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Greetings!
We hope this update finds you safe
during this global health crisis.
The COVID-19 crisis echoes the
climate crisis in important ways, within a much shorter time frame.
Movements are already mobilizing to prevent multi-trillion-dollar
bailouts from focusing solely on asset funds and transnational
corporations; the usual beneficiaries of crisis situations. Workers,
migrants and the most vulnerable – the victims of an agenda of deep
cuts to welfare states and globalization of supply chains as well as
of the COVID-19 pandemic – are left out of the bailout
largesse.
Geoengineering plays a similar role
with the climate crisis. After years of industry-funded climate denial
and delays, geoengineering is the option that will keep the fossil
fuel extractors in business, by allowing them to keep
extracting.
As governments come to terms with
the scale of the climate crisis, the pathway out of climate chaos is
still being debated and contested. Geoengineers are busy building a
panic button that will keep fossil fuel extraction going, through the
false promise of technologies that could theoretically cool the planet
by blocking the sun or sucking carbon out of the
atmosphere.
 The United States Congress recently passed a bill that includes $1.47 billion for large-scale
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects and $367 million for Direct
Air Capture research. Most alarmingly, $4 million was allocated to
activities including solar geoengineering
experiments.
Following in US footsteps, the
United Kingdom’s parliament
allocated £800 million for
two CCS “clusters”.
Corporations are also investing in
CCS. Microsoft recently committed to offsetting all of the company’s carbon
emissions since its
founding in 1975 through a mix of measures including CCS. Even BP has
declared its intention to go “net zero” (though analysis casts doubts on the company’s sincerity). Meanwhile the
CEO of BlackRock, which holds $7.4 trillion in assets and has
invested in carbon capture boondoggle
Drax, said in a letter that “governments and the private sector
must work together,” to lower emissions, though remained vague on
specific measures.
Carbon Capture is Ineffective and Harmful at
Scale
 Because Carbon Capture and Storage
(CCS) is quickly gaining funding and corporate backing, we put
together a list of seven key reasons why CCS is not a solution
to the climate crisis.
- Carbon capture buys time for
fossil fuel companies to continue extracting
- Carbon often ends up back into
the atmosphere, or creates new pollution
- It’s an expensive use for money
that’s better spent reducing emissions at the source
- It diverts renewable energy to
keep the fossil fuel treadmill going
- Carbon capture increases the
power and profits of the fossil fuel industry
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Carbon capture paves the way for
dangerous solar geoengineering
7. The global
opportunity for a different path
Read the whole thing here.
From Carbon Suck to Sun Block: SCoPEx inches
forward
 SCoPEx, the main attempt to create
facts on the ground for solar geoengineering, is run by David Keith,
who is also an entrepreneur in Direct Air Capture, a type of Carbon
Dioxide Removal geoengineering. SCoPEx has been quiet since it
recruited an advisory board aimed at legitimizing its efforts, which
violate international moratoria on geoengineering
experiments.
However, Keith has continued to
promote his plans to test solar geoengineering, probably somewhere in
the American southwest. He recently posed with a propeller from the self-propelling gondola that they
plan to use to spray various substances into the upper atmosphere, and
taking time to argue about the environmental effects of solar
geoengineering for Canada’s national broadcaster.
In August, 31 civil society groups
from five continents wrote to the advisory committee, asking them to respect the international
moratoria currently in
place. So far, none have said they will do so.
New Doubts on Ocean Fertilization
 New research from MIT suggests that iron levels in oceans globally have been fine-tuned by
evolution to be at optimal levels to support life, and draws the
conclusion that ocean fertilization might not actually result in any
carbon being stored. The report’s lead author said that according to
their framework, “iron fertilization cannot have a significant overall
effect on the amount of carbon in the ocean because the total amount
of iron that microbes need is already just right.”
Previous critiques have suggested that ocean fertilization
could simply rob nutrients from plankton growth that would normally
have happened down-current, and that the process could create
deoxygenated “dead zones” that could be dangerous for sea life and the
ocean food web.
Is California Flirting with Geoengineering, or Going
Steady?
 Last fall, leaked documents revealed
that the ISO standards organization was working on a new standard for
“radiative forcing” – altering the amount of heat retained by
the atmosphere – which appeared to imply the potential for a market
that could incentivize some forms of geoengineering.
Concurrently, legislation covering
radiative forcing was
proposed in the California State legislature. The early draft of the
legislation made explicit reference to the ISO’s then-secret proposal.
In any case, the bill stalled in committee early this year, and is
likely to expire.
Another bill up for debate soon in
California this year sneaks in encouragement of so-named “Carbon
Dioxide Removal” technologies under legislation that is nominally
about expanding forests.
Meanwhile, the chair of the SCoPEx
advisory committee is a California State employee who reports to the
governor.
We will be keeping an eye on the
state government as California gets ready to reveal the official
status of its relationship to geoengineering.
DAC Infrastructure Requires Subsidies
 A recent article, supportive of Direct Air Capture, suggests
that vast subsidies for new infrastructure will be required. Writing
for the Breakthrough Institute, the author explains that for DAC
efforts to scale up would require a vast network of pipelines, up to
23,000 additional miles, to move the CO2 around.
It goes on to conclude that vast
subsidies and government planning will be needed to set up this
infrastructure:
“Although the need for new CO2
infrastructure can be reduced somewhat — by developing DAC facilities
near either storage basins or other sources of captured carbon such
major industrial centers — it can’t be eliminated. And as with all
large infrastructure systems, building it will require considerable
government funding and planning.”
(See also our summary
of recent DAC plans.)
Biochar Record Still Mixed
 After their 2011 evaluation of the
much-hyped, subsidy-seeking biochar proposals, our colleagues at
BioFuelWatch reviewed the last nine years of scientific
literature on the would-be
geoengineering technology.
Their findings remained much the
same: results of even short-term studies of mixing biochar in soil
found widely variable results when it comes to sequestering carbon.
Results appear to be dependent on specific soil conditions, which are
not necessarily well-understood.
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