A last resort to negative emissions?Researchers warn of “highly … – Germany radio

The candidate no. 1 for the removal of carbon dioxide from the air is called BECCS. For biomass power plants with CCS. Such plants burn plants, which have taken up the time of your life carbon dioxide. This CO2 is not deposited in combustion free again, but in a secluded and deep in the earth. Net to withdraw greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in this way, and comes to so-called negative emissions.

absolutely will be necessary to achieve the Two degree target, but still – at least retrospectively. Because in all realistic climate and energy scenarios, the world has an attempt on this goal. Niklas Höhne of the New Climate Institute in Cologne:

“There are models that say that almost half of today’s emissions would need to be taken out of the atmosphere out of it per year. Twenty times the emissions of Germany today.”

BSCCS was “highly speculative technology”

policy makers and the Public should not trust that anything will ever succeed. Writing two experienced climate scientists in the journal “Science”. Biomass power plants with CCS you refer to as “speculative in a high technology”. It would be unrealistic to assume that they could be built to the required extent. Glen Peters from the Norwegian climate research centre Cicero in Oslo, one of the two “Science”-authors: “the whole of the biomass for such a force to cultivate plants, you would need an area as large as India. Or even bigger”.

So much Land for the cultivation of energy crops will not be available, as the world population continues to grow, and thus the need for agricultural land for the production of food.

Peters expresses but also technological concerns: “ten years Ago, the world of the idea of CO2-capture and -sequestration is still very fond of. The International energy Agency introduced hundreds of new plants within a short period of time. But the technology is much more complex and more difficult than I thought. Today, worldwide there are just ten to 15 fossil fuel power plants with CCS – and only one larger plant that works with biomass.”

That CCS and BECCS are not from the children’s shoes, pointing to the climate protection projects of the industrial and emerging countries after the historic Paris agreements. In what is supposed to happen by the year 2030, so Peters:

“It’s just a handful of concepts in which CCS occurs. And then only in connection with fossil fuels. Technologies for generating negative emissions play in the plans of the countries. In doing so, you would have to be in accordance with the Two-degree scenarios in the next decade, on a large scale will be introduced.”

CCS as a pretext, the climate protection lax address

The world should not make of such a vague future technologies dependent, argues Glen Peters. This is risky and also immoral, since you have to dump the solution to the problem of future generations:

“If we expect these technologies to come, we mean, of course, our emissions today are not as strong reduce. But what if you work? Then, we have operated and, until then, much too little for climate protection. It is therefore likely dangerous, that such technologies will be available.”

For Peters and his British Co-author Kevin Anderson is divorced from negative emissions, therefore, as a kind of retrospective global insurance against climate damage. You should not be used as a large-scale technical solution for the Problem considered. Instead, the world should do much more energetic what you missed so far: the emission of greenhouse gases, chokes.