No to geoengineers’ technofix gold rush, yes to Real Zero!

Previously buried within the UNFCCC’s negotiating corridors and committees, a new technofix gold rush has been stealthily emerging in global climate change negotiations – with potentially disastrous implications for the world’s fight against climate change. 

Find out more by joining this co-hosted online event direct from critical “intersessional” meetings in Bonn, Saturday 10 June, 2023: “Real Zero pathways or dangerous distractions? Why geoengineering & risky removals are no path to 1.5”

If this gold rush gets the go ahead, it will actually facilitate the continued emissions of fossil fuels by the world’s worst polluters, just as the world recognises that this is potentially our last chance to stop this deadly practice. [1]

Speculative geoengineering technologies, called “carbon dioxide removal technologies” or “engineered removals” (language that is carefully framed to avoid any mention of “geoengineering”), are central to the technofix gold rush agenda, even though they are currently under a de facto moratorium in the UNFCCC’s sister convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), because of their highly uncertain and risky nature. [2]

The UNFCCC’s labyrinthine tunnels conceal negotiating nuggets that could be transformed into vast amounts of financing for so-called “carbon removal activities”, and the corporate carbon cowboys are riding into town to try and make sure this happens. 

In order to successfully exploit the current UNFCCC negotiations, in the run up to the COP 28 summit in the UAE later this year, they need to get their various “removal” technologies accepted as being sources of carbon credits, worthy of future certification, so that their technologies’ theoretical outputs (such as quantities of carbon that have been supposedly captured or sequestered) can be sold, traded and even used as offsets. This includes both geoengineering technologies and new assaults on soils, forests and other natural ecosystems under the guise of “climate nature-based solutions”. [3]

This whole shaky edifice rests on the completely erroneous idea that “Net Zero” is a desirable goal. This means that dirty industries can “offset” their continued fossil fuel extraction and emissions – in other words, that nothing changes and the global climate gets worse. Furthermore, the potential for such geoengineering deals offers a powerful incentive to put aside real policies to reduce and eliminate emissions. “Net Zero” is fool’s gold. [4]

On World Oceans Day (8 June), the prospect of several marine geoengineering technologies being heralded as a whole new “blue carbon market” is therefore a reason for the greatest concern.

Several ways of seriously messing with our oceans’ chemistry – through extensive rock dust dissemination (euphemistically termed “enhanced weathering”), the deployment of massive monocultures of industrial algae, or even the much debated and currently banned ocean fertilization – are being considered, under the entirely disingenuous banner of “nature-based carbon removals” (even though they are all geoengineering technologies). [5]

Ocean fertilization being advanced in this way is a prime and extremely worrying example. This technology theoretically involves dumping iron nanoparticles in the ocean to encourage sudden phytoplankton blooms that are expected to sequester carbon and then sink to the seabed. [6] 

However, the key word here is “theoretically”. The feasibility of ocean fertilization remains unproven, as the carbon is re-emitted through the marine food chain, whilst there is broad scientific consensus about negative impacts on critical marine ecosystems and the livelihoods of highly dependent coastal communities. Both are similarly at risk from the  other marine geoengineering technologies proposed, including establishing large scale monocultures of algae and sinking biomass. [7]

Furthermore, our oceans are complex and largely unknown ecosystems critical to the regulation of the planet’s systems. It beggars belief that these giant ocean disruptions can possibly be considered “solutions” to climate change. [8]

Much of this is happening under a strand of the climate change negotiations known as the “Article 6.4 mechanism” which seeks to establish a new carbon market (voluntary but sanctioned by the UN). 

If you want to find more about what’s happening directly from Bonn you can tune in to this co-hosted online event on Saturday 10 June, 11.45-13.00 CEST: “Real Zero pathways or dangerous distractions? Why geoengineering & risky removals are no path to 1.5”

REFERENCES

[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made it clear that the way to halt and recover from climate change is to drastically reduce the extraction and use of fossil fuels. Continuing to extract fossil fuels at the current rate will cause the Earth’s temperature to rise by more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels within a few years, leading to a scenario with serious global consequences, which the IPCC calls “climate overshoot”. IPCC. Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, quoted in ETC Group. False Solutions Alert: Geoengineering in Climate Negotiations. November 3, 2022.

[2] Geoengineering Monitor. The Earth should not be a climate laboratory. May 18, 2023. 

[3] ETC Group. False Solutions Alert: Geoengineering in climate negotiations. November 3, 2022.

[4] Geoengineering Monitor. The Earth should not be a climate laboratory. May 18, 2023. 

[5] For more information see: Geoengineering Monitor. Marine Geoengineering: between profits and climate protection, our oceans are becoming an experimental field. June 1, 2023.

[6] “Recent pushes for [Ocean Fertilization] have come from the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair (CCRC) which has partnered with India’s Institute of Maritime Studies to conduct testing off the coast of Goa, India in the Arabian Sea. A new geoengineering initiative, the Carbon Removal Partnership led by Arizona State University, names plankton fertilisation a technique for Ocean Restoration. Rogue researcher Russ George is perhaps the most infamous proponent, ​leading the 2012 ocean fertilization experiment with Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, and has since revived his research in Alaska and New England under an organisation called Ocean Pasture Restoration. An Elon Musk-funded venture, WhaleX, in partnership with Ocean Nourishment Corporation, is working hard to rebrand ocean fertilization, calling it ‘Artificial Whale Poo’.” Geoengineering Monitor. Marine Geoengineering: between profits and climate protection, our oceans are becoming an experimental field. June 1, 2023.

[7] Geoengineering Monitor. Commercialization in Geoengineering Continues to Increase, Quarterly Review. February 15, 2023.

[8] Geoengineering Monitor. Marine Geoengineering: between profits and climate protection, our oceans are becoming an experimental field. June 1, 2023.