negative emissions Concepts

After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso · 7 Jul 2025 · 264pp · 96,174 words

carbon back out of the atmosphere: sequestering it, for example, in reforested areas or geological formations or via some other “negative emissions” technology we have not yet discovered. The possibility of negative emissions at scale at some future date is no excuse to do less to address climate now. But even if some miracle

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(meaning, stabilization) caused lower distant-future temperatures than if we assumed the depopulation future. We present this in our research paper Budolfson et al. This negative emissions mechanism is not responsible for the result in chapter 3 because (to focus on that chapter’s mechanism) we turn off

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negative emissions in the model runs we show. Glaeser E. 2012. Triumph of the City. Penguin. Yglesias M. 2020. One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells · 19 Feb 2019 · 343pp · 101,563 words

degree Celsius of additional warming to come. Which is why staying below 2 degrees probably requires not just carbon scale-back but what are called “negative emissions.” These tools come in two forms: technologies that would suck carbon out of the air (called CCS, for “carbon capture and storage”) and new approaches

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raft of recent papers, both are something close to fantasy, at least at present. In 2018, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council found that existing negative-emissions technologies have “limited realistic potential” to even slow the increase in concentration of carbon in the atmosphere—let alone meaningfully reduce that concentration. In 2018

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of the bell curve of probability, sits at about 3 degrees, or just a bit above. Probably even that amount of warming would require significant negative-emissions use, given that our use of carbon is still growing. And there is also some risk from scientific uncertainty, the possibility that we are underestimating

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concerned climate scientists, many of whom will also note that none of the quite modest goals of the Paris climate accords can be achieved without negative-emissions technologies—at present prohibitively expensive. Carbon capture may indeed prove to be “magical thinking,” but the cruder technologies—we know these will work. Rather than

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considerably less time. This is one reason a single-shot cure-all offers an undeniable appeal—which brings us back to that magic phrase, “negative emissions.” Neither negative-emissions method—“natural” approaches involving revitalized forests and new agricultural practices, technological ones that would deploy machines to remove carbon from the atmosphere—requires wholesale transformation

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of the global economy as it is presently constituted. Which is perhaps why negative emissions, once a last-ditch, if-all-else-fails strategy, have recently been built into all conventional climate-action goals. Of 400 IPCC emissions models that

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land us below two degrees Celsius, 344 feature negative emissions, most of them significantly. Unfortunately, negative emissions are also, at this point, almost entirely theoretical. Neither method has yet been demonstrated to actually work at anything like the necessary

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fumes out of the air. Given the indomitable scale of the conventional approach, and given just how little time left we have to complete it, negative emissions may be, at present, a form of magical thinking for climate. They also seem like a last, best hope. And if they work, carbon capture

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and Malte Meinshausen, “Warming Assessment of the Bottom-Up Paris Agreement Emissions Pledges,” Nature Communications, November 2018. “limited realistic potential”: European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, Negative Emission Technologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets? (Halle, Ger., February 2018), p. 1, https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Negative_Carbon/EASAC

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_Report_on_Negative_Emission_Technologies.pdf. “magical thinking”: “Why Current Negative-Emissions Strategies Remain ‘Magical Thinking,’ ” Nature, February 21, 2018, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02184-x. full-scale carbon capture plants: Andy

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-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production,” Nature 527 (October 2015): pp. 235–39, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725. Of 400 IPCC emissions models: “Negative Emissions Technologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets?” European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, February 2018. a third of the world’s farmable land: Jason Hickel

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker · 13 Feb 2018 · 1,034pp · 241,773 words

measured century: An illustrated guide to trends in America, 1900–2000. Washington: AEI Press. CarbonBrief. 2016. Explainer: 10 ways “negative emissions” could slow climate change. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-10-ways-negative-emissions-could-slow-climate-change. Carey, J. 1993. The intellectuals and the masses: Pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel · 12 Aug 2020 · 286pp · 87,168 words

, and Elon Musk has shown that it’s possible to mass-produce storage batteries at a rapid clip. For others, it’s a matter of ‘negative-emissions technologies’ that will pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Still others bank on the hope of enormous geo-engineering schemes: everything from blocking out the

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energy, capture the carbon emissions at the chimneys and store it all underground where it can never escape. Voila: a global energy system that produces ‘negative emissions’. This technology is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. When Obersteiner published his paper there was no evidence that the scheme

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a dangerous distraction’ from the imperative of reducing emissions.4 And they’re not alone. The following year, another forty scientists argued that reliance on negative-emissions technologies like BECCS is ‘extremely risky’.5 Professor Kevin Anderson of Manchester University, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has been a particularly

