The bloc’s scientific advisory board on climate change wants the EU to scale up carbon removals.
BRUSSELS — You made this mess. You clean it up.
That’s how the European Union should treat companies polluting the atmosphere with planet-warming greenhouse gases, the bloc’s climate science advisers say.
On Friday, the EU’s scientific advisory board on climate change issued a blockbuster report focused on scaling up carbon removals — an essential but underdeveloped element to curbing global warming.
Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is necessary to compensate for emissions that can’t be avoided, as well as to lower global temperatures in the second half of the 21st century, scientists say.
But reliable, CO2-hoovering technologies haven’t yet been proven at scale, and the required research and deployment requires tons of money. Meanwhile, Europe’s forests and soils have a dwindling and only temporary capacity to absorb carbon dioxide.
In Friday’s report, the advisory board — an independent consortium of senior researchers that gives the EU climate policy guidance — issued nine recommendations for tackling those problems.
One proposal is to force big polluters to help clean up the CO2 they’ve emitted to boost the takeup and financing of carbon removal tech — similar to new rules the EU agreed to this week on textile waste, which require fashion brands to pay a fee to finance waste collection.
The board doesn’t prescribe specific options, however. “We leave it open if this is something which could be part of a voluntary contract or take the form of a heavy tax on the fossil fuel capital stock,” the board’s director, Ottmar Edenhofer, told POLITICO.
Ideas include getting companies to pay a deposit they get back once they’ve removed a certain amount of CO2, a “clean-up certificate” integrated into the EU carbon market, or debt-like financial obligations reflected on a company’s balance sheet.
In general, Edenhofer said, the idea is that the EU “could say to an oil refinery: ‘You are allowed to emit one ton of CO2 today, but you have to remove it later.’ We could even say it’s not just one ton, but you have to remove two tons.”
Nature vs. technology
The board’s recommendations have proven influential in the past. Its report suggesting the EU set a 2040 emissions-cutting target of at least 90 percent became the de facto baseline for the new climate milestone, pushing the European Commission to adopt the same goal.
But it’s now high time for the EU to look past climate neutrality in 2050, Edenhofer said: “What we’re saying is that net-zero is not the focal point. It should be net-negative.”
Scientists have found that even in the most optimistic scenario, the world will warm beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — a threshold after which catastrophic, irreversible climatic changes such as the disappearance of ice sheets become more likely.
Removing carbon dioxide could return temperatures to just below the 1.5C barrier. While it’s impossible to reverse global warming, doing so would put the planet in safer climatic conditions — meaning fewer disasters, less intense heat waves and a far lower chance of triggering cataclysmic changes.
European lawmakers should therefore set specific CO2 removal targets, the board’s report says — with one important condition: The EU must distinguish between the two categories of removals and set separate goals for each.
Carbon can be withdrawn from the atmosphere using natural methods — for example, planting trees to boost forests’ ability to sequester CO2 — or technological solutions.
For now, the EU relies on nature, as carbon-removing tech is still in its infancy.
But CO2 stored in trees or soils only stays there for a few decades — not exactly a long-term solution — and natural absorption capacity has declined by a third between 2013 and 2022 due to overexploitation and climate-fueled disasters such as wildfires.
In contrast, technology allows for long-term storage — for example by injecting CO2 into rocks deep underground, where it stays for millennia.
Yet these methods — which include directly sucking carbon from the air — haven’t been tested at the scale required. (The report describes the current efforts as “minuscule.”) Pipelines to transport the captured CO2 and sites to store it aren’t available yet, either.
The EU urgently needs to boost research and deployment of these technologies, the board said. It argued that setting separate, legally binding targets for technological and nature-based removals would send investors a major signal.
Policy debates
The report adopts the EU’s newfound obsession with economic “competitiveness” to make its case, linking their advice to Europe’s ambitions to become a clean-technology leader.
But it’s not all about industry. The EU must take urgent steps to reverse its natural carbon absorption capacity decline — boosting nature restoration efforts and aligning the EU’s agricultural policies with its climate targets.
The bloc’s new Nature Restoration Law and green standards for farmers triggered tractor protests and a political backlash against environmental legislation last year, prompting the Commission to weaken sustainable agriculture requirements.
Scientists say that boosting nature’s carbon removal capacity should benefit farmers, too, giving them a chance to earn additional income by sequestering CO2 on their land. But natural and technological removals must be kept separate, they insist.
A new carbon market could put a price on emissions and removals in the land and agriculture sector. Meanwhile, permanent technological removals should be gradually integrated into the EU’s existing carbon market covering power plants and heavy industry.
Some additional regulations will also be required — including a thorough reporting framework to ensure removals placed on the market are really gone from the atmosphere, the scientists say.
Although even the world’s top climate science body considers carbon removals essential to fighting global warming, climate campaigners have raised concerns that boosting carbon removals could deter companies and governments from reducing emissions.
The report stresses that carbon removals cannot replace deep, fast cuts in the EU’s CO2 emissions. Removals should only be used to compensate for emissions that are difficult or impossible to eliminate, such as in aviation or agriculture, and to reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
Yet there’s no specific definition of emissions considered hard to avoid.
Finally, there’s the funding question. And the scientists seem convinced that joint EU debt must play a role.
The bloc should consider extending its pandemic recovery fund, financed by joint borrowing, “beyond 2026 to ensure continued support for long-term removal projects,” they write.
Given the controversy surrounding common debt, the idea of getting big polluters to pay for removals might be more attractive to EU governments — though the report cautions that even with such measures, “additional funding mechanisms will be required.”
