The Nature of the Challenge

In the wake of the failure at Cophenhagen to agree on measures to slow global climate change, it was comforting to read this:

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Tuesday signed a law requiring that Brazil cut greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent by 2020, meeting a commitment made at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Brazil announced at the summit a "voluntary commitment" to reduce CO2 emissions by between 36.1 and 38.9 percent in the next ten years.

The new law, however, is subject to several decrees setting out responsibilities and regulations for the farming, industrial, energy and environmental sectors.
Lula is expected to sign the decrees in January after consulting scientists and other experts, officials said.

Despite its ambitious targets, Greenpeace's top representative in Brazil, Sergio Leitao, called it merely a list of good intentions and accused Lula of using double standards in environmental issues.

Double standards or no, it's still double the goal of any other nation, and quite a giant step for a country whose bulk of emissions come from the burning of the Amazon rain forest.

Here at home, cap-and-trade legislation remains endangered. When the lies and idiocy that pass for debate these days devolve, as they will, into promises about "clean coal" technology, you can find ammunition against it in this superb piece from Holly Wren Spaulding in The Nation.

But of all the ideas that are being considered, carbon capture and sequestration stands out because it might, just might, not be totally nuts. CCS involves a complicated process through which carbon dioxide is removed from fuels like coal and oil--or even from the air--and is then forced into spent oil wells, porous rock formations or under the ocean floor for long-term storage. Already there are a smattering of small CCS projects around the world. Most of them involve oil companies that pump CO2 into active oil wells to help force up more petroleum in a practice known as enhanced oil recovery. A few companies use the CO2 for industrial purposes, like carbonation of drinks.

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But the real question for any of these methods--beyond who would organize and pay for them--is what to do with the CO2 after it is captured. For one thing, leaks could be lethal--concentrated CO2 asphyxiates. A natural version of this happened in Cameroon in 1986 after a volcanic eruption caused the bottom of Lake Nyos to belch out a cloud of CO2, killing 1,700 people and hundreds of cattle over a range of twenty-five kilometers.

If CCS goes commercial, the storage of this dangerous gas would need to be regulated--a prospect that does not exactly excite energy producers. "What I heard industry saying is that they don't want to be compelled to do real-time monitoring...and they don't want a public process," says Lee Sprague, who manages the Clean Energy Campaign for the Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club. He says communities need to become engaged when a CCS project is under consideration and make sure public health and safety officials are prepared for potential emergencies.

Whatever the combination of technologies, CCS on a large scale would be fabulously expensive. And it would have a meaningful impact on the climate only if it were an adjunct to rapid industrial transformation away from fossil fuels toward a clean-energy economy.

The biggest problem with CCS is not so much its expensive, experimental, high-tech aspects but the twisted political discourse surrounding it. These days CCS functions as a canard, a misleading ruse, set afloat by the coal industry to greenwash its image. Billboards around Appalachia read, "Coal: cleaner greener power for the people and protection for the environment." The political class happily falls in line behind the marketing because coal states are swing states. As a result, candidates from both major parties bloviate about their commitment to "clean coal"--a thing that manifestly does not exist. CCS also offers middle-class consumers the salve of hope: it suggests that we can carry on with our profligate ways--that we can have our fossil fuel and burn it too.

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CCS is not the solution to the climate crisis. As one proponent of geoengineering admitted, it "is simply a temporary 'stay of execution.' We will still have to work for a pardon." And that comes in only one form: radically and rapidly reducing emissions.

Global climate change is complicated. Figuring out the best way to slow that change by reducing emissions is 10 times that complicated. And passing legislation ensuring that reduction is 10 times more complicated than that.

But debunking the "clean coal" peddlers is easy: It's a myth, to a degree that makes magical elves and the Tooth Fairy as factual as gravity.