Vital Interests: Thank you for participating in the Vital Interest forum on issues that are important for the United States and for the global community. We hear a lot these days about the challenges from climate change. For some it is a progressively developing reality that threatens the survival of mankind, for others it is a hoax perpetrated by anti-growth advocates, but for many it remains an undefined threat. You have studied the environmental science behind climate change as well as practical ideas, using geoengineering technologies, to try to mitigate the impact of climate change. Can you tell us your view of what needs to be done?

William Burns: We definitely face a potential global crisis due to climate change. There's a false narrative that has been propagated by some vested interests  that there's a division of opinion in terms of climate science and the role of humans in contributing to climate change. There really isn't. A recent study found that about 98% climatologists have concluded that there's a clear nexus between human activity, namely spewing out greenhouse gas pollutants in the form of the burning of fossil fuels, industrial production and so forth, and the warming that we've been seeing clearly over the course of the last couple of centuries, and that it’s the overwhelmingly predominant factor.

Currently the rate of warming is well outside of any conceivable background rate. We've reached a point where temperatures have risen more rapidly than probably in the last 400,000 years. We are on track for temperature increases by the end of this century of somewhere between about 3.2 to 3.7 degrees Celsius, which could have catastrophic implications in terms of both human institutions and ecosystems.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that if temperatures rise more than three degrees Celsius, 40% to 60% of species on Earth could be threatened.  A three degree increase in temperatures could ultimately result in a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would ultimately result in about seven meters of sea level rise. That's only one ice sheet among many that would be impacted. The rate of ice sheet melting has accelerated six-fold since the 1980s.

There could be huge declines in agricultural production, especially in vulnerable areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, increases in violent weather events, increases in human health-related diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis, and a sea level rise that would ultimately overwhelm small island states as well as huge swaths of low -lying areas in nations with very large populations such as Bangladesh and China. In plain fact, the world needs to confront an existential crisis that we have very little time at this point to address in an effective way.

VI: There have been many attempts by the United Nations and other international organizations to sound the alarm for concerted action - the Paris Accords being the most recent example. But to date we do not see much progress. How do you move from global awareness of this crisis to international action?

William Burns: Well, it's a very good question. The Paris Agreement, at least conceptually, is a big advance over what we had before, which is the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. Paris establishes specific temperature targets that seek to avoid thresholds above which climate scientists project substantial harms associated with climate change. The Agreement calls for holding temperatures to well below two degrees Celsius and, at least aspirationally, to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also establishes a timetable to balance emissions, and methods and processes to sequester carbon dioxide.

What's lacking is the political resolve to effectuate the reductions that are necessary to achieve these objectives The treaty calls for countries to pledge how much they'll reduce their emissions (Nationally Determined Contributions), but the pledges to date, if anything, put us on track by 2030 for emissions to actually continue to increase, which is really discouraging. Moreover, we have a number of major emitting countries that aren't even complying with the rather tepid pledges that they've made to date.

It's a clear lack of political resolve. Because the manifestations of climate change are slow and incremental, it’s difficult to galvanize the world community politically. Also, quite frankly, many of the largest emitting States have the greatest capabilities to adapt to climatic impacts. Thus, they have a rather callous perspective in terms of what happens to the extremely vulnerable countries that don't have that capability. It's a political calculus and it's a hard one to break out of.

VI: You talk about the timetable and the goals of the Paris Accord and the need for political resolve to reduce carbon emissions, but what are the methodologies? Are there practical guidelines that can be given to countries that say, "You do this, this and this and the result will be an achievable amount of reduction"?

