AP PHOTO/CHARLES DHARAPAK
THE CARBON QUANDARY
dioxide is, in fact, staying put?
Who is responsible for monitoring storage sites? How long does
that responsibility last — 30
years? 100 years? Forever? How
will both the safety of gathering,
transporting and burying CO₂ be
monitored and regulated? At the
federal level? By states? And who
is legally and financially liable if
things don’t work out and carbon
dioxide does begin leaking?
These are vital questions — and
they won’t likely receive suitable
answers until industry and society
is forced to grapple with them on
a massive scale. And that simply
won’t happen until the option of
HUFFINGTON
09.15.13
spewing carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere is taken off the table,
either by making it prohibitively
expensive, or flat-out illegal to do
so. And these policies would need
to have some measure of universality to be meaningful and effective. Global warming does not recognize international boundaries.
As things stand, the International Energy Agency has estimated that about 1,500 commercial-scale CCS projects must be
in place over the coming decade if
there is any hope of keeping global
average temperatures from rising
more than 2-degrees Celsius over
pre-industrial averages — a goal
that scientists consider necessary to avoid the worst of what a
warming planet might offer. To-
President
Obama
spoke about
his climate
change
initiatives at
Georgetown
University in
June 2013.