Professor Kevin Anderson:

I am happy to discuss that. I will try to keep my answer as simple as possible. We are relying on a number of technologies, one of which, as the Deputy mentioned, is CCS. The standard interpretation is that CSS is used with fossil fuels. Coal, oil or gas are burned. It is usually gas in modern power stations. The CO2 is captured thereafter and buried under the ground somewhere. That technology is part of CCS. In that way, in theory, no CO2 is released into the atmosphere. It can also be done by splitting the gas into oxygen and hydrogen beforehand. There are different ways of doing this. One of the concerns is the full life cycle emissions. Many people who work in this area do not look at the full life cycle. There was a very good method study report in 2017 that looked at the different technologies. The life cycle emissions for CCS from power stations are still very high - approximately 150 g to 300 g of CO2 equivalent per kWh. To give a feel for what those numbers mean, the emissions from renewables and nuclear energy sources are approximately 5 g to 15 g of CO2 per kWh. Emissions from coal on its own are approximately 900 g of CO2 per kWh. Emissions from gas on its own are approximately 450 g of CO2 per kWh. Emissions from carbon capture storage are approximately 150 g to 300 g of CO2 per kWh. Those are still very high levels of emissions. It is inappropriate for energy. It cannot deliver at the life cycle level. Of course, the oil industry loves it. Fossil fuel companies love it because it means they can carry one producing fossil fuels. Academics, if they are paid by fossil fuel companies, merrily say how wonderful CCS is.

CCS can, however, be used on cement. Cement produces approximately 8% of all emissions globally. Some 4% of emissions are what are called process emissions from the chemical process. CCS can be used to remove those emissions. There is some work going on in that regard at the moment. The other technologies people think about in this area are negative emission technologies. These are technologies that are either very small pilot schemes, such as the recent one in Iceland of which people will be aware, or that are still just ideas. These are technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in the future. The primary option considered in almost all the models is the burning of biomass. Trees or other forms of biomass are grown and burned. As those trees or other forms of biomass grow, they suck in CO2. They are then burned to get energy and the CO2 is buried. It is incredibly inefficient and requires, according to the models, an area somewhere between two and three times the size of India to be planted out.

It allows wealthy countries to carry on with business as usual under the guise that there will be this technology in the future that our children will apply but, increasingly, from an ecological perspective, from a land rights perspective and from a simple technology perspective, people say that is not the right way forward. There are other technologies such as direct air capture, which is when you use a chemical process to suck CO2 out of the air using a catalyst and then bury the CO2, but that requires lots of energy - ideally, low- or zero-carbon renewable energy, which we do not have at present. All of these things effectively are relying on technologies in the future which may or may not work on different levels.

In the various models and in all the assumptions we make, the problem that arises relates to the level of uptake. To get a feel for it, in almost all the models the level of reduction of CO2 from the atmosphere is roughly equivalent to the net reduction by global photosynthesis today. All of global photosynthesis for all the plants on the planet is roughly what we think, in the context of the models, we will have from these technologies that do not exist other than at pilot scale. It is not as if it is a small adjustment. This is an industry that is roughly the same size as the current oil and gas industry. It does not yet exist. That is fine if it is in one out of ten models, but when it is in 99 out of 100 models, it has become a systemic bias that allows us to have a nice world in terms of politics now because we are passing the burden on to future generations. It is absolutely massive.

International aviation and shipping are not included in the submissions from every country to the UNFCCC, annually except as a memorandum. That is because in the Kyoto Agreement in 1997, there was an agreement that they were international emissions and should be the responsibility of the International Maritime Organization, IMO, for shipping and the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO. However, both of those organisations have fundamentally failed to grapple with the emissions from their sectors. As a result, the EU, for instance, has included aviation in its emissions trading scheme - certainly, in the context of EU flights, and there has been some discussion about international flights also. The EU is also threatening to include shipping in the emissions trading scheme. That is why aviation and shipping have not been included. In the UK, the Climate Change Committee has stated that we should include it because the IMO and ICAO have not done their jobs and that it is the responsibility of the Government to take action.