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Technology has an important role to play in fighting climate change. Here are some ways in which technology can help: Renewable energy: One of the main drivers of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels for energy. Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower can help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency: Another way technology can help fight climate change is by improving energy efficiency. Energy-efficient technologies such as LED lighting, smart thermostats, and efficient appliances can reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon capture and storage: Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a process that involves capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and other industrial sources and storing them underground. This technology can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from these sources. Direct air capture: Direct air capture (DAC) is a process that involves capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air. This technology has the potential to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help mitigate climate change. Electric vehicles: The transportation sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The development and adoption of electric vehicles can help reduce emissions from transportation. Sustainable agriculture: Technology can also play a role in sustainable agriculture, which can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land use. For example, precision agriculture technologies can help farmers reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, while regenerative agriculture practices can help sequester carbon in soils. Leveraging technology has the potential to play a significant role in fighting climate change. However, it is important to remember that technology alone is not enough. We also need strong policies, incentives, and public support to drive the adoption of these technologies and achieve meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is any of several technologies that trap carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from large industrial plants before this greenhouse gas can enter the atmosphere. CCS projects typically target 90 percent efficiency, meaning that 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from the power plant will be captured and stored. However, CCS could capture more CO2, and thus do more to combat climate change, if industries and governments decide not only to invest in CCS at a large scale but also to pay extra to maximize its potential.

As good as it gets?

Direct Air Capture Prizes To Accelerate Just and Sustainable Carbon Management Solutions

Applications Now Open for Two DAC Prizes Focused on Pre-Commercialization

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have been at the heart of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) assessment of pathways towards keeping average global warming to less than 2 °C within this century.6 They provide a means to explore the future role of particular technologies in meeting climate targets such as renewables or nuclear.

CCS is one of the very attractive options in the IAMs mitigation portfolios, as it has a number of advantages. First, CCS can be integrated into existing energy systems without requiring large amendments to the system itself. Clearly, renewable technologies become more expensive at high penetration rates as a result of the need for the infrastructure to accommodate intermittency.29 Furthermore, CCS is a viable option for the decarbonisation of emission-intensive industries such as cement production (specific industrial CO2 capture costs are given in Section 3.3).30 And finally, CCS can be combined with low-carbon or carbon-neutral bioenergy (BECCS) to generate negative emissions,31i.e. while the cultivation of the feedstock biomass sequesters about as much CO2 as is generated during the process of producing energy (bio-electricity or biofuels), additionally capturing the latter leads to a withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere.32 BECCS has the double benefit of mitigating emissions and generating energy, making it attractive from the cost-optimisation perspective of an IAM.

Coastal wetlands, including salt marshes, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows, are among the most productive—and threatened—ecosystems on the planet. They provide many benefits to people and nature, such as helping communities adapt to severe storms, flooding, and other climate-related threats and sequestering carbon from the water and atmosphere in their branches, leaves, roots, and underlying soils. These carbon stores are known as “blue carbon” because they are located in places where the land meets the sea. However, these wetland habitats have lost more than a third of their area over the past half-century.

Because coastal wetlands provide carbon sequestration and other important benefits, conservation and restoration of these areas is an important nature-based strategy for mitigating the effects of climate change, and helping communities internationally and across the United States adapt to a changing climate.

Diane Nazaroff 21, University of South Wales, Biochar: The waste product that could help mitigate climate change, Phys.org, 8-4-2021, https://phys.org/news/2021-08-biochar-product-mitigate-climate.html/, yao

Needs to be economically viable

Storing biomass in dry landfills by salting and burying it can economically preserve greenhouse gases for thousands of years.

Lowering the worldwide greenhouse gas emissions is crucial to avoiding a climate disaster, but existing carbon removal techniques are proving to be inefficient and expensive. A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, has come up with a scalable answer that utilizes basic, low-cost technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it for thousands of years.

