All Climate Events

Wednesday, February 1, 2017. 1:00 PM. Webinar: Restoring the Carbon Balance - Session 2: The Technologies. Joel Makower, Green Biz; Klaus Lackner, Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, Arizona State University; Susan Hovorka, Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas, Austin. Sponsored by Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability and the Security and Sustainability Forum. More information here.

The capacity of the Earth's atmosphere to safely hold excess carbon without too much warming is very limited. The situation is growing more urgent, but even after the 2015 Climate Conference in Paris, the pace of transforming economies away from hydrocarbon fuels is too slow to meet the ambient temperature goal of 2 degrees or less Celsius.

Unless that pace is dramatically accelerated, the planet will almost certainly exceed its "carbon budget" within two decades, if it hasn't already. This concern has led the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to conclude that Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs), which remove CO2 from the air, will be needed to meet climate goals.

However, NETs technologies are still in the research, development or demonstration stages of commercialization, which poses a conundrum. Technologies cannot develop without policy drivers; policy cannot lead the way without the assurance of demonstrably affordable and scalable technologies.

Join Arizona State University' Global Institute of Sustainability and the Security and Sustainability Forum in the second of a three part series on "Restoring the Carbon Budget" where leading experts will address the NETS technologies and the status of the research to develop and commercialize them.