Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/17/2014
AUSTIN, Texas – Unique considerations exist when exploring the potential deployment of carbon capture and storage in the world’s developing nations, according to a panel of global experts participating in a discussion at the International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Technologies, held here last week. Because of the global nature of climate change, decisions about how to best combat it must be measured against other imminent needs of the world’s poorer populations, Mark Budolfson, a researcher with Stanford University explained. “When confronted with global challenges, the policy maker must also consider how to make tradeoffs between the interests of her own citizens and on the other hand the interests of other people in the world,” he said.
Budolfson outlined the ethical question posed by deploying a costly technology like CCS in areas of the world with more immediate issues to address. “Arguably the most important value of all is meeting people’s basic needs for food, energy, water and a healthy environment. … Tradeoffs must sometimes be made between, for example, satisfying energy needs and, on the other hand, satisfying entitlements to clean water and a healthy environment,” he said, also noting that “when we impose policies on people, especially on those who are desperately poor and powerless, we want to be able to look them in the eye, ideally, and explain how our policies are truly justifiable to them and how we are truly treating them as people with the same fundamental worth as ourselves, especially when our policies are not the most effective way of alleviating their desperate poverty.”
Challenges exist in deploying CCS in some areas of the world that those in developed countries would never think to consider, said Polly Modiko of the South African Center for CCS. As an example, Modiko cited various unique characteristics of South Africa that need to be addressed to deploy the technology there, such as the fact that South Africa has 11 official languages, making community outreach more complicated. Also, the areas which geologically appear most ideal for storage are located in rural areas where access to electricity for residents is rare. “How do I go to the people in the rural areas that don’t have access to electricity, don’t have access to potable water, and tell them that we want to inject CO2 in their areas because [of] the emissions … in the metropoles?” Modiko said.
A lack of access to energy is a large factor of the ethical dilemma surrounding the deployment of CCS in developing nations, according to the panel. “Today there are still … about 1.2 billion people who lack access to electricity at all. I think the reality is far worse than that,” Sally Benson, a professor at Stanford University said. “From a more tactical point of view, I think that there are clear benefits to these projects to the society. I think that there should be local benefits to people and that somebody needs to make sure that those local benefits are delivered, be it access to electricity – it seems incredibly unfair if you’re putting up a big CCS project and the community still doesn’t have electricity – so I think that making commitments and following through would be a way to make this a repeatable process for those projects it makes sense to pursue,” Benson said.
