Problems Posing as Solutions, Part 1
6/15/23 – This week, just say no to carbon capture and carbon offsets
Hello everyone:
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
“You cannot solve a problem,” Albert Einstein reportedly said, “with the same mind that created it.” But apparently the quote is apocryphal, perhaps a pithy confection from Ram Dass based on some things Einstein actually said. Here is the renowned physicist, for example, seeking new thinking in a telegram sent in May of 1946 to hundreds of “prominent Americans,” as the Times put it, raising funds for a national campaign to wake up the electorate to the dangers of nuclear war (bold emphasis is mine):
Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
We scientists who released this immense power have an overwhelming responsibility in this world life-and-death struggle to harness the atom for the benefit of mankind and not for humanity’s destruction…
We need two hundred thousand dollars at once for a nationwide campaign to let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
The editors of the Times were so unmoved by this plea that they placed it on page 13, wedged between new book announcements and a list of church services in the city, as if Einstein had published a hybrid of poem and prayer. Which, in a way, he had.
It’s not a stretch to imagine Einstein tweeting today that
The unleashed power of fossil fuels and industrial agriculture has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
It’s ironic that, so far at least, the governments wielding nuclear warheads have learned strategic restraint while at the same time willfully burning the world down with fossil fuels. That has to change.
It's long past time that policy-makers and the public treated the petrochemical industry, agribusiness, and all forms of large-scale habitat destruction as existential threats equal to nuclear devastation. ExxonMobil, RoundUp, and bulldozers have each caused far more global carnage than nuclear weapons. An “unparalleled catastrophe” like the one that terrified Einstein is unfolding in our lifetimes, but because it’s the result of a slow fire instead of a white-hot blast and mushroom cloud, we continue to let it burn and call it progress.
But to shift the direction of civilization we’ll need very different thinking than that which created the problem in the first place, and we’ll need it both in conference rooms and at the kitchen table of the electorate. To some extent this is already happening, of course. At the largest scale you see the U.N. putting together major reports and treaties on climate, biodiversity, ocean health, and plastics. Here in the U.S. the Biden administration’s efforts to jumpstart the clean energy revolution far surpass anything in the country’s history. At the smallest scale, all around you and in every community, there are folks shrinking their footprint, rewilding landscapes, funding conservation work, and advocating for better policy.
In the midst of all that good work, however, a quick scan around the landscape of proposed large-scale “solutions” reveals far too many which are the product of planet-wrecking Anthropocene thinking. They can be thought of as costly distractions, technological boondoggles, or catastrophic mistakes. My task this week is to begin briefing you on several of them.
What these boondoggles and distractions have in common is the selfish prioritizing of corporate profits over human and planetary well-being, the unacceptable delaying of actual solutions, the intensifying erasure of plants and animals, and the childish avoidance of an obvious truth: Our use of energy and resources must be revolutionized and restrained, not merely tweaked and remarketed.
Several of my topics in this series are subject to the elegant statement of our energy problem by the inimitable
: “We need to stop burning things.”Each of these topics deserve an essay or three on their own, rather than a handful of paragraphs, but my purpose is to give you a sense of just how widespread and deeply-rooted these irrational “solutions” are. Think of it as a map to where we should not be going. With any luck, this will help you push back against them in the voting booth and in your own life decisions.
As always, I’m not an expert on these topics, but I am a concerned observer putting together the facts and the story, linking you to the good work others have done to reveal these truths, providing you an opportunity to go deeper and to tie these stories to your own.
Carbon dioxide removal and storage
To keep the rise in global temperature at or below 1.5°C, the IPCC admits that we’ll need to do more than merely reduce our emissions. We’ll need “negative emissions technology” to remove excess emitted CO2 and bury it deep in the Earth. Sequestration, as the burial is called, is nothing more than a manmade acceleration of a natural Earth process normally managed by plant communities on land and in the sea over thousands of years. The only reason we need to do this is that we’re desperately trying to compensate for the manmade acceleration of CO2 emissions, having burned millions of years of fuel in several decades. We’re awkwardly trying to find balance, which judging by the past couple centuries we’re ill-equipped to do.
This promise of removal and sequestration – often called CDR, carbon dioxide removal – is a fundamental part of most corporate and governmental “net-zero” plans, but so far, that’s all it is: a promise. And to a large extent, it’s a promise being made by the fossil fuel companies, using their investments in the nascent technology as a smokescreen to cover much larger investments in future oil and gas production. But far too many policy-makers seem to be banking on this promise, and that’s one of several signs that civilization is likely to blow way past the 1.5°C threshold.
