ExxonMobil and the Ruse Called “Direct Air Capture”

In this short and extremely general video, a representative of ExxonMobil explains Direct Air Capture (DAC), a set of technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Anyone seeking to solve this problem needs to deal with the challenge that the concentration of carbon dioxide is extremely low, about 400 ppm or 0.04%, meaning that 99.96% is something else, mostly nitrogen.  Thus, the enterprise necessarily involves sucking massive volumes of air through a filter, a process that itself has a huge carbon footprint, looking for something that’s very scarce.  The concept is doomed to failure, and everyone, including Exxon, knows this.

If Exxon were honest, they would admit it, and attack the problem from another direction, i.e., transitioning away from the consumption of fossil fuels.  But we’re talking about the company that has known since the late 1970s that their products were slowly destroying our planet but conspired to withhold that information from the world’s people, including the scientists who may have been able to deal with climate change before its ruinous effects set in.

Today, Exxon is throwing out more red herrings (like DAC) so that it can continue to bake the Earth.  As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “There are no words in the English language that describe acts like this.  The word ‘evil’ doesn’t even come close.”