A globalised solar-powered future is wholly

unrealistic – and our economy is the

reason why
September 6, 2019 7.54am BST Alf Hornborg Professor of Human Ecology, Lund University

Alf Hornborg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or
organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond
their academic appointment.

Over the past two centuries, millions of dedicated people – revolutionaries, activists, politicians,
and theorists – have been unable to curb the disastrous and increasingly globalised trajectory of
economic polarisation and ecological degradation. This is perhaps because we are utterly trapped in
flawed ways of thinking about technology and economy – as the current discourse on climate
change shows.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions are not just generating climate change. They are giving more and
more of us climate anxiety. Doomsday scenarios are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate.
Scientists from all over the world tell us that emissions in ten years must be half of what they were
ten years ago, or we face apocalypse. School children like Greta Thunberg and activist movements
like Extinction Rebellion are demanding that we panic. And rightly so. But what should we do to
avoid disaster?
Most scientists, politicians, and business leaders tend to put their hope in technological progress.
Regardless of ideology, there is a widespread expectation that new technologies will replace fossil
fuels by harnessing renewable energy such as solar and wind. Many also trust that there will be
technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and for “geoengineering” the
Earth’s climate. The common denominator in these visions is the faith that we can save modern
civilisation if we shift to new technologies. But “technology” is not a magic wand. It requires a lot
of money, which means claims on labour and resources from other areas. We tend to forget this
crucial fact.
I would argue that the way we take conventional “all-purpose” money for granted is the main
reason why we have not understood how advanced technologies are dependent on the appropriation
of labour and resources from elsewhere. In making it possible to exchange almost anything – human
time, gadgets, ecosystems, whatever – for anything else on the market, people are constantly
looking for the best deals, which ultimately means promoting the lowest wages and the cheapest
resources in the global South.
It is the logic of money that has created the utterly unsustainable and growth-hungry global society
that exists today. To get our globalised economy to respect natural limits, we must set limits to what
can be exchanged. Unfortunately, it seems increasingly probable that we shall have to experience
something closer to disaster – such as a semi-global harvest failure – before we are prepared to
seriously question how money and markets are currently designed. Green growth?
Take the ultimate issue we are facing: whether our modern, global, and growing economy can be
powered by renewable energy. Among most champions of sustainability, such as advocates of a
Green New Deal, there is an unshakeable conviction that the problem of climate change can be
solved by engineers.
What generally divides ideological positions is not the faith in technology as such, but which
technical solutions to choose, and whether they will require major political change. Those who
remain sceptical to the promises of technology – such as advocates of radical downshifting or
degrowth – tend to be marginalised from politics and the media. So far, any politician who seriously
advocates degrowth is not likely to have a future in politics.
Mainstream optimism about technology is often referred to as ecomodernism. The Ecomodernist
Manifesto, a concise statement of this approach published in 2015, asks us to embrace technological
progress, which will give us “a good, or even great, Anthropocene”. It argues that the progress of
technology has “decoupled” us from the natural world and should be allowed to continue to do so in
order to allow the “rewilding” of nature. The growth of cities, industrial agriculture, and nuclear
power, it claims, illustrate such decoupling. As if these phenomena did not have ecological
footprints beyond their own boundaries.
Meanwhile, calls for a Green New Deal have been voiced for more than a decade, but in February
2019 it took the form of a resolution to the American House of Representatives. Central to its vision
is a large-scale shift to renewable energy sources and massive investments in new infrastructure.
This would enable further growth of the economy, it is argued.

What will it take for us to seriously consider the roots of our problems?
Rethinking technology
So the general consensus seems to be that the problem of climate change is just a question of
replacing one energy technology with another. But a historical view reveals that the very idea of
technology is inextricably intertwined with capital accumulation, unequal exchange and the idea of
all-purpose money. And as such, it is not as easy to redesign as we like to think. Shifting the main
energy technology is not just a matter of replacing infrastructure – it means transforming the
economic world order.
In the 19th century, the industrial revolution gave us the notion that technological progress is simply
human ingenuity applied to nature, and that it has nothing to do with the structure of world society.
This is the mirror image of the economists’ illusion, that growth has nothing to do with nature and
so does not need to reckon with natural limits. Rather than seeing that both technology and
economy span the nature-society divide, engineering is thought of as dealing only with nature and
economics as dealing only with society.
The steam engine, for instance, is simply considered an ingenious invention for harnessing the
chemical energy of coal. I am not denying that this is the case, but steam technology in early
industrial Britain was also contingent on capital accumulated on global markets. The steam-driven
factories in Manchester would never have been built without the triangular Atlantic trade in slaves,
raw cotton, and cotton textiles. Steam technology was not just a matter of ingenious engineering
applied to nature – like all complex technology, it was also crucially dependent on global relations
of exchange.

Sketch showing a steam engine designed by Boulton & Watt, England, 1784.
This dependence of technology on global social relations is not just a matter of money. In quite a
physical sense, the viability of the steam engine relied on the flows of human labour energy and
other resources that had been invested in cotton fibre from South Carolina, in the US, coal from
Wales and iron from Sweden. Modern technology, then, is a product of the metabolism of world
society, not simply the result of uncovering “facts” of nature.
The illusion that we have suffered from since the industrial revolution is that technological change
is simply a matter of engineering knowledge, regardless of the patterns of global material flows.
This is particularly problematic in that it makes us blind to how such flows tend to be highly
uneven.
This is not just true of the days of the British Empire. To this day, technologically advanced areas of
the world are net importers of the resources that have been used as inputs in producing their
technologies and other commodities, such as land, labour, materials, and energy. Technological
progress and capital accumulation are two sides of the same coin. But the material asymmetries in
world trade are invisible to mainstream economists, who focus exclusively on flows of money.