Broadly speaking, there are four areas for carbon dioxide removal: carbon capture by fossil fuel companies in the production process, CO2 capture done at the smokestack in industrial settings, direct air capture (DAC) which pulls traces of CO2 from the atmosphere, and ocean CO2 capture.
By far, the worst of these is the fossil fuel companies’ carbon capture, as an article titled “Carbon capture has a long history. Of failure” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists makes very clear. Carbon capture has mostly been used to enhance gas and oil extraction (the trapped gas is pumped underground to push more petroleum to the surface). Most CO2 storage projects have failed miserably. Worse, there’s good evidence that the CO2 stored underground doesn’t always stay there.
Which means that the end result of industrial CO2 capture and direct air capture (DAC) is also questionable. In this game, it doesn’t matter what you capture if you can’t keep it indefinitely. “Negative emissions” is zero-sum. Nonetheless, DAC is gaining popularity as governments grow desperate, recognizing how far behind the curve they are in cutting emissions. The Biden administration has just made $3.5 billion dollars available to incentivize the technology, but the obstacles to success are massive:
The IPCC calculates that ten billion tons of CO2 will need to be sucked out of the air each year to meet climate goals, but the largest DAC plant is only managing 4,000 tons, and at enormous cost.
The manufacturing costs of creating thousands, or tens of thousands, of these facilities around the globe would amount to an entirely new type of civilizational infrastructure.
The energy required for DAC will be mind-boggling. It must be clean energy, or else the whole project is for nothing. The problem is that we need that clean energy for the rest of global infrastructure.
An entirely new transport system – pipelines, particularly – will have to be built to ship CO2 to sequestration sites. The cost, permitting, and legal hurdles to create this network may prove insurmountable.
As a recent statement from the Deep South Center for Environment Justice points out, there is good reason to believe that sequestration sites will be unfairly concentrated in poorer communities that have long suffered environmental injustices at the hands of industry and negligent government policy.
And again, the entire concept of carbon sequestration relies on the carbon remaining deep underground for centuries, and we have neither experience nor proof of that happening.
Even if the development of DAC proceeds quickly, the results may be more about recycling CO2 than actually reducing emissions. As an excellent overview of DAC from Mother Jones pointed out, the entrepreneurs behind the technology
envision using DAC mostly for catch-and-release over the next few decades: Harvest CO2 from the air, convert it into synthetic fuels, burn those fuels, and recapture the CO2. We wouldn’t start removing legacy carbon until 2060 or 2070 because only then will DAC, by small improvements, become cheap enough that companies and nations (at today’s tax rates, anyway) will be open to paying for it.
All of this suggests that the entire concept of DAC might not be scalable, which means it may be a really, really terrible investment in this critical moment when we must be making good investments with immediate results for reducing emissions.
Right now, the economics of DAC are no better than building and deploying millions of robot vacuums to rove the world siphoning up lost pennies. And given the deep involvement by the petrochemical industry, the ethics seem little better. The New Republic article summed it up neatly: “Carbon capture is necessary. But fossil fuel executives are the last people who should get to define how much of it’s needed, what it should look like, and who benefits.”
I should note that when the article calls carbon capture “necessary,” they mean as an area of research, not a vote of confidence in the as-yet-unproven technology. The better plan, they write, is to
electrify everything, build lots of renewables, and rapidly phase out fossil fuels. Federal research into how to capture carbon at scale is a necessary complement to reducing the amount of work those processes will have to do. But carbon capture will always be a complement—never a substitute.
More importantly, we need to nurture and accelerate the CDR technique that’s been working well for billions of years: The growth of healthy ecosystems locking CO2 away in forests, grasslands, peatlands, etc. The three best and wise things we can do are 1) drastically reduce our emissions, 2) halt the destruction of habitats, and 3) radically increase the conservation of natural places, especially old forests and peatlands.
This healthy planet plan has limitations, of course, not least because of the radical shifts in climate that await us even as we work to replant forests and rebuild wetlands. We can’t plant enough trees to sequester all our emissions. And as our population continues to increase so too will the resource demands by 9 or 10 billion people who all have an equal right to a comfortable, healthy life.
