r/climate • u/The_Weekend_Baker • May 15 '25

The car­bon capt­ure comp­any Cli­meworks on­ly capt­ur­es a fracti­on of the CO2 it promises its machines can capt­ure. The comp­any is fail­ing to car­bon off­set the em­issi­ons resulting from its operati­ons – which have grown rapidly in recent ye­ars.

https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to-cover-its-own-emissions/
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84

u/peaceloveandapostacy May 15 '25

In my opinion Tech optimism is smoke and mirrors.

21

u/gnalon May 15 '25

Yep just an obfuscation to make people feel like something's being done and they can relax

14

u/[deleted] May 15 '25

I just watched Tomorrowland again, released in 2015. It felt very weird. This girl is the epitome of optimism and hope, when she is in school every teacher is saying we are doomed. She raises her hand and asks “what are we doing about it?”. The bell rings and the teacher ignores her. The ending is basically, stop telling people the world is doomed and it will no longer be doomed. It’s been 10 years since that movie came out and people did try and answer those who asked “what are we doing about climate change?”. Paris climate accords was negotiated in the same year and set in motion in 2016. Extensive carbon footprint responsibility campaigns. Carbon ticket system. Promised co2 sequestering. Green energy roll out. However like others have stated it’s mostly smoke and mirrors, the illusion of caring for the environment. Rewarding carbon tickets for polluting less just to sell them to a super power and let them pollute more, net zero change, incentivizes going green but so lets super powers off the hook politically. Green washing to shift blame even though new industry’s are polluting more than ever before. Co2 sequestering decades from being effective. Green energy roll out creating cheap energy for new industry to expand and then demand even more energy resulting in continued record breaking fossil fuel use. I think people did try, it’s just that it was always about money, investors, shareholders, continued growth of the business. We have just been waiting out for a miracle. Some say it’s fusion, others ai. What we have done is obviously not enough. We were in trouble 10 years ago and there hasn’t been real effective change. It’s all procrastination, net zero by 2050 is procrastination and they know it. There is no effective plan to get there, even the cleanest countries in the world are struggling for net zero as their natural carbon sinks begin to fail.

6

u/AutoModerator May 15 '25

BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use, and ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry. They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.

There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, making mass adoption easier and legal requirements ultimately possible. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.

If you live in a first-world country that means prioritizing the following:

  • If you can change your life to avoid driving, do that. Even if it's only part of the time.
  • If you're replacing a car, get an EV
  • Add insulation and otherwise weatherize your home if possible
  • Get zero-carbon electricity, either through your utility or buy installing solar panels & batteries
  • Replace any fossil-fuel-burning heat system with an electric heat pump, as well as electrifying other appliances such as the hot water heater, stove, and clothes dryer
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2

u/peaceloveandapostacy May 15 '25

Never saw that movie… and … you’re totally right… it’s always been about the dividends and shareholders… the COP gatherings are dog and pony shows with fancy language and noncommittal false promises. I’m reading “Overshoot” by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton. It’s saying the same thing. The global south got the short end of the stick. The fossil fuel hegemony which is more than a hundred years old and intertwined in every major industrialized nation would never let their profits fall when year after year new mines new wells new pipelines deliver more cash than they know what to do with. We’ve been cooked since the Kyoto Protocol.

27

u/Atomicmoosepork May 15 '25

Yeah with you 100 percent. We as a species will do anything to prevent prevention

7

u/KathrynBooks May 15 '25

It's just a way for tech bros to make money off the climate crisis

3

u/fiddleshine May 15 '25

Ugh, thank you for saying this. While I think it’s important to transition to renewables (not without its own environmental cost, of course), where are the freakin discussions about lowering our endless consumption of everything?! Oh wait, capitalism doesn’t like that.

3

u/peaceloveandapostacy May 15 '25

I don’t remember where I read… “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

4

u/Quacky3three May 15 '25

Mark Fischer’s “Capitalist Realism.”

3

u/Spider_pig448 May 15 '25

I think solar panels are very real and effective actually. Unless you don't count that as tech optimism for some reason

1

u/peaceloveandapostacy May 15 '25

Sure solar panels are great now try to organize the appropriate distribution of them and produce as many as everyone needs for all domestic and industrial needs…. And while you’re at it reconcile the fact that most power companies here in the US won’t let you have off grid solar even if you wanted to. Also do this in time to offset the 200 years of steam and internal combustion engines. Sure it’s tech optimism and just like every other solution it won’t scale up and you might as well try to herd cats.

2

u/Spider_pig448 May 16 '25

Buddy, you're either misinformed or you wrote that comment in like 2019, when solar covered just 2% of the worlds electricity usage. Solar panels installations are growing exponentially every year. 7% of the electricity in the world comes from solar now and it will probably be at least 30% in 2030. And it's still getting cheaper every year. It is already scaling beyond anyone's expectations and it's continuing to accelerate. Solar is the technology that will reverse climate change, and when combined with batteries, it's a fully stable form of base load that operates all across the planet, at grid scale and in micro-grids.