Read more: Decolonise science – time to end another imperial era

Ironically, this understanding of technology is not even recognised in Marxist theory, although it
claims to be both materialist and committed to social justice. Marxist theory and politics tend
toward what opponents refer to as a Promethean faith in technological progress. Its concern with
justice focuses on the emancipation of the industrial worker, rather than on the global flows of
resources that are embodied in the industrial machine.
This Marxist faith in the magic of technology occasionally takes extreme forms, as in the case of the
biologist David Schwartzman, who does not hesitate to predict future human colonisation of the
galaxy and Aaron Bastani, who anticipates mining asteroids. In his remarkable book Fully
Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, Bastani repeats a widespread claim about the
cheapness of solar power that shows how deluded most of us are by the idea of technology.

Nature, he writes, “provides us with virtually free, limitless energy”. This was a frequently voiced
conviction already in 1964, when the chemist Farrington Daniels proclaimed that the “most
plentiful and cheapest energy is ours for the taking”. More than 50 years later, the dream persists.

The realities
Electricity globally represents about 19% of total energy use – the other major energy drains being
transports and industry. In 2017, only 0.7% of global energy use derived from solar power and 1.9%
from wind, while 85% relied on fossil fuels. As much as 90% of world energy use derives from
fossil sources, and this share is actually increasing. So why is the long-anticipated transition to
renewable energy not materialising?
One highly contested issue is the land requirements for harnessing renewable energy. Energy
experts like David MacKay and Vaclav Smil have estimated that the “power density” – the watts of
energy that can be harnessed per unit of land area – of renewable energy sources is so much lower
than that of fossil fuels that to replace fossil with renewable energy would require vastly greater
land areas for capturing energy.
In part because of this issue, visions of large-scale solar power projects have long referred to the
good use to which they could put unproductive areas like the Sahara desert. But doubts about
profitability have discouraged investments. A decade ago, for example, there was much talk about
Desertec, a €400 billion project that crumbled as the major investors pulled out, one by one.
Today the world’s largest solar energy project is Ouarzazate Solar Power Station in Morocco. It
covers about 25 square kilometres and has cost around US$9 billion to build. It is designed to
provide around a million people with electricity, which means that another 35 such projects – that
is, US$315 billion of investments – would be required merely to cater to the population of Morocco.
We tend not to see that the enormous investments of capital needed for such massive infrastructural
projects represent claims on resources elsewhere – they have huge footprints beyond our field of
vision.

Ouarzazate Solar Power Station (OSPS), one of the largest solar plants in the world.
Also, we must consider whether solar is really carbon free. As Smil has shown for wind turbines
and Storm van Leeuwen for nuclear power, the production, installation, and maintenance of any
technological infrastructure remains critically dependent on fossil energy. Of course, it is easy to
retort that until the transition has been made, solar panels are going to have to be produced by
burning fossil fuels. But even if 100% of our electricity were renewable, it would not be able to
propel global transports or cover the production of steel and cement for urban-industrial
infrastructure.
And given the fact that the cheapening of solar panels in recent years to a significant extent is the
result of shifting manufacture to Asia, we must ask ourselves whether European and American
efforts to become sustainable should really be based on the global exploitation of low-wage labour,
scarce resources and abused landscapes elsewhere.

Read more: Lithium is finite – but clean technology relies on such non-renewable resources

Workers in a factory of a Chinese solar panel maker in Hangzhou.

Collecting carbon
Solar power is not displacing fossil energy, only adding to it. And the pace of expansion of
renewable energy capacity has stalled – it was about the same in 2018 as in 2017. Meanwhile, our
global combustion of fossil fuels continues to rise, as do our carbon emissions. Because this trend
seems unstoppable, many hope to see extensive use of technologies for capturing and removing the
carbon from the emissions of power plants and factories.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) remains an essential component of the 2016 Paris Agreement on
climate change. But to envisage such technologies as economically accessible at a global scale is
clearly unrealistic.
To collect the atoms of carbon dispersed by the global combustion of fossil fuels would be as
energy-demanding and economically unfeasible as it would be to try to collect the molecules of
rubber from car tires that are continuously being dispersed in the atmosphere by road friction.
The late economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen used this example to show that economic processes
inevitably lead to entropy – that is, an increase in physical disorder and loss of productive potential.
In not grasping the implications of this fact, we continue to imagine some miraculous new
technology that will reverse the Law of Entropy.
Economic “value” is a cultural idea. An implication of the Law of Entropy is that productive
potential in nature – the force of energy or the quality of materials – is systematically lost as value
is being produced. This perspective turns our economic worldview upside down. Value is measured
in money, and money shapes the way we think about value. Economists are right in that value
should be defined in terms of human preferences, rather than inputs of labour or resources, but the
result is that the more value we produce, the more inexpensive labour, energy and other resources
are required. To curb the relentless growth of value – at the expense of the biosphere and the global
poor – we must create an economy that can restrain itself.

