Oil companies sold the public on a fake climate solution -- and swindled taxpayers out of billions [View all]

[Bundbuster]

The fossil fuel industry’s carbon capture bamboozle, explained.

https://www.vox.com/climate/363076/climate-change-solution-shell-exxon-mobil-carbon-capture

This spring, Democrats wrapped up a nearly three-year investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate disinformation, and asked the Department of Justice to pick up where they left off. In House and Senate Democrats’ final report and hearing, investigators concluded that major oil companies had not only misled the public on climate change for decades, but also were continuing to misinform them about the industry’s preferred climate “solutions”— particularly biofuels and carbon capture.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who spearheaded the investigation, also accused oil companies of “obstructing” the investigation, submitting few documents, and redacting much of what they did send. One ExxonMobil employee who spoke with Drilled and Vox under condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation described what the company sent as “a truly random assortment of unimportant documents.”

If you’ve read the New York Times recently, or seen this ad on Politico’s website or heard it on one of its podcasts, or listened to the Planet Money podcast, you may have noticed the industry’s relentlessly positive marketing of carbon capture, which aims to collect and store CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial and fossil fuel extraction facilities, so they don’t add to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said carbon capture might be necessary to reduce the emissions of certain “hard to abate” sectors like steel, concrete, and some chemical manufacturing, but noted that in the best-case scenario, with carbon capture technology working flawlessly and deployed at large scale, it could only account for a little over 2 percent of global carbon emissions reductions by 2030.

Stanford University researcher Mark Jacobson said that because it also requires energy and materials to function, CCS attached to a fossil-fueled power plant is still worse for the climate than replacing fossil energy with renewables. “They actually increase carbon dioxide emissions by doing this, in addition to increasing air pollution,” he said, referencing a study he conducted in 2019 quantifying the lifecycle CO2 emissions of various carbon capture scenarios. Even when CCS is powered by wind, Jacobson said it’s not worth doing, from a climate perspective. “If you just used wind to replace coal in the first place, you’d get a higher reduction in CO2 emissions,” he said.

Much much more at link.