The US special presidential envoy for climate, John Kerry has warned that relying on technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is “dangerous” and a cause for “alarm”.
In an interview, Kerry said that new technologies may not prevent the world from passing “tipping points”, key temperature thresholds that, once passed, could trigger a cascade of unstoppable physical effects.
“Some scientists suggest that it’s possible there could be an overshoot [of global temperatures, beyond the limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels that governments are targeting] and you could clawback, so to speak – you have technologies and other things that allow you to come back,” Kerry said.
Speaking further, he said, “The danger with that, which alarms me the most and motivates me the most, is that according to the science, and the best scientists in the world, we may be at or past several tipping points that they have been warning us about for some time,”. “That’s the danger, the irreversibility.”
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He asked various governments to deploy renewable energy faster, along with related technologies such as electric vehicles as according to him, these are already available for widespread deployment and could prevent the world from reaching the high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that would cause temperatures to breach the 1.5C threshold.
“Part of the challenge we face right now is countries that have technologies available to them are not necessarily deploying them at the rate that they should be,” he said. “Fatih Birol [executive director of the International Energy Agency] has made it very clear for some time that all you need to meet the 2030 goal of 45% reduction [in greenhouse gas emissions] globally is to deploy renewables in the current state of technology, and that’s not happening.”
He further stated that, “There’s a resistance right now that I see from several quarters to doing what we know we need to do,” Kerry said. “I think there are things that are really quite simple that we could be doing, but it requires political will, it requires resources, allocation, and a determination to get the job done.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
