UK Nature and Environment

Labour’s carbon-capture scheme will be Starmer’s white elephant: a terrible mistake costing billions George Monbiot George Monbiot

The supposedly green project – brainchild of the previous Tory government – will increase emissions, not reduce them Fri 11 Oct 2024 06.00 BST

This will be Keir Starmer’s HS2: a hugely expensive scheme that will either be abandoned, scaled back or require massive extra funding to continue, after many billions have been spent. The government’s plan for carbon capture and storage (CCS) – catching carbon dioxide from major industry and pumping it into rocks under the North Sea – is a fossil fuel-driven boondoggle that will accelerate climate breakdown. Its ticket price of £21.7bn is just the beginning of a phenomenal fiscal nightmare.

There might be a case for a CCS programme if the following conditions were met. First, that the money for cheaper and more effective projects had already been committed. The opposite has happened. Labour slashed its green prosperity plan from £28bn a year to £15bn, and with it a sensible and rational programme for insulating 19m homes.

The government boasts that its CCS scheme will be “the equivalent of taking around 4m cars off the road”. But at far lower cost, through a rational transport policy, it could remove millions of real cars from the roads, while improving our mobility, cutting air pollution and releasing land for green spaces and housing.