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