BECCSville

Once there was a city called BECCSville, it had a smoking problem. Thousands and thousands of young people, some aged as young as 14 were smoking 20 or 30 cigarettes a day. The numbers of smokers in Beccsville was above the national average, and way above the global average, smoking had got out of control and nobody could see how to slow it down, let alone stop it completely.

Policymakers in Beccsville were scared of the smokers – there were a lot of them, they needed their votes – but they were scared for the smokers too. They knew that if these thousands of young people carried on smoking 20 a day, a large number of them would suffer chronic and even fatal diseases by the time they reached 50. A catastrophe was looming.

The policymakers also knew that the minority, but increasingly vocal, population of non-smokers were also being badly impacted. They were suffering from the effects of passive smoking and, in thinking about the long term, felt it very unfair that the future costs of providing healthcare to all the sick smokers would put an extra burden on them as taxpayers.

A plan was badly needed. There was a desperate need to decrease the number of cigarettes people were smoking, ideally to zero by the year 2030, if not sooner. They only had ten years to play with, the clock was ticking.

The problem was that despite knowing the harm smoking was doing to their long term health, how it was shortening their lives, and the lives of others, people really liked smoking – including many of the policymakers – and they didn’t want to stop.

Tobacco companies also didn’t want them to stop and neither did newsagents, petrol stations and supermarkets who liked the money they were making from selling cigarettes. They were all influential stakeholders in local politics. Any politician being seen to damage the profits of these businesses was taking a big risk.

Policymakers decided to implement some soft measures. They wanted to be seen to be tackling the problem, but not in an overly zealous way. There were education and awareness campaigns about the effects of smoking, a small tax applied to gradually increase the price of cigarettes and the introduction of a few healthier alternatives. But these measures weren’t having much effect, some smokers decreased to 18 a day, but smoking was as popular as ever, if not more. In fact, although smokers were smoking on average a little bit less, more people than ever were taking up smoking. The situation wasn’t improving and nobody was both brave and powerful enough to really up the ante.

Then one day, the Mayor heard about a scientist who had developed an experimental way of removing tar from people’s lungs. Her experiments were showing that this technique could scrub tar off 4% of a patients lungs, making that part of the lung 100% healthy – even if that tar had started to accumulate three decades before! And, even better, the magic scrubbing ingredient was 100% natural and organic, it came from the sap of a tree that was cheap and fast to grow.

The Mayor was very excited by this, he flew to meet the scientist to see the technique for himself. He was very impressed and couldn’t wait to tell his fellow policymakers about the enormous potential of this technique. To him it meant they could go a bit easier on the smokers in the city, he could tell them that most of the damage they were doing to their lungs would one day be reversible. So, instead of needing to reduce their smoking to zero by 2030, they could reduce much more slowly, cutting their 20 a day habit to 19 a day in 2025, 18 a day in 2028 and never less than 12 a day before 2050, at which point lung scrubbing would be universally available and cleaning 70 or 80% of everyone’s lungs!

In his excitement, the Mayor was making quite a few assumptions. In his mind this new technique meant he had a policy for dealing with the smoking problem and soon he wouldn’t have to worry about it, or about the complaints of the protesting non-smokers. The news of the lung scrubber meant that all he would now have to do was to keep the soft measures ticking over (they were lowering smoking rates quickly enough after all) and wait for the lung scrubber to scale up.

The scientist listened and nodded along as the Mayor explained how brilliant her invention was and how it would solve so many problems. When he’d finished, she interjected, she urged him to stay calm and not necessarily assume that this would be a solution to the smoking crisis in his city. To temper his enthusiasm a little, she reminded him that making 4% of a smokers lung healthy again was good, but because 96% of the lung would still be covered in toxic tar, it wasn’t really going to make any difference to someone’s health, it might increase their life expectancy for a week or two, but no more than that.

This didn’t faze the Mayor, he asked her if she could scrub more than 4% of the lung clean? The Scientist said, yes, definitely, she was confident she could scale it up quite a bit more, maybe to 20%. The Mayor asked her if 75% and cured lungs was possible? She paused, then said, ‘yes, theoretically’. The Mayor smiled, that’s what he wanted to hear.

The scientist carried on, she explained that cleaning 75% of thousands and thousands of people’s lungs would require the City to grow and harvest a huge amount of the trees that provide the precious tar scrubbing sap. She also told him that she needed a lot more money to do research into the feasibility of scrubbing so much more of the lungs and what the knock-on impacts for the health of the rest of the body of doing this would be. She also explained that environmentalists, biologists and sociologists needed funds too. They needed to study the ecological and social justice implications of planting the millions of trees that would be needed to supply all the sap.

