The mental inertia that grips the brains of carbon capture proponents has induced such a potent gravitational force that they risk sucking the rest of society into a black hole of lunacy with them.

You wouldn’t pay for lung transplants so you could keep inhaling asbestos. You’d stop the exposure. Carbon capture makes the same mistake: billions spent pumping CO2 underground while we continue burning fossil fuels, rather than building clean alternatives that make the problem obsolete.

This may sound absurd, but within this analogy lies the truth of carbon capture: a perverse dance of accounting that justifies absurd projects by manufacturing fines.

Real vs Manufactured Costs

A real cost produces real value. Building a nuclear power station costs money, but it generates electricity for decades – powering homes, businesses, and industry. The expenditure creates something tangible that improves lives. It is real.

A manufactured cost only exists because we created it. Carbon pricing, regulatory fines, compliance targets – all examples of manufactured costs. Artificial penalties developed with the spurious assumption that by penalizing a bad thing, that bad thing will somehow disappear or be solved.

“Put a price on carbon and carbon emissions will fall as releasing more carbon will cost more and therefore make companies less competitive.”

The idea seems logical – by putting a price on carbon, emissions will fall – but the intent masks the reality. Creating an artificial cost induces a “business case” for expensive solutions that produce nothing except the avoidance of that penalty.

Consider the Thames Tideway Tunnel: a £4.9 billion super-sewer built beneath London. The project was justified as “saving money for Thames Water customers.” However, no money was actually saved. Yes, the tunnel prevents sewage flowing into the Thames, and yes, that is good. But the business case was manufactured. The only thing the tunnel saved was self-imposed fines, reasoning that goes something like this: “For each hour sewage is discharged into the Thames I will charge myself £100,000, therefore if I build a super sewer I will avoid these costs and save money.”

Self-imposed fines are similar to thinking “If my car is older than three years I’m going to fine myself £400 a day, so I need to buy a new car next week.”

Yes, that’s a somewhat facetious example. But it highlights a point, we can justify any expenditure with frivolous logic, but that doesn’t make it right. It isn’t that the tunnel is wrong – it’s the spurious reasoning that accompanies it. The tunnel doesn’t generate electricity or produce clean drinking water; it creates no real utility beyond preventing a fine. The “value” is entirely manufactured by the regulatory framework.

The same pattern pervades government policy. ULEZ charges, congestion charging, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods – none of these make public transport better, faster, or more reliable. They simply make driving worse and more expensive. Low Traffic Neighbourhoods don’t create new infrastructure – they block existing routes. ULEZ doesn’t make buses better. Congestion charges don’t improve trains. The intention is to force people out of their cars by making the status quo worse, not by developing better alternatives.

This cuts to the core of current government policy: manufactured costs and difficulties are invented to make the status quo worse, not to make the alternative better. They are lazy solutions used to justify policy intentions.

The Carbon Capture Case

These regressive manufactured costs pervade ever more of our lives, but carbon capture represents their apotheosis. The core idea is that by connecting industrial emitters to depleted oil fields and pumping CO2 emissions underground, we will save both money and the planet. However, we don’t save any real money – we simply avoid self-imposed fines for releasing CO2. The outcome is accounting success, but everything else surrounding the process is madness. No electricity generated. No useful product created. Just carbon moved from one place to another, at enormous cost, because it has been assigned an arbitrary price.

I don’t want to pretend we shouldn’t reduce CO2, but carbon capture is simply rent-seeking behaviour dressed up as climate action. All of the effort, work, time and money combined to produce these carbon capture facilities could have been placed elsewhere. The money could be spent on something useful, something that results in something; nuclear power stations, train lines, housing – something tangible, something with permanence that can be sold, traded, used in the economy. Not merely buried to avoid a self-imposed cost.

There is a certain perversion to it all – a deep-seated inability to coherently understand the consequences of interacting policies. “Look at all the fines we’re avoiding, look at these industries that aren’t emitting carbon.” But there is no attempt to quantify the real ROI for carbon capture; it is all spurious.

Addressing the Counterarguments

“But climate change is real, and carbon imposes real costs on the environment.”

That might be the case, but if the US and China aren’t imposing carbon pricing, then the UK is poised for self-immolation at the spurious altar of moral good. This act of absurdity is analogous to Gordon Brown selling off the UK’s gold at record low prices – an instant reward, a feeling of doing good, but at the expense of destroying our own industries, offshoring jobs, reducing meaningful employment, and placing us in a state of subservience to the manufacturing hubs of Asia.

Playing hide-the-carbon doesn’t change anything globally; it just expends effort in the wrong direction while making British industry uncompetitive. Carbon border taxes won’t change this – any tariff will instantly result in reciprocal tariffs.

“We need all solutions, and hard-to-abate sectors require carbon capture.”

This reveals the circularity of the entire framework. Hard-to-abate sectors don’t need to be abated – they represent an insignificant amount of carbon released. They’re only “hard to abate” because we’ve created an arbitrary carbon price that penalizes them, forcing them to pursue abatement to remain competitive. Net Zero has become an accounting trick: carbon offsets, shuffling bits of paper, pretending to do something.

It isn’t real R&D. It doesn’t actually solve anything. It’s the dregs of a once productive oil field swallowed by a gaggle of gullible politicians.