Only the political imagination is captured

Robin McAlpine

Scottish Government funding for Carbon Capture and Storage was trailed in the morning. Given my long track record of trying to make sure you all understand that this is a simple, barely-disguised con, I waited to see how serious they were based on how much money they were putting forward. I snorted into my tea when I saw.

Just so you get a sense of this, the amount of money ploughed into the carbon capture scheme which came closest to actual large-scale carbon capture (the Petra Nova facility in the US) was a cool billion dollars before it was closed after failing to work. Literally a billion pounds was wasted on a white elephant that never, ever worked and was never going to.

The Scottish Government is dedicating a less-cool £2 million. This tells us that the Scottish Government doesn't think this is going to work either. Two million pounds is how much you spend to maintain a fantasy if your just transition strategy is otherwise in tatters. It is not the kind of money you spend to build a large, experimental industrial facility.

So the Scottish Government is happy to blow £2 million to keep this whole silly story going but isn't actually going to put serious money where its mouth is, and certainly not the kind of money that would be needed to deliver this capacity in timeframes consistent with their own decarbonisation timetable (such as it remains).

I won't bother going over why Carbon Capture and Storage is a con – for those who haven't seen it, instead go and enjoy this very funny and very rude Australian explainer. It isn't even technically feasible in principle to get anywhere near capturing 100 per cent of the emissions of a big single-site fossil fuel plant.

The only real purpose of CCS was to enable the oil and gas industry to maintain a fiction in which its products could be burned and still be consistent with the need to decarbonise the economy. It let a lot of people also hold on to the vague sense that decarbonisation was important but actually wouldn't be that different from now.

What I instead want to argue that the only thing it really captured was the political imagination. This is the real problem with carbon capture in all its forms – it lets us believe that decarbonisation is very much like what we do now but with some extra technologies tacked on to clean things up. It stopped us imaging an alternative.

So plant some trees, stick carbon capture and storage on some industrial sites and hope that direct air capture (pulling existing CO2 out the atmosphere) somehow becomes affordable and efficient enough and carry on as before, that sort of thing.

It is amazing how captured people are by this. It seems to make sense to say 'well we can't just switch fossil fuels off'. Except we can and we must. It isn't going to happen in one go – there won't be a morning when all the petrol stations close in one go.

But it must happen, and it must begin now. That's what a transition is – from one thing to another gradually. We must get into our heads that we're burning fewer fossil fuels today than we did yesterday and fewer tomorrow than we did today, and onwards to zero. Initiatives like Carbon Capture and Storage let us believe that there is one day in the indeterminate future when we achieve net zero without changing much now.

This is the problem. Let me call it transition denialism, the idea that you can make a change the size we have to make by very heavily backloading it all off to some point in the future. What I am aghast at is that this is what we already did in 1992 in Rio. That was when, nominally, the world accepted that it was going to have to decarbonise.

And we are the people they thought would have decarbonised by now. That is 30 years ago, and we've done nothing like enough. So now we're telling ourselves we've got another 30 years. We don't. We are already over time.

I'm starting to find all of this a bit petrifying. The thing that was identified in Rio in 1992 was not really codified until Paris 2016 – 24 years. The threshold set then which we had to keep to has already been crossed (by many estimates anyway). So we're finding stories to tell ourselves that let us believe that we have another 20 years to play with.

And of course behind this is the power and frankly the villainy of the oil industry. This is an industry that knew in the 1970s that it was killing humanity and much more along with it and then spent its time between then and now trying to hide this information, lie about it, distort it, deny it and now con you out of taking action.

In this context I find recent Scottish politics a bit stomach-churning. There is a better case for holding criminal trials for senior oil executives than there is for giving them money for carbon capture. Every argument they have is easily dismantled by anyone who wants to dismantle it. They can't justify what they are doing or what they want to do.

So they don't really try. They tell lies. Presumably now Labour will add that two pence to tax on oil companies it promise and then presumably Unite and the oil barons will be able to demonstrate all 100,000 jobs that are going to disappear overnight like they warned us over and over. They won't disappear, almost like they were taking you for a fool in the first place.

While the day the Scottish Government dropped its climate targets was a day of anger, for me it was also a day of hope. Those fictional targets were only held up by the false promise of carbon capture. I had greatly hoped that when the fictional targets were gone, all the other fictions and false promises that had been propping them up would go too.

This week we saw that that is not what has happened. What we can see is a Scottish Government which is re-announcing what it re-announced numerous times before – decarbonisation through experimental technology, not change. It keeps getting re-announced because it doesn't work.

The SNP is one of two governments we have, neither of which knows how to decarbonise seriously or quickly enough for our planet. Or actually they possibly do but are unwilling to challenge the oil industry. It's getting a bit pathetic.

There is one truth that rings out from all of this; whenever you hear anyone talking about carbon capture you are listening to someone who is not serious about change, who is captured by the existing way of thinking.

I now no longer believe that the existing Scottish Government is capable of providing the serious lead on climate change we need. They are too limited in almost every respect – ideas, courage, vision, delivery capability. But nor is the UK Government providing an acceptable lead.

We are drifting into extinction based on lies and fictions and trickery and political cowardice. Over and over the same fictions keep returning. I think I must have heard every argument by now. I've heard every 'pragmatic' position which begins 'of course I'm not a climate change denier, but...' followed by pure climate change denial.

This week we were right back in the depths of it, repeated once more but with even less feeling. And so £2 million of your tax income is going to be spent on whatever it takes to keep this whole daft thing chugging along again.

I wish this was farce, but it's tragedy.