Carbon capture and storage technology is about as effective as stopping a flood with a bucket.
'Hoping someone invents a way to fix this' is now a key part of European climate goals. So that's encouraging.
I said I’ll reply later when I’m home. I’m in the middle of something right now. We’ll see each other in the meeting anyway.
Are you joining the meeting?? Here’s the link. Of course, I forgot.
Yet again I’ve not followed through, yet again left people hanging, and why? Burnout? A bad case of Gen Z attention deficit? We are, according to the news, the generation of quiet quitters and time thieves. Some say we’re reclaiming our time, some say we’re lazy.
Could be both. People usually are more than one thing.
I’m very good at telling my friends to be OK with being imperfect. Last week I spoke to about the way we internalise our obsession with capitalist productivity, seeing ourselves as resources to be exhausted.
But just like you, I think I am different, special, on some subconscious level I believe I deserve to be held to higher standards: Everyone else can mess up. Not me. In a paradoxical way at once self-punishing and self-aggrandizing. This doesn’t apply to me.
So how confronting that I mess up constantly.
They diagnosed me with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) a month ago. I sort of saw it coming. The complete inability to plan ahead or visualise next week. The way I have been triple-booking events my whole life. The neverending cycle between tornado-level energy and days stuck on the sofa, with little in-between.
I live in the now - more than most. I can’t visualise next week, let alone prepare for something a month from now. In that way I have a lot in common with politicians.
Anyway, I didn’t go to the meeting. Actually I resigned altogether. Corporations pour oil into the ocean and tell people to feel bad about their carbon footprint. But it is not other people’s responsibility to offset the problems they didn’t cause. In the same way, nobody else should be picking up the slack for me.
It’s also a waste of energy and resources to will myself to be different, more focused. I’ve had plenty of time to try. Time blocking, to-do lists, phone reminders. But trying to allocate my attention is like trying to capture emissions. It’s not likely to work.
Me and the 9-5 office life were never really going to work out.
If I can’t offset or undo my own wiring, I must adapt.
We have written extensively about the need to adapt to a new way of living, working and organising societies in the green transition. But this only works if we’re able to imagine a different future and a different way of thinking about the world. We must jump out of our comfort zone.
Well, me and my impulsive brain have never had any issue with that. I once agreed to make a podcast for the UN without having any clue how podcasts work. Another time, I got on a 36-hour bus to Budapest on a whim.
In the endless search to fix internal restlessness and external dissonance between what we need and what we do, I have ended up making far more changes than I ever thought I was capable of. Went vegan, went flight-free, moved to a foreign country, became a freelancer. Started a newsletter.
A dose of this impulsivity and curiosity to take that leap, to seek out the shock of the new, goes a long way in an anxiety-paralysed society.
Neurodiversity is not a quirk, it’s not a TikTok trend or a superpower. It’s not a problem either. It simply is and making space for that variety and diversity is another element of creating a world that works for us. Aren’t you bored of the status quo yet?
Climate Drinks are back! And they’re getting weirder.
Save the date for the 10th April in Brussels for another round of the climate drinks - and this time, it’s the weirdest networking you’ll ever do.
(And no, the networking is not obligatory).
Follow our socials for more details soon.
What’s Going On?
The UN is investigating the environmental impact of the war in Gaza. It’s not good.
Related: The global oil industry is funding Israel’s war on Gaza.Artificial Intelligence risks spreading climate disinformation, faster.
Related: Oil industry has sought to block state backing for green tech since 1960s.Climate activists across Europe block access to North Sea oil infrastructure.
Related: Greenpeace could be thrown out of UN deep-sea mining body for protesting mining exploration.
Major banks are funding expansion of unsustainable global meat and dairy production.
Related: Scientists call out the UN for omitting meat reduction from climate plans.Seven times size of Manhattan: the African tree-planting project making a difference.
Related: European Parliament approves law requiring solar installations on buildings.
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Focus On… Carbon Capture and Storage
Cass Hebron talks to forest campaigner Martin Pigeon about the science behind these technological promises.
Who are you and what is Fern?
Fern is an NGO based in Brussels and the UK, that works to protect forests and the rights of people who depend on them, through EU legislation.
I’ve been a forest & climate campaigner with Fern for the past three years, working to limit EU renewable energy incentives for burning wood in the energy sector, aka biomass. By driving additional logging and wood burning, this absurd policy worsens the climate and biodiversity crisis while claiming to fight climate change.
What is carbon capture and storage?
First a reality check: according to the IEA, in 2023 global energy-related CO2 emissions reached “a new record high of 37.4 billion gigatonnes.” Last year human societies emitted more CO2 than any other year in history, 8 years after the Paris Agreement. And almost every month now brings a new heat record.
At the heart of this crisis are difficult policy decisions that need to be taken, and have not been. The hope that technology could provide an escape route is one reason we are in such a dire situation today.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of these technology promises. It’s an old technology, developed in the 1970s by the oil industry. It consists of capturing the CO2 emitted by big industrial sites (such as gas refineries) through chemical processes and injecting it underground for long-term storage.
But it’s mostly been used for “enhanced oil recovery” - injecting compressed CO2 in mature oil and gas fields to increase oil extraction. In public policy, the fossil fuel industry has been pushing the concept for at least three decades, arguing that this would be a way to produce “low carbon fossil fuels” and that CCS technologies would be needed to reach the EU’s and international climate goals.
Leaked internal memos from the oil industry describe CCS as enabling the “full use of fossil fuels across the energy transition and beyond”. But despite lots of governmental funding available, CCS projects never really took off and mostly failed to meet their own expectations.
