Many decarbonisation pledges relying on unproven tech

In the rush to decarbonise the world’s economies, many countries are turning to untried and untested technological solutions in pledges to limit rising global temperatures.

Nuclear fusion, the chemical reaction by which atoms of lighter elements such as hydrogen unite to form a heavier element, promises unlimited amounts of carbon-free energy. Unlike nuclear fusion, which is the reaction used to produce power in nuclear plants from Brazil to Japan, it doesn’t create long-lived nuclear waste either.

There’s only one problem. After decades of research, harnessing the mechanism by which the sun keeps burning for our own power needs is still only in the test phase. Even those pushing nuclear fusion as a way to decarbonise admit working fusion plants are still at least a decade away, when temperatures may already be 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. This figure is normally seen as the extent of ‘safe’ global warming.

But its not just those with a vested interest pushing unproven technologies. Last year in Glasgow, John Kerry, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate said that decarbonising the world’s economies would require ‘technologies we don’t yet have.’

Many look to carbon capture and storage (CCS), also known as carbon capture and sequestration. This process sees carbon dioxide released from industry being collected and then stored securely, permanently and in an economically viable manner deep underground.

An analysis of 13 carbon capture projects determined that the technology was a ‘wildly unrealistic climate solution’. Most projects have failed or been cancelled outright. The same report went on to state that CCS shouldn’t be used to extend the life of existing fossil fuel power plants.

The world’s largest carbon capture facility is in Iceland. After carbon dioxide is extracted from the air, it is mixed with water and pumped underground, where it reacts with the island’s basalt rocks to become a stable carbonate. But it can only extract 4,000 tons of the 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide currently being released into the atmosphere each year. It also costs around $800 per ton.

Using the money for capturing just one ton of carbon would cost the same as a commercially available 250W solar panel, which will produce carbon-free energy for at least a decade. Other unproven technologies go as far as proposing to fire dust into the earth’s atmosphere to physically stop the sun’s UV radiation reaching the planet’s surface.

Relying on technologies that don’t yet – and might never – work is obviously risky. An opponent of this position is Manfred Lenzen, a climate scientist at the University of Sydney. ‘Because we’ve not implemented significant emissions reductions over the past decades when we should have, we now need to reduce emissions rapidly and like we’ve never done before,’ he said. ‘We cannot keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees using technology alone.’

The longer it takes to reduce our global carbon emissions and decarbonise, the more we will rely on these technologies, still at the science fiction stage, to stop the worst effects of climate change. Campaigners would argue we already have technologies and policies at hand which we know work. 

Photo by NASA