Debate entry published in Klimamonitor on 28 February 2022 by Claus Ekman, director of the Green Transition Denmark.

On Friday, the Climate Council concluded in their annual status report that the government has still not shown the way towards achieving the 70 percent target. It is certainly not a surprising conclusion when you look back on the past year, but it is an important conclusion that should give extra impetus to the political efforts to find concrete and ambitious climate measures here and now.

The report's 200 pages contain, in line with last year's status report, a large number of other elaborate and significant conclusions and recommendations.

Two points in the report stand out, and they record two fundamental challenges in Danish climate policy. One concerns the state's lack of risk management and the other concerns the danger of a one-sided focus on negative emissions.

Risk management

When it comes to risk, the Climate Council in their report has exactly the right focus on uncertainties and the risks that uncertainties create.

It is a focus that is largely absent from the Danish climate policy, and it is a big problem. There is a reason to look carefully at risks. This is known in the private sector, where a great deal of effort is spent on risk assessment and risk management when multibillion dollar investments are made.

By only looking at the outcome that is considered most likely, you overlook all possible other probable outcomes that can be completely destructive to the strategy. In the private sector, that oversight can mean the company's bankruptcy. In Danish climate policy, this can both mean enormous additional costs and a collapse of our climate efforts.

The problem is illustrated, for example, by counting the word risk in the Climate Council's status report and the government's climate programme, respectively. Both are around 200 pages long, but the Climate Council uses the word risk 428 times, while the government settles for only 35.

The government thus underplays the risks inherent in their policy. Concretely, this challenge is decisive when it comes to the government's major investment in carbon capture and storage, CCS – a technology which has not actually been tested in Denmark yet, but which, according to the government, must account for a significant part of CO₂- the reduction in 2030.

There is an enormous risk here, which is one of the primary reasons why the Climate Council concludes that the path towards the 70 percent is not foreseeable.

Danish climate policy deserves better, so officials should be given a thorough course in risk management. And then all politicians should be aware that the best estimate is not in itself a sufficiently informed basis on which to build climate policy. Risk assessments are required.

Negative emissions

The other important point is that a one-sided focus on so-called negative emissions is an incredibly dangerous way to go. The fundamental question we should ask ourselves in this context is where the carbon atoms move from and to when we produce, consume and make new climate measures.

In the fossil economy, we take the carbon out of the ground, use the stored energy in the carbon compounds and then emit CO₂ into the atmosphere. In a green economy, we ensure a sustainable carbon cycle, where the CO₂, we emit into the atmosphere, is absorbed again at the same rate. In a period where we are not yet on track with the green transformation of the economy, or where we can see that CO₂-the concentration in the atmosphere becomes too high, it can make good sense to bet on negative emissions.

But the problem arises if this becomes a sleeping pad, so that we do not get to make the necessary reductions, which there is a significant risk of in the Danish case.

With CCS based on imported biomass, we can drain natural carbon stocks in foreign forests at a rate where they cannot be naturally replenished. We then send the imported carbon into our underground, and it counts as negative emissions, meaning that we do not need to make a real green transformation of the Danish economy.

The math looks fine in the officials' excel sheet, especially if you just use best estimates for costs and technology development and don't consider the risk, cf. above. The reality can easily become a delay in the necessary global CO₂-reductions that, in addition, undermine the basis of life for many of the species that depend on the natural carbon cycles in the forests.

It is a misfire both in relation to the climate and biodiversity. A mistake that both ministries, experts and politicians choose to turn a blind eye to. Solutions to the challenge include a ban on lifetime-extending CCS on biomass-based power and heating plants, that is, we can capture and store CO₂ from relatively new biomass-fired plants, which it is not realistic to shut down for the time being.

But plants that are due to expire in the coming years must be decommissioned and replaced by real renewable energy. At the same time, we must have taxes on biomass and a greater focus on the global consequences of our national investment in CCS.

The status report contains many other good points and also has angles that we in the Green Transition Denmark would have presented differently. But the two most important points are central to the conclusions and recommendations, and the Climate Council should be very grateful for that.