Thread by @patrickgaley

I'm sorry but this is a tremendous waste of time and money and toes the fossil fuel lobby's line

Instead of inventing hair-brained schemes - solar reflection, pole freezing, ocean greening - to mitigate emissions, target their source: oil, gas and coal bbc.com/news/science-e…

The @IPCC_CH is the most complete authority there is on #climatechange, includes no geoengineering in its models, because the systems proposed "face large uncertainties and knowledge gaps as well as substantial risks" geoengineeringmonitor.org/2018/11/ipccs-…

Oil and gas giants still include carbon capture and storage (CSS) in their models, which they claim will allow them to continue using #fossilfuels as long as they want, so long as CO2 can be sucked out of the air in 2nd half of 21st century energy-transitions.org/sites/default/…

The industry's belle is a hypothetical system known as BECCS. It would involve growing biofuel, burning it and capturing and storing the CO2 produced

The problem? At current emissions trajectories, we'd need BECCS to cover an area the size of India fern.org/fileadmin/uplo…

The EU alone has spent close to half a billion euros in CCS development. But none of the six projects worked. Not a one qz.com/1431655/the-eu…

Thing is, Earth already has really neat systems to capture greenhouse gases. They are known as forests

They absorb -/+40% of all manmade GHGs. Problem is we're burning more fossil fuels than they can handle

Oh yeah. And agribusiness is cutting them down
redd-monitor.org/2019/02/01/cli…

Solar radiation management is a batshit crazy idea that involves firing reflective particles into the atmosphere to bounce back more of the Sun's heat

It's a bit like setting fire to your house then trying to put it out by turning on the air conditioning desmogblog.com/2018/12/09/war…

Ocean greening, SRM, iron spreading, lime spreading, CCS etc.

All of these are incredibly expensive, untested and quite likely extremely damaging ways of weaseling out of the one step we are sure would work:

Stop burning fossil fuels theguardian.com/environment/20…

The business models of oil and gas majors right now, supported by governments to the tune of $billions in subsidies:

1. Dig all the oil
2. Burn all the oil
3.
4. Solve #climatechange

The IMF last week concluded that global pre- and post-tax #fossilfuel subsidies account for $5 TRILLION annually, without which the oil and gas industry would simply not be economically viable theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

Different methodology but the OECD this week found that global #fossilfuel subsidies are at least 10X those given to #biodiversity conservation oecd.org/environment/re…

So govts spend billions each year to support the one industry we know without doubt is driving #climatechange, and rather than save their money, plan to invest billions more in pie-in-the-sky uberprojects to mitigate the damage done by the industry they subsidise

Homo sapiens