Climate Change: emission reduction doesn't cut it, we need to remove carbon dioxide

The rich world will not pony up the funds needed for largescale mitigation. India and other countries should focus on is carbon dioxide removal tech, where R&D is already advanced

Not by emission reduction: we need CDR

India has been a part of the chorus at COP29, for more funds from developed countries for climate change mitigation. Mitigation here means reducing or avoiding fresh greenhouse gas emissions. This is fundamentally misconceived, on par with joining the mob running pell-mell and shouting, ‘thief, thief ’, blessedly unaware that the thief had himself started the full-throated chase, to divert attention.

What would be a really pro-people demand? To remove GHGs already saturating the atmosphere and already warming the planet.

● Don’t reducing further emissions and removing their existing stock amount to the same thing? Absolutely not. Emission reduction is everyone’s responsibility, including that of developing countries. Depleting the stock of warming gases in the atmosphere is primarily the responsibility of those who had put this carbon load on the planet in the first place, meaning rich countries.

● Besides, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is the only way to arrest climate change before warming reaches deadly proportions. Every year, humanity adds 40-odd gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions to the 2,400 Gt, give or take 10%, emitted over the period 1850-2019. It was estimated, in 2019, that further emissions of 500 Gt would be all it took to raise the average global temperature to more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial times.

If ‘CO2 equivalent’ struck you as darkly jargony, here is the light. All gases are not equal when it comes to their warming effect. Over 20 years, methane is 80 times as potent as CO2. So one tonne of recent methane is 80 CO2 equivalent tonnes. Quantity of other warming gases such as oxides of nitrogen and fluorocarbons is also measured in CO2 equivalent tonnes, so that their combined noxious presence can be measured as so many CO2 equivalent tonnes.

● The 1.5°C preferred ceiling limit set by the Paris Climate Accord at COP21 in 2015, has become even more significant since. Scientists have grown more certain that beyond this level of warming, extreme climate events – cyclones, cloudbursts, forest fires, floods, droughts and heat waves – would grow more frequent and severe.

● The rich world has always focused on emission reduction, spreading the responsibility for climate action on all nations. But per capita emissions in South Asia are less than 1.5 tonnes, less than 1 tonne for Africa, and close to 9 tonnes for Europe, 17 tonnes for North America. The countries worst affected are the poorest, which can least afford to invest in adaptation and mitigation. Hence the demand for funding by the rich world, and the begrudging generosity of the rich.

● Once the discourse shifts to CDR, the balance of responsibility for remedial action shifts, and skews towards those who pollute more and, more to the point, have polluted more in the past to grow rich at the cost of warming the planet.

● But is CDR viable, technically and economically? Climeworks, a Swiss startup that operates two Direct Air Capture plants in Iceland, started off with a cost of $1,000 per tonne. Now, it expects costs to come down to $400 per tonne, and has a taker for carbon credits this expensive in Morgan Stanley. But Climeworks captures carbon only to store it, not to use it.

● CO2 can be put to income-generating use, and so is valuable. Setting aside things like adding fizz to soda or beer, which are just a few burps away from releasing CO2 back into the air, the most straightforward largescale use is to pump it into depleted oil wells, to push up reluctant oil. Thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, US oil giants have undertaken CDR projects to remove more than a million tonnes of CO2 each from the air.

● But this is just the (melting) tip of the iceberg. Multiple technologies exist to convert CO2 into graphene, whose price can be as high as $2,000 per kg. Other processes create graphite and ethanol, with ammonia as a by-product. The point is to carry out more research into tech and scale the process to make CDR a source of profitable raw materials, and not a mere cost to be defrayed by selling carbon credits to large companies looking to prove their climate credentials.

● Nasdaq-listed LanzaTech uses bacteria to convert CO2 into ethane, isopropanol and other raw materials. Why not mine the air for CO2 and use it as the starting chemical for producing any of the entire chain of petrochemicals, and put paid to pumping oil from the ground?

● Innovation is happening in other areas as well. Pyrolysis of natural gas yields hydrogen and usable carbon. Imagine all coalbed methane being converted into hydrogen, which, when burnt, produces only water. Hydrogen so produced is reportedly cheaper than conventional green hydrogen produced by splitting water with renewable power.

The climate agenda is full of opportunity, to be harvested using R&D and innovation. Let us get our startups and engineers innovating for MNCs in our sprawling global capability centres. If govt sets the trend, oodles of private capital would flow in, too. Climate action is a whole lot more than warbling about renewable energy and volubly importuning the rich at COPs for mitigation funds.