Out in the middle of the ocean, off the far northern coast of Australia, floats one of the country's biggest regulatory failures in a generation. The rusting hulk of the Northern Endeavour – a 274m-long, floating oil production, storage and offtake facility, named for the ship Captain James Cook used to sail the coast of Australia – sits approximately

 of Darwin in the Timor Sea, out in Australian waters. 

(Pictured above; photo courtesy Australian Government, Department of Industry, Science and Resources).

The vessel first entered production in 1999 and over the next two decades, under various owners, pulled roughly 200 million barrels from nine wells 380m beneath the sea. In 2016, as the field was almost depleted, Woodside Energy – Australia’s biggest domestic oil and gas producer, and the owner at the time –

Northern Oil and Gas Australia (NOGA) had been founded the year before by Sydney-based entrepreneur Angus Karoll, who had made his money in coal seam gas but had no experience in offshore oil production. Having picked up the facility for a song, his plan was to squeeze the last dregs out of the aging field, a deal that would also allow Woodside to side-step substantial decommissioning costs—an approach that's become a hallmark of fossil fuel producers the world over. But as the Northern Endeavour began

, running costs outstripped any money it was making. By 2020, NOGA was bankrupt.

Who might be responsible for dismantling and cleaning up the facility remained an open question as the

 took it over. The question was resolved in 

 on Australia’s oil and gas producers to cover the cost. 

 to unhook the vessel from its wells and tow it to shore. There’s a one-to-ten percent chance it may break apart when the attempt is made.

It is possible to read the story of the Northern Endeavour as a morality tale about greed and lax regulation. But the episode also underscores a very real example of what could go wrong with several new large-scale carbon, capture and storage (CCS) projects across the country. As ageing oil and gas fields are nearing the end of their productive lives, the companies that once exploited these formations are increasingly proposing they now be used to store carbon dioxide as a climate solution.

With 1000 known wells in coastal waters around the country, fossil fuel producers face an estimated

 in Australia. Tim Beshara, manager of policy and strategy at The Wilderness Society Australia, suggests that this looming cost is what's really at the heart of the country’s push to embrace CCS. Re-using old platforms and infrastructure at each site means the industry can wipe a liability from their books, claim a climate win without verifying emissions reductions, and even potentially shift clean up costs to the government. The Northern Endeavour, and other sites like it—including right next door in 

—provide a preview of how messy the process could be, particularly in countries that lack the regulatory regimes necessary to hold global companies to account.

“It’s happening all over the world,” Beshara says. “These companies sell over their late-life assets to late-life asset specialists who roll the dice to see if they can get a few more years out of a field, or in the new version try to turn it into a profit-producing enterprise using CCS for speculative applications.

“If it doesn’t turn out, the liability just rusts into the ocean.”

Australia has long looked upon CCS as a get-out-of-jail free card for its climate obligations. As one of the world’s top coal and liquid natural gas exporters, fossil fuel producers have enjoyed a protected status in Australia for decades. Almost from the very beginning, Australia’s efforts to address climate change have been considered through the prism of its dirty exports.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the Australian government and companies operating in the country began looking at how

 to deploy the technology to capture emissions during power generation

, as a way to help protect the coal industry. The basic idea was to bolt a CCS operation onto ageing coal-fired power plants to skim off the CO2. The CO2 could then be injected beneath the earth to prolong the working life of the plant in a carbon-constrained world.

 to act as a scaffold for what was anticipated to be an emerging industry focussed on carbon sequestration. A particular concern among potential operators was the risk that, since this carbon was meant to be stored forever, they might be on the hook for maintaining a closed CCS site, long after commercial operations had ceased and they had moved on. To resolve this, the Australian government

 operators. Fifteen years after an operation closed, the government would assume full responsibility for the site, so long as proper process had been followed and there was no obvious issue with the work done. Similar provisions were later passed in states such as Western Australia to enable projects like Chevron’s Gorgon on Barrow Island, the world’s largest long-term industrial CCS project. The planning for Gorgon took shape in 2016 as a partnership that included Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil, with the first CO2 injected in 2019. The CCS component of the operation has consistently failed to perform to expectations, with the amount of CO2 injected falling each year between 2020 and 2023. Factoring in the emissions created by gas extraction, the operation is one of Australia’s largest industrial emitters.

But as fossil fuel producers used the technology to

, the anticipated wave of investment in CCS never arrived. As of March 2024, there are now just 18 projects in various stages of development around the country being tracked by the CO2CRC, a predominately

 research organisation that focuses on CCS. The non-for-profit business, which began as part of an Australian

 to promote collaboration between industry and researchers, also operates Australia’s first CCS project, the Otway International Test Centre, that includes saline aquifer storage and a former gas field along the Victoria coast.

CO2CRC claims that the Otway facility has successfully injected 65,000 tonnes of CO2, in its first stage of operation and 15,000 tonnes during each of its second and third stages. The carbon dioxide was not sourced from an industrial operation, but from a nearby well-head providing naturally-occurring CO2.

This work, says the organization’s CEO, Dr. Matthias Raab, is proof of concept. It has established that it is possible to safely inject and store CO2 beneath the earth’s surface. With another 10,000 tonnes injection planned for this year, Raab says that the current goal is to help develop high-fidelity monitoring technologies to track CO2 as it moves through a geological formation – a field of research that is currently in high demand. As companies and governments embrace CCS, there is growing pressure to prove that carbon stored underground actually stays underground, but there is currently no way to do this with certainty.

“We do pilot research for many different technologies.” Raab says “Unless the engineering is being done, the upscaling is being done and the operational challenges are being addressed and learned, new technologies remain conceptual.”

Raab says that though some technologies are still being developed, “CCS [itself] is a proven technology and is essential to decarbonisation” – particularly for Australian gas producers.

“One of the fundamental assumptions is whether we are going to use oil and gas going forward? The answer in every single forecast is ‘yes’,” he says. “As long as there are no alternative fuels, we better pull up our sleeves and decarbonise our primary energy sources.”

