206 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 8 No. 2 So, after exploring many more complications than I have hinted at here, Smith and colleagues not surprisingly make the following strong recommendations: emission reductions must continue to be the central goal for addressing climate change. … A heavy reliance on NETs in the future, if used as a means to allow continued use of fossil fuels in the present, is extremely risky, as our ability to stabilize the climate at <2°C declines as cumulative emissions increase. A failure of NETs to deliver expected mitigation in the future, due to any combination of biophysical and economic limits examined here, leaves us with no ‘plan B’. … ‘Plan A’ must be to immediately and aggressively reduce GHG emissions.9 Calling NETs ‘a moral hazard par excellence’, Anderson and Peters draw complementary normative conclusions: negative-emission technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather an unjust and highstakes gamble. There is a real risk they will be unable to deliver on the scale of their promise. If the emphasis on equity and risk aversion embodied in the Paris Agreement are to have traction, negative-emission technologies should not form the basis of the mitigation agenda.10 I believe these conclusions, from both Smith and colleagues and from Anderson and Peters, are correct and important as applied to BECCS. I will now lay out more explicitly some of the implicit reasoning behind the normative recommendations in these two important articles by leading scientists. 3 IS BECCS AT SCALE COMPATIBLE WITH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? ‘Extremely risky’ for whom? ‘An unjust and high-stakes gamble’ for whom? Besides suffering from highly uncertain feasibility, as we have just seen, BECCS has completely unacceptable moral costs, as we can see next. These moral costs come at two levels. First, political pressure in subsequent decades to recover from the emissions ‘over-shoot’ produced by half-hearted mitigation occurring now and continuing into the next few years, currently rationalized by the prospect of recovery later using BECCS, is likely to grow. The damage wrought by escalating climate change will become increasingly graphic and increasingly difficult for politicians to brush aside as many do now. Publics in affluent democracies who are now paying no attention to climate change will impatiently demand decisive action. If BECCS has by then become the NET of choice and BECCS requires more land and more water in order to remove carbon at a sufficient scale to reverse enough of the earlier emissions, the public will say that land and water must be found. A political imperative to find more land and more water for BECCS can go wrong in two ways. First, in so far as the land, the water, or both are removed from agricultural production, the prices of foods are likely to rise. This could be avoided if some now unpredictable and tragic reduction in the growth of global population occurred, K Richards, J Allwood, et al., ‘The Importance of Food Demand Management for Climate Mitigation’ (2014) 4 Nature Climate Change 924–9. doi: 10.1038/nclimate2353. Thanks to Pete Smith for this reference. 9. Smith et al. (n 2) at 48–9. 10. Anderson and Peters (n 3) at 183. © 2017 The Author Journal compilation © 2017 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd