In this article, originally published on The Conversation, three scientists argue that the concept of net zero which is heavily relying on carbon capture and storage technologies is a dangerous illusion.
By James Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter, Robert Watson, Emeritus Professor in Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr, Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University
Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps.
Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.
The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.
The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.
This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.
We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.
To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.
Steps towards net zero
On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.
By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
If we had acted on Hansen’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonise our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.
Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.
It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.
They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.
Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.
Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.
Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.
It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.
That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.
But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.
This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
The rise of net zero
When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.
First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.
The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.
Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.
With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.
So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.
With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.
A Parisian false dawn
As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.
The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialised nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.
But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible”. Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.
Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.
Taking centre stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilise, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.
Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.
Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.
The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.
Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.
It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?
Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.
And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.
As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.
Pipe dreams
Given the dawning realisation of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario”. Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.
Mass tree planting, for bioenergy or as an attempt at offsetting, had been the latest attempt to stall cuts in fossil fuel use. But the ever-increasing need for carbon removal was calling for more. This is why the idea of direct air capture, now being touted by some as the most promising technology out there, has taken hold. It is generally more benign to ecosystems because it requires significantly less land to operate than BECCS, including the land needed to power them using wind or solar panels.
Unfortunately, it is widely believed that direct air capture, because of its exorbitant costs and energy demand, if it ever becomes feasible to be deployed at scale, will not be able to compete with BECCS with its voracious appetite for prime agricultural land.
It should now be getting clear where the journey is heading. As the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place. The next is already on the horizon – and it’s even more ghastly. Once we realise net zero will not happen in time or even at all, geoengineering – the deliberate and large scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system – will probably be invoked as the solution to limit temperature increases.
One of the most researched geoengineering ideas is solar radiation management – the injection of millions of tons of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere that will reflect some of the Sun’s energy away from the Earth. It is a wild idea, but some academics and politicians are deadly serious, despite significant risks. The US National Academies of Sciences, for example, has recommended allocating up to US$200 million over the next five years to explore how geoengineering could be deployed and regulated. Funding and research in this area is sure to significantly increase.
Difficult truths
In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals. In fact developing ways of reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide can feel tremendously exciting. You are using science and engineering to save humanity from disaster. What you are doing is important. There is also the realisation that carbon removal will be needed to mop up some of the emissions from sectors such as aviation and cement production. So there will be some small role for a number of different carbon dioxide removal approaches.
The problems come when it is assumed that these can be deployed at vast scale. This effectively serves as a blank cheque for the continued burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of habitat destruction.
Carbon reduction technologies and geoengineering should be seen as a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change. Just like an ejector seat in a jet aircraft, it should only be used as the very last resort. However, policymakers and businesses appear to be entirely serious about deploying highly speculative technologies as a way to land our civilisation at a sustainable destination. In fact, these are no more than fairy tales.
The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.
Academics typically see themselves as servants to society. Indeed, many are employed as civil servants. Those working at the climate science and policy interface desperately wrestle with an increasingly difficult problem. Similarly, those that champion net zero as a way of breaking through barriers holding back effective action on the climate also work with the very best of intentions.
The tragedy is that their collective efforts were never able to mount an effective challenge to a climate policy process that would only allow a narrow range of scenarios to be explored.
Most academics feel distinctly uncomfortable stepping over the invisible line that separates their day job from wider social and political concerns. There are genuine fears that being seen as advocates for or against particular issues could threaten their perceived independence. Scientists are one of the most trusted professions. Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy.
But there is another invisible line, the one that separates maintaining academic integrity and self-censorship. As scientists, we are taught to be sceptical, to subject hypotheses to rigorous tests and interrogation. But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.
In private, scientists express significant scepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS, offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.
Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?
The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.
Friends of Earth International (FoEI) published a report revealing the greenwashing of net zero emissions of the fossil fuel industries. In this piece, Kim Hill writes about the problems with the concept of economic growth that the report does not acknowledge.
A recent report from Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) unpacks the greenwashing of fossil fuels in the term ‘net zero emissions’. Net zero is a scheme for expanding the oil and gas industry, that does nothing to address the causes of climate change, and indeed exacerbates ecological collapse.
This is how FoEI describes net zero targets: “‘Greenwashing’ hardly suffices as a term to describe these efforts to obscure continued growth in fossil emissions — ‘ecocide’ and ‘genocide’ more accurately capture the impacts the world will face.”
FoEI joins the many environmental activists and groups campaigning against net-zero, in defence of the ecosystems, indigenous peoples, peasants and third-world communities that are being harmed by fossil fuel expansion and offset trading.
The climate movement has adopted net zero emissions as its core demand, and continues to mobilise many thousands of people around the world to join protests in support of this goal. By endorsing the fossil fuel companies’ campaigns for net-zero pledges and targets, rather than taking the side of environmental groups organising against it, the climate movement and Extinction Rebellion are complicit in genocide and ecocide. While individual climate activists may have other motives, the movement as a whole is controlled by corporate interests, and has been co-opted into marketing the goals of its funders.
While climate activists have been inspired by the celebrity status of Greta Thunberg in coalescing around the net zero target, Greta herself has said in recent months “we must forget about net zero” and calls these schemes “empty words, loopholes and greenwash.”
Just a few of the many headlines to be found via a web search of the term net zero emissions.
Two recent articles in The Guardian also expose the net zero spin. One titled Global oil companies have committed to net zero emissions. It’s a sham. says “many companies and countries are using “net zero” to justify expanding the production of fossil fuels…All that the major oil companies have done (with tacit support from many governments) is shift their public narrative about the climate crisis from denial to delusion. They’re no longer insisting there’s no problem, because they lost that argument. “net zero” is their attempt to continue business as usual without addressing what they’re doing to people and the planet.”
A second article, The climate crisis can’t be solved by carbon accounting tricks, states “Net zero increasingly involves highly questionable carbon accounting. As a result, the new politics swirling around net zero targets is rapidly becoming a confusing and dangerous mix of pragmatism, self-delusion and weapons-grade greenwash.”
The FoEI report, titled Chasing Carbon Unicorns, opens with: “Powerful actors, particularly those most responsible for emissions, such as the fossil fuel industry and agribusiness, continue to obscure the need for the phase-out of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions with the distractions and seductions of the carbon market. “net zero” pledges are a new addition to the strategy basket of these actors who are fighting hard to maintain the status quo. And the status quo will certainly worsen the climate catastrophe.”
