Climate change could be halted within a generation if the energy companies selling fossil fuels were required to dispose responsibly of the waste CO2 they generate, the climate scientist who led the first work on Net Zero has said.
Professor Myles Allen CBE, Head of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics at Oxford University, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work on climate physics. Now, 15 years after identifying the challenge of achieving Net Zero, he and a coalition of other leading climate scientists warn it could be being fatally watered down.
Their study, published today in Nature, draws attention to rules that allow countries and companies to offset ongoing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels with CO2 absorption by forests and oceans that is happening anyway as a result of past emissions. This means the world could appear to achieve net zero by 2050 without actually stopping global warming – or even reducing emissions at all until the late 2030s.
Instead, the authors call for a recognition of the need for 'geological net zero', that the only way of compensating for any continued production of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is to capture and dispose of it back underground, or somewhere equally permanent.
Their study coincides with an hour-long climate special aired today on BBC Television and iPlayer by Panorama, in which Professor Allen comments on what’s needed to halt global warming and examines options to remove CO2 and slow climate change.
'As the world warms, a lot of carbon stored in natural sinks like forests is actually getting released into the atmosphere,' Professor Allen told the BBC. Calling for a renewed focus on reducing fossil fuel use and scaling up permanent CO2 disposal, he argues: 'We could stop climate change within a generation if we just put our minds to it. If we actually put the resource that’s in the fossil fuel industry and require them to dispose responsibly of the CO2 generated by the fuels they sell.
'The fossil fuel industry can afford to fix this. For what we paid for gas in 2022 in the UK, they could have captured every single molecule of CO2 that gas generated back out of the atmosphere and stuck it back under the North Sea - twice over.'