In Praise of (Natural) Carbon Capture

The western world is committing cultural suicide in so many ways that it can be hard to choose which act of self-harm to focus one’s attention on. As in so many things, the UK is ahead of Australia in this headlong rush to oblivion, but in too many respects we Australians are faithfully following the playbook being written by the UK and Europe. Like Europe, we have imported far too many followers of Islam, made far too few requirements on them to leave their ancient hatreds behind and embrace Australian cultural norms, and been far too tolerant of their habitual intolerance.

Unlike Europe, we proved two decades ago that by treating illegal immigrants like the law-breakers they are, and subjecting a tiny number of them to exemplary deportation, we have simultaneously stymied the people-smuggling trade and silenced the idiotic voices of the bien-pensant elites, who were so vociferous in their insistence that not only was such a policy wicked, but it would fail in its objectives. There are signs that reality is starting to mug the British elites, with grandees of the Labour Party such as Jack Straw calling for Britain to repudiate the ECHR, and other Labour figures, like Graham Stringer, calling for the resuscitation of the previous government’s Rwanda scheme, which it was Kier Starmer’s first act in government to extinguish.

So, in the matter of illegal immigration, we are, in a limited and benign sense, leading the UK. In the matter of its close cousin, ‘multiculturalism’, we may not yet be quite so polluted as the UK, but as witness the repulsive displays of Judeophobic bile that defaced our cities following October 7th, we do not lag far behind. Both countries harbour extensive Islamic ghettoes, whose imams are free to spout jihadist venom which in any other context would see them prosecuted, and whose inhabitants avidly embrace the largesse our welfare systems provide, while showing not the slightest interest in embracing our culture.

British public opinion – that of the ordinary Briton who has not been schooled to reject common sense on the grounds that it’s just so, well, common – is showing signs of having had enough. It remains to be seen just how ugly the resulting revolt will get – if the Straw/Stringer axis gets a decent hearing from its own party, Britain may yet avoid serious bloodshed, but Starmer, who wears perpetually the look of a man who has just been told something that has utterly baffled him, has such a tin ear for popular sentiment and such an obstinately legalistic turn of mind that such an outcome is by no means unthinkable.

When it comes, however, to the climate, and to the confected crisis the elites insist afflicts it, we are only slightly behind the UK in terms of the level of societal damage so far inflicted by these sociopaths. Britain has its Miliband, we have our Bowen. Both are tireless boosters of ‘renewables’, despite neither’s CV showing any trace of a scientific education.

Even as the latest ‘five years to save the planet’ deadline passes without the promised catastrophe occurring, adding one more failed prediction to a list which stretches back to the 80s, these purblind zealots plough on. The trajectory of the earth’s temperature may yet be statistically indistinguishable from that of a planet emerging, with what ought to be gratitude, from the Little Ice Age, but for these clowns the observed data don’t matter – what matter are the outputs of the computer models run by the third-rate ‘scientists’ who have hitched their wagon to this spavined mare. For an excellent analysis of just how foolish and destructive this obsession with renewables is, I heartily recommend this interview with Kathryn Porter, an energy consultant with a Master’s degree in physics who actually does know what she’s talking about. She tells the amusing story of a recent period in the UK when wind power was producing no more than it would if the entire population were to blow at the wind turbines. Amusing anecdotes apart, she paints in forensic detail, and in language readily comprehensible to a lay reader, a grim picture of folly, ideological conceit and ignorance.

In Britain, the process of deindustrialisation has gone rather further than in Australia, but perhaps only because we had less industry per capita before this madness began, and because we have more abundant natural resources to prop up what remains of our economy. Ironically, much of this propping up takes the form of selling to China the coal they need to produce the stuff we – and the British – need, but no longer make.

The climate scare, and the efforts it has spawned to ‘decarbonise’, are so monumentally silly, so utterly contrary to reason, that it’s hard to pick a winner, so packed is the field. It’s tempting to pick the truly insane, like the idea recently floated, apparently in all seriousness, to dim the sun by seeding the atmosphere. It is to be hoped, however, that this idea will remain where it belongs, in the deranged imagination of the lunatics who thought it up.

To find a winner in this grotesque beauty contest, we have to look for an idea that is not only a fathomlessly silly attempt to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, but also stands a fighting chance of being adopted, and thus being the occasion for the squandering of even more billions of taxpayers’ money. Enter Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, as it’s catchily known to the cult adherents who cherish it. CCS is the name given to a range of ‘technologies’ which sequester CO₂, either from the residue of industrial processes or, God help us, from the atmosphere at large, and then transport it to a place of entombment, there to let it languish for all eternity, with only its own disgrace for company.

The principle sounds simple, but the devil, as so often, lies in the detail. Getting entropy to step aside for your convenience is no simple matter. Even if you believe the claptrap about CO₂, capturing it, compressing it into a transportable form then carrying it to its tomb without, in the process, doing more damage to the environment than you fancy the CO₂ would have done if you simply left it alone, turns out to be a tough call, and to date no CCS systems have proceeded beyond the experimental stage.

None, that is, apart from one. It’s a system that requires no human intervention, is absolutely cost-free, and has been in operation since the dawn of life on earth. It’s called photosynthesis, and all it requires, to feed us, and to produce the verdure we find so beautiful, and perhaps to contribute to the moderation of our climate, is water, sunlight, nitrogen – and CO₂.

Many years ago, when the demonisation of CO₂ was in its infancy, I remember telling my sister about my scepticism, and hypothesising that increasing CO₂ levels, together with a modest increase in temperature, should, all else being equal, result in accelerated photosynthesis, particularly in the higher latitudes and at the margins of deserts, where the greening gradient – from zero photosynthetic activity to some photosynthetic activity – was at its sharpest. I reasoned that the removal from the atmosphere of CO₂ in this manner might be the mechanism by which the earth had survived much higher than present-day levels of CO₂ without the ‘runaway’ warming that was then beloved of the catastrophists, but of which we hear rather less these days.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in good scientific company – Svante Arrhenius himself, the man who first hypothesised that anthropogenic CO₂ might warm the earth, further hypothesised that this would be entirely beneficial, since it would increase crop yields. Funny how the carbonistas bang on about the first half of Svante’s hypothesis, but not the second. But then these people rely, for the sustenance of their highly lucrative scam, on the supposed existence of positive feedbacks to enhance the theoretical warming response to increased levels of CO₂. If it turned out that increased CO₂ was simply gobbled up by the biosphere, well, that would be a negative feedback, wouldn’t it? If all, or even a large part of that CO₂ that mankind has released into the atmosphere is simply being turned into foliage and fodder, the plebs might get the perverse idea that they had nothing to fear from it, and get a bit upset at having their pockets picked and their society ruined to subsidise the ‘transition’ to renewables, not to mention the comfortable lifestyles of said catastrophists and their rent-seeking adherents. Best not mention it, then.

However, as this research shows, the evidence is mounting that my hypothesis was correct, and that the world, far from facing catastrophe, is greatly benefitting from the CO₂ mankind has liberated – just as I now know Arrhenius predicted. Studies confirming the greening of the planet are proliferating, and it cannot be long before they breach the firewall erected by the BBC and the ABC to prevent the escape of such heresy into its credulous congregation.

So, there you have it, Harrumpfers, next time some ecolunatic starts gushing about CCS, and how it’s on the brink of saving us from Thermageddon, you can tell them we’ve already got CCS units aplenty – they’re called trees.

So, that’s the climate crisis solved – all by itself. If only the crisis of the Islamification of the West were so easy to solve…

This article originally appeared on the Harrumpf blog.