A few more excerpts:
“These deliberate corporate strategies distract attention from the undeniable and urgent need to eliminate fossil fuel emissions…”
“‘Net zero’ is a smokescreen, a conveniently invented concept that is both dangerous and problematic…” (p4)
“engineered “negative emissions” technologies, such as bioenergy carbon capture and storage(BECCS) or direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), are untested.” (p8)
“There are no saviour ecosystems around the planet, nor fairy godmother technologies, that will suck up continued fossil fuel emissions.” (p8)
“at best there are no overall emission reductions from an offset” (p11, emphasis in original)
“financial interests are not giving up on the profit-making opportunities they see in markets for carbon and for financial assets, such as securities and derivatives, based on carbon.” (p13)
“There are no surprises among the members of the TSCVM [Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets]. BP, Shell, and Total represent the oil majors; Bunge, Nestlé, and Unilever are there for agribusiness; Boeing, easyJet, and Etihad, the aviation sector. Bank and finance industry members include Bank of America, BlackRock, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, Itaú Unibanco, and Standard Chartered…Major big green conservation organisations are also engaged in the effort to rehabilitate offsetting and help to dramatically increase the supply of “nature-based” offset credits. Four organisations sit on the consultative group of the TSVCM: Conservation International (CI), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). All four are prominent advocates for “nature-based” solutions / offsets. All four have active projects in the developing world that are set to generate carbon-offset credits, sometimes including direct alliances with fossil fuel majors.” (p15)
“Government “net zero” targets also obscure fossil emissions and the responsibility for reducing those emissions, as do the “net zero” pledges of the private sector.” (p16)
The report ends with no realistic plan of action, but instead lists vague demands comprising meaningless buzzwords, and calls for “real zero”, a target cooked up in an equally murky shade of greenwash. At no point does FoE acknowledge the reality that infinite economic growth will rapidly destroy all life on Earth, regardless of how the economic system is powered. It takes no account of the physical impossibility of powering a globalised growth economy without continued extraction of fossil fuels, nor the enormous expansion of mining and land-grabbing required to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels at scale. The necessity of scaling back and localising economic activity, and prioritising the needs of people and nature over corporate profits, is never mentioned. Despite sincere efforts to expose the distractions marketed by corporate actors, FoE reveals its own reliance on corporate funding as a serious limit on what it can achieve.
A movement that can genuinely bring down the fossil fuel industry and stop the destruction of nature needs to extract itself from corporate funding, and be completely independent of business interests. It needs to abandon the tactic of making nebulous demands that can be twisted around by governments and corporations to promote ecocidal economic growth. Merely marching in the streets, and expecting governments and corporations to represent the interests of the people, is a failed tactic. Activists will need to be strategic, and take personal responsibility for organising the direct dismantling of fossil fuel infrastructure. The movement must take an eco-centric rather than business-centric view, and unite around the goal of permanently shutting down all extractive and destructive industries, and regenerating damaged landscapes and communities.
“In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.” — Derrick Jensen
On November 6, 2020, I allowed myself one breath out, a breath of relief that a despicable administration and its despicable leader have been voted out of office. With my next breath in, I reminded myself that the administration that will replace it will be just as despicable, only in different ways. Its leaders may be more humane—perhaps they will no longer separate children from their parents at the border, and perhaps they will offer sincere sympathies to the families of those who have died of COVID-19—but they will not usher in a voluntary transition to a more sane and sustainable way of living. They may not lie about their tax returns or the size of their inauguration crowd, but they will certainly lie about many other things. More dangerously, they will lie about those things while believing they are righteous, and in so doing will convince many others to believe they are righteous, too.
One lie the Biden-Harris administration is telling that I am most immediately concerned with is the lies that the words “clean energy” and “net zero” mean something real. This lie is rooted in a fundamental denial of physical reality.
“Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
Most people will, at this point, be familiar with the term “clean energy”. This usually means renewables, including wind, solar, hydropower, hydrogen, geothermal, and nuclear. These technologies are considered “clean” because the generated energy does not emit CO2 at generation time.
However, many will be less familiar with the term “net zero”. It’s understandable why so many in climate change circles, including Joe Biden and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), would rely on the concept of “net zero” given the decline in CO2 emissions required to meet the IPCC’s stated goals of keeping global warming to “well below +2C” if we actually wanted to get our emissions to zero:
SOURCE: @Peters_Glen
The delusion of “clean energy” and “net zero” allows policy makers world wide to instead produce a graph that looks more like this:
This second graph is a lot more reassuring than the first. It means that we can continue to emit CO2 as long as we count on something—technology? forests? soil?—to pull extra CO2 out of the atmosphere (called carbon dioxide removal, or CDR) so we can say our CO2 emissions are “net zero” instead of zero. As long as the amount of CO2 we continue to emit is less than or equal to the CO2 we are pulling out of the atmosphere at the same time, we’re good.
We imagine that instead of facing the cliff-like drop-off in CO2 emissions in graph 1, we can follow graph 2, by gradually replacing the electricity grid with renewables producing “clean energy”, replace all 1.2 billion cars in the world with EVs, somehow figure out how to make concrete without massive amounts of fossil fuels, invent a substitute for steel that doesn’t require massive amounts of fossil fuels, replace industrial agriculture with regenerative agriculture world wide while still feeding 8 billion people, and do all this at a slower pace than within the decade or two required to get to zero emissions to avoid climate catastrophe. And, if the CDR works well enough, perhaps we imagine that we can continue to burn small amounts of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, putting CO2 into the atmosphere and pulling it out in equal measure.
Clean energy and net zero go hand in hand, and not just in the Biden-Harris climate plan. Indeed, net zero is required for a clean energy plan to work. To see why, think about what’s required for clean energy.
Wind and Solar
To build, install, and maintain wind and solar requires not just a whole lot of mining and refining of the materials (metals and minerals) to manufacture the component parts of wind turbines and solar panels; it also requires installing the turbines and the panels in giant farms, most often on public lands where plants and animals live until they are scraped away and killed for these farms. Installing the giant turbines and panels is a fairly energy intensive process. It also requires maintaining these farms for their lifespan, which is about 25-30 years, and then dismantling and disposing of the waste at the end of that lifespan (most often in landfills) and replacing them with new wind turbines and solar panels.
