(Corporate) Capture and Magical Thinking

There’s been 50 years of CCS development and it’s a proven failure, So what is Labour doing, and where did they find the money? 

There’s a neat symmetry to the Tory financial £22b ‘black hole’ that surprised nobody but the incoming Labour government – and the announcement this week of £22b investment in carbon and capture and storage projects.

“I though there wasn’t any money?” I hear you say. Yeah well, shut up and turn the radiators down.

This neat symmetry, I hear other cynics mutter, is joined by another, the arrival of £4 million – the largest donation ever to Labour – from the Quadrature Climate Foundation which is fully funded by Quadrature Capital, a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands which invests in fossil fuel firms. Could these things possibly be connected?

Who can tell?

But it does seem quite the coincidence that the government’s new climate envoy Rachel Kyte is co-chair of the advisory board of the Quadrature Capital.

Meanwhile Sir Keir has penned the following for The Sun, declaiming those who support Net Zero, like, er, his own party, as ‘finger-wagging extremists’, which is bizarre, to say the least. These are Reform UK talking points.

Labour finding £22b down the back of a sofa has shocked many – but the move has been completely slated by a huge range of environmentalists and climate activists and researchers. Greenpeace said the government was “locking ourselves into second-rate solutions”. But it’s worse than that.

Ketan Joshi, the author of Windfall has written: “Wow – a  £22bn subsidy for carbon capture in the UK. Looking at the latest GCCSI report summarising projects, the comfortable majority of the UK’s capture projects will be used on fossil or biomass power generation, prolonging the lifespan of projects that should be replaced by clean alternatives instead.”

“CCS has the most incredible ratio of [billions and billions of public support] to [failed realisation of projects] of any climate solutions – and honestly possibly any technology – of the past few decades.”

This isn’t just because CCS is expensive and over-complicated. It is also because CCS has a rhetorical purpose as a climate delay tool, and that purpose breaks if CCS actually ends up working. Perpetual failure is a feature, not a bug.”

Rather than ask the big oil companies to clean up their oil fields and take part in Just Transition – instead we are giving them a Get Out of Jail Free – and an opportunity to promote greenwash. We have seen this all across the world, but especially in Australia (‘In Australia, a New Way to Avoid Decommissioning Oil Fields: Call Them Carbon Capture Projects – Converting oil fields that are no longer productive into carbon capture and sequestration projects could turn a cost into a revenue stream for fossil fuel companies in Australia, thanks to climate policies that require no proof of any actual emissions reductions‘):

“What is clear is that CCS now underpins Australia’s climate policy – a faith in the technology that climate scientist and Australian lead author on the IPCC6 Assessment Report Joëlle Gergis describes as “wilful ignorance” about the reality. With four-in-five CCS projects having failed to deliver over the last 30 years and currently-operational facilities having helped only offset 0.1 percent of carbon emissions each year, she says the technology is being treated as a “silver bullet”.

“Governments are expecting CCS to materialise and reduce our emissions, and that to me is a reckless gamble with our future,” Gergis says. “We’re effectively refusing to acknowledge the fact that we do need to stop the burning of fossil fuels. The science tells us that around 60 percent of oil and gas reserves, and 90 percent of coal must remain unextracted if warming is to be limited to 1.5C. If we’re going to continue onto extraction, we’re going to pour more fuel on the fire.”

Lorenzo Sani, an analyst at Carbon Tracker, a climate thinktank, said the government’s decision “repeats the mistakes of the previous administration” by committing new funding without first reassessing its CCS strategy.

Sani said the plan “remains anchored in outdated and overly optimistic [cost] assumptions”, which risk “squandering even more taxpayer money on carbon capture projects that are both high risk and not future proof”.

I mean, that’s a polite way of saying this is Magical Thinking. If we step back this commitment to CCS is part of a wider story that technology will magic away our carbon problems and the narrative that nothing has to change about our society, our economy or our way of life. At this stage, most people know, deep-down that this is a nonsense.

Rachel Reeves has announced that the investment will “reignite Britain’s struggling heavy industry” by funding two major carbon capture and storage (CCS) clusters; one in Teesside in north east England, and a second in north-west England and north Wales.

