Back Forty: The need to feed the world exposes the fallacy of a leading climate strategy
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By Christopher Ketcham
Despite the warnings from scientists that humanity is on a path to climate catastrophe, greenhouse gas emissions continue to pour into the atmosphere at record rates. The safe level of concentration of carbon dioxide is said to be 350 parts per million; we breached that number in 1988. At the end of July 2024, CO2 levels reached 424 ppm, the highest ever recorded.
There is no sign we will stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon. According to World Energy Data, an educational nonprofit in Australia, fossil fuels were subsidized worldwide at a rate of $13 million per minute in 2022, totaling $7 trillion. Notwithstanding billions of dollars of investment in renewables and massive leaps forward in green-tech efficiencies, the world in 2023 saw record primary energy produced from coal, record electricity generation from coal, record oil and gas production, and sweeping new exploration for oil and gas fields. “High-emitting governments and corporations are not just turning a blind eye,” António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, stated in a 2022 address. “They are adding fuel to the flames … based on their vested interests and historic investments in fossil fuels.” Guterres reiterated: “We are on a fast track to climate disaster … This is not fiction or exaggeration.”
It is with Guterres’ admonishment in mind that sustainability researcher Wim Carton and human ecologist Andreas Malm wrote Overshoot: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, their bracing account of global society’s failure to curb emissions. By the 2020s, they write, “Things were completely, infernally, demonically out of control: the classes ruling the planet seemed bent on burning it as fast as physically possible.”
The highest emitters in fossil-fueled civilization, Carton and Malm argue, have come to a kind of tacit agreement: We will overshoot emissions limits that might have kept temperature rise to 2°C or below simply to avoid any disruption of the industrial capitalist system. Backing this “overshoot ideology,” as the authors term it, is the presumption that deep cuts to emissions in the most profligate countries are politically infeasible, as they would impinge on affluence, growth, and the survival of the global economy.
Yet this zero-sum game need not be the case, according to modelers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world body tasked with shepherding humanity through the valley of the shadow. According to IPCC scenarios, there is a way to overshoot emissions limits but draw down the carbon in the atmosphere after the fact, years from now. This technological miracle cure is called “bioenergy carbon capture and storage,” or BECCS.
BECCS, on its face, is charmingly simple. Plant enormous acreages of genetically modified fast-growing trees — say poplars, willows, birch — and let them absorb CO2. Then, on a yearly basis, as the trees mature, harvest them for burning to produce electricity, as a replacement for coal. On the smokestack of the power plant, however, place a filter that snatches CO2 molecules out of the column of smoke, creating a pure stream of carbon dioxide which can be compressed and stored in sealed underground chambers (in depleted oil and gas fields, for example, or deep aquifers). The process is repeated over and over, for years on end, with trees drawing carbon from the atmosphere, bioenergy from the trees supplying our electricity needs, and the carbon from the burning of the trees whisked away via carbon-capture tech.
A Swedish team of researchers working with the IPCC in the early 2000s was the first to come up with the BECCS model. According to Carton and Malm, the Swedes found that “if BECCS were to happen in the future, then CO2 emissions might well be allowed to continue in the meantime” with “a greater total sum permitted” — that is, BECCS conceivably would give free rein to unrestrained emissions. Carbon capture is a technology imbued with moral hazard; its use incentivizes more burning of fossil fuels. It is also a technology that has yet to mature, with substantial questions remaining as to how it can be scaled up and effectively deployed.
Regardless, BECCS modeling soon became all the rage at the IPCC, with most scenarios for reducing emissions during the 21st century dependent on development of vast tree plantations and countless modified power plants to burn biomass. If overshoot ideology was predicated on what Carton and Malm decry as “intergenerational buck-passing,” with BECCS it was elevated “from blind practice to explicit credo — with the added proviso, of course, that the mess will be efficiently dealt with later, when removal technologies such as BECCS have materialized.”
An obstacle to moving forward with BECCS on the scale IPCC envisions, perhaps an insurmountable one, is food production. According to a growing body of scientific literature that calls BECCS into question, the widespread conversion of land for tree planting may be incompatible with the already daunting project of feeding a world of 8 billion-plus people. There simply isn’t enough land to do both. As Carton explained in an email, “BECCS has massive implications for food production — to the point where that alone makes optimistic BECCS scenarios totally unrealistic.”
Carton was one of the authors of the 2022 Land Gap Report, which investigated the commitments of governments worldwide to use terrestrial carbon dioxide removal, including BECCS, to reduce carbon emissions. The land assumed for tree plantations amounted to more than 1 billion hectares. According to the report, “[O]ver half of this area … requires a land-use change to achieve the projected carbon removal, with the potential to displace food production including sustainable livelihoods for many smallholder farmers.”
Even while emissions-reduction modelers at the IPCC promote BECCS, ecologists who advise the organization have warned that deployment of BECCS could “significantly impact food prices via demand for land and water” and could result in “dispossession and impoverishment of small-holder farmers, food insecurity, food shortages, and social instability.” When the World Wide Fund for Nature looked at BECCS this year, it found even a “medium” deployment scenario envisioned in IPCC models could require up to 0.8 billion hectares of land — more than twice the size of India — “resulting in competition for land with food production or with natural ecosystems.”
Perhaps the most damning report, issued in 2018 from a team of researchers working at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, found that “substantial” use of BECCS “bear[s] the risk of triggering potentially irreversible changes in the Earth system through extensive land-use change, water use, alteration of biogeochemical flows, and compromising biosphere integrity.” BECCS on a grand scale, the Potsdam researchers said, was “difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries” — including the boundaries for food production. Despite all this, BECCS remains on the table as a subject of serious discussion among modelers of our climate future. It has to be part of the discussion, as without it the acceptance of overshoot is a sociopathic response to the climate crisis. In exposing the outrageous falsehoods underpinning overshoot ideology, as the crisis careens out of control, Carton and Malm have done the world a great service. Their book is required reading to understand how the people who are supposed to be planning for a better future are failing us and failing the planet.