The Big Money Behind Carbon Capture and Storage

Jay OwenReforming Global Finance, Resource Efficiency, Latest Headlines

“Sad to see $12 billion in the US Congress bi-partisan infrastructure bill for mechanical CO2 capture and wasteful ,unproven storage ideas!  This $12 billion could be re-deployed in so many more powerful way of actual decarbonizing including in the food, and renewable resources and circular economy sectors.

~Hazel Henderson, Editor“

 

The bipartisan infrastructure legislation that passed the Senate last week includes more than $12 billion in direct support for systems that pull carbon dioxide out of smokestacks and other technologies that suck the greenhouse gas directly from the air before storing it underground. Energy companies, electrical utilities and other industrial sectors have been quietly pushing through a suite of policies that have fast-tracked environmental reviews and allocated billions in federal funding for research and development of carbon capture and storage, which stands to yield tens of billions of dollars for corporate polluters, but may do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many environmental advocates argue that the massive government support would be better spent on proven climate solutions like wind and solar energy, which receive far less in direct funding under the infrastructure bill.

Also this week, research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences looked at eight climate tipping points, including runaway permafrost thaw, extensive dieback of the Amazon rainforest and the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet. They found that if all those systems tipped irreversibly into a new state, it would at the very least increase the expected price of future climate impacts by 25 percent, as measured by the social cost of carbon.