A report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change brought renewed media interest in Carbon Capture and Storage this week. Professor Cameron Hepburn warned that the technology “needs to scale up by 100 to 1,000 times, but even then, it’s just 10 per cent of the answer.”
Geoengineering could be crucial in the fight against climate change, but scientists need to learn how to talk to the public about it. This article features the Smith School's State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report and comment from former researcher associate Emily Cox.
Dr Ben Caldecott, Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, called for a global effort to establish a dedicated carbon removal budget to determine which CDR methods are feasible and how much emissions could be removed on a global scale to ensure that carbon removal supply is allocated fairly among countries, companies and financial institutions.
Kaya Axelsson commented on changing climate standards in the Financial Times. "There was a lot of concern from companies about how they were going to meet emission reduction targets", she said, adding that the Science Based Targets initiative has tried to meet some of these concerns.
Achieving net zero means making "every effort to eliminate or reduce the burning of fossil fuels," said Kaya Axelsson in an article about carbon credits.
Bloomberg's Lara Williams referenced an Oxford Smith School policy brief in this article on Labour's impending, and controversial, oilfield decision. The policy brief recommended six climate tests to align future production with net zero goals, including alignment with the Paris Agreement and UK net zero targets, clean energy investment requirements, and mandatory carbon storage.
Injy Johnstone, who closely followed the Article 6 negotiations on carbon markets at COP29, explains exactly what was negotiated, the outcomes, and what still remains to be done.
Oxfordshire County Council has become the first local authority in the UK to extend its current carbon neutral target, and additionally invest in carbon dioxide removal. The Council has taken specialist advice on its strategy from Prof Steve Smith, Arnell Associate Professor of Greenhouse Gas Removal at the Smith School.
Dr Steve Smith, researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, has been appointed Arnell Associate Professor of Greenhouse Gas Removal.