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that brings together the national science academies of all the states of the European Union, published a report condemning the reliance on BECCS and other negative emissions technologies. In the scientific community, it’s difficult to get a stronger conclusion than this. The report urges that we stop speculating on tech fantasies

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report outlining what it will take for us to keep global warming under 1.5°C if we accept that we cannot reasonably rely on negative emissions technologies. The report landed like a bombshell in the world’s media. It was difficult to find an outlet that didn’t carry the headline

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declining material and energy throughput. This is the only scenario for staying under 1.5°C or 2°C that does not rely on speculative negative-emissions technologies. The underlying paper is Arnulf Grubler et al., ‘A low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5 C target and sustainable development goals

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dioxide capture and storage: issues and prospects,’ Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 39, 2014, pp. 243–270. 4 Sabine Fuss et al., ‘Betting on negative emissions,’ Nature Climate Change 4(10), 2014, pp. 850–853. 5 Pete Smith et al., ‘Biophysical and economic limits to negative CO2 emissions,’ Nature Climate Change

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6(1), 2016, pp. 42–50. 6 Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, ‘The trouble with negative emissions,’ Science 354(6309), 2016, pp. 182–183. 7 Vera Heck, ‘Biomass-based negative emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries,’ Nature Climate Change 8(2), 2018, pp. 151–155. 8 Pete Smith et

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negative CO2 emissions,’ Nature Climate Change 6(1), 2016, pp. 42–50. 9 ‘Six problems with BECCS,’ FERN briefing, 2018. 10 Henry Shue, ‘Climate dreaming: negative emissions, risk transfer, and irreversibility,’ Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 8(2), 2017, pp. 203–216. 11 Hickman, ‘The history of BECCS. 12 Daisy

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

by Rowan Hooper · 15 Jan 2020 · 285pp · 86,858 words

and then catching and burying the carbon dioxide produced when the fuel is burned. As with solar geoengineering, we don’t yet know if this ‘negative emissions’ technology of carbon dioxide removal will work well enough at scale, or be cost-effective. However, just the idea that

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negative emissions might one day work on a significant scale justifies the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its claim that we may be able to

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this century we will start removing large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is known both as CDR – carbon dioxide removal – and NET, negative emissions technologies. The big problem is that we can’t do this yet at any kind of scale to make a difference. For all its world

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Research), Norway. www.cicero.oslo.no/en/posts/klima/does-the-carbon-budget-mean-the-end-of-fossil-fuels 22 Sabine Fuss et al. (2018) ‘Negative emissions – part 2: costs, potentials and side effects. Environmental Research Letters 13(6). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f 23 Rob Jackson et al. (2019) ‘Methane

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow

by Tim Jackson · 8 Dec 2016 · 573pp · 115,489 words

rate of emissions, this budget would be exhausted within a decade. Beyond that point, meeting the target we would have to rely on largely unspecified negative emission technologies; technologies that remove carbon permanently from the earth’s atmosphere.45 The message from all this is a profoundly uncomfortable one. Global average temperatures

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, in order to have a decent chance of restricting global temperature rise to less than 1.5°C. On a closer examination, the rate of ‘negative emissions’ required to stay within the carbon budget is daunting. Through the late 2020s and early 2030s we would need to be taking carbon out of

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the atmosphere at a rate of around 25 GtCO2 a year. The potential to achieve this level of negative emissions on that timescale is highly speculative at the very least.33 One option would be to go for an even deeper reduction target. Let’s

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. A deeper cut definitely makes life easier in the long run, with a lower requirement for negative emissions in the second half of the century. But it doesn’t do much to contain the need for negative emissions in the short term, which still peak at around 25 GtCO2 in the late 2020s. A

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reduction. Let’s say we aimed to hit our reduction target in 2035 rather than in 2050. This would about halve the peak demand for negative emissions. But it would clearly also involve us in a frantic rush to introduce low carbon technologies at an even faster pace. In fact the carbon

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negative emission technologies, see for example Smith et al. (2016). Carbon dioxide emissions for 2015 were (estimated at) 35.7 Gt CO2 (Lequéré et al. 2015: 374).