Whether CCS can actually decarbonise fossil fuels is a matter of some debate, even among proponents. Dr. David Ho, a climate research scientist with University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, is an advocate for carbon removal technology that removes CO2 from the air rather than capturing it at the point of production. This is in contrast to the use-case often proposed by industry to capture reservoir CO2 during oil and gas production.

“CCS can make sense for harder-to-abate situations, like fertilizer and concrete, but it doesn't make sense to use CCS to prolong our use of fossil fuels, especially to produce electricity," Dr. Ho says."I would love to see us take CO2 out of the atmosphere, but it’s important not to put it there in the first place.”

Raab says that “there is no scenario by any agency, IPCC, [International Energy Agency], Net Zero Australia” that imagines a world without gas or CCS—and the technology will be “vital,” he says, to addressing climate change.

“There’s so much more confidence and sophistication in the technology than what is currently publicly discussed,” Raab says.

Raab’s views echo those of other Australian industry figures at a time when oil and gas producers have been under pressure from scientists and civil society groups to end fossil fuel production. Kevin Gallagher, the managing director of domestic Australian oil and gas producer Santos, has repeatedly called for “decarbonisation, not defossilisation” and

 oil and gas companies are the only ones with the “capability, resources, infrastructure, customers and balance sheets” to deliver a transition using CCS. In a

 in March this year, Samantha McCulloch, CEO of Australia’s longest-running oil and gas industry association, Australian Energy Producers (AEP), falsely claimed that “in the [International Energy Agency’s] vision for net zero, gas provides more energy between today and 2050 than wind or solar."

In truth, the International Energy Agency’s landmark

 – attacked by Gallagher as relying on “assumptions” – forecasts that solar and wind will provide seven times more energy than gas globally by 2050. When it comes to CCS, the IEA found that the technology became significant in scenarios where the world delayed phasing out oil, gas and coal — or took no action at all.

Within Australia, Tennant Reid, Director of Climate Change and Energy at the Australian Industry Group, says that gas will only play a small role in the country’s energy grid going forward. The most recent plans by the 

 have the country sourcing the overwhelming majority of its electricity – “between 95% and 99%,” Reid says – from renewables by 2040, with the remainder provided by gas peaking plants that only operate as back-ups.

“This is a really ambiguous zone rhetorically – a thing can be small and significant,” Reid says. “The insurance role for gas gets confused with a very different role for gas. A lot of people don’t make a clear distinction in their heads between that back-up role, and the role that gas has played in the power system in places like the US where there has been this huge shift in bulk energy from coal to gas.”

With gas playing a small role within Australia into the future, and the vast majority destined for export to South Korea and Japan, Kevin Morrison, an energy finance analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, says it is telling that Australia is “going all in” on CCS.

“It’s really a fig leaf so industry can continue producing more oil and gas; it really doesn’t do anything to reduce emissions,” Morrison says. “[CCS] is only addressing, really, Scope 1 as it’s collecting the CO2 contained in the gas and the oil field. That’s less than 10 percent of the emissions for the oil and gas project, because most occur when the gas is combusted.”

According to an IEEFA analysis of data used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 

 released in 2023, even if CCS were deployed at maximum scale and efficacy, it could only account for about 2.4 percent of global decarbonisation by 2030.

However, Morrison says CCS is essential to plans by countries like Japan to create a future CO2 export industry. A

 by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analytics published in May found that as Japan’s own gas demand has been falling, the country has been on-selling Australian gas across South East Asia in pursuit of geo-political goals – even as it eyes Australia as a dumping ground for waste CO2.

“Not only have Japanese companies made agreements with Santos and Bayu Undan,” Morrison says. “They’ve also made agreements with companies in Indonesia and Malaysia. Japan sees all of the Asia-Pacific as some big CO2 trading hub. Everything is totally opportunistic with CCS.”

Billions of dollars are currently being spent across Australia to lock in new gas production. There’s Woodside’s AUD$16.5bn Scarborough project and its

 AUD$30bn Browse development, which recently was found by the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority to pose an “unacceptable” risk 

, a coral reef ecosystem home to 1500 species. Santos is currently building pipelines 300km to connect the AUD$5.8bn Barossa gas project – described by 

 as a carbon-dioxide emissions factory, with an LNG by-product – to its processing facility near Darwin. Under Australia’s Safeguard Mechanism – a baroque and highly complex set of laws and regulations designed to drive decarbonization by ratcheting up pressure over time – these and other projects in the pipeline will need to fully offset the carbon dioxide produced from their gas fields.

CCS offers a solution to the problem for industry, particularly at a time when they are becoming liable for decommissioning. Among the most significant of these proposals is a plan by ExxonMobil to repurpose offshore gas platforms and pipelines built in the 70s off the southeast Australian coastline to store CO2 beneath the ocean floor in the Bass Strait. Another involves two separate proposals by Santos to repurpose depleted fields at Moomba in the Australian outback for an onshore CCS project, and a second using the depleted Bayu Undan gas field off the coast of northern Australia – not far from where the Northern Endeavour lies. A third, smaller venture has been proposed by operator Pilot Energy, off the coast of Perth, Western Australia; this project would reuse a depleted oil field for carbon sequestration, with a long-term goal to set up a direct air capture operation in the future.

Louise Morris, oil and gas campaign manager with the Australian Marine Conservation Society, says that the rush to set up a new industry to facilitate “carbon pollution dumping” is being done without a real appreciation of the risks involved – the first being inherent unknowns with geology, even in heavily-explored oil and gas fields.

"Think of it like doing an autopsy on a dead cat with a straw,” Morris says.  The Norwegian CCS operation 

 “has long been held up by the industry as a success story and proof carbon dumping below the ocean floor is a safe and predictable adventure," Morris says. "However, when they injected the CO2 into the subsea formation they found it moved and migrated in unexpected ways, and into formations they had not predicted were connected."

