Carbon Capture Scam Does Not Even Offset Its Own Emissions – Watts Up With That?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Paul Weldon

This is a remarkable story coming out of Iceland, and a warning for Net Zero zealots wanting us to go down the same route:

Climeworks in Iceland has only captured just over 2,400 carbon units since it began operations in the country in 2021, out of the twelve thousand units that company officials have repeatedly claimed the company’s machines can capture. This is confirmed by figures from the Finnish company Puro.Earth on the one hand and from the company’s annual accounts on the other. Climeworks has made international news for capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere. For this, the company uses large machines located in Hellisheiði, in South Iceland. They are said to have the capacity to collect four thousand tons of CO2 each year directly from the atmosphere.

According to data available to Heimildin, it is clear that this goal has never been achieved and that Climeworks does not capture enough carbon units to offset its own operations, emissions amounting to 1,700 tons of CO2 in 2023. The emissions that occur due to Climeworks’ activities are therefore more than it captures. Since the company began capturing in Iceland, it has captured a maximum of one thousand tons of CO2 in one year.

Read the full story here.

Let’s be clear – we are not talking about conventional carbon capture, the sort that Miliband wants to waste £22 billion on – capturing carbon dioxide from power stations and factories which emit the stuff.

Climeworks are into Direct Air Capture, DAC, which the CCC say we will need to offset CO2 emissions that we cannot totally eliminate.

DAC is an unproven process at scale, but will almost certainly be unimaginably expensive. In particular, DAC needs phenomenal amounts of energy, which itself produces CO2 emissions one way or another.

You might wonder why or how Climeworks are even doing this. The answer is carbon credits, as the article explains:

A professor of environmental and civil engineering at Stanford University in California says the carbon capture and disposal industry is a scam and is causing harm when it comes to climate solutions. More than 20,000 people pay Climeworks monthly for CO2 capture. A retired scientist in the UK says he feels like a gullible idiot after buying carbon credits from Climeworks, which he hopes to receive in about six years. However, the wait will be much longer unless significant progress is made in capturing carbon quickly. He can therefore expect to receive the two tonnes – which he has already paid for – in a few decades at the earliest.

Climeworks has sold a significant amount of carbon credits. They are not only credits that have already been certified and captured, but also a large amount of credits that Climeworks plans to capture in the future. According to the company, one third of all the credits that the Mammoth capture plant is expected to capture from the atmosphere over the next 25 years have already been sold. About 21 thousand people have a subscription with the company, where they pay monthly for the capture and disposal of carbon credits. The waiting time to receive these carbon credits can be up to six years, according to the company’s terms. If Climeworks’ capture figures do not improve, the wait could extend from years to decades.

In short, the whole thing is a crooked scam. And those who have fallen for it through their wish to virtue signal deserve no sympathy.

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