The terrible secrets of the world plan to prevent climate catastrophe

In 2014, Henrik Carlson, a Swedish entrepreneur, whose startup was experiencing serious difficulties at that moment, was worried about the bankruptcy notice he received when he received a call from the BBC. The journalist had a sensation: on the eve of the release of a large report, the UN climate change expert group, apparently, decided to advertise the untested technology as a key mechanism for keeping the planet's temperature at a safe level. The technology was called an ugly abbreviation BECCS, and Carlson was the only expert in this field who was able to find a journalist.



Carlson was amazed. The bankruptcy notice concerned his startup, whose activities were related to BECCS, which he founded seven years ago after he got the idea while watching TV at home in Gothenburg. The program described the benefits of capturing carbon dioxide before it escaped from power plants. It was the technology behind the widely advertised "clean coal", a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change.



Then Carlson was a 27-year-old student who studied as an operatic tenor, and he was neither a climate scientist nor an engineer. But the transfer made him think: during photosynthesis, plants naturally take carbon dioxide from the air and keep it in their leaves, branches, seeds, roots and trunks. What if growing grains, and then burning them, producing electricity, while capturing all the released carbon dioxide? This hazardous gas can then be stored in underground storage facilities. Such a power station would not only make less greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, it also took CO ₂ from the air. Carlson captured this idea. He decided to help prevent a global catastrophe.



The next morning, he ran to the library, where he read the 2001 scientific work on the authorship of Austrian developer Michael Obersteiner, who discussed the same idea, which was later called “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS). Carlson decided. He launched a startup for BECCS in 2007 on the wave of optimism created by Al Gore's first climate change film. Carlson's company even became a finalist in the Richard Branson competition of the Virgin Earth Challenge, offering $ 25 million for a scalable solution to the task of removing greenhouse gases. But by 2014, the startup Carlson failed. And he took the call from the Air Force as a sign that he should not give up.



The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (another abbreviation - IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) presented the results of hundreds of computer-modeled scenarios in which the planet's temperature rises less than 2 ° C (or 3.6 ° F) above the pre-industrial level - this restriction was established by the Paris Climate Agreement .



The 2 ° C target was the theoretical limit to what warming humanity can accept. From the point of view of the leading climatologist James Hansen, even such a restriction is unsafe. And without reducing emissions, global temperatures should rise by 4 ° C by the end of the century. Many scientists reluctantly make predictions, but the apocalyptic list of what a 4 ° C warming can cause includes widespread droughts, famines, millions of climate refugees, wars threatening civilization, a rise in sea level that will flood most of New York, Miami, Mumbai, Shanghai and other coastal cities.



But here's what's strange. The UN report describes 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are not allowed to grow by more than 2 ° C. In 101 of them, this goal is achieved by sucking up a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere - this concept is called “negative emissions” - mainly through BECCS. And to prevent a planetary catastrophe, this should happen by the middle of the century, or even by 2020. One note, as if the instructions to the drug, warned: "methods may find side effects and long-term consequences of a global scale."



And indeed, if you follow the assumptions of these scenarios, only the cultivation of grain needed to power these BECCS power plants will require an area of ​​land comparable to one or two Indians, as climate researchers Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters write. And the output energy, which should give BECCS, is comparable with the issuance of all coal-fired power plants of the world combined. In other words, these models are calling for an energy revolution - which should somehow happen during the life of the millennials .



And today, a huge sector of the future economy is the only working project in the world: a corn processing plant in ethanol in Decatur, pc. Illinois. What causes the question: has the world really decided to rely on the fictional technology that should save it?



On December 12, 2015, 195 nations — including the United States — adopted the Paris Climate Agreement, promising to finally keep global temperatures rising at 2 ° C above the pre-industrial level this century, with the longer-term goal of keeping the rise at 1.5 ° C . Kristiana Figuera, a UN diplomat who led the global climate talks out of the post-Copenhagen crisis, recalls: “5,000 people jumped out of their seats, wept, clapped, shouted, felt euphoric, and still could not believe what had happened.”



But behind this euphoria was a cruel truth. The realistic goals of the Paris Agreement relied on what was described in the report in small print: huge negative emissions based primarily on BECCS - to put it mildly, an unproved concept. How did BECCS get into the model?



