Thread by @autofac

It's been a while in the pipeline, but delighted to share this news! Thanks to all the project team, and to the excellent EPA Steering Committee for their help and support.

https://twitter.com/EPAResearchNews/status/1326092085666197504

Big shoutout to: Mike Jones (TCD), Paul Price aka @swimsure (DCU), Alwynne McGeever and Paul Rice who all made huge contributions to bringing this to completion. And to @EPAResearchNews for providing the essential funding support.

In (very!) brief: It is now scientifically understood that effective climate action sets a finite limit on total future net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from human activities: the "forever" Global Carbon Budget.

Unfortunately, due to delay and procrastination to date, it is now likely (but not inevitable!) that this global budget will be exceeded. *IF* that happens we may need to try to actively *remove* CO₂ from the atmosphere very quickly and at large scale.

This would be such a high risk (and highly unjust!) situation that we should do *everything we can* to avoid or minimise this possibility!

Nonetheless, on a precautionary basis, this research presents the first, preliminary, assessment of the technical feasibility for so-called "negative emissions technologies" to be deployed in Ireland.

Such Negative Emission Technologies or NETs are not a panacea; they vary greatly in maturity, remain
uncertain in feasibility (technical, social, political and
economic) and all have a very significant lead time to
deployment. We need to absolutely minimise dependence on them.

We found the aggregate *technical* potential for accumulated Irish gross CO₂ removals of (up to 2100) to be approximately 600MtCO₂. The corresponding *practical* potential is likely substantially less; a current, prudent, upper policy assumption is suggested as max 200MtCO₂.

The draft new Irish Climate Action Bill proposes the introduction of a rolling 15-year "carbon budget" governance framework. We recommend that this be explicitly grounded in a declared limit to the national "fair share" claim on the remaining global "forever" carbon budget.

This would be specifically facilitated by binding the statutory National Climate Objective (NCO) to making our fair share contribution to meeting the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. (see also: docs.google.com/a/dcu.ie/viewe…)

But critically, we should be honest with young people, and climate-vulnerable communities around the world, about the now critical tradeoffs between early, radical, emissions reduction and relatively reckless reliance on speculative future negative emissions technologies.

Video teaser for the IE-NETs report: bit.ly/32vP2cz

Full text report download: epa.ie/researchandedu…

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