Michael Oppenheimer has long been involved in climate issues. He has worked on them as a researcher in both the academic world and the environmental movement. Since 2002 he has been Professor of Geosciences at Princeton University. He is also a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and as such was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007.‘The Prize drew attention to climate issues, but above all the award went to the many researchers who have long worked on these issues without actually being paid for their efforts,’ Oppenheimer says.
The IPCC’s reports are important documentation for the world’s decision-makers and for the forthcoming climate talks at Copenhagen in December 2009. In his view, our expectations of what the negotiations can achieve should not be too high.
Oppenheimer says: ‘Copenhagen is a step in the right direction and the encouraging thing is that the US has now rejoined. But before this country can sign binding agreements on emission reductions, we must first have domestic legislation that restricts emissions of greenhouse gases, and this kind of legislation is unlikely to be approved by Congress before December or, rather, sometime next year. But I could be wrong.’
Storing carbon dioxide
Before Michael Oppenheimer became a Professor at Princeton University, he spent two decades heading research for the Environmental Defense Fund, an American non-governmental interest organisation.
Experience from the Fund has, he thinks, given him a more realistic idea of how the world beyond academia works, how decisions are taken and how the public perceive them. One of his research interests has therefore come to be the manner in which decisions are taken and how decision-makers justify them.
One topical issue that interests him is how CCS should be managed, in terms of the technology as such but also its presentation. This is why he accepted Mistra’s invitation to investigate the scope for Mistra to set up a research programme concerning CCS.
Untested technology
‘The whole notion of CCS is based on its being a way of cutting CO2 emissions fast. But the technology is relatively untested and the matter needs to be examined in terms of several different aspects,’ Oppenheimer says.
These aspects include not only the opportunities afforded by the technology, but also what it costs in relation to other methods and how using CCS would affect people’s motivation to switch from fossil to sustainable, renewable fuels.
‘Granted, CCS can reduce emissions of CO2 almost immediately. Nevertheless, a range of adverse impacts persist if coal extraction continues at the same time. You have to ask how much the technology costs and whether it’s reliable,’ he says.
Risks and transparency
One of the questions concerning CCS that are harder to investigate is whether CO2 stored in rock chambers or under the seabed will stay in place, or whether it will leak out and in that case how long it will be before the leakage starts.
‘The technology is being tested, but we haven’t used it long enough yet, so we can’t say with certainty whether the CO2 that is stored could, for instance, leak into groundwater — which would be very serious,’ Oppenheimer points out.
The safety aspect is one that must be clarified and publicised before the technology starts to be used on a substantial scale. And the question is what stance public opinion will take towards a technology that cannot be said with certainty to involve no risks.
In Oppenheimer’s opinion CCS is very much a political issue, at national and international level alike.
‘In the USA, above all, but also in the developing countries, safety and transparency concerning the issue are key aspects. When nuclear power was going to be introduced in the US, people didn’t talk much about the risks involved in the technology. Instead, it was launched as a cheap way of generating electricity.’
Informing the public
It is thus extremely important for the matter to be investigated and the public informed. CCS must not be introduced with the same misleading arguments, Oppenheimer says.
One of the key conclusions he has drawn from his work in the environmental movement is that all the facts must be laid on the table.
‘We live in a democracy, and among the most crucial questions in a high-tech society are how we take our decisions and how the public perceive them. This means that the CCS issue has to explained by political scientists, as well as behavioural and natural scientists,’ Michael Oppenheimer says.
