Regardless of droughts, floods, heatwaves and crop failure, the oil and fuel trade is utilizing sleight of hand to maintain fossil fuels flowing.
A key instance is the best way the trade has influenced the European Fee’s plans to certify “carbon removals”, a proposal resulting from be introduced on 30 November.
Fossil-fuel giants’ backing of the fee’s plans for CO2 removals is predicated on the concept that we will hold extracting and burning fossil fuels so long as we ‘take away carbon’ at a later stage.
Business is utilizing the carbon elimination agenda to get but extra help for failed carbon seize and utilisation (CCUS), which is a key element of the pie-in-the-sky carbon elimination applied sciences being promoted by the fee.
However this can be a lethal distraction from actual local weather motion. CCUS is a techno-fix promoted by huge polluters that permits them to proceed to pollute, so long as they’ll one way or the other seize the CO2 they emit from fossil energy stations or industrial manufacturing crops, after which transport and retailer it underground, or use it in different manufacturing processes.
Nevertheless, the dangers, failures, and issues — together with the large power required to work, and the huge expense to taxpayers — of CCUS are huge and quite a few.
Fairly merely, it’s a failed expertise that has been introduced as a “future resolution” for 3 a long time now — and nonetheless doesn’t exist at scale.
Counting on future carbon removals quite than pressing emissions cuts now could be like approaching the sting of a waterfall and as an alternative of adjusting course and backing away from the sting as quick as you’ll be able to, trusting that an untested, unfinished platform that you simply hope is in building will catch you midway down.
A brand new report printed by Company Europe Observatory in collaboration with 9 different civil society teams urges the EU to reject the upcoming proposal on the certification of carbon removals on the idea that it’s simply one other method for the oil and fuel trade to maintain fossil fuels flowing.
The lethal local weather gamble examines the responses from fossil gas firms reminiscent of Equinor, Eni, and Shell, and trade teams like Eurogas and the Worldwide Affiliation of Oil and Fuel Producers (IOGP) to the European Fee’s public consultations that paved the best way for the upcoming proposal.
These teams efficiently lobbied for enormous help for CCUS, as seen within the communication for Sustainable Carbon Cycles which funnels huge quantities of public cash into dangerous CCUS, supplies extra regulatory help for it, and provides a privileged seat to trade to set coverage.
That is extraordinarily regarding given the large environmental, well being, and local weather dangers and prices that include CCUS.
Failed pilots, cash burnt
To take only one instance of how unviable this ‘resolution’ is, the CCUS trade and related infrastructure is estimated to should be two to 4 instances bigger by 2050 than the present world oil trade.
And the full 28 CCUS services now working globally have the capability to seize simply 0.1 % of fossil gas emissions.
A staggeringly low determine for one thing introduced as a ‘local weather resolution’; in the meantime 81 % of that carbon at present captured is pumped into wells to supply more durable to achieve oil that may in any other case by no means have been burned.
The European Court docket of Auditors itself criticised the EU for channelling €424m into unsuccessful CCUS initiatives. But right here is the fee planning to massively subsidise new CCUS infrastructure.
The fee’s carbon removals plans additionally serve the fossil gas trade agenda by subsidising the infrastructure community for the transport and storage of CO2, which is able to assist lock us into extra fossil gas use for many years to come back.
Business can also be counting on public funds for CCUS and CO2 infrastructure to push hydrogen gas made with fossil fuel, with the promise this gas will probably be ‘low carbon’ if we hypothetically seize emissions utilized in making it — ‘sooner or later’ in fact.
It’s extremely problematic that the fee has put trade within the coverage driving seat, together with via its Carbon Seize, Utilisation and Storage Discussion board, which is able to meet in Oslo on the finish of October. Closely-dominated by fossil gas trade teams, the draft paper imaginative and prescient on CCUS that the discussion board is getting ready for DG Vitality is a veritable trade wish-list.
Oil and fuel firms — and the EU decision-makers they’re method too near — insist that we want CCUS-based carbon elimination applied sciences to get to ‘web zero’.
Nevertheless, the Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change’s newest report is obvious that CO2 elimination “can’t function an alternative to deep emissions reductions”, and that solely fast emissions cuts earlier than 2030 can forestall the catastrophic results of overshooting 1.5ºC.
We want EU decision-makers to embrace a Fossil Free Politics firewalled from Huge Polluters’ foyer calls for.
The Fee ought to rethink present carbon elimination certification plans, not pour public funds into flawed CCUS and associated infrastructure. And the EU must get critical about reaching ‘Actual Zero’, with the pressing part out of fossil fuels and the fast scaling up of actual and simply renewable power.
