Video: The flawed “study” that says serotonin doesn’t cause depression

I have a problem with anxiety and depression. I think that’s pretty normal for anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about climate change, but a few years back it got to the point where I was worried about my heart. I ended up going on an SSRI(Strategic Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor). I’m not sure which, but I think it was Wellbutrin. The first couple weeks I was on it were great. For whatever reason, my brain suddenly worked! I had been expecting it to take the edge off my anxiety (which it did), but suddenly my problem with procrastination was just gone. It was like there had been a loose wire in my brain for my entire life, and someone had suddenly fixed the connection. That went away pretty quickly, and I was back to having to fight my brain to do just about anything, but my anxiety was under control, and that made a huge difference in my quality of life. Managing that didn’t fix my depression, but it made it a lot easier to handle.

Since then I’ve been taking them off and on. In the U.S. it was because of money. When I got to the UK, it just took my a while to get around to getting a prescription, because as I’ve mentioned, that part of my brain doesn’t seem to work quite right. I’ve been on fluoxetine (generic Prozac) since March of 2020, and while I did get a productivity kick when I went back on it, that faded as before. My own experience has been that SSRIs work.  That’s why it was odd to see headlines saying otherwise. I didn’t bother digging into it much because I’m aware of how inaccurate headlines can be, and I’ve had other things on my mind. I also knew that Rebecca Watson had looked at the issue in the past, and would likely do so again. I was not disappointed.

But before we even get to that, the title should also give away the fact that this was NOT a review to determine whether or not antidepressants work (which, again, they do). This was a review to determine HOW antidepressants work. Because in all fields of science, researchers accept that sometimes we know that something works but we’re not yet sure why, like when James Lind performed a randomized controlled trial that found that citrus fruit cured scurvy in 1753. Vitamin C wasn’t discovered for another 150 years.

The brain is a complicated lump of meat, so it makes sense that how it works remains a big question. In the late 1980s, doctors found that depressed patients could be helped by giving them fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac, which is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. SSRIs, to put it very simply, change the way your brain processes serotonin, causing serotonin to stay for a longer period of time in your synapses.

This led some researchers to think, quite understandably, that maybe people are depressed because they need more serotonin. That hypothesis got popular in the years that followed the introduction of Prozac and it certainly became popular amongst the general public, but serious researchers knew that it was always going to be more complicated than that. They already knew that depression has many causes: yes, there’s an imbalance of chemicals in the brain which might include serotonin, but there’s also depression that comes from bad life events, or from physical ailments. Just because it helps a person when you adjust their serotonin levels, doesn’t mean the problem was the serotonin levels. I’ve heard several doctors recently explain it like this: taking Advil may help your headache but it doesn’t mean that your headache was caused by a lack of Advil in the brain.

I will probably die angry about “reporting” like this. While I think the sigma against people with mental health problems has decreased in my lifetime, it is far from gone, and that means there are a lot of people who still have to fight constantly just to get the people in their lives to treat them with respect. Stuff like this makes that a lot harder. It’s irresponsible reporting, and it can do real harm to people.

Watch the video or go to Skepchick for the transcript and sources, and if you see people saying that SSRIs don’t work, please push back, even if it’s just linking them to Watson’s breakdown.

 

If you’re near Washington D.C., there’s an action tomorrow that you should try to attend

Now or Never is going to protest the Congressional baseball game at 6pm on July 28th, I’m planning on doing another post about this after the event, but the more people turn up, the better. I don’t know how I didn’t hear about this before today, but now that I know about it, I’ll do what I can to help get the word out.

What is Now or Never? 

We are a new collective, founded because we can no longer accept that our politicians twiddle their thumbs as the world burns. We see this summer as our last chance to pass bold, federal climate legislation. We need our leaders to see that too.

Why are you choosing to engage in direct action?

Because conventional tactics are not enough. Petitions are not enough. Phone calls are not enough. We need a dramatic and confrontational intervention to demonstrate just how serious this is.

We spoke truth to power but power shrugged us off. It’s time to escalate.

Will you still shut down the Congressional Baseball Game if they’ve reached a deal by game time?

If a climate spending bill has passed by then (or if passage is imminent), we will still take action to demand further legislation – this crisis won’t be solved by one bill, no matter how broad. However, we will ensure that our tactics fit the moment we are in. If Congress has passed climate legislation or is on the cusp of doing so, we may use a more conciliatory tactic.

