On: 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.