Carbon sequestration: the critics are raving!

Reports are indicating the leader of the free world and President Obama will announce an accord “to work together on clean energy technology,” in the words of one of my colleagues’ source. “It will include elements like carbon capture and sequestration and the smart grid.”

This is very popular stuff among people who want to solve global warming without changing human behaviour. Paul Martin was all about this sort of thing too: “Clean technology,” which would cancel out the effect of all the dirty technology by seizing carbon dioxide from the air and burying it underground. Well. If that’s an option, why hasn’t been done before?

Because it’s not clear it’s an option, is why. Assorted critics have called carbon sequestration “horribly expensive,” a “false hope;” if implemented on a scale large enough to make a difference — a scale thousands of times that of current pilot projects — it would make carbon dioxide “the world’s largest transported good;” and that, while it does have considerable potential, it “simply hasn’t been put through enough paces to know yet.”