Is this action about Biden, too?

Yes. It is time for him to play hardball.

Will there be a training before the action in which participants can learn how to engage in nonviolent direct action?

Yes. Details about the training will be available soon!

I want to protest the Congressional Baseball Game but cannot risk arrest – can I still come?

Yes.

Why are you announcing this plan publicly? 

Because we need this to be as big as possible.

This is good.

In case it wasn’t clear by now, I’m in favor of yelling at members of Congress over climate change, and doing it at this baseball game is even better. The Republican Party is committed to Christian fascism, with all the horrors one might expect, and they seem to be perfectly happy to drive our entire species to extinction. The Democratic Party responds to this unprecedented evil by bragging about how good they are at being chummy with the fascists. Their inaction has been unacceptable for decades. This game, whatever you think it may have been in the past, is now about normalizing and humanizing fascist politicians. The fact that the Democrats are going along with it is a clear demonstration of just how little they actually care about dealing with climate change. It’s disgusting.

The collective has a clear plan, both for tomorrow’s action, and for further action in August and September. Join tomorrow if you can, and look for ways to help if you can’t.

Rising temperatures aren’t the only reason the weather’s getting weird

Because their movement is largely founded on greed and lies, anti-environmentalists have a different relationship with the truth than most normal people. They’ll use arguments based on how much traction they get, rather than trivialities such as factual accuracy. Skeptical Science maintains this delightful list of the lies that climate deniers favor, and that represent the one circumstance in which they really seem to care about recycling.  If an argument stops working, they shelve it for a little while, and then start using it again when other arguments stop working. This is something they have in common with all reactionary movements, from what I can tell. Longtime readers of Freethought Blogs are certainly aware of how the various flavors of religious fundamentalist will bring up arguments that were debunked literal centuries ago. Their philosophical framework does not value honesty or factual accuracy, it values dominance of “us”. These days, my favorite quote on this phenomenon is Jean-Paul Sarte’s discussion of anti-Semites:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

I recently objected to a commenter’s view that we should apply humanism as a blanket philosophy, rather than putting in the effort to pick apart the differences in circumstance that occur around the world. This is one area where that approach is useful – when dealing with reactionaries, remember that they don’t “believe in words” or in truth, at least in the way that we do.

All of this is to preface the fact that in the last few weeks I’ve seen people talking about the 20th century scare about atmospheric ozone depletion. For those who need a refresher, a class of chemicals called CFCs, used in refrigeration and various other things, was causing the stratospheric ozone layer to thin, particularly over Antarctica. The ozone layer is our primary protection against solar radiation. The thinner it gets, the faster we burn, and the faster we get cancer. The fact that we were creating a hole in it got a lot of attention, and with a great deal of effort, bans on CFCs were put in place around the world, and by the early 2000s, the ozone layer had moved from depletion to recovery. It’s considered one of the major successes in environmental policy driven by scientific warnings.

And there’s a sizable group of people who believe that because the problem “went away”, that means that it was a false alarm. In 2022, I have seen people sincerely argue that the ozone crisis shows why we don’t need to pay attention to climate scientists. To paraphrase Sartre, never believe that they are completely unaware of the absurdity of their arguments.

Unfortunately, we do need to worry about the ozone layer. The successes made with CFCs made a real difference, and there’s value in taking credit for and celebrating our victories. They also took place in the context of the same global capitalist regime that seems Hell-bent on our extinction, so it should not surprise you to know that ozone depletion is still a problem. Once again, our society’s obsession with declaring problems to be solved has distracted people from the causes of those problems, and the ways in which the solutions are either inadequate or entirely illusory. Tegan reminded me to mention here that this isn’t a universal problem Australia, being pretty close to the Antarctic ozone hole, has done a better job of keeping the issue in the public consciousness.

Know how the weather’s been strange lately? That’s not just because of the rise in temperature:

Whether there is a causal relationship between stratospheric ozone destruction and the observed weather anomalies is a matter of debate in climate research. The polar vortex in the stratosphere, which forms in winter and decays in spring, also plays a role. Scientists who have studied the phenomenon so far have arrived at contradictory results and different conclusions.

