Twenty six years ago, on this day, August 15th, 2000,
Emissions soar 17 per cent despite $1b spent on crisis
AUSTRALIAN scientists are investigating a scheme to bury carbon dioxide underground as a way of reducing our burgeoning greenhouse gas emissions.
A research team, which is in the middle of a four-year project, claims it can find a cost-effective way of sealing carbon dioxide in the earth, safely and permanently, by putting it back where it came from.
They are looking at sedimentary basins across Australia – deep saline areas, coal seams which cannot be mined and depleted oil and gas reservoirs – for spaces big enough to hold big volumes of carbon dioxide.
The continuing research will be presented at an international conference on greenhouse gas control technologies in Cairns today, after new figures which warned of the effects of global warming.
Rose, R. 2000. Plan To Bury Greenhouse Gas. The West Australian, 15 August, p.9.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 370ppm. 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 was the idea of capturing and storing carbon dioxide because of climate change went back to 1975 when Italian physicist Cesar Marchetti did some back of envelope calculations as part of an International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis workshop. This had been built on, looked at, and in the late 90s examined a bit more deeply and disregarded because it was palpable nonsense,
The specific context was that with the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 it was clear that actual emissions reductions for rich nations might be unavoidable, and therefore carbon capture and storage no longer looked too expensive and too ridiculous to consider. There had been a series of international workshops on greenhouse gas technologies from the early 90s onwards, and here we see another such meeting.
What I think we can learn from this is that a technology can be laughed at, but come back later, because it now meets either an ecological, economic, or political need.
What happened next Carbon capture and storage really started to take off by the mid 2000s as a political solution to an ecological and social problem. There was a spike in interest in the second half of the 2000s especially in the lead up to the Copenhagen climate summit. It then went away again, and it has now come back, but seems to be as far as I can tell, and I really can’t be bothered to look closely because it is way later than anyone things – on life support.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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Also on this day:
August 15, 1952 – flash flood – caused by Weather Modification experiment?
August 15, 1977 – “Theoretical climate effects of doubling the atmospheric carbon dioxide content
August 15, 2010 – a walk against warming fails to catch fire. #RepertoireRot
August 15, 2010 – Russia halts grain exports because of droughts and heatwaves