Carbon is stored in vegetation, soils, woody products, and aquatic habitats through biological carbon sequestration. Biological carbon sequestration requires the implementation of advanced management strategies that enhance the quantity of carbon stored by vegetation (cropland, grassland, forest), soil, ocean, and microorganisms. However, biological carbon sequestration alone cannot achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Carbon capture and storage (CCS), bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture (DAC), and carbon capture and utilization (CCU) hold the potential for decreasing emissions of greenhouse gasses by lowering the use of fossil fuels and advancing the adoption of clean and sustainable energy sources. CCS, CCU, and DAC approaches can deliver the steep CO2 emissions reductions necessary with the promise of large-scale deployment given strong structural and policy support, research and development, and reduction in cost. Along with human intervention, the definite variation in carbon sequestration capacity of each technology, our best estimations for global negative emission technologies (NETs) potentials based on extensive literature study in 2050 for BECCS, ocean carbon sequestration, biochar, DAC, and soil carbon sequestration is 0.5–5 gigaton of carbon dioxide (GtCO2 yr−1), 2.2 ± 0.4 GtCO2 yr−1, 1–1.8 GtCO2 yr−1, 0.5–5 GtCO2 yr−1, 5.5–6.0 GtCO2 yr−1, respectively. However, to solve climate change, no one single technology can acquire it and the review concluded that a collective deployment of feasible and scalable NETs could help to reduce CO2 emissions and combat climate change.

Letting market prices of fossil fuels rise immediately to reflect social costs may not be desirable for other reasons too.  as people, capital and other resources do not flow seamlessly into new sectors. During the transition, resources can be unemployed for long periods, and the larger the immediate price increase, the larger the potential disruption in the short term. Some of the resources used in other sectors will flow into the renewable energy and supporting sectors where both investment and jobs will increase. Yet, this too, will not automatically and immediately make up for disinvestment in fossil fuels, as is already evident. Supply- demand mismatches will happen in the short run. Add to this substantial uncertainty regarding several economic variables, such as the size of fuel reserves, the size of stranded assets, the harshness of winter, the future direction of climate policy, the pace of innovation in the renewables sector, or demand risk, and it is clear how economic disruption may be magnified.  

Happily, the historical record indicates that China and its neighbors are unlikely to escalate their energy sparring. Contrary to overheated rhetoric, countries do not actually “take the oil,” to use President Trump’s controversial and inaccurate phrase. Instead, my recent research demonstrates that countries avoid fighting for oil resources.