New findings are now shedding light on the situation, thanks to doctoral student Marina Friedel and Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow Gabriel Chiodo. Both are members of the group headed by Thomas Peter, Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at ETH Zurich, and are collaborating with Princeton University and other institutions.
Simulations reveal correlation

To uncover a possible causal relationship, the researchers ran simulations that integrated ozone depletion into two different climate models. Most climate models consider only physical factors, not variations in stratospheric ozone levels, in part because this would require much more computing power.

But the new calculations make it clear: the cause of the weather anomalies observed in the northern hemisphere in 2011 and 2020 is mostly ozone depletion over the Arctic. The simulations the researchers ran with the two models largely coincided with observational data from those two years, as well as eight other such events that were used for comparison purposes. However, when the scientists “turned off” ozone destruction in the models, they could not reproduce those results.

If this research bears out, that’s both concerning, and extremely useful to know. I’ve been aware for a while that the ozone depletion problem didn’t really go away, but I admit that my focus was mostly on the direct harm of increasing our exposure to solar radiation. It hadn’t occurred to me to look into how more radiation reaching the lower atmosphere and the planet’s surface might affect the weather. It also hadn’t occurred to me to remember that more radiation reaching the lower atmosphere means less radiation in the upper atmosphere.

The phenomenon as the researchers have now studied it begins with ozone depletion in the stratosphere. For ozone to be broken down there, temperatures in the Arctic must be very low. “Ozone destruction occurs only when it is cold enough and the polar vortex is strong in the stratosphere, about 30 to 50 kilometres above the ground,” Friedel points out.

Normally, ozone absorbs UV radiation emitted by the sun, thereby warming the stratosphere and helping to break down the polar vortex in spring. But if there is less ozone, the stratosphere cools and the vortex becomes stronger. “A strong polar vortex then produces the effects observed at the Earth’s surface,” Chiodo says. Ozone thus plays a major role in temperature and circulation changes around the North Pole.

Again, this makes sense to me. I also find it interesting because stratospheric cooling driven by ozone depletion comes on top of stratospheric cooling driven by greenhouse gas increases. It’s not just that the planet’s heating, that heat is also being concentrated lower in the atmosphere. In 2020 – one of the years whose weird weather is attributed to Arctic ozone depletion – I posted about how the momentum of global warming means that a hot year matters more than a cold one. I’m now wondering whether we do need to be paying more attention to atmospheric cooling, specifically in the outer layer of the atmosphere. Well, I say “we”, but it’s pretty clear that climate scientists are studying that, and have been all along. The nice thing about humanity as a “collective” is that through specialization of interest and skill, we can be reasonably certain that given the resources, someone’s going to be passionate and knowledgeable about pretty much any problem that affects us. That’s a good thing, and this news is not entirely bad.

The new findings could help climate researchers make more accurate seasonal weather and climate forecasts in future. This allows for better prediction of heat and temperature changes, “which is important for agriculture,” Chiodo says.

Friedel adds, “It will be interesting to observe and model the future evolution of the ozone layer.” This is because ozone depletion continues, even though ozone-​depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) have been banned since 1989. CFCs are very long-​lived and linger in the atmosphere for 50 to 100 years; their potential to cause ozone destruction lasts for decades after they have been taken out of circulation. “Yet CFC concentrations are steadily declining, and this raises the question of how quickly the ozone layer is recovering and how this will affect the climate system,” she says.

The work that was done on safeguarding our ozone layer was important, and we are all better off because of it. You can still rub that in the faces of any troll who’s spouting obvious bullshit about it, but it’s also worth mentioning that the problem hasn’t gone away, it’s just that in most of the English-speaking world, it has faded from public consciousness. The work that was done was important, but, we’ve got plenty still to do.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

 

The Renegade Cut takes a look at the enforcement of patriarchy

This is the second video in The Renegade Cut‘s series on the enforcement of hierarchies. If you haven’t seen the introduction, I’ve linked it below. This video looks at what patriarchy is, what it is not, and how it’s enforced. It also delves into the history of the subject, and some of how it intersects with other vectors of oppression. Leon has set a high bar with his past work, and in my opinion this video is no exception.

 

Here’s the series introduction:

The bigger the global temperature change, the biggest the mass extinction.

Who could possibly have seen this coming? Bigger temperature changes mean more ecological upheaval?

It seems pretty straightforward, but what I find interesting is that the authors frame it as a cause for some hope about our current situation:

“These findings indicate that the bigger the shifts in climate, the larger the mass extinction,” Kaiho said. “They also tell us that any prospective extinction related to human activity will not be of the same proportions when the extinction magnitude changes in conjunction with global surface temperature anomaly.”