Technology that achieves famous “negative emissions” does not yet exist in the real world, apart perhaps from some small pilot projects. To my knowledge none of the projects developed so far are storing more carbon than they emit on a project lifecycle analysis basis.
Two types of carbon capture technologies:
Direct air capture (DAC or DACCS). This uses huge amounts of energy: large volumes of air need to be moved to capture meaningful amounts, and then a lot of heat is also needed to separate the captured CO2 from the chemicals used to capture it.
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (“Bio-CCS” or BECCS): burning plants (in particular trees), producing energy, capturing the resulting CO2 and storing it underground.
Then there is the scale problem. Scientists have been repeatedly calling for strong environmental boundaries for carbon dioxide removal (CRD) projects.
“Many governments and industries are relying on future large-scale, land-based carbon dioxide removal to avoid making necessary steep greenhouse gas emission cuts today. Not only does this risk locking us into a high overshoot above 1.5°C, but it will also increase biodiversity loss... CDR deployments also pose major economic, technological, and social feasibility challenges; threaten food security and human rights; and risk overstepping multiple planetary boundaries, with potentially irreversible consequences”.
Science Journal, 2024
Is the EU currently capturing any of its carbon?
Today, all the carbon capture happening in the EU is done by ecosystems and oceans. The EU has policies that both reward the extraction of natural resources and aim at protecting them, but the incentives to extract remain much stronger than the incentives to protect.
A brilliant 2019 investigation on the EU’s agricultural policy by the New York Times demonstrated that EU farm subsidies were rewarding pollution and the destruction of nature.
EU renewable energy legislation rewards energy companies burning wood - €15 billion in 2021- but Member States hardly face any penalty when their forests are so logged that their land carbon sinks turn into net emitters, which recently happened in Finland, Estonia and Germany.
The EU recently announced its updated 2040 goals which rely on carbon removal and storage to achieve them. What role do you think CCS should play in achieving the goals?
For CCS technology to play any role in meeting EU climate goals, it should first be able to achieve negative emissions – and this may never happen on a meaningful scale.
My big concern is that too few people seem to know that about 30% of the excess carbon in the air does not come from fossil fuels but past land use changes and deforestation (I only learned this when arriving at Fern). Future nature restoration can only “compensate”for the greenhouse gas emissions from past nature destruction, not the emissions of fossil fuels.
Studies by the IEA indicate that CCS projects so far are failing to deliver. Why are they being promoted so widely?
There are many efforts in the policy world to create a business case for CCS projects, not least the recent draft EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF). It is important, but the draft is really bad (the Commission proposal was even worse).
We’re calling for its rejection, together with most NGOs active on the file – even the carbon offsets industry is concerned about the remaining loopholes (they badly need a credibility boost for their deceptive business after another year going from scandal to scandal). No deal is better than a bad deal.
Apart from policy preferences, a big reason for the continued promotion of CCS projects is that too much has been gambled on it already in climate policy. So more public money is being thrown at the technology promise - the UK government is now considering betting £40 billion on this - for it to solve the policy problem of how to organise a fast and just transition away from fossil fuels for us all to have a liveable future.
Is it possible to reach the EU climate targets without relying on new technology?
I would first prefer to be sure that trying to reach these targets does not cause something worse. The EU 2040 draft targets rely on a 30% increase of bioenergy use because biomass emissions are still counted as zero in the energy sector.
Wood burning still counts for about 40% of the EU’s “renewable” energy supply. Wood combustion’s direct CO2 emissions are higher than most fossil fuels’ and the EU’s land sink has been falling for a decade as a result of overlogging and the climate and biodiversity crisis.
EU targets are public policy and can be changed; laws of physics are a reality we can’t compromise with. I would prefer EU climate targets that do not rely on an accounting that fails to include biomass emissions and consumption emissions (those we import). I prefer to rely on forests’ proven track record than on promises that endanger them even more and need billions of taxpayers’ money to be pursued with no guarantee of success.
The situation is bad but we don’t have to make it worse – we should choose a happier, healthier way to organise our societies. It’s like quitting an addiction. Leaving an addiction to burn stuff can be hard, but you really benefit once you’ve managed!
So Now What Do I Do?
LEARN MORE
Join Clean Creatives for a webinar on the long (long) history of fossil fuel misinformation about climate change. 26th March at 17h CET.
Hear some Global South perspectives on how to move to an economy beyond growth. Free online talk 28th March.
TRY SOMETHING NEW
We’re looking for a volunteer! If you’re enthusiastic about community-building and climate action, drop us a line at wearethegreenfix@gmail.com to chat. (Thanks to those who have emailed already - we will reply soon).
Join Generation Climate Europe for a discussion on how to make green urban mobility more accessible for everyone. 25th March at 15h CET.
European Forum Alpbach is looking for young people to join a series of discussions on the theme of the ‘Moment of Truth.’ Scholarship available. Deadline 28 March.
CHANGE THE SYSTEM
The Resilience Project is looking for mentors over 35 years old for younger changemakers. Apply by 25th March.
Apply to take part in the International Youth Conference on Biodiversity, Yokohama, Japan on 25-31 August. Deadline 30 March.
WECF have greated a free online toolkit on the EU elections for young people who want to be involved but don’t know where to start.
By the way…
The Green Fix is now offering low-cost sponsored slots on the newsletter. Book your slot by emailing wearethegreenfix@gmail.com.
Stay in the loop
You can follow us on Twitter @TheGreenFix, Instagram @thegreenfix_ and LinkedIn. Connect with Cass on Instagram @cass.hebron and LinkedIn Cass J Hebron.
felt ALL of this