Abstract
This paper puts forward two claims about funding carbon capture and storage. The first claim is that there are moral justifications supporting strategic investment into CO2 storage from global and regional perspectives. One argument draws on the empirical evidence which suggests carbon capture and storage would play a significant role in a portfolio of global solutions to climate change; the other draws on Rawls’ notion of legitimate expectations and Moellendorf’s Anti-Poverty principle. The second claim is that where to pursue this strategic investment poses a morally non-trivial problem, with considerations like near-term global distributive justice and undermining legitimate expectations favouring investing in developing regions, especially in Asia, and considerations like long-term climate impacts and best uses of resources favouring investing in the relatively wealthy regions that have the best prospects for successful storage development.
Highlights
Despite three decades of growing intention to avoid dangerous climate change, progress in decarbonising the global economy has been insufficient to address growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel use
We focus on the technological option of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a process which involves the injection of C O2 into underground geological features for sequestration over the long-term
This covers both the capture of large scale, point-source C O2 emissions resulting from the use of fossil fuels1 (FF-CCS), and the carbon dioxide removal process of capturing and sequestering CO2 that is already in the atmosphere (CDR-CCS)
Summary
We focus on the technological option of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a process which involves the injection of C O2 into underground geological features for sequestration over the long-term This covers both the capture of large scale, point-source C O2 emissions resulting from the use of fossil fuels (FF-CCS), and the carbon dioxide removal process of capturing and sequestering CO2 that is already in the atmosphere (CDR-CCS).. While industrial scale CCS facilities have been operating successfully for 25 years (Greig et al, 2016), uptake of the technology has repeatedly failed to deliver on hopes for a transformative infrastructure rollout (Arranz, 2015; Backstrand et al, 2011; IEA, 2018) Despite that, those hopes remain entrenched in the most recent wave of global scenarios for meeting the PA goal, with the modelled transitions strongly reliant on the implementation of CCS at massive scales. Regardless, the potential for these geophysical risks, along with other localised socio-economic concerns (e.g. the potential impact on real estate values) were prominent in the community objections that overwhelmed Dutch and German attempts to instigate industrial scale CCS (Shackley & Dütschke, 2012).
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