Huffington Magazine Issue 66 | Page 57

COURTESY OF IEAGHG/GHGT10 THE CARBON QUANDARY centives may provide some marginal nudging, but it remains far, far cheaper to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than to develop, test and nurture the sort of gargantuan captureand-storage systems that might put a real dent in the global warming problem. Yet, according to many energy experts, the costs of not developing technologies like CCS will continue to rise as the climate clock keeps ticking. Solar and wind power, they say, simply cannot be deployed quickly and widely enough to tackle climate change on their own. That leaves just two other possibilities, Herzog suggests: A rapid expansion of nuclear power, which has a low carbon footprint, but a dubious reputation, or rapid deployment of industrial-scale CCS. The Paris-based International Energy Agency has estimated that in the absence of CCS, the cost of addressing climate change may be as much as 70 percent higher by mid-century. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the transnational body charged with assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic dimensions of the HUFFINGTON 09.15.13 global warming problem and its potential solutions, considers CCS an essential part of any effort to de-carbonize the planet’s economies over the next century. Not everyone buys these metrics, and many climate and clean-energy advocates routinely dismiss or downplay the potential role of CCS. They consider it hopelessly expensive, dangerously untested, and, under the rubric of “clean coal,” little more than an empty slogan embraced by an industry angling to preserve its grip on power production — or by lawmakers keen to appear friendly to Howard J. Herzog has been the head of MIT's Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies Program since 1989.