ABSTRACT:Anthropogenic energy-related CO 2 emissions are higher than ever. With new fossil fuel power plants, growing energy-intensive industries and new sources of fossil fuels in development further emissions increase seems inevitable. The rapid application of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a much heralded means to tackle emissions from both existing and future sources. However, despite extensive and successful research and development, progress in deploying CCS has stalled. No fossil fuel burning power plants, the greatest source of CO 2 emissions, are currently using CCS, and publicly supported CCS demonstration programmes are struggling to deliver actual projects. Yet, CCS remains a core component of national and global emissions reduction scenarios. Governments have to either increase commitment to CCS through much more active market support and emissions regulation, or accept its failure and recognise that continued expansion of fossil fuel burning energy capacity is a severe threat to attaining climate change mitigation objectives.

Targets and accounting for negative emissions should be explicitly set and managed separately from existing and future targets for emissions reduction. Failure to make such a separation has already hampered climate policy, exaggerating the expected future contribution of negative emissions in climate models, while also obscuring the extent and pace of the investment needed to deliver negative emissions. Separation would help minimize the negative impacts that promises and deployments of negative emissions could have on emissions reduction, arising from effects such as temporal trade-offs, excessive offsetting, and technological lock-in. Benefits for international, national, local, organizational, and sectoral planning would arise from greater clarity over the role and timing of negative emissions alongside accelerated emissions reduction.

Non-technical summaryIn the face of limited carbon budgets, negative emissions technologies (NETs) offer hopes of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. It is difficult to determine whether the prospect of NETs is significantly deterring or delaying timely action to cut emissions. This paper sets out a novel theoretical perspective to this challenge, enabling analysis that accounts for interactions between technologies, society and political and economic power. The paper argues that, seen in this light, the scope of NETs to substitute for mitigation may be easily exaggerated, and thus that the risk of harm from mitigation deterrence should be taken seriously.

The political economy of technical fixes: the (mis)alignment of clean fossil and political regimes

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