Carbon capture is a fig leaf for fossil fuel expansion | Letters

The letter from Mr. Boswell - though I have not yet met him - arrives with the weight of numbers, as if the very ink were pressed by a steam-engine’s relentless piston. £264 billion by 2050! A sum so vast it dwarfs the entire annual revenue of the British Empire, yet it is but a fraction of the cost of not acting. The figures, when laid out, resemble the strata of some vast geological deposit: layer upon layer of expenditure, each promising to offset the next, yet none erasing the underlying trend.

The argument against carbon capture is not merely economic - though the numbers are damning enough - but structural. It is the same paradox I have observed in breeding experiments: a method that purports to correct a flaw by reinforcing the very system that created it. The fossil fuels continue to expand, their infrastructure to grow, while the capture mechanisms are built upon the same foundations, the same labor, the same vast consumption of resources. It is as if one were to breed a stronger, more resilient plant by grafting it onto the roots of the very blight that has already consumed its kin. The system does not change; it merely adds another layer of foliage to disguise its decay.

And yet - here is the anomaly, the case that does not fit - the writer suggests that renewables avoid far higher emissions than can be captured. This is not merely an economic observation; it is a biological one. The fossil fuels are the parasite, the renewables the host that thrives without them. The question is not whether carbon capture can be made to work, but whether it can be made to matter when the host is already withering under the weight of the parasite’s grip.

I confess I was unwilling to accept this conclusion until the numbers were laid out so plainly. The figures do not lie, though men may. The difficulty is not in the arithmetic, but in the will to act upon it. To abandon the fig leaf is to admit that the garment was never whole. And that, I fear, is a truth too stark even for the most patient of observers.

July 19, 2026

The morning papers are full of the latest estimates for carbon capture - a staggering £264 billion by mid-century. It is presented as a necessary investment in our planetary solvency, a technical bridge to a cooler future. In truth, it is a classic instance of the beauty contest, where we are asked to admire not the most efficient solution, but the one that allows the current judges to remain in their seats.

The Treasury and the energy giants argue that we cannot abandon the old fires without these elaborate filters. They frame the cost as an unavoidable entry on the national ledger. But every economic necessity has a political author. By committing such vast sums to capturing what should never have been emitted, we are not buying a solution; we are purchasing a delay. We are subsidizing the status quo under the guise of innovation. The preference for carbon capture over the immediate, cheaper expansion of renewables is not an engineering requirement. It is a choice to protect existing capital from the indignity of obsolescence.

The advocates of this scheme speak of 2050 with the detached calm of men who will not be there to settle the accounts. They recommend patience and a slow transition, a perspective always most popular among those whose current dividends are secure. To suggest that we must spend hundreds of billions to keep the old engines humming is to mistake a sunk cost for a future asset. We are being asked to pay for the privilege of not changing.

When the state guarantees the viability of an inefficient industry, it dampens the very animal spirits required for a genuine revolution in power. We are managing the decline of the past rather than investing in the vitality of the future. It is a triumph of accounting over imagination. The climate does not care for our balance sheets, and the short run is getting shorter by the day.

Another morning, another proposal to dress the gallows in silk. This carbon capture fantasy - £264 billion by 2050, they say - is not a solution. It is a subsidy, a life support system for the very industry that suffocates us. Capital, having exhausted the external world, now turns inward, seeking to commodify the very air we breathe, to profit from cleaning up the mess it made.

They speak of capturing carbon as if it were a technical problem, not a political one. But I see the trap: this “solution” stabilizes the system, makes extraction tolerable, delays the necessary rupture. It allows them to keep drilling, keep burning, while offering the illusion of responsibility. The cost is not just financial - it is the cost of stolen time, of a future foreclosed by false promises.

Renewables avoid emissions; carbon capture merely manages them. One is a path beyond this system, the other is its perpetuation. And who will bear the £264 billion? Not the fossil giants - it will be public money, our money, spent to save their profits. The spontaneity of mass opposition, the clarity of those who refuse this bargain - that is where hope lies, not in these calculated concessions meant to pacify us.