Today the government announced major funding for two carbon capture sites in Teesside and Merseyside to create thousands of jobs locally, boost growth and accelerate the UK towards our net zero goals. pic.twitter.com/BxjOnFa2Kz

— UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) October 4, 2024

From a Scottish perspective this is being presented as a betrayal given that in 2014 NE Scotland was promised a carbon-capture facility “as part of campaign against independence”.

It is true that we were lied to by politicians in 2014, but then, that’s not a revelation. CCS is an industry scam. It doesn’t matter if its in Teeside or Peterhead. Greenpeaces’s Rex Weyler writes (‘The Great Carbon Capture Scam‘):

“The corporate strategy appears to be: Socialize costs and privatize profits. However, carbon capture added an additional strategy: Socialize risk. Since carbon emissions would accelerate global heating, and since the hydrogen produced is highly explosive, the companies faced severe liability risks. No problem: In Australia, Chevron and Shell convinced the government, the taxpayers, to accept liability for the hazardous Gorgon project. The swindle appears simple: Pretend to help solve a problem, while making the problem worse, socialize the costs and liabilities, and privatize the profits.”

Hey @Keir_Starmer and @Ed_Miliband. Before plunging £22 Billion into unproven, unworkable and undeliverable Carbon Capture and Storage to provide cover for fossil fuel companies to carry on digging and burning. Please watch this pic.twitter.com/yeRsVuoQRt

— Cllr Martin Abrams 🕊️🍉 (@Martin_Abrams) October 4, 2024

How did we get here?

It’s a societal problem to indulge in the fantasy that technology can dissolve all of our ecological problems. It stems from the inability of an entire generation of politicians to tell people the truth and show some leadership. The reality that our economic models of perpetual growth, extractivism and colonialism are responsible for our ecological predicament are unpalatable truths that no-one wants to tell. Instead we are indulged in fantasies to keep us quiet and docile – even as the rampaging reality of climate breakdown knocks at our door, floods our homes and devastates livestock and food systems. There’s only so long that the disconnect between ‘business as usual’ and the sort of corporate capture that CCS represents can be upheld.

Rachel Reeves political choices are starkly exposed here. She claims the “£22bn financial black hole” left by the Tories means she has to keep the two-child benefits cap, freeze pensioners and squeeze public services – and Labour talk of “tough decisions ahead”. But they seem to have found £22bn to give to the fossil fuel industry for a discredited scam.

Rec Weyler again:

“According to Reuters, 26 commercial CCS facilities around the world capture about 40 million tonnes of CO₂ each year. To put that in perspective, the world emits about 36.4-billion tonnes of CO2 each year.

That means that after 50 years of CCS development; after billions of dollars in subsidies; after all the hype, deceits, tax breaks, and guarantees; the oil industry captures about 0.1% of annual CO₂ emissions. The other 99.9 % pollutes the atmosphere and heats Earth. Meanwhile, most of this captured CO₂ is used to produce more oil. Since that first CCS project began in 1972, world CO₂ emissions have almost tripled from 14.68 to 36.4 billion tonnes per year, not exactly the “net zero” we were promised. Carbon capture was a scam from the beginning, and remains so today.”

Think of what £22b could have done.

Climate breakdown isn’t the sort of predicament you can throw money at  and make it go away, but you can mitigate its worst effects and dismantle the fossil fuel industry and replace it with zero-carbon alternatives. They could have devolved a portion of that to Scotland to transition Grangemouth and invest in Burntisland and other shipyards to create industry-hubs for community renewable systems and retrofit thousands of homes. They could have invested in affordable new zero-carbon houses, followed Paris’s example in urban cycling for our cities, helped the mass transition to renewable home energy schemes and insulated the homes of people suffering from fuel poverty. They could have helped create more future-facing resilient local food economies less vulnerable to the coming climate-shocks, and they could have helped invest in Scotland, and Britain’s low-carbon transport network. This is another disastrous missed-opportunity and failure from the new Labour government, our descendants, should they exist, will look back on in dismay.