AT BECCS bwa ha ha ha this is dumb

Among the various CDR schemas, it is BECCS, because of its promise of negative emissions, that today is attracting the most support. This is because it seems to allow nations to overshoot climate targets on the basis that the carbon can be removed from the atmosphere decades later. Although BECCS exists at present largely as an untested computer model, it is now incorporated into almost all climate models utilized by the IPCC. 16 As modeled, BECCS would burn cultivated crops in order to generate electricity, with the capture and underground storage of the resulting carbon dioxide. In theory, since plant crops can be seen as carbon neutral—taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then eventually releasing it again —BECCS, by burning biomass and then capturing and sequestering the resulting carbon emissions, would be a means of generating electricity while at the same time resulting in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon.

BECCS, however, comes into question the moment one moves from the abstract to the concrete. The IPCC’s median-level models are projected to remove 630 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, around twothirds of the total emitted between the Industrial Revolution and 2011. 17 This would occur on vast crop plantations to be run by agribusiness. To remove a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as envisioned in the more ambitious scenarios would take up a land twice the size of India (or equal to Australia), about half as much land as currently farmed globally, requiring a supply of freshwater equal to current total global agricultural usage. 18 The costs of implementing BECCS on the imagined scales have been estimated by climatologist James Hansen—who critically notes that negative emissions have “spread like a cancer” in the IPCC climate models— to be on the order of hundreds of trillions of dollars, with “minimal estimated costs” ranging as high as $570 trillion this century. 19 The effects of BECCS—used as a primary mechanism and designed to avoid confrontation with the present system of production—would therefore be a massive displacement of small farmers and global food production.

Moreover, the notion that the forms of large-scale, commercial agricultural production presumed in BECCS models would be carbon neutral and would thus result in negative emissions with sequestration has been shown to be exaggerated or false when the larger effects on global land use are taken into account. BECCS crop cultivation is expected to take place on vast monoculture plantations, displacing other forms of land use. Yet, biologically diverse ecosystems have substantially higher rates of carbon sequestration in soil and biomass than does monocrop agriculture. 20 An alternative to BECCS in promoting carbon sequestration would be to promote massive, planetary ecological restoration, including reforestation, together with the promotion of agroecology modeled on traditional forms of agriculture organized around nutrient recycling and improved soil management methods. 21 This would avoid the metabolic rift associated with agribusiness monocultures, which are less efficient both in terms of food production per hectare and carbon sequestration.