Amy Westervelt is an independent investigative climate journalist who has been on the climate beat for more than 20 years, reporting for a wide range of outlets over the years, including Inside Climate News, The Guardian, The Nation, The Intercept, NPR, and many more. Despite her move into audio in the past 10 years, Amy still reports and writes regularly for a wide range of publications. You can keep up with her work by following Amy on Mastodon or Twitter as well. Source: An “Unabated” Disaster
Last month, COP28 president, oil CEO Al Jaber unveiled his “action plan” for this year’s climate summit. Amidst a lot of big talk about fossil fuel phase down was one little word that puts the lie to all of it: “unabated.” Whenever Al Jaber makes a commitment to moving the world away from fossil fuels it comes with this caveat. “Unabated” refers to fossil fues that don’t have carbon capture or direct air capture associated with them. The idea being that those emissions are being taken care of, so no problem. Except…the data on these technologies is far from conclusive about their capacity to “abate” anything but fossil fuel companies’ responsibility to do anything at all about climate change.
In case there was any doubt about that, Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub has been saying the quiet part out loud. “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Hollub told an oil and gas conference in March. “This gives our industry a licence to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think is going to be very much needed.”
Emissions abatement technologies are, of course, a worthy endeavor. We would all love to have a magic vacuum that sucks greenhouse gas emissions out of the sky. But overstating the technology’s capability today only locks us into more pain and suffering tomorrow. Moreover, when scientists talk about DAC as a helpful technology—and they do! yay!—it is always, always with a very important caveat: it will only work to mitigate climate impacts if emissions are reduced first. As scientist David Ho put it in the journal Nature, “Drastically reduce emissions first, or carbon dioxide removal will be next to useless.”…
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