Going Negative: the Next Horizon in Climate Engineering Law
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4/20/2018 Going Negative: The Next Horizon in Climate Engineering Law Home > ABA Groups > Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources > Publications > Natural Resources & Environment > 201718 > Spring 2018 > Going Negative: The Next Horizon in Climate Engineering Law About NR&E Going Negative: The Next Horizon in Climate Natural Resources & Engineering Law Environment (NR&E) is the Vol. 32 No. 4 Section’s quarterly magazine of practical, informative articles Tracy Hester and Michael B. Gerrard for practitioners. Each issue Mr. Hester is a lecturer at the University of Houston Law Center in publishes 8 to 10 feature Houston, Texas. He may be reached at [email protected]. articles reflecting the theme of Mr. Gerrard is the Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice a given issue. Regular at Columbia Law School, where he directs the Sabin Center for departments include Insights, Climate Change Law. He may be reached at featuring short articles on hot [email protected]. topics in environmental, energy, and resources law; Literary Resources, featuring As the global community struggles to turn the Paris Agreement’s reviews of books and commitments into meaningful emission reductions and the United periodicals of interest to the States turbulently reverses its climate policies, the potential role of environment, energy, and “negative emissions technologies” and other climate engineering resources bar; and Interviews, approaches is drawing increasingly serious attention. These featuring conversations with technologies are engineering on the grandest scale: climate leaders in the environment, engineering seeks to offset the effects of anthropogenic climate energy, and resources fields. change by either altering the solar radiation reaching the earth’s Section members receive NR&E surface or changing the composition of the atmosphere itself. as a member benefit and they Specifically, negative emissions technologies would directly remove can view past issues archived greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the ambient air and help to remove online. accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by NR&E is available online to historical emissions. After over a decade of debate, substantive members of the Section of research and planning associated with negative emissions Environment, Energy, and technologies and solar radiation management have begun to inch Resources. If you are not a forward. But this movement is happening in unexpected ways, and member and belong to the some of the most important decisions and commitments are ABA, you can join the Section occurring outside of the spotlight. by visiting the ABA membership website or calling the ABA Service Center at Although proposed climate engineering approaches recently have (800) 2852221. grown into a bewildering array of potential technologies, most proposals tend to fall into two distinct categories: solar radiation https://www.americanbar.org/groups/environment_energy_resources/publications/natural_resources_environment/2017-18/spring/going-negative-next-horizon-climate-engineering-law 4/20/2018 Going Negative: The Next Horizon in Climate Engineering Law management (SRM) technologies and CO2 removal (CDR). SRM Subscriptions to NR&E are also technologies would seek to reduce the amount of solar radiative available. energy that reaches (or stays) at Earth’s surface. This type of Learn more about the ABA Section of “sunscreen” has been proposed in many forms, including the Environment, Energy, and Resources distribution of spacebased mirrors to deflect sunlight or More publications from the Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources modification of cirrus cloud structures to reduce their retention of reflected radiation. The SRM approach attracting the most attention, however, is the dispersal of aerosol particles in the Additional Resources stratosphere, probably by airplanes. By artificially mimicking the Writing for Section Publications haze created naturally by major volcanic eruptions, SRM arguably Information for Authors could lower the surface temperature of Earth’s surface quickly and Copyright Information (comparatively) cheaply without altering the composition of its lower atmosphere or reducing the amount of GHGs already present Contact Us from historical emissions. Jane HarperAlport By contrast, CDR removal strategies seek to remove large amounts Managing Editor of GHGs from the ambient atmosphere, resulting in negative American Bar Association emissions. This strategy also relies on a growing number of varying 321 N. Clark Street technologies, including bioenergy with carbon capture and storage Chicago, IL 606547598 (BECCS), accelerated weathering of minerals, increased biochar Phone: 3129886046 production, and local methane capture from destabilized Fax: 3129886030 permafrost. The CDR approach getting the most attention is large scale direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 by BECCS. This technology Stay Connected captures CO2 through growing large amounts of biomass and then burning that biomass in a combustion power plant that can capture the resulting CO2 from its emissions. The plant would then sequester the CO2 through underground storage or other means. This process results in a power source that effectively removes CO2 as it generates power. BECCS already has become a fixture in proposed strategies for nations to attain their commitments to reduce their total GHG emissions in conjunction with mitigation technologies to control ongoing emissions from other sources. But, as discussed below, serious concerns have been raised about the costs, effectiveness, reliability, and environmental side effects of BECCS. Although SRM and CDR offer vastly different approaches to climate engineering, the two strategies often are indiscriminately lumped together under the single rubric of geoengineering, leading to confusion. At its heart, SRM provides a comparatively inexpensive, fastacting, and highly risky approach to immediately respond to some of the urgent dangers posed by rising surface temperatures, but it does little to offset the underlying causes of climate change or its other damaging effects (such as ocean acidification). CDR, by contrast, tackles the ambient concentrations of GHGs that cause climate change, but it would act very slowly to create measurable effects, could be enormously expensive (depending on technological development), and would generate a staggering waste disposal challenge for the captured GHGs. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/environment_energy_resources/publications/natural_resources_environment/2017-18/spring/going-negative-next-horizon-climate-engineering-law 4/20/2018 Going Negative: The Next Horizon in Climate Engineering Law Despite their differences, both approaches share important drawbacks. Each remains unproven at the scale needed to affect significantly global climate change processes. Both need extensive studies and monitoring to verify their safety and effectiveness, as well as substantial financial support. Both technologies also lack any international or national governance system that expressly identifies who will control their deployment, bear the risks of liability for damages that they cause, and give affected stakeholders an opportunity to have their concerns heard and addressed. The unknowns about technologies and side effects have hobbled the consideration of climate engineering options as potential strategies to respond to climate change, and, as a result, SRM and CDR have remained secondary considerations in international climate discussions until now. As they must, governments, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals have focused instead on strategies to reduce GHG emissions and to adapt in anticipation of inevitable risks and challenges of impending additional climate change. Recent Changes in the Climate Engineering Landscape As the challenge of responding effectively to climate change has grown steeper because of a rash of extreme events, the discoveries of new hazards from climate change, and some countries’ weakening or abandonment of their GHG reduction goals, climate engineering approaches—particularly negative emissions technologies—are stepping out of the policy shadows. The increased interest in negative emissions technologies reflects the reality that anthropogenic GHG emissions cannot possibly reach zero even under the most optimistic scenarios because of inevitable deforestation, methane releases from multiple sources, and the continued use of fossil fuels. Society almost certainly will need some type of negative emissions strategy to lower ambient CO2 levels already in the atmosphere as well as to offset these continuing emissions. This reality has surfaced already in the latest climate computer modeling. When the international community reached the historic Paris Agreement in 2015, it agreed to limit global average surface temperature increases to 2˚Celsius (C) (3.6˚ Fahrenheit (F)) at a minimum and to strive for a more ambitious target of 1.5˚C (2.5˚F). At this point, essentially every serious climate model that attains the Paris Agreement’s 2˚C goal (much less the more ambitious 1.5˚C target) already requires large reductions through use of negative emissions strategies. In particular, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) most recent Integrated Assessment Model’s suite of 900 scenarios could find only a narrow band of 76 pathways that showed a substantial chance to stay below 2˚C. The majority of those 76 models required the use of