The obstacles to building our way out of climate change
Averting catastrophic climate change — while ensuring economic growth for the world — will require renewable energy and carbon removal projects on a massive scale.
Why it matters: There’s strong ingrained public resistance to big infrastructure projects, including among many environmentalists.
Driving the news: On Friday at the UN climate summit in Glasgow, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it will launch a major research effort to bring the cost of carbon removal below $100 a ton by 2030.
- That’s good news for the climate, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has calculated the world may ultimately need to remove 100 billion to 1 trillion tons of CO2 by the end of the century to keep temperature rise below 1.5°C.
- But beyond the scientific challenge of vastly reducing the cost of effective carbon removal — which is currently as much as $2,000 per ton — achieving it on a massive scale would require building out an entirely new kind of energy infrastructure.
- An academic consortium last year calculated that using nature-based solutions would require setting aside land several times the size of Texas, while relying on direct air-capture of CO2 would demand as much as a third of today’s global energy use.
Between the lines: That’s just carbon removal. Fully decarbonizing the economy will require replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources like wind and solar, as well as nuclear and other zero-carbon energy supplies.
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Πηγή: axios.com
