Comments merrick has made

carbon accounting loopholes

Thebike45, you are right that some of the oil will be used for plastics, medicines, and other non-carbon emitting purposes. But the idea that the oil might not produce carbon emissions is frankly absurd. The quality of the oil will affect how much is made into combustion fuels, but it is certain some of it (in all probability the vast majority) will.

There are published data for the various uses, and from this it's possible to calculate an average emissions per barrel of oil.

David Ahlport, the possibility of leakage is the first thing that comes to mind. However, the various studies, including the IPCC, say it is incredibly unlikely.

Thing is, this is new technology. How would we look for seepage? If we found it how would we stop it?

Rather like the way the nuclear industry doesn't factor in the cost of maintenance, monitoring and liability for its waste for all eternity, so the carbon-capture projects presume it'll all cost nothing and be safe forever. That's a hell of a gamble, especially when you consider that we have non-carbon emitting options.

Odogrpah, you ask So what's the argument here?  That we should use steam and "micellar-polymer flooding" but not CO2, because CO2 implies sequestration, and we don't think that sequestration would be 100% effective?

The argument is partly that it's unsafe as we can't be sure the CO2 will stay sequestered for all time, but mainly that this is being touted as low-carbon when it isn't. The totals for the project should factor in the carbon released from EOR oil that would otherwise have stayed in the ground.

In Scotland, BP proposed a gas power plant that would have used EOR for its storage. The emissions from the oil would have been around half the amount being sequestered, yet BP were calling it 'carbon-free'.

It's as disingenous as the Chinese carbon capture plant that's using the CO2 in soft drinks (peoples stomachs are even leakier than oil wells and saline aquifers).

The carbon-emitting corporations are already treating carbon accounting the way they treat tax accounting.

Bristling Badger

do read this astonishingly detailed work

You misquoted the hydrogen car part.

He spends the following two and a half pages discussing the issues with hydrogen as car fuel, before concluding that it will, as you point out, be decades before it could possibly work. Thus, it's useless in a world that need to cut emissions in the next couple of decades.

His premise is that the science demands a 60% global cut in around 30 years in order to (hopefully) stay below a 2 degree rise. If we're to share the emissions equally, for the over-emitting UK it means a 90% cut. Given that making everyone live in non-electric primitivist utopia is not gonna happen in that timeframe, how do we reduce the emissions without social collapse?

He does manage to show how it can be done (with some radical restructuring but feasible and using only technology that does exist) with all industries bar aviation.

I defy anyone to write several hundred pages of anything political and have you agree with it all. There are certainly things in Heat that I'd question, but these things are a handful among literally hundreds of ideas that are definitely practical.

More, he's sifted through thousands of sources and cites them all. There are so many figures bandied around on climate change, if nothing else Heat is an invaluable reference text for finding the ones that are scientifically sound.

It leads to some surprising conclusions. For example, microgeneration using wind turbines seems something of a no-go, despite the fact that we all (and Monbiot admits he too is one) like the sound of it.

Bristling Badger