A whole lot of people seem to want the technical immaturity and moral hazard of carbon capture to mean it won’t be necessary. Their argument against it is that we shouldn’t have let things get bad enough to need it.

It’s like they’re secretly time travelers. “Hmm, let’s not have made carbon capture likely necessary” is a completely reasonable thing to say for someone who can go back to 1950 and make some changes.

For the rest of us, trapped like bugs in the resin of linear time, carbon capture presenting very serious problems doesn’t do a lot to change its probable necessity. And pretending not to get that doesn’t help. It’s not a useful part of the equation to argue with.

People want a side door out of this. Like if we all just agree not to talk about carbon capture, emitters will forget it exists and do the right thing. Or maybe planting trees will save us! Ignore what the forest experts say about that!

Pretty reasonable routes through the climate crisis remain. The IPCC just spelled that out. But the good ones, the ones without moral hazards, spending lots of money, or disruptive policies – the tasteful ones – haven’t been on the table since sometime in the 1990s.

And I think a lot of well-meaning people are in denial about that, and that’s bad, the end.