Six years ago, on this day, July 3rd, 2020, the Daily Mail published a puff piece about a technofantasy ‘Direct Air Capture’.
- The PM’s advisor wants to spend £100 million on direct air capture technology
- The technology uses chemical filters to capture CO2 from the surrounding air
- The greenhouse gas is then stored underground or reused by various industries
- But the system is energy-sapping and doesn’t encourage a switch to renewables
Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings is backing a scheme to suck carbon dioxide out of the air using technology first used on World War Two submarines.
The PM’s advisor wants to spend £100 million on ‘direct air capture’ (DAC) machines, which consist of a stack of metal ‘air scrubbers’ that use a chemical solution to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere.
The CO2-laden solution is then stored underground, reducing the amount of the greenhouse gas that reaches the atmosphere.
,Boyle, D. and Chadwick, J. 2020. Scheme backed by Dominic Cummings to ‘suck’ excess carbon dioxide from the air and bury it underground gets £100m from the Treasury. The Daily Mail, July 3
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 421ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context is that for fifty years now we have been coming up with outlandish technofixes for a basic problem – we have to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we EMIT. End of pipe solutions – CCS and DAC – are fantasies. If they weren’t, we’d have them by now.
DAC as fantasy goes back to the late 1990s. I mean, christ.
The specific context was that there was a pandemic going on and fantastic sums of money were being thrown around. Also, Dom Cummings is not quite as smart as he thinks.
What I think we can learn from this – We are going to die. Horribly. Oh well.
What happened next
Loads of UK tax payer money is indeed being thrown against the wall on DAC.
You cannae change the laws of physics.
https://www.missionzero.tech/lab-notes/our-second-direct-air-capture-plant
You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
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Also on this day:
July 3, 1986 – House of Lords debate about the atmosphere and fuel use…
July 3, 1988 – US Navy kills hundreds of Iranian civilians…
July 3, 2008 – Greenpeace occupies an Australian coal plant.
July 3, 2008 – Greenpeace activists enter New South Wales coal power station