The evils of capitalism

Much of the discussion on climate change suggests that we are on a battlefield, confronting evil
people who want to obstruct our path to an ecological civilisation. But the concept of capitalism
tends to mystify how we are all caught in a game defined by the logic of our own constructions – as
if there was an abstract “system” and its morally despicable proponents to blame. Rather than see
the very design of the money game as the real antagonist, our call to arms tends to be directed at the
players who have had best luck with the dice.
I would instead argue that the ultimate obstruction is not a question of human morality but of our
common faith in what Marx called “money fetishism”. We collectively delegate responsibility for
our future to a mindless human invention – what Karl Polanyi called all-purpose money, the
peculiar idea that anything can be exchanged for anything else. The aggregate logic of this
relatively recent idea is precisely what is usually called “capitalism”. It defines the strategies of
corporations, politicians, and citizens alike.
All want their money assets to grow. The logic of the global money game obviously does not
provide enough incentives to invest in renewables. It generates greed, obscene and rising
inequalities, violence, and environmental degradation, including climate change. But mainstream
economics appears to have more faith in setting this logic free than ever. Given the way the
economy is now organised, it does not see an alternative to obeying the logic of the globalised
market.

It’s the rules which are the issue – not those who win.
The only way to change the game is to redesign its most basic rules. To attribute climate change to
an abstract system called capitalism – but without challenging the idea of all-purpose money – is to
deny our own agency. The “system” is perpetuated every time we buy our groceries, regardless of
whether we are radical activists or climate change deniers. It is difficult to identify culprits if we are
all players in the same game. In agreeing to the rules, we have limited our potential collective
agency. We have become the tools and servants of our own creation – all-purpose money.
Despite good intentions, it is not clear what Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and the rest of the
climate movement are demanding should be done. Like most of us, they want to stop the emissions
of greenhouse gases, but seem to believe that such an energy transition is compatible with money,
globalised markets, and modern civilisation.
Is our goal to overthrow “the capitalist mode of production”? If so, how do we go about doing that?
Should we blame the politicians for not confronting capitalism and the inertia of all-purpose
money? Or – which should follow automatically – should we blame the voters? Should we blame
ourselves for not electing politicians that are sincere enough to advocate reducing our mobility and
levels of consumption?
Many believe that with the right technologies we would not have to reduce our mobility or energy
consumption – and that the global economy could still grow. But to me that is an illusion. It
suggests that we have not yet grasped what “technology” is. Electric cars and many other “green”
devices may seem reassuring but are often revealed to be insidious strategies for displacing work
and environmental loads beyond our horizon – to unhealthy, low-wage labour in mines in Congo
and Inner Mongolia. They look sustainable and fair to their affluent users but perpetuate a myopic
worldview that goes back to the invention of the steam engine. I have called this delusion machine
fetishism.

Not the guilt free option many assume them to be.

Redesigning the global money game
So the first thing we should redesign are the economic ideas that brought fossil-fueled technology
into existence and continue to perpetuate it. “Capitalism” ultimately refers to the artefact or idea of
all-purpose money, which most of us take for granted as being something about which we do not
have a choice. But we do, and this must be recognised.
Since the 19th century, all-purpose money has obscured the unequal resource flows of colonialism
by making them seem reciprocal: money has served as a veil that mystifies exploitation by
representing it as fair exchange. Economists today reproduce this 19th-century mystification, using
a vocabulary that has proven useless in challenging global problems of justice and sustainability.
The policies designed to protect the environment and promote global justice have not curbed the
insidious logic of all-purpose money – which is to increase environmental degradation as well as
economic inequalities.
In order to see that all-purpose money is indeed the fundamental problem, we need to see that there
are alternative ways of designing money and markets. Like the rules in a board game, they are
human constructions and can, in principle, be redesigned. In order to accomplish economic
“degrowth” and curb the treadmill of capital accumulation, we must transform the systemic logic of
money itself.
National authorities might establish a complementary currency, alongside regular money, that is
distributed as a universal basic income but that can only be used to buy goods and services that are
produced within a given radius from the point of purchase. This is not “local money” in the sense of
LETS or the Bristol Pound – which in effect do nothing to impede the expansion of the global
market – but a genuine spanner in the wheel of globalisation. With local money you can buy goods
produced on the other side of the planet, as long as you buy it in a local store. What I am suggesting
is special money that can only be used to buy goods produced locally.

Locally produced goods.

