‘Magical’ tech innovations a distraction from real solutions, climate worriers claim

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

Real ‘solutions’ like degrading entire economies and reducing living standards? How many toytown ‘climate innovations’ does it take in order to grasp that such things are always a dead end, and often an expensive one? The tedium of COP meetings repeating the same worn-out themes grinds on and on.
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Machines to magic carbon out of the air, artificial intelligence, indoor vertical farms to grow food for our escape to Mars, and even solar-powered “responsible” yachts: the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai has been festooned with the promise of technological fixes for worsening global heating and ecological breakdown, says Yahoo News.

The UN climate talks have drawn a record number of delegates to a sprawling, freshly built metropolis, which has as its centrepiece an enormous dome that emits sounds and lights up in different colours at night.

The two-week programme is laden with talks, events and demonstrations of the need for humanity to innovate its way out of the climate crisis.

Given the ponderous action by governments to cut planet-heating emissions – the world is still hurtling towards disastrous climate breakdown [Talkshop comment – if you believe media like The Guardian] – the tech focus is helpful, said Bill Gates, the multi-billionaire Microsoft co-founder, as he ventured into the Dubai sunshine.

“I’m most optimistic about the incredible innovation,” he said. “People’s willingness to pay for climate is limited … We need to really innovate. You have to create the new before you shut down the old.”

But this fixation has alarmed some scientists and climate activists, who warn that technologies are being used to distract from the primary task of stopping fossil fuels being burned. Cop28’s president, Sultan Al Jaber, also the head of the UAE’s national oil company, has questioned the feasibility of a fossil fuel phase-out.

A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists are at this Cop, including Darren Woods, chief executive of Exxon, who has said he wants an “emphasis put on a problem statement of eliminating emissions, versus a problem statement focused on the oil and gas industry per se.”

“It’s frightening because they see this as a new business opportunity, a new way to make money and continue as before,” said Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate researcher at the University of Exeter, of the hopes being ladled upon carbon removal technologies.

Total current technology-based CO2 removal, excluding nature-based means such as planting new forests, removes just 0.01m tonnes of CO2, according to recent research led by Friedlingstein, which is more than a million times smaller than current fossil fuel CO2 emissions.

Full article here.