Carbon Capture Sucks the Big One

Everyone loses with carbon capture.

First, you and me Joe Taxpayer lose because Stephen Harper just announced he's going to plough millions into this speculative technology (for sucking CO2 out of fossil combustion) without bothering to give any economic value to carbon emissions. Duh. Without cap-and-trade or a national carbon tax, carbon emissions are still free, so how can carbon capture move from being an interesting lab experiment to a scaled-up, economically viable technology? It won't (see economist Mark Jaccard on this point). So research divisions of the fossil fuel companies, floating on fat public grants, win big, and... uh... you lose.

Meanwhile green groups like Greenpeace rail against carbon capture as the 'new nuclear debacle' -- by which they mean a pointless exercise in expensive technology when efficiency and renewables would do a better job. They happen to be right -- a coal-fired power plant outfitted with carbon capture would, for example, use up 30 to 40 percent of its energy output just to run the damn carbon capture process, so this technology actually has the potential to pointlessly increase carbon emissions. But.. I can't help thinking that a) Harper and his friends in Alberta (and, sigh... Washington) are going to fund experimental gizmos in this direction no matter what, and b) the world really needs Greenpeace to be focusing on the main event. Hello! You've got the tarsands in the bull's-eye in Canada and coal exports on the agenda in Australia, and you've got Barack Obama using the words 'carbon footprint' -- FOCUS my friends! FOCUS! Press the case for pricing carbon -- which every intelligent economist and policy wonk agrees with -- because it's the single most efficient, effective, and rapid way to stop carbon emissions from growing and start the necessary reductions.

But note: when we finally win policies to put a price on carbon, there is bound to be a plethora of viable ways to reduce emissions -- and that may just include carbon capture, which makes it even harder to stop because the very policies we need to protect our fragile atmosphere will give it the logic it needs to succeed. So there is very little mileage in building up public angst about it right now.

So to my friends in the green movement: Stick with actions to hurt the biggest, baddest, climate horrors, but don't get sidetracked by the built-in capitalist impulse to pour our wealth into new technology - after all, that's the impulse we want to harness for renewables, which are far more interesting to the public anyway.