Our Mastodon friend Geoffrey Deihl (aka Sane Thinker @gdeihl) has just posted a stinging recap of #COP28. If you want to learn what happened in Dubai, while avoiding the pro-industry slant of corporate media, this is where you should turn.

I hope you'll read everything Geoff wrote, but I'm going to focus here on just a portion of it, where he addresses the folly of carbon capture...
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Presiding at COP28 was Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). Al Jaber’s goal is to increase ADNOC's crude oil output from 2.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2021 to 5 million by 2027. According to a 2022 report from Oil Change International, ADNOC’s projected growth will lead to more than 2.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions, exceeding the yearly combined emissions of Germany and Japan.

But don’t despair. Fortunately, ADNOC and the world’s largest fossil fuel producers are also investing huge sums of money in carbon capture, you know, those magic pink unicorns sucking carbon and methane out of the sky and farting them underground where it is claimed they will be sequestered forever.

Carbon capture is a cynical smoke screen for Big Oil to continue drilling and burning for as long as possible. The most favored technologies are carbon capture and storage (CCS), which removes carbon dioxide from highly concentrated sources like power plants, and direct air capture (DAC), which attempts to remove CO2 from less concentrated open air.

There are four problems, however.

First, after decades of investment, research, and development, existing carbon capture projects can only remove a *few seconds* of our annual greenhouse gas emissions. Seriously.

Second, these projects are wildly expensive, costing thousands of dollars to remove a mere ton of CO2. Remember, the growth Jaber desires for ADNOC alone is projected to produce 2.7 gigatons of additional carbon dioxide. For perspective on that figure, one gigaton equals one billion tons. The world produced 41.46 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2022.

Third, industrial carbon removal consumes enormous amounts of energy, meaning scaling these projects to effectiveness is ludicrous. Powering them with fossil fuels would add to the folly (as they are forced to clean their own pollution) and powering them with renewable or nuclear energy would be far less beneficial than simply using that energy to directly *eliminate* fossil fuels.

Fourth, storing massive amounts of carbon underground and under oceans is an incredulous assumption. One miscalculation, one leak, one shift of the Earth could result in a catastrophic release of years of greenhouse gasses and a disastrous, near instantaneous rise of global temperatures. Proponents will tell you this is unlikely. Of course they will. There are billions of dollars involved.

Carbon capture is pure greenwashing, a public relations ploy. Along with ADNOC, the Biden administration is investing billions into this spurious technology, as is Europe. In fact, the fading hope of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is in part predicated on the farcical assumption that CSS and DAC will be successful.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/cop-out28

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #CO2 #Emissions #Greenwashing