William Burns: Paris takes a different approach than the Kyoto Protocol, which was “top down” in orientation, establishing a timetable for reducing emissions and establishing emissions reductions targets for developing countries. By contrast, Paris is a bottom-up approach, whereby countries pledge what they're willing to do in terms of emission reductions. In many ways, this was a recognition of the political reality that the top-down approach really wasn't working. The U.S. refused to even become a party to the Kyoto Protocol. Canada, in the fact of egregious non-compliance with its emissions target, simply chose to withdraw from the agreement in 2011. In the second commitment period for Kyoto, a number of major emitting States withdrew, including Japan and Russia. The remaining parties to Kyoto now only account for approximately 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Paris reflects the belief of some that the most propitious approach may be to accord States the discretion to pledge what they are willing to do in terms of emissions reductions. Paris also has some safeguards built in to try to ensure that the Parties’ pledges drive good-faith efforts to comply with the temperature targets set forth in Article 2. For example, the Agreement’s “stock-taking” provision requires regular assessment of progress in meeting treaty objectives, including the temperature targets. Moreover, the treaty mandates that when new Nationally Determined Contributions are made every five years, the Parties are required to meet their highest potential ambitions and ratchet up their commitments.

There are some metrics. There's certainly metrics that the scientific community provides, in terms of what they think the remaining carbon budget is before we pass these critical thresholds. There's an array of ways that we know we can reduce emissions, but the question is whether countries are willing to take the necessary steps to ensure that we don’t pass critical climatic thresholds.

VI: Just talking in an ideal sense - if all the countries of Europe got together and said, "Okay, for the sake of the planet we're going to ban internal combustion vehicles, all cars and trucks will be electric-based within the next 10 years." What kind of impact would that make?

William Burns: It's controversial. There's a lot of assumptions based on the sensitivity of the system, feedback mechanisms in the system, how much more we can put into the atmosphere before temperatures rise above the critical threshold. That's one question. 

The second question is how heroic these efforts would have to be. The transportation sector is roughly 1/3 of the emissions in many countries, somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 depending on where you are. If we were to move to a fully electrical fleet, it would certainly make a difference, but we need far more heroic efforts at this point because of the huge amount of emissions in other sectors and the inertia of the system, which ensures that temperatures continue to rise for many years after we ultimately decarbonize.

Many climate scientists tell us that if we're going to avoid passing the 2 degree Celsius threshold at this point, we probably need to be reducing emissions by more than 5% annually. At this point, even though last year we were essentially stable in terms of emissions, in recent years, our emissions have been growing by about 2% - 2.5% a year. So, you’re essentially talking about a net 7% annual reduction. That's a titanic effort. Even in times of severe economic downturn, we usually haven't seen emissions drop more than a couple of percentage points.

There are people such as Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford, who think that if we really aggressively seek to electrify all the sectors of the economy that can be electrified and massively increase investment in renewables, and change lifestyles in some aspects, such as substantially curtailing meat consumption, we could meet the Paris Objectives and reach carbon neutrality over the course of the next several decades. But, as I rattled off some of those things, you can see imposing political challenges that many of these actions would pose.

VI: None of this is going to happen overnight, obviously.

William Burns: No, it's not. And when you broach the subject of “lifestyle changes,” for example, this becomes a major ideological flashpoint for many.

VI: You talk about the effort to electrify everything, but there still has to be a power source for the generation of electricity. There's been a lot of discussion of doing away with oil, but then we become more dependent on natural gas, which is coming out of fracking, which has its own implications, and then left out of the discussion - certainly in the United States but not in other parts of the world - is nuclear energy. How do you see those energy generation arguments being played out?

William Burns: Natural gas, even under the most idealized scenarios, should only be considered a bridge fuel. Moreover, it’s even questionable if natural gas should be considered a good bridge fuel. Natural gas production often results in substantial leakage of methane.  Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If your methane leakage rates at a facility are more than about 3%, many studies say that it's worse than burning coal from the perspective of global warming. In the United States, the Trump administration has assiduously worked to eliminate reporting requirements for methane leakage, which means we’re largely in the dark in terms of climatic implications of large-scale use of natural gas as a fuel.

Thus, from a precautionary standpoint, one would have to say that natural gas does not seem to be a very good bet when it comes to climate policymaking. You also mentioned fracking, which poses other threats in terms of potential increases in local seismicity and leakage of toxins into groundwater.

