每天一篇經濟學人
「 再忙也不忘充電 」
-Dec 10th 2019 | 1069 words-
本次選文：Climate change：Reverse gear
「自己的攤子自己收拾。」應對氣候挑戰，各國可以聽一聽幼兒園教的這句話，既公平又可行。
當地時間2日，第二十五屆聯合國氣候變化大會(COP25)在西班牙馬德裡開幕。大會呼籲，要鼓勵碳吸收和儲存技術：停止排放還不夠，必須得把二氧化碳吸出大氣。
2020年將進入巴黎協議的關鍵實施階段。全球均溫已上升了1℃，焦慮升溫，刻不容緩。
Climate change：Reverse gear
Pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be difficult, but it is necessary
Of the wisdom taught in kindergartens, few commandments combine moral balance and practical propriety better than the instruction to clear up your own mess. As with messy toddlers, so with planet-spanning civilisations. The industrial nations which are adding alarming amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere—43.1bn tonnes this year, according to a report released this week—will at some point need to go beyond today’s insufficient efforts to stop. They will need to put the world machine into reverse, and start taking carbon dioxide out. They are nowhere near ready to meet this challenge.
→ commandment: a law given by God戒律，戒條
→ propriety: moral and social behaviour that is considered to be correct and acceptable得體的舉止，有分寸的行為
→ toddler: child who has only recently learnt to walk 學步的兒童；剛學會走路的孩子
→ put……into reverse: 使……出現反轉，使……轉向對立面
→ nowhere near遠不及
Once such efforts might have been unnecessary. In 1992, at the Rio Earth summit, countries committed themselves to avoiding harmful climate change by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, with rich countries helping poorer ones develop without exacerbating the problem. Yet almost every year since Rio has seen higher carbon-dioxide emissions than the year before. A staggering 50% of all the carbon dioxide humankind has put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution was added after 1990. And it is this total stock of carbon that matters. The more there is in the atmosphere, the more the climate will shift—though climate lags behind the carbon-dioxide level, just as water in a pan takes time to warm up when you put it on a fire.
→ staggering: so great, shocking or surprising that it is difficult to believe 令人難以相信的，同義詞：astounding，incredible
The Paris agreement of 2015 commits its signatories to limiting the rise to 2°C. But as António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, told the nearly 200 countries that attended a meeting in Madrid to hammer out further details of the Paris agreement this week, 「our efforts to reach these targets have been utterly inadequate.」
→ signatory: a person, a country or an organization that has signed an official agreement （協議的）籤署者，籤署方，籤署國
→ UN secretary-general 聯合國秘書長
→ hammer out: to discuss a plan, an idea, etc. until everyone agrees or a decision is made 反覆討論出；充分研討出
The world is now 1°C (1.8°F) hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution. Heatwaves once considered freakish are becoming commonplace. Arctic weather has gone haywire. Sea levels are rising as glaciers melt and ice-sheets thin. Coastlines are subjected to more violent storms and to higher storm surges. The chemistry of the oceans is changing. Barring radical attempts to reduce the amount of incoming sunshine through solar geoengineering, a very vexed subject, the world will not begin to cool off until carbon-dioxide levels start to fall.
→ heatwave: a period of unusually hot weather 酷熱期
→ freakish: very strange, unusual or unexpected 怪異的，反常的
→ go haywire:失控
→ barring: prep. except for; unless there is/are 除了；除非
→ vexed: a problem that is difficult to deal with （指問題等）棘手的，傷腦筋的，同義詞:thorny
Considering that the world has yet to get a handle on cutting emissions, focusing on moving to negative emissions—the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—might seem premature. But it is already included in many national plans. Some countries, including Britain, have made commitments to move to 「net zero」 emissions by 2050; this does not mean stopping all emissions for all activities, such as flying and making cement, but taking out as much greenhouse gas as you let loose.
→ net zero 淨零排放
→ let loose:to free sb/sth from whatever holds them/it in place 讓…自由；釋放；放開
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change（IPCC） estimates that meeting the 1.5°C goal will mean capturing and storing hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2100, with a median estimate of 730bn tonnes—roughly 17 times this year’s carbon-dioxide emissions. In terms of designing, planning and building really large amounts of infrastructure, 2050 is not that far away. That is why methods of providing negative emissions need to be developed right now.
→ the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:IPCC聯合國政府間氣候變化專門委員會→ negative emissions:負排放，通俗地說，即把排出去的二氧化碳「捉」回來That raises two problems, one technological, the other psychological. The technological one is that sucking tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year is an enormous undertaking for which the world is not prepared. In principle it is simple to remove carbon dioxide by incorporating it in trees and plants or by capturing it from the flue gas of industrial plants and sequestering it underground. Ingenious new techniques may also be waiting to be discovered. But planting trees on a scale even remotely adequate to the task requires something close to a small continent. And developing the engineering systems to capture large amounts of carbon has been a hard slog, not so much because of scientific difficulties as the lack of incentives (see Briefing).
