A new climate study partly funded by the Trump administration calls for a major federal initiative to develop technologies that put the brakes on global warming.
The National Academies of Sciences released a report on Wednesday calling for the rapid development of “negative emissions technologies” that can remove carbon dioxide, a key contributor to climate change, directly from the air.
The study also concludes that even with the technologies, the carbon emissions cuts won’t be enough to meet the current goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord, which Trump withdrew the U.S. from in June 2017.
“Therefore, a concerted research effort is needed to address the constraints that currently limit deployment of [negative emissions technologies], such as high costs, land and environmental constraints, and energy requirements,” reads a summary of the Academies‘ report.
The new study calls for the creation of a “substantial research initiative” to advance these technologies as soon as possible.
The technologies are “essential” to offsetting carbon emissions and “should be viewed as a component of the climate change mitigation portfolio,” said Stephen Pacala, the Princeton University professor who chaired the study.
“Most climate mitigation efforts are intended to decrease the rate at which people add carbon from fossil fuel reservoirs to the atmosphere,” he explained. “We focused on the reverse.”
The technologies they studied are designed to take carbon dioxide out of the air and put it back into the land.
The study identified four land-based negative emissions technologies that are ready for large-scale deployment and that are cost competitive with other strategies used to cut emissions.
These technologies include changes in forest management, reforestation, changes in agricultural practices, and enhanced ground carbon storage.
The fourth technology ready to scale up is “bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration,” which use plants, or plant-based substances, to generate electricity, liquid fuels, and heating, while capturing all the carbon dioxide that is produced.
“However, these four NETs cannot yet provide enough carbon removal at reasonable cost without substantial unintended harm,” the report says.
The agencies that sponsored the report included the Department of Energy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and United States Geological Survey.
The study was requested under the Obama administration, but did not get underway until just before the 2016 elections, with the first public meeting on the study being held last year under the Trump administration. A spokesperson for the Academies said the level of engagement by the agencies under Trump has been normal.
Other groups that also sponsored the study included the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Linden Trust for Conservation, Incite Labs, along with support from the National Academy of Sciences’ Arthur L. Day Fund.