It all started with the goal itself at 2 ° C, a formal international goal that has existed since 2010 (and informal since the 1990s). For many years before Paris, climate researchers warned that the 2 ° C restriction was slipping out of hand, or was already out of bounds.



And here's why: since climatologists explicitly (and tirelessly) attributed the increase in temperature to an increase in CO ₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, they can calculate, based on the maximum allowable temperature, the maximum amount of CO ₂ we can throw away - our “carbon budget”. And with a probability of over 66% in order to stay within 2 ° C, our CO ₂ concentration should not exceed 450 parts per million [450 x 10 ^-6 ].



In 2010, when the target at 2 ° C was accepted at a major conference in Cancun in Mexico, the budget at 450 * 10 ^-6 , or 2 ° C, was already extremely tense: only a third, or 1000 gigatons of carbon dioxide, remained. Since people emit 40 gigatons per year, this budget is easily spent before the middle of the century. This problem of the global accounting department of several specialized groups involved in modeling, began to face in 2004, when the IPCC asked them to develop scenarios that use the target at 2 ° C. That is, how much do we need to cut emissions in order not to completely slow down the economy, depending on fossil fuels?



Tackling this problem, the groups used a tool called “integrated assessment models” - algorithms that use data on climate, economics, politics, and technology to provide effective solutions.



Around the time when Carlson's life was forever changed by a late show on Swedish television, Detlef van Vyuuren, head of the IMAGE model team from the Netherlands, came across the idea of ​​BECC in literature after seeing the 2001 Obersteiner and the work of Christian Azar and Jose Moreira. He became interested in them. In theory, producing energy and sucking CO ₂ out of the atmosphere, BECC can lead the way in keeping the economy in a 2 ° C rise.



The key to this was that BECC leads to negative emissions, which is a negative contribution to the carbon budget. This is similar to a climate credit card: negative emissions allowed modelists to go beyond the emissions budget in the short term, allowing greenhouse gases to grow (as they do in reality) and then paying off their debts, exhausting CO ₂ later from the atmosphere.



“The idea of ​​negative emissions has become deeply logical,” says van Vyureren.



The rationale behind negative emissions depended heavily on the work of physicist Klaus Lackner, who at the turn of the millennium made sketches of CO ₂ removal schemes on school boards for his students at Columbia University. Lackner, who worked on carbon capture and storage (which was then supposed to be used at coal-fired power plants) was the first person to suggest the idea of ​​direct air capture — pulling CO ₂ straight from the atmosphere. At that time, the Lackner idea, similar to BECCS, was purely theoretical.



But van Vyuyuren says that for the construction of models it was possible to assume the existence of BECCS, at least its components. The IPCC published a report on carbon capture and storage — and bioenergy meant simply burning large amounts of grain. Some models used direct air trapping, other technologies of negative emissions, afforestation (planting heaps of trees that naturally absorb and store CO ₂ as a result of photosynthesis). But BECCS was cheaper because it gave electricity.



In 2007, IMAGE published an influential work based on BECCS in Climatic Change, and attracted much attention at an IPCC expert meeting. Other groups also began to include BECCS in their models, and thus this technique began to prevail in the models included in the fifth IPCC report (because of which Carlson got a call from the BBC).



The models used large-scale implementation of BECCS. According to the analysis, which the British climatologist Jason Low shared with Carbon Brief magazine, at the median level, the models using BECCS suggested the removal of 630 gigatons of CO ₂ , which is about two thirds of the carbon dioxide emitted by people from pre-industrial times to 2011. Was it correct?



Not for James Hansen, who wrote that dependence on negative emissions quietly “spread like cancer” across all scenarios, along with the suggestion that young people somehow figure out how to extract CO ₂ at a price he estimated at $ 140-570 trillion .



Anderson (from Indian computing) noted that several scenarios that fit 2 ° C and did not use BECCS suggested that the peak of CO ₂ emissions would occur in 2010 — which, he dryly noted, “obviously did not happen.” In a stinging letter from 2015, Anderson accused scientists of using negative emissions to tailor his research to regulator requests, calling them a “grand piano in the bushes” [deux ex machina]. Critics who supported him argued that integrated assessment models had become a political tool that made a 2 ° C target more realistic than it actually was.



Oliver Geden, who heads the European Union division of the German Institute for Security and International Relations, raised the alarm in the popular press. On a journalism page in the New York Times during the conference, he called negative emissions "magical thinking" - a concept that is needed in order to maintain life in a "fairy tale" about 2 ° C.



