U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus is seen outside a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles on April 6, 2022. Along with several others, he locked himself to the front door of the building and was ultimately arrested as they engaged in civil disobedience as part Scientist Rebellion’s week of action. (Photo: Scientist Rebellion)
The letter to President Joe Biden came amid a week of “scientist-led civil disobedience” demanding urgent climate action.
In a powerful direct appeal to President Joe Biden urging him to follow through on his vow to listen to science, a group of over 275 scientists on Thursday called on the U.S. leader to urgently ditch fossil fuels and lead the country to a renewable energy transition.
Written “in this moment of climate emergency… with utmost urgency,” the letter to Biden was coordinated by the advocacy group Food & Water Watch along with noted U.S. climate experts including Peter Kalmus, Sandra Steingraber, Robert Howarth, Mark Jacobson, and Michael Mann.
As Common Dreams previously reported, the scientists leading the effort unveiled the letter last month, seeking a critical mass of signatures to push back against the administration’s move to further oil and gas production as nations look to reduce their dependence on Russian fuels in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
The letter–bluntly declaring “Follow the Science, Stop Fossil Fuels”–was officially sent to the White House Thursday, landing amid a week of “scientist-led civil disobedience” featuring strikes and occupations in dozens of countries to highlight the urgency of the ecological and climate crisis.
In their letter to Biden, the expert group cites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in February cataloging the “unfolding climate catastrophe” as evidence of the need for swift action. Millions worldwide, including within the U.S., are already facing climate impacts, the IPCC report notes, including water scarcity and extreme weather events.
“These problems will only accelerate as we continue our reliance on fossil fuels,” the scientists wrote. “And, this is on top of the significant health and environmental justice impacts that power plants, export facilities, and other fossil fuel infrastructure have on neighboring communities.”
“As the IPCC report indicated, the scientific evidence is overwhelming that we must act now,” they wrote, “we simply do not have time to waste.”
Firmly rejecting Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s framing of the U.S. being “on war footing” in pushing for more domestic fossil fuel production, the scientists told Biden that such urgency must instead be directed at “building a renewable energy economy” and that he must exercise his “executive authority to redirect these massive investments, mobilize the country, and rally the global community around a program of energy security through a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”
“We urge you to lead boldly, take on the fossil fuel titans, and rally the country towards a renewable energy future,” the scientists wrote.
Lead signatory and climate scientist Kalmus was among those taking part in Scientist Rebellion direct actions on Wednesday; he was ultimately arrested after locking himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles.
He was driven by what he sees as “humanity heading directly toward climate disaster” and “currently on track to lose everything we love.”
In an op-ed published at The Guardian Wednesday explaining why he was willing to risk arrest, Kalmus wrote, “If everyone could see what I see coming, society would switch into climate emergency mode and end fossil fuels in just a few years.”
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Despite his big talk on climate, when it comes to fossil fuels, President Biden’s policies just build on previous expansion.
A slew of White House actions are undermining efforts to address climate change, and under Biden, the country is producing more energy from fossil fuels than it did under former President Donald Trump.
The science is clear: Building any new fossil fuel infrastructure is incompatible with a livable climate. Yet, while President Joe Biden touts the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, as the country’s biggest climate law ever, he’s glossing over all the ways his administration has advanced fossil fuels, including in the IRA.
A slew of White House actions are undermining efforts to address climate change. And under Biden, the country is producing more energy from fossil fuels than it did under former President Donald Trump. In 2022, the U.S. broke its record for most fossil fuels produced in a year. Worse, it’s on track to break that record for 2023.
We know that to stem the tide of climate chaos, we need to move off fossil fuels, period. Instead, the Biden administration has approved and supported several projects that will unleash carbon bombs on our climate and lock in decades of drilling, burning, and emitting.
“Unless he drastically changes course, Biden’s legacy will forever be marred by his failure to directly address fossil fuels, the primary driver of the climate crisis,” said one campaigner.
Climate campaigners on Tuesday responded to U.S. President Joe Biden’s speech touting the clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act on the eve of its first anniversary by condemning his administration’s fossil fuel expansion and calling on him to declare a climate emergency.
Biden has repeatedly hailed the $368 billion in clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) while claiming last week that he has “practically” declared a climate emergency. On Tuesday, the president delivered his remarks at Ingeteam, a company that makes wind turbine systems and says it plans to manufacture electric vehicle charging stations and hire 100 workers.
“This is happening across the state,” Biden asserted. “It is a direct result of the clean energy investments I signed into law a year ago. Folks, as I’ve said for a long time, when I think climate, I think jobs.”
