Techno-fixes translate into tricky reading

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest advice could actually make things even worse, says Dr Richard Dixon

This week saw the publication of a major report which lays out how we might save the world from runaway climate change. It urges very rapid emissions reductions, with global emissions having to peak by 2025, but relies heavily on techno-fixes which would send the world beyond critical temperature limits.

The UN’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a collection of the world’s leading experts on climate science, impacts, adaptation and technology.

They have been busy.

Last August, the IPCC published a report on climate science – we’re headed for nearly 3C of warming, and that’s a disaster.

UN Secretary-general António Guterres described this report as “code red for humanity.”

At the end of February, the IPCC produced a report on the impacts of climate change – bad things are happening faster than predicted. The Secretary-general described this one as an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership”.

This week, it was an IPCC report on climate change mitigation – what we should do about the rapidly approaching humanitarian catastrophe. The Secretary General said: “We are on a fast track to climate disaster.”

The report was not easy to produce. Monday’s launch was pushed back by six hours because the summary had to be agreed line by line by nearly 200 nations. In these processes, the words of thousands of pages of the main report are watered down in the summary.

February’s report said it would be very dangerous to overshoot the vital 1.5C temperature limit and then try to come back, potentially triggering irreversible change in major planetary systems and submerging island nations, but this third report suggests this is likely to happen even in the best case.

The report includes a major element of net-emissions technologies – things which take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it up somehow. Many of these rely on carbon capture and storage (CCS).

However, CCS is massively overhyped. There have been previous pilot plants, but currently there isn’t a single CCS plant operating in Europe. Of those that exist elsewhere in the world, the vast majority use the carbon dioxide captured to help extract more oil – making things worse rather than better.

Relying on CCS, and even more speculative technologies, is a really bad bet on our future, but it suits oil companies and many countries because it makes it sound like we can keep pumping the oil and not worry about climate change or having to

Relying on CCS, and even more speculative technologies, is a really bad bet on our future

make massive transformational changes to society.

The second bit of trickery is carbon markets. The theory is that the people, businesses or countries who are most easily able to reduce emissions do so and those who would find it harder buy credit for the emissions reduction to cover their own targets.

But the real-world experience has been quite different. The first big carbon market – the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – is only now starting to make a difference, after 17 years of operation.

The latest IPCC report is very strong on the urgent need to act, but weaker on the solutions required. Instead of calling for the urgent phase out of fossil fuels and a real transformation in how we do just about everything, it relies on technologies that may never deliver.

Dr Richard Dixon is an environmental campaigner and consultant