"Investment that can reignite Britain’s industrial heartlands to create good jobs in the industries of the future – like wind power and solar. And this includes carbon capture and storage. That’s why today we have announced up to £21.7bn of funding over 25 years to launch this major new industry for our country in a new era for clean-energy investment and jobs".
Ye gods. Labour is the current British government in good part because it plausibly promised a return to evidence-based policy. Instead they propose to throw £22bn at carbon capture, a snake oll industry with a consistent record of costly failure around the world. It is perfectly clear that betting the farm on flue gas CCS was a huge mistake, and we need something much better.
I have been the resident carbon removal hawk on JQ's old blog, on the grounds that the world is certain to overshoot the 1.5 degrees C target, and has in fact already hit it, while 1.5 degrees is too damned hot already, with much worse to come. Ergo, we are going to need net carbon removal by the hundreds of gigatonnes after we hit net zero. The current technology portfolio is not up to the job, so what we need now is a very big, rigorously professional, technology-agnostic, and globally coordinated *research and development* programme to identify, test, and weed out the long list of candidates. Global investment in green transition tech - emissions mitigation - is running at $1.3 trn a year, so a Manhattan Project of a generous billion or two a year initially would not materially divert funds from mitigation. Reeves' plan is to spend far more than this in one smallish country on the logic of the Sir Humphrey syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this." Coming after Hinkley C and HS2, a little caution would be in order.
Footnote: A rational carbon price should include an equal subsidy for demonstrated long-term sequestration, starting now. A little of this money would be awarded to successful CDR trials. If the Manhattan-bis Project goes well, it may lead to earlier net zero. This outcome, with low residual emissions balanced by removals, should not be condemned by climate mitigation hawks, in spite of the bad faith of many early CCS proponents. I dealt with the diversion argument above.
A deadly pair of charts from IEEFA (via Coalwire) on Australian experts of metallurgical coal. The history clearly shows slow but steady structural decline. The other one exhibits a sequence of Dunning-Krueger forecasts by the responsible government agency, DISR, always showing growth ahead.. It's not as dramatic as the famous chart of old IEA forecasts of solar PV capacity, but shows the same refusal to learn. (In the end, the IEA did,) An AI chatbot would surely do better.
Rachel Reeves, in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/04/carbon-capture-labour-green-revolution-britain-industry-jobs:
"Investment that can reignite Britain’s industrial heartlands to create good jobs in the industries of the future – like wind power and solar. And this includes carbon capture and storage. That’s why today we have announced up to £21.7bn of funding over 25 years to launch this major new industry for our country in a new era for clean-energy investment and jobs".
Ye gods. Labour is the current British government in good part because it plausibly promised a return to evidence-based policy. Instead they propose to throw £22bn at carbon capture, a snake oll industry with a consistent record of costly failure around the world. It is perfectly clear that betting the farm on flue gas CCS was a huge mistake, and we need something much better.
I have been the resident carbon removal hawk on JQ's old blog, on the grounds that the world is certain to overshoot the 1.5 degrees C target, and has in fact already hit it, while 1.5 degrees is too damned hot already, with much worse to come. Ergo, we are going to need net carbon removal by the hundreds of gigatonnes after we hit net zero. The current technology portfolio is not up to the job, so what we need now is a very big, rigorously professional, technology-agnostic, and globally coordinated *research and development* programme to identify, test, and weed out the long list of candidates. Global investment in green transition tech - emissions mitigation - is running at $1.3 trn a year, so a Manhattan Project of a generous billion or two a year initially would not materially divert funds from mitigation. Reeves' plan is to spend far more than this in one smallish country on the logic of the Sir Humphrey syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this." Coming after Hinkley C and HS2, a little caution would be in order.
Footnote: A rational carbon price should include an equal subsidy for demonstrated long-term sequestration, starting now. A little of this money would be awarded to successful CDR trials. If the Manhattan-bis Project goes well, it may lead to earlier net zero. This outcome, with low residual emissions balanced by removals, should not be condemned by climate mitigation hawks, in spite of the bad faith of many early CCS proponents. I dealt with the diversion argument above.
Metallurgical coal
A deadly pair of charts from IEEFA (via Coalwire) on Australian experts of metallurgical coal. The history clearly shows slow but steady structural decline. The other one exhibits a sequence of Dunning-Krueger forecasts by the responsible government agency, DISR, always showing growth ahead.. It's not as dramatic as the famous chart of old IEA forecasts of solar PV capacity, but shows the same refusal to learn. (In the end, the IEA did,) An AI chatbot would surely do better.
PDF link: https://ieefa.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/fact-sheet-met-coal_0.pdf
I couldn't work out how to copy the charts, but the whole document is only 2 pages.