The Carbon Capture fallacy, illustrated

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Why capturing and burying CO2 won’t solve anything

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We still see articles that claim that CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage, also known as Carbon Sequestration) is the magic bullet that will end global warming.

Just capture all the industrial CO2 and bury it deep in the ground. Nothing else has to change. No need to reduce energy use or switch to non-renewables.  It’s like magic.

And just like magic, the thrill disappears when you learn the secret, as revealed in this comic comment on a recent pitch for CCS made by Oxford professor Myles Allen.

Princesses-and-CSS

This comic originally appeared  Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. New captions were written by climate scientist (and one of my favorite bloggers) Eli Rabbett.

Eli describes CCS as an “engineering problem without real answers, many flaws, a lot of unknowns and enormous costs in money and energy.  Fundamentally it is more of a hail Mary than geoengineering, and unfortunately beloved of those who want no real action.”

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Ian

More from my notebook …