This would help decrease demand for global transports – a major source of greenhouse gas
emissions – while increasing local diversity and resilience and encouraging community integration.
It would no longer make low wages and lax environmental legislation competitive advantages in
world trade, as is currently the case.
Immunising local communities and ecosystems from the logic of globalised capital flows may be
the only feasible way of creating a truly “post-capitalist” society that respects planetary boundaries
and does not generate deepening global injustices.
Re-localising the bulk of the economy in this way does not mean that communities won’t need
electricity, for example, to run hospitals, computers and households. But it would dismantle most of
the global, fossil-fuelled infrastructure for transporting people, groceries and other commodities
around the planet.
This means decoupling human subsistence from fossil energy and re-embedding humans in their
landscapes and communities. In completely changing market structures of demand, such a shift
would not require anyone – corporations, politicians, or citizens – to choose between fossil and
solar energy, as two comparable options with different profit margins.
To return to the example of Morocco, solar power will obviously have an important role to play in
generating indispensable electricity, but to imagine that it will be able to provide anything near
current levels of per capita energy use in the global North is wholly unrealistic. A transition to solar
energy should not simply be about replacing fossil fuels, but about reorganising the global
economy.
Solar power will no doubt be a vital component of humanity’s future, but not as long as we allow
the logic of the world market to make it profitable to transport essential goods halfway around the
world. The current blind faith in technology will not save us. For the planet to stand any chance, the
global economy must be redesigned. The problem is more fundamental than capitalism or the
emphasis on growth: it is money itself, and how money is related to technology.
Climate change and the other horrors of the Anthropocene don’t just tell us to stop using fossil fuels
– they tell us that globalisation itself is unsustainable.
Is it true climate change will cause
the end of civilisation by 2050?
Environment 6 June 2019 , updated 7 June 2019 By Adam Vaughan

Flooding caused by climate change will displace people

Climate change could bring about the end of civilisation as we know it within
three decades, an Australian think tank has warned. The report by Breakthrough,
endorsed by a retired Australian admiral, says a war-time response is needed
to avoid the doomsday scenario. “The report speaks, in our opinion, a harsh but
necessary truth,” says co-author David Spratt.

What does the report say we are in for?

The authors sketch a scenario where by 2050 more than half of the world’s
population faces 20 days a year of lethal heat, crop yields globally drop by a
fifth, the Amazon ecosystem collapses, the Arctic is ice-free in summer, and
sea levels have risen by 0.5 metres (they rose by 0.19 metres over the 20th century). In
the worst case, “the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with
a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end.”

The report says more than a billion people could be displaced by climate
change by 2050, is that true?
The figure is a lot higher than most estimates. The World Bank says 140 million by 2050,
for example. Breakthrough cites as evidence a 2018 report by a Swedish non-
profit, which in turn sourced it from a 2010 report by a German non-profit. That said a
billion people live in areas that could be inundated by sea level rises this
century – quite different to saying there will be a billion climate migrants by
2050. Pratt also referred to a UN website which says: “Unless we change the way
we manage our land, in the next 30 years we may leave a billion or more
vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.”

Hasn’t the world committed to stop nightmare impacts by limiting temperature

rises to 2°C?

Yes, it did in the 2015 Paris climate accord, though the plans that countries
have put forward for cutting emissions would still still see us hit around 3°C of
warming. But Breakthrough says warming will be much higher because the
number does not include long-term carbon cycle feedback loops (such as warmer
soil releasing more carbon). The think tank explored these views more fully in a report
last year.

Read more: Don’t panic about The Uninhabitable Earth, a new book predicting chaos
Why does this all sound a lot worse than the reports by the UN climate science
panel?
Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have an
inherent degree of conservatism built into them, partly due to the years-long review
process involved in putting them together, but also because the summaries of the
reports have to be signed off by governments. Breakthrough says the IPCC is
not paying enough attention to processes that can lead “to system feedbacks,
compound extreme events, and abrupt and/or irreversible changes.”

What do other researchers think about the claims?

Mark Maslin of University College London says the report adds to the deep
concerns expressed by security experts such as the Pentagon over climate change.
“Maybe, just may, it is time for our politicians to be worried and start to act to
avoid the scenarios painted so vividly,” he says.

Does anyone disagree?

Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University says the report is overblown

rhetoric. “I respect the authors and appreciate that their intentions are good,
but as I have written before, overblown rhetoric, exaggeration, and unsupportable
doomist framing can be counteractive to climate action.” Spratt denies the
report is overblown.

Can we stop these doomsday predictions coming to pass?

Yes but we must reverse emissions, which are still climbing. Spratt says there are
“plenty of signs” from citizens around the world that they would like to see a
war-like response to climate change, pointing to the Extinction Rebellion campaigners
and school pupils striking. Maslin says the report is a “stark warning that we must
act now.” Spratt acknowledges that countries may also ratchet up their
ambition at a key UN climate summit next year.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2205741-is-it-true-climate-

change-will-cause-the-end-of-civilisation-by-2050/#ixzz6CzR79PUC
 New CO₂ capture technology is not the magic bullet
against climate change
April 17, 2019 5.43pm BST

