Breaking the carbon cycle

‘This century will witness a major transformation in how energy is acquired, stored, and utilized globally,’ said three of chemistry’s big hitters – Richard Eisenberg, Harry Gray and George Crabtree – in a report of a symposium held by the National Academy of Sciences last year on decarbonising the energy landscape.¹ But that’s the optimistic view; one could add: ‘because if it does not, human civilization might crumble’.

The authors don’t hold back on the grim realities. ‘To avoid the worst consequences of climate change, global carbon emissions must peak by 2020 to 2030, decline to zero by 2050, and become negative (by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere) beyond 2050,’ they report from a 2018 analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But current trends don’t look good: although carbon emissions stayed more or less flat from 2014 to 2016, they rose by 2% in 2017 and by 2.7% in 2018. We can’t blame all of this on President Donald Trump’s climate-change denialist policies, although those have hardly helped.