Author: Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science, Director of Oxford Net Zero, University of Oxford

The UK government has given the go-ahead to carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) schemes worth £22 billion (US$28.6 billion). Critics are insisting that this technology – which involves capturing carbon as it is emitted or taking it back out of the atmosphere, then pumping it into rocks deep underground – is unsafe, unproven and unaffordable. Defenders are responding with painstaking rebuttals. Could the whole debate be missing the point? I think it is better to focus on the big picture – why we need CCS to work – rather than playing whack-a-mole with every objection to individual projects. The…