“October 2024 was 1.650 C above pre-industrial level, marking the 15th month in a 16-month period with average temperatures above the 1.50 C threshold set by the Paris Agreement” – this bald assertion by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, on the eve of the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change pronounces the relative futility of the emission reduction strategy followed hitherto to contain global warming below 1.50 C above pre-industrial times.
COP29, which starts in Baku, Azerbaijan on Monday, 11 November promises more of the past futility in terms of exhorting nations to reduce additional emissions, attempts to shame nations by showing up their shortfall in achieving the emission reductions they had committed to, bargaining over fund flow from the rich world for climate action elsewhere, self-satisfied smirks by Indian negotiators at agreeing only to phase down, rather than phase out, the use of coal, and such other displays of semantic jujitsu. If COP29 is to make a difference to the climate, it would have to agree to a concerted, fully funded programme to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, on a scale large enough to achieve net negative emissions every year.
El Nino Effect: A Warning Sign
2024 was so hot not just on account of greenhouse gas emissions but also because of a strong El Nino effect. In normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean, trade winds blow from the West Coast of South America to Asia. The winds do not just billow the sails of ships travelling east, but also carry warm water from west to east. When warm water on the surface of the ocean flows to the west, cold water from the deep moves up, in a phenomenon called upwelling. In an El Nino, the winds do not blow as normally, slackening, instead. This causes warm water to stay put, relatively speaking, warming the air above South and North America. This affects weather across the globe.
The relevance of 2024’s extra warmth being on account of El Nino and not just greenhouse gas emissions is that the elevated temperature would not remain at its dangerous level – once El Nino goes away, the temperature would go down, to 1.10 C or 1.20 C above pre-industrial times. If the temperature stays elevated, the permafrost that traps dead biomass in large parts of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia would melt and release the CO2 trapped in that biomass into the atmosphere. Global warming would get a booster shot.
The duration of El Nino is not entirely predictable. If it goes on for more than a year, the average global temperature could stay elevated. The 2024 spike in temperature gives the warning that the current pace of climate change mitigation, by reducing reliance on fossil fuels for human energy needs, will not suffice to save the planet from overheating.
Need for Carbon Removal
Human activity has pushed out 2,400 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent of emissions, give or take 10%, from mid nineteenth century to 1919, according to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every year, humanity adds something like 40 Gt of additional emissions to the existing stock. Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy, whether in power generation or transport only reduces the quantum of addition to the existing stock. It does not deplete the existing stock. Only carbon dioxide removal (CDR) on an industrial scale can achieve that.
Steady improvement in the technology has been reducing the cost per tonne of CDR. But if the captured carbon is only stored (CCS), it is pure cost, and the only attraction is the ability to convert the carbon credits accumulated via removal and storage into money on a trading platform. However, if the technology to convert the captured CO2 into useful products is perfected and scaled up, humanity would mine the air for the building blocks of petrochemicals, including synthetic fuels, and even proteins, rather than pump out oil from the ground for the purpose.
A Shift in Strategy
Technologies exist in the lab to capture CO2 from flu gases, and even the air, and convert it into useful forms of carbon – graphene, graphite, carbon fibre – and oxygen. In one chemical process, the end products are ammonia and carbon.
A company like Nasdaq-listed Lanzatech uses biotechnology to utilize the captured CO2 to make ethylene, isopropanol and nutritional protein. These technologies and companies need to move from niche to mainstream, and be scaled up.
A stream of climate activists look at CDR with beady eyes, seeing it as an excuse for going slow on low-carbon energy production. This approach has more in common with theology than with the goal of curbing or reversing global warming. If CO2 removal scales up to regularly achieve net negative emissions even without any further reduction in the emission-intensity of production, that would meet the requirement of slowing and even reversing climate change.
If CDR replaces emission reduction as the centrepiece of climate action, the burden of action would fall squarely on the rich countries that account for the bulk of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
As the would-be champion of the Global South, India should be at the forefront of demanding such a strategy shift on climate change, to let the poorest people on earth, with CO2 emissions less than one-tenth to one-seventeenth the level in Europe and America, improve their living standards without being forced to share the burden of emission reduction on par with their rich world counterparts.
In other words, CDR is far more urgent, effective and fair as a strategy to combat climate change, as compared to simple emission reduction. COP29 should be the place to switch gears.
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