What’s Wrong with Carbon Capture
After lying to us for decades and continuing to expand the extraction, use, and export of fossil fuels when we need to be eliminating them altogether, the oil and gas industry has come up with yet another way to confuse the public and persist in their climate destroying practices–“carbon capture.” It would be great, of course, if we could pull large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, but current proposals to rely on the feeble, inefficient, expensive, existing technology for carbon removal as a key climate strategy, are disastrous and intentionally deceptive.
Forests do an excellent job of removing carbon from the atmosphere and we should preserve and expand them everywhere. On the other hand, current industrial carbon capture methods are “wildly expensive,” use a great deal of energy, and remove only “pathetically small” amounts of carbon. They are no where near to being a meaningful strategy for addressing the climate crisis.
The most rapid way to deal with climate change, and we do need to act rapidly, is to cut emissions by abandoning fossil fuels, increasing renewable energy generation, increasing energy efficiency, and reducing overall energy use. The problem is that the fossil fuel industry is using the idea of industrial carbon capture as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely, in increasing amounts.
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