The photos from Friday 4th October showed the Prime Minister smiling, the Energy Secretary and the Chancellor smiling, and in the background some fossil fuel executives smiling, all in front of some impressive pipework representing Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This is a new development from photos of Ministers smiling on helicopter flights over windfarms, but the story is the same: Ministers have spent our taxes wisely, Chief Executives will spend it to construct something profitable, and we can relax. New technologies, developed profitably by incumbent emitters, will solve climate change, with uninterrupted economic growth, and no participation from the rest of us.
The smiles are quite genuine. In the foreground, the Ministers are smiling because they’ve spent some money, so can now tick climate action off their immediate list of worries. And the Fossil Executives are smiling because they’ve got away with it again. The millions they invest in marketing CCS have paid off. They’ve won a 3:1 public subsidy for two projects which support their implausible claims to have a loud voice in climate policy. Without CCS, all the oil and gas major’s products will be illegal in the UK by 2050, but even with BP and Shell delivering record profits of £75bn in the past two years, they have refused to invest the £1bn per year required to fund these projects, and instead have won a subsidy of nearly £1000 from every household in the UK. No wonder they’re smiling.
Should the rest of us be smiling?
Probably this particular photo was politically inevitable. CCS was first deployed commercially in 1972 in Texas, was listed as an urgent priority in the Stern Review in 2006 and has been marketed heavily, not least through the industry’s revolving door with government, and fossil-funding of compliant academics. As a result, it features prominently in politically acceptable climate policy recommendations, including all the reports of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change.
If we described the photo accurately, we might smile. Global capacity for CCS today could store 0.08% of the world’s annual emissions, and although we don’t know how much of that capacity is used, the new UK projects will increase it to 0.09%. CCS might be important in a post-mitigation world, so investing in the next stage of a national R&D project makes some sense. The trouble is that it’s being promoted as if it’s a significant contribution to reaching zero emissions by 2050. It isn’t, because it can’t scale fast enough.
The projects were announced as costing £28bn and opening in 2028, but Flyvbjerg’s Iron Law of Megaprojects says that they will be “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.” More likely, they will cost £56bn and open in 2032, but if so, they will have done better than Cross Rail, HS2 and Hinckley C. They are unlikely to complete within the life of this government, and the next one will delay decisions on any further CCS deployment until we have evaluated their cost, performance and public acceptability. If they work at full capacity, they could reduce UK emissions by about 2%, and perhaps two or three more will open by 2040.
We must wait to measure their true benefits once they are operating. They certainly won’t capture all the emissions of the processes to which they are connected. The fossil-lobby claims capture rates of 90% but the first report published earlier this year on the Al Reyadah Steel project, the only steel-factory world-wide with CCS, says that actual capture rates are no more than 13% of the emissions of the connected plants. Even if the full 8.5 million tonnes of CO2 are captured and stored in the new UK projects, the processes feeding them will still emit to the atmosphere.
If Ministers can only smile in front of pipes, how are we going to close emitting aviation, pivot away from ruminant animals, do the hard graft of retrofitting our homes to use half the energy, electrify the remaining two-thirds of our rail network, or face the reality that we will only have enough emissions-free electricity to power half the number of cars?
Climate change is fundamentally a problem of Health and Safety, not a stimulus for innovation and growth, and like all such harms, our main response must be regulation. To help Ministers smile while enacting it, we need much greater clarity about the devastating human costs of inaction, and we need a different set of photos. We need to see the well-off – say those of us who live in dwellings larger than forty square metres per person or who fly more than seven hours per year – smiling while embracing a highly specific set of restraints (avoiding the fossil boiler, fossil car, fossil planes, ruminants and using only recycled materials), to confirm that by regulating emissions we lose nothing of real value and can continue to have a great time.