But instead of being released back into the atmosphere in the exhaust, the crops' carbon would be captured and pumped underground.
The idea is to cultivate fast-growing grasses and trees to suck CO 2 out of the atmosphere and then burn them at power plants to generate energy.
One particular technology has quietly risen to prominence-thanks to global models-and it is the one on tap in Bozeman.
Tiny planet tree farm plus#
"We probably need aggressive and immediate mitigation, plus some negative emissions," says Pete Smith, a soil scientist and bioenergy expert at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. Others say we no longer have a choice-that we have dallied too long to meet the Paris targets solely by tightening our belts. "In many ways, we're saying we expect a bit of magic to occur," says Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who instead favors drastic emissions reductions. Few operate at commercial scales today, and some researchers fear they offer policymakers a dangerous excuse to drag their feet on climate action in the hopes that future inventions will clean up the mess. Some NETs amount to giant air-purifying machines, and many remain more fiction than fact. Whether that's doable is another question. "They allow you to emit more CO 2 and take it back at a later date." The technologies would buy time for society to rein in carbon emissions, says Naomi Vaughan, a climate change scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. To limit warming, humanity also needs negative emissions technologies (NETs) that, by the end of the century, would remove more CO 2 from the atmosphere than humans emit. In most model scenarios, simply cutting emissions isn't enough. In the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, researchers surveyed possible road maps for reaching that goal and found something unsettling. In 2015, the Paris climate agreement established a goal of limiting global warming to "well below" 2☌. "We have this new energy economy that's necessary to avoid dangerous climate change, but how is that going to look on the ground?" he asks.
Paul Stoy, an ecologist at MSU, paces in front of whiteboards in a powder blue shirt and jeans as he describes how a landscape already dominated by agriculture could be transformed yet again by a different green revolution: vast plantations of crops, sown to sop up carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the sky. They are here to talk about the equally profound impacts of trying to stop it. They all know that climate change will reshape the region in the coming decades, but that's not what they've come to discuss. Some are scientists, but most are people with some connection to the land: extension agents who work with farmers, and environmentalists representing organizations such as The Nature Conservancy. On a sunny day this past October, three dozen people file into a modest, mint-green classroom at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman to glimpse a vision of the future.
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