Amid Economic Concerns, Carbon Capture Faces a Hazy Future … A carbon capture and storage project at the Mountaineer coal plant in West Virginia was put on hold last year due to the weak economy. The technology meant to scrub carbon dioxide pollution from the air is experiencing stiff headwinds that have stalled many projects at the bottom line. – Reuters
Dominant Social Theme: This is not a good trend!
Free-Market Analysis: Imagine sucking an invisible gas from the sky and storing it underground at great expense. Sounds insane? Welcome to "carbon capture."
With a straight face (in aggregate) National Geographic's editors have just come out with an article alternately expressing surprise and bemoaning the fate of this looniness.
Even if one accepts that the world is warming (a most controversial assumption) there is no evidence that this is in some sense unusual or "bad" in the scheme of things. Additionally, the assumption that humans are responsible for it is also most questionable.
Human generated carbon dioxide is said to represent only a fraction of what causes "greenhouse gases" to be "trapped." Most of what is responsible involves humidity (moisture). Carbon dioxide is one or two percent of the total, though proponents of global warming claim this creates the "tipping point."
What nonsense! Not that it matters. The elites that apparently want to run the world don't care about making sense. They wish to provide a narrative, a dominant social theme.
This sort of meme can be built around any selected theme. The corporations that they apparently control are now marshaled to the task. Society is mobilized. School children are frightened.
Nonetheless, within this context, some things are not working out. Carbon exchanges have foundered. Smart metering of one's every energy move is being fought in the courts (in the US anyway). And now carbon capture is seen as failing as well. Here's some more from the article:
Many companies have determined that expensive CCS operations simply aren't worth the investment without government mandates or revenue from carbon prices set far higher than those currently found at the main operational market, the European Trading System, or other fledgling markets. According to a recent Worldwatch Institute report, only eight large-scale, fully integrated CCS projects are actually operational, and that number has not increased in three years.
"In fact, from 2010 to 2011, the number of large-scale CCS plants operating, under construction, or being planned declined," said Matt Lucky, the report's author. Numerous projects in Europe and North America are being scrapped altogether, Lucky added. Last month, TransAlta, the Canadian electricity giant, abandoned plans for a CCS facility at an Alberta coal-burning plant because financial incentives were too weak to justify costly investment in CCS.
"For a very small industry that's still in the developmental state, it's not a good sign when the number of planned projects is declining," Lucky said. "This is a period when it should be exploding, so this doesn't signal significant growth of the CCS industry in the near future."
Low-Cost Carbon Killing Investment
Carbon capture and storage could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by capturing CO2 where it's produced and storing it permanently in various types of underground geological reservoirs. The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes CCS technology can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions when implemented at dirty fossil fuel power plants and other industrial facilities that enlarge the world's CO2 footprint.
The IEA would like to see more than 3,000 CCS-equipped plants come online by mid-century to achieve 20 percent of planned reductions in CO2 emissions. But no large-scale projects currently operate at power plants, and Howard Herzog, a CCS expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said efforts to scale up the industry are largely on hold.
Interestingly, the article reveals to us that monetizing global warming was very important to the additional steps that industry might take. Because the powers-that-be have been exposed over and over as lying about global warming, the consensus to monetize it has withered.
And this in turn is causing a good deal of pushback when it comes to the various technologies that the powers-that-be had hoped to deploy to address the (non) issue. Chief among them: carbon capture.
Again, just to make sure that the craziness of this meme is to be fully appreciated, try this at home. Take a straw and walk outside. Sit down. Dig a small hole. Now, inhale through the straw and exhale into the hole.
Organize your neighbors to do this. Get 100 or 1,000 sitting side by side to do the same thing. Observe the effect. It is exactly … nothing.
This is indeed analogous to carbon capture. The result is exactly … nothing.
But how have we come to this, you may ask. Because, so it seems, a handful of dynastic families bent on world control have the power to print all the money in the world via central banking.
This is a massive market failure, but in defense of markets, market failures are eventualy rectified. What we call the Internet Reformation is gradually ruining this franchise. People want to know why a handful of good, gray bankers can print trillions while they lose their houses and businesses.
The answers, of course, are not forthcoming. There is no justifying central banking. Eventually, the questions will likely reach a kind of critical mass. This has not happened yet. Wait.
In the meantime, the power elite shall continue to create memes for social control, one madder than the next. This is what happens when money is manipulated. It ends up supporting unproductive methodologies. It is the reason that maket manipulations don't work.
The elites have refused to puncture the biggest bubble of all, the banking bubble. This has resulted in endless unemployment as it is not clear what businesses are solvent and what are not.
The elites want people, metaphorically, to suck air in through a straw and then blow out. This is an absolutely useless exercise, but one needs to understand that it is a kind of metaphor for the larger dysfunction that the elites have inflicted upon society.
There are a myriad of useless, incoherent strategies now being foisted on long-suffering populations around the world. it is no wonder the economy is collapsing.
We have put forward the theory that this is being done on purpose to create chaos that will further world government. But in the era of the Internet, this demands a very fine balance. More and more people are waking up to their manipulation. And it is likely over time, more and more will resent it.
As the elite mechanism of control via dominant social themes is better understood, it becomes less effective. Eventually, only war, violence and economic ruin are left as prime motivators. This is not a good situation to be in when there are 6,000 of you and six billion of everyone else.
