Inside Climate News reports:

Over the last year, energy companies, electrical utilities and other industrial sectors have been quietly pushing through a suite of policies to support a technology that stands to yield tens of billions of dollars for corporate polluters, but may do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

These policies have fast-tracked environmental reviews and allocated billions in federal funding for research and development of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technologies that pull carbon dioxide out of smokestacks or directly from the air before storing it underground. Just a single bill—the bipartisan infrastructure legislation that passed the Senate last week and is now headed to the House of Representatives—includes more than $12 billion in direct support for carbon capture, and could unlock billions more through other programs, according to the recent drafts.

Many environmental advocates argue that the massive government support would be better spent on proven climate solutions like wind and solar energy, which receive far less in direct funding under the infrastructure bill.

“We know today that renewable energy is ready to be deployed, it works, it helps decarbonize the energy sector,” said Josh Axelrod, a senior advocate in the nature program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “On the flip side, carbon capture has a mixed record, is not widely deployed anywhere, and if it holds promise, it holds promise in the next decade or the next 20 or 30 or 40 years.” [Continue reading…]