DEFINITION OF CCS:
capturing the emissions from the combustion of these fossil fuels BEFORE they're released into the atmosphere, and then compressing, liquefying and storing that CO2 in old oil and gas reservoirs.
Its noisiest champions are the big oil and gas companies, with governments providing billions of dollars of R&D investment over the last 20 years.
PREDATORY DELAY: diverting policy-makers’ attention away from urgent, cost-effective and proven decarbonisation strategies by promoting all sorts of long-term, costly and speculative technologies – which just happen to ensure a continuing role for fossil fuels.
n short, this is a clunky, ineffective and costly technology. All those tons of CO2 were already captured and stored underground – in coal, oil and gas deposits – and that’s where it should’ve stayed. It’s also increasingly unnecessary when it comes to abating emissions from power plants. A combination of renewable electricity, efficiency, storage and smart grids will deliver a far greater decarbonisation benefit for the same amount of money.
So what’s going on? CCS is clearly not ‘a climate solution’. But it IS a very significant way of helping today’s oil and gas companies in that it permits them to go on extracting, refining and profiting from hydrocarbon resources that would never see the light of day if we were treating accelerating climate change as a true Emergency.
His new book, ‘They Knew’, is out today. It’s an updated version of that Expert Report – and an utterly devastating indictment of the role of different US Administrations (from Carter to Trump) in aggressively promoting the interests of the fossil fuel industries even as they acknowledged the validity of the science behind accelerating climate change. Decades of deceit, double-dealing and craven subservience to Big Oil.
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