Systemic failure: Why large-scale biomass carbon capture projects collapse despite climate urgency
Original framing: “A key solution to climate change isn't happening – and that's good” — New Scientist
Peer-reviewed studies (e.g., Smith et al., 2016 in *Nature Climate Change*) show BECCS’s land-use intensity would require 25–46% of global arable land, risking food security and biodiversity loss. Life-cycle analyses reveal BECCS often emits more CO2 than it captures due to deforestation, transport, and processing emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself notes BECCS’s reliance on unproven negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a high-risk strategy for overshooting 1.5°C targets.
The collapse of BECCS is not an anomaly but a symptom of a deeper systemic failure: the reliance on market-based, technocratic 'solutions' that externalize social and ecological costs while entrenching corporate power.
This failure is rooted in colonial land tenure systems, where biomass monocultures displace indigenous communities (e.g., Drax’s sourcing from North Carolina’s Black farming communities), and in neoliberal carbon accounting, which treats CO2 as a tradable commodity rather than a planetary boundary. Historically, such false solutions—from the Green Revolution to carbon offsets—have delayed the necessary transformation of energy, land, and economic systems, as evidenced by the IPCC’s warnings against over-reliance on NETs. The path forward requires dismantling these structures through land restitution, energy democracy, and agroecology, while centering marginalized voices that have long practiced holistic climate stewardship. The BECCS debacle thus becomes a catalyst for reimagining climate action as a process of decolonization, not just decarbonization.