Prof. Kevin Anderson - excerpt from main interview titled Climate Failures & Phantasies.
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In all of the scenarios, all of the high level scenarios, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, what is called Working Group 3 of the IPCC, all of their scenarios, and indeed, really all of them, all of the major global high-level scenarios, and these are scenarios about the future, in terms of energy and emissions, they all rely on some form of carbon dioxide removal. And these terms now, trip off our tongue, as if they're perfectly reasonable things to discuss. Carbon Dioxide Removal, negative emission technologies, and increasingly even the language of geoengineering. But these things aren't material, particularly the negative emissions and the geoengineering, they're not actually material things you can go out and get and buy at scale. They are at very best, very small pilot schemes that capture a few thousand tonnes here and there, but set against the fact is, we're emitting around about 36 to 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year from burning fossil fuels. These technologies are just capturing just a few 1000 tonnes, there's absolutely no way that you can scale these things up from just being very small pilot schemes, often with a very chequered technical history, that you can scale these things up in a timeline that matches the carbon budgets that come out of the science that relate to 1.5 and two degrees centigrade. And yet we evoke them as if somehow they are, they can be aligned, they cannot be aligned. In fact, they've undermined the narrative, I would argue for the last at least 10 to 15 years, if not 20 years. So the adoption of these sorts of technologies, and it's not they're not the only ones, not only these technologies that are planned to remove on our carbon dioxide, to suck the carbon dioxide, hundreds of billions of tonnes, up to half a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it securely underground in a timely manner. The assumption of that is actually done the oil companies job for them. It has allowed us to postulate ongoing fossil fuel use, to avoid major profound political and social change. I have made this point before; I think, what I've often referred to as integrated assessment models, whilst I think a lot of the modellers are good people doing as objective work as they can, the the boundaries they work within are deeply subjective. And they have actually done the job of Exxon for the last 20 years by undermining the narratives we've needed to have to start to address climate change. So and I think that these have been so normalised now that when you talk about them, and that they may not work, as is assumed you almost seem to be an extremist, so you are an extremist, because you're pointing out that these technologies that barely exist, are completely relied on in the models; that is seen to be the extreme position, rather than the extreme position being, how on earth can it be that virtually every single model run that we have, rely on these, either technologies or some other use of, the awful term of nature based solutions. The language we use, it sort of captures something and makes it all sound so neat that we can simply put it into the accountancy spreadsheet that underpins these models, and hey, presto, we can evoke wonderful low carbon futures that occur almost overnight. And the journalists have allowed this to happen. A lot of the senior academics have allowed this to happen. And I think it comes back to the my point earlier that actually, often as experts, we're very good at reductionist thinking but we're not very good at Systems Thinking