24-hour coverage PT
Breaking News Brazil and the world, minute by minute
United Kingdom

The great carbon capture con: behold the wasted billions Burnham could claw back | George Monbiot

There are far better ways to tackle climate breakdown, but successive governments have chosen to listen to the fossil fuel companies instead The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The...

The great carbon capture con: behold the wasted billions Burnham could claw back | George Monbiot
365 Summary

That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project.

  • The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets,...

Editorial reading aid based only on information contained in this story and its identified source.

There are far better ways to tackle climate breakdown, but successive governments have chosen to listen to the fossil fuel companies instead

The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.

Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist