Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

Abstract

Recent IPCC assessments highlight a key role for large-scale carbon removal in meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. This focus on removal, also referred to as negative emissions, is suggestive of novel opportunities, risks, and challenges in addressing climate change, but tends to build on the narrow techno-economic framings that characterize integrated assessment modeling. While the discussion on negative emissions bears important parallels to a wider and older literature on carbon sequestration and carbon sinks, this earlier scholarship-particularly from the critical social sciences-is seldom engaged with by the negative emissions research community. In this article, we survey this "long history" of carbon removal and seek to draw out lessons for ongoing research and the emerging public debate on negative emissions. We argue that research and policy on negative emissions should proceed not just from projections of the future, but also from an acknowledgement of past controversies, successes and failures. In particular, our review calls attention to the irreducibly political character of carbon removal imaginaries and accounting practices and urges acknowledgement of past experiences with the implementation of (small-scale) carbon sequestration projects. Our review in this way highlights the importance of seeing continuity in the carbon removal discussion and calls for more engagement with existing social science scholarship on the subject. Acknowledging continuity and embracing an interdisciplinary research agenda on carbon removal are important aspects in making climate change mitigation research more responsible, and a precondition to avoid repeating past mistakes and failures.

Deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies at the National Level: A Need for Holistic Feasibility Assessments

“…Emission pathways from Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) most prominently feature Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) and afforestation/reforestation (IPCC, 2018). While some approaches, such as afforestation/reforestation, have a long history in climate mitigation, the envisioned deployment scale in these pathways exceeds anything that has been deployed before (Fajardy et al, 2019;Carton et al, 2020). As NETs have not yet been scaled up, assessing the feasibility of deploying such technologies at a larger scale inevitably involves uncertainties about their implementation, effectiveness, and side effects (IPCC, 2018).…”

“…Moreover, NETs are neither static nor singular and can be broken down into components or procedural steps (e.g., TRLs as described in section Feasibility Operationalized in NETs Assessments). In addition, they need to be understood in relation to other societal goals such as energy security and sustainable development at the national level, as well as trade-offs resulting from the maximization of one ecosystem-service (carbon sequestration) before others (Dooley and Kartha, 2018;Fajardy and Mac Dowell, 2018;Carton et al, 2020). Moreover, socio-cultural dimensions are not only potential barriers to deployment, but can also be potential drivers (Beck and Mahony, 2018;Fajardy et al, 2019;Waller et al, 2020) and thus holistic assessments need to embrace this dynamism.…”

Coming to GRIPs With NETs Discourse: Implications of Discursive Structures for Emerging Governance of Negative Emissions Technologies in the UK

“…These governance meta-discourses, in turn, can be tied to a longer arc of liberal and neoliberal governmentalities outlined by historical Foucauldian analyses of western democracies (Foucault, 2008;Kerchner, 2010;Kerchner and Schneider, 2010). Governing logics which have historically underpinned climate and carbon governance (and western democratic governance per se) are therefore seemingly being reproduced within NETs governance discourse, highlighting the persistent shaping function of existing power/knowledge structures on the emergence of new objects, subjects and instruments of governance (Carton et al, 2020;Low and Boettcher, 2020;McLaren and Markusson, 2020).…”

Delaying decarbonization: Climate governmentalities and sociotechnical strategies from Copenhagen to Paris

“…Despite these uncertainties, heavy BECCS deployment in modeling scenarios allows emissions to ‘overshoot’ in the near term before being sequestered later in the century – effectively, a time-buying scheme for climate policy created from modeling parameters ( Anderson, 2015 ; Beck and Mahony, 2018 ; Markusson et al., 2018 ; Carton, 2019 ) that reflects 'a long history' of how carbon sinks have been historically discussed and branded ( Carton et al, 2020 ). The degree to which other novel CDR approaches may reflect similar logics is underexamined.…”

“…direct air capture), through deployment in enhanced oil recovery, are beginning to follow in these tracks ( Markusson et al., 2017 ; McLaren, 2019 ; Carton, 2019 ). BECCS is exemplary of path dependencies, linked to biomass energy and CCS, and further on to the logics of marketized carbon sinks ( Buck, 2016 ; Markusson et al., 2018 ; Carton et al, 2020 ). The third positions climate goals as a co-benefit with the pressing demands of energy security (particularly in the US) emerging over the early 2000s, with the clearest examples being biofuels and shale gas.…”