Twenty two years ago, on this day, October 26, 2001, BECCS put in an early appearance, in a letter to the American publication Science.
“We provided this information in an IIASA interim report, which never received much attention, but laid a foundation for the forthcoming Science letter. However, in retrospect, these early scenarios were the cradle of the types of scenarios we now see underpinning the Paris Climate Agreement. With these scenarios at hand, we had more confidence and submitted our letter to Science, which was published on October 26th, 2001.” https://climatestrategies.org/twenty-years-of-beccs-a-short-retrospection/
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 371ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
The IPCC was putting together a special report on CCS. There was a workshop within it including the stuff about bio energy, carbon capture and storage, which is where you would basically plant trees, burn them and capture, or dump the trees in the deep ocean. In essence.
What I think we can learn from this
BECCS had a long history longer than I thought, and crucially, IIASA is a midwife again. And so these technologies have long histories. It takes a long time to get anything off the ground. And if you do want to get it off the ground or in this case under the ground you could do worse than IIASA.
What happened next
By 2013-14 BECCS was becoming part of the narrative. It has stayed there. There are all sorts of fantasies we will tell ourselves and each other, soothing stories of salvation
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.