Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius may require investing hundreds of trillions of dollars in negative carbon technologies, a bill that will fall to today’s youth to pay, Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen said in a report Monday. “The scenarios assume that young people are going to somehow figure out how to do this, but even with optimistic assumptions about the cost, it’s in the hundreds of trillions of dollars in today’s dollars,” Hansen told reporters during a press call. “It’s not clear that they will have the ability to take such actions.”
If steps are taken now to rapidly phase out the use of fossil fuels worldwide, most of the needed CO2 extraction could be achieved by harnessing natural processes such as reforestation, along with improved agricultural practices, according to the report.
However, if fossil fuel use is not quickly ended, future generations will have to develop technological CO2 extraction processes such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage or direct air capture with estimated costs of $104 trillion to $570 trillion. “Continued high fossil fuel emissions unarguably sentences young people to either a massive, possibly implausible cleanup or growing deleterious climate impacts or both, scenarios that should provide both incentive and obligation for governments to alter energy policies without further delay,” the report says.
Hansen is serving as the guardian in a lawsuit brought by 21 youths against the U.S. government due to inaction on climate change. The group, known under the name “Our Children’s Trust,” alleged in a lawsuit filed in August 2015 that “the Federal Government is violating Plaintiffs’ constitutional and public trust rights by promoting the development and use of fossil fuels. The Complaint explains that, for more than fifty years, the U.S. Government has known that carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution from burning fossil fuels causes global warming and dangerous climate change, and that continuing to burn fossil fuels destabilizes the climate system.”