Another associated risk, Morris says, is the “pin-cushion effect”. Even assuming every drill site is known, accurately documented, and correctly plugged – every shaft needs additional plugs above each layer where the gas may sit – attempting to store carbon dioxide in formations carries additional risks. A failure to properly manage these risks, or to anticipate them, can render the operation unworkable either because the CO2 cannot be properly stored, or it cannot be injected fast enough to make it commercially viable.

But that is not all, Morris says. Pipelines built to carry oil or gas use a particular grade of steel that may not be suitable to carry CO2, or may not have been properly maintained. Pumping liquefied CO2 risks corroding the metal to the point where it ruptures – a significant risk. In April 2024,

CO2 pipeline used for Enhanced Oil Recovery in Louisiana burst

, blanketing a small community in a thick, suffocating fog. Where a rupture occurs in a marine environment, Morris says a suffocating blanket of CO2 will asphyxiate nearby ocean life and acidify the water. This risk is even greater where the geological formation itself is compromised or a “marine fissure” may occur, resulting in an uncontrollable release of CO2 that “turns the ocean to soda water”.

“Really, it’s about avoiding decommissioning – we just use CCS instead,” Morris says. “It is another quarry-nation approach to dealing with commercial interests. We dig and mine our way out of problems for short term financial returns.”

Concerns that CCS is a way for companies to avoid or delay costly clean up bills are not without basis. In a recent report, Santos 

posted a $US135m loss (AUD$198m) and disclosed

 that it faced substantial costs from cleaning up leaking wells within its Western Australian division that threaten to drag down the company’s financial performance. One such liability is the Legendre gas field off the Pilbara coast, where 22 gas wells are leaking methane – a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO2. The company has previously 

 it is impossible to fix these leaks. Outgoing Chief financial officer Anthea McKinnel said Santos was “working with regulators” to spread decommissioning costs out over time.

Santos is not the only company with ageing infrastructure and a big clean-up bill. Recycling old infrastructure for CCS potentially offers a way out of an expensive dilemma – but if something were to go wrong, the question of who would be left to pick up the bill remains. Professor Tina Soliman Hunter, a legal academic and director of Macquarie University’s Centre for Energy and Natural Resources Innovation and Transformation, believes the Australian government has learned from experience with the Northern Endeavour. Legislation covering CCS in Australia now contains provisions that allow for 

. These provisions, Hunter says, mean that “whoever has got [an asset] now, if they can’t pay for it, the one behind them will.”

“What we’ve got is a set of legislation going forward for any activity that’s going to happen,” Hunter says. “In fact, we’ve got these provisions for CCS that we don’t have for petroleum.”

However, Hunter says these laws “still need to be tested” as there have been no CCS wells handed back to the Australian government to date.

A Department of Industry, Science and Resources spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about how Australian regulations might handle liability for closed CCS projects. “The Australian Government expects, and the legislative regime requires, the oil and gas industry to pay for safe and responsible decommissioning,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The government has made it clear that taxpayers will not be left to pick up the costs.”

What is clear is that CCS now underpins Australia’s climate policy – a faith in the technology that climate scientist and Australian lead author on the IPCC6 Assessment Report Joëlle Gergis describes as “wilful ignorance” about the reality. With 

 to deliver over the last 30 years and currently-operational facilities having helped only offset 0.1 percent of carbon emissions each year, she says the technology is being treated as a “silver bullet”.

“Governments are expecting CCS to materialise and reduce our emissions, and that to me is a reckless gamble with our future,” Gergis says. “We’re effectively refusing to acknowledge the fact that we do need to stop the burning of fossil fuels. The science tells us that around 60 percent of oil and gas reserves, and 90 percent of coal must remain unextracted if warming is to be limited to 1.5C. If we’re going to continue onto extraction, we’re going to pour more fuel on the fire.”

In Australia, a New Way to Avoid Decommissioning Oil Fields: Call Them Carbon Capture Projects

 Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Last week was Climate Week in New York, and I went for the first time, actually.

The main reason I was there was to do a panel with with Bill McKibben and Kendra Pierre Louis, moderated by Genevieve Gunther on the language of climate politics, which is also the subject and title of Genevieve's new book. In it, she looks at the dominant narratives around climate policy and politics and whittles it down to six key words that just keep showing up over and over again. Each chapter is devoted to one of those words and offers a deep dive into how that word and the narrative it's attached to became so dominant, how it's been weaponized to block climate policy, and what kind of messaging you could use to combat it.

I got to sit down with Genevieve after our panel as well and talk about the book, why it's made some people so mad on the internet, and a lot more. After the break, you'll hear her reading from a bit of the book, and then we're going to have that conversation. That's coming up after this quick message.

 Fossil fuel propaganda is spun out of six terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, India and China, innovation and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this "yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need keep using them and with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, america should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China."

This narrative is designed to foment the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels, either because climate change won't be that destructive or in some versions of the story because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.

 Yes. Awesome. Okay. I want to have you start by talking a little bit about where the idea from the book came in general and then how you whittled it down to these six key words that I do feel like really capture the essence of the sort of discourse that we're hearing

 so glad to hear Yeah. Yeah, because the book started out being much bigger. It was sprawling. I had like, you know, I don't know, almost almost 27 words that I was thinking about writing about. So definitely much smaller than it was in the beginning. But I conceived of this book in 2017, after the New York Times hired this commentator named Brett Stevens away from the Wall Street journal. favorite voice at the Times.

At the time though, Stevens was a pretty inveterate climate denier. Like he was definitely on the more extreme end of the skeptical spectrum, so to speak. Like he called, you know, climate change a religion or climate change science a religion, um, presided over by like, Singularly unattractive hairfans, which I just thought was a really obnoxious thing to say about anybody, right?

