In October 2024 the United Kingdom government announced that it’s going to spend £22 billion (around US$28 billion) for building projects to capture and store carbon emissions deep underground from energy and industry production. Before that, in December 2023 the Congressional budget office in the United States published that the expenditure on carbon capture technologies between 2011 and 2027 would be US$21.9 billion in the form of direct funding and tax credit for US companies. The same report mentioned that the current capacity to capture carbon and store it deep underground is just 0.4 % of the nation’s total annual CO2 emissions, and if all the planned projects to be completed this capacity will increase only to 3%. In 180 pages comprehensive review article published on June 2024 in the journal of Carbon Capture Science & Technology entitled “A comprehensive review of carbon capture science and technologies”, the authors concluded that “CO2 capture from flue gas sources still faces considerable challenges impeding further development and commercialization. Accordingly, more extensive studies are required to explore the commercial prospects of CO2 capture process” and continued to say, “the primary factor limiting the commercialization of CO2 capture technology is its high cost.” In other words, all of these billions will be spent on a putative technology that does not actually exist dreaming that it will by some miracles meet the great urgency we face globally to reduce CO2 emissions, apart from the fact that this hypothetical technology is very complicated and expensive as any reader of this comprehensive review can conclude. However, this extravagant governmental spending on a non-existent technology is predicated on the principle that we should continue business as usual in the form of extracting more fossil fuels from the ground and keep burning them confident that a premature technology that does not exist will come to the rescue of sometime in the future after such huge investments for developing these expensive technologies. This logic is floated and promoted heavily by the fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists as the ultimate solution that does not require weaning the global economy from fossil fuels which is what humanity urgently needs in order to escape the climate collapse ravages that started to show their ugly manifestations after heating planet Earth to almost beyond the recovery point. It is worth remembering that the earth average temperature now is 1.5°C above what it was before the Industrial Revolution. This level of increase in the overall planet temperature was considered the target of the Paris agreement of December 2015. This kind of wishful thinking about non-existent technologies is very convenient to maintain the status quo and preserve the immense power of the fossil fuel companies in every aspect of the human life globally as well as their gigantic wealth and profits that many of these companies do not know what to do with these profits other than investing them in speculations in the global stock markets and lending them to the developing nations at a very high interest rate. We also have to observe that this narrative of carbon capture technologies is almost exclusively funded by the taxpayers not by the fossil fuel companies, which sometimes spend a minuscule fraction of their overflowing profits on these projects for public relations purposes i.e. greenwashing. Of course, this minute spending does not constitute even a rounding effect on the gigantic figures of their huge profits.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development states that “the annual cost to fight climate change, protect biodiversity and cut pollution is projected to cost nearly $5.5 trillion annually from 2023 to 2030”. While the International monetary fund (IMF) declared in August 2023 that “fossil fuel subsidies surged to record $7 trillion” in 2022. Although the previous phrases are self-explanatory, we have to reiterate what it means. It means that the world is spending $7 trillion to subsidise fossil fuel companies, which is more than what the world needs to avoid the calamity of climate collapse that will cost humanity $38 trillion dollars per year starting in 2050, which means eroding 19% of the total international GDP according to the Potsdam Institute for climate impact research in a report published in April 2024.
This practice of subsidising fossil fuel companies to extract more fossil fuels can be literally viewed as a stifling approach to other clean sources of energy such as wind turbines and solar panels, as the green energy companies will not be able to compete with the fossil fuel companies while the latter receives 7 trillion dollars which makes them able to always offer cheaper energy than any other clean source. It is clear that this practice is a blatant interference in the free competition in the free markets principle as preached by the defenders of capitalism. This also reflects the depth of democracy deterioration worldwide as no rational or irrational human being would prefer to leave this earth to be uninhabitable to her/his children and grandchildren. It is hardwired in the human brain to propagate its genes to the following generation and protect them from perishing. Nonetheless, even in the staunchest capitalist democracies the governance system operates in contrast with the principles of traditional capitalism as envisaged by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that controls the interactions within the free market economy, which has been redefined and reshaped in the neoliberal era to become a deformed and metamorphic form of state capitalism admixed with “cronyism, corruption and monopoly power” and controlled by “the revolving doors between the private sector and civil service” as declared in Oxfam recent report in January 2025 entitled “takers not makers”. Apparently, the global fossil fuel companies still hold the remote controller of these revolving doors. This cannot change without a dramatic increase in the amount of activism and organising led by the ordinary human beings who want to preserve planet Earth for their offspring. This should happen now as unfortunately there is no more time to waste.