SCOTLAND is in the midst of a grand sell-off of our land – again. Folk in the sector are openly saying that instead of valuing land based on grouse and deer, Scottish uplands are now being valued based on their ability to be harvested for carbon capture credits.

Campaigner Andy Wightman recently announced that the US-owned, London-based hedge fund Gresham House is now the third-largest private landowner in Scotland based on this market.

But this isn’t a column about land reform, but instead about the push for carbon capture and sequestration itself – which is increasingly being relied upon to greenwash pro-fossil fuel policies.

I was introduced to a different way of looking at carbon emission reduction thanks to the inestimably valuable science communicator Hank Green. He recently showcased work done by the

US-based Environmental Defense Fund which makes it much easier to see the job in front of us in terms of fixing the climate emergency.

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The problem we face with many political solutions is that they are still putting off the work we need to do “till later” and are basically relying on unproven magical technologies rather than doing what we know we can do now right now.

Rather than waiting until we’ve invented a ladder-like “carbon capture” to pick all of the fruit from the proverbial tree at once, we should pick the low-hanging fruit first while someone is away trying to invent that ladder. This is what the concept of a “marginal abatement cost”, or MAC curve, is about. It essentially shows us what the next lowest-hanging fruit is, and which is the one just a little way above that.

The EDF chart takes a traditional MAC curve a stage further by laying out the various technologies in terms of at what cost they “switch on” and show when we can’t really go any further with that particular technique.

The challenge is this. The world needs to get not to net zero but to actual zero carbon emissions and, honestly, to real negative emissions so that we can start to repair all of the damage we’ve done up to the point where we reach net zero.

This means getting the world from about 4.6 gigatons of carbon emissions per year down to something like -1.0gt of carbon dioxide per year.

All that remains is to work out how much money we want to spend right now to remove one tonne of carbon from the emissions budget. If we decide to spend nothing, there’s obviously very little we can do – though not nothing. Some things like energy efficiency of electrical goods is basically happening for economic as much as environmental reasons, so would likely happen even if there was no climate emergency.

The next lowest-hanging fruits start to switch on at about $50 per ton of carbon. These are cheap, already available techs, like rolling out rooftop solar and onshore wind and these make a major bite into the carbon budget (around 2gt globally out of that 4.6gt challenge) but they also hit their limit shortly after this.

Once you’ve rolled out “enough” solar and wind, it’s hard to do it again. The roofs are full and the cheap land is covered. You can get a little more by spending more, but at that point, you start competing solar farms against crops and the diminishing returns settle in.

Electrifying vehicles starts to ramp up at this point and they can go a little further in terms of abatement costs (you can still pick “more EVs” as a policy from a little higher up the tree than you can “more solar”) but these roll over too as there comes a point where you’ve replaced all of the cars with EVs.

Higher up the tree still starts to come the more expensive, less proven techs. Rolling out zero-carbon fuels like bio-kerosene or, later still, hydrogen shouldn’t be seriously talked about until you’ve already decarbonised every home boiler that you can (see Common Weal’s paper Carbon-Free, Poverty-Free for our prediction that that would be the case).

And then, only once we’re almost at the top of the tree, having eliminated 90% of current carbon emissions and we’re willing to spend something like $200 to eliminate the next highest ton of carbon from the budget, can we realistically think about things like carbon capture. Its real value will be in taking us from net zero to real negative emissions.

Carbon capture cannot be an indulgence paid for by industry and very rich elites to allow them to keep polluting while the rest of us boil in their exhaust fumes.

In short, our governments need to let go of the magic wand of “carbon capture will let us do nothing and fix it later”.

I’m not saying we won’t need it, it’s just that in order to fix the climate emergency, carbon capture is the last thing we should do.