Is Joe Manchin Aware That His Favorite Climate Technology Is a Total Bust?
Senator Joe Manchin has insisted for months that he won’t support President Biden’s Build Back Better Act unless it subsidizes a largely unproven and expensive climate technology. Democrats are now bending to the conservative Democrat from West Virginia: The multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill being debated in the Senate is likely to include generous tax credits for coal, oil, gas, and other industrial companies to capture their massive greenhouse gas emissions and bury them underground.
But carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is light years away from doing anything to help climate change. That’s the conclusion of a new report written not by a climate group but rather by some of the technology’s biggest corporate defenders.
The 43-page report, released earlier this week by the Global CCS Institute, reveals that even with substantial financial support from governments and thousands of advertisements from oil companies touting the potential of CCS, the actual climate-fighting capacity of such projects in operation or in various stages of planning worldwide is slightly lower than it was a decade ago. “Despite unprecedented growth in the CCS project pipeline for the last 12 months, there remains a massive gap between today’s CCS fleet and what is required to reduce global anthropogenic emissions to net zero,” explains the institute, whose members include Chevron, Exxon, General Electric, Occidental Petroleum, Southern Company, and dozens of other top industrial climate polluters.
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