A wave of carbon-burial projects has small-town America fighting back — and a scientist fighting a columnist

Climate & Energy 4 min 6 sources

Oil-linked firms are racing to bury CO2 underground for billions in US subsidies, alarming towns like Clymers, Indiana — while scientists and critics argue over whether carbon capture is climate salvation or a licence to keep drilling. Meanwhile, Europe's late-June heat killed an estimated 10,000, and Britain's biggest community solar farm was ordered to switch off.

Key takeaways

A rush of US carbon-burial projects, funded by billions in public subsidies, has small towns organising against them — and split scientists from critics over whether carbon capture cuts emissions or just excuses more drilling.
Europe's late-June heatwave killed an estimated 10,000 people across 27 countries, and Britain's May–June heat may have killed more than 2,700 — deaths counted only after the fact.
Britain's biggest community solar farm was forced to switch off for the summer because the local grid couldn't handle the power — a sign that the wires and switches, not the panels, are now the hard part of the transition.

The fight over burying carbon

A plan to pump carbon dioxide deep under the farmland around Clymers, Indiana, is supposed to be a win for the climate. To some of the people who live there, it feels like the end of their town. [1]

Across the US, dozens of “carbon sequestration” projects are in development — capturing CO2 and injecting it thousands of feet underground for permanent storage. [1] The federal subsidies are so generous that companies are rushing to file for permits. The idea is straightforward: if you can bury the carbon a process emits, that carbon never warms the planet. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is the umbrella term.

The Clymers project would bury CO2 from a local ethanol plant run by the Andersons Renewables — a firm partly owned by a Marathon Oil subsidiary at the time. [1] Some residents were offered $150 a year to have carbon stored under their land. Melissa Harrison, who is raising five grandchildren there, told the Guardian: “This is our place.” [1] Locals worry about their already-strained well water and the risk of storing pressurised gas beneath their homes. The company says the technology is safe, rigorously permitted, and monitored to protect groundwater. [1]

International climate monitors call CCS a secondary tool — useful, but no substitute for cutting fossil fuels fast. Some environmental groups go further, arguing it mainly delays the shift to clean energy. [1]

Con, or physics?

That argument spilled into print this week. The columnist George Monbiot called carbon capture “the great carbon capture con.” A group of scientists — led by Oxford’s Prof Myles Allen — wrote back to say physics disagrees. [2] The world will keep producing more CO2 than the atmosphere, oceans and forests can safely absorb, they argue. So stopping global warming requires capturing and permanently burying carbon at scale. For cement alone — about 8% of global emissions, with no other clean route today — they call it the only viable option. [2]

But Allen conceded the critics’ sharpest point: why should taxpayers pay to bury carbon while private firms profit from digging up the fuel that made it? [2] His fix flips the bill. Require the companies that extract oil and gas to pay for storing the CO2 their products create. Allen points to Britain’s proposed Jackdaw gasfield: make its licence conditional on burying a rising share of its emissions. The result, in his words: “fossil fuels that don’t cause global warming.” [2]

Same technology. Two completely different things, depending on who signs the cheque.

Why the question isn’t abstract

The stakes showed up in the mortality data. An estimated 10,000 people died across Europe during the late-June heatwave. That is the count of deaths above a normal week, pooled from official statistics in 27 countries for 22–28 June. [3] Scientists found no other likely cause. One researcher said the excess was hard to explain “by anything but the extreme heat.” A separate analysis judged the heatwave “virtually impossible” without human-caused warming. [3]

Britain counted its own toll. More than 2,700 people may have died from the heat across an exceptionally hot May and June. The estimate comes from Imperial College London, the Met Office and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. [4] June was England’s warmest on record; the mercury hit 37.7C in Lingwood, Norfolk, beating a high that had stood since 1957. [4] Heat rarely names its victims — most died of strained hearts and lungs, days later, counted only when the statistics came in.

The grid that couldn’t take the sun

Here’s the transition’s other face. Britain’s biggest community solar farm — Derril Water in Devon, owned by nearly 10,000 ordinary members — was ordered to switch off for its entire first summer. [5] Not because it made too little power. Because it made too much.

On sunny days, the flood of rooftop and farm solar in north Devon threatened to push the local transmission network past its safety limits — a “thermal overload.” [5] The grid operator ordered a key transformer shut to protect the wires. The equipment that would fix this was due by the end of 2025, but the upgrade was delayed. The switch-off is expected to cost the co-op’s members about £2m in lost income before it can restart in September. [5]

It’s a small story with a large lesson: clean generation is arriving faster than the wires and switches that carry it. The US faces the same strain from the other direction. A mid-year review of the American power system points to demand climbing as data centres multiply — a grid built for a slower world. [6] Making the electricity is increasingly the easy part. Moving it, storing it, and deciding who pays to upgrade the network is where the fight now lives.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The same machine can cut emissions or excuse them — the bill decides which

A technology isn't good or bad on its own. Whoever pays for it, and how, quietly decides which direction it points.