Van Vyuyurena and other modellers surveyed by us believe that this criticism goes wrong. They argue that integrated assessment models should not be involved in predictions, since no one can predict future technologies or political decisions. Also, they are not a guide to action. Van Vyyyuren says that these models - is "intelligence", designed to show what political decisions and investments need to be made to achieve the goal of 2 ° C. With this in mind, van Vyuyren observes a “dangerous gap” between the dependence of scenarios on BECCS and how few research programs and projects there are in the real world.



Whether the IPCC scenarios are political cover or a guide for regulator research depends on point of view. But, in any case, this gap can not be denied. Part of it can be explained by the fact that BECCS is a conceptual tool, and not a real technology that anyone in the engineering world is protecting (with the exception of a few non-professionals like Carlson). At a recent meeting in Berlin, a climatologist called BECCS a “devilish spawn”, which caused laughter. Bioenergy and carbon capture have been met with quite active criticism. Bioenergy - for misusing the crops needed to feed people, and capturing carbon for, among other things, avoiding the need for strong cuts in emissions.



For this reason, Anderson and Peters in last year’s article in Science magazine called the hope of negative emissions “an unreasonable high-stakes gambling” and a “moral threat” that allows regulators to avoid introducing sharp emission limits. In a response letter, Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in carbon seizure, warned that their assertions could lead to the closure of a whole area of ​​research needed. “If we had this conversation in the 1980s,” he writes, everything would be different. But now that the carbon budget has flown into the pipe, potentially negative emission technologies “can save lives.”



But the most cruel truth: even if negative emissions appeared in hand-made and impractical computer models, we now need to achieve negative emissions in the real world in order to keep the temperature of the planet at a safe level.



Temperatures have increased by 1.2-1.3 ° C. Current concentrations of carbon dioxide are at 406 * 10 ^-6 . According to Sabine Fass and Jan Minks from the Climate Change Research Institute. Mercatura, our budget of 1.5 ° C is almost failed - and many experts agree with them. If you have a melancholic mood, you can look at the timer, the countdown of the carbon budget on the website of the Institute. They believe that without significant actions by the world community to limit emissions, the two-degree budget will be exhausted by 2030 [until the budget is exhausted, judging by the institute's timer, 18 years remain (2035) with average values, and in the worst case - only 8 years (2025 year) / approx. trans.].



The question is, can negative emissions technology work in the real world on a global scale? To study this question, we visited a working project in Decatur, pc. Illinois, quoted by modellers as evidence of the real existence of BECCS.





Workers at a station owned by Archer Daniels Midland Corporation in Decatur, Illinois, inject clean carbon dioxide into underground storage. Theoretically, it can be stored there forever.



You may not have imagined the future like that which can be seen driving a car south from Chicago, following signs to Memphis, taking a few hundred thousand hectares of corn fields to the right, past homemade signs that advocate the free sale of weapons, and biofuel advertising signs (these are not the oil fields of the Middle East, these are soy biodiesel fields). It was here, 10 years ago, before the collapse of the biofuel market, people could admire their wealth - soybean and corn fields - stretching to the horizon. From Decatur you need to go towards the station Archer Daniel Midland, from afar, with its square white towers and a mysterious dome that looks like an Emerald city without glasses with green glasses.



When you drive up to the gate with a guard, the station turns into randomly scattered substations, large tanks and pipelines, wrapped in an unpleasant smell, reminiscent of cat food. Trains and tons of trucks deliver soybeans and corn to process them into food chemicals and ethanol for fuel. And somewhere in the depths of this agricultural giant in the Midwest is the Illinois Carbon Capture Industrial Project, also known as the world's only BECCS station.



“I warned that there’s nothing particularly to look at,” says Sally Greenberg, a geologist and first assistant to the director of energy research and development at the Geological Bureau of the State of Illinois, an ADM partner, opening a white trailer serving as the project’s headquarters. And yet, she says that the project was visited by more than 900 people from 30 countries of the world: “He is first-class”.



The station is an ideal place to capture and dispose of carbon, which is why almost 15 years ago the US Department of Energy decided to conduct a pilot project here. In the depths of the station, sugar extracted from corn kernels is fermented to produce ethanol, during which CO _{2 is released} , which is particularly easy to catch: you just need to separate it from ethanol and get rid of water. Next, this CO _{2 is} compressed, fed into the pipe and injected into a deep tank with salt water and sandstone walls, located two kilometers below the station.



