Deploy Betteridge's Law Of Headlines To Describe "Carbon Capture"? Hey, Why Not?

Last edited Mon Sep 18, 2023, 09:11 AM - Edit history (1)

Sorry, forgot to include the inspiration for invoking Betteridge's Law Of Headlines:

The world’s biggest carbon capture facility is being built in Texas. Will it work?

Rising out of the arid scrubland of western Texas is the world’s largest project yet to remove excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, a quest that has been lauded as essential to help avert climate catastrophe. The creators of the project have now been awarded funding from the Biden administration, even as critics attack the technology as a fossil fuel industry-backed distraction.

Proponents of setting up enormous fans to gulp in huge amounts of air and remove planet-heating carbon from it, a process called direct air capture (DAC), are basking in their greatest breakthroughs yet in the US. In June, ceremonial shovels were plunged into the dirt in Ector county, Texas, to mark the start of a $1bn project called Stratos, which aims to remove 500,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere a year once fully operational in 2025.

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“We are going to pay an oil company to pump crap out of the ground and then pay them to put some back in – it’s plainly obvious this isn’t a climate solution,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which works on responses to the climate emergency. “It’s just so silly. If you just buried dollar bills it would make more sense. This has just given big oil decades of talking points to promote a fake solution so they don’t have to stop polluting today; it’s a huge greenwashing exercise and we are falling for it.”

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Human activity, primarily through burning coal, oil and gas, produces about 36bn tons of CO2 emissions a year. Given how emissions have grown in recent years despite urgent warnings of an unfolding climate crisis, there is little chance of the rapid, massive cuts needed – by as much as half this decade – to avoid severely escalating heatwaves, floods, drought and other impacts. This shortfall, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), means almost every plausible scenario to avoid 2C of warming above pre-industrial times, and certainly 1.5C warming, which countries have agreed to, involves removing large amounts of CO2 directly from the atmosphere. Up to 10bn tons of CO2, which is double the US’s total annual emissions, may have to be removed each year by 2050 just to secure a chance of hitting these goals and get to net zero emissions.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/12/carbon-capture-texas-worlds-biggest-will-it-work