According to a recent major UN report, if we are to limit temperature rise to 1.5 °C and
prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we need to reduce global CO₂
emissions to net zero by 2050. This means eliminating fossil fuel use fast – but to
cushion that transition and offset the areas in which there is currently no replacement
for combustibles, we need to actively remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Planting trees
and rewilding are a large part of this solution, but we are highly likely to need further
technological assistance if we are to prevent climate breakdown.
So when recent news emerged that Canadian company Carbon Engineering has
harnessed some well-known chemistry to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere at a cost
of less than $100 a tonne, many media sources hailed the milestone as a magic bullet.
Unfortunately, the big picture isn’t as simple. Truly tipping the balance from carbon
source to carbon sink is a delicate business, and our view is that the energy costs
involved and likely downstream uses of captured CO₂ mean that Carbon Engineering’s
“bullet” is anything but magic.
Given that CO₂ only accounts for 0.04% of the molecules in our air, capturing it might
seem like a technological marvel. But chemists have been doing it on small scales
since the 18th century, and it can even be done – albeit inefficiently – with supplies
from the local hardware store.
As secondary school chemistry students will know, CO₂ reacts with limewater (calcium
hydroxide solution) to give milky-white insoluble calcium carbonate. Other hydroxides
capture CO₂ in the same way. Lithium hydroxide was the basis of the CO₂
absorbers that kept the astronauts on Apollo 13 alive, and potassium hydroxide
captures CO₂ so efficiently that it can be used to measure the carbon content of a
combusted substance. The 19th-century apparatus used in this latter procedure still
features on the American Chemical Society’s logo.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a small-scale problem anymore – we now need to capture
billions of tonnes of CO₂, and fast.
Carbon Engineering’s technique is hydroxide chemistry at its best. At its pilot plant in
British Columbia, air is pulled in by large fans and exposed to potassium hydroxide,
with which CO₂ reacts to form soluble potassium carbonate. This solution is then
combined with calcium hydroxide, producing solid and easily separable calcium
carbonate, along with potassium hydroxide solution, which can be reused.
 Calcium carbonate can be used as a soil fertiliser. 
This part of the process costs relatively little energy and its product is essentially
limestone – but making mountains of calcium carbonate doesn’t solve our problem.
Though calcium carbonate has uses in agriculture and construction, this process would
be far too expensive as a commercial source. It also isn’t a practical option for
government-funded carbon storage due to the massive quantities of calcium
hydroxide that would be required. To be feasible, direct air capture needs to produce
concentrated CO₂ as its product, which can either be safely stored or put to use.
Thus, the solid calcium carbonate is heated to 900 °C to recover pure CO₂. This last
step requires a vast amount of energy. In Carbon Engineering’s natural gas-fired plant,
the whole cycle generates half a tonne of CO₂ for every tonne captured from air. The
plant does capture this extra CO₂, and of course could be powered by renewable
energy for a healthier carbon balance – but the problem of what to do with all the
captured gas remains.
Swiss start-up company Climeworks is using similarly captured CO₂ to aid
photosynthesis and improve crop yield in nearby greenhouses, but as yet the price is
nowhere near competitive. CO₂ can be sourced elsewhere for as little as one-tenth of
Carbon Engineering’s $100 bottom line. There are also much cheaper ways for
governments to offset emissions: it is far easier to capture CO₂ at the emission source,
where the concentration is much higher. So this technology is likely to mainly interest
high-emitting industries which may stand to benefit from CO₂ with green credentials.
For example, one of the key investors in Carbon Engineering’s capture technology is
Occidental Petroleum, a major user of Enhanced Oil Recovery methods. In one such
method, CO₂ is pumped into oil wells to increase the amount of crude oil that can be
recovered, thanks to increased well pressure and/or improving the flow characteristics
of the oil itself. However, including the energy cost of transporting and refining this
extra oil, using the technology in this way will likely increase net emissions, not
decrease them.
Another key spoke of Carbon Engineering’s operations is its Air To Fuels technology, in
which CO₂ is converted into combustible liquid fuel, ready to be burned again.
Theoretically this provides a carbon-neutral fuel cycle, provided that each step of the
process is powered with renewable energy. However, even this use is still a far cry
from a negative emissions technology.
Metal-organic frameworks are porous solids capable of capturing CO₂.
There are promising alternatives on the horizon. Metal-organic frameworks are
sponge-like solids that squeeze the equivalent CO₂ surface area of a football pitch into
the size of a sugar cube. Using these surfaces for CO₂ capture requires far less energy
– and companies have started exploring their commercial potential. However, large-
scale production has not been perfected, and questions over their long-term stability
for sustained CO₂ capture projects mean that their high cost is not yet merited.
With little chance that technologies still in the laboratory will be ready for gigatonne-
scale capture within the next decade, the methods employed by Carbon Engineering
and Climeworks are the best we currently have. But it’s important to remember that
they’re nowhere near perfect. We will need to switch to more efficient methods of CO₂
capture as soon as we are able. As Carbon Engineering’s founder David Keith
himself points out, carbon removal technologies are overhyped by policymakers, and
have received “extraordinarily little” research funding thus far.
More generally, we must resist the temptation to see direct air capture as a magic
bullet that saves us from having to address our carbon addiction. Reducing or
neutralising the carbon burden in the life cycle of hydrocarbon fuels may be a step
towards negative emissions technologies. But it is just that – a step. After being on the
wrong side of the carbon ledger for so long, it’s past time to look beyond just breaking
even.

