Per Axbom

I'm reading Catastrope Ethics by Travis Rieder. This passage drives home why we need to question how politicians talk so promisingly about negative-emissions tech that sucks CO2 from the air:

"The other category of negative-emissions technology avoids at least the land-use problem and is popular among the more techno-optimistic, as it does something that sounds borderline magical: it sucks CO, directly from the air and returns it to the ground. There's only one problem, which is that it doesn't yet exist in a scalable form.

What scientists have come up with so far are proof-of-concept models that show initial promise but that have very real drawbacks.

Consider, for instance, Orca, which is the largest carbon-capture plant in the world, located in Iceland just outside Reykjavik. This facility is instructive for many reasons. First, despite being the largest plant in the world, it will only capture about 4,000 tons of CO2 annually. And while that may sound like a large number, remember the scale that we're talking about: the all-time anthropogenic CO2 budget is 3.67 trillion tons. On average, humanity emits more than 1,250 tons of CO2 per second. What that means is that our largest plant to date, running around the clock for a year, will capture about 3 seconds' worth of humanity's emissions."

Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of human emissions. If institutions are the problem we could be letting them off the hook by focusing on individuals.

"[…] this sort of deflection of responsibility is likely what energy companies and other major corporations want: if we're pointing the finger at one another, we're not pointing it at them." (Catastrophe Ethics, p. 50)

Climate scientist Michael Mann in an interview about his book The New Climate War:

"Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies. Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don't need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby's motto, 'guns don't kill people, people kill people,' which is classic deflection.

For a UK example look at BP, which gave us the world's first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs."

The idea of individual responsibility can be weaponized to prevent real climate progress.

🔗 Originally posted on Akkoma