I’ll ignore the fact that you have somehow glommed carbon credits (which has always been a scam) with carbon capture (which was never going to be a viable technology), wait, maybe they do belong together.
Al Gore may have been right about a lot of things, but I’ve never seen how carbon credits were anything other than an investment scam. There was never even a definition of what a carbon credit was or how much it should offset.
And carbon capture is going to be way more expensive than just producing power from sources that don’t release carbon (and more importantly all the other pollutants) in the first place.
Of course where you and I completely disagree is whether or not we should even be trying to reduce pollution of all kinds through wind, solar, tidal forces, etc.
But yeah, carbon credits and carbon capture were never going to work.
I’ll ignore the fact that you have somehow glommed carbon credits (which has always been a scam) with carbon capture (which was never going to be a viable technology), wait, maybe they do belong together.
Al Gore may have been right about a lot of things, but I’ve never seen how carbon credits were anything other than an investment scam. There was never even a definition of what a carbon credit was or how much it should offset.
And carbon capture is going to be way more expensive than just producing power from sources that don’t release carbon (and more importantly all the other pollutants) in the first place.
Of course where you and I completely disagree is whether or not we should even be trying to reduce pollution of all kinds through wind, solar, tidal forces, etc.
But yeah, carbon credits and carbon capture were never going to work.
No, let’s be clear, I also think we should try to reduce pollution through technological innovation, however, I think such investments should be funded entirely by private market particiapants, not governments.
The evidence is that when the state gets involved in this kind of stuff, only one thing results–swift and certain destruction of scarce capital.
Carbon capture–and this story specifically–illustrate this point exactly.
The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52.
Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place.
Al Gore may have been right about a lot of things, but I’ve never seen how carbon credits were anything other than an investment scam. There was never even a definition of what a carbon credit was or how much it should offset.
I didn’t even have a main issue with the take that carbon capture isn’t really going to work, but you had a lot wrong in this sentence. You are failing to differentiate between carbon credits sold by random companies to make you feel better and carbon credits which are used as part of a large scale cap and trade system like they have in Europe. Carbon credits in actual systems (namely the European one) are allowances to emit 1 tonne of CO2, and the amount of credits is based on a targeted figure to meet the CO2 reductions that those countries agreed upon in the Kyoto Protocol. The same system was used to great effect to reduce acid rain emissions (NOx and SOx) more quickly and cheaper than other systems could/would have.
Even though I have worked on carbon capture off and on for the last ~5 years now, I’ve slowly been becoming more and more pessimistic about it as I go along. It’s only real purpose is as a “bridge” technology, to start reducing CO2 emissions right now since other stuff is too expensive and we have a ton of coal plants. But it’s not any cheaper than plenty of other low-carbon technologies, never mind that it requires an increase in our strip mining coal production. It’s really another 10 years before the current (expensive) technology is even ready for heavy commercial use, and then another 10-20 years to make the commercial stuff cheap. By that point we can have solar/wind/nuclear just as cheap too.
The whole carbon credit scam makes Bernie Madoff look like a playground loan shark in comparison. At least ol’ Bernie never had governmental powers to back up his deals, which makes the scams obligatory instead of merely depending on greed or ignorance.