The magnitude of the problem is staggering.
At the start of the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were around 280 parts per million (ppm) – a level that had been sustained for nearly 6,000 years. By 2023, the global average concentration of CO2 was 419.3 ppm.
Annual emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased every decade, from close to 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year in the 1960s to an estimated 36.6 billion tons in 2023. Europe and the USA together account for around 10 billion tons, China another 11 billion tons, with Russia and India combined emitting about 4.5 billion tonnes. These countries have a total population of around 4 billion, around half of the world’s population, but account for around 70% of the carbon emissions. If the remainder of the world’s population became carbon emitters to the same extent then CO2 emissions would be around 40% higher than they are today.
Natural “sinks”—processes that remove carbon from the atmosphere—on land and in the ocean absorbed the equivalent of about half of the carbon dioxide we emitted each year in the 2011-2020 decade. To stop the increase without other steps to reduce production would require the removal of around 20 billion tonnes of CO2 each year, an amount that is still increasing year on year despite all the promises of reductions from industrialised countries.
Other, technological, solutions have been proposed to ameliorate the effects of burning fossil fuels, the most significant being Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
The idea of this technique is to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (or better still, from the chimneys of emitters) and store it somewhere where it cannot contribute to atmospheric carbon. Although huge amounts of money have already been spent developing this technology it has yet to be proven to work at the scale needed.
CCS is extremely expensive, and the money being invested could much more profitably be spent in other carbon emission reduction scenarios, for example insulating buildings to reduce their energy consumption.
CCS is not a viable technology at the scale needed to tackle the climate crisis. Its value is in reducing carbon emissions from processes that, at the moment, are not easy to make carbon neutral, such as cement or steel production.
A significant problem with CCS is that it is being used by the fossil fuel industry as an excuse to continue business as normal, on the basis that the harm caused by burning coal, oil and gas can be mitigated by capturing the carbon produced. In addition oil companies are backing the technology as they can pump CO2 into depleting or empty oil reserves, and in the process extract more oil.
The best way of restricting atmospheric CO2 is not to produce it in the first place. Renewable energy (wind, solar, tidal) are increasingly cheaper than other means of generating electricity and avoid the costs of carbon capture. Carbon capture itself uses considerable amounts of energy for little CO2 reduction.
The government’s recent announcement of £22 billion investment in CCS over the next 25 years came after an extensive round of lobbying by fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil, Equinor, and BP. The investment is supposed to drive the development of CCS to commercial (and environmental) viability, but decades of research already done have failed to produce a commercial solution. The government’s plans involve 3 CCS projects, one a power plant under development by BP and Equinor, a project to create hydrogen from natural gas (another fossil fuel) and an ‘energy to waste’ plant. None of these are aimed at removing carbon from processes like concrete production that are difficult to make carbon-zero; and all prolong the lifetime of the use of fossil fuels, contrary to the absolute need to reduce fossil fuel consumption to ameliorate climate change.
The government announcement represents a massive bet on a still unproven technology, and will lock the UK into fossil fuel dependence for decades to come. The Climate Change Act mandates that the UK should achieve net zero emissions by 2050, yet this will be impossible if carbon capture leads to the UK building new gas power stations instead of wind and solar farms.
What if that £22 billion was invested in renewable energy projects instead? What might be better solutions to Climate Change?
The primary goal is to reduce energy production from fossil fuels, by increasing energy supply from renewables, and reducing energy expenditure.
This is technically simple: curtailing population growth, reducing wasteful consumption, insulating leaky buildings, providing sustainable transport and sustainable buildings, better forestry management and sustainable agriculture.
In the changing world ahead a multiplicity of solutions will be required, behavioural, and technological, but the direction of survival is unlikely to be found by the commercial and social drivers that got us into this mess in the first place.
In future columns I will be examining other ‘carbon reduction’ technologies such as hydrogen fuel, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and other follies.
Phil Shotton, Ramsgate Society Lead on Environment and Climate Change