The Mayor nodded along absentmindedly, he had stopped listening after the scientist had said ‘yes, theoretically.’ He told the scientist that he’d talk to other Mayors and find the money she needed to continue her research and experiments. The scientist was delighted by this prospect, but a little anxious. Had she given the Mayor the impression that it was a question of when, not if, lung scrubbing could be done at the scale they were talking about? And, even if it could be done, she asked herself, should it be done?

But, she pushed those worries aside, she’d waited a long time for this, finally someone with real money was showing real interest. So she bit her tongue and thanked the Mayor for visiting and being so enthusiastic about her research. She couldn’t wait to tell her colleagues.

The Mayor returned to Beccsville, he read through the papers he’d been given by the scientist and they further convinced him that lung scrubbing was the answer. He organised a press conference to tell smokers the good news.

The news went down very well, good news usually does. Even some of the non-smokers praised his commitment to the cause. Only one or two people understood lung-scrubbing well enough to raise the concerns the scientist had played down. ‘It might not scale. It might do more harm than good’ they protested. But these naysayers were easily drowned out. They were taunted for being pessimistic, with the Mayor leading the jibes, and quickly silenced for ‘dooming’ all over everyone’s optimism.

Everyone else was happy. They were ready to believe and wanted to believe. As far as they were concerned there was a technological solution on the horizon and it was so good that they would barely need to change the way they were living. They didn’t question the Mayor, nor the new plan. They were just pleased that this plan left them to keep calm and carry on.

Unsurprisingly, after his announcement, the Mayor’s meetings with the Supermarkets, Tobacco. and Petrol companies started to go well again, they loved the new plan, he could count on their support at the next election.

Over the next few years, smoking slipped down the political agenda, smokers started to cut down a little bit to make their day to day breathing a bit easier, but they weren’t overly concerned, the lung scrubbers – even if they didn’t fully understand what they were or how they worked – were going to keep them safe. They could go on smoking; they were happy.

As years turned into decades and smokers reached their thirties and forties they started to feel the effect that thousands and thousands of cigarettes were having on their bodies. Compared to their non-smoking friends they looked older and more weathered. It was harder to walk and cycle long distances; their coughs started not just to irritate, but to hurt.

Appointments at Beccsville general hospital started to build up, more and more patients complained of chest pains and needed x-rays on their lungs and throats. 2030 passed, then 2040, the Mayor had long since retired and had moved away. The Scientist had moved on too, she’d become mired in the political realities of scaling lung scrubbing up. The social and economic costs of buying up enough land to grow the trees that produced the magical sap turned out to be far higher than anyone had anticipated back in 2020.

As 2040 turned into 2050, the people of Beccsville were still smoking. It had turned from a pleasure into an addiction and they’d smoked too many. With no lung scrubbers in sight, they began to realise they’d been too ready to believe the promises of the Mayor and the scientist, the mythical lung scrubbers hadn’t advanced as they’d said they would. They were angry at the Mayor and at their own naivety, but anger wasn’t a solution now.

Few survived into their 60s. Most smoked their last smokes and perished in their fifties. They were victims of the reckless promises and complacency of their former Mayor. And they were victims of their own wishful thinking.

The naysayers of 2020 didn’t say ‘I told you so’; what solace would that bring anyone? They sighed heavy sighs and mourned what had happened to their city and their friends.

Things could have been so different in Beccsville. Instead of putting blind faith in the promises of shallow politicians and ambitious scientists, they could have chosen a different path. Yes they could have funded research into lung scrubbing, but they could have kept a much closer eye on whether it would scale. They should not have relied on it coming good, instead they should have operated under the assumption that it wouldn’t. Then, rather than only very slowly reducing cigarette consumption, they could have gone all out to eradicate it. That way they could have eliminated the need for lung scrubbing and let the land that would have been set aside for sap producing trees to have been put to another more productive use. They could even have left that land to be reclaimed by nature and wildlife.

Right now we all live in Beccsville. We carry on burning fossil fuels at a frightening speed while assuming that an embryonic technology will scale up fast enough to stave off climate catastrophe. That technology, BECCS*, is relatively new. Theoretically it has enormous potential, but that theory is still very much contested. And BECCS at scale has ecological, political and social challenges that are so complex it is difficult to map out even the simplest of scenarios.

We should research and test BECCS and other negative emissions technologies and hold out hope that they will become viable at scale. But assuming they will emerge in ecologically and ethically palatable forms is a gamble, potentially a huge one. The dice have already been rolled, but it is not too late to action a contingency plan that doesn’t leave us begging for a double six.

*Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage

Read next: History of BECCS by Carbon Brief