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Ain’t no hole big enough to hide our sins forever (not enough holes, either)
A coal-fired plant in Germany is being heralded as being the first to employ ‘clean technology’ to dispose of its carbon emissions. All CO2 produced by the plant’s burning of coal will be separated, squashed to one 500th of its original volume and squeezed into a cylinder ready to be transported to a gas field and forced 1,000m below the surface into porous rock where it should—note that word, and the lack of certainty it conveys—stay until long after mankind has stopped worrying about climate change. Because we’ll either be long gone, or will have switched over to using non-polluting energy.
Is landfill a clean option because we bury our rubbish, out of sight and out of mind? Is nuclear waste disposed of safely by burying it underground? They used to say yes about the former, but are less inclined to do so today; with the latter, opinions are deeply divided.
Most countries are running out of available space for landfill, while controversy has always surrounded the disposal of nuclear waste, whether underground dumps are situated near centres of human population, or far out to sea. Sequestered carbon shouldn’t immediately concern anyone from the point of view of leaks—leaking carbon would be no more immediately dangerous to us than a leaking tap. But landfill sites emit methane, an even more destructive greenhouse gas, while the dangers involved in a leak at a nuclear dump, even if several miles underground, are obvious enough to anyone other than politicians, pro-nuclear lobbyists and the nuclear industry. However, carbon leakage would be at least as dangerous as nuclear and methane in the longer term, because the whole point of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is to avoid more carbon entering the atmosphere and increasing the planet’s temperature, leading to our being roasted to death, or drowned, or to the world becoming inhospitable to most life-forms currently around.
If we have very few sites left in which to dump our day-to-day rubbish, where are they going to find the many, many more sites needed for carbon sequestration? The moon, perhaps?
More and more nuclear waste is buried, often deep below the ocean beds, as time goes by. There is only so much land, so much sea, so much of everything. Given that the amount of carbon we produce already dwarfs the waste generated by households and nuclear plants, disregarding the varying levels of pollution and toxicity involved in each, it surely follows that within a relatively short time of CCS being implemented across the world—if it ever is—burial sites for produced carbon would become increasingly hard, if not impossible, to find. It wouldn’t be a problem today, tomorrow, or 100 years from now. But thereafter? We still use the sticking plaster approach, and fail to give a damn about the mess we leave behind for our descendants.
CCS has its evangelists and its naysayers. This writer’s view should be obvious enough—as a species, we still seek to solve our problems by burying them. It’s not a solution. It’s putting a problem on hold until it comes back to haunt us, as is the case already with landfill. Dumping anything that isn’t safely biodegradable is not sustainable, and we should be working towards sustainability in all things. CCS cannot hold off global warming—because it’s too late to stop it altogether, if we ever could. Even if we stopped producing carbon today, the temperatures are set to rise, with all the devastating consequences involved. CCS can only cut the speed at which we drive ourselves to extinction, along with all other life on Earth.
What we need to find is a way to stop driving that crazy death car altogether, and that means renewable, truly clean energy—wind-power, and solar, and perhaps hydrogen.
CCS is another depressing example of how our species responds to the greatest dangers in stupid ways while undoubtedly using our cleverness in coming up with technology. While the ostrich buries its head (actually, that’s a myth, but go with the parallel…) in the hope that the predator won’t see it, humanity buries its shit and pretends it never shat in the first place, and that there’s no problem because it can’t be seen. But there is. We fool ourselves, and it seems we do anything we can to ensure our own survival, and perhaps that of our children—but the great- and great-great grandchildren? Welllll… They’ll be okay. We’re sure of it. Aren’t we? All these holes we dig for fossil fuels, and the bigger holes we dig to dump the waste from burning those fossil fuels, and the holes we dig for nuclear waste, and the holes we dig for our rubbish…
The earth can cope. We can cope. Can’t it? Can’t we?
