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BBC News – World ‘needs Plan B’ on climate – IPCC report.
The photo here fits the agenda:
in the wake of the recent IPCC report, press coverage has taken on
a much greater urgency in conveying the elemental force
of climate change. Curiously, though, the reader is not engaged
by being involved or included, so much as being told what
the experts prescribe for us…
Let’s look at what this article says and, more importantly, what it does not include:
“The final draft report to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adopts a new tone of realism in the face of repeated failures by governments to meet their rhetoric on climate change with action.
It warns that governments are set to crash through the global CO2 safety threshold by 2030. Humans have tripled CO2 emissions since 1970, it says – and emissions have been accelerating rather than slowing.“
In contrast with previous IPCC recommendations,
the policy statement from Yokohama last month does
have a greater “tone of realism”.
The possibility that governments may
fail to match rhetoric with action leads the article’s writer
to suggest the inevitability of a “Plan B”. But the description of that plan
involves a risky and ruinously expensive fantasy known as CCS:
“It warns governments if they overshoot their short-term carbon targets they will have to cut CO2 even faster in the second half of the century to keep climate change manageable.
If they fail again, they will have to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
This could be achieved by burning wood and capturing the CO2 emissions.
The gas could then be stored in rocks underground.”
The CO2 that a BECCS system would seek to sequester
has to be pressurized for deep-well injection;
indeed the pressurization consumes a third of the energy
produced by the system. It then presents a long-term
threat of leaking back into the atmosphere.
Is this the best solution experts can offer?
But farmers, ranchers, and other citizens all over the world
are raising the flag for a far better use for the carbon
that is out of balance in the atmosphere,
eco-restoration.
As long as these half-solutions and half-truths
are spread without challenge in the media,
we will be losing precious time for telling the complete story
and offering safe, healthy and lasting relief from the extreme
effects of climate change.
Solutions are available and people all over the world
want to help put them in effect.
Let’s build soil carbon into the climate conversation,
and tell the whole story!