It also requires building massive energy storage plants, either from batteries, which require their own energy intensive resources to make, or in energy storage schemes like pumped hydro, which requires building dams (see below). It also requires building additional grid lines to the solar and wind farms and their associated energy storage, which requires vast amounts of copper, steel, and concrete. None of this is easy to do, and all of it currently requires a whole lot of minerals and metals, which must be mined out of the ground, and energy, which is usually in the form of fossil fuels. Hmmm. That means these clean energy solutions are still emitting a lot of CO2.
Dams
To build dams requires immense amounts of concrete, and concrete is still one of the world’s most energy-intensive substances to make. It requires large, heavy machinery, running on fossil fuels, and high heat, provided by fossil fuels. And the reservoirs behind the dams often become methane producers, and methane is a greenhouse gas with 20 times the atmosphere heating qualities of CO2. The water energy must be turned into electricity, which must be transported for use or storage, requiring grid lines. Hmmm. That means that this clean energy solution is still emitting greenhouse gases, both CO2 and methane. Oh, and dams kill rivers, but that doesn’t seem to matter to clean energy advocates.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen fuel is clean when burned (meaning it produces only water at burn time), but currently requires a lot of energy to make. It is usually made from natural gas (a fossil fuel), but sometimes biomass (i.e. plants and trees). Mining natural gas emits quite a bit of methane, and cutting trees and harvesting plants emits CO2. The energy required to convert natural gas or biomass to hydrogen fuel could come from renewable sources but as we’ve seen those renewable sources are not clean. Hmmm. That means this clean energy solution is still emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Geothermal
Geothermal might be the least bad of these bad solutions, but geothermal still requires that we build infrastructure (from steel) and power plants (to convert steam heat into electricity) and grid infrastructure to get the electricity from the source to where the electricity is used. Hmmm. All of those steps require metals, minerals, concrete, and other resources, so it would seem this clean energy solution is still emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, too.
Nuclear
Everyone already knows the main downside to nuclear energy: we’ve seen these downsides first hand at Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Aside from the energy required to mine uranium, build nuclear power plants, and deal with the nuclear waste (all of which requires fossil fuels), the devastating long term impacts of nuclear waste on the natural environment mean that it is perhaps the epitome of delusion to consider nuclear energy clean in any way.
So, even if we were somehow to run our “clean energy economy” on electricity from renewables alone, we’d still be far from zero CO2 emissions. Which is why we need “net zero”. We need a way to offset the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions that will happen in the energy sector even if we were to somehow replace fossil fuels with renewables world wide. This accounting also does not include the emissions from other sectors producing greenhouse gas emissions, such as industrial agriculture, transportation, and industry (even if industry is run on renewables for its energy, large amounts of greenhouse gases are released during manufacturing from chemical reactions, as an example).
Negative Emissions Technologies
So what is the future something that we will rely on to pull CO2 from the air so we can get to net zero emissions? It’s a suite of technologies known as negative emissions technologies.
In a 2018 report on negative emissions technologies, the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC, with 197 countries participating) includes the following technologies: reforestation and afforestation, land management, enhanced weathering, ocean fertilization, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture and carbon storage (DACCS), and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Nature-based NETs
Reforestation and afforestation means planting a whole lot of trees. It means reforesting the areas we’ve deforested, and it means planting trees in areas that were not previously forested. The thinking is that trees pull CO2 from the air as they grow. Of course, before industrial civilization, there were a whole lot more trees, and those trees were part of the normal carbon cycle of the Earth, pulling CO2 out of the air in balance with the amount of CO2 emitted by normal processes that are part of life and death on this planet. So to get more CO2 pulled from the atmosphere to offset the industrial emissions from fossil fuels and other man-made sources of greenhouse gases, we’d have to plant a whole lot more trees.
This at a time when deforestation continues apace for mining, development, and industrial agriculture, and at a time when population continues to grow and land is regularly cleared of forest in order to produce the vast quantities of food to feed that growing population. Unfortunately, many tree planting schemes concocted for carbon offsets tend to be mono-crops of trees, rather than forests, and so don’t contribute to increasing viable habitat for wildlife at the same time. In addition, if trees are planted in the wrong place, this can often do more harm than good. It is hard to argue against planting more trees (if done well, and in the right places), but given we continue to deforest more than reforest, it seems unlikely this solution is viable.
Increasing carbon storage in soil through land management:
including regenerative agriculture and biochar, could store up to 0.7 gigatons of carbon (GtC) a year from the atmosphere, according to the UNFCC, and perhaps more if the depth of carbon storage is increased significantly with deeper soils. Keep in mind, that the total GtC released into the atmosphere from fossil fuels is about 10 GtC a year, and that carbon capture in soil would require completely overhauling global industrial agriculture at a time when industrial agriculture is rapidly expanding to feed the world’s growing population.
Enhanced weathering
Enhanced weathering is a technique to increase the rate of CO2 absorption in slow natural mechanisms that remove CO2 from the air, such as rock weathering, by applying chemicals to rocks, or by spreading finely ground rock over large areas of land. This is a purely speculative NET since no studies have been done at scale on the process.
Ocean fertilization
Ocean fertilization is the process of adding fertilizer, typically iron, to the ocean to increase the uptake of CO2 by plankton algae. Only small tests have been done with ocean fertilization, including one rogue fisherman who dumped 100 tons of iron dust in the waters off Canada. As the UNFCCC states in its report, ocean fertilization is “associated with very high levels of uncertainty and ecological risks for relatively small sequestration potential.”
My conclusion is that manipulating nature to reduce atmospheric CO2 has limited potential at best, and the risk of damaging the natural ecology of the Earth at worst.
Technology NETs
That leaves technology. The technologies included in the UNFCCC report are carbon capture and storage (CCS), bioenergy with CCS, and direct air CCS. CCS is really just a catch all name for BECCS and DACCS, as well as the ecosystem manipulation techniques described above.
BECCS requires replacing the fossil fuels burned in power plants world wide with biomass fuels, and adding technology that can capture the CO2 emitted when burning the biomass. Estimates of the amount of land required to grow the biomass to replace electricity at current levels of demand are about twice the size of India. Needless to say this would be problematic not just for food production, but also the reforestation and afforestation plans mentioned above. Another major problem with BECCS is that capturing CO2 in power plants is still highly speculative, has been demonstrated in only a few power plants, and the captured CO2 is most often used for “enhanced oil recovery”—i.e. getting more oil out of the ground—rather than stored. As of 2012 there were 62,500 power plants operating around the world, and 18 of them can now capture carbon. I’ll leave you to do the math.
