What if negative emission technologies fail at scale? Implications of the Paris Agreement for big emitting nations
By A. Larkin, J. Kuriakose, Maria Sharmina, Kevin Anderson. 2018
145 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT A cumulative emissions approach is increasingly used to inform mitigation policy. However, there are different interpretations of what ‘2°C’ implies. Here it is argued that cost-optimization models, commonly used to inform policy, typically underplay the urgency of 2°C mitigation. The alignment within many scenarios of optimistic assumptions on negative emissions technologies (NETs), with implausibly early peak emission dates and incremental short-term mitigation, delivers outcomes commensurate with 2°C commitments. In contrast, considering equity and socio-technical barriers to change, suggests a more challenging short-term agenda. To understand these different interpretations, short-term CO2 trends of the largest CO2 emitters, are assessed in relation to a constrained CO2 budget, coupled with a ‘what if’ assumption that negative emissions technologies fail at scale. The outcomes raise profound questions around high-level framings of mitigation policy. The article concludes that applying even weak equity criteria, challenges the feasibility of maintaining a 50% chance of avoiding 2°C without urgent mitigation efforts in the short-term. This highlights a need for greater engagement with: (1) the equity dimension of the Paris Agreement, (2) the sensitivity of constrained carbon budgets to short-term trends and (3) the climate risks for society posed by an almost ubiquitous inclusion of NETs within 2°C scenarios. POLICY RELEVANCE Since the Paris meeting, there is increased awareness that most policy ‘solutions’ commensurate with 2°C include widespread deployment of negative emissions technologies (NETs). Yet much less is understood about that option’s feasibility, compared with near-term efforts to curb energy demand. Moreover, the many different ways in which key information is synthesized for policy makers, clouds the ability of policy makers to make informed decisions. This article presents an alternative approach to consider what the Paris Agreement implies, if NETs are unable to deliver more carbon sinks than sources. It illustrates the scale of the climate challenge for policy makers, particularly if the Agreement’s aim to address ‘equity’ is accounted for. Here it is argued that much more attention needs to be paid to what CO2 reductions can be achieved in the short-term, rather than taking a risk that could render the Paris Agreement’s policy goals unachievable.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97c8a2e12b272071e68f0bfefdb12deedf17668d
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- A Review of Criticisms of Integrated Assessment Models and Proposed Approaches to Address These, through the Lens of BECCS (2019, background): “’s [106] assertion that without BECCS we need vastly upscaled rates of decarbonisation makes no attempt to explore the economic trade-offs between this strategy and that of exploiting BECCS at different costs and scales, a trade-off that can be explored in IAMs.”
- Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve? (2021, unknown): “Hence, although model outputs are intended to be exploratory rather than prescriptive, they tend to emphasize a narrow suite of technological options for reducing emissions, with typically limited representation of demand-side options or more far-reaching changes to socioeconomic structures (98, 99)”
- “Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay (2019, unknown): “As Larkin et al. (2018:692) note, “ IAM outputs risk delivering overly optimistic, unrealistic and potentially fl awed message about future change [in which] challenging, but incremental energy policy is suf fi cient to deliver on the Paris Agreement ” .”
- Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence by negative emissions technologies (NETs) (2018, background): “It is no longer enough to consider messages to policy makers that NETs should not be used as substitutes for mitigation [2,12], nor to ‘open up’ the standard framings that make mitigation deterrence a possible outcome.”
- Quantifying the potential scale of mitigation deterrence from greenhouse gas removal techniques (2020, background): “Many researchers have questioned the technical feasibility of delivering the high levels of carbon removal implied in sub-2 °C pathways modelling (Fuss et al. 2014, Anderson and Peters 2016, Larkin et al. 2017).”
- A factor of two: how the mitigation plans of ‘climate progressive’ nations fall far short of Paris-compliant pathways (2020, unknown): “…arguments for the research, development and potential deployment of NETs 2 , but their ubiquitous inclusion at the scale assumed in IPCC mitigation scenarios (Fuss et al., 2014), including within the UK and Sweden ’ s climate strategies, is premature (Larkin, Kuriakose, Sharmina, & Anderson, 2018).”