To look at the new well for gas withdrawal, which came into operation last May, we drove back from the station following the signs to “City of Progress” - an agricultural exhibition complex from ADM, where local residents enjoyed the unusually warm October weather on “Family Safety Day”. At a mile and a half from the station, we braked at the fenced injector - a rusty pipe, with several bends and measuring devices, which disappeared into the cement block in the ground. We stood there, and carbon dioxide poured into the earth, quietly and unnoticed. Now 1.4 million tons of CO _{2 are} stored underground , which would otherwise pollute the atmosphere of the planet.



Theoretically, it inspires; in fact, we stood in bare corn fields, looking at a pipe that looked suspiciously rusty for such an advanced project. Honestly, the most impressive of the entire installation was hidden underground.







Have we watched the work of the favorite technology of modellers saving the world? The ADM is not such a BECCS as the scientists represented it - that is, not a power plant that produces electricity by burning cereals. Greenberg generally met with the term BECCS only a few years ago, despite the fact that he started working on the project in 2005, and says that so far no specialist on comprehensive evaluation models has called her.



But by luck, Decatur became the first BECCS station in the world. The process of converting maize into ethanol can technically be called bioenergy, and this process does produce negative emissions, at least according to approximate calculations. Roughly speaking, two-thirds of carbon from corn is converted to ethanol, and then released into the atmosphere after combustion in car engines. The remaining third of carbon is pumped underground. Greenberg says that the team has yet to take into account all overhead costs, including transportation of corn, but BECCS was not the original goal of this project.



One argument of this project in favor of BECCS is that we could always store huge amounts of carbon dioxide underground. Once in the salt reservoir, CO ₂it reacts with the brine and stone that binds it, and on top of it the pool is covered with a layer of hermetic stone, which guarantees no leaks. While tracking the position of CO ₂ underground, the team has not yet seen signs of movement or leaks. “It can be stored there forever,” says Greenberg. And only this tank is capable of storing carbon dioxide in an amount of about 100 billion tons, according to research, which makes the prospect of saving 600 billion tons - the amount described in the models - reasonable.



On the other hand, the project provides a good overview of the scope of the BECCS implementation task. In the future, the Decatur unit plans to save another 5 million tons of carbon dioxide over the next few years - and in 2016, the average amount of emissions in the United States was 14 million tons of carbon dioxide per day. So how many stations do we need for BECCS?



If you think about this question, it will be clear how difficult it is to answer it. In recent workEngineers Matilda Fayyardi and Nial McDowell [Mathilde Fajardy, Niall Mac Dowell] from Imperial College in London have studied with utmost care the best and worst development options of BECCS. In the worst cases (for example, when burning willows growing on European pastures), it is possible that negative emissions will not be achieved at all. You will spend too much carbon on transporting plants [ some varieties of willow and poplar are used as energy crops / approx. perev.], soil preparation and construction of the station. And even in the best cases (using fast-growing elephant grass in Brazil’s underutilized arable lands) will be requiredland areas comparable to India, and the amount of water comparable to that consumes all the agriculture of the world. “If we extrapolate the amount of output of crops to the required scale, it turns out to be a disaster,” Lackner told us.



There is still a problem with money. BECCS stations do not make money - burning plants is only half as efficient as burning coal. In the US, BECCS can be stimulated by charging companies for carbon dioxide emissions — but the carbon tax plan promoted by several Republicans in the US does not match the new Trump administration’s climate policy. In principle, some US companies get tax breaks for storing CO ₂ underground, but, with the exception of ADM, they do it to improve oil production by pumping CO ₂into almost dry wells to get to hard-to-reach oil. Although part of the CO ₂ remains underground, this process releases even more fossil fuel to be incinerated.



So, when we left Decatur, despite the viability of the project, it was very difficult to imagine using BECCS on the scale required for these scenarios.



We shared our concerns with Noah Deich, who calls himself a recovery management consultant, and founder of the world's first and only organization that promotes negative emissions, the Center for Carbon Removal [Center for Carbon Removal]. Deich suggested that we take a different look at the technology of negative emissions - not as a universal solution, but as a “portfolio”. This portfolio includes natural approaches to carbon sequestration, for example, development of carbon sinks (land that absorbs more carbon than it emits), afforestation, biochar (an additive for coal soils that permanently binds CO ₂ ), and technologies such as BECCS stations and direct air trapping.