Betting on speculative geoengineering may risk an escalating

‘climate debt crisis’
July 18, 2019 12.58pm BST
Shinichiro Asayama Visiting Scholar at Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
Mike Hulme Professor of Human Geography, University of Cambridge

The opening of the Oscar-winning film The Big Short, a comedy-drama on the global financial crisis of
2007-2008, begins with a famous quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what
you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
This phrase captures one of the main reasons why the US housing bubble popped in 2008, triggering the
worst economic recession since the 1930s. The movie portrays an eccentric hedge fund manager discussing
the idea of betting against subprime mortgage bonds. The investment bankers, at first, reply politely: “Those
bonds only fail if millions of Americans don’t pay mortgages. That’s never happened in history.”
But it happened. And as a consequence, many people worldwide have suffered severely, and the enduring
effects still haunt us, politically and economically, even a decade later.
In a new paper published in Climate Policy, we argue that a similar tragic “debt crisis” could unfold for
climate change. The “debt” would be measured in excess carbon emissions, which will keep accumulating
until we reach net-zero. In this scenario, the bankers are those who assume that the debt will be paid back by
removing carbon from the atmosphere.
But such a bet will be necessary if we recklessly embark on the strategy of reducing emissions slowly and
removing carbon later, while in the meantime using speculative technology to block out heat from the sun.
Among climate scientists and policy analysts, this is the so-called temperature “overshoot and peak-shaving”
scenario.
‘Overshoot and peak-shaving’
In December 2015, the world adopted the Paris Agreement and pledged to limit global temperature rise well
below 2℃ – if not 1.5℃ – above pre-industrial levels. Despite that, global CO₂ emissions continue to rise.
The slow and uneven pace of global emissions reductions is increasing the likelihood of “overshoot”
scenarios, in which warming will temporarily exceed 1.5 or 2°C, but will later fall to the target temperature
through the large-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies. These remove CO₂ from the
atmosphere by, for example, planting trees or scrubbing it through chemical filters and burying it deep
underground.
But the world would still need to adapt to the impacts of increased warming during the overshooting period.
Because of this concern, the idea of so-called “peak-shaving” has also emerged among some scientists who
want to avoid such an overshoot by temporarily using solar geoengineering.

Solar geoengineering means dimming sunlight itself. In theory, the Earth could be cooled very quickly by,
for example, spraying sulphate aerosols in the upper atmosphere.

Small particles in the upper atmosphere could reflect a few percent of incoming solar radiation.
The concept of an “overshoot and peak-shaving” scenario is therefore based on the temporary use of solar
geoengineering, combined with large-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies.
In this scenario, the two technologies are in a mutually dependent relationship – solar geoengineering is used
to keep the temperature down for the time being, while negative emissions technologies are used to reduce
atmospheric CO₂ to the point where solar geoengineering is no longer needed.

Emissions debt and temperature debt

But this assumed reciprocity may not work as intended. Here, the notion of debt is useful. As the sociologist
Lisa Adkins suggests, the logic of debt rests on a promise to pay (back) in the future. In this sense, both
overshooting and peak-shaving can be seen as acts of “borrowing” or “creating debt”.
Overshooting avoids reducing carbon emissions today by effectively borrowing emissions from the future
(creating “emissions debt”), with a promise to pay back that debt later through negative emissions
technologies.
Peak-shaving is borrowing global temperature (creating “temperature debt”) through the temporary use of
solar geoengineering to cancel excess warming until the point when no further borrowing, of either sort, is
needed.
In such an outcome the world will take on a double debt: “emissions debt” and “temperature debt”.
Emissions debt results from the near-term excess of CO₂ emissions in the overshoot compared to the non-
overshoot scenario, while temperature debt results from the temporary masking of warming committed by
excess emissions above the target temperature. Asayama & Hulme
The analogy with housing loans
The fact of being indebted may not sound so bad. (Almost everyone has a debt of some kind in their
everyday life, right?) But the key question is: can we duly pay off this “climate debt”? How credible is the
promise?
Here, the analogy with housing loans is most useful for properly rating the riskiness of such debt repayment.
Given that overshoot allows slow rates of emissions reductions by “promising” that delays can be
compensated later through carbon removal, this looks a bit like borrowing an adjustable-rate subprime
mortgage loan. Peak-shaving, on the other hand, is more like borrowing additional loans for “home
improvement”, which maintains house values – (keeps global temperature constant during the overshooting
period).
Since most negative emissions technologies are still speculative or under development, overshoot should be
rated like a subprime loan with a high risk of default. Just as American homeowners weren’t able to keep
paying their mortgages after all, so negative emissions technologies may never be an effective enough way to
take carbon out of the atmosphere.
This doesn’t sound like a secure, feasible investment. The failure to keep the overshoot promise of later
repayment would lead to endless peak-shaving. Solar geoengineering would become an ongoing necessity –
an unpayable massive “climate debt” accumulating year-by-year.
Framing matters — let’s not blind ourselves
Concerns over crossing so-called “tipping points” – paving the way toward a “hothouse Earth” – may push
some people towards accepting overshooting and peak-shaving. But because this is a speculative scenario, it
matters how we frame it.
Some scientists say that solar geoengineering is like a drug to lower high-blood pressure – an overdose is
harmful, but a “well-chosen” and limited dose can lower your risks, helping you have a healthier life.
They suggest that solar geoengineering is not a substitute for cutting emissions but a supplement for
containing global temperature increases. But this works only if negative emissions technologies are rolled
out very swiftly on a massive scale.
The housing loans analogy sheds light on an important assumption that is implicitly built into such a
scenario, namely that overshooting is simply like borrowing money (for example, a mortgage) and that
people pay back mortgages. This was also the unquestioned assumption in the run up to the US housing
market crisis and it created the systemic failure to notice the growing risk of the bubble bursting.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that a similar “debt crisis” will not happen for managing the risk
of climate change. Beware the dubious promises of “overshoot and peak-shaving” technologies – they may
well turn out to be risky subprime loans.