Kaiho cites an earlier study, which claimed a 5.2°C temperature increase in average global temperature would result in a mass extinction event comparable to previous ones. Yet, based on this study’s analysis, the temperature will need to change by 9°C, and this will not appear until 2500 in a worst-case scenario.

“Although predicting the extent of future extinctions is difficult because causes will differ from preceding ones, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that any forthcoming extinction will not reach past magnitudes if global surface temperature anomalies and other environmental anomalies correspondingly change,” Kaiho said.

I hate to sound pessimistic, but I think it would be unwise to set your clock by this research. I can’t speak to the quality of the work, but while I find the research and conclusions interesting, it seems to leave out the rate of warming. While past temperature changes have occurred fairly abruptly, I’m not aware of a warming event that happened at this rate, even if the number at which it stops is lower than those worse extinctions.

In addition to only looking at the scale of change, they also only look at temperature. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t account for human habitat destruction, over-fishing, and chemical pollution, all of which have been taking their own toll on the resilience of the biosphere. Maybe I’m missing something about past climate shifts, but I’m reasonably certain that none of them had a mix of factors even resembling the nightmare we’re confronting.

Regular readers will know that I put a fair amount of time and effort into hope and excitement as motivation, rather than fear. I try to make this blog a place that faces the terrifying reality of what’s happening, while also holding on to enough hope and happiness that we can keep working to make things better. I clicked on this research because I was hoping it would give me genuinely good good news to share, but I’m honestly more worried that this will be used to claim that global warming isn’t an urgent issue.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Stray: First impressions (Oh gods, what is that on the walls?)

A while back, Tegan and I became aware of an upcoming video game in which you play as a cat. All I knew about it for sure was that you could knock things over, you could find places to curl up and sleep, and you could interact with other cats. It sounded like a cute, harmless game that might be fun for unwinding. Then, more recently, we saw the launch trailer, and it was very clear that there’s a lot more to this game than just wandering around as a cat.

I’ll try to avoid any spoilers that aren’t in the trailer, but as you can probably tell, all is not well in the world of this game. Early gameplay is a little confusing. It takes you through the basic controls by having you go through the normal life of yourself and your cat family. The game starts when you get separated in a very dramatic moment, and find yourself in a strange underground world full of pipes and fuseboxes, odd lighting, and graffiti.

As the trailer shows, when you encounter “people” – the robots – they’re terrified of you. It seems a little odd, as you’re just a cat with a little backpack, but as you learn about who the robots are, where they came from, and what their lives are like, you learn to share their terror.

This is a horror game, without question, but the moments of fear and revulsion are cushioned by genuinely beautiful artwork, and a very peaceful atmosphere. And then you go deeper, into the sewers where robots dare not tread, and you learn that the robots were more right to be afraid than they knew. The walls are alive, and they’re watching you.

And lest you’ve forgotten, you’re literally just a cat. There’s an achievement for using up your first nine lives – want to know how I found out? In that regard, playing this game can be a little rough, but not as bad as you might fear from what I’ve written so far. The fact that cats are small and agile is central to both the plot and the gameplay, and as in real life, the wise cat gets very good at running away.

I’m not sure how far into the game we are (Tegan’s been watching over my shoulder), but I’m guessing maybe halfway through? The story is fascinating so far, and I already know I’m going to have to play through again because there are a number of things I’ve missed, and can’t go back to complete. I’m also very impressed by the way the people who made this game have been able to convey so much with only little bits of dialogue and exposition here and there. You only get to learn what the other entities around you know, and often they know very little.

This is a game for cat lovers, if a little stressful for them to play. It’s also a great game for people who like stuff like the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I think I might have nightmares…

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

.

Video: Biden Burgers and Right-Wing Media

Today was a day off for me, so I’ll leave you all with this video on how right-wing media uses obvious bullshit to obfuscate, and how liberal media tends to enable that. The fact that the bullshit is so obvious is a part of the strategy.

Right-wing news media invents a story about a liberal politician. Mainstream media debunks it. Liberal media uses the invented story to defend the liberal politician from legitimate criticism and from the left. It happened during the Barack Obama administration, and it is happening under the Joe Biden administration already. This is not just about hamburgers.

