Huffington Magazine Issue 66 | Page 58

THE CARBON QUANDARY the very deep-pocketed peddlers of fossil fuels. Tens of thousands of miles of new pipelines and other infrastructure would be needed to move the CO₂ around, these advocates argue. And while there are some potential markets for the gas — the food and beverage industry, for instance (think bubbly soda), or even by fossil fuel drillers, who have long injected CO₂ into waning underground wells to coax out more crude — commercial demand for captured CO₂ will remain minuscule compared with the tens of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide we currently exhale into the ether every year. All of that would need to find safe and permanent storage underground — itself a worrying prospect for environmentalists. “I think it’s at least in part a way for politicians to show they’re not anti-coal,” says climate activist and author Bill McKibben. “But I’ve never met anyone who thinks [CCS] will actually play a serious part in dealing with our crisis. You can do it — but so expensively it makes no sense.” Herzog and others don’t dispute that CCS is costly, but they argue that every other potential HUFFINGTON 09.15.13 solution to the gathering climate crisis is equally if not more so. They also suggest that much of the skepticism surrounding CCS is unfounded, given the long history of capturing the stuff and a robust body of geological research and evidence suggesting that CO₂ can, in all likelihood, be safely and securely stored underground. But Herzog noted that until it becomes vastly more expensive to simply puff the stuff skyward — through a cap-and-trade scheme or a carbon tax, for instance, or tough government-enforced emissions limits — the technologies needed to tackle global warming will always remain out of reach. “You have to remember,” he says, “there’s really no such thing as a free lunch.” A MASSIVE PROBLEM The scope of the challenge is immense. Carbon dioxide emissions come from lots of sources — cars and trucks, for example, or residential and commercial buildings. But heavy industry and electricity production, both of which rely to a significant extent on the burning of coal, natural gas or oil to do what they do, make for a highly polluting combination. According to the Energy Information Administration, the world currently spews a little less than 35 billion