Greenwash

Billionaire PM Sunak is in Scotland today, no doubt travelling up in his solar powered helicopter to announce 100 new oil and gas exploration licenses, as well as new carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. An energy minister on the BBC said that this will keep us on track for net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and also keep us out of the clutches of energy rich tyrants, mentioning only Putin (but not bin Salman of course). Around the world, it appears (as of 2020) that 40 million tonnes of carbon were captured in CCS plants—compared to the 38 billion tonnes emitted each year, so 1,000th of the total. So the question for the energy minister, but not asked, should be how much of the new gas and oil carbon emissions in Scotland will be accounted for by CCS? If all the gas went to power stations one could theoretically say most of it if those places had CCS installed. Large oil using industrial complexes may also be able to employ CCS. But a lot of this new oil and gas will be used where it is totally impractical to install CCS. What happens to those carbon emissions? And to date a lot of CCS plants which do exist are economically viable only because the pressurised carbon is used to force more oil out of the ground. But not to worry. The same people who used  to publicly decry climate change models will now be talking up their own models to demonstrate that CCS is the solution. And as the minister implied CCS will help us get every last drop out of the North Sea. Another point not raised this morning was how much will all this cost? The more efficient CCS is, the more energy the process consumes. Hence there will be few CCS plants that are designed to operate at 100% efficiency. 75% might be seen as quite good. At least Labour has said it will not approve new exploration licenses. But I wonder, given Starmer’s U-turns, what level of policy capture and storage that commitment is predicated on.

Addendum: I came across this today, from Inside Climate News. It’s from an article about climate change denial propaganda materials being sent to US schoolchildren:

‘Big Oil’s climate misinformation machine has been operating for decades, despite the industry’s early awareness of the crisis. In 1965, American Petroleum Institute (API) President Frank Ikard gave a speech directly acknowledging that burning fossil fuel would cause climate change,  saying “there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.” In 1978, Exxon Mobil’s own scientists published an internal report confirming that rising carbon emissions would lead to global warming, and by 1980 industry giants were  discussing the “globally catastrophic effects” of temperature rise.’ (emphasis added)

In 1965! I hadn’t seen warnings from that long ago—lots of people reference NASA scientist James Hansen’s evidence to Congress in 1988 as the moment the truth was told. Hansen now expresses “a sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response” (Guardian 19th July 2023). Perhaps there’s some truth in the former part of that statement. There’s 100% truth in the latter.