The votes are in. The people have spoken.
Snap!
Since online voting is the definitive way to settle key issues, it’s time to move on to climate solutions we can rely on….
More seriously, let’s review the case. In my opening statement on the role carbon capture and storage will play in solving the climate crisis, I focused on the vast economic challenge. In my rebuttal, I explored how “Feasibility, Permanence and Safety Issues Remain Unresolved.”
My closing statement looks at the solutions we need to embrace aggressively now so that CCS even has a chance of being a contribution to avoiding catastrophic global warming:
Time has run out for delay.
Study after study after study makes clear that we must start dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions now if we are to avert multiple, simultaneous catastrophes that will threaten the health and food security of billions of people by mid-century, as I discuss here.
Barry Jones says “when the six projects currently under construction go live by 2015″, carbon capture and storage will avoid “some 33m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.” That will be one part in one thousand of global emissions. Great. Go for it I say.
He hopes for “20 demonstration projects by 2020″ since “the idea is that CCS then becomes a commercial reality and begins to make deep cuts in emissions during the 2030s”. As dreams go, that is a good one.
But we need to get serious about “the daunting scale of the challenge,” as Vaclav Smil explained in “Energy at the Crossroads“:
