I have just finished reading an extract from The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg [1], which I highly endorse reading. I am a big fan of Greta Thunberg and think she is a modern version of Joan of Arc. Similarly, she succeeded in uniting laypeople around the critical environmental cause against powerful forces that try to keep the public dormant. However, I must disagree with the path she advocates for saving the planet in her book.
In the extract, Thunberg deems the measures taken so far to mitigate #climatechange insufficient, providing evidence that despite all our #decarbonization efforts, we are still heading the wrong way. For example, a UN projection that global emissions will increase by another 16% by 2030. She claims the fault is in carbon accounting schemes that mask actual emissions and appease the public. She concludes that #netzero2050 is too little and too late, and true zero is needed.
I think that the gravity of these words is too large to ignore. Imagine our lives with almost no [2] residential or commercial heating and electricity (17.5% of global emissions), transportation (16.2%), construction of new buildings (cement, iron, and steel account for 10.2%), meat and dairy products (5.8%), and much more. Moreover, the main driver of the growth of emissions is not the western rich countries; it is third-world countries whose populations are developing and stepping out of poverty, which is accompanied by growing consumption [3]. Therefore, to achieve a true zero, not only will the citizens of the developed world have to live as in the third world countries, but the development of the third world countries would have to cease.
There is another way to mitigate climate change, which Greta Thunberg unjustifiably regards as “undeveloped technologies”: Emerging technologies that can safely and permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere, compensating for our unavoidable emissions. For example, Charm Industrial and Climeworks removed by now, with a high degree of confidence, more than 10000 tons of CO2. That is not a lot, but the scale of carbon dioxide removal is projected to grow significantly. For example, the cumulative capacity of planned, #directaircapture facilities is expected to reach almost 40 million tons of CO2 annually by 2030 [4]. This figure does not include other methods of carbon dioxide removal, such as the ones used by Charm Industrial or Carbon Blue, which will also contribute their share. In conclusion, if you want to contribute to real, #sustainablegrowth and #climatechangemitigation that does not sacrifice human progress, join the carbon dioxide removal cause.
You can pay for high-quality carbon removal (more on what makes it high-quality in a future post) and contribute to an increase in annual CO2 removal capacity simply due to increasing demand pressures. Most likely, that can be a more straightforward and less painful way to mitigate climate change than the alternative. #environmental#carboncapture#netzero
