Allowing the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere to reach a level so high that it must be removed with negative carbon technologies in order to limit global temperature rise is a moral hazard, two researchers said in an article published Friday in the journal Science. If nations continue to emit carbon at today’s high volumes, betting on the eventual existence of viable negative carbon technologies, and those systems do not materialize, the results will be “felt most by low-emitting communities that are geographically and financially vulnerable to a rapidly changing climate,” according to Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo.
In the Paris Agreement on climate change, the world’s nations agreed to work to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius. In order to do that, only a limited amount of carbon can be emitted going forward. “The appropriateness or otherwise of relying, in significant part, on negative-emission technologies to realize the Paris commitments is an issue of risk. However, the distribution of this risk is highly inequitable,” the paper says.