President Obama met with Prime Minister Harper today, and they announced a plan to capture and store carbon emissions. It is at best a partial solution, if even that.

Date:   2/19/2009 6:19:57 PM ( 15 y ago)

Feb. 19th. 2009
Announcement by Obama and Harper - Carbon Sequestration

Canadians were feeling proud today after the "World's Most Popular Man" - President Obama - came to visit Canada on his first trip to a foreign nation.

We were also feeling relieved that our Prime Minister didn't embarrass us all by irritating Obama with the right-wing ideology of the former American administration under George Bush that brought disgrace to, and ruined the economy of, the USA.

Obama and Harper talked about a few things in their meeting today that could have highlighted the differences between the views of the two leaders, but the issues of energy and global warming were the most likely to show those differences. Harper has allways been backed by western Canadian oil interests, and therefore is bound to protecting the oil and coal industries, and Obama has promised his electorate change, and that might mean changing to a sustainable energy policy without oil and coal being the primary source of energy.

The major announcement after their meeting was about carbon sequestration and storage. From that, one could assume that P.M. Harper got his way, but Obama is just starting to show his stripes, and apparently coal is still king in America, because carbon sequestration is a tactic that allows fossil fuels to continue to be used instead of starting on the path to real change.

The Carbon Storage idea won't help us reach the goal of at reducing or even stabilising emissions [of grenhouse gases suspected of contributing to global warming and climate changes]. At best, it is a partial measure.

President Obama and P.M. Harper announced a plan that, in their words, "would allow the economies to grow but at the same time reduce emissions" - carbon storage. This idea involves capturing, or sequestering, and then storing underground, the carbon dioxide emissions from industrial operations such as coal burning power plants, oil refineries and other oil production facilities including the Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada.

It will help, it should have been done long ago, but it is not any sort of complete answer to global warming. For one thing, it only involves the emissions from the large emittors mentioned above, and not the transportation sector. Nonetheless, this annoucement is a good thing but it should not be any sort of reason to take our eye off the ultimate goal of eliminating the use of fossil fuels wherever possible. That was never mentioned once in the meetings between Obama and Harper, so we should be very concerned that they do not intend to go far enough to address global warming and the growing emissions that are causing it.

In fact, there are some major problems with carbon storage, and it might be a total red herring. Sequestering the carbon dioxide that comes from the tar sands operations is a hugely expensive idea, and the technology is not even ready yet. It will take years to get that technology up and running, where the emissions from the tar sands is captured and then stored underground - meanwhile, the emissions will continue and the planet will warm up.

If we are going to depend on carbon capture and storage, the atmosphere will reach the unacceptable level of 450ppm long before even half the tar sands, or coal burning power plant emissions, are captured and stored.

The experts have no idea yet if the storage part of the plan will work - will the CO2 simply perculate to the surface and enter the atmosphere a few years later?

I think we should be very wary of this announcement. Global Warming needs real change, not sort-of-changes and patchwork fixes. We need to get off oil and coal, and especially dirty tar sands, and switch over to an "electrification" economy where "everything that can be powered with electricity IS powered with electricity", and where that electricity is produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar.

In fact, if we put our minds to it, we could set up as much renewable electricity production as would be needed, from wind and solar, by the time they start storing the carbon from the tar sands and coal-fired power plants - 10 to 15 years - and the money that will be spent on carbon storage could be going to setting up renewable energy. Lets just hope there is enough money to do both.



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Edited on March 7th 2009 for additional information:

David Suzuki wrote about Carbon Capture and Storage [CCS] at this link:
http://www.straightgoods.ca/2009/ViewFeature.cfm?Ref=125


Suzuki tells about the lack of knowledge about how CCS will work out ; there are certain bacteria living underground that eat CO2 and turn it into METHANE, which is 1000 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, so that could make things worse, not better.

He also agrees with me, or me with him, that the BILLIONS that will be spent by governments and industry developing and installing the CCS technology would do much more good if that money were invested in renewable energy systems, which are a sure bet to reduce emissions that are contributing to global warming. Why risk good money on such an uncertain , and as yet undeveloped, technology as CCS?

Arrrrgggg.




 

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