Machines to extract carbon from the air, artificial intelligence, indoor vertical farms to grow food for our escape to Mars, and even solar-powered “responsible” yachts: the Police 28 climate summit in Dubai was celebrated with the promise of technological solutions to worsening global warming and ecological collapse.
The UN climate talks have drawn a record number of delegates to a sprawling, newly built metropolis, which has an enormous dome that emits sounds and lights up in different colors at night. The two-week program is loaded with talks, events and demonstrations of the need for humanity to innovate its way out of the climate crisis.
Given the heavy-handed action by governments to reduce planet-warming emissions – the world is silent catastrophic climate collapse – the technology focus is useful, said Bill Gates, the multi-billionaire Microsoft co-founder, as he braved the Dubai sunshine.
“I am most optimistic about the incredible innovation,” he said. “People’s willingness to pay for climate is limited… We really need to innovate. You have to create the new before you turn off the old.”
AI was touted at Cop28 as a way to track emissions and was used by young climate activists to send “compelling messages from the future” by artificially aging them to represent themselves in the year 2050. An exhibit featured people promoting climate innovations through hologram, while a company promoted the idea of making aviation fuel from the fruit of macaúba palm trees in Brazil.
Some of the innovations feel particularly appropriate for the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate and coastal playground of the super-rich, such as an event to promote “responsible yachting” held on Tuesday. The enormous emissions from yachts are “scary”, admitted a spokesperson for Sunreef Yachts, which positions itself as an eco-yacht company. But they added: “The yachting environment is very diverse. We are here to discuss the alternatives.”
But this fixation has alarmed some scientists and climate activists, who warn that technology is being used to distract from the primary task of stopping fossil fuels from being burned. Cop28’s president, Sultan Al Jaber, also the head of the UAE’s national oil company, questioned the feasibility of a fossil fuel phase-out.
A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists are with this cop, including Exxon CEO Darren Woods who said he wants to place an “emphasis on a problem statement of eliminating emissions, as opposed to a problem statement focused on the oil and gas industry per se.”
“It’s scary because they see it as a new business opportunity, a new way to make money and carry on as before,” Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate researcher at the University of Exeter, said of the hope that carbon removal technologies are established.
Total current technology-based CO2 removal, excluding nature-based means such as planting new forests, only removes 0.01 million tonnes of CO22according to recent research led by Friedlingstein, which is more than a million times smaller than the current fossil fuel CO2 emissions.
Despite its small scale, bulky carbon removal techniques are relied upon in many climate models and plans by countries and companies to avoid breaching a 1.5C rise in global temperatures since pre-industrial times and catastrophic heat waves, droughts, floods and other impacts are triggered.
“They will scale it up, and if they do it by a factor of 100 in the next 10 to 20 years, that will be great, but they won’t scale it up by a factor of 1 million,” Friedlingstein said. “There is no alternative to massively reducing emissions. These technologies are a distraction, a way to pretend we’re dealing with the issue, but we’re not.
“We have housing insulation, we have electric vehicles, we have renewable energy, we have batteries. Scaling them up is not trivial, but we don’t need a magical new technology for the first 90% of this problem.”
Greater efforts will be needed for “carbon management” – which includes the direct removal of carbon, as well as capturing emissions at their source from industrial facilities and storing them in some way – if climate goals are to be met, negotiators from countries including the The US, UK, Brazil and Kenya agreed at Cop28 on Wednesday.
Keeping to 1.5C is “simply not possible” without the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS), US climate envoy John Kerry told the meeting. “It’s not an American position, it’s a matter of science,” he said. “If we don’t have carbon capture, we can’t get to net zero.” Kerry acknowledged the gaping gap to the amount of emissions reductions needed, but added: “We have to try.”
Capturing carbon is no substitute for reducing emissions and promoting clean energy, agreed Majid Al Suwaidi, the UAE’s top climate negotiator, but “the reality is that we have to deal with the energy systems we have while dealing with the energy systems build what we want.” .
Global emissions need to be cut almost in half this decade and then to net zero by 2050, and about 10% of this will likely have to come from carbon management techniques, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. Birol said that the high hopes placed on such technology have so far largely fallen flat: “When I look at the last 15 years or so, the story of CCS is, to say the least, a disappointing one.”
Countries are negotiating whether to include a phase-out of fossil fuels in the Cop28 agreement and a final agreement could include language around “unreduced” emissions. This will put new onus on carbon removal and CCS – but also at a cost.
An extra 86 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases could be released by 2050 if CCS relies on but underperforms, says a new report by Climate Analytics warnedwhile a large build-up and use of this technology would cost the world an extra $1tn per year, a separate study found by Oxford University.
But the lack of urgency to reduce emissions – 2023 is about to set new records in both heat and carbon pollution – means that no options should be discounted, according to Steve Smith, executive director of Oxford Net Zero.
“You can’t take anything off the table if you want to meet our climate goals,” he said. “There is not much room for either/or. It’s both/and. This technology is not a bogus solution – there is no one solution.”
For countries in the teeth of the climate crisis, nothing short of the end of the fossil fuel era will suffice. Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, which is at serious risk from rising sea levels and other hazards from global warming, said she welcomed a commitment to ramp up renewable energy and other technologies, but said coal , oil and gas are still necessary to abandon.
“We cannot afford not to address the root cause of this problem,” she said. “Nor can we afford to pretend that there are other ways to recover 1.5C when so many lives are at stake.”