We must learn to channel our inner pocket gopher

Biomimicry is a fascinating concept in a lot of ways. The basic idea is pretty straightforward – evolution is a process of trial and error that’s been doing on for billions of years, and there are certain physical or behavioral patterns that show up repeatedly, or hang around for eons, because they work. So, we study those things, figure out how and why they work so well, and then find ways to apply them to technology. It has been pretty popular for while now, and I’ve seen it applied to renewable energy, architecture, military tactics, medicine, and more.

This is not a new process for our species. If I had to guess, I’d say we were learning how to do things by watching other animals long before our ancestors were human. Watching and trying out things done by other organisms seems to be a basic part of the “monkey” operating system in general. Myths, legends, and fables from around the globe are filled with people learning important lessons from nature, and that’s one of those ancient traditions that I think is absolutely worth keeping.

This time, however, it’s a little different. There are lessons for us to consider for our society, but they’re not new lessons for us. In pocket gophers, we find an example of evolution finding a useful approach to agriculture that matches one we’ve discovered for ourselves before:

“It really depends on how ‘farming’ is defined,” says Putz. “If farming requires that crops be planted, then gophers don’t qualify. But this seems like a far too narrow definition for anyone with a more horticultural perspective in which crops are carefully managed — such as fruit trees in forests — but not necessarily planted. With this perspective, the origins of agriculture included Mesopotamian annual cereal and pulse crop cultivation as well as maize cultivation in the Americas, but many cultures around the world developed agriculture based on perennial crops, many of which they didn’t plant but did tend.”

I don’t think that this approach to subsistence is a viable way to generate food for all of humanity, but I do think that it would be a brilliant way for us to both add variety to our diets, and to repair the harm we’ve done to ourselves by trying to separate ourselves from “nature”. Because of the changes we’ve made to Earth’s biosphere, we desperately need to prioritize ecosystem management, if only out of self-preservation. I think that this approach is one we should strongly consider. That said, I think it is time to learn what the gophers have to teach us:

“Southeastern pocket gophers are the first non-human mammalian farmers,” says F. E. “Jack” Putz of the University of Florida, Gainesville. “Farming is known among species of ants, beetles, and termites, but not other mammals.”

Veronica Selden and Putz report that pocket gophers don’t just eat roots that happen to grow in the paths of new tunnels they excavate. Instead, they provide conditions that favor root growth, by spreading their own waste as fertilizer. As a result, the authors argue that — by promoting root growth in their tunnels and then harvesting or cropping those roots — southeastern pocket gophers have stumbled upon a food production system that qualifies as farming.

[…]

Selden and Putz suggest that root cropping may explain why gophers keep and defend such extensive tunnel systems. The tunnels are comparable to rows of crops. If indeed what they’re doing counts as farming, then the gophers are the first non-human mammal known to farm.

“Pocket gophers are great examples of ecosystem engineers that turn over soil thereby aerating it and bringing nutrients back to the surface,” says Putz. “They eat only roots, some of which they grow themselves, and seldom interfere with human activities.”

They note that further study may reveal whether gophers eat fungi and how seasonal variation in the energetic contributions of roots growing into tunnels relates to their activity cycles. It’s not clear yet how their underground activities affect vegetation at the surface.

“Whether or not [pocket gophers] qualify as farmers, root cultivation is worth further investigation,” the researchers write.

I hereby declare that they qualify as farmers. Glad I could clear that up.

The article also mentions that these roots make up anywhere from 20% to 60% of the gophers’ daily calories. That’s a pretty broad range, at least to my eyes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if studying creatures like this is pretty difficult, especially if you don’t want to harm them and their farms in the process. Regardless, I think this is really cool!

I also think it’s worth underlining the fact that they are not necessarily incompatible with human agriculture – just the way we do it right now. Youtube is full of videos about how to kill pocket gophers, but I could see them actually being extremely useful for the “edible ecosystem” approach.

I also, as a science fiction writer, am fascinated by the possibilities that could be uncovered by modeling ourselves more after the humble gopher. Specifically, I think we should live underground, and farm in tunnels.

Sort of.