The Green New Deal is already changing the terms of the climate
action debate
February 28, 2019 12.15pm GMT
Rebecca Willis Researcher in Environmental Policy and Politics, Lancaster University. She receives
funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. She is an Associate of Green Alliance and
a Trustee of the New Economics Foundation.
What a splendid irony it would be if the enduring legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency was the
Green New Deal – a radical, government-directed plan to transition the US to a socially just society
with a zero-carbon economy.
Of course, it isn’t Trump’s idea. The Green New Deal was first proposed a decade ago, but has only
recently captured the public imagination. Environmental activists from the “Sunrise Movement”
protested in the office of House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on November 13 2018, demanding the deal.
And they were joined by recently elected congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has
argued passionately on behalf of the plan ever since.
Still, it’s partly thanks to Trump and the shock of his election that radical ideas are getting a hearing
and his opponents are being forced to think bold. That’s just what is needed if the world is to get
serious about tackling climate change.
Alongside an aim for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and 100% renewable energy, the Green
New Deal demands job creation in manufacturing, economic justice for the poor and minorities and
even universal healthcare through a ten-year “national mobilisation”, which echoes President
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.
The UK has, for the past decade, thought of itself as a climate leader. It’s true that the 2008 Climate
Change Act, which sets a legally-binding framework for carbon reduction, is ambitious compared to
legislation in many other countries.
But the UK’s approach – like so many other countries – is based on quiet consensus. So far, climate
politics has been a polite conversation between government, industry and researchers, not a subject
of heated debate in parliament.

Youth climate strikes highlighted the gulf between popular sentiment on climate change and
government action.
My research with UK politicians shows a reluctance to speak out on climate change, as many prefer
a low-key approach – dressing up climate action in the language of economic policy and market
mechanisms to avoid confrontation with colleagues, the electorate or the industries that risk losing
out in the shift to a low-carbon economy.
Some members of parliament even told me that they deliberately avoid mentioning climate change
in speeches to the House of Commons or in their constituency, fearing it could backfire. One
worried that he would be branded a “zealot”, and marginalised by his colleagues if he argued too
vociferously in favour of climate action.
This approach is severely limiting. Moving to a zero-carbon society will require changing the way
that people live in their homes, travel around, shop, eat and source their food. It’s impossible to do
all this without people noticing and attempting to impose change from above, without social
consent, may also cause a backlash.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, found this to his cost when he tried to implement fuel tax
rises which disproportionately affected poorer consumers. The result was the Gilets Jaunes protests
which erupted in France in late 2018.
Climate policies should involve and excite people by addressing their concerns and aspirations.
Climate policy proposals have typically centred around technically optimal solutions – trying to
establish the least disruptive or costly approach, without paying attention to the question of whether
people might vote for them.
Barack Obama’s well-intentioned climate policies as US president fitted this mould. His Clean
Power Plan, which sought incremental carbon reductions from existing power stations, was a
pragmatic response to a divided political scene.
After decades of technocratic and consensus-building climate politics, the Green New Deal
swaggers onto the scene – an avowedly political and idealistic take on climate action.
The Green New Deal’s first victory
The Green New Deal was put forward as a Resolution to the House of Representatives, by Ocasio-
Cortez and supporters from both houses on February 5 2019. It’s only a non-binding statement of
intent at this stage and would require complex legislation. Bold political plans often founder on the
rocks of implementation, especially when politics are as fractious as in the current Congress.
But the Green New Deal has already succeeded in one important aspect: it puts climate policies on
the agenda that are as ambitious as the science of climate change demands. This makes it impossible
for opponents to stay silent. The Green New Deal is forcing Democrats and Republicans to consider
their own stance on climate change.
Some Democrats have branded the plan as unrealistic – a “green dream”, as Pelosi called it. Veteran
senator, Diane Feinstein, was similarly dismissive, when young campaigners asked for her support.
Republicans, meanwhile, have branded it a socialist takeover to rally their own supporters. But the
Green New Deal’s opponents can’t simply criticise. They will need to find their own answer to the
climate question.
For the Republicans, denying or dismissing the science of climate change is becoming less tenable
by the day. The impacts of climate change are mounting, public concern is rising, and
schoolchildren are striking.
The Green New Deal has drawn attention to a gaping hole in right-wing politics – the confident
articulation of a climate strategy. If you agree with the scientific consensus that rapid action is
necessary, but you don’t like the strongly social flavour of the Green New Deal, what do you
propose in its place?
In the UK, the fog of Brexit has clouded any serious political debate on climate change, but when
politicians manage to take a breath, they too will face the same challenge. The Labour Party has
promised action but the Conservatives have been told that their own commitments aren’t
compatible with the Paris Agreement and so they, too, need a plan.
The fight is not nearly won. But the Green New Deal is already succeeding in putting climate action
where it belongs, as the defining political issue of our time. How strange that we have dysfunctional
US politics to thank for this huge step forward.
 Why you need to get involved in the geoengineering debate – now
Rob Bellamy October 19, 2017 11.46am BST
James Martin Research Fellow in the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of
Oxford
Rob Bellamy receives funding from V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and the ClimateWorks
Foundation for research on the Greenhouse Gas Instruments and Policies (GRIP) project and from
the Swedish Energy Agency for research on the Premises for Bio-energy with Carbon Capture and
Storage project. He has previously received funding from the Economic and Social Research
Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council for research on the Climate Geoengineering
Governance (CGG) project.