So far, the direct capture of air from this portfolio exists only on the scale of laboratory tables. At the University of Arizona, Lackner is experimenting with small portable boxes that remove carbon dioxide from the air. But there are very few companies with a profitable business plan. One of them belongs to a charismatic climatologist from Harvard, David Keith.



In the city of Skvamish, an hour from Vancouver, it seems that the world does not need to be saved. The city perched on a narrow peninsula between a dark blue inland canal and coastal mountains with snow-capped peaks in British Columbia, which climbers adore crowding in Starbucks coffee houses. Rumor has it that Microsoft plans to build a campus here. At one of the branches of the peninsula, at the site of the station that once produced chemicals for the paper industry, there is a startup founded by Keith in 2009 and funded by Bill Gates - one of the few companies in the world engaged in direct air trapping. At headquarters, well-knit engineers in coarse-knit sweaters sip coffee at a common table, and in the list of employees there are three dogs that also walk around the offices.



Only this week the team reached a long-standing goal: they created synthetic fuel (which can be used to refuel a car) only from carbon dioxide extracted from air and hydrogen extracted from water. Why fuel? In order not only to demonstrate the operation of direct air trapping on a large scale, but also to show how you can make money on freely available CO ₂ - this aspect of negative emissions, as shown by BECCS, can be difficult to achieve.



On a guided tour of the pilot station, Geoff Holmes, a former student of Kita and his business development manager, rejects his admiration for the project, explaining that carbon dioxide can be captured using chemistry classroom equipment.



In the Carbon Engineering experiment, which takes place at a construction site and in a hangar, four structures work together, connected by various pipes, and all this resembles some ingenious board game Mouse Trap of gigantic size. In the first stage, carbon dioxide, acid-forming in solution, is absorbed by potassium hydroxide (base). In a silo-like briquetting machine, carbon dioxide is converted into calcium carbonate briquettes (chalk) through yet another reaction from the lessons of senior chemistry. When you hold them in your hand, they resemble small white balls. Theoretically in such CO ₂ briquettescan be stored forever. Then the briquettes are heated in a calciner to release carbon dioxide, and to close the process, the remaining calcium is processed for the next stage. The process absorbs only air, water and electricity, which in British Columbia is almost entirely provided by the renewable energy of hydroelectric power plants. The output is a clean stream of carbon dioxide.



The next step: make carbon dioxide something sold. This year, a Climworks, a direct-start Swiss start-up startup, began selling carbon dioxide to a nearby greenhouse. Carbon Engineering decided to create gasoline-like fuels using the Fisher-Tropsch process.. This technology comes from the 1920s and usually uses coal and hydrogen from it. During the Second World War, the Germans used this technology because of a shortage of oil. But Carbon Engineering extracts hydrogen from water. Using these materials, the pilot station can produce several barrels of pure synthetic fuel per day, which, given the price of oil at $ 60 per barrel, does not pay back many of the company's salaries, which employ 32 people.



“To develop such a technology takes a lot of time and a lot of money,” says director Adrian Corles. In four years, he said, the company plans to scale up to a demonstration station capable of producing thousands of barrels of fuel per day. Potential market - states like California or British Columbia, encouraging companies to use more efficient fuels. These rules can make such fuel more competitive.



Is the fuel received by the company negative emissions? No — at best, it is a carbon neutral process, since all the atoms captured will return to the atmosphere when the fuel is burning. But in theory, a company can drive this station in order to produce negative emissions, instead of producing fuel, by pumping CO ₂under the ground - if the market is willing to pay for such a service.



From his Cambridge office, Keith, famous for his innovative solar geo-engineering work , told us via Skype that he founded Carbon Engineering, as the direct air trapping impressed him with “technology that it would be nice to have if we knew ". He later clarified: “The best way I know the cost is to roll up my sleeves and plunge into the engineering process.”