An exception to the general foolishness of CDR may be ocean CO2 removal. The benefits are manifold – reduction in ocean temperature and acidity, improvements in ocean habitats, and more – and the chances for success may be greater than on land or in the air. The oceans have already “captured” much of the CO2 we’ve produced, and the density of it in seawater is about 100 times greater than in the atmosphere. As MIT News reports, some new tech is on the horizon. The researchers envision a low-cost application attached to ships, drill rigs, fish and aquaculture farms, and desalination plants. It’s still more promise than reality, though, like all CDR tech.
The Anthropocene has been an age of promise over reality, of a fable called “constant growth” feeding an utterly unsustainable way of life for an expanding population that lost touch with the realities of the natural world. Any proposed solution that echoes that history is likely to prove to be more threat than promise.
Carbon Offsets
Carbon offsets are a scheme for paying others to reduce emissions or absorb CO2 as compensation for your own emissions. More often than not, it’s about as effective as throwing alms in the church plate to pay for your sins. Some vague magic happens far away, and we feel good about it, and we feel even better that we didn’t have to do much to make it happen. Offsets are lazy, which is why they’ve been so popular, particularly with corporations looking to advertise their “net-zero” plan, and with high-consumption citizens looking for a way to compensate for their lifestyle. Fly to Paris guilt-free! Click here to plant a tree! The problem is that there are no lazy solutions to the Anthropocene.
“The biggest problem with carbon offsetting,” as the title of a Greenpeace article puts it, “is that it doesn’t work.” Partly this has to do with human nature, partly with corporate behavior, but mostly because we’ve constructed a world in which economies pretend to be more important than ecologies, and in which convenience rules over conscience.
A basic understanding of climate change physics demands that we 1) reduce emissions as much as possible and 2) restore as much of the living planet as we can, because healthy ecosystems absorb emissions. Carbon offsets are meant to neutralize a particular set of emissions – your flight to Paris or a corporation’s electricity bill – but in effect they’ve provided a permission slip to lazy corporations to keep emitting.
Worse, the marketing for offsets has been a sleight-of-hand trick by industry to shift the responsibility for the climate catastrophe onto consumers. (There’s a long history to this. Remember the Crying Indian commercial in the 1970s? That was a fraud by the beer bottlers, can companies, and soda makers who didn’t want to take responsibility for the litter their products became.)
For carbon credits to be real, they have to create or incentivize an emissions benefit that would not exist otherwise. And that simply doesn’t happen enough, and is very hard to prove even when it does. Here are several of the reasons carbon offsets have been a failure of both policy and imagination:
That planted tree won’t really account for your emissions until it’s grown for a few decades.
And that assumes that the tree lives. Many mass tree plantings fail because the only incentive was to plant them. Others grow only to be harvested, burned up in forest fires, or killed by disease, and any offsets tied to lost forests are not offsets at all.
As the planet heats, more and more “protected” forests will be lost to heat, drought, fire, and pests.
Planting trees in a monoculture to be harvested rather than rebuilding complex forest habitats that contain biodiverse communities only makes the world a worse place.
Often, these projects take place in the Global South without consultation with local communities, which in some cases have been evicted from what became a reforestation project.
Many offsets are tied to the protection of a forest or other CO2-absorbing ecosystem that was not at risk or harvest or destruction.
Likewise, for offsets tied to the building of renewable energy projects, there’s little evidence that those projects wouldn’t have been built anyway.
Because offsets are a capitalist “solution” to a reality problem, there has been widespread fraud and abuse, with projects that never existed, projects sold multiple times, government malfeasance, etc.
Our carbon emissions will impact the planet for millennia. Forests and energy projects cannot guarantee any kind of compensation at that time scale.
Partly as an admission that carbon offsets have been a failure, the better corporate “net-zero” plans are looking for higher-quality offsets. The problem is that now carbon dioxide removal – with its promise of eternal sequestration – is being used for carbon offsets. See above for why that’s likely a bad investment.
For a deeper dive on the topic, check out these articles by Fast Company, Yale e360, and the Times.
Finally, then, for offsets to truly help with the climate and biodiversity crises, they need to be directly responsible for protecting and expanding the living world. If offsets could, for example, be organized to fund a reversal of the loss of tropical forests in the Amazon and Indonesia, then they can be a powerful force for good. This Guardian article suggests that the offset market could do exactly that, if managed properly.
