Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven industry’s focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull the planet back from dangerous levels of warming.
if it were profitable to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we’d do it where it’s a lot more concentrated: on exhaust outlets from power plants, etc
which is not to say carbon capture is a bad idea, but it ain’t gonna be profit-driven unless you force companies to pay for their emissions through offsets or something
The most obvious lever for that is a CO2 emissions price on the same level as the price for its removal. CRT are insanely expensive so an emissions price based on that is nicely arguable as long as they promote CRT and the high emissions price would accelerate the transition immensely.
Tax every single thing based on the CO2 equivalent emissions over its entire lifecycle and use those funds for an equal payout to every citizen to offset the social inequality of such a tax.
The profit-driven industry is the physical source of the problem, but it’s the conservative minded citizens at large who keep voting against good climate regulations who are the real villains here. Yeah, the people at the top have a disproportionate amount of power compared to any one person, but in aggregate, the general public has the ultimate power. If only we could get everyone to act with long-term implications in mind for a single moment…
It’s ironic to watch the self-delusions unfold in countries that have working multi-party voting systems, and a dedicated green party. In self-interest/status quo preservation, voters avoid them like the plague because “they are too extreme”, and rather vote for some other party that puts up a fake eco-friendly front based on some technological pipe dream & shoveling off responsibilities to other countries.
Previous election in Norway (late 2021), the green party were the only ones who went to election with a pledge to stop search&test drilling for new oil fields (extraction from the currently running & newly prospected oil fields will run well into the 2050’s)- they got below 4% of the votes, and no other party wanted to include them in negotiations for forming a government, because they were “too extreme”.
Today, the foreign minister of the government lead the Dubai climate negotiations and pretended to be disappointed that other countries blocked the term “end our dependency on fossil fuel”, and that they had to compromise for something vaguer like “start the transition away from fossil fuel” or something like that…
It’s common for the people who vote these stooges into office to say stuff like “the politicians aren’t doing enough to combat the climate crisis”. The hypocrisy lies thick in the air.
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