Nuclear power is also a difficult proposition. On the one hand, it does present the possibility of a very low carbon, or no carbon, alternative to fossil fuels in terms of electricity production. As you point out, many countries, including places like France, have fully embraced nuclear power. However, I think the issue of safe storage of waste, which can remain very dangerous for thousands of years, remains an ongoing challenge in the United States. We still don't have a permanent waste repository. This has been a huge political dust-up in this country for decades, including the failure to establish a permanent repository for waste in Nevada. In some cases, there’s leakage of spent fuels in temporary storage facilities, posing threats to human health. 

Nuclear power is also a very expensive proposition. We heavily subsidize nuclear power in this country.  Thus, the question must be asked as to whether this is the best use of our resources, or whether it make more sense to try to fully decarbonize the economy through rapid escalation of the use of  solar, wind, and hydropower, and seek to expend more of our capital on energy storage options in cases of intermittent power sources.  

Having said that, I think ongoing research in terms of the viability of expanding nuclear power as a climate change solution makes sense. Small modular reactors, for example, might reduce the cost of deploying such facilities and ameliorate some of our waste concerns. At this point, we certainly don't have the luxury of taking anything off the table, in my opinion.

VI: You have been involved in the so-called climate geoengineering community for more than a decade. More specifically, your Institute focuses on one sub-category of climate geoengineering - carbon dioxide removal technologies - which seek to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce radiative forcing. What do you think are the prospects for these methods?

William Burns: It's an emerging field.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its Fifth Assessment Report, ran thousands of scenarios to ascertain how society can hold temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius.These scenarios make different assumptions about critical factors associated with temperature projections, such as population growth rates, rates of economic growth, and market penetration of renewable energy over the course of this century. Of all of those scenarios, there were only 204 of them that held temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius. Of those 204, a whopping 87% assume that there is large-scale adoption of carbon dioxide removal options. So, no pun intended, it's been “baked” into their assumptions about how we effectively address climate change.

The most disconcerting aspect of these so-called “negative emissions” scenarios is that they assume extremely large-scale deployment of technologies that remain largely speculative at this point, or which may not prove sustainable in the long term.

One widely-discussed option is called Bio-Energy and Carbon Capture with Storage (BECCS). BECCS entails capturing CO2 from bioenergy applications and sequestering it through either Carbon Capture and Storage or Carbon Capture, Use and Storage.

We only have a few facilities globally actively using BECCS technologies, and there are many potential barriers to use, as well as many concerns about the implications of large-scale deployment. One imposing barrier to widespread use is cost. Unless there’s a meaningful price of carbon that sends clear market signals, it is highly unlikely that industries will adopt this technology voluntarily.

Large-scale deployment of BECCS could also have serious social justice and environmental implications. For example, some studies indicate that sequestering as much carbon as contemplated in many IPCC scenarios - somewhere between 12-20 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, or 1000 tons overall -  could require the diversion of as much as a third of all agricultural land to the production of energy crops. This could result in massive increases in food prices for the world’s most vulnerable populations. Some studies say it could raise food prices 30% to 40% for the impoverished. This would clearly contravene the human right to food and might also have serious national and international security implications. Some people argue that you can reduce the potential threat by using crop residues instead of dedicated energy crops as biomass feedstocks, but residues are insufficient to substantially scale up BECCS. Moreover, we usually plow residues back into our soils to ensure higher agricultural yields, so if you dispense with this, you may need to divert more land to crop production, which could release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Therefore, you're going to have to expand the areas for crops. That probably means clearing forest areas, which releases more carbon dioxide. The same might be the case in terms of diversion of other land masses for biomass production, including prairie grasslands, or tundra regions where planting trees might reduce surface albedo, offsetting many of the benefits of the approach (see more below).

