BECCS stands for "Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage": > In 2001, an Austrian academic named Michael Obersteiner published a paper describing a brilliant new technology: an energy system that would not only be carbon-neutral, but would actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The proposal was stunning in its elegance. First you establish massive tree plantations around the world. The trees suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as they grow. Then you harvest the trees, churn them into pellets, burn them in power plants to generate energy, capture the carbon emissions at the chimneys and store it all underground where it can never escape. Voila: a global energy system that produces ‘negative emissions’. This technology is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. When Obersteiner published his paper there was no evidence that the scheme would actually work; it was just speculation. > A few years after Obersteiner’s paper was published the IPCC started including BECCS in its official models, even though there was still no evidence of its feasibility. And in 2014 the idea took centre stage: BECCS appeared in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), not only as a side show, but as the dominant assumption in no fewer than 101 of the 116 scenarios for staying under 2°C. AR5 is the blueprint that the Paris Agreement relies on. Governments are using the AR5 scenarios as a guide when it comes to deciding how quickly to reduce their emissions. This helps explain why national plans significantly overshoot the carbon budget for 2°C: it’s because everyone’s relying on scenarios that assume BECCS will save us. > > In other words, BECCS sits right at the centre of our big plan to save the world, even though most people have never even heard of it. Journalists never mention it, our politicians never talk about it; not because they’re trying to hide something, or because it’s too complicated to explain, but because most of them don’t know it even exists. They’re just following the scenarios. The future of our planet’s biosphere, and of human civilisation, hinges on a plan that very few people know about, and to which nobody has [[Importance of consent|consented]]. - Hickel, Jason. [[Reference Notes/Less is More]] (pp. 129-130). Random House. Kindle Edition. Hickel identifies 4 problems with BECCS: - It would need to suck up about 15 billion tons of CO2 a year. A typical CCS facility can handle about 1 million tons. We would need to build 15,000 new facilities. This would be one of the biggest infrastructure projects in human history. It would only be viable if governments agree to put a price on carbon at least 10 times higher than it is currently priced in the EU. - In order for BECCS to remove that much carbon, we will need to create biofuel plantations covering 2-3 times the size of India, taking up two-thirds of the planet's arable land. This would exacerbate the problem we already have of feeding the world's population which is on track to hit 9 billion by mid-century. Relying on BECCS at scale would cause severe food shortages and trigger famines. - Creating those plantations would also slash global forest cover by 10%. This would lead to 7% loss in biodiversity. There would be increased use of chemical fertiliser, and would require twice as much water as is being used for farming. The environmental impact would be bordering on suicide. - Even if we got BECCS working smoothly, the effects of overshooting our carbon budget could trigger tipping points and feedback loops that push temperatures completely out of control. We might be able to pull carbon out of the air, but not before we've hit irreversible tipping points. Obersteiner, the inventor of the BECCS concept, says he conceived of it as a "risk-management strategy" or a "backstop technology", in case climate feedback loops turned out worse than expected. It was meant for emergency conditions. Instead, policymakers are using it as an excuse to carry on with the status quo. The scientific concensus against BECCS is rock-solid. In 2018, the European Academies' Science Advisory Council, bringing together all the national science academies of the European Union, published a report condemning the reliance on BECCS and other negative carbon emissions technologies. The latest assessments show that the safe use of BECCS will allow us to reduce global emissions by at most 1%. --- Other links: Details on the timeline of the adoption of BECCS: https://www.carbonbrief.org/beccs-the-story-of-climate-changes-saviour-technology