Tune in as I deliver remarks on how Bidenomics is Investing in America to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down. https://t.co/dcsbgitKAt
Progressive critics pushed back against the president’s claims.
“President Biden can talk until he’s blue in the face about investments in clean energy, but as long as he continues to approve massive new fossil fuel projects throughout the country, we keep moving backward on the path to a livable climate future,” Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a statement. “No amount of investment in wind turbines, solar panels, or faulty carbon capture schemes will protect our environment or stabilize our climate if we simultaneously extract and burn more and more oil and gas.”
“The Alaska Willow drilling project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a plethora of new LNG export terminals—these are among the features of Biden’s energy legacy that will doom us to climate catastrophe if he doesn’t change course now,” Hauter continued. “Meanwhile, President Biden’s massive investments in unproven, impossibly expensive carbon capture schemes serve only to allow the fossil fuel industry to keep doing what it does best—drill, frack, pump, and pollute—under the premise that a mysterious, magical technology will somehow clean it all up.”
“These faulty initiatives are sucking away precious time and money that could otherwise be spent on legitimate clean energy projects like wind, solar, and building efficiency,” she added.
It’s been almost one year since the Inflation Reduction Act passed Congress, but @POTUS and his administration aren’t acknowledging how they’ve advanced fossil fuels – even in the IRA. We need to move off fossil fuels NOW to truly stop climate chaos.
Oil Change International U.S. campaign manager Allie Rosenbluth called the IRA “one of the biggest handouts to the fossil fuel industry in U.S. history.”
“With tens of billions of dollars in giveaways for the oil and gas industry, provisions expanding fossil fuel leasing, and incentives for dangerous and unproven technologies designed to keep the fossil fuel industry in business like carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and direct air capture, this law will not accomplish what we need to have a livable future.”
“Unless he drastically changes course, Biden’s legacy will forever be marred by his failure to directly address fossil fuels, the primary driver of the climate crisis,” Rosenbluth added.
President Biden @potus please watch this video. It makes the case for a climate emergency declaration with concision and conviction @FightFossilshttps://t.co/em7PrzsA0M
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) said in a statement that “one year after President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the need is more urgent than ever for him to declare a climate emergency, phase out fossil fuels, and fast-track distributed energy systems.”
CBD energy justice director Jean Su argued that “it’s clear that the IRA isn’t enough.”
“This summer has been an absolute horror show of the catastrophic consequences of burning fossil fuels. President Biden needs to run, not walk, away from the climate catastrophe of fossil fuels,” she asserted. “Every time his administration approves another oil or gas project, it pushes us toward a more hellish future.”
“Biden should use all his executive powers to speed the end of the fossil fuel era, because every tenth of a degree matters,” Su added. “Unless he does, these projects will perpetuate human suffering, environmental racism, and wildlife extinction. They’ll just keep on cooking the planet.”
March to End Fossil Fuels. Sept 17th. NYC. Please join us to call on our leaders to step up or step aside. https://t.co/kwKD6UYdwj
‘Direct air capture’ of carbon pollution is still experimental, but a fossil fuel company is embracing it as a way to keep drilling.
In a new TED Talk posted on August 7, 2023, former Vice President Al Gore pointed to Occidental CEO Vicky Hollub’s acknowledgement that direct air capture enables a fossil fuel forever strategy. Credit: Screen grab of <a href=”https://youtu.be/xgZC6da4mco”TED Talk video via YouTube.
The U.S. Department of Energy has announced that a subsidiary of U.S.-based oil company Occidental Petroleum will receive a grant to develop a commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) facility in southern Texas.
It is one of two DAC projects selected under a $1.2 billion federal program to scale up DAC, which the Energy Department has called the “world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history.”
This new DOE funding is part of a larger $3.5 billion allocation from Congress – under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, part of the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation – to develop four large-scale DAC hubs. But some critics contend that the federal government’s involvement in this new climate technology is giving fossil fuel companies cover, allowing them to create the impression that they are part of the transition to greener energy while they continue to focus most of their activities and money on their core oil and gas businesses.
Direct air capture is a nascent technology designed to capture carbon dioxide from the ambient air. In theory, it could help remove “legacy emissions,” or the carbon pollution that has already been emitted. Research and development projects to date have not yet shown how DAC can be scaled up to a global scale that would have an effect on slowing climate change.
Yet major polluters are already capitalizing on the conceptual promise of this technology to promote it as a climate solution.
“Oxy has said out loud that this is a ‘get out of jail free’ card, enabling the oil and gas industry to continue business as usual,” said researcher Kert Davies, director of special investigations with the Center for Climate Integrity, referring to Occidental Petroleum’s stock ticker symbol, “instead of heeding the urgent fossil fuel phaseout warning scientists have shouted in our faces for decades.”
