If your business model cannot survive without massive influxes of government cash it might not be the most stable idea. It’s one thing if you are a defense contractor or provide specific things that government needs. But, carbon capture? It was really based on Government giving them money
Carbon Capture Comes Back Down to Earth
Six months ago, the prospects for the nascent carbon removal market seemed as vast as the sky.
Bill Gates and other investors were lining up to fund start-ups that promised to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, helping to curb global warming. Big-name companies like Google, Airbus and Amazon moved in to buy carbon removal credits. And McKinsey projected the market could be worth as much as $1.2 trillion by 2050. One investor called it “the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years of doing venture capital.”
But less than six months into President Trump’s second term, in which he has moved to drastically reshape climate policy, the carbon capture industry is decidedly more subdued.
The Energy Department last month terminated 24 awards worth $3.7 billion, most of which had been earmarked for carbon capture and storage projects. Applications for new carbon capture and sequestration permits in the United States were down 55 percent in the first three months of the year.
If these start ups were so great why can’t they do it without the government money? Surely Gates and the others could fund them 100% with their own money, right? Or, is it that they were looking for a big return based on Los Federales spending a ton of taxpayer money on the projects, not caring if they succeed, but, just looking good temporarily?
Yet it’s not just the political landscape that has changed. There are also new questions about the viability of some prominent carbon capture technologies.
Climeworks’ flagship plant in Iceland, which uses so-called direct air capture to scrub carbon dioxide from the sky, removed just a sliver of the carbon dioxide it had hoped to during its first 10 months in operation, according to Heimildin, an Icelandic news organization.
In other words, it’s BS. Maybe some of these projects around the world should be audited, see where the money has gone. Did it enrich some people, while doing little, just like with lots of solar projects (Solyndra, for instance)? If it is projected to be so big, then why is it failing and unable to operate without vast sums of taxpayer money, whether taxpayers like it or not?
Bonus points if they also give up everything manufactured/derived from petroleum.
There. Fixed it for you. Climate change has always been about theft, not CO2 or even air pollution. The thieves would love to get wealthy from taxes on carbon, but taking billions from the taxpayers is more immediate.
‘Carbon capture’ sounds like a great idea, right up until you realize that if we could capture released atmospheric CO2, the left would lose a huge opportunity to run our lives for us.