The prospect of engineering the world’s climate system to tackle global warming is becoming more
and more likely. This may seem like a crazy idea but I, and over 250 other scientists, policy makers
and stakeholders from around the globe recently descended on Berlin to debate the promises and
perils of geoengineering.
There are many touted methods of engineering the climate. Early, outlandish ideas included
installing a ‘space sunshade": a massive mirror orbiting the Earth to reflect sunlight. The ideas most
in discussion now may not seem much more realistic – spraying particles into the stratosphere to
reflect sunlight, or fertilising the oceans with iron to encourage algal growth and carbon dioxide
sequestration through photosynthesis.
But the prospect of geoengineering has become a lot more real since the Paris Agreement. The 2015
Paris Agreement set out near universal, legally binding commitments to keep the increase in global
temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and even to aim for limiting the rise to
1.5°C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that meeting these
targets is possible – but nearly all of their scenarios rely on the extensive deployment of some form
of geoengineering by the end of the century.

Some geoengineers take their inspiration from supervolcanic eruptions, which can lower global temperatures.

How to engineer the climate

Geoengineering comes in two distinct flavours. The first is greenhouse gas removal: those ideas that
would seek to remove and store carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The second is solar radiation management: the ideas that would seek to reflect a level of sunlight
away from the Earth.
Solar radiation management is the more controversial of the two, doing nothing to address the root
cause of climate change – greenhouse gas emissions – and raising a whole load of concerns about
undesirable side effects, such as changes to regional weather patterns.
And then there is the so-called “termination problem”. If we ever stopped engineering the climate in
this way then global temperature would abruptly bounce back to where it would have been without
it. And if we had not been reducing or removing emissions at the same time, this could be a very
sharp and sudden rise indeed.
Most climate models that see the ambitions of the Paris Agreement achieved assume the use of
greenhouse gas removal, particularly bio-energy coupled with carbon capture and storage
technology. But, as the recent conference revealed, although research in the field is steadily gaining
ground, there is also a dangerous gap between its current state of the art and the achievability of the
Paris Agreement on climate change.
The Paris Agreement – and its implicit dependence on greenhouse gas removal – has undoubtedly
been one of the most significant developments to impact on the field of geoengineering since the
last conference of its kind back in 2014. This shifted the emphasis of the conference away from the
more controversial and attention-grabbing solar radiation management and towards the more
mundane but policy relevant greenhouse gas removal.
Controversial experiments
But there were moments when sunlight reflecting methods still stole the show. A centrepiece of the
conference was the solar radiation management experiments campfire, where David Keith and his
colleagues from the Harvard University Solar Geoengineering Research Programme laid out their
experimental plans. They aim to lift an instrument package to a height of 20km using a high-altitude
balloon and release a small amount of reflective particles into the atmosphere.
This would not be the first geoengineering experiment. Scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs have
already begun experimenting with various ideas, several of which have attracted a great degree of
public interest and controversy. A particularly notable case was one UK project, in which plans to
release a small amount of water into the atmosphere at a height of 1km using a pipe tethered to a
balloon were cancelled in 2013 owing to concerns over intellectual property.
Such experiments will be essential if geoengineering ideas are to ever become technically viable
contributors to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. But it is the governance of experiments,
not their technical credentials, that has always been and still remains the most contentious area of
the geoengineering debate.
Critics warned that the Harvard experiment could be the first step on a “slippery slope” towards an
undesirable deployment and therefore must be restrained. But advocates argued that the technology
needs to be developed before we can know what it is that we are trying to govern.
Geoengineering measures. IASS
The challenge for governance is not to back either one of these extremes, but rather to navigate a
responsible path between them.
How to govern?
The key to defining a responsible way to govern geoengineering experiments is accounting for
public interests and concerns. Would-be geoengineering experimenters, including those at Harvard,
routinely try to account for these concerns by appealing to their experiments being of a small scale
and a limited extent. But, as I argued in the conference, in public discussions on the scale and extent
of geoengineering experiments their meaning has been subjective and always qualified by other
concerns.
My colleagues and I have found that the public have at least four principal concerns about
geoengineering experiments: their level of containment; uncertainty around what the outcomes
would be; the reversibility of any impacts, and the intent behind them. A small scale experiment
unfolding indoors might therefore be deemed unacceptable if it raised concerns about private
interests, for example. On the other hand, a large scale experiment conducted outdoors could be
deemed acceptable if it did not release materials into the open environment.
Under certain conditions the four dimensions could be aligned. The challenge for governance is to
account for these – and likely other – dimensions of perceived controllability. This means that
public involvement in the design of governance itself needs to be front and centre in the
development of geoengineering experiments.
A whole range of two-way dialogue methods are available – focus groups, citizens juries,
deliberative workshops and many others. And to those outside of formal involvement in such
processes – read about geoengineering, talk about geoengineering. We need to start a society-wide
conversation on how to govern such controversial technologies.
Public interests and concerns need to be drawn out well in advance of an experiment and the results
used to meaningfully shape how we govern it. This will not only make the the experiment more
legitimate, but also make it substantively better.
Make no mistake, experiments will be needed if we are to learn the worth of geoengineering ideas.
But they must be done with public values at their core.