Oil companies lobbied for - and received in the Inflation Reduction Act - better subsidies for carbon capture and storage while overstating its efficacy and selling captured CO2 for new oil extraction
Carbon capture is something to maybe possibly start looking into after reducing emissions to next to 0.
Doing carbon capture while there’s still a coal power plant burning is bailing water while someone’s still drilling new holes in the side of the boat. Stop the dude with the drill first.
Given that the CO2 is being used to extract oil from otherwise hard-to-reach places, it’s more like using the water in the boat as a pressure jet to punch new holes in the hull. It’s funny (as in “ha ha, now face the wall” funny) that oil companies have been able to get positive PR out of this.
Oh god yeah I wasn’t even thinking about that, I was just thinking about the concept broadly in theory. The reality of how it’s used makes it even worse.
Hypothetically if we can somehow get to net zero emissions and have scalable carbon capture, I think it will have taken long enough that geoengineering like stratospheric aerosol injection will be necessary to alleviate the worst of the warming from the extra gigatons of greenhouse gasses we’ve already put into and will have added to the atmosphere to get to net zero in the first place. Without some kind of artificial cooling effect and something to stabilize rainfall patterns, some degree of industrial agriculture collapse and famine seem inevitable to me down the road.
Carbon capture is about as effective as blowing to stop a hurricane. I am reasonably sure that we will keep fucking up like this until it’s too late.
I know adventurism is ultimately bad, but like. Just walking up to an oil executive as he’s dining on steak, then just shooting him in the head, will be more effective at reducing climate change for even just 24 hours than these make believe market incentives.
