No abstract

No abstract

Limiting climate change to less than 1.5 o C would require vast quantities of CO2 storage in subsurface geological formations. Global injection rates projected by integrated assessment models synthesised in IPCC reports are on the order of ten gigatonnes per year by 2050. Industrial experience with megatonne per year storage projects allows us to evaluate the feasibility and potential limitations of a transition to the gigatonne scale. The successes with CO2 have also led to interest in new energy technologies using subsurface fluids, including hydrogen storage underground. We review the role of subsurface CO2 and H2 storage in a sustainable energy transition. We have found that current deployment demonstrates the viability of CO2 storage in a variety of geological, social, economic, and technological contexts, and is making contributions to climate change mitigation today commensurate with the impact of solar photovoltaics in the USA market. The implications of this are that CO2 storage is well positioned to play an important role in the energy transition, and H2 storage may benefit from this experience. However, these are not certain outcomes, with many hurdles -the development of multi-site regional scale storage, viable business models for accelerated deployment, demonstrating environmental sustainability and achieving societal acceptability -yet to be addressed.

a b s t r a c t Sustainability transitions receive major scholarly attention, often explicitly with the intention to develop policy recommendations aimed towards progressing such transitions. Despite these efforts, many implemented transition policies have not been able to meet expectations. This tendency of systems to defeat the policies that have been designed to improve them is known as 'policy resistance'. This paper addresses the question how we can explain the persistence of policy resistance in the context of sustainability transitions, and aims to bring us a step further in the direction of identifying policies that support overcoming policy resistance. System dynamics is an approach that explicitly addresses policy resistance and we investigate how this approach complements existing transition approaches. As an illustration, we apply the approach to the case of the Dutch energy transition, with the participation of 96 experts. We conclude that system dynamics complements the dominant multi-level perspective and the transition management approach by providing a middle ground between emphasizing agency or structure. Moreover, the approach helps overcoming policy resistance by mapping out the structure of the system responsible for policy resistance, thereby enabling the identification of high leverage points that support sustainability transitions.

As we speed through the development and distribution of a vaccine for the COVID-19 pandemic, economies are suffering through the worst decline of the century while, at the same time, being pushed to comply with global agreements regarding climate change. Because of this, the economic downturn is also seen as an opportunity to speed up the sustainability transition or, in simple terms, to achieve a “green recovery”. What can we expect from a green recovery? We address this question by reviewing position documents in the debate between green recovery and its opponent, “quick rebound”, in the Netherlands. We apply systems thinking to model causal arguments regarding key concepts comprising green recovery and identify issues of consensus and dissensus. Our findings indicate that green recovery is promising for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing growing socioeconomic inequalities. However, the position of what green recovery means for economic growth, including the development of gross domestic product and employment, is still largely unclear and at times contradictory. While some see tradeoffs, others suggest that economic growth and sustainability goals can be achieved simultaneously. Thus, we conclude by reflecting on the question: Can we have our cake and eat it?