Climate advocate and former Vice President Al Gore noted in a recent TED Talk that Occidental CEO Vicky Hollub has said that because of DAC, “we don’t need to ever stop oil,” and that the technology gives the fossil fuel industry “a license to continue to operate.”
According to Gore, “They’re using it in order to gaslight us, literally.”
Direct air capture may play a role someday, but the best option now is to halt carbon emissions in the first place, said John Fleming, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “[Direct air capture] requires large amounts of energy, spurring more demand for the same fossil fuels that caused the climate crisis,” Fleming said.
Two of the four DAC hubs funded by the Department of Energy will be located on the Gulf Coast. In addition to Occidental’s hub in Kleberg County, Texas, a project proposed by Battelle, Climeworks, and other partners, called “Project Cypress,” will be constructed in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. On paper, the two projects together will have the capacity to remove two million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. It is unclear exactly how much each project will receive in government funding, as they will be undergoing award negotiations.
DOE has not yet announced selection of the other two DAC hub projects. “We’re expecting in 2024 or soon thereafter that we will have another solicitation for additional hubs,” said Kelly Cummins, deputy director of DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
Under the Inflation Reduction Act’s expanded tax credits for carbon capture technologies – a subsidy under section 45Q of the Internal Revenue Code for developers to capture CO2 from polluting facilities or from the atmosphere – qualifying DAC projects can receive $180 per ton of CO2 captured and stored, a significant increase from the previous credit of $50 per ton.
Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive, which focuses on developing carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) and DAC projects, will be developing the South Texas DAC facility, according to DOE’s announcement. The company is currently building a smaller DAC facility in Ector County, Texas, in the Permian Basin, where Occidental continues to operate as one of the largest extractors of oil and gas.
Occidental has indicated that CO2 captured from its Permian Basin DAC plant could be used to drill for more oil through a process it has long used known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In its latest annual report, the company stated that its CO2 EOR operations “are critical to Occidental’s long-term strategy.”
However, according to DOE’s Cummins, this hub is not expected to be linked to enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations.
A ‘Gimmick of the Fossil Fuel Industry’
Researchers who have analyzed the technical requirements of direct energy capture, such as energy load, warn that it is little more than a boondoggle. A 2020 analysis published in Nature Communications found that “the energy and materials requirements for [DAC] are unrealistic even when the most promising technologies are employed.”
In a 2019 study that examined the impacts of direct air capture, Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, found that it would increase CO2 emissions, air pollution, fossil mining and fossil infrastructure, largely because of the enormous amount of energy required to extract, compress, and separate the CO2.
Even if renewable energy is used to operate DAC, Jacobson told DeSmog that this would simply divert renewables away from directly replacing fossil fuels. At least for the next several decades or until fossil fuels are eliminated, “it is impossible for there to be a benefit of DAC, only an opportunity cost. It will only delay our solution to the climate problem,” Jacobson said.
“DAC is simply a gimmick of the fossil fuel industry to keep themselves operating and pretend they are doing something useful,” he added.
We really need to be smarter than this if we want to hold out any hope of solving global warming, air pollution, and energy security problems.
In a statement, Occidental’s Hollub said the company looks forward to partnering with DOE to “deploy this vital carbon removal technology at climate-relevant scale.”
June Sekera, a climate researcher who has studiedDAC, said that the feasibility of actually getting to that scale is “absurd,” and that DAC is meaningless from a climate change perspective.
Sekera, a research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, told DeSmog that “the IPCC has said that DAC is going to be removing [essentially] zero CO2 by 2030.” The one commercial-scale DAC plant currently operating anywhere in the world, in Iceland, is designed to remove just 4,000 tons of CO2 a year, she said.
The IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the United Nations body that issues regular reports on the latest climate change science.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told reporters on Thursday that if deployed at a commercial scale, DAC technology “can help us make serious headway on our net zero goals.” But climate and environmental justice advocates are largely opposed to the kinds of “carbon management” projects that fossil fuel interests are promoting, including direct air capture, and see them as a way for industrial polluters to continue operating as usual.
“We know that engineering-based removal activities are technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks,” said Marion Gee, co-executive director of Climate Justice Alliance.
Fenceline Watch, a Texas-based environmental justice organization, said in a statement that DOE’s funding of DAC hubs in Texas and Louisiana “represents, once again, the sacrifice of our communities along the Gulf Coast in the interest of the oil, gas, and petrochemical industry.”
