Here Come the Technologists

After researching the Breakthrough folks and their nuclear ambitions (that I wrote about a few weeks ago) I am now seeing a new meme being propagated throughout the media around the necessity of embracing carbon capture and storage technologies as well. A fellow named Josh Reed, director of something called Third Way, advocates both: "Nuclear and carbon capture are critical to reducing co2 emissions" he writes. We wonder where he gets his funding?

In a little piece in the NYTimes just yesterday I read how: "Many experts agree that technologies like carbon capture for coal plants and nuclear power can play a critical role in reducing emissions" Not quite word for word but close.

In her New Yorker article "Going Negative" Elizabeth Kolbert (Sixth Extinction)runs through the dilemmas of CCS and BECC (bioenergy with carbon capture) and ends with the frightening conclusion that "carbon removal is vital without necessarily being viable". But economic growth is never questioned.

And today in the Economist an article states: "In any realistic scenario, emissions cannot be cut fast enough" so we need to deploy "negative emissions" technologies. The great majority of models used by the IPCC do involve "negative emissions" to reach a ( disastrous) goal of 2 degrees warming but this term encompasses everything from improved farming (shallow till) and forestry practices to actual scrubbers that pull CO2 from the air. There is already scrubbing done at the smokestack and most of this CO2 is sold to oil exploration companies to force more fossil fuels from the earth (which pays for the scrubbing) So that's insane bullshit on its face.

The scrubbers that would pull it from the atmosphere (direct air capture) so far only work at small scale and are energy intensive. Plus the storage/sequestration issue, pumping it far underground below shale formations, is still being researched. But what we should be paying attention to is this language around "realistic scenarios". What realistic means is anything that doesn't disrupt economic growth or put the capitalist system in a bad light. The modern way of tackling these problems is to only consider a technology that will also produce profit. In an unrealistic scenario we could decide our children's lives have value and drastically cut emissions and end economic growth. So much for Obama's "de-coupling".

Which is why the rate of emissions has just gone up again after plateauing for a few years. It is why the US pulled out of the Paris Accords and the rest of the world is stalling when it comes to setting verifiable targets. No profit. But once we "overshoot" the carbon budget you can expect investors to start backing nukes and these scrubbers, in a desperate attempt to "do good and do well". Or start breaking out the aerosols.