“The curious incident of the (missing) Vacuum Cleaner”  

By Matthew Pye

Oxygen

“… under the gentle reminders of longer, stronger sunbeams, the coniferous trees of the Northern hemisphere forests unsealed their dark buds. In a ritual that has been practised for hundreds of millions of years, they slowly uncurled their baby bright green leaves open to face the sun. With biotechnology that has been perfected through eons of evolutionary practice, this astonishingly beautiful natural tapestry began to suck out billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere with remarkable efficiency. A major organ of the planet had burst back into life again on the upper side of our tilted planet.” 

(Pye, “Plato Tackles Climate Change”, p21). 

Trees are both beautiful and vital for the stability of our Earth systems. 

But let’s not forget the often-overlooked work of phytoplankton. They are wonderfully delicate microscopic organisms that are responsible for the oxygen in every second breath you take. 

Maybe hold your breath for 30 seconds in the next minute, in a silent tribute to them. 

The little stress that you might have experienced in that 30 seconds is important. It is a powerful reminder of the absolutely basic fact about human beings that our funky consciousnesses often forgets: we are biological, chemical machines, that depend on an atmosphere that has got enough oxygen in it. 

Sometimes it is good to go back to basics. And it doesn’t get more basic than this. 

Carbon Dioxide 

All the plants, algae, and cyanobacteria of the world are not just providing us with oxygen, they are also doing another vital job: sequestering (“sucking out and storing”) carbon dioxide. 

Given that we have catapulted the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere to well over 400 ppm, we should therefore be doubly attentive to their fundamental contribution to our lives. Indeed, a little shout-out to the mangroves; they are the superheroes of the plant world for their amazing levels of carbon sequestration. Mangroves could advertise their services to humanity as green vacuum cleaners, or “The Mega Dyson Carbon Suckers” of the planet.  

Negative Emissions

Speaking of vacuum cleaners, the fact that we are so close to 1.5°C and 2°C heating means that some investments have been made in new technologies to sequester more carbon from the atmosphere. Any carbon sucked out of the atmosphere like this might be referred to as “negative emissions”. 

Now, here is what really sucks about all this. 

Whenever you see the media talk about where we are up to with the carbon budget, they all assume a monumental level of negative emissions will take place in the future, with technology that is nowhere near close to existing at the scale required. Prof Kevin Anderson (an advocate of CUTx) has written and spoken extensively about this major distortion in the figures. He is not alone. 

For example, Climeworks’ Orca DACCS plant based in Hellisheiði (Iceland) is the single biggest CO₂ vacuum cleaner in the world, doing about half (58%) of all global carbon sequestration. Their official project website declares a max sequestration potential of 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year. That is 0.000036% of annual emissions. We would need 2.7 million of these to absorb all anthropogenic annual emissions.”

Calculations including carbon capture make the timeframes for action appear much more manageable than they actually are. These figures were introduced into the standard climate models in 2014 ahead of the Paris Agreement, against the advice of eminent climate scientists. They set out misleading hopes, underpinned by a technology known as BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) which, even if it could be implemented at such a large scale, would cause significant biodiversity loss.

Misinformation and the Media

The next time you hear a media channel talk about 1.5°C as if it were remotely possible, or suggest that we are on track for warming that is less than 3°C by the end of the century, you should take a sharp in-take of breath. Not to contribute more to CO₂  levels in the atmosphere, but to provide a sound-effect to the shocking level of misinformation that is being presented. 

Organised Lying 

The CUTx Index does not tolerate such magical thinking. We do not include it in our numbers. The fact that the IPCCC does include these remote and fantastical negative emissions makes it hard for major news corporations to step away from them. 

We are in a tough fight with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called, “organised lying”. 

Back in the 1960s, with the Vietnam war in mind, and with her deep philosophical radar turned on, Arendt wrote, “Organised lying is the relatively recent phenomenon of mass manipulation of fact and opinion as it has become evident in the rewriting of history, in image-making, and in actual government policy”. It is the result of “gigantic interest organisations” and government offices.  

To be continued… 

To find out more about the CUTx Index, and its simple common-sense division of the carbon budget, go to www.cutxpercent.org. Perhaps in future guest articles, I will unravel more big lines of misinformation and underline again the importance of clear, scientifically credible journalism. 

Previous articles in the series:
1 Are we nearly there yet? 
2 The Missing X
3 Australians need to stop breathing

Footnotes and references: 
¹ Fossil remains of the Wattieza tree (found near New York) date back to the Middle Devonian Period, c. 385 million years ago.
² Oxygenic photosynthesis began 2.4bn years ago, resulting in the build-up of free oxygen in the atmosphere. Blankenship R.E., “Early Evolution of Photosynthesis”, Plant Physiology, October 2010.–
³ All the rocks of the lithosphere are another important member of the carbon sucking party. 
⁴ Mangroves store huge amounts of carbon in their highly suberised roots, which are very waxy and do not decompose (suberin is the main substance in cork). 
⁵ Studies have found that Mangroves sequester carbon 2 – 4 times greater than mature tropical forests and contain the highest carbon density of all terrestrial ecosystems (Fatoyinbo et al, 2017)
⁶  Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, “The trouble with negative emissions.” Science 354 (6309), 2016, pp42-50. 
⁷ Sabine Fuss et al., “Betting on negative emissions”, Nature Climate Change 4(10), 2014, pp. 850-853.  
⁸ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/ 
⁹ V Heck, D Gerten, W Lucht, A Popp., “Biomass-based negative emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries”. Nature climate change 8 (2), 151-155, 2018.  
¹⁰  Arendt, H., “Truth and Politics” (1967).  
¹¹  Quoted from Pye, “Arendt Tackles Climate Change” (to be published later in 2024).