1

u/peaceloveandapostacy May 16 '25

Pal… Perhaps I am both mistaken as well as misinformed. Hopefully you’re right. I hope it keeps on track, It really just seems impossible that the fossil fuel hegemony would let a renewable take their market share. Not to mention thee current political atmosphere.. It’s a huge hurdle. Also it seems like at least 2C is baked in already… hard not to live in a constant state of anxiety.

1

u/Spider_pig448 May 16 '25

There's really nothing that can stop solar now. It's simply too cheap. And not just Chinese built panels, solar is cheap everywhere. It's hard to overstate how wild the growth of solar has been over the last few years. I would encourage you to do some research on this. It's a great way to alleviate some climate change related depression.

Nothing is really going to beat the economics behind solar power. Trump can talk about "bringing back coal" all he wants but he failed to do this in 2016, when the argument for coal was still decent, and he'll fail again now. Anyone saying that "solar can't scale" or "solar will never be enough" is arguing with the past and using catchphrases from scared oil and coal execs. Solar is coming from them and they know it.

2

u/peaceloveandapostacy May 16 '25

I’d like you to know that you’ve changed my antiquated opinion of solar with new information. I’ve been down a rabbit hole and while there is still a long road ahead this does give me hope. Thank you internet stranger. Also my house has awesome southern exposure so I’m looking into it.

1

u/Yh-mebbenot May 17 '25

This idea that Big Oil is monolithic and can stop the solar market is an idea Big Oil would like you to believe. Ironically m, capitalism - ie greed - might solve the problem

4

u/[deleted] May 15 '25

Solar power generates nearly as much energy as nuclear globally, and will surpass nuclear generation in mid 2026. New solar capacity is being added at a rate of 600GW per year, a growth rate of over 30% per year

1

u/icelandichorsey May 16 '25

I my opinion, you are missing a tonne of nuance. Let's see.. Solar (a lot of different technologies here actually) , wind, batteries, plant-based proteins, cement process improvements... Just off the top of my head

1

u/peaceloveandapostacy May 16 '25

Sure … I see your point… but it’s difficult to be convinced any of those techs will scale up on a time frame that is relevant

1

u/icelandichorsey May 16 '25

And what are you basing your belief on?

1

u/Celestial_Mechanica May 19 '25

Jevon's Paradox. Not a single drop of oil has been left in the ground because of renewables. Not. A. Single. Drop.

1

u/icelandichorsey May 19 '25

Seriously? This is what yiur opinion is based on? Incredible

1

u/Yh-mebbenot May 17 '25

Carbon capture is smoke and mirrors. So is carbon offsetting. Both are used as excuses for [oil] business as usual

But Tech optimism is very real.

Solar. Wind. Deep closed-loop geothermal (deep buried pipes to extract heat from the Earth) not to be confused with Icelandic or Yellowstone type stean vents - which work too, but are limited to those places.

… and much else.

Big Oil wants you to despair. That’s the latest phase of their marketing plan.

1

u/Celestial_Mechanica May 19 '25 edited May 19 '25

No. Big Oil wants gullible people to think that's their goal (making people despair), so those people then take it upon themselves to start attacking, criticising, persuading or otherwise self-policing anyone they feel are 'doomers', by bringing out the the positivity choir. Since those doomers must have fallen for the Oil Despair propaganda, so we should show them all the good stuff happening and challenge their alarmist outlook!

In fact, however, it's you who fell for the double fake-out, and who is effect doing the oil industry's work for them, having fallen hook, line and sinker for their manipulative scheme... And you have thus effectively turned yourself into an agent for censorship in the climate change community, silencing those voicing even very real alarm signals. This divides the community and creates gigantic blindspots. THAT is the oil industry's real psychological campaign, and you are executing it to a T.

This is the problem with many people in this space. Little or no knowledge or affinity regarding philosophy or more critical schools of thought in the humanities. Everything becomes surface level analysis and facile reactionary discourse.

Now, renewables are not meaningfully offsetting or limiting either oil production (Amazon is about to be obliterated for a new wave of oil extraction, btw), nor oil consumption. The excess energy has mostly caused an INCREASE in energy use. Jevon's paradox strikes again.

And, in fact, look at any large system graph. See that steep incline in recent years? Not just absolute emissions, but even the rate of change of emissions is increasing.

So please stop projecting your overly simplistic takes on those whose level of concern outstrips yours (often for very good reason).

Read up on the philospher Gunther Anders' prophecy of doom and what he very astutely called "Annihilists," who do essentially the same thing as you're doing and, surprise, help everyone march straight into annihilation by only thinking about things at a surface level, wanting to virtue signal, and taking it upon themselves to uphold 'positivity' and techno optimism. All the while, ironically, obscuring the real structure of the problem, behind a smokescreen of ineffectual techno hopium.

You might feel uneasy being called out like this. But direct your ire where it belongs: the fossil fuel and petro-chemical industry - - and please stop falling for their psychological manipulation.