Underground cities have been discussed as a way to adapt to climate change for a while now. I’ve dabbled in the concept a bit – I’ve got a stalled novel about a solar-powered steampunk society living under the vast, lethally hot desert of the American Midwest, a few centuries in the future. Maybe if I hit a future patreon goal I’ll patch some of it up and publish it here for fun (sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia, featuring new content and rewards starting in August!). I think there are a lot of problems with underground living – especially at the scale of a modern city – of which we can see only those on the surface. Even so, as I keep saying, we’re facing the end of the world as we know it, and that means that we need to be open to modes of living that would not have been worth the effort in the past.

I also don’t think that we need to resort to living in tunnels and farming indoors or underground to take advantage of this. Farming from tunnels could also be a way of doing it safely in extreme heat, as well as irrigating crops without the evaporative water loss from spraying. Subsurface irrigation is a thing that’s been used for a while now (though less than it should be in these days of shrinking water supplies), but I think it’d be interesting to see it combined with things like hydroponics or aeroponics as a way to continue taking advantage of direct sunlight, without putting farmers at risk.

Also we should store things in our cheeks.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: New York Times debunks corporate climate lies

I never look to the New York Times for my climate news, but this popped up in my Youtube feed, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. The concept of “Net Zero” long predates the current corporate vogue, but I think it has always acted to protect the unrealistic notion of continuing fossil fuel use, and just “cancelling it out” through various forms of carbon capture, and other things declared to be “offsets”. Basically, it’s the foolish hope – a hope that I held before gaining a better understanding of the world – that we can somehow solve this problem while keeping our society more or less the same as it was at the end of the 20th century. I will always be in favor of pulling excess carbon out of the air, but we can’t afford to fall for capitalist misdirection and misinformation. We haven’t the time.

Carbon capture is a distraction we cannot afford.

I’m in favor of carbon capture as a general concept. I’ve written before about using plants for that purpose, and I continue to think that we should be doing that.

But.

Without eliminating fossil fuel use, carbon capture is a distraction we cannot afford.

A new report from Imperial College London has outlined the degree to which carbon capture worked between 1996 and 2020, as well as the degree to which it has been over-estimated:

The researchers compared estimations of stored carbon with official reports, and found that the reports lead to overestimates of actual carbon stored by 19-30 per cent.

They calculated 197 million tonnes of carbon were captured and stored between 1996 and 2020, which represents a significant achievement in climate change mitigation. However, the researchers say the lack of consistent reporting frameworks mean current reported rates of carbon capture are overestimated, giving an inaccurate picture of the technology’s contribution to fighting climate change. This, the researchers say, disempowers us in meeting climate mitigation strategies like the Paris Agreement and risks hiding issues that could otherwise be easily solved, such as inefficiencies in facility technology and transport.

Lead author Yuting Zhang, PhD candidate at the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: “Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is rightly a cornerstone of climate change mitigation, but without a centralised reporting framework we approach climate change on the back foot when we need to be more proactively tackling the issue with robust and accurate reporting.

I’m sorry, but in light of this report, I have to disagree with the lead author. If this is an example of what carbon capture and storage has to offer, then we cannot rely on it at all. Once again – 197 million tonnes of carbon captured and stored over a period of 24 years. For comparison, we emitted 36.3 billion tonnes in 2021 alone. The decrease in emissions from the 2020 lockdowns was 2 billion tonnes, which is over ten times what was captured during that 24 year period.

Taking this seriously as “a cornerstone of climate change mitigation” feels like declaring a toddler with a bucket to be a cornerstone of our firefighting strategy. This is not the first time I’ve wondered whether industrial carbon capture is anything more than a greenwashing campaign, fueled by a willful detachment from reality. As always, I’m glad for this research. It’s good to have numbers on how carbon capture has been going (as badly as all the rest of our climate “action”), and how the propaganda surrounding it has over-sold its usefulness.

The study authors suggest centralizing the process of tracking and reporting on carbon capture and sequestration. That’s fine. It seems like a good idea. I also think it’s worth noting that it’s not like any of our other climate mitigation efforts have been going any better, so it’s possible that if we ever take the issue seriously (you know, before it kills us all), carbon capture will make a huge difference. Even so, if that happens, it won’t matter if we’re still generating so much carbon dioxide. Carbon neutrality is not enough. It shouldn’t need saying, but freezing CO2 levels where they’re at right now is still a catastrophe – it’s just a slower one.

Carbon capture and storage is rightly a cornerstone of climate mitigation, but without a rapid elimination of fossil fuel use, it will do little more than help our rulers deflect blame for the horrors they have wrought.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!