We’re at this point where emissions reduction alone is no longer enough because of two decades of denial pushed and financed by the fossil fuel industry, picked up by populist politicians and amplified by the Murdoch media. It follows that what’s required to meet the Paris goals to which the world has signed up is for governments to either pay for CCS and sequestration or demand it of companies, making consumers pay. The problem is that none of the technologies for this is viable yet: Whatever sequestration is applied to – coal-fired power generation, or the manufacture of cement, steel and fertiliser – is rendered more expensive and therefore uncompetitive against those to which it is not applied.ĭirect air capture of carbon dioxide and then sequestering it underground is both “technically immature”, says the CCA, and commercially unviable.

The CCA says that to meet the Paris goals – that is, to save humanity from multiple horrors (my words, not theirs) – we need to remove six billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050 and 14 billion tonnes by 2100. I’m not sure they’re even right about the first part of that sentence, that there is broad understanding of the challenge of reducing emissions, but they’re definitely right about the second part.

In anticipation of the apathy, the CCA wrote: “There is broad understanding of the scale of the challenge to reduce emissions, but there is far less awareness of the critical and urgent need to scale up sequestration and how to do so.” The CCA’s grim report about sequestration got a bit of coverage online at Beef Central and the Shepparton News, while The Australian put a positive spin on it by calling carbon sequestration an “economic opportunity”, rather than simply what is now required to avoid “dangerous climate change”. I guess the CCA is not “positive” enough for that task. And last week he announced the creation of a new body, to be called the Net Zero Authority, to promote “the orderly and positive economic transformation associated with achieving net-zero emissions”. National cabinet did meet on April 28, and discussed health care and housing – important problems, no doubt, but somewhere below global catastrophe on the direness scale (not that the CCA used the word ‘catastrophe’, but that’s the implication of not keeping the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average).Ĭhris Bowen announced a national electric vehicle strategy on April 19. Which is why, after the release of that paper on April 17, the Prime Minister immediately called an emergency national cabinet meeting to discuss the problem while the Minister for Climate Change, Chris Bowen, issued a blizzard of urgent policy announcements, including the funding of a national project to commercialise carbon capture and storage (CCS).

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