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The window of opportunity to combat climate change has not closed. A decade of extraordinary innovation has made the greening of the global economy not only feasible but also likely. But we're going to need negative emission technologies, or NETs, to make it happen...(thread)
To stabilize the total atmospheric concentration of CO2 and other GHGs, the world will have to reach net negative emissions, or taking more GHGs out of the atmosphere than are being pumped into it. Achieving that through emission reductions alone will be extremely difficult
Getting to net negative emissions requires tech that actually removes CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s where negative emission technologies (NETs) come in. Not as a substitute for aggressive efforts to reduce GHGs but as a complement. Not a Plan B, but a critical part of Plan A
NETs range from old-fashioned reforestation to high-tech machines that suck carbon out of the sky and store it underground. Along with accelerating cuts in emissions, NETs boost our chances of keeping warming to bearable levels and reduce the risk of catastrophe
Embracing NETs sooner than later makes economic sense; it'll be cheaper to deploy them at the same time as emission-reduction tech rather than waiting to exhaust those options first. The wider the solution set, the lower the costs, the easier to raise ambitions/political support
To make NETs economically viable and scale them rapidly, policymakers have to tap into a much more powerful force: the profit motive. Putting a price on carbon emissions creates an economic incentive for entrepreneurs to find cheaper, faster ways to cut pollution
Valuing negative emissions (for example, through an emission-trading system that awards credits for carbon removal or a carbon tax that provides rebates for them) would create an incentive to join the hunt for NETs
Put another way, humanity’s best hope is to promise that the next crop of billionaires will be those who figure out low-cost ways to remove carbon from the sky
NETs are exciting, essential. The essence of addition by subtraction. Dive deep into the details, challenges, opportunities in my latest for @ForeignAffairs bit.ly/2SqFLzu, with my colleagues @NatKeohane + @EricPooley (/thread)
