Mark Carney backs CCS — a technology that has never worked as promised.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has absorbed billions in subsidies over decades, but continues to underperform.
On paper, CCS sounds like the perfect compromise: keep burning fossil fuels, but “capture” the CO₂ before it reaches the atmosphere. In practice, the record has been remarkably poor. Most projects capture far less than advertised, cost far more than expected, and depend on a constant flow of public money to stay alive.
CCS also does nothing to solve the upstream problem of continued fossil fuel extraction and combustion. It tries to clean up at the smokestack instead of preventing emissions in the first place. At best, it trims a fraction of the damage. At worst, it becomes a marketing tool that allows companies to claim “net-zero pathways” while building new long-lived oil and gas infrastructure.
This is why so many offset schemes built around CCS are problematic. They invite people, companies, and even governments to believe that emissions can simply be cancelled somewhere else by a technology that has never delivered at scale. That is not climate responsibility; it is a form of wishful accounting.
The hard truth is that we already know what works: electrification, renewable power, deep efficiency, transit and building upgrades, and industrial processes that genuinely avoid emissions in the first place. If public money is scarce, directing it toward proven solutions — rather than another round of CCS promises — is the only strategy that matches the physics of the atmosphere and the urgency of the problem.