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In Qatar at the end of the year, politicians from around the world will once again gather to try to thrash out the details of a global, legally binding deal to help prevent dangerous climate change. But it is hard – at least since the events of the Copenhagen summit in 2009 – to look forward to that meeting of minds with any great optimism.
Senior figures at the IMechE will tell you that concern over climate change in political circles has, if you’ll pardon the expression, come off the boil in recent times. The priorities have shifted as financial meltdown has been followed by sluggish growth in the global economy, the Eurozone crisis, rising unemployment, and fears over a double-dip recession at home.
The suspicion is that, until these economic indicators start to recover, environmental concerns will continue to take a backseat.
This is the backdrop against which the talks in Qatar in November and December will take place. With countries keen to protect their fragile economies, it seems unlikely that substantive progress will be made. The current approach just doesn’t seem to be working.
Tim Fox, head of energy and climate change at the institution, has been busy preparing evidence that MPs on the energy and climate change committee will consider ahead of the Qatar meeting. He believes that the talks represent an opportunity for the UK to take a lead in making what he calls a “paradigm shift” in thinking on emissions reduction policy.
“In terms of moving forward with a legally binding international agreement – you can probably predict where that’s going to end up. The first point of our submission is to say ‘maybe we should stop this and start looking at exploring different opportunities and different possibilities’,” he says.
The IMechE is suggesting that the so-called geo-engineering technique of using air-capture machines that sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could be made to set a global price for carbon. Market forces could then act to drive down the cost of carbon abatement technologies, so, for example, renewables would have to compete with air capture to bring down the cost of CO2 per tonne.
This would result in a proliferation of cheaper environmentally friendly technology, or a green virtuous circle.
Fox says: “That would be a highly dynamic market. As soon as you get a fleet of air-capture machines working in a niche market and they can get their cost down in terms of dollars per tonne of CO2 captured and sequestered, or used, then you’re going to end up with a situation where the air-capture OEMs compete for business – which will in itself drive the cost out of capture.”
So technology and the market could succeed where attempts at global agreements have failed. This marks a shift upwards in recognition by the institution of the potential of air capture, which is still relatively untried.
But most agree that setting a global carbon price will be the key to efforts to mitigate emissions. And the UK has already arguably acknowledged with the introduction of the carbon price floor that multilateral agreements to make caps on emissions are not working.