Carbon Capture, Or Government Capture? Keir Starmer's Flimsy, Divisive Case For CCS
Carbon Capture, Or Government Capture? Keir Starmer's Flimsy, Divisive Case For CCS
In a poorly conceived political stunt, the UK Prime Minister wrote an op-ed in The Sun attacking climate protesters and making the case for the fossil fuel industry's favourite decarbonisation tech.
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On Thursday, Keir Starmer took to the pages of British tabloid The Sun to make his case for throwing £22bn at carbon capture and storage. The climate research community reacted with dismay to the piece, but some defended it on the basis that the rhetoric—Starmer repeatedly attacks those he calls “net zero extremists”—should not detract from the underlying substance of the article.
Such defenses are wrong on several important counts. Here’s why.
In his piece, Starmer frames net zero as a fight between the “drum-banging, finger-wagging extremists” of Just Stop Oil, and working people who just want to put food on the table.
This divide-and-conquer strategy, pitting “regular people” against those who care deeply about the world and about one another, is the opposite of consensus-building, which is a necessary condition for leadership and national buy-in. Rather, it is an exercise in consensus destruction.
In doing this, Starmer’s op-ed attempts to undermine a foundational truth and sharing understanding: that we are of this Earth. We are all, whether we consciously know it or not, in a shared, existence-defining struggle to assert our stewardship of the planet. Pitching this knowledge as “extremist” is directly antithetical to that common goal. For this reason, in its anti-environmentalism, the op-ed is implicitly anti-human.
Some have claimed that the prime minister is only going after Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion when he describes them as “extremists”. Indeed, many British people are not sympathetic to JSO and XR. Many are. But this misses the point: you can take issue with the activists’ actions, but don't for a minute suggest that their underlying motivation is rooted in misapprehension. It is not.
Climate activists do, as a rule, appear to have a firmer grasp of climate science than most government ministers. Let there be no equivocation here: it is the world's scientists—the people tasked with quantifying physical reality—who are saying that climate change is a planetary-scale emergency, and that it is happening on our watch.
In many regards, JSO and XR act as our collective conscience, lashing out in the face of institutional inertia and the authorities’ apparent indifference both to this emergency and to human suffering. Their tactics may chafe, but such behaviour is, in at least one sense, wholly rational. It is no less sensible—or commendable—to care about your world and your community than it is to care about your job and your family. Some of us do all four. The Starmer op-ed appears to deny this, condescendingly conceiving of the Sun reader as someone of no imagination; incapable of thinking beyond their front door or this week's paycheck.
Furthermore, while you can condemn their tactics, denying that JSO and XR might just have a point is to implicitly endorse the fossil fuel industry lie that we can and should continue business as usual. We cannot.
To reiterate, as scholar Genevieve Guenther has shown in a recent book, rhetoric matters. The way we frame our understanding and our action can bring people together, enhancing community cohesion and inspiring collective effort, or it can drive them apart. The Sun op-ed is clearly an attempt at the latter, in a bid for political clout.
Starmer’s choice to divide rather than to unify is one that can only be rationalised through the lens of short-term political calculation. It bespeaks both a lack of vision and of confidence. It also misrepresents what needs to be done. The climate transition needs *everyone*, and as such it needs buy-in from everyone. Attacking those who understand and care the most is the opposite of leadership.
Meanwhile, the substantive points made by Starmer—that CCS is a necessary condition for net zero, and that CCS is a necessary condition for preserving jobs and strengthening the UK’s industrial sector—are largely specious.
The first claim, that CCS is a necessary condition for net zero, is at least rooted in current IPCC rubric. But even the chair of the IPCC has warned that CCS is not, as Starmer seems to imply, a magic bullet.
Furthermore, Starmer states that CCS is a “ground-breaking technology”: it is not. It’s been around for half a century, and in that time it’s been shown to be far more expensive than other decarbonisation alternatives. Indeed, as researcher Marc Hudson has shown, the fossil fuel industry has turned CCS into a “Schrödinger’s cat technology”: it is simultaneously mature and proven, while at the same time being nascent, depending on whether juicy investment capital is on offer. Why is that?
Well, while certain researchers naively insist that CCS will enable the fossil fuel industry to come to our rescue, investigations on the ground show that that is not happening, and that the fossil fuel giants do not intend it to happen. It is, as far as we can empirically surmise, intended to enhance shareholder value and nothing more.
Next, Starmer’s claims about CCS on economics and employment grounds are wholly without merit. There is no evidence to show that CCS will safeguard the jobs of “brickies” (bricklayers), and as for “sparkies” (electricians), their jobs will be guaranteed not by CCS but by wholesale electrification, which researchers agree actually is, unlike CCS, a necessary condition for decarbonisation.
(In a rhetorical flourish breathtaking in its chutzpah, Starmer adds, “if history has taught us anything, it’s that nothing worth pursuing is easy. Blockers will always get in the way.” Note here that he is not referring to the almighty power of the fossil fuel lobby, which has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars blocking actual, substantive systems change worldwide. Rather he is targeting a ragtag community of concerned citizens who are watching aghast as the world goes up in flames.)
Starmer further insists that CCS makes hard-headed economic sense—a claim that flatly contradicts the view of economists at Oxford, who warn that heavy investment into CCS is, at best, a huge gamble. CCS will be massively more expensive than an electrification-first pathway, grow our already huge stock of stranded assets, and cost trillions with far fewer co-benefits.
While not a cost-effective or intelligent decarbonisation strategy, CCS will, however, be very good at helping to maintain fossil fuel supply and demand, which is why the two entities set to benefit most from the government’s £22bn pledge for CCS are British Petroleum and Norwegian oil giant Equinor.
Baking fossil fuels into the economy of the future will have cascading, deleterious ripple effects. With NCDs 3.0 around the corner, nations around the world will be looking to decarbonise their supply chains. Should CCS fail to effectively decarbonise British industry and manufacturing—and, as shown, there is no good evidence to suggest that it will—UK exports will have nowhere to go.
In summary, Starmer’s rhetoric is deliberately divisive, and the substance of his argument for CCS is wafer thin, based on the exceedingly flimsy promises of an oil and gas industry that is, day by day, actively diminishing its already weak commitments to the zero-carbon transition. For a chance at preserving a habitable Earth for future generations while ensuring economic development and a better quality of life for us all right now, we’d be better served by attending to reality, and by understanding what research is actually telling us.