But when discussing issues of global impact, Keith did not describe this technology like a magic wand - and the rest of the team shares the same opinion. He said that low-cost direct air capture technology would have "major environmental benefits." Whale does not like epithets like "innovative" and "pioneering", or even "interesting", because of which we begin to think that there will be some kind of revolutionary technology that can save the world. He recalls that some of the most important technological developments aimed at mitigating climate change were similar not to sudden breakthroughs, but to agonizing successive stories of engineering success — such as, for example, solar panels gradually decreasing in price, which in principle existed since 1970 -h.In order to draw the attention of employees to this, in the first days of the company's existence, he even hung up a sign in the office with the words “no science”.



Keith believes that we need consistent research on technologies of negative emissions of every kind, since the concentration of carbon has already risen too high. "Limiting emissions will not solve the climate problem," says Keith. “It will just stop the development from bad to worse.”



When visiting Carbon Engineering, it becomes clear that these studies will require not only conceptual solutions or revision of computer model parameters, but, as Keith says, “grinding this problem”, on a daily basis, for several years - just to transform the technology, everything components of which existed in laboratories for decades, in a meaningful reality. And it is also clear how difficult this applied research can be, even for a visionary genius with funding from two billionaires and an optimistic approach to business that you expect from a team of Canadian engineers.



On the phone a few hours later, after the team created what everyone called simply “first fuel,” Holmes happily explains that Carbon Engineering is not actually the first company that produces fuel from carbon dioxide produced from air. But, he emphasizes, they are the first to do it on equipment that can be scaled on an industrial scale. The first in the sense of demonstrating the possible utility of the technology.





At the Carbon Engineering factory in Squamish in British Columbia (Canada), engineers produce automotive fuel from chemical elements derived from air and mixed with water.







Talking about climate change in the United States is reduced to talking about how Trump left the Paris Climate Agreement — and not about what is written in small print.



If the elections did not go well, negative emissions could be part of our discussion. A few days after the 2016 election at a meeting in Marrakesh, John Kerry, then foreign minister, published an ambitious report describing how the United States can conduct “deep decarbonization”, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80% or more by 2050. In the report, the main actors are negative emissions and BECCS, as well as two scenarios - one assigns the limited role of BECCS, and the other excludes it altogether. Emily McGlynn, who wrote this part of the report, says that this goal can be achieved without any technologies of negative emissions - it will just be more expensive.



On the question of how to relate to the results of conflicting integrated assessment models, McGlynn sighs. “The most important IPCC predictions are that we are covered if we cannot figure out how to remove CO ₂ from the atmosphere, since we did not act as quickly as we could,” she says. “I think this is the most important.”



Yet, negative emissions are not mentioned in the Paris Agreement or in formal international climate negotiations. As recently pointed outPeters and Göden, no country mentioned BECCS in its official plans to cut emissions to meet the 2 ° C target, and only a dozen of them mentioned carbon extraction and storage. Politicians do not specifically develop complex plans for the implementation of BECCS, with supply chains stretching across continents, and taking into account carbon, carried on for decades. So even if negative emissions of any type turn out to be technically and economically viable, it is difficult to understand how they can be implemented on a global scale in the meager time that remains for us - from 13 to only 3 years, as some scenarios predict.



If you study BECCS and direct air entrapment purely academically, it is especially clear that the speed of their implementation is very limited, and that modellers, engineers, politicians and everyone else may face the need to introduce negative emissions.



In Britain and Europe, people at least do research on negative emissions, even if not as quickly as BECCS entrepreneur Henrik Carlson would like. In his company one employee. Financing "zero" as he says. Still, Carlson is optimistic about the project, which is planned to be carried out together with the Swedish refinery.



Meanwhile, Britain launched the first state program to study negative emissions - albeit at a modest $ 11.5, but this is only the beginning. In international negotiations, negative emissions and BECCS are likely to be widely publicized next fall in a special IPCC report on how the world can reach the 1.5 ° C target. This is evidenced by report editor Joeri Rogheli, who talked with us on Skype in October, when New York had a temperature of 32 ° C - shortly before the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, put an end to the Clean Power Plan.



In America, Trump we burn the carbon budget as if tomorrow does not come at all. The mid-century report presented in Marrakesh is not used - and climate data was recently deleted from the EPA website, and they are only kept in the archives. But from there they can be downloaded if necessary in the future.



And we will do it.



Authors: journalist and literature teacher Abby Rabinovich, who wrote for newspapers such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Buzzfeed and Vice; chemical engineering professor Amanda Simson at Cooper Union College, where she also does renewable energy research.