There are also biodiversity implications of large-scale BECCS, through ecosystem implications of things such as prairie grass diversion and harvesting of forests. One recent study concluded that the biodiversity impacts of BECCS could be as much as raising temperatures by 2.8 degrees Celsius.

We have also talked about other options too. President Trump, for example in the most recent State of the Union, talked about a “trillion tree initiative,” a proposal for a massive afforestation/reforestation to sequester large amounts of carbon dioxide.

VI: The Johnny Appleseed option.

William Burns: Exactly. Certainly, and there's assuredly a role for afforestation/reforestation strategies, but there's also many challenges in this context. One question is how many trees you can plant sustainably. The studies of planting all those trees assume that at least a quarter of them go into areas that are prairie grasslands which are high in biodiversity. That's one of the reasons we usually don't plant a large number of trees in prairie restoration projects, when we're talking about restoring prairie grasslands, and yet the studies assume that about a quarter of it comes from these regions.

A lot of the studies also assume that we plant a lot of these trees in tundra regions in the Northern Hemisphere. One of the problems with this idea is that tundra regions are largely composed of ice surfaces characterized by high surface albedo. Ice masses reflect a lot of incoming solar radiation back to space, which exerts a cooling impact. Well, if you plant trees, they do take up more carbon dioxide, but they also absorb a lot more of the incoming radiation, and that creates warming that will offset a lot of the benefits of the ice masses.

Another problem with planting huge amounts of trees is that you assume permanence in terms of carbon sequestration. However, climate change itself ensures that a lot of trees that would be planted would be lost through fires related to climate change, releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. In Australia, the recent forest fires resulted in carbon dioxide emissions that have effectively doubled the nation’s emissions . So it's hard to assume that in an era of global change planting trees is going to be that viable.

We are scrutinizing other options also. We're talking about, for example, something called Direct Air Capture (DAC). Direct Air Capture systems use filtration systems, using chemicals such as calcium hydroxide or lye, to separate carbon dioxide from other constituent elements of ambient air. This carbon dioxide can then be stored terrestrially or in ocean environments or utilized.  This technology could, potentially, sequester enough carbon dioxide to offset a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, there are a number of challenges here also. Some studies in recent years pegged the cost of sequestration at a cost-prohibitive $600-1000 per ton of carbon dioxide sequestered. However, a number of companies in the past year have suggested that they have been able to bring the cost down to below $100/ton and are launching pilot plants to develop the technology further. We also need to ensure that there’s adequate space to store billions of tons of carbon dioxide (a concern with BECCS also) and concerns that public resistance to permitting carbon dioxide to be stored underground might delay or scupper many projects.

And there are a number of other options also being discussed. There are ocean-based approaches. People talk about seeding certain areas of the oceans to stimulate phytoplankton production, because phytoplankton take up CO2 for photosynthetic processes. Then when the phytoplankton die, a portion of that CO2 goes with them, drops to the bottom of the ocean, and the CO2 can be stored in sediments for centuries. This approach is called ocean-iron fertilization (OIF).

However, there are a lot of questions associated with OIF. While early studies projected that the approach might effectuate sequestration of as much as 25% of atmospheric carbon dioxide, field research has demonstrated that much of the carbon dioxide sequestered in phytoplankton is quickly re-mineralized and released to the atmosphere. As a consequence, more recent studies have concluded that large-scale OIF might not result in sequestration of more than 5% of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and maybe even less.

There are also environmental and economic concerns. One is that we won't know what kind of phytoplankton species get produced if production is stimulated. If they're species that zooplankton in that ecosystem can’t eat, it could precipitate a trophic cascade. And if you produce high productivity in one area of the ocean, it may rob other areas of the ocean of nutrients. As a consequence, you may start to get international security issues, when other countries are extremely unhappy that fish populations start to decline in their regions, for example.

