Last-ditch climate option or wishful thinking?

News about climate change is going from bad to worse: Last October, global warming breached the 1oC temperature rise barrier and has stayed above it for six months running. Carbon levels in the atmosphere are anything but safe and it is hardly surprising that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been seriously looking at ‘negative emissions’, i.e. at ways of taking carbon already emitted out of the atmosphere again.

This report summarises the key evidence that must be considered about BECCS. It looks at the overwhelmingly destructive impacts of existing large-scale bioenergy production and use and the implications of massively scaling it up, as would be required for a global BECCS programme. It examines the different technologies proposed for BECCS and shows them to be unproven, highly complex and thus failure-prone, and extremely costly.

The full report is also available for download.