be those who figure out low-cost ways to remove carbon from the sky.

To realize its promise, CORSIA must be implemented properly, and there are powerful forces working to see that it is not. Some countries, including ones negotiating on behalf of their state-owned companies, are trying to rig the system by allowing credits from projects that do not produce legitimate carbon reductions, such as Brazil’s effort to allow the sale of credits from huge hydroelectric dams in the Amazon that have already been built and paid for (and thus do not represent new reductions). Allowing such credits into the system could crowd out potential rewards for genuine reductions. But there are also powerful, sometimes unexpected allies who stand to gain from a global carbon market that works. For example, some airlines are motivated to act out of a fear that millennials, concerned about their carbon footprint, may eventually begin to shun air travel. The new regulations, by creating demand for emission reductions and spurring investment in NETs to produce jet fuel, could be the industry’s best hope of protecting its reputation—and a critical step toward a broader global carbon market that moves NETs from promising pilot projects to a game-changing reality.

Skeptics say that NETs are too speculative and a possibility only, perhaps, in the distant future. It is true that these innovations are not fully understood and that not all of them will pan out. But no group of scholars and practitioners, no matter how expert, can determine exactly which technologies should be deployed and when. It is impossible to predict what future innovations will look like, but that shouldn’t stop the world from pursuing them, especially when the threat is so grave. The fact remains that many NETs are ready to be deployed at scale today, and they might make the difference between limiting warming to two degrees and failing to do so.

Ultimately, climate change will be stopped by creating economic incentives that unleash the innovation of the private sector—not by waiting for the perfect technology to arrive ready-made, maybe when it’s already too late. No one is saying that achieving all of this will be easy, but the road to climate stability has never been that. Hard does not mean impossible, however, and the transformative power of human ingenuity offers an endless source of hope.