 And, you know, his hiring generated a ton of controversy, many climate scientists and activists tried to get the Times to rescind their offer to him because they just thought it was outrageous that someone who, you know, was spreading these overt falsehoods would take a position at the sort of paper of record. But, of course, the Times didn't want to... 

 respond to outside pressure very often or really ever so Stephens took his position and he wrote, arrogantly enough, his first column about climate change. And it was called the column was called a climate of complete certainty And what this piece did was sort of recycle the fossil fuel talking point that had been kind of dominant in the discourse . And that talking point as you know yourself You Was that the science of climate change is too uncertain to motivate or justify the kind of policy moves that we would need to make, or the behavior changes we would need to make in order to halt global heating and resolve the climate crisis because the climate crisis might not even be a thing.

 Now, I had just taken level course in climate science. so while I was reading this column, was like, wait a minute. this man is using the word uncertainty in a kind common sense, colloquial way. He's using the of word to say uncertainty means not enough information or knowing enough come to some sort of decision or judgment. Right. But this is actually the way that climate scientists use the word research. So in...

 or that scientists in general, like this is the language of science in which uncertainty means something very different.

 Exactly. And what it means is the range of outcomes you can project out of a model with confidence. I mean confidence and uncertainty are actually synonyms say the confidence interval or the uncertainty interval. So when scientists would talk about the uncertainty of their research, they were not saying they weren't sure whether their results were correct or that what they were studying was real. What they were saying was there's a range of possible outcomes from bad to really bad that they project confidence. But the problem was that because fossil fuel interests put this sort other meaning of uncertainty out into the public discourse through the mediasphere, anytime a climate scientist in his or her public communications would talk about uncertainty of their research, seem to be confirming that they weren't sure whether climate change was real or not.

What fossil fuel interests had done was appropriate, weaponize, and kind of distort the meaning of the scientific term order kind manipulate scientists into confirming fossil fuel propaganda. So I saw this dynamic uncertainty, I started see everywhere.

 So I like, you know, I got all these folder files because I'm very old school. And I, you know, made files email and I started research into the words that seemed to have salience for me connected climate change. And I was doing sort of database academic style research. I was reading, research in the social sciences, in rhetoric, um, in climate science. But I was also sort of pulling news articles and like press releases and advertisements and tweets and sort of, high and low discourse, um, news media and I was dumping it all into files.

And after about 18 months of this kind of very broad, almost sloppy way of doing research, I noticed that the files for these words were much thicker than the other ones.

 And that in these files were often, um, you know, language that had been produced by policymakers, by scientists themselves in oil and gas advertisements, like all the things that we sort of centered and focused on. What we're going to do to try to resolve this crisis. And I was like, okay, these are the words that dominate the language of climate politics.

And I need to focus the book on these words. So that's what I decided to do.

 And they all kind of relate to each other in this way too, that I think is really interesting to create this, well, I think of it as like a narrowing of climate solutions too, it sort of puts these parameters on how we're allowed to even talk about or think about this issue that's very limiting.

 Well, it's interesting you say that because, you know, for the chapter on growth, it took a long time to write this chapter because, you know, first I had to sort of really get my head around kind of neoclassical resource economics, how standard economists talked about environmental concerns the climate crisis in order to understand you counter voices might be arguing

 And then I read all the degrowth literature. Um, and I sort of first thought to myself, well, am I going to try to talk about the language of growth in in degrowth framework?

What am I going to do here? And then I realized that actually, we can't even have the conversation about degrowth, I don't think, while everybody universally believes that growth itself is a climate solution. Like, as long as you believe that being rich will protect you from climate devastation, why would anyone embrace degrowth? And so I thought, okay, this is what I keep bumping up against as I'm researching this belief that growth itself is a climate solution that will be available to us. even if the planet sort of heats up three degrees or more

 and that will be available to everyone infinitely

 A hundred percent. Exactly. Like growth will never end. So I started digging into this, you know, because as you said, I felt like it was really kind limiting our imagination of how we might need to transform the world in order to halt global heating. Yeah, and I discovered as I say in the chapter that belief growth will just Yeah. no matter what we do to the planet is based on absolutely nothing. It's based on beliefs that have no empirical foundation whatsoever.

 It's almost itself a form of religious faith. So one of these beliefs is that human beings will be able to adapt to climate change no matter how bad it gets. And you know, humans are pretty ingenious. we are adaptable, but in fact, there is no research showing that any country, including developed nations in the global north, have to date adapted to climate change. And It's just going to get harder to do that. And there's something nonlinear about these climate change impacts. So, you know, if you have a seawall, it'll keep the water out until the day that the water gets so high that it won't keep the water out anymore. But none of those complicated risks that we're facing and none this sort of lack of historical evidence that 

 going to be able to adapt to the climate crisis, make it into economic models. In fact, what economists do is the opposite. They look at sort of historical relationships between say heat and GDP growth And try to project those out into the future. And then they adjust their results by using a mathematical variable called adaptation, which allows them to downplay or adjust the dangers that they project. by at the past and... And drawing it out into the future, by using this mathematical variable that they give value to, simply based on the economist's belief in how much we're going to be able to adapt in the future. So at the bottom, it's just about the individual economist's trust that adaptation is possible, and it's something that we're going to do. Not based any kind of empirical data whatsoever. And that's just one of the fantasies or the, the ephemeral beliefs that support, or at least, um, justify this fundamental belief of the entire planet, that growth will just continue even if we ruin our climate system.

 It's so interesting because a lot of the things in here had me also thinking about how a lot of this stuff gets painted in very gendered terms too, or even just science versus humanities kind of language too, where it's like, oh, economists are, , hard science, objective measurement, whatever.

But climate activists don't understand that or certain technologies. It's like, oh, well, you just don't understand the engineering behind it or whatever. I've had this experience of digging into an economic model and realizing that it's just based on, yeah, one person's assumptions or beliefs or whatever.

And being like, no, I must be wrong. It can't be that. You know, I must not be understanding the numbers or whatever. And like...

