Negative Emissions of GHG-NEGHG
The world has committed to keep the global temperature to 1.5oC by 2050, however we’ve locked in climate changes we’ve yet to experience. We think that recent extreme weather events and their downstream implications have been horrendous but we haven’t seen the full impacts yet! Due to the lag-time from emissions and build-up in the environment and the resulting decreasing ability of our natural world to absorb run-away greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) we must start reducing the GHGE in the atmosphere now! Carbon capture is the only way to remove excess CO2, all-natural mitigation solutions ignore the decreasing resilience of natural habitats, already undermined or depleted by corrupted capitalism. The UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol CDM[1] carbon offset by REDD[2] are only short-term fixes unfortunately because forests get burnt by wildfires beyond recovery or deliberately harvested or cleared for mining, palm oil or cattle for short-term profits. How much longer are the Global Commons going to be exploited for the wealth of the few?
Things are changing slowly as emitters become committed to managing scope 3 GHGE, no longer just passing the buck to consumers. Take plastics for example, we need to return all plastics to the producer and make them accountable for their ‘timeless’ products, before we, like organisms worldwide die from micro-plastic ingestion. People forget that plastics aren’t pure and toxic substances leach or are emitted from combustion, and particulate matter, and eventually poison us.
But, back to the topic at hand, we need to have negative emissions of GHGs (NEGHG) where they are captured and stored permanently. Despite the fact that purists decry the oil industry that they rely on they must play a major part of the solution. The good news is that the accumulated knowledge, expertise and technology to reverse engineer disused oil reservoirs has been well proven, excuse the pun, it already exists and can be safely, sustainably and securely achieved for geological time-scales not just the next few hundred years of a tree that may no longer be growing anyway! So, get off your high horse power engines and plastic fantastic stuff and encourage the ‘fossil’ fuel industry to accelerate carbon capture, re-use, storage and transport (CRUST) back to where it came from in the crust long-term and now!
[1] Clean Development Mechanism
[2] Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation