Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is vital to climate change mitigation, and has application across the economy, in addition to facilitating atmospheric carbon dioxide removal resulting in emissions offsets and net negative emissions. This contribution reviews the state-of-the-art and identifies key challenges which must be overcome in order to pave the way for its large-scale deployment.
China's energy consumption doubled within the first 25 years of economic reforms initiated at the end of the 1970s, and doubled again in the past 5 years. It has resulted of a threefold CO 2 emissions increase since early of 1980s. China's heavy reliance on coal will make it the largest emitter of CO 2 in the world. By combining structural decomposition and input-output analysis we seek to assess the driving forces of China's CO 2 emissions from 1980 to 2030. In our reference scenario, production-related CO 2 emissions will increase another three times by 2030. Household consumption, capital investment and growth in exports will largely drive the increase in CO 2 emissions. Efficiency gains will be partially offset the projected increases in consumption, but our scenarios show that this will not be sufficient if China's consumption patterns converge to current US levels. Relying on efficiency improvements alone will not stabilize China's future emissions. Our scenarios show that even extremely optimistic assumptions of widespread installation of carbon dioxide capture and storage will only slow the increases in CO 2 emissions.
China is the top CO2-emitting nation, with emissions making up nearly a third (29.5%) of the global total in 2015 1. For this reason, international efforts to stabilize the Earth's climate depend heavily upon the trajectory of Chinese emissions, and the country's recent pledge to reduce its annual emissions before 2030 has been widely celebrated 2,3. Now, it is becoming clear that China may have already fulfilled this commitment: estimates made by various organizations indicate that-after more than decade of rapid growth-China's annual CO2 emissions have decreased year-on-year over the period 2013-2016. Although undoubtedly a watershed event, the peak of Chinese emissions prompts important questions about what factors are driving the current decrease, their relative importance, and whether or not the decline can be sustained or even accelerated. In particular, if China's emissions are have fallen primarily as a result of slowing economic activity, as happened in the U.S. during the global financial crisis 4 , renewed economic growth could reverse the decrease 5,6 .
This comprehensive review appraises the state-of-the-art in direct air capture materials, processes, economics, sustainability, and policy, to inform, challenge and inspire a broad audience of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
Despite sharp differences in government policy, the views of the U.S. public on energy and global warming are remarkably similar to those in Sweden, Britain, and Japan. Americans do exhibit some differences, placing lower priority on the environment and global warming, and with fewer believing that "global warming has been established as a serious problem and immediate action is necessary". There also remains a small hard core of skeptics (<10%) who do not believe in the science of climate change and the need for action, a group that is much smaller in the other countries surveyed. The similarities are, however, pervasive. Similar preferences are manifest across a wide range of technology and fuel choices, in support of renewables, in research priorities, in a basic understanding of which technologies produce or reduce carbon dioxide (or misunderstandings in the case of nuclear power), and in willingness to pay for solving global warming.
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