 I had that experience too, but let me be clear. Every single chapter in this book. Yeah. chapters on economics were read by some of the, Most respected climate economists working today and the chapter that I wrote on innovation, which turned out in climate discourse to be, code for carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and sequestration. So CDR and CCS. So in that chapter I had. not only one of the most prominent scientists who's working on CDR read this chapter But I had two other climate scientists read this chapter. So I also thought is this possible like it it as flimsy as I think it is? Exactly. in fact It is. And it's hard to tell because very often when we encounter these things in our public discourse, it's through news media articles or sort of treatments that are decontextualized or just sort of touch on one thing. But they marshal these like ideological beliefs that I try to sort of disabuse in the book. And it only becomes clear how this ideology is very often based no information like in the growth case or false information like in the CDR case.

 So once you compile all the information and put it together, it becomes easier to show how a lot of the beliefs that we hold about growth and technological innovation are influenced or shaped by fossil fuel propaganda themselves.

 Yes, totally. One of the very compelling things about this book is that you see it. You're just like, Oh, thank That's

 like how that has shaped. Um, okay. I want to ask you about the Breakthrough Institute cause they, they've been very mad about your book and also, you mentioned them in the book and they have been, quite, adamant proponents of some of these ideas and particularly in the vein of kind of castigating climate people for not thinking about growth in the right way or innovation in the right way.

But anyway, I wanted to ask you about just kind of your thoughts on how much they have shaped the public discourse and how they have been able to do that.

 I mean, i, you know, I got the climate movement, as I said, in 2017. so I perceive them as people who are instrumental in shaping the discourse. I do see them kind of, um, exemplifying a a kind of centrist position, center position climate crisis, which is why they're very with many centrist journalists, and leaders because they put the of imprimatur of environmentalism on this centrist position. Right. And the problem with this position, in my view, is not that it's, you know, advocating for developing new technologies. Clearly, we will need that. Like, I am a proponent of lab grown meat, To me, it is not that they are pushing for nuclear. I actually also think that nuclear energy would be an excellent alternative thing to bring into our energy mix, maybe for thermal heat things that are harder to produce with solar or wind, for example.

You know, like 8 million people a year die from fossil fuel pollution, right? And the number of people, that we can trace, of course, who have died from nuclear accidents is probably a lot smaller than that. So if you want to just judge two different forms of energy based on the number of people it kills historically, then obviously nuclear wins, right? problem with the Breakthrough Institute is they promote expanding fossil fuels.

That is my problem with them because this is to me, the belief, the false belief that is really preventing our politics, our, business leaders, even our, climate advocacy from Solving problem or even really knowing there is this idea we can do We can develop clean energy and we can support expanding fossil fuel extract extraction. We can have more evermore. more and gas and ever more clean energy. And somehow we're gonna deal with climate change anyway. So this is the false belief that is not just coming from fossil fuel interests on the right. It's also coming these center left groups, which give a permission structure for these fossil fuel interests to seem legitimate and not like the murderous monsters they really are. And so the Breakthrough Institute argues for increased fossil fuel production. They say that coal plants in the global south, quote, save lives.

Let's be clear, it's electricity that saves

that electricity does not need to be generated by coal, which is killing. Millions of people a year, mostly in the global south. And for them, they justify their argument for increasing fossil fuel production, not by even saying that with CDR, um, which is something that they, support.

It's a position that they support, and they platform people who do make that argument. But really, the reason they say we can to expand our fossil fuel production and consumption is that climate change will never be that bad, right?

It's never gonna be worse than I think Nordhaus called it a case of planetary right? Um, that you can just sort of manage with with what he calls, you know, medicine, which what he means is adaptation or whatever. Now, climate scientists like Joelle Gerges, the Australian climate scientist, who's one of the lead authors of the last IPCC report. She figures climate change as a cancer, as a disease in our planetary body has been established and is now getting worse and that we have to cure cut out. Before it metastasizes out of control. but Nordhaus and the Breakthrough Institute are very often um, on the opposite side of that. They would call her an alarmist, and they would claim that actually, People who think that climate change is like a cancer or will be very dangerous as the planet continues to heat up are emotional, hysterical, very often women in the climate movement people who aren't serious.

 And their kind of, um, lukewarmer position that, Oh, climate change isn't going to be that bad is actually somehow the serious position. But what I try to argue in the book is that in fact, it is. a dishonest position. It misrepresents what the science says is happening to our planet and will happen if not phase out fossil fuels, bring our emissions down to real zero , and halt global heating. So it's not a realism, it's actually a falsehood that they are advancing

 it's fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. I do find it really interesting that Nordhaus in particular takes these really strong stances on science when he has no scientific background. You know, He was a PR guy forever and then

 I know. I love that he was a that he's a PR guy.

 Yeah. And then started the breakthrough and like, you know, now kind of does PR for their ideas.

 Right? Right. Exactly. But like, um, I mean, I just say that. They've been coming after me for couple of weeks now, at the point we are recording this. They've been coming after for a couple of weeks now. And first he tried to suggest that I didn't have the credentials to write this book.

 And then I thought, wait a minute, I'm go look at his academic credentials. I have a Ph. D. in English literature from UC Berkeley, and he has a B. A. in history

 from UC Berkeley. So I don't understand how he's, you know, just on that metric, more credentialed to talk about the climate crisis than I am.

And I'm talking about the rhetoric that leads to political beliefs, which is literally something I've been studying since I went to graduate school, because that was what I was studying in the English Renaissance too. Like, it's not a different topic for me. It's just a different domain into which I'm bringing my expertise. But it's interesting because other ways, so, so once I sort of like disabused him of that strategy.

Then they started to suggest that somehow I wasn't a serious scholar because there were some, you know, sloppy errors in the footnotes. Um, they found what I would claim are two errors among 300 in three chapters.

The book has 600 footnotes and it's been peer reviewed and extensively fact checked and every single book in the world will have one or two details that are are wrong,

What they're doing is they're trying to come after me to suggest that I'm not serious I'm all vibes. I don't have research credentials, because they don't want to engage with my arguments they have never defended their position on supporting fossil fuel use.

