Last week George Monbiot had an article in the Guardian on Carbon Capture and Storage, which he isn’t a fan of (for entirely justifiable and well-backed up reasons).
The same day I sent in this letter below. It seems not to have made the cut. The Guardian did however publish three letters here that largely agree with Monbiot.
George Monbiot’s latest (“Labour’s carbon-capture scheme will be Starmer’s white elephant: a terrible mistake costing billions” Guardian October 11) is a classic of the genre. A killer analogy to start with (CCS = HS2; that will stick) followed by clear arguments supported with facts.
And yet. Mr Monbiot, a fan of nuclear (certainly not a white elephant), has been known to chide opponents for downplaying the difficulties of not accepting the messiness and difficulty of the real world, and over-estimating the speed with which their favoured alternatives might be researched, developed and deployed. That’s sensible, but he falls into the same trap, surely, when making some optimistic (dare I say glib) statements about green cement, steel and so on.
The dilemma, outlined in my recent book “Carbon Capture and Storage in the United Kingdom: History Policies and Politics” is that CCS would be very useful (essential?) for decarbonising ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors (a lot of industry, aviation, agriculture) but can’t be built without oil and gas company expertise, and would the be used by them as a Trojan Horse (or fig leaf) to continue their very profitable extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
We appear to be in a slight bind.
Dr Marc Hudson
marchudson.net 
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