→ incorporate: to include sth so that it forms a part of sth吸收
→ Sequester: setapart from others 使隔離
→ remotely: to a very slight degree 微弱地；細微地；程度很低地
→ slog: a period of hard work or effort 一段時間的艱苦工作（或努力）
→ not so much…as…與其說是…,不如說是…
The psychological problem is that, even while the capacity to ensure negative emissions languishes underdeveloped, the mere idea that they will one day be possible eats away at the perceived urgency of cutting emissions today. When the 2°C limit was first proposed in the 1990s, it was plausible to imagine that it might be met by emissions cuts alone. The fact that it can still be talked about today is almost entirely thanks to how the models with which climate prognosticators work have been revised to add in the gains from negative emissions. It is a trick that comes perilously close to magical thinking.
→ languish:to become weaker or fail to make progress未能取得進展
→ eat away (at):侵蝕
→ climate prognosticator氣候預報器
→ perilous: very dangerous 危險的；艱險的
This puts policymakers in a bind. It would be reckless not to try to develop the technology for negative emissions. But strict limits need to be kept on the tendency to demand more and more of that technology in future scenarios. As at kindergarten, some discipline is necessary.
→ put…in a bind:使……進退維谷
The first discipline is to keep in mind whose mess this is. One of the easiest routes to negative emissions is to grow plants. And the world’s cheap land tends to be in poor places. Some of these places would welcome investment in reforestation and afforestation, but they would also need to be able to integrate such endeavours into development plans which reflect their people’s needs. The second discipline is for those who talk blithely of 「net zero」. When they do so, they should be bound to say what level of emissions they envisage, and thus how much negative emitting their pledge commits them to. The stricter they are about its use, the less they are in reality accommodating today’s polluters.
→ afforestation: the process of planting areas of land with trees in order to form a forest 植樹造林
→ blithely adv. in a joyous manner 快活地，無憂無慮地
Government capture
The third discipline is that governments need to take steps to make negative emissions practicable at scale. In particular, research and incentives are needed to develop and deploy carboncapture systems for industries, such as cement, that cannot help but produce carbon dioxide. A price on carbon is an essential step if such systems are to be efficient. The trouble is that a price high enough to make capture profitable at this stage in its development would be unfeasibly high. For the time being, therefore, other sticks and carrots will be needed. Governments tend to plead that radical action today is just too hard. And yet those very same governments enthusiastically turn to negative emissions as an easy way to make their climate pledges add up.
→ at scale 大規模的
→ stick and carrot: 軟硬並施
→ plead v. offer as anexcuse or plea 找藉口
世界氣象組織最新報告顯示：2010年至2019年是有記錄以來最熱十，並警告稱，自20世紀80年代以來，每個連續的十年都比前一個十年溫度更高。
全球變暖很重要的原因就是空氣中的二氧化碳太多。2018年全球二氧化碳平均濃度水平相當於工業化前水平的147%，與2017年的水平相比進一步增長，再次創下歷史新高。
要想降低二氧化碳濃度，除了減少碳排放，能不能把空氣中的二氧化碳給「抓」起來或轉化掉？種樹顯然很慢，那科技手段呢？
在2017年，瑞士公司Climeworks聯手愛爾蘭的一家地熱發電廠推出了全球首座「負排放」發電廠。這家發電廠不僅不會排放溫室氣體（零排放），還能神奇地將二氧化碳變成「石頭」。
該項目被稱作CarbFix，科學家將發電廠產生的二氧化碳溶解到水中，然後使用水泵將其輸送到地下700米，當二氧化碳水和地下的玄武巖接觸之後，可以很快形成碳酸鹽礦物。
在這一發現之前，這種礦化過程被認為需要上百年乃至上千年的時間，但CarbFix團隊卻驚奇地發現可以縮短至兩年。且一旦礦化，這些二氧化碳將被封存成千甚至上百萬年。
更妙的是這種玄武巖巖石遍布世界各地，足以抵消未來數十年的化石燃料排放，用於直接空氣採集或其他方面。
專家們之前一直認為直接空氣採集之於任何實際用途都是過分昂貴的，他們仍然傾向於更大範圍的碳採集和存儲。
但Climeworks和它的競爭對手們向我們證明，為滿足商業利益，如果直接空氣採集能被以足夠低的成本實現，那麼針對點排放的碳採集經濟也應該行得通。
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