Greens hate hydrocarbons but open warfare is breaking out in their ranks as the world outside their luxury millenarian cult realises it is impossible to run a modern industrial society without hydrocarbons. In the U.K., the penny is finally dropping that gas is the only realistic backup to an electricity system powered by unreliable breezes and sunbeams. But at the same time the mad Miliband crew is closing down local oil and gas exploration, and step forward Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell University who claims transportable American liquified natural gas (LNG) has a bigger ‘carbon’ footprint than coal. The Guardian was all over an early draft of Cornell’s work which helped support last year’s pause by the Biden Administration of pending LNG export permits. LNG was described as a carbon “mega bomb”. Cornell’s work was funded by the billionaire Park Foundation which supports ‘progressive’ causes and divestment from oil and gas extraction. By a happy coincidence – such coincidences, of course, being common in the complex webs of the Green Blob – Park has given $650,000 to the Guardian over the last three years.
Pennies dropping over gas backup lie behind the recent decision by the U.K. Government to waste £22 billion capturing carbon dioxide and burying it underground. The sheer futility of this exercise is obvious to many since it will require enormous amounts of energy to capture and compress a gas that is likely to eventually seep out of any nearby cavernous hole in the ground. The whole exercise bears some similarity to the old lag Fletcher telling Prison Officer MacKay in the 1970 sitcom Porridge that the prisoners had hidden the earth from an escape tunnel by digging another hole to put it in.
In geological terms, pumping massive quantities of pressurised gas into the substrata may come with some risks. On August 21st 1986 there was a sudden release of 1.6 million tons of magmatic CO2 from the bed of Lake Nyos in Cameroon. Heavier than air CO2 fell on the surrounding villages and suffocated 1,746 people. The gas had accumulated under high pressure and could have been released by volcanic activity or a minor earth tremor. One of the first sites for U.K. CO2 storage is Liverpool Bay, while other locations around the country have been identified. No doubt strict geological guidelines will be observed to ensure CO2 does not escape in bulk, but over time conditions might change. The suggested threat from earthquakes was enough to ban onshore fracking in the U.K. and it will be interesting to see if similar concerns arise when many millions of tonnes of pressurised CO2 are being buried.
As we have seen, so-called climate ‘solutions’ such as carbon capture are hated by true green cult believers. The green billionaire activist unit Oil Change International (OCI) has described carbon capture as a “colossal waste of money”. In a recent detailed report, OCI noted past expenditure of $83 billion with a failure rate of over 80% in the U.S. “Carbon capture projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform,” states OCI.
The hatred arises because carbon capture is seen as legitimising the continued use of hydrocarbons. The less insane greens are finally realising that they cannot ban hydrocarbons altogether. This is due to the fact that half the world’s population would die without hydrocarbon-based medicine, fertiliser, waste disposal etc. But of course the true believers are right in that carbon capture is a colossal waste of money providing little more than a fig leaf to cover the continued use of oil and gas.
Then let us consider hydrogen, an explosive, expensive waste of money but favoured by many greens as a scalable alternative to oil and gas. The U.K.’s Royal Society said as much last year in a major report written by over 40 leading scientists. The Environmental Defence Fund, an influential Green Blob-funded activist and campaigning operation, thinks otherwise. In a recent paper, it noted that the higher combustion temperature of hydrogen produced more polluting nitrogen dioxide. In addition the gas is very light and easily escapes into the atmosphere. Chemical changes then produce pound for pound 37 times the warming of CO2. Inconvenient for alarmists, who haven’t yet worked out that the various warming gases in the atmosphere ‘saturate’ past certain levels, a suggestion backed up by 500 million years of climate observations.
In understanding these civil war battles that are breaking out in the green movement, the general public is hamstrung by a news blackout long imposed on all sceptical consideration of Net Zero and climate science. The BBC can broadcast a 40 minute antisemitic rant by the Iranian leader justifying the rape and slaughter of women and children in Israel, but it will not consider a single second of sceptical comment around the ‘settled’ science of climate change. It justifies the former with a free speech, need-to-inform argument, but withholds such an indulgence over Net Zero. As a result, a Potemkin village of fake science, fudged weather figures, ridiculous computer model attributions and predictions and Jim Dale/Dale Vince pronouncements are allowed to flourish with little or no push back permitted. Largely unreported are the increasingly vicious battles breaking out in the green movement as it continues on its handcart-to-hell journey.
If there is a pressing need to understand these internal green battles it is important to disclose the links that bind many of the participants together. Professor Howarth’s work is intent on demonising LNG for political purposes. Who is funding and publicising it is important information since it may well affect the future supply of LNG to a gas-starved Britain under a Harris Administration. Mainstream media are incapable of covering these issues since they are bound to a set reporting narrative with scepticism barred as ‘misinformation’. But who is saying what, why they are saying it and who is paying for them to say it are all important items of information in navigating the increasingly treacherous waters of green and Net Zero politics.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Great article Chris, thanks for your never ending commitment to keeping us informed.
Hear, hear.
Occasionally you come across some ideas that are so incredibly stupid, you just don’t know what to say any more.
How is carbon capture supposed to work?
Let me get this right: here in the UK we will build a machine that will extract CO2 from the atmosphere that we share with the rest of the world? Including the gigantic amount of CO2 that coal power plants in China and produce? Really? Educated, supposedly intelligent people can listen to an idea like this and nod in agreement: “yes, sounds like a plan.”