No Blood for Oil

There is no shortage of bad ideas circulating in U.S. foreign policy discourse. On occasion, however, a particularly poor argument can be helpful insofar as it reveals something noteworthy about the assumptions and ideology that produced it. With an article in The National Interest entitled “,” Julian Spencer-Churchill provides such an example. The piece — which makes the case that Australia and the United States ought to consider military intervention to topple the government of the Solomon Islands in the wake of the small nation’s adoption of a security pact with China — presents an inartful mix of threat inflation, outright factual error, and regurgitations of basic international relations theory, and is not particularly worth engaging with in and of itself. Yet Spencer-Churchill’s argument is useful in that it draws out some important contradictions in the strategy of liberal hegemony that drives U.S. foreign policy, and the “rules-based international order” it supposedly upholds. The piece begins with a brief recitation of the origins and importance of self-determination and state sovereignty to the international system. This is immediately followed by a claim on behalf of the “coalition of democracies” to a right to violate these principles more or less at will. This coalition, Spencer-Churchill writes, has “legally and morally valid justifications for intervention in a foreign country” first, “when there is a dire security threat that emerges within its sphere of influence” and second, “because liberal democracies have an unprecedented understanding of the world population’s aspirations for human rights-based rule of law and innovation-based prosperity for middle-income countries.” The policies of liberal democracies, he asserts “are moving in concert with the broader direction of history.” The citation for this last statement is a link to a brief summary of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History.” The first claim bears a notable resemblance to Russia’s justifications of its ongoing aggressive war against Ukraine. Such claims of “dire security threats” can be asserted by great powers with little evidence and no need for ratification by any third party, and, as Spencer-Churchill demonstrates, it is easy to gin up a grave security threat out of developments that pose . The second claim is even more striking. In essence, Spencer-Churchill argues that all peoples self-evidently desire liberal democratic capitalism, and therefore capitalist democracies like the United States have a right to deliver this system to them by force, whether asked for or not. This contention, of course, is nothing new. It has helped sell numerous U.S. military interventions since the Second World War and itself is only a refinement of the “civilizing missions” of earlier European imperialisms. Yet, in a year when the United States has rallied global opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the name of upholding the rules-based international order, state sovereignty, and self-determination, the absurdity of Spencer-Churchill’s claims is shown in stark relief. In Spencer-Churchill’s formulation, the United States and its allies serve as the guarantors of a rules-based international order, but also enjoy license to violate these rules under broad circumstances of their own determination. While it is not often laid out so bluntly, this is largely how American foreign policy has operated for over seven decades. The United States points to a liberal order as the justification for and result of its predominant military power and global influence, and will invoke that order in the face of other parties’ abuses, but will accept no restraints on its own freedom of action. This is well demonstrated by Washington’s of international treaties produced by the United Nations system (the creation of which, of course, was led by the U.S. itself). The U.S. will nonetheless these treaties against the behavior of other nations, as it does with China’s maritime claims and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has neither signed nor ratified. When proponents of liberal hegemony acknowledge this tension, some argue that it is necessary, even beneficial to the project of building a stable, liberal world order. The international system is anarchic and actors worse than the United States abound, ready to fill any power vacuum left vacant by Washington or its close allies. Such an order needs a powerful state to enforce it, and sometimes it may be necessary to in defense of higher principles. In a for The Atlantic, journalist Tom McTague made such a case, examining the “idea that convinces U.S. leaders that they never oppress, only liberate, and that their interventions can never be a threat to nearby powers, because America is not imperialist.” McTague recognizes that this – the notion that the U.S. is driven by universal values and acts in the universal interest – is both a “delusion” and “lies at the core of [the United States’] most costly foreign policy miscalculations.” Yet McTague asserts that this delusion is necessary to sustain America’s commitment to upholding global order and keeping more malicious powers at bay. Never mind that some of the heroic interventions McTague cites — like the Korean War — were in fact that could not credibly be presented as defenses of democracy at the time they actually took place, his larger case is also unpersuasive. Outside of the U.S. and Europe, what he calls the “necessary myth” of American benevolence has been hemorrhaging credibility, and the hypocrisy at the heart of the liberal international order is not a means to its perpetuation, but rather to its steady undoing. Decades of lawless interventions in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have left nations of the Global South of the United States as an upholder of international law. Younger Americans U.S. exceptionalism and global military dominance as well. As America’s relative power declines and we move toward an increasingly multipolar international system, the contradictions inherent in Washington’s version of the liberal order will become even harder to ignore. A United States that faces more and greater challenges to its power will likely turn to increasingly coercive means to defend that power, rendering its “liberal” guise increasingly threadbare. It is clear that, going forward, the laudable goal of creating a global order based on international law and mutually agreeable rules of conduct is incompatible with U.S. hegemony — or for that matter, the hypothetical hegemony of any other power. Any state possessing a preponderance of power will, as the U.S. has, reject external restraints on that power. Any “rules-based order” put forward by a hegemon will be wielded in service of hegemony, not the other way around.

American grand strategy since 1945 has been one of “primacy,” to secure itself by acquiring unrivalled dominance and denying key regions to hostile powers. Against hopes to the contrary, Washington’s consolidation of its primacy since the collapse of the Soviet Union has not created an international order content to submit to its will. Despite—or because of—expanded alliances in Europe and Asia, a globe-girdling military presence, wars of regime change and occupation, and the spread of capitalism on Washington’s terms, U.S. rivals have amassed greater capability and increased appetite for risk-taking. Additionally, U.S. allies are hedging—for instance through their participation in the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) or their opposition to Washington’s abrogation of the JCPOA nuclear agreement and its new sanctions against Iran, all over the United States’urging.2Emerging powers, such as India, also hedge, sharing intelligence with Washington while buying S-400 missiles from Russia and muting criticism of Beijing.3And American allies in Asia are investing increasingly heavily in defense. Though this has come partly through U.S. urging, it could tip potentially into an arms race.