If we add CO2 capture to all existing, non-biomass burning power plants, this will reduce the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels at burn time, but will do nothing to stop the destructive mining to get the fossil fuels from the ground. Existing coal power plants that have been converted to biomass typically burn wood pellets, some of which come from forests cut down to provide that wood, which seems counterproductive given the first NET discussed above, requiring that we plant more trees, not cut more of them down. In addition, it takes more wood to produce the same energy as you’d get from burning coal, so more CO2 is emitted, and because of the long lag time in tree regrowth and associated carbon sequestration, it quickly becomes clear that burning biomass will add more CO2 to the atmosphere during the critical near-term time period we need to be rapidly decarbonizing.
This is a well-known loophole in CO2 accounting schemes, and yet biomass burning has been enthusiastically embraced by power plants as an easy way to reuse current technology without having to account for the CO2 emitted.
DACCS is another speculative technology that uses giant fans to bring air into reactors made with plastic and potassium hydroxide to bind with CO2 and remove it from the air.
The CO2 is then purified and processed with “chemicals” (I’m not sure which chemicals, it seems to be proprietary information)—a process that requires energy, of course—and the resulting pure CO2 can then be stored to keep it out of the atmosphere. However, to pay for the technology and energy required to capture CO2, rather than being stored, the captured CO2 is typically used for enhanced oil recovery, which would seem to make the entire process moot. Indeed, one of the most well known of the DACCS companies operating today, Carbon Engineering, partnered with Chevron in 2019 in order to use the captured CO2 to pump more oil and gas.
If the captured CO2 from both BECCS and DACCS is to be stored, which is necessary to prevent it from heating the atmosphere, the CO2 must be stored forever. So far the most promising technique for storing CO2 long-term is to mix it with water and inject it into basalt (volcanic) rock, where it reacts with the rock and remineralizes. This technique has been demonstrated in only a small number of experiments. If one imagines power plants and direct capture infrastructure capturing CO2 all around the world, this also begs the question of how to get the captured CO2 to locations where it can be stored into rock, remembering that the world currently emits about 40 GtCO2 a year, which is a huge amount of CO2. Would we use pipelines? And if so, how do we build the pipelines without a whole lot of steel and fossil fuels? Other techniques for storing CO2 are to put it in old salt mines or to replace oil extracted from the ground, but both of these storage techniques have limitations in a world with regular earthquakes, seepy rock, and human error.
In sum, none of the negative emissions technologies discussed in the UNFCCC report sound particularly hopeful, and even the UNFCCC admits in its own report that
“these technologies offer only limited realistic potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere.”
“global emissions need to be reduced to net-zero within the next few decades to avoid a dangerous increase in global temperatures”
and that
“the good news is we already have affordable, reliable technologies that can put the peak in global emissions behind us and start the drive down to net zero.”
They continue,
“Deployed quickly and on a major scale, the clean energy technologies we have at our disposal right now can bring about the kind of decline in energy-related emissions that would put the world on track for our longer-term climate goals.”
Governments around the world, including the United States, look to the IPCC for guidance on making policy related to climate change and yet this guidance is clearly delusional.
The list of lies one must tell oneself in order to believe this rhetoric is long:
renewable energy and associated technologies (e.g. electric vehicles) is “clean”;
deploying renewable energy world wide in time to avoid climate catastrophe is possible or even desirable;
mining and refining the metals and minerals required to build that renewable energy is an acceptable further destruction to the natural world at a time when scientists are telling us habitat loss and biodiversity loss and extinction are crises just as important as climate change;
that it’s okay for us to target “net zero” emissions rather than zero emissions because we have faith we’ll have the technology we need to pull CO2 from the air,
that we can deploy these technologies globally in time to prevent catastrophic climate change;
and perhaps worst of all, that any of this can be called “environmental justice” for those most impacted—the land, rivers, lakes, plants, and human and non-human animals whose homes and lives are lost to mining, industry, and technology.
Nowhere does the Biden-Harris plan for the future make mention of de-growth, reducing industry or the military, or reducing consumption. Nowhere. In fact we see the opposite: the catch phrase for the Biden-Harris administration is “build back better”. Build back to what? The unsustainable lifestyle to which we have become accustomed? A life of jumping on planes to the nearest tourist destination, where we buy crap we don’t need and throw away six months later? A life of building more houses, more roads, and bigger and more productive corporations with the municipal and industrial waste that goes with that? A life with a military that is the worst polluter in the United States and requires a constant supply of fossil fuels, metals, and minerals mined from the ground? Biden claims he wants to “build prosperity”. Does he understand that true prosperity is created by healthy ecosystems, because without healthy, flourishing, fecund ecosystems, there is no life on Earth? We live in a world where eight people have more wealth that most of the rest of the world combined. How is that prosperity helping the natural world? How is that prosperity being used to stop the destruction? The answer is obvious: it isn’t.
These are just a few of the lies we must tell to each other, and especially ourselves, if we wish to go along quietly with the policies outlined in the Biden-Harris plan for the next four years.
However, if you cannot lie to yourself or your loved ones, speak up. Tell the truth. Face ecological reality. This is no time for delusion, unless we are ready to ignore the suffering around us and give up on this beautiful planet we call home.
Editors note: “Green technology” has become the policy centerpiece of the mainstream climate movement. But the idea that technology will solve global warming is a dangerous lie. And as Kim Hill explains in this piece, it is also highly profitable. This is no accident. We offer this article to those who suspect XR is engaging in ineffective resistance, and who are looking for a better way. Analysis is the first step toward effective action.
By Kim Hill
The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has taken off around the world, with millions of people taking to the streets to demand that governments take action on climate change and the broader ecological crisis. The scale of the movement means it has the potential to have an enormous impact on the course of history, by bringing about massive changes to the structure of our societies and economic systems.
The exact nature of the demanded action is not made clear, and warrants a close examination. There is a long history of powerful government and corporate interests throwing their support behind social movements, only to redirect the course of action to suit their own ends, and Extinction Rebellion is no exception.
With the entirety of life on this planet at stake, any course of action needs to be considered extremely carefully. Actions have consequences, and at this late stage, one mis-step can be catastrophic. The feeling that these issues have been discussed long enough and it is now time for immediate action is understandable. However, without clear goals and a plan on how to achieve them, the actions taken are likely to do more harm than good.
Extinction and climate change are among the many disastrous effects of an industrial society. While the desire to take action to stop the extinction of the natural world is admirable, rebelling against the effects without directly confronting the economic and political systems that are the root cause is like treating the symptoms of an illness without investigating or diagnosing it first. It won’t work. Addressing only one aspect of the global system, without taking into account the interconnected industries and governance structures, will only lead to worse problems.