No, really, the inmates have taken over the asylum.
The idea is so stupid that I don’t believe that they believe it. Instead I think “carbon capture” is a device for furthering the globalists’ technocratic despotism.
Carbon credits. Follow the money.
My own opinion is that these people think we will be setting some sort of example, which the rest of the world will then follow. They lack the capacity or will to examine the feasibility, efficiency/effectiveness (or even the rationale) of such projects at the macro level; as doing so would force them to reexamine their entire worldview and ideology.
It is a cult, and cultish adherence is not easy to break.
Yes as if the Chinese Indian and Malaysian government people will be sitting around their dinner tables in the evening and telling their families “Hush I am trying to listen to Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband”
It’s intelligence, Jim, but not as we know it.
There’s all that CO2, ready to come out if the oceans. But don’t tell them that, as they only have Arts and Humanities degrees, and won’t understand!
It is there to try and justify keeping using gas as backup for silly renewables. The green fundamentalists don’t seem to realise that you cannot run Industrial Society on wind and sun and hate the idea of any fossil fuels at all. Mainly because they are ideologically motivated but also because they don’t understand how energy works.
Preaching to the choir here, but it’s always worth going back in time, now and again, to recall just how old this whole ‘climate crisis’ scam is and who was/is behind it all. I’m sure everyone on here knows the answer by now, but nevertheless, usual suspects ( 5mins );
https://x.com/RealBoomdiggity/status/1842268902308630599
Thank you for that
wink
Not heard about the event in Cameroon before – terrible
Maybe not. The loss of Liverpool under a great miasma of expensively-captured greeny gasses wouldn’t be that tragic.
On a more serious note, it would be rather jolly if the boondoggle ‘scientists’ did manage to invent a machine which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere, this caused CO2 levels to fall below say 200 ppm (parts per million) plant life started dying and humans became extinct.
I am sure that a lot of the green brigade would qualify, at some point in the future for nominations of the Darwin Award. If only they would be trying the carbon reduction on themselves rather than the rest of us who would prefer its balance in nature to be the purview of nature itself.
You can imagine the spin though can’t you, due to ‘labour’ investment in carbon capture, we now have a ready supply of co2 to release into the environment to save humanity from the latest disaster… without even a hint of irony it was all their bloody fault in the first place
Yep, that’s about right, I am waiting for someone to take the credit, not the solar minimum, for a reduction in global temperatures over the next few years, and don’t mention Tonga Wonga Volcano.
for the locals it was grim, but what the engineers and scientist did to try and prevent it happening again was quite innovative. I think the Discovery Channel did a programme on it in about 1997, I have no telly so cannot help any further.
I will try to look that up. You think it was a natural disaster then not a man-made toxic spill?
I remember it but didn’t know the gases involved – it was reported as a toxic lake spill. Why is that form of CO2 so heavy? What is magmatic?
A religion will always fragment into sects and then the fighting starts over whose observance, ritual, interpretation is correct.
Spot on. A rule of human nature.
The green cult hates anything that allows modern society continue which is why they hate nuclear as well.
I’m finding this extremely funny.
I’ve run out of worry, horror and grief, so I’m sitting back to enjoy the show.
It surely can’t get even funnier.
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” sums up Green projects to waste the country money
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/green-thinking/
FUBAR
Powerful last paragraph. Great article.
Spend the CCUS £21Bn on Rolls Royce SMR’s. We should be able to get about 7 of them. We need more like 50, but it would keep the lights on for a bit longer.
Carbon Capture is a complete farce and a scam.
The real risk to people and animals from CCUS is not some failure to keep it underground in perpetuity but if the pipeline carrying the CO2 was damaged leading to an uncontrolled release of CO2.
CO2 is heavier than air and any release on land will cause valleys, ditches, cellars and other low points to fill wil CO2 asphyxiating every person and animal. Being much heavier than air it will not disperse easily in wind.
If a natural gas pipeline leaks, the gas rises quickly out of harms way and disperses easily because it is lighter than air.
We are now in the age of having less of everything. Less Energy Less food, Less travel, so maybe we should have Less BBC as well.
The triumvirate of unbiased BBC reporters (propagandists) on foreign affairs and Brexit consists of Orla Guerin, Lyse Doucet and Katya Adler. They are respectively nationals of The Republic of Ireland, Canada, and Germany (dual British). The long-planned and deliberate weaponization of energy and emissions to impoverish and control us is completely obvious, the insidious erosion of national sovereignty and identity less so. Both are deadly enemies of the powerless.
I think we should produce billions of toy ducks using potato starch, set batches of them in recycled glass and plastic and Bury them deep in the ground. This needn’t cost more than £22 billion.
What’s the point you ask? Exactly!
What can men do against such reckless knuckleheadedness?
Chris—–Nice to see you last week on GB news. ——We need you.
“The suggested threat from earthquakes was enough to ban onshore fracking in the U.K. and it will be interesting to see if similar concerns arise when many millions of tonnes of pressurised CO2 are being buried.”
Or, to put it another way, when there’s no problem with many millions of tonnes of pressurised CO2 being buried, for ages
, why is fracking a problem?
With fracking in the UK, water, with around 1% of benign additives, is injected into the ground to release the trapped Methane, which is then released, to be used by us. When the well is spent, there is no excess pressure to cause any problems.
With storing Carbon Dioxide underground at very high pressure, there is, obviously, excess pressure that could cause problems, for some considerable time.
And if not, why not?