by Silvia Ribeiro (This article originally appeared in Jacobin Magazine and on the Science for the People website.) According to the most recent IPCC report, we have only twelve years to drastically reduce emissions if we’re to keep the Earth’s temperature rise from...
Carbon Dioxide Removal / Greenhouse Gas Removal
Fire and Plantations in Portugal
by Oliver Munnion (This article was originally published by Science for the People.) Devastating wildfires are increasingly a feature of summers across the globe, and their intensity and scale have been linked directly to climate change in a number of recent...
Jacobin’s “Utopian” Geoengineering Leads to Dystopian Sun-blocking Technologies
by Pat Mooney In Jacobin Magazine ("The Need for Carbon Removal," July 24, 2018), Holly Jean Buck set out to convince readers that the left should develop a “utopian” political strategy favourable to Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technology. While I appreciate the...
Where is California’s Climate Summit Heading? Watch Arizona
by Dru Jay On climate issues, California governor Jerry Brown has been “hailed as the ‘anti-Trump’” for his efforts to keep the United States government committed to the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. So when California recently hosted the Global Climate Action Summit,...
Marine Geoengineering: a technofix for the climate? (video)
Large-scale technological interventions to “fix” the climate crisis are moving up on the political agenda. Some climate scientists are now proposing geoengineering interventions on land to halt global warming - most prominently BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture...
Land-based geoengineering: a technofix for the climate? (Video)
Large-scale technological interventions to “fix” the climate crisis are moving up on the political agenda. Some climate scientists are now proposing geoengineering interventions on land to halt global warming - most prominently BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture...
Negative CO2 emissions cannot replace rapid reductions
Conference report: An international conference on negative emissions highlights extent of trade-offs and reinforces urgency of near-term emission reductions. by Kate Dooley (this article was originally posted by HBF) From May 22nd to 24th, over 200 academics,...
Pirates of the Pacific
by Silvia Ribeiro The pirates of marine geoengineering are not giving up easily. Although there is a UN moratorium on ocean fertilisation, the company Oceaneos wants to experiment with this risky technology in Chile and Peru, despite not having permission from the...
The Big Bad Fix
ETC Group, BiofuelWatch and Heinrich Boell Foundation present a comprehensive argument against geoengineering in this report. Click here to download the full report (pdf) As a rapidly warming world manifests heat waves, floods, droughts and hurricanes, geoengineering...
Mapping Geogengineering Projects
Interactive map from ETC Group and Heinrich Boell Foundation shows growth of climate control efforts This interactive geoengineering map, prepared by ETC Group and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, is an attempt to shed light on the worldwide state of geoengineering by...
Governance for a ban on geoengineering
[Originally posted by Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative.] by Lili Fuhr All geoengineering approaches are by definition large-scale, intentional, and high-risk. Some have well-known negative impacts, threatening the achievement of the Sustainable...
Risks of large-scale biosequestration as a form of CO2 removal
Source: Global Forest Coalition Click here to view the report. At the start of a major Climate Engineering Conference [1] in Berlin, the Global Forest Coalition [2] has launched a Working Paper that highlights the risks of different proposals for large-scale Carbon...
Riding the geostorm: Is it possible to govern geoengineering?
The prospect of controlling global temperatures raises serious questions of power and justice: Who gets to control the Earth’s thermostat and adjust the climate for their own interests? Who will make the decision to deploy if such drastic measures are considered...
Failure of Kemper County “clean coal” plant casts more doubts on BECCS
After years of embarrassing delays and $5.3 billion in cost overruns, Southern Company has finally pulled the plug on its pioneering “clean coal” plant in Kemper County, Mississippi. The $7.5 billion Kemper County project would have been the world’s first Integrated...
Climate Change, Smoke and Mirrors
For the past decade, a small but growing group of governments and scientists, the majority from the most powerful and most climate-polluting countries in the world, has been pushing for political consideration of geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale...
Pioneering coal plant with CCS isn’t viable, admits CEO
A new report by Greenpeace Energy Desk reveals that one of the US’s premier coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration plants, the Kemper County Energy Facility, is not economically viable. The project, located in Kemper County, Mississippi, received...
Pulling carbon out of the air: NETS, BECCS, and CDR
Geoengineering Monitor has long reported on the speculative concept of “negative emissions”, together with certain favored approaches such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) - a geoengineering technique which recent studies show would have...
UN to extend freeze on climate change geoengineering
Update to this article: The plenary of the COP 13 adopted the decision described below on Friday 9th December By Ed King (Climate Home) Draft documents suggest countries will agree to further ban on large-scale climate techno-fixes, warning risks of damage to...
Climate Change Policy and The Super-Hero Syndrome
by Roger Boyd (Resilience) There is a genre of Hollywood “feel-good” disaster movie, where everything seems nearly hopeless until the end, and then suddenly, many times against all hope, the super-hero (or super-heroes) saves the day. Whether it be human heroes that...
Responses to: The Trouble with Negative Emissions
Last month we reported on Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters' piece in Science describing how a reliance on negative emissions to draw carbon out of the atmosphere - rather than making necessary and drastic emissions cuts now - will only lock in carbon addiction and make...
Using forests to curb climate change threatens human rights
by Fred Pearce (Thomson Reuters Foundation News) Trees offer ways to help achieve "negative emissions", but what does that mean for forest communities? The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was a landmark the world rightly applauded. Its pledge to limit global...
Radical Realism About Climate Change
by Lili Fuhr (Project Syndicate) BERLIN – Mainstream politics, by definition, is ill equipped to imagine fundamental change. But last December in Paris, 196 governments agreed on the need to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – an objective that...
With Sights Set on COP22, Group Offers Roadmap for ‘Fair Future’ in Warming World
by Nika Knight (Common Dreams) A sustainable solution to the climate crisis will also work to alleviate poverty and seek climate justice, says Friends of the Earth Germany "A future without climate chaos for all human beings on our planet is only possible if we don't...
A reliance on negative emissions technologies is locking in carbon addiction
University of Manchester The Paris Agreement on climate change and the carbon-reduction plans of many governments (including the UK) are unwittingly reliant on unproven technologies to suck hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere....