From earth they came, to earth they must return

Humanity across the globe is threatened with a possible extinction coming not from terrorism or the coronavirus or even from western aggression. But rather from carbon dioxide. Humans are responsible for these carbon emissions. It is the Anthropocene epoch. Carbon accumulates in the atmosphere, which traps the heat here on Earth. When that heat cannot escape into space, global warming happens.

Different solutions have been proposed to tackle the issue of climate change such as electric cars, solar and wind energy, artificial meat, and so forth. They are all good and merit serious attention. Money hungry billionaires have suggested carbon suction technologies, which would suck the carbon from the environment. That is not the silver bullet for climate change because as long as emissions are ongoing, no amount of suction would make a serious dent.

The shifting winds in the direction of electric cars and the urge and practical work toward generating clean energy using solar and wind power are causing an enormous amount of anxiety in the oil industry. They do not want to be left out and are looking for desperate ways to find relevance and ways to keep making money. The oil giants have realised that they need to come up with a way to sell their oil reserves, the estimated value of which is calculated to be about $3 trillion. To make oil kosher in this newly climate change aware world, one outlandish method proposed is to bury the carbon instead of letting it fly.

It just reminded me of a story I came across in the book, The Most Dangerous Place, by Imtiaz Gul. Right after 9/11, somewhere in Peshawar there was a publishing house where a man was busy sanitising the books off jihad before sending them for publication. When asked what he was busy doing, he replied that he was removing from the books what he had inserted in them back in the 80s. America wanted jihad buried after nourishing it for decades.

Fossil fuel is basically extracted from the remains of the once living beings buried deep underground. So, what the oil giants are really saying is that they should extract fossil fuels from the remains of the dead deep underground and make enormous profits with it. And when a planet-threatening waste is created out of the burning of those fossil fuels, they would send that waste back into the ground just so that they can continue to profit. One such project is being worked on at an English area called Teesside along the River Tees by the British oil giant BP. Royal Dutch Shell, Norway’s Equinor, France’s Total, and Italy’s Eni are investors in the same project.

They are investing billions of dollars to keep our bad habits active and stay addicted to oil. But we should never underestimate the entrepreneurial tendencies of these oil giants. They are not investing billions just to keep selling their oil, they are also going to profit from this new method of burying the waste. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer called the Teesside “the future economy of this country [UK]”. Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed saviour of humanity, has announced a $100 million award for the best carbon capture technology.

While this is being sold to us as the elixir of climate, its efficacy is unknown, neither its lethality after billions of tons of carbon are drilled underground. We are in the dark about the leakage and given the history of oil giants, leakages are unavoidable. Most importantly, this has the devilish potential of slowing the momentum that electric cars and clean energy are gaining. It can put a cute face on this extinction accelerator. We cannot afford to use our planet, our only home, as a testing lab. Just as terrorism would disappear by stopping the aggression instead of fighting against it, carbon would disappear by stopping fossil fuel burning, instead of burying it.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 15^th, 2021.

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