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

Walking through the marketplace with a lamp at midday, I find men who claim to be saving the air by building even larger chimneys to hide the smoke they refuse to stop making.

That a private interest should claim the public purse for a contraption designed to preserve its own monopoly, while the sun offers its energy to every man without tribute, is an artifice that nature must eventually overthrow.

Forget the speeches; here is who has leverage: the producers of coal and oil remain essential to the state's immediate power, and they have successfully traded a promise of future cleanliness for the right to continue their present profit.

The permit to increase the smoke was granted on the condition that a machine be constructed to catch it, but the machine requires so much smoke to operate that the permit must be expanded once again.

When we call a plan to burn more fuel a 'capture' of its waste, the words no longer match the deeds, and when names lose their meaning, the people have no floor upon which to stand.

They sat on the terrace discussing the billions of pounds and the intricate pipes that would clean the sky, while in the garden, the gardener quietly cut down the last of the dying birch trees.

The proposal is described as an environmental necessity, but it functions as a vast bounty paid by the public to a few merchants to subsidize the continued use of an obsolete and expensive stock.

Observing this scheme is like watching a physician who prescribes a very expensive tonic to settle the stomach while insisting the patient keep swallowing the poison that caused the ailment in the first place.

In these western lands, they build great iron monuments to trap the very air they soil, whereas in the gardens of Shiraz, the people simply plant trees and trust in the shade the Almighty provided.

Things that are truly tiresome: a massive machine that makes a terrible noise to hide a mess that should never have been made, and the person who smiles while asking for gold to build it.

Tracing the operational sequence, I find the energy required to seize the carbon nearly equals the energy the carbon produced, creating a closed loop of futility that serves no purpose but to keep the engine turning.

It is a measure of most excellent reason to spend the entire wealth of the kingdom on a sieve to catch the soot, rather than commit the indecency of simply putting out the fire.