The United States is not willingly accepting these developments that under-mine its primacy. It neither makes major concessions nor willingly shares power. Despite President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric, the United States on his watch pursues a more illiberal version of dominance, enlarging its footprint in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.4Trump has drawn down a small garrison in Syria, but increased the overall U.S. presence in the Gulf, and his administration is attempting to isolate and contain Iran. Trump’s domestic opponents, too, show no signs of renouncing the pursuit of primacy abroad. Apart from opposing his trade wars, they denounce the White House for being too accommodating to adversaries and not supportive enough of allies. With escalating rivalries under way against two Eurasian heavyweights, Russia and China, and potential confrontations with two designated proliferation “rogues” in Iran, North Korea and possibly Venezuela, the United States is in danger of being locked into combat with five adversaries simultaneously.

Like many believers, proponents of hegemonic stability theory base their view on faith alone.41 There is precious little evidence to suggest that the United States is responsible for the pacific trends that have swept across the system. In fact, the world remained equally peaceful, relatively speaking, while the United States cut its forces throughout the 1990s, as well as while it doubled its military spending in the first decade of the new century.42 Complex statistical methods should not be needed to demonstrate that levels of U.S. military spending have been essentially unrelated to global stability.

Hegemonic stability theory’s flaws go way beyond the absence of simple correlations to support them, however. The theory’s supporters have never been able to explain adequately how precisely 5 percent of the world’s population could force peace on the other 95 percent, unless, of course, the rest of the world was simply not intent on fighting. Most states are quite free to go to war without U.S. involvement but choose not to. The United States can be counted on, especially after Iraq, to steer well clear of most civil wars and ethnic conflicts. It took years, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the use of chemical weapons to spur even limited interest in the events in Syria, for example; surely internal violence in, say, most of Africa would be unlikely to attract serious attention of the world’s policeman, much less intervention. The continent is, nevertheless, more peaceful today than at any other time in its history, something for which U.S. hegemony cannot take credit.43 Stability exists today in many such places to which U.S. hegemony simply does not extend.

SANCTIONS ON OIL, GAS, AND OTHER CARBON-INTENSIVE COMMODITIES WILL BECOME MOOT

Sanctions targeting oil, gas, and coal will cease to be effective as the share of these in the global energy mix gradually decreases. According to the International Energy Agency, in a global net-zero scenario, the world’s demand for gas could drop by 55 percent, demand for oil by 75 percent, and demand for coal by 98 percent over the next three decades. This will weigh on the effectiveness of Western sanctions against energy powers, such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela (see figure 1). Measures targeting the Iranian, Russian, and, to a lesser extent, Venezuelan energy sectors form a huge part of Western sanctions packages; taken together, these three countries account for nearly 20 percent of global oil production and almost 25 percent of global gas production. Climate change will also have an impact on the effectiveness of sanctions against countries that are not commodities producers. For instance, UN sanctions on North Korea include measures restricting Pyongyang’s oil imports. Such sanctions will become moot if renewable energy makes up a significant part of North Korea’s energy mix.

Chinese officials are highly conscious of the geopolitical advantage they derive from their REE dominance. The 2010 incident over REE shipments to Japan was a wake-up call to import-dependent customers. Almost a decade later in 2019, threats of restricted supply returned.[65] Xi’s visit to a REE magnet production facility in Ganzhou in 2019 was widely regarded as a sign that restricting REE supply is on the table.[66] A week later, the People’s Daily posted an article explicitly threatening that if “the U.S. side wants to use the products made by China’s exported rare earths to counter and suppress China’s development,” the U.S. should not “underestimate the Chinese side’s ability to safeguard its development rights and interests.”[67] The more recent MIIT draft controls list proposed in January 2021 also suggests that international policy responses significantly influence Chinese domestic policies toward rare earths.[68] Officials in Beijing are particularly focused on how quickly the U.S. would secure alternatives if REE were included on the control list.