So, it should be emphasized that none of these approaches can be considered silver bullets, and many are fraught with substantial risks at large-scales of use. Moreover, it needs to be emphasized that drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would be a very slow process. If you were to stand up these technologies at a very large scale, you're probably going to be able to reduce the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere by only one to two parts per million per year. So, even in 50 years, maybe you're talking about reducing carbon dioxide concentrations by 100 parts per million, which is certainly nothing to scoff at, but it's not an approach  where you snap your fingers and you avoid passing these critical temperature thresholds.

This is one of the reasons that people in my field of climate geoengineering also frequently discuss the other major category of interventions, Solar Radiation Management (SRM). SRM approaches seek to reflect incoming solar radiation back to space, exerting a cooling effect. SRM could potentially reduce temperatures dramatically and quickly, but also pose substantial risks.

VI: In other words, will science try to mitigate the warming by offsetting it with techniques to increase cooling?

William Burns: Yes. Perhaps. The widely discussed SRM (solar radiation management) option is called Sulfur Aerosol Injection (SAI). The idea is to inject large quantities (perhaps somewhere between 5-20 trillion grams annually) of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which when combined with water vapor, would form highly reflective sulfate particles. This approach could reduce the amount of incoming radiation by nearly 2%, which could return temperatures back to pre-industrial levels.

Another potential approach is marine cloud brightening, whereby we would spray maritime clouds with salt water to increase the nuclei in those clouds, which will make them brighter. Again, you might be able to return temperatures back to industrial levels, and do it very quickly. That's the other branch of geoengineering, people talk about.

However, these options could pose a number of risks. They include potentially substantial reductions in precipitation in certain regions, which could imperil the monsoon season in South Asia or cause diebacks of forests in the Amazon. It could also delay recovery of the ozone layer by decades and pose huge risks of sudden temperature pulses should society ever terminate use.

VI: These are huge scientific challenges that no single government can really take on alone. What is international cooperation like these days? Does the global scientific community work together even though countries may not? The current administration in the United States denies climate change and is not eager to cooperate with other nations on these complex geoengineering ideas. China seems to have some environmental awareness and understands climate change challenges. Do you see the international community supporting scientific efforts to find the silver bullet or, at the very least, effective mediation methods?

William Burns: At least in terms of geoengineering, there's a modest amount of research that's happening and it's growing somewhat, though many argue that the pace is glacial compared to the challenges that we're facing and the short time-frame to avoid passing critical climatic thresholds. In the United States, for example, there have been hearings in the last couple of years on the potential role of these options. We have expanded tax credits for carbon sequestration, including for some of the options we discussed above, among them direct air capture and BECCS.

The Europeans have also increased research in this context. China has a geoengineering research program. Again, however, the amount that's being spent is pretty minimal. There's a bit of political sleight of hand here, because to talk about these things is to acknowledge that we're not doing enough to reduce emissions. Countries are hesitant to talk about or enthusiastically support these options as a consequence. Of course, many of the same policymakers and private sector actors aren’t willing to embrace the aggressive decarbonization strategies that might substantially reduce, or even eliminate the need, for geoengineering options.

Our Institute, which was established to ensure that we talked about the social and political implications of geoengineering, believes that we should substantially increase funding for research and development of carbon removal options, while simultaneously pressing for much more aggressive efforts to decarbonize the economy.  But it's unclear, especially in places like the United States, where there is a major resistance to any kind of federal research and development. These are technologies that would really potentially benefit from that.

In a lot of cases, industry is not going to fund the kind of basic research that's critical for getting some of these things to market. Whereas, if that basic research is done and it's successful, it's often handed off to industry.  We've seen it in many other contexts. 

Unfortunately we hear politicians invoke failures of alternative energy companies like Solyndra and argue that if there's ever been a case of a failure of research and development to bear fruit, or any kind of scandal, then it means all research and development is evil per se. It's an extremely misguided and immature way to view it.

When we look at federal research and development, its return on investment has consistently been better than what's transpired in the venture capital markets. Government is relatively good at this, and the government has a critical role to play in this. It's, unfortunately, been caught up in political resistance in ways that are  not helpful.