They have never explained why they believe that economic growth will just continue indefinitely and shield the wealthy from climate devastation. They have never engaged any of the arguments that I make in the book and defended them. They have only come after me with these ad hominem attacks because they know they don't have a position from which to argue. In fact, Nordhaus on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it these days-- he got mad at me because I quoted him as having said that the agenda to phase out fossil fuels was impossible. And so I said, Okay, does that mean right here that you're gonna say that it is possible to phase out fossil fuels and he he sputtered and fulminated But then reiterated that the climate movement's agenda to phase out fossil fuels in the next decade is impossible And then I like tweeted a screenshot of my book which is quoting him saying that exact thing and I was like, what? Dude, what is your problem?

 Their problem is, is that they're scared of what I say in the book because I honestly think, and not to be arrogant about this, but I think this is the first book that ties what we think of as traditional climate denial on the right to these centrist democratic positions showing that actually the reason our climate politics is blocked is not that it's polarized, even though that's a problem, too, but because it's weirdly unified on this belief that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels when we absolutely do.

 Yes, I have been seeing this in the last couple of years, you know, increasingly, this weird hesitancy to just say, yeah, we need to phase out fossil fuels and almost a shift towards acting like that's a radical stance

 Well, there's comms, I mean, it's a, I'm not saying it's an easy problem. Because there is comms research that shows that people don't like it when you tell them they can't use something they're already using, right?

So that, I mean, it's, it's a fiercely challenging problem to communicate that we do need to phase out fossil fuels. I don't want to downplay that. And so I think people shy away from saying it because it does seem like like tricky or radical. Um, and it has radical implications for our whole world. economic system for sure. but if you believe that climate change is real, if you understand what the science is saying about what's going to happen to our climate system and our, the links between our planet and our economy, if the planet just keeps heating up, and if you understand that the planet will keep heating up until emissions. get to net zero or real zero, then, you know, every scientist will tell you that we need to stop using coal, oil, and gas. It's really not up for debate anymore.

 Including like, you know, the IEA, the IPCC, like it's,

 So this is what I quote in the, this is what I quote, In the introduction to the book In 2023, in synthesis report, IPCC said that we already have enough fossil fuel infrastructure. Because that infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for two degrees Celsius, which means that we actually have to like strand some that infrastructure, strand some of those assets, because the total carbon budget has to include like agriculture right and wildfires and other things. So people, so to me, you can say yes climate change is bad, yes I believe in climate change until the cows come home.

But if you are denying that fact, you are a climate denier. I mean, just think about being an alcoholic. Right. You're drinking a lot of booze. Your liver is about to croak and your doctor says to you, you're an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking. And you say, okay, yeah, I'm an alcoholic, but I'm not going to stop drinking.

Like we all know that that person is still in denial. If you say climate change is real, I want to help stop it, but I'm going to ignore the fact that we already have too many fossil fuels to halt global heating at a relatively safe level. I'm sorry. You are a climate denier.

 I want to talk about the innovation chapter in more detail because we've been doing this series too on like on CDR and carbon capture and we'll eventually get to like hydrogen and biofuels and all that stuff too.

 Yeah, exactly, exactly. But it is like, um, I find it interesting how the industry and then like people who are kind of carrying water for them do really. mess with the building blocks of information in this way of like because I feel like there's been um there has been like this real focus on on disinformation, which I almost see as like The end result of all of this stuff, right?

You know, it's like yeah, like that's what we end up with but like that gets built by very strategic investments in particular types of research or white papers from thought leaders or whatever it is, you know, it's like it gets built in that way. So, um, I'm curious how you honed in on CDR and, um, CCS as like the things that you wanted to focus on in that chapter.

 Yeah. I really, didn't set out to focus on those two technologies in particular, at all. I was just like, why are people talking about innovation in this way? Why are people talking about innovation as a independent climate solution? What does this word mean? That's so vague. And usually when you drill down, this was often in sort of, you know, climate journalism or, um, even just political journalism or business journalism. and you would drill down and it would be about these that would either capture or remove emissions. And then I started to see Exxon Mobil and other oil and gas companies use the word innovation in their advertising and on their websites and whatever, and then drilling down into that. I was like, Oh, for them, innovation also means carbon capture.

And, yeah, to some degree, also carbon dioxide removal. I was like, wow, this word is actually code in climate discourse for CCS and CDR. And it's interesting because I don't think it is anymore because I think that oil and gas companies were really Greenwashing themselves with very thick paint right after the IPCC report on 1.5 in 2018 and the rise of the global climate movement, blah, blah, blah, blah. They all came out with net zero, um, targets. They, you know, and they

 but partly because of all of this rhetoric that

 We can... it's fine because we can decarbonize oil and gas

 Exactly. Thank you. That's exactly the point. So what happened was around this question of innovation, oil and gas companies started to claim that they were going to turn themselves into carbon management companies. they were going to be able to either capture the emissions of their products, or they going be able decarbonize their products, decarbonize oil by removing the emissions, carbon from the atmosphere after their products have been used and combusted.

So, you know, usually I don't start with the research. Usually I start with the rhetoric. But I started this chapter with the research into how challenging it's going to be. Well, first, the historical account of the fact that most, I mean, if not all carbon capture projects, which is, you know, the technology that captures emissions at the source, most, if not all carbon capture products, to date have failed.

 a very large scale. They have captured nothing close to their targets. And very often they've had to build an additional fossil fuel plant to power the technology, which if you do a full life cycle assessment, they're actually carbon additive and not carbon neutral. neutral.

 That's right. There's really good research from Mark Jacobson on that in particular.

 So insofar as you use methane gas as a kind of, you know, firm generation instead of batteries or something else, you might want to slap CCS on that, but it would be very challenging to do it in a way that would actually be carbon neutral and it would be much, much more expensive, even potentially than building out a system of redundancy and lots of storage. or a nuclear or something else. So, and even if the economics pencil out better for CCS, CCS just doesn't work. So that's really what you need to come back to.

 And. The technology has been around for a really long time. Like exactly. It's it doesn't mean it's impossible that it will improve at some point, whatever. But yeah, there are a lot of plans being made with the assumption that CCS will somehow magically start to work better than it ever has.