My apologies for a rather dour, information-heavy letter this week. It’s hard to make news like this sing. As a parting gift, then, I’ll leave you with the always-wonderful John Oliver in a very funny harangue on carbon offsets. Enjoy.
Stay tuned next week for some (hopefully) good writing on more bad ideas… If it helps, you can think of the Field Guide as a descendant of Einstein’s telegram. (I’m not asking for $200,000 to help spread the word, but I would love for more of you to become paid subscribers if you feel that the work is valuable to you – and you can afford it.) My point here, as articulated by the telegram, is that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Nautilus, a really hopeful story of science and conservation in Gongorosa National Park in Mozambique. A massive team of researchers from around the globe is working together to build the Gongorosa Map of Life, creating an incredibly complex and beautiful tapestry of species and their ecological connections.
From the Times, a new answer to the age-old question of why insects are drawn inexorably and often fatally to lights. The answer is fascinating, and cleverly conceived, but the most useful information in the article is about how you can stop contributing to the insect apocalypse: 1) turn outside lights off whenever possible, and 2) “limit light pollution by using downward pointing light fixtures that illuminate only the nearby ground.”
Also from the Times, an important climate-change trial has begun in Montana. The plaintiffs are sixteen young residents who are challenging the state’s support for the fossil fuel industry. Montana is one of several states which have language in the state constitutions guaranteeing “a clean and healthful environment” to its citizens. The judge in the trial, therefore, “will be asked by the plaintiffs to declare that the state’s support for the fossil fuel industry is unconstitutional.” For information on how to bring such protections to your state, check out the Green Amendment movement and this interview with its founder, Maya van Rossum, at E&E News.
From the Financial Times, the Norwegian government is in turmoil over the energy ministry’s push to open up huge swathes of ocean floor for mining. Norway’s fishing industry is “not at all impressed” by the proposal, and the environment ministry warns of “significant and irreversible consequences for the marine environment.”
From
andhere on Substack, a manifesto of sorts describing the purpose of their video series “Dispatches from the Outlaw Ocean.” I have not yet watched the video series, but highly recommend you read the manifesto. Most of us see the oceans as blank space and a source for occasional meals, but Urbina opens our eyes to the greater, darker, wilder human relationship with the sea. The oceans, he says,are a workplace, a metaphor, an escape, a prison, a grocery store, a trash can, a cemetery, a bonanza, a tinderbox, an organ, a highway, a weapons depot, a window, an emergency, and, above all, an opportunity. Unless we reckon with this truth, unless we reimagine this domain more broadly, we will continue falling short in governing, protecting, and understanding the oceans.
From Benji Jones at Vox, an excellent report on efforts to create a global treaty to curb global plastic production. The only way we can begin to control the planetary spread of toxic plastic waste is by slowing the production of plastics at the petrochemical source, and to ban the worst uses and types of plastic products. Check out the article for a sense of what the treaty is trying to accomplish and how far along they are in the process.
From Grist, a legislative antidote to corporate greenwashing. A high-stakes bill in California, if passed, will require major corporations of all kinds to report their entire carbon emissions footprint, even from their supply chain. Not surprisingly, there is intense pressure from industries (fossil fuel, agriculture, etc) to kill the bill.
From Wired, a revelation in detecting wildlife DNA. Recent technology has made it possible to detect airborne DNA, whether from plants or animals, to provide a rough portrait of an ecological population. What none of the biologists in this new scientific field thought of, however, was that air quality monitoring stations around the world have been accidentally capturing this data every hour for years. Only some of these stations keep their air filters, and it’s still unclear how long the DNA survives on the filters, but even if a fraction of the data is available it will provide a goldmine of information for conservation biologists and others.
Thanks, as usual, Jason, for your research and forceful writing. I'm just finishing "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives" by Siddharth Kara, about how virtually all rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are blood batteries. Our phones and computers and electric vehicles run on child labor, rape, death, corruption and greed — misery across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is a sobering, disheartening, difficult book.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250284297/cobaltred
Thank you for this excellent analysis of why both carbon capture and carbon offsets are dreamy ways to offset not only corporations' responsibility to make deep changes, but our own as individuals. I love your comparison of carbon offsets to "throwing alms in a church plate to pay for your sins." These ideas are what the psychologists call magical thinking: ways of coping with difficulties that deny reality and leave the problem and the person with the problem in a state of unreality. Your essays always bring us back to reality, a reality that grows more frightening every day.