VI: Jeff Bezos has announced that he will spend $10 billion on challenges related to climate change. If he called you up and said, "Will, I have this $10 billion I want to spend to counter the impact of climate change." What would be your recommendation to Jeff? 

William Burns: I would say that a fair amount of that money should be spent on research to develop breakthroughs in energy storage capability. One of the issues that we have with solar and wind, for example, is that they're intermittent sources. The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow. To ensure what we call baseload transmission of electricity, to ensure that it's always on, we're going to need more ways to store solar and wind energy when we are getting massive throughput from these sources. Battery storage is a critical component, and we need to bring the costs down so that it's viable in all parts of the world that are planning on expanding renewable energy use.

We also need to transform the grid so that we can ensure reliable transmission of renewable energy, especially to the remote parts of the world. This is critical to ensure that, if we're moving to renewable energy,  we're not exacerbating the energy poverty that we often see in developing countries. In fact, it's an opportunity to do the opposite, to ensure that people in remote and poor areas are no longer dependent on large national grid distribution that often leaves the most vulnerable in the lurch. This transition has to be effectuated purposely and it will require considerable investment. That's certainly one of the things that I would be looking at.

I also think that there is a role for research on some of these carbon dioxide removal technologies that we have discussed already. It is going to have to play a role. Even though, as I said, it's very slow, it may help us in cases where we ultimately overshoot the 2 degree Celsius target, because we're going to. We have to be honest here, we're not going to meet the Paris Accord targets. One of the roles that carbon dioxide removal could have is to help us claw temperatures back down below that threshold.

Now, that doesn't mean that this will happen overnight and it doesn't mean that some of the implications of passing that threshold are reversible. However, there is a role in this so-called overshoot scenario, for carbon dioxide removal technologies to help us to start to back temperatures down and potentially ameliorate and reverse some of the impacts when we pass this 2 degree Celsius threshold.

I would advocate, especially in the context of Direct Air Capture, a more robust investment platform that brings down the cost of the technology and helps us also to figure out how to utilize more of the carbon dioxide as opposed to burying it. When you have to bury the carbon dioxide, one of the other issues that you get - beyond the question of whether there's sufficient areas to bury 1000 billion tons of carbon dioxide - is potential citizen resistance.

We've seen in places like the Netherlands and Germany, for example, where they've tried to create pilot plants to capture carbon and store it, that  local communities don't want the carbon transported through their communities and then buried underground. Instead of NIMBY (not in my backyard), they call this NUMBY, not under my backyard. If you started talking about billions of tons of CO2 being stored, it's likely that that would generate substantial resistance in many potentially affected communities. What that would mean is it would make these things much more expensive to deploy, or in many cases, it might just shut them down.

Another way that I think Bezos could spend some of his money would be to figure out how to utilize the carbon dioxide. Can we create fuels, for example? That's one of the things that people talk about a kind of a closed-loop economy where the CO2 is used to produce hydrogen-based synthetic fuels. Or can we use some of this carbon for development of high strength materials for things like planes and automobiles, or chemicals, or incorporation into concrete?

Anything that we can do to keep it out of the ground is probably worth looking at, with the proviso that in some cases utilization is a bit of a canard because, for example, if you utilize CO2 to produce plastics for things like cups, if you use those cups in a few days and dispose of the cups, the carbon dioxide can be released again very quickly into the atmosphere.

VI: We have come to the end of our time. Thanks again for this conversation exploring the realities of climate change and global warming, but also a number of the solutions that are being developed and tested. Science is certainly active in trying to find solutions which gives us a lot to think about how we confront climate change challenges.

William Burns: Yes indeed, thank you very much.

Dr. William Burns is a Professor of Research and Founding Co-Director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is also a Senior Research Fellow for the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and Co-Chair of the International Environmental Law Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association. Previously, he served as the founding Co-Executive Director of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment, a scholarly initiative of the School of International Service at American University. He also served as the Director of the Energy Policy & Climate program at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.