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debt see debt, public-sector nationalisation 191; financial crisis 38, 188 natural selection 132–3 see also struggle for existence nature, rights of 6–7 negative emissions 98–9 negative feedback loops 16–17 Netherlands 58, 62, 206, 207 neuroscientific perspectives: flourishing 68, 69; human behaviour 134 New Climate Economy report Better

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

by Bill Gates · 16 Feb 2021 · 314pp · 75,678 words

more gases but actually need to start removing some of the gases we have already emitted. You may see this step referred to as “net-negative emissions.” It just means that eventually, we’ll need to take more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than we put in so that we can

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, or natural gas fitted with a device to capture the carbon it emits. If all these pieces come together, we could make plastics with net-negative emissions. In effect, we’d find a way to take carbon out of the air (using plants or some other method) and put it into a

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: David J. C. MacKay, Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air (Cambridge, U.K.: UIT Cambridge, 2009), 98, 109. And in all likelihood: Consensus Study Report, “Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda,” National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019. Chapter 5: How We Make Things Each weighs thousands of

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, 154, 155, 156, 244n global electricity from, 71, 70 history of use and cost of, 44 and job replacements, 188 and methane, 19, 21 net-negative emissions, 19, 110 net-zero emissions goal see also zero, getting to Nigeria, 4, 5, 127 nitrogen, 123, 125 nitrous oxide, 21, 113, 117, 124 nuclear

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert · 15 Mar 2021 · 221pp · 59,755 words

of the world’s power plants. Carbon dioxide removal offers a way to change the math. Extract large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and “negative emissions” could, conceivably, balance out the positive variety. It might even be feasible to cross the threshold of catastrophe and then suck enough carbon out of

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the air to keep calamity at bay, a situation that’s become known as “overshoot.” * * * — If anyone can be said to have invented “negative emissions,” it’s a German-born physicist named Klaus Lackner. Lackner, who’s now in his late sixties, is a trim man with dark eyes and

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go, the two did not specify.) More years went by. Lackner let the auxon idea slide. But he found himself more and more interested in negative emissions. “Sometimes by thinking through this extreme endpoint you learn a lot,” he told me. He began giving talks and writing papers on the subject. Humanity

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by undertaking economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets,” while developing countries are called on, more hazily, to enhance their “mitigation efforts.” All of which makes negative emissions—as an idea at least—irresistible. The extent to which humanity is already counting on them is illustrated by the latest report of the Intergovernmental

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°C (9° Fahrenheit). Just a hundred and sixteen scenarios were consistent with holding warming under 2°C, and of these, a hundred and one involved negative emissions. Following Paris, the IPCC produced another report, based on the 1.5°C threshold. All of the scenarios consistent with that goal relied on

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negative emissions. “I think what the IPCC really is saying is, ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios,’ ” Klaus Lackner told me. “ ‘And, of the scenarios which

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stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.’ ” * * * — Climeworks, the company I paid to bury my emissions in Iceland, was founded

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half-time on getting their company off the ground. Four of the IPCC’s “illustrative 1.5° C-consistent” pathways. All of the pathways require negative emissions and result in “overshoot.” Like Lackner, the two initially faced a lot of skepticism. What the duo was trying to do, they were told, was

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and dissolved in the oceans. This would induce the seas to absorb more CO2 and, as an added benefit, combat ocean acidification. Another family of negative-emissions technologies, or NETs, takes its cue from biology. Plants absorb carbon dioxide while they’re growing; then, when they rot, they return that CO2 to

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as BECCS (pronounced “becks”), short for “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.” The models employed by the IPCC are extremely partial to BECCS, which offers negative emissions and electrical power at the same time—a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too arrangement that, in climate-math terms, is tough to beat

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to Global CO2 Emissions?” Our World in Data (Oct. 1, 2019), ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-CO2. a hundred and one involved negative emissions: Sabine Fuss et al., “Betting on Negative Emissions,” Nature Climate Change, 4 (2014), 850–852. All of the scenarios consistent with that goal: J. Rogelj et al., “Mitigation Pathways Compatible

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century

by Ronald Bailey · 20 Jul 2015 · 417pp · 109,367 words

they grow and then use them as fuel to produce energy. When the plants are burned, the carbon emissions are captured and buried, resulting in negative emissions. Another proposal is direct air capture, a possibility offered by Columbia University researcher Klaus Lackner; this involves using a specific resin that absorbs atmospheric carbon

Making Globalization Work

by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 16 Sep 2006

assistance to developing countries is around $60 billion.) In addition, as we have noted, the forests “clean” carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The annual “negative emissions” of the rainforest countries are estimated (using the $30 a ton figure) at some $100 billion a year.20 While Kyoto recognized the role that

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” services are hard to estimate, partially because analogous services are provided by the forests of the advanced industrial countries, including the United States, and these “negative emissions” have not been included in the carbon accounting for them. 21.There are a number of technical details in the implementation of avoided deforestation schemes