Demand 2: net-zero emissions
The rebellion’s goals are expressed in three demands, under the headings Tell the Truth, Act Now and Beyond Politics. I’m starting with the second demand because net-zero is the core goal of the rebellion, and the one that will have enormous political, economic and social impact.
What does net-zero emissions mean? In the words of Catherine Abreau, executive director of the Climate Action Network: “In short, it means the amount of emissions being put into the atmosphere is equal to the amount being captured.” The term carbon-neutral is interchangeable with net-zero.
Net-zero emissions is Not a Thing. There is no way to un-burn fossil fuels. This demand is not for the extraction and burning to stop, but for the oil and gas industry to continue, while powering some non-existent technology that makes it all okay. XR doesn’t specify how they plan to reach the goal.
Proponents of net-zero emissions advocate for the trading of carbon offsets, so industries can pay to have their emissions captured elsewhere, without reducing any on their part. This approach creates a whole new industry of selling carbon credits. Wind turbines, hydro-electric dams, biofuels, solar panels, energy efficiency projects, and carbon capture are commonly traded carbon offsets. None of these actually reduce carbon emissions in practice, and are themselves contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, so make the problem worse. Using this approach, a supposedly carbon-neutral economy leads to increased extraction and burning, and generates massive profits for corporations in the process. Head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, Louis Redshaw, predicted in 2007 “carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall.”
The demand for net-zero emissions has been echoed by a group of more than 100 companies and lobby groups, who say in a letter to the UK government: “We see the threat that climate change poses to our businesses and to our investments, as well as the significant economic opportunities that come with being an early mover in the development of new low-carbon goods and services.” Included in this group are Shell, Nestle and Unilever. This is the same Shell that has caused thousands of oil spills and toxic leaks in Nigeria and around the world, executed protesters, owns 60 per cent of the Athabasca oil sands project in Alberta, and intends to continue extracting oil long into the future; the same Nestle that profits from contaminated water supplies by selling bottled water, while depleting the world’s aquifers; the same Unilever that is responsible for clearing rainforests for palm oil and paper, dumping tonnes of mercury in India, and making billions by marketing plastic-wrapped junk food and unnecessary consumer products to the world’s poorest people. All these companies advocate for free trade and privatization of the commons, and exploit workers and lax environmental laws in the third world. As their letter says, their motivation is to profit from the crisis, not to stop the destruction they are causing.
These are XR’s allies in the call for net-zero emissions.
A few more of the billionaires and associated capitalists promoting (and profiting from) the cause
The coal industry sees net-zero as a great opportunity to expand its business.
The nuclear industry also sees the net-zero target as a cause for celebration, and even fracking is considered compatible with the goal.
Net-zero emissions in practice
Let’s look at some of the proposed approaches to achieve net-zero in more detail.
Renewable energy doesn’t reduce the amount of energy being generated by fossil fuels, and doesn’t do anything to reduce atmospheric carbon. Wind turbines and solar panels are made of metals, which are mined using fossil fuels. Any attempt to transition to 100% renewables would require more of some rare earth metals than exist on the planet, and rare earth mining is mostly done illegally in ecologically sensitive areas in China. There are plans to mine the deep sea to extract the minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines and electric car batteries. Mining causes massive destruction and pollution of forests and rivers, leading to increased rates of extinction and climate change. And huge profits for mining and energy companies, who can claim government subsidies for powering the new climate economy. The amount of fossil fuels needed to power the mines, manufacturing, infrastructure and maintenance of renewables makes the goal of transitioning to clean energy completely meaningless. Wind and solar ‘farms’ are installed on land taken from actual farms, as well as deserts and forests. And the energy generated is not used to protect endangered species, but to power the industries that are driving us all extinct. Not a solution. Not even close. In the net-zero logic of offset trading, renewables are presented as not an alternative to fossil fuel extraction, but instead a way to buy a pass to burn even more oil. That’s a double shot of epic fail for renewables.
The composition of a single 3MW turbine. There are currently around 350 000 turbines in the world, and to meet current energy consumption with 100% wind power would require close to 4 million turbines. Image: The World Bank — Climate-Smart Mining: Minerals for Climate Action
Improving efficiency of industrial processes leads to an increase in the amount of energy consumed, not a decrease, as more can be produced with the available energy, and more energy is made available for other uses. The industries that are converting the living world into disposable crap need to be stopped, not given money to destroy the planet more efficiently.
Reforestation would be a great way to start repairing the damage done to the world, but instead is being used to expand the timber industry, which uses terms like ‘forest carbon markets’ and ‘net-zero deforestation’ to legitimize destroying old-growth forests, evicting their inhabitants, and replacing them with plantations. Those seeking to profit from reforestation are promoting genetically engineered, pesticide-dependent monocrop plantations, to be planted by drones, and are anticipating an increase in demand for wood products in the new ‘bioeconomy’. Twelve million hectares of tropical rainforest were cleared in 2018, the equivalent of 30 football fields a minute. Land clearing at this rate has been going on for decades, with no sign of stopping. No carbon offsets or emissions trading can have any effect while forest destruction continues. And making an effort to repair past damage does not make it okay to continue causing harm long into the future. A necessary condition of regenerating the land is that all destructive activity needs to stop.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is promoted as a way to extract carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, and bury it deep underground. Large amounts of energy and fresh water are required to do this, and pollutants are released into the atmosphere in the process. The purpose of currently-operational carbon capture installations is not to store the carbon dioxide, but to use it in a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), which involves injecting CO2 into near-depleted oil fields, to extract more fossil fuels than would otherwise be accessible. And with carbon trading, the business of extracting oil becomes more profitable, as it can sell offset credits. Again, the proposed solution leads to more fossil fuel use, not less. Stored carbon dioxide is highly likely to leak out into the atmosphere, causing earthquakes and asphyxiating any nearby living beings. This headline says all you need to know: “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”. Carbon capture for underground storage is neither technically nor commercially viable, as it is risky and there is no financial incentive to store the carbon dioxide, so requires government investment and subsidies. And the subsidies lead to coal and gas becoming more financially viable, thus expanding the industry.
Captured carbon is used to extract oil, in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). If the emissions site is not near an oil well, the carbon dioxide must be shipped or piped vast distances. Implementing carbon capture at scale will require 23 000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines in the US alone.
Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a psychopathic scheme to clear forests, and take over agricultural land to grow genetically modified fuel crops, burn the trees and crops as an energy source, and then bury the carbon dioxide underground (where it’s used to expand oil and gas production). It would require an amount of land almost the size of Australia, or up to 80% of current global cropland, masses of chemical fertilizers (made from fossil fuels), and lead to soil degradation (leading to more emissions), food shortages, water shortages, land theft, massive increase in the rate of extinction, and I can’t keep researching these effects it’s making me feel ill. Proponents of BECCS (i.e. fossil fuel companies) acknowledge that meeting the targets will require “three times the world’s total cereal production, twice the annual world use of water for agriculture, and twenty times the annual use of nutrients.” Of course this will mostly take place on land stolen from the poor, in Africa, South America and Asia. And the energy generated used to make more fighter jets, Hollywood movies, pointless gadgets and urban sprawl. Burning of forests for fuel is already happening in the US and UK, all in the name of clean energy. Attaching carbon capture to bioenergy means that 30% more trees or crops need to be burned to power the CCS facility, to sequester the emissions caused by burning them. And again, it’s an offset, so sold as a justification to keep the fossil fuel industry in business. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (in the three most likely of its four scenarios) recommends implementing BECCS on a large scale to keep warming below 2°C. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea can go burn in hell, where they can be put to good use as an energy source.
This image was made in 2015, and since then millions of tonnes of wood pellets have been imported into the UK from clearfelled US forests, and burned in the Drax Power Station in Yorkshire, to power people’s homes. Energy companies receive around £1billion per year in UK subsidies for generating electricity from biomass. There are plans to build several more biomass power stations. Image: www.biofuelwatch.org.uk.
This is what a decarbonised economy looks like in practice. An enormous increase in fossil fuel extraction, land clearing, mining (up to nine times as much as current levels), pollution, resource wars, exploitation, and extinction. All the money XR is demanding that governments invest in decarbonisation is going straight to the oil, gas, coal and mining companies, to expand their industries and add to their profits. The Centre for International Environmental Law, in the report Fuel to the Fire, states “Overall, the US government has been funding CCS research since 1997, with over $5billion being appropriated since 2010.” Fossil fuel companies have been advocating net-zero for some years, as it is seen as a way to save a failing coal industry, and increase demand for oil and gas, because solar, wind, biofuels and carbon capture technologies are all dependent on fossil fuels for their operation.
Anyone claiming that a carbon-neutral economy is possible is not telling the truth. All of these strategies emit more greenhouse gases than they capture. The second demand directly contradicts the first.
These approaches are used to hide the problem, and dump the consequences on someone else: the poor, nonhuman life, the third world, and future generations, all in the service of profits in the present. The goal here is not to maintain a stable climate, or to protect endangered species, but to make money out of pretending to care.
Green growth, net-zero emissions and the Green New Deal (which explicitly states in its report that the purpose is to stimulate the economy, which includes plans to extract “remaining fossil fuel with carbon capture”) are fantasy stories sold to us by energy companies, a shiny advertisement sucking us in with their claims to make life better. In reality the product is useless, and draws us collectively into a debt that we’re already paying for by being killed off at a rate of 200 species a day. With exponential economic growth (a.k.a. exponential climate action) the rate of extinction will also grow exponentially. And the money to pay for it all comes directly from working people, in the form of pension funds, carbon taxes, and climate emergency levies.
The US branch of Extinction Rebellion lists growth as its primary goal. Image: extinctionrebellion.us
The transition to net-zero
There are plans for thousands of carbon capture facilities to be built in the coming years, all requiring roads, pipelines, powerlines, shipping, land clearing, water extraction, pollution, noise, and the undermining of local economies for corporate profits, all for the purpose of extracting more oil. And all with the full support of the rebellion.
Shell’s plan to reach net-zero is to make more than a billion cars, cover millions of acres of land with solar panels, build a new large-scale carbon capture facility every day for 40 years (that’s more than 14 000), and for one third of current oil consumption to be met by bioenergy. This would leave a large proportion of the world’s human population without food, and most of the world’s wildlife without homes. This plan amounts to both genocide and ecocide. And Extinction Rebellion wants all this to happen by 2025.
To get a sense of the scale of this economic transformation, a billion seconds is almost 32 years. If you were to line up a billion cars and run over them (or run them over) at a rate of one car per second, you’d be running for 32 years non-stop. That’s enough cars to stretch 100 times around the equator. You’d probably need to turn entire continents into a mine site to extract all the minerals required to make them. And even that wouldn’t be enough, as some of the rare earth metals required for batteries don’t exist in sufficient quantities. If all these cars are powered by renewables, you do the math on how much mining would be needed to make all the wind turbines and solar panels. Maybe several more continents. And then a few more covered in panels, turbines, powerlines, substations. And a few more to extract all the oil needed to power the mining and road building. Which all leaves no space for any life. And all for what? So we can spend our lives stuck in traffic? It’s ridiculous and apocalyptic, yet this is what the net-zero lobbyists, with the US and UK governments, and the European Union, have already begun implementing.
Shell leads the energy transition, with gas, biofuels, carbon capture, renewables, patented technologies, selling offsets, “Scenarios thought leadership” meaning setting the global agenda, and advising governments on how best to serve their business. All while continuing with their core activity of extracting oil.
Shell’s thought leadership and government advisory schemes appear to be going great, with the US senate passing a number of bills in recent months to increase subsidies for oil companies using carbon capture, and a few more, to subsidise wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, research and development, and even more carbon capture, are scheduled to pass in the coming months.
This from July 17, lists just a few of the many bills proposing to increase funding for the energy industry. No objections from the rebels.
The UK government, with guidance from the creepy-sounding nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, is implementing a transition to net-zero, involving carbon capture, nuclear, bioenergy, hydrogen, ammonia, wind, solar, oil, gas, electric cars, smart grids, offset trading, manufacturing and the obligatory economic growth. And offering ‘climate finance’ to third world countries, to impose this industrial horror on the entire planet. All led by their advisors from the fossil fuel and finance industries, with input from the CCS, oil, gas, bioenergy, renewables, chemical, manufacturing, hydrogen, nuclear, airline, automotive, mining, and agriculture industries.