Two people, one machine, opposite outcomes

Picture the carbon-capture equipment bolted to a smokestack. It takes CO2 that would have gone into the air, compresses it, and pumps it underground. That machine does not know whose factory it sits on. It does exactly the same thing for everyone.

Now watch what it becomes in two different hands.

In hand number one, it sits on a cement plant. Cement is about 8% of the world’s emissions, and there is no clean way to make it yet — the chemistry releases CO2 no matter what fuels the kiln. Here, the machine removes carbon that could not have been avoided any other way. It is a genuine subtraction.

In hand number two, it sits on an oil-linked operation collecting a government cheque for every ton it buries. Now the same machine does something else entirely. It becomes the sentence “we can keep drilling — look, we’re handling the carbon.” The burial doesn’t replace the drilling. It defends it.

Identical hardware. Opposite effect. Nothing about the technology changed. What changed was who was paying, and for what.

Follow the money, and you find the direction

This is the quiet mechanism under the whole carbon-capture fight, and it’s worth naming plainly, because it runs through far more than climate.

A tool points wherever its incentive points.

When the public pays a company to bury carbon — billions in subsidies, a fee for every ton stored — you have paid for the act of burying. You have not paid for the thing that actually matters, which is less carbon coming out of the ground in the first place. So the sensible move for whoever collects that cheque is to keep producing, keep emitting, and keep burying — because each step now earns money. The burial doesn’t shrink the problem. It puts it on the payroll.

That’s why Oxford’s Prof Myles Allen, defending carbon capture as physically necessary, still handed the critics their strongest point. Why should taxpayers foot the bill to put carbon back, while private firms profit taking it out? His fix isn’t to ban the machine. It’s to move the invoice. Make the companies that extract the fuel pay to store the CO2 it creates. Suddenly the same machine points the other way. Now every ton you produce costs you money to clean up — so you produce less, or you clean up more, or both. The incentive that used to reward digging now taxes it.

The hardware never moved. The cheque did.

Why “is it good or bad?” is the wrong question

We badly want technologies to have a moral setting — nuclear is good, or bad; solar is good; carbon capture is a con, or a saviour. The columnist called it a con. The scientists called it vital. They were arguing past each other, because a tool doesn’t have a fixed moral setting. It has a slot where an incentive goes, and whatever you plug in there decides the answer.

Both sides were right about their own half. The critics were right that carbon capture, funded the way it is now, mostly buys the oil industry room to keep going. The scientists were right that the physics leaves no way to reach a stable climate without burying some carbon we can’t avoid making. The disagreement dissolves the moment you stop asking “is the machine good?” and start asking “who’s paying, and what does that pay them to do?”

You can feel how uncomfortable that is. It means you can’t judge a solution by looking at the solution. You have to look at the arrangement wrapped around it — the subsidy, the licence, the rule about what counts as success. And that arrangement is usually written quietly, by the people it will pay.

The rule that looks like a fact

Here is the part that’s easy to miss. The current setup — taxpayers pay, producers collect, and “tons buried” is what earns the reward — feels like just how carbon capture works. It isn’t. It’s a choice someone made about who holds the invoice, and it happens to serve the people who asked for it.

Change one line — the extractor pays instead of the public — and the whole technology switches sides. That line isn’t physics. It’s policy. It only looks like a fact because it’s already in place, and things that are already in place stop looking like decisions.

Ask it of anything sold to you as a fix. A recycling scheme, a carbon offset, an efficiency standard, a tax break for something “green.” The machinery might be real and even useful. The question that decides what it actually does is never the machinery. It’s: who pays for it, who collects, and what exactly does the payment reward?

Where this leaves us

The people of Clymers, Indiana, aren’t fighting a technology. They’re the ones offered $150 a year to hold the risk while the subsidy flows somewhere else. It’s a small, sharp picture of who pays when the invoice is written by someone else. And the money paying for all of it is public. The subsidy comes from taxpayers — so the direction that machine points was, in a distant and diluted way, bought with our money too.

None of us wrote the rule. Most of us didn’t know there was a rule to write. That’s the humbling part. The decision that matters most about a technology is usually made before anyone sees the technology at all. It’s a quiet sentence about who pays, and it reads like a footnote. Seeing the whole here doesn’t make you clever about carbon capture. It makes you slower to trust the word “solution” until you’ve found the invoice.

03 · Lab · your turn

The Carbon-Capture Rule Desk

Set who pays for carbon capture and what counts as success, and feel the same machine swing from a licence to keep drilling to a genuine emissions cut.

04 · Hope · carry this

The thing that decides what carbon capture actually does is just a line about who pays — and lines can be rewritten. The same machine that excuses more drilling today could cut emissions tomorrow, no new invention required, only a better rule.