Science | Environment

01 Dec 09

Mandating fossil fuel producers to sequester (bury) a steadily increasing fraction of the carbon they extract would be a simple, effective, and fair way of sharing out the pain of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to a leading group of climate researchers.

The concept, called SAFE (Sequestered Adequate Fraction of Extracted) carbon, is put forward by scientists from Oxford University and the University of Wyoming in a Commentary article published online in a special issue of Nature Geoscience focusing on carbon sequestration.

The researchers suggest that fossil fuel producers could be mandated to sequester a steadily increasing fraction of the carbon they extract from the ground, with the fraction set to reach 100 per cent before total emissions into the atmosphere exceed an agreed total, with the costs passed on to fossil fuel consumers.

‘The neat thing about SAFE carbon is that is breaks the apparent conflict between short-term economic development and long-term climate protection,’ said Dr Myles Allen of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, an author of the paper with Dr David Frame, of Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and Chuck Mason, of the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Wyoming.

Their work explores the policy implications of research published earlier this year which showed that it is the total amount of carbon released into the atmosphere over all time that principally determines the risk of dangerous climate change, not the rate of emission in any given year.

Dr Allen added: ‘We would no longer be asking a country like India to accept limits on their consumption. Instead, we would be saying that as long as you use SAFE carbon, you can go ahead and consume as much as you like.'

'Of course, unlike a comprehensive emission permit or carbon tax regime, mandatory sequestration would not generate massive new government revenues or provide a mechanism for modifying consumer behaviour, but depending on your political perspective, that might be considered a good thing. We didn’t save the Ozone Layer by rationing deodorant.’

The article, entitled ‘The case for mandatory sequestration’, is published online in this week's Nature Geoscience.