From the report Net Zero: The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming, p140. This makes clear that as well as ‘low-regret’ options, there is the full intention to institute some ‘speculative options’, meaning technologies that are certain to cause environmental and social devastation. And high levels of regret. Among these are Direct Air Capture, increasing demand for timber, reducing meat and dairy consumption by 50% and replacing with synthetic meat, converting farmland to biofuel crops, short-rotation forestry (meaning cutting down a lot more trees), enhanced weathering, biochar, synthetic fuels, higher CCS capture rates, and wider hydrogen roll-out. On this scale, carbon capture and BECCS are only considered low-to-mid-range regrettable. The report makes clear that “CCS is a necessity not an option.”
More from the UK’s plan for transition to net-zero. Biofuel-powered planes, ammonia-powered shipping, electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles, and “clean growth and industrial opportunities.” All completely dependent on fossil fuels.
September 3: The oil and gas industry has already begun expanding its operations in response to the UK’s announcement of the net-zero goal. “The new Centre will work with government and industry to address the UK offshore oil and gas industry’s footprint while also developing technologies that will contribute to the growing demand for hydrogen production and carbon sequestration… UK Energy and Clean Growth Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, said: ‘The UK’s oil and gas sector has a pivotal role to play in the UK’s journey towards becoming a net zero economy by 2050. Support from companies within the industry is vital to us making this energy transition to a greener future.’”
The European Union, advised by the corporate-funded European Climate Foundation, are implementing a similar plan, aiming to remain competitive with the rest of the industrialised world. The EU intends to commit 25% of its budget to implementing so-called climate mitigation strategies. Other industrialised countries also have plans to transition to a decarbonised economy.
Net-zero emissions is also the goal of the councils that have declared a climate emergency, which now number close to 1000, covering more than 200 million citizens.
This is the plan the rebellion is uniting behind to demand from the world’s governments.
Australia’s decarbonisation plan, with all the usual suspects: efficiency, renewables, nuclear, CCS, gas, carbon forestry, bioenergy and economic growth. ClimateWorks is funded by fossil fuel industry investors.
+ + + + + +
Part II will cover the rebellion’s other two demands, for truth from government and a Citizens’ Assembly; the tactics being used by the rebellion; and their proposed solutions to climate and ecological collapse.
Editor‘s note: This review from the book “Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet” talks about why the energy transition from fossil fuels to so-called renewable energy is slow and not that profitable. We at DGR believe it is not a transition – worldwide we see an increase in fossil fuel consumption. But the use of electricity from wind and solar power increases are just as strong, especially by digital companies like Amazon whose carbon emissions go up while powering with electricity. The public should get much more skeptical towards the “energy transition” and question the profit-making energy corporations.
Review of ‘The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet’ by Brett Christophers.
Wind and solar power projects, that for so long needed state backing, can now provide electricity to wholesale markets so cheaply that they will compete fossil fuels out of the park. It’s the beginning of the end for coal and gas. Right? No: completely wrong.
The fallacy that ‘market forces’ can achieve a transition away from fossil fuels is demolished in The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, a highly readable polemic by Brett Christophers.
Prices in wholesale electricity markets, on which economists and analysts focus, are not really the point, Christophers argues: profits are. That’s what companies who invest in electricity generation care about, and these can more easily be made with coal and gas.
Zeitgeist
Christophers also unpicks claims that renewables projects are subsidy-free. Even with renewably-produced electricity increasingly holding its own competitively in wholesale markets, it’s state support that counts: look at China, which is building new renewables faster than the rest of the world put together.
The obsession with wholesale electricity prices, and costs of production – to the exclusion of other economic factors – emerged in the 1980s and 90s as part of the neoliberal zeitgeist, Christophers explains.
The damage done by fossil fuels to the natural world, including climate change, was priced at zero; all that needed correcting, ran the dominant discourse, was to include the cost of this ‘externality’ in prices.
This narrative became paramount against the background of neoliberal reforms: electricity companies were broken up into parts, typically for generation, transmission, distribution and supply; private ownership and competition in markets became the norm.
However prices do not and can not reflect all the economic factors that drive corporate decision-making.
Smooth
The measure that has become standard, the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE), is the average cost of a unit of electricity produced by different methods. But for renewables, 80 percent-plus of this cost is upfront capital investment – and the fate of many renewables projects hinges on whether banks and other financial institutions are prepared to lend money to cover that cost. And on the rates at which they are prepared to lend.
The volatility of wholesale electricity markets does not help: project developers and bankers alike have to hedge against that. “We don’t like to absorb power price volatility”, one of the many financiers that Christophers interviewed for the book said. “We’ll take merchant price risk – right now we often don’t have a choice – but we’ll charge three times more for it. […] No bank in the world will take power price risk at low returns”.
Christophers writes in an exemplary, straightforward way about markets’ complexities. He details the hurdles any renewables project has to get over before it starts: as well as securing finance, it needs land and associated rights and licences, and – increasingly a problem in many countries including the UK – a timely connection to the electricity grid.
If we confront, confound and supercede capitalism a future in which electricity is used equitably and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change is surely plausible.
Corporate and financial decision-makers are concerned not so much with costs, compared to those of fossil fuel plants, as with “an acceptable rate of financial return”. Does the project meet or exceed that rate?
“The conventional transition model […] assumes an effortlessly smooth trade-off between fossil fuels and renewable electricity sources, just as stick-figure mainstream economics more widely assumes all manner of comparable smooth trade-offs, not least between present and future goods.
“But real-world processes of production and consumption involving real-world businesses do not come even close to approximating to such smooth trade-offs.”
Revival
The clearest illustration of the argument that profit is the main driver of investment, not price, is the big oil companies’ behaviour.
Christophers writes: “[T]he returns ordinarily associated with wind and solar power are much lower than those to which fossil fuel companies are accustomed in their core businesses.”
He adds: “The big new hydrocarbon projects still being initiated by the international oil majors in the 2020s, in the face of widespread public fury and dismay, promise significantly higher rates of return – and, of course, on a significantly greater absolute scale – than renewables ever do.”
So tiny renewables businesses are used solely to greenwash the companies’ continuing investment in fossil fuel production. Shell, which in 2020-22 dabbled in slightly larger renewables investments, found that the rate of return for shareholders was the lowest of all its businesses.
“Chastened by Wall Street’s savage indictment of his company’s erstwhile turn – effectively – away from profit, [Shell chief executive Wael] Sawan spent the first half of 2023 pivoting Shell back to oil and gas. Hence the horrific spectacle of a significant revival in upstream exploration activity on the part of the European majors, with Shell to the fore. […] At the same time, Shell and its peers were busily scrapping projects (including in wind) with ‘projections of weak returns’.”