Therein lies a paradox: China’s state-supported rare earth enterprises remain at the behest of international market dynamics. Overburdening policy changes and perceived supply insecurity would push buyers away from Chinese suppliers. Any restrictive moves would likely spur proactive value chain restructuring away from Chinese REE. Therefore, Chinese officials would be unlikely to directly restrict trade for political reasons and calls for such are primarily just sword rattling to disguise domestic policies and production controls that bear a more long-term effect on supply coming out of China.

The policy consequences of American weakness. Most Europeans’ view of America as politically broken and likely to soon be overtaken by China as a global power appears to affect public perceptions of the value of the transatlantic alliance in ways that could have a significant impact on the Biden team. We noticed four profound changes. Firstly, the move towards greater self-reliance. One of the most striking findings of ECFR’s survey is that at least 60 per cent of respondents in every surveyed country – and an average of 67 per across all these countries – believe that they cannot always rely on the US to defend them and, therefore, need to invest in European defence. Interestingly, 74 per cent of British respondents hold this view – a higher share than in any other national group. ECFR’s opinion poll also reveals a change in threat perceptions across Europe, most dramatically in Germany. During the cold war, Germany felt threatened by invasion and was, therefore, wedded to the Atlantic alliance. But, nowadays, Germans seem to have caught up with the French (whose country has the strongest military in the EU and is a long-time proponent of European defence integration) in feeling less of a need than other Europeans for the US security guarantee. Currently, only 10 per cent of respondents in France and Germany say that their country needs the American security guarantee “a great deal” to be safe from military invasion. Only in Poland do a substantial number of respondents (44 per cent) believe that they need this guarantee “a great deal”. Therefore, it seems that Germany’s – and Europe’s – transatlantic policy in the years to come could be influenced not only by the country’s increasing economic ties with China but also by the fact that over half of the German public does not now see US military power as an existential guarantee of its security. The second big surprise is around the question of geopolitical alignment. Biden has called for the US and Europe to form a united front against China and thereby shape its rise. But ECFR’s poll shows that, in today’s Europe, there is no dream of a return to a bipolar world in which the West would face off against China and its allies as it once did against the Soviet Union. Troubled by doubts about America and influenced by Trump’s focus on narrowly defined national interests, European voters have started to think differently about the nature of the transatlantic alliance. In 2019 ECFR conducted a that indicated that a large majority of respondents in all surveyed countries wanted to remain neutral (rather than align with Washington) in a conflict between the US and China or Russia. Many people around Biden may have hoped that his victory in the November election would have changed that dynamic. They may have assumed that Europeans’ shift towards neutrality could be explained by their mistrust of, and disgust with, Trump. However, ECFR’s latest poll shows that political change in Washington does not appear to have fundamentally altered respondents’ calculus about geopolitical alignment. At least half of the electorate in every surveyed country would like their government to remain neutral in a conflict between the US and China. This even applies in Denmark and Poland, the two countries with the highest proportions of people who would like to take the United States’ side – 35 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. This may reflect the fact that, although both Europeans and Americans are toughening up their approaches to China, their long-term goals are somewhat different. While Americans want to do so to decouple from and contain China, Europeans (above all Germans) still hope to bring China back into the rules-based system. Europe’s unwillingness to side with the US also comes out in respondents’ views on a conflict between the US and Russia: in no surveyed country would a majority want to take Washington’s side. Amazingly, only 36 per cent of respondents in Poland and 40 per cent in Denmark say that their country should side with the US in such a scenario. Across the 11 surveyed countries, just 23 per cent of respondents hold this view – while 59 per cent want their country to remain neutral. In Denmark and Poland, neutrality is the preferred option of 47 per cent and 45 per cent of voters respectively. This shift in perceptions might have as much to do with power as anything else. What Europeans love about the memory of cold war 1.0 is that they were on the winning side; the fear in many European countries is that cold war 2.0 might have a different outcome. The growing mistrust about Washington’s reliability and power is changing the nature of the transatlantic alliance. America’s cold war coalitions took the form of a Catholic marriage. They were meant to be monogamous, with no possibility of divorce. After four years of Trump, the alliance looks like a more casual arrangement – an open marriage in which bringing in other players is the key to not being exploited. Europeans no longer trust America to defend Europe and would express little solidarity with the US if it became involved in a conflict with other great powers. Reading ECFR’s survey, Washington will also have no reasons to trust European publics’ readiness to conduct a joint transatlantic foreign policy. The third consequence of changing perceptions of power is a desire to be less sentimental in dealings with the US. A perverse effect of Trump’s term in power is that, by ruthlessly focusing on the national interest, he has encouraged other players – including Europeans – to concentrate more on protecting their own interests at the expense of focusing on the broader common interests of the democratic West. This is reflected in many Europeans’ desire to invest in defending themselves. There has also been a marked change in how people regard the transatlantic economic relationship. Among the eight countries in which ECFR asked voters about this issue, pluralities in Germany (37 per cent), France (48 per cent), Great Britain (37 per cent), and Italy (42 per cent) think that their country should be tougher with the US on economic issues such as international trade, the taxation of multinational companies, and the regulation of digital platforms. Poland is the predictable outlier on this point, with just one in ten voters saying that their country should become tougher with the US on economic issues.

