Public support for low carbon projects is based on trust in companies developing these — and the regulatory enforcement regime: David Reiner

David Reiner is professor of technology policy at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das, he discusses factors shaping the growth of pro-environment strategies:

Q. What is the core of your research?
A. One of the biggest challenges the world faces now is acting on climate change — this is a huge and pervasive problem with some aspects of it being particularly difficult for technical, social or political reasons. I focus on those parts of the climate problem which are the hardest to resolve.

Q. What shapes public perceptions of Earth’s subsurface — and why is this so important for mitigation strategies?
A. Most people learn subjects like chemistry, physics and math in school. Even among those who study science or engineering at an undergraduate level, few take on geological sciences. This has become a blind spot, even among people considered fairly technically proficient. So, talking about issues related to the sub-surface is one of the more difficult aspects in this context, given the lack of training and understanding. This explains why many people struggle to understand strat-egies like storing carbon underground in terms of depth, safety, implications, etc.

Q. Which factors drive public acceptance of low carbon technologies?
A. Probably because of a lack of adequate knowledge, the public takes their cues on this in other ways — they look, for example, at the level of trust in a developer, company or organisation leading a project. They often think, ‘I don’t know anything technical about this but if it’s an organisation I can trust, I’d be more favourably disposed towards it’. If the company is less trustworthy, known or liked, people are less likely to support its investments — also, if you believe in the regulatory enforcement regime to be accountable and effective, you would back such strategies.

Q. Which negative emissions techno-logies are currently most significant?
A. These strategies themselves have come about as a result of net zero com-mitments made by governments and companies who are now very keen to find ways to meet these. After the proliferation of these assurances, there has been an effort to build methods to achieve this aim at relatively low cost — this has generated
the emphasis on carbon offsets, volun-tary carbon markets, etc. There has been considerable interest in forest offsets — but recently, we’ve started seeing grow-ing and legitimate scepticism about how useful these are in terms of monitoring their carbon storage capacity, duration, etc. One of the key challenges here is that nations have local, national and global timber markets — if I pay someone to pro-tect 100 hectares of forested land in north-ern India, that doesn’t mean someone can’t chop down 1,000 hectares in southern India. So, this often doesn’t accomplish the desired aims. It is a low cost option — but with investigative journalism and scientific studies probing it, a growing number of questions are being raised about it now. There are other nature-based solutions like soil carbon sequestration. Here, farmers change their tillage practices — rather than tilling the soil as actively as normal, they adopt a no-till approach and let carbon stay in the soil for longer. However, it is quite challenging to demonstrate results here. On the other extreme are the engineered removals like direct air cap-ture or bioenergy with carbon capture — these build on carbon capture storage or taking CO2 out of coal or natural gas plant combustions and putting it underground instead of letting it reach the atmosphere as emissions which increase global warming. The idea is to store CO2 in a kind of sponge, with limestone and other formations hold-ing it for thousands of years instead of it dissipating after a short duration.

However, that doesn’t deliver nega-tive emissions. To get there, you need to store CO2 from a carbon-neutral entity like biomass. The alternatives are giant filters which take CO2 out of the air — but the concentration of CO2 pro-duced from, say, a coal plant might be 100 times more than that found in the air we breathe. It takes a great deal of energy to separate that CO2 from the membranes which capture it and then store it permanently.

Some of these ideas, like direct air capture, are appealing but energy-intensive — we now face a tension between solutions which are cheap but more likely to be ephemeral and less effective at lowering emissions over-all while negative emissions strategies have greater certainty but are very expensive and energy-intensive. The hope is improvements in the efficiency and credibility of nature-based solutions or reducing the costs of engineering-based removal strategies.

Q. Why do you write democratisation aids the clean energy transition?
A. This is another strand of work we’ve done in terms of looking at multiple countries and their journey to democrat-isation, which includes measures like elections, freedom of speech and assem-bly, etc., to examine choices made about environmentally-oriented technologies. We found the greater role for green technologies is in democracies — our data sets also showed developed economies opting for more civil nuclear power while emerg-ing economies tend to choose more renew-able energy. Democratisation might have some differential impacts here.

Views expressed are personal