The real problem with CCS is that it’s a crock. It’s just not been shown to work, and even if it did work perfectly and tomorrow it’d take decades to put into place. It just takes time to build things. You know, concrete, steel, qualified engineers to supervise it all, and so on. It wouldn’t give us the emissions reductions we need quickly enough.

To deal with just one-tenth of current emissions would require a CCS infrastructure about the same size as our entire world oil industry’s infrastructure – which took a century to build up. One-tenth? Nothing – our annual rise in emissions would chug that up in a few years.

As I said earlier, fossil fuels will decline in availability in the next few decades anyway – that won’t give us a quick enough reduction in emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change, but it’ll be a stronger reducing effect than even a perfect CCS scheme would be.

CCS also face the problem that renewables do, that politically they’re often misused – we need them to substitute for fossil fuel use, not add to it. For example, if you have an island nation with 1,000MW of coal power, they might add 250MW of wind and solar, and they don’t turn off 250MW of coal, they keep it and say, “look! we’re 20% renewable!” and everyone thinks they’re less polluting now, but… still the same amount of coal is being burned.

I think CCS, if it could be made to work (which again, is extremely unlikely), would have the same problem.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. People like to forget the first part. As for spending on efficiency… well, I’d say first let’s reduce by spending less. It doesn’t cost money to turn things off when they’re not being used, or when you don’t really need to use them, it saves money.