Politicians are clutching on to carbon capture technologies as a climate solution – just as evidence mounts of its failures, writes Kerstin Meyer.
The climate crisis is intensifying by the day.
Its catastrophic consequences are playing out before our eyes. Wildfires are devastating Los Angeles, and raging in forests around the world. Floods, storms and heatwaves are now occurring with a frequency that human beings have never experienced, as deadly weather is “supercharged” by global heating.
We should be extremely wary, then, when fossil fuel corporations – who bear responsibility for this emergency – tout technological solutions that do not halt burning fossil fuels but do channel billions in subsidies towards those corporations.
And we should be equally sceptical of governments and politicians who put forward climate policies that perpetuate the burning of fossil fuels.
Take, for example, the new European Commission and the German Government, who are embracing carbon capture and storage (CCS)-based technologies as a climate solution.
In simple terms, CCS refers to technologies that ‘capture’ the carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels, then transport and inject it deep underground. Bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) applies the same idea to emissions from burning wood or other biomass.
Critically, oil companies often use the CO2 primarily to pump more oil, while calling it a ‘climate solution’.
Rubber stamp
In February last year, the European Commission heralded its proposed 2040 climate scenarios as ambitious. However, the underlying hypothesis had changed from phasing out fossil fuels to scaling up CCS-based technologies to ‘net out’ fossil fuel emissions – on paper.
Within weeks of the Commission’s Communication, the German Government published a plan to build a grid of CO2 exhaust pipelines to transport the climate-wrecking gas from industrial sites and power plants. A law was proposed that would rubber-stamp CCS projects, regardless of their real climate impact. Companies could therefore be given a licence – and public money –to burn fossil fuels and wood for decades to come.
In Germany, as across much of Europe, a ‘greenlash’ against policies to protect people and planet has gained momentum, and opposition to climate spending played a role in the collapse of Germany’s coalition government.
The Conservative Party, the current opposition, is leading the polls in the run-up to the 23 February snap elections. Its leader Friedrich Merz wants to reverse current positive action on climate, such as a law that promotes renewable energy in buildings, although he agrees with the outgoing government’s course on CCS.
In late December, his parliamentary faction even proposed a non-partisan majority vote on the pending CCS law, which would trigger even larger subsidies. Billions in public monies have been promised to big industrial polluters for CCS projects, despite many warnings that these pay-outs work against the energy transition and will not make a dent in real emissions.
Despite increasing evidence that CCS is a dangerous mirage, more governments are staking the future on such schemes – perhaps an outcome of the CCS lobbyists who were out in force at the recent UN climate change conference in Baku.
A litany of failures
Take for example, Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor’s flagship CCS projects, Sleipner and Snøhvit. These have been heralded as models for CCS’s potential in fighting against climate change. Recent evidence suggests that, instead, they are cautionary tales that highlight the exceptional financial, technical and regulatory risks of offshore CO2 storage. Yet, the new EU climate targets would rely on hundreds of even larger storage sites being filled simultaneously by 2040.
Last year, a review of 12 large-scale CCS projects by the news website Desmog, which exposes global warming misinformation campaigns, revealed a vast gulf between the fossil fuel industry’s promises to capture CO2 and what it did: findings included “a litany of missed carbon capture targets; cost-overruns, and billions of dollars of costs to taxpayers in the form of subsidies”.
BECCS also features heavily in EU climate strategies, despite its many problems. As with CCS, evidence is piling up of its flaws.
This includes recent research by the Natural Resources Defence Council showing that the UK Government’s plans to use BECCS to help achieve its climate aims “will actually increase greenhouse gas emissions and require the logging of millions of hectares of forest.” The report found that “instead of being a climate solution, this would be devastating for our climate and the biodiversity crisis.”
The European Commission is so committed that it gave the Swedish Government the green light for a €3 billion state aid scheme for BECCS projects that would dangerously incentivise the business of burning wood.
Meanwhile the country’s flagship proposed BECCS plant, developed by the energy company Stockholm Exergi, has secured a €180 million grant from the EU’s Innovation Fund. Yet, as recent analysis by Fern showed, the Stockholm Exergi project “will burn forests and public capital but won’t help the climate”.
House of cards
Despite this, EU and national policymakers are apparently cleaving to these technologies, thereby building a house of cards that is liable to come crashing down.
In an open letter, 100 organisations, companies and citizens initiatives have called on German parliamentarians to stop the dangerous CCS-law and turn to real climate solutions instead.
Their call was recently echoed by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Climate Change, Elisa Morgera, who said in an interview that powerful forces are using technological fixes to divert attention from real, equitable solutions that would benefit countries least responsible but most affected by the climate crisis.
Real solutions to this emergency are at hand.
Investing in reaching 100% renewable energy, or in energy efficiency, drastically reducing pollutants such as plastics, cement or fertiliser, ensuring that our food (responsible for around a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions) is more plant based: all of this and more can vastly reduce emissions.
The science is clear: a fast, fair phase-out of fossil fuels is the only way to dampen climate risks. Any delay is reckless, whatever the story we are being told.
2024 was the hottest year on record globally – breaking the previous record for global temperatures, which was set in 2023. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Kerstin Meyer is head of economic and financial policy with Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND), Friends of the Earth Germany. She holds an MSc from London School of Economics and has previously worked as a policy advisor for GIZ. She is also a grassroots activist who defended Tempelhofer Feld, a former airport, in Berlin to remain a public park.
Image: LianeM / Shutterstock