Requiring fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up their carbon emissions could help curb dangerous global warming at a relatively affordable cost, a group of scientists from Oxford, the US and the Netherlands have suggested.
To do this, the firms should be required to offset emissions from all fossil fuels extracted or imported into a region, country or bloc by storing the same amount of carbon back underground.
“The technology exists – what has always been lacking is effective policy,” said Myles Allen, a professor of geosystems science at the University of Oxford and one of the scientists behind the proposal. “The failure has been policy, not technology – we know how to do this.”
The approach already exists in other areas such as plastic packaging or electrical goods, where firms are made responsible for the effects of their activities on the surrounding environment. It is also not dissimilar to the water sector, where companies have to invest in...