However, seven months earlier in March 2022 during the annual “Two Sessions,” namely the simultaneous convening of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Taiwan was mentioned only briefly, in reference to the “one China” policy.

Both in the government work report presented by the outgoing Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to the NPC on March 5 and in the CPPCC work report presented by its chairman Wang Yang the previous day, the Taiwan issue, including unification, was downplayed in a surprisingly uncharacteristic manner. This deemphasizing was particularly significant when viewed in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which had started just a week before the convening of the Two Sessions.

It would be foolish to ignore China’s provocations, for several reasons. With this much hostile hardware moving through narrow lanes of air and water, accidents can happen, and any incident that increases the risk of direct armed conflict between the two most powerful countries on Earth must be taken seriously. Second, China’s maneuvers amount to a rehearsal. Though China will not show Taiwan, the U.S., or anyone else exactly how it would launch a full blockade or invasion of Taiwan, China’s armed forces find it very valuable to practice. After all, Chinese troops haven’t faced a shooting war since a brief conflict with Vietnam in 1979. Finally, Taiwan will hold national elections next year. Though China’s latest intimidation may not lead to military conflict anytime soon, it may have an effect on how Taiwan’s voters imagine the future.

All that said, the actual risk of imminent Chinese military action against Taiwan remains low. Beijing always flexes military muscle when highest-level U.S. and Taiwanese officials meet face to face. Yet, though Speaker McCarthy’s visit with Taiwan’s president marks the highest-level U.S.-Taiwan meeting on US soil since 1979, China’s latest response was less militarily threatening than its reaction to last summer’s visit to Taiwan by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi – and Beijing is well aware that Washington will notice that.

Q4: What would it mean for the global climate if China achieved this 80% clean electricity target?

China’s power sector alone accounts for 14% of global energy-related emissions. So, cleaning up China’s power grid would be a giant step toward meeting its carbon neutral goal before 2060. With a clean power system, electrification of buildings, transport, and industry could achieve even more reductions.

To counter China’s dominance in critical mineral supply chains, the US and its allies have adopted a two-pronged strategy – seeking to bolster cooperation among themselves to facilitate increased mining efforts while simultaneously expediting the construction of processing units.

Through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the US has formed minilateral alliances in the Indo-Pacific. In March last year, a group of US senators introduced the Quad Critical Minerals Partnership Act while Australia, India and Japan formed the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative. Then in July, Australia and India launched a Critical Minerals Investment Partnership. In a similar vein, Japan and India as well as South Korea and Australia have established separate collaborations.