Carbon180, an organization supporting carbon removal, told DeSmog that addressing environmental justice issues and not catering to polluters’ interests are key to building industrial-scale carbon removal in an equitable way. “We believe that the carbon removal industry can and should be built to redress the harms and injustices of the past. We’re keen to see DOE prioritize the interest of communities and not those of the fossil fuel industry,” said Sasha Stashwick, director of policy at Carbon180.
But Fenceline Watch contends that direct air capture further endangers communities already overburdened by industrial pollution.
“While the industry positions direct air capture facilities as a viable solution to removing carbon from the air, the reality is these hubs have never proven to be able to achieve these claims,” the organization said in an emailed statement. “This is a greenwashing campaign that will continue to put our communities’ health, environment, and safety at risk.”
“Fossil fuel interests see a clear benefit in promoting direct air capture as a means to preserve the dominance of dirty fossil fuels,” said one advocate.
Campaigners demand far-reaching climate action at a rally. (Photo: michael_swan/flickr/cc)
Climate action groups on Friday said the U.S. Department of Energy’s newly announced $1.2 billion in grants for two carbon capture projects are far from the climate action that scientists and advocates have demanded for years—despite the Biden administration’s claim that the “next-generation technologies” must be used alongside renewable energy sources to draw down carbon emissions.
The department said it will invest $1.2 billion to build the nation’s first commercial plants that will conduct “direct air capture,” in which “giant vacuums… can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky,” as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters on Thursday.
The unproven technology has been a key focus of oil and gas lobbyists, who argue that fossil fuel companies can continue their planet-heating extraction activities if plants are built to remove the pollution they cause.
Advocacy group Food & Water Watch noted that one oil company, Occidental, stands to benefit directly from the grants because its wholly owned subsidiary, 1Point5, was selected by the Energy Department as one of the recipients.
“Direct air capture is expensive, unproven, and will ultimately make almost no difference in reducing climate pollution… Capturing just a quarter of our annual carbon emissions would require all of the power currently generated in the country.”
“Fossil fuel interests see a clear benefit in promoting direct air capture as a means to preserve the dominance of dirty fossil fuels,” said Jim Walsh, the group’s policy director. “The federal government is handing them hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, when it should be pursuing policies to end the era of fossil fuels.”
Occidental plans to build one of the plants in Kleberg County, Texas, while nonprofit research firm Battelle will build another in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana—one of the state’s air pollution hotspots, according to New Orleans Public Radio.
“Frontline communities that have borne the brunt of environmental racism and climate change for generations say, ‘Enough!'” said Marion Gee, co-executive director of the national grassroots coalition Climate Justice Alliance. “In an effort to move quickly and carelessly to balance a ‘carbon budget,’ the backyards that he’s talking about building in won’t be [White House Deputy Chief of Staff John] Podesta’s, President [Joe] Biden’s, or their neighbors. It’ll be Black folks, Indigenous communities, and poor BIPOC neighbors—sacrificed, yet again, in the name of protecting corporate interests.”
Critics note that carbon capture is expensive and requires a huge amount of energy to run the “capturing” mechanisms, increasing the very emissions companies aim to remove from the atmosphere.
Former Vice President Al Gore said in a TED Talk last month that turning to carbon capture—as the Biden administration did when it included $3.5 billion to fund a total of four direct air capture plants in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law—is a “moral hazard” that will give fossil fuel giants “an excuse for not ever stopping oil.”
“That gives them a license to continue producing more and more oil and gas,” he said.
Basav Sen, climate justice policy director at the Institute of Policy Studies, accused the Biden administration of playing “cynical political game of squandering public funds on unproven, expensive, and potentially dangerous schemes such as direct air capture, purportedly to gain credibility for backing climate solutions, while doubling down on expanding fossil fuels.”
The grants were announced days after President Joe Biden angered campaigners by claiming that “practically speaking,” he has already declared a climate emergency, despite his approval earlier this year of a massive oil drilling project in Alaska and his recent proposal to update rules for—but not end—fossil fuel leasing on public lands.
As Common Dreams reported in May, Food & Water Watch recently unveiled an interactive online website titled Carbon Capture Scam to expose the “false narratives” being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and lawmakers to promote a “dangerous distraction from the pressing need to move off oil and gas.”
“Direct air capture is expensive, unproven, and will ultimately make almost no difference in reducing climate pollution,” said Walsh on Friday. “Capturing just a quarter of our annual carbon emissions would require all of the power currently generated in the country.”
“Even if the technology was effective, there are still serious questions about whether there is a safe and effective way to store the captured carbon dioxide,” he added. “A more practical and effective approach would be to invest money in wind and solar energy—which would be far more effective in actually reducing climate pollution.”
