Pathways for balancing CO2 emissions and sinks

Abstract

In December 2015 in Paris, leaders committed to achieve global, net decarbonization of human activities before 2100. This achievement would halt and even reverse anthropogenic climate change through the net removal of carbon from the atmosphere. However, the Paris documents contain few specific prescriptions for emissions mitigation, leaving various countries to pursue their own agendas. In this analysis, we project energy and land-use emissions mitigation pathways through 2100, subject to best-available parameterization of carbon-climate feedbacks and interdependencies. We find that, barring unforeseen and transformative technological advancement, anthropogenic emissions need to peak within the next 10 years, to maintain realistic pathways to meeting the COP21 emissions and warming targets. Fossil fuel consumption will probably need to be reduced below a quarter of primary energy supply by 2100 and the allowable consumption rate drops even further if negative emissions technologies remain technologically or economically unfeasible at the global scale.

Bio‐ethylene from sugarcane as a competitiveness strategy for the Brazilian chemical industry

“…Current emissions (including land‐use change emissions) are already close to 40 GtCO 2 eq per year . Moreover, if the target of limiting the temperature increase is set at 1.5 °C, instead of 2 °C, the challenge becomes even more difficult, highlighting the urgency of considering various technological options to achieve appropriate net carbon‐dioxide removal (CDR) …”

“…3 Moreover, if the target of limiting the temperature increase is set at 1.5 °C, instead of 2 °C, the challenge becomes even more difficult, 4 highlighting the urgency of considering various technological options to achieve appropriate net carbon-dioxide removal (CDR). 5,6 The chemical and petrochemical sector is the largest industrial energy user, accounting for 28% of the world's industrial final energy consumption, 7 10% of the world's total final energy consumption, 7 and 7% the of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with industry. 8 At the same time, the climate debate in this sector is one of the key 'blind spots' in the global energy debate, 9 and differs from what happens in other industrial sectors.…”

Bridging the Gap between the Direct and Hydrocarbon Pool Mechanisms of the Methanol‐to‐Hydrocarbons Process

“…Overall, carbon emissions from renewable feedstocks such as biomass and waste,are significantly lower than from fossil resources. [1] Thus,t he methanol-to-hydrocarbons (MTH) process over zeolites is arguably one of the most sustainable pathways to produce liquid transportation fuels as well as C 2 -C 4 olefins from renewable resources (provided the methanol is not sourced from natural gas/coal). [2][3][4][5] Despite the industrial success of the MTH process,i ti sahighly complicated reaction mechanistically,w hich has led to the proposal of over twenty different mechanisms over the last three decades.…”

Moral Conflicts of several “Green” terrestrial Negative Emission Technologies regarding the Human Right to Adequate Food – A Review

“…Due to this, I conclude that EW would also not be a suitable means to limit global warming "to well below 2 • C" if used as a single CDR strategy. However, every CDR strategy considered in this paper could contribute to a more comprehensive strategy to achieve the main goal of the Paris Agreement (Fuss et al, 2018;Werner et al, 2018;Minx et al, 2017). Such a strategy needs to encompass further other natural climate solutions, such as the protection and proper management of peats and soils, as well as more and stronger mitigation efforts, such as a global carbon trade system to efficiently reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a tax on kerosene, a large-scale roll-out of renewable energies and a stronger awareness of everyone for climate change and its causes.…”