 You know what's so interesting? So the rhetoric And I'll get to CDR in a minute. But the rhetoric about CCS from oil and gas companies and from advocates um, trade advocates, is that CCS is a proven technology, right? That's what they say. Because it's been around for so long, right? And it's a proven technology. They've been using it for decades. This is great. And so now, The EPA has come up with a new regulation saying that by a certain date fossil fuel power plants need to have CCS

 And then in their public comments, they're all like, but it doesn't work. You can't hold us to this. It's

 So the climate guy at the Cato Institute requested a review copy of my book because he said he wanted to write a review about it. I don't know if he's actually going to write a

Transcription

Guenther digs into six key rhetorical devices that are being used to slow or block climate action. For an academic book, it's made some folks on the Internet awfully mad. In this episode we talk about why, what went into her research, and what it tells us about the coming months.

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petrostates

In this week’s podcast episode, reporter Molly Taft digs into multiple new reports on fossil fuel funding of university research, and talks to experts Geoffrey Supran and Craig Callender about the impact this funding is having on climate policy. 

 Welcome Molly Taft, our senior reporter, editor extraordinaire. You have been looking into fossil fuel funding in universities in lots of different ways, but there's some news recently on this front.

 Yeah, so there's been a lot of movement on a conversation that I feel like has been going on both officially and unofficially for, for several years. You know, One of the more interesting things that happened this month is a team of researchers released a literature review, which sounds kind of boring, but basically what they did is they said to themselves, okay, you know, in order to move forward in researching fossil fuel funding in universities, we need to figure out what we know first, right? So they basically did what's called an academia literature review, which is you look at all the literature on a topic and you kind of come to some conclusions about it. And what's interesting about this literature review is that you know, even though activists and folks in, in universities, folks concerned about the climate have been talking about fossil fuel funding in academia for a really long time.

The researchers found that there's actually not that many peer reviewed articles about it. There's not that much peer reviewed research about what all of this oil money is doing to academic research. Yeah. Which is kind of crazy. Cause like, Uh, the parallels here that they drew were conflict of interest, uh studies on bias in research are really prevalent when it comes to other industries like tobacco, pharmaceuticals, you can find hundreds of peer reviewed articles on this topic, like what happens when an industry funds research and those discussions have been going on for decades, but there's, there's just not a lot with fossil fuel, Funding and a lot of it is really recent.

They found seven peer reviewed articles in their search and only a few of them were before 2012. So, you know, there's a real dearth of peer reviewed research on this topic. So to complete their literature review, what they did was they use what they call gray literature, which is reports from NGOs, reports from journalists, you know, articles about what fossil fuel funding is doing and moving through universities and, and reports from students too, which are a really valuable part of this conversation.

And they use that to kind of bulk out the literature review, And found that there's a lot of really valuable work going on to understand how this industry is shaping policy at the top levels of university. But there's also like still a lot more that especially folks involved in academia can do. Academia needs to kind of turn the mirror towards itself in a sense, and really take a much closer look at how this industry is, is shaping what's going on inside of it.

 Yes, exactly. I think It just sort of helps to have this report as like a official accounting of where this stuff is at now. As we're looking towards getting more information and figuring out more.

Speaking of which I know there are also student reports coming out.

 So yeah, there's a batch of new research that's coming on this stuff.

 Yeah. So one actually, and that sort of ties into the literature review. So I was talking to one of the researchers, Geoffrey Supran, and, you know, he really emphasized that, again, a lot of their literature review came from students on campus noticing stuff about how their university takes fossil fuel money.

And You know, there's no replaceable way of doing research on a campus that's quite like being on the campus and being in the campus culture and understanding the way a school works, whether you work there, or you're a student there, or you're an alum. Those are really the front lines of understanding this kind of stuff.

And so, there's been a push from a group called the Campus Climate Network. They have gathered students on a couple of different universities across the U S and some international groups as well. And the first batch of their reports on how fossil fuel money Is is working throughout their specific universities were also released in September. And, these students put a lot of really interesting numbers on a problem that doesn't have a lot of numbers right now. I think the last real accounting, was data for progress estimated back in 2023 that five fossil fuel companies had donated, I think, 700 million To a group of us universities over the past decade and they said that was almost certainly an undercount and really turns out it was. So one number that really shocked me was, students at Columbia really buckled down and combed their university's public facing documents, like stuff they could obtain publicly. This isn't any sort of, peek into the inner workings of Columbia.

They just sat down and they did the work. They expanded the reach a little bit to not just five major fossil fuel companies, but a variety of different fossil fuel influences. And by their calculations, Columbia has taken, I think more than 37 million since 2005 in fossil fuel funding which includes an environmental health professorship endowed by, uh, a descendant of, of HES, uh, the guy who started HES.

So there is an environmental health field of study that is being funded by like the HES foundation, which I found particularly ironic. But. Yeah, it really goes to show and I think in the, the data for progress report, the number they put on Columbia was 5 million and you know, it really goes to show like when you are familiar with how your school works and, and where to look for these things, it can be insanely beneficial in, in figuring out where the money is coming from and what it's going towards.

 Totally, which is the perfect segue into the other thing that we're going to, we're going to talk about in

 which is like, I know, beautiful, smooth transition, but but like the students are amazing because they know where to look for things and they also like catch wiffs of things on campus that they're kind of like, wait a minute, that seems weird.

And the other great place to look for information on this stuff, because again, A lot of these schools do not disclose all of their funding, and with the private schools in particular, you can't get, get at it through public records requests, you have to talk to people and figure it out.

And one of the best sources on that stuff is actually other professors at those schools too, because in a lot of cases. People who are working at these campuses and are working on climate stuff, for example, are not super happy about the fact that other people are taking fossil fuel money. Like actually I had an interesting conversation with Mark Jacobson at Stanford about this and how much some of his colleagues there have been Ponying up to the fossil fuel money trough.

 there's a lot of fossil fuel funding and institutes like at our university, we have these institutes that are funded largely by Fossil fuels. We have even in our new school of sustainability. What's the number one flagship research project that they're promoting?

besides Stanford, Princeton and MIT are culprits in pushing carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, electro fuel. So therefore, these four technologies are really pushed by the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry is funding universities

 And you had an interesting conversation with Craig Callender, who's a professor at UC San Diego. Both about what he's seen there, but also they passed some interesting new policies recently.