Despite all this, renewable electricity generation is expanding. Christophers forensically dissects the economics, showing that ‘market forces’ have played little or no part in this.
Many renewables projects only go ahead when they have signed long-term sales agreements (power purchase agreements or PPAs), that shelter sellers from choppy markets and provide good PR (“green” credentials) for buyers.
In many countries, PPAs with utility companies that provide electricity to households are being superceded by those with corporate buyers of electricity, and above all big tech firms that wolf down electricity for data centres and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
And then there is state support – not only overt subsidies such as the tax credits offered by the US Inflation Reduction Act, but also schemes such as feed-in tariffs and contracts for difference, market instruments that shelter projects’ income from volatility.
China’s new megaprojects are “about as far from being market-led developments as is imaginable”, Christophers writes. So too are those in Vietnam, mammoths given the total size of the economy, that soared with a special feed-in tariff in 2020, and slumped to zero in 2021 when it was withdrawn.
“That investment plummets when meaningful support for renewables investment is substantially or wholly removed demonstrates precisely how significant that support in fact, and also just how marginal – or even downright unappealing – revenue and profitability prospects, in the absence of such support, actually are.”
Pretences
Christophers concludes that the state has to champion rapid decarbonisation, and “extensive public ownership of renewable energy assets appears the most viable model”. But this should not be done in a fool’s paradise, where it is presented as a means for taking profits from renewable electricity generators (what profits?!) and returning them to the public purse.
This is how the Labour Party is portraying its proposed state-owned renewable electricity generator, Great British Energy. Labour’s claims that GBE will benefit the state and taxpayers “betray a deep and perilous misunderstanding of the economics of renewable energy, and of the weak and uncertain profitability that actually plagues the sector”.
By way of contrast, Christophers points to the Build Public Renewables Act, passed by the US state of New York in 2021 in response to years of campaigning by climate action groups – which rests on the assumption that it is precisely the market’s failure to produce renewable energy projects on anything near to the timescale suggested by the climate emergency that necessitates state intervention.
All this prompts the question: don’t we need to challenge the whole idea of electricity being a commodity for sale, rather than a requirement of 21st-century living that should be provided as a public service?
Yes, we do, Christophers writes in his conclusions, with reference to Karl Polanyi’s idea of “fictitious commodities”, that under capitalism are bought and sold, but only in markets that are fashioned by “props, rules, regulations and norms”, and are therefore essentially pretences. The description fits the electricity markets ushered in by neoliberalism well.
Monopoly
The commodification of electricity, and other energy carriers, raises the prospect that, with a perspective of confronting and superceding capitalism, it should be decommodified.
Renewables technologies have opened up this issue anew, since they have hastened the trend away from centralised power stations and made it easier than ever for people – not only through the medium of the state but as households, community organisations or municipalities – to source electricity from the natural environment, without recourse to the corporations that control the market. How this potential can be torn from those corporations’ hands is a central issue.
The analysis by Christophers of the “props, rules, regulations and norms” used to bring renewables to neoliberal markets certainly convinced me. So too did his point that the returns from developing oil and gas, relatively higher historically, “are not ‘natural’ economic facts” either.
On the contrary, government economic support has always characterised the oil and gas business: in fact the line between state and business is often blurred.
In many countries they are “the selfsame entities, actively assembling monopolistic or oligopolistic constrol specifically in order to subdue volatility, stabilise profits and encourage investment”; indeed these “established institutional architectures of monopoly power” that scaffold oil and gas are a key distinction between it and renewables.
Corporate
We badly need a comparative analysis of state support for renewables and for fossil fuels – not just the bare numbers, which are available in many reports, but an understanding of the social dynamics that drive it, and that are deliberately obscured by oceans of greenwash manufactured by the political class everywhere.
Themes that Christophers touches on, such as governments’ failure to phase out fossil fuel plants, even as they make plans to expand renewables need to be developed. The appallingly slow progress of renewables and the weight of incumbency that favours fossil fuels can not be separated.
This understandable book, which brings dry capitalist realities to life so well – and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the transition away from fossil fuels is so disastrously slow – raised some questions in my mind about electricity demand.
Take the steep increase in demand for renewably generated electricity from big tech. Amazon is the world’s biggest buyer of solar and wind power under corporate PPAs, and an even bigger promoter of its own “green” image. But its carbon footprint continues to grow, Christophers points out, especially that of its “energy-gorging cloud-computing Web services business”.
A big-tech-dominated fake energy transition? “It would be difficult to conceive of a more ironic statement on the warped political economy of contemporary green capitalism.”
Trashing
Which is reason to interrogate the way society uses electricity – and the way that capitalist social relations turn use – to fulfil needs, to make people’s lives good into demand – an economic category no less ideologically-inflected than other ‘market forces’.
Amazon and the rest are sharply increasing their electricity demand, which in the US and elsewhere has led to shutdowns of coal-fired power station being postponed – while hundreds of millions of people in the global south still have no electricity at all.
Furthermore: the “green transition” envisaged by most politicians will see the economic sectors in the global north that gulp down the greatest quantities of fossil fuels – road transport, the built environment, and industry – switching many processes to electricity. The classic example is the shift from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles. And this will increase electricity demand.
Christophers takes no view on these issues: “[R]ight or wrong, good or bad, electrification largely is what is happening and what will continue to happen”.
While I agree that, under capitalism, the dominant political forces take this for granted, I think that we should not. To stick with the example of road transport, none of the scenarios that assume swapping petrol vehicles one-for-one for electric vehicles can happen without trashing meaningful climate targets.
Catastrophic
The economic transformations that tackling climate change implies must include reshaping – for collective social benefit, and with a view to rapidly reducing emissions – the huge technological systems, like road transport, that account for the largest chunks of fossil fuel use. Simply electrifying them is not enough.
Moreover, with the current level of technology, including the prospects opened up by decentralised renewables, there is potential to establish completely new relationships between production and use – which are currently controlled by big capital, but need not be.
Hopes of energy conservation implied in the International Energy Agency’s latest net zero report “border on the Pollyannaish”, Christophers writes. Yes, granted – if the perspective is limited to one dominated by capital.
But insofar as it is possible to confront, confound and supercede capitalism, a future in which electricity is used less wastefully, more equitably, and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change, is surely plausible.
That is where hope lies – outside the matrix of profit-driven relationships that Christophers skewers so exquisitely.
Title photo by Matthew T Rader/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham and writes a blog at peoplenature.org.