 Craig's doing some really interesting work and under his and other folks on his committee's leadership, they're kind of pioneering the next step forward in, Talking about this kind of stuff. He teaches the philosophy of science.

So this is like, kind of right up his alley. And you know, he got on the academic Senate committee and, and they started wrestling with this question of like, okay, what do we do about fossil fuel , money in our university, in the UC system in general. What are the best policies to kind of start tackling this.

And so. You know, uh, back in the early two thousands, lots of schools joined on this bandwagon to ban tobacco money for specifically medical or health research. And a lot of these schools still have those policies in place. Surprisingly that policy actually failed at UC. But they did put on this other policy where you would need a special review of tobacco money by the chancellor.

And so they said, okay, what if we do that? for fossil fuel money. And, that was basically, he said, they told me that was kind of dead on arrival. There's all sorts of concerns about academic freedom. , I think latent in this conversation sometimes is when you bring this up, it's, you know, I think people who are working at research centers and universities think that you're accusing them of like knowingly conspiring with oil and gas companies, which is absolutely like that's far and away. Not the case, but there is research showing that when you take money from an industrial funder or corporate funder that does, like, set the tone of your research, whether you sort of realize it or not, you know., it doesn't mean that you're emailing BP every day to update them on your progress in destroying the climate, but it does mean that if BP is paying for something, then they want that research done for a specific reason, right?

 that piece was so good and really highlights you know, and he being at Columbia is also really interesting, especially given this new student report tallying up some of the money involved. But anyway, so Craig and the committee sort of regrouped and they were like, all right, so if we're not going to get a special review from the chancellor, why don't we just like beef up?

Transparency disclosures around this. And I think a lot of people I've talked to and Amy, I'm, I'm sure you had this experience too. Like people you talk to about this are like shocked that that's not required, but like, they're really, there's so few disclosure requirements for this stuff. It is mind blowing.

There's no federal policy, state policies, nothing in the state, you know, most universities. have some sorts of ethics stuff, but like, a lot of them don't require you to talk about where you take money from.

 they don't. And there's this really interesting thing. So like the, the the last time I wrote about this stuff was around the, the data for progress report. And the only school that gave me like a full accounting of their funding from fossil fuel companies was Berkeley. And when I asked them about, what they thought of this push to try to ban fossil fuel funding of research , they were like, well, I don't think we could do that without getting sued.

And I said, but what about, you know, which is the thing people always say is like, well, we did it with the tobacco industry. And they were like, yeah, but that was pre citizens United. So that's super interesting how that stuff dovetails with this idea that like, it's part of academic freedom to allow people to take money from wherever.

And something Craig said to me, and I'm sure repeated to you as well, is that like, even when they talk about transparency and disclosure, people will argue that it could impact or have like a chilling effect on academic freedom. If. People have to disclose where their funding is coming from. And I'm kind of like, I, I kind of feel okay with that chill.

Like if, you know what I mean? It's like, if someone is like, Ooh, I like this money is going to make me look bad or it's like, you know, they're worried that they will be criticized for taking money from somewhere. I don't know. To me, I'm kind of like, I don't know. It just seems like where there's smoke, there's fire on that one.

 totally. But it's also, you know, and, and yeah, he, we talked about, you know, he was like, a lot of the standards that you think of this stuff come from conversations around pharmaceutical products and like ethics around disclosure in the pharmaceutical industry. And those conversations were like really heated a couple of decades ago.

And people were defending, writing an op ed in favor of a drug while being paid for the company that manufactures that drug and saying that's academic freedom. So our conversations around, yeah, it's not great. Yeah. Like, no, that was, that was a hot button issue back in, I think he said the eighties.

So I think that one thing I took away from him is that our definition of academic freedom, both culturally and in universities is subject to debate. I think most people now would say that it's, it's important to disclose if you're getting paid by a drug company to promote a drug.

But there's also this issue, not, it's not just Citizens United, but like increasingly universities and research have been just so privatized over the past couple of decades.

 That's a really important point. Like I, I know I looked at this a while ago and it's probably, I think it's probably only gotten worse, but the proportion of research funding that comes from the private sector has just been growing exponentially

 couple decades. So you have corporate donors, then you have high net worth individuals donating and they have specific agendas oftentimes to and then, you know, donor advised funds have become a major donor. To universities as well, which is where you get a lot of like the Koch money, but also lots of other hidden industry interests as well. So it's definitely,

 Yeah. There's a lot going on, so What Craig and his, uh, fellow faculty members on the Senate committees formed is this policy that says, look, you can take money from fossil fuel industries. That's fine. You just have to disclose it. Like, you have to be really clear about what, where it's from and what it's going towards.

 passed by 91 percent in May 91 percent of the vote. So, clearly, you know, I think these conversations are, are perhaps for folks on campuses, , difficult to have with your peers who might, be taking money from a corporation and doing what probably is, like, valuable research. But, you know, having the conversations around, just how low of a bar disclosure is and how much good actually just being forthcoming about where the money is coming from can help address some of the issues and, and honestly, also just open up a dialogue about, like, what's the purpose of taking this money?

So that measure is with the chancellor right now. So like, we still don't know if it's going to pass in the meantime, UCSD all of their students are being required to take, like, climate change courses. It's a new as of this semester, a new uh, curriculum requirement for everyone there, which is really cool.

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Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

In Australia, a New Way to Avoid Decommissioning Oil Fields: Call Them Carbon Capture Projects

[Podcast] New Research Is Clear: Fossil Fuel-Funded University Research Is Warping Policy

Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution

Newsletter: Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

Could Climate-Related Homicide Charges Be a Path to Accountability the Supreme Court Can’t Block?

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petrostates

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