The fossil lobby has long conflated the two pathways under the CCS acronym since doing so helps to avoid their comparison – for instance of the inefficiency of CDCS in its having to handle over three times the tonnage of CO2 gas as actual CCS manages in the form of carbon via sustainable farming and via its use of Biochar. When aiming for gigatonnes/yr scale that difference is immense.

Similarly the comparison of the utility of the pathways is stark. With CDCS, beyond the partial storage of industrial CO2 outputs no benefits are gained, while with CCS there is in addition a highly relevant increase in crop yields and hence in Food Security due to farms’ improved soil ecology, as well as a potentially major rise in rural employment in the Native Coppice Forestry needed at scale for charcoal for Biochar production.

Moreover, the hydrocarbon offgasses from coppice charcoal production can serve as feedstock for onsite conversion to methanol, an exceptionally clean-burning green liquid fuel that can displace various fossil fuels. Until 1920 this coproduction was the standard industry practice for making methanol and it offers a current yield of over 570kg per tonne of feedstock wood [NREL], which equates to 4.53 million barrels (or 2.23 million barrels of petrol-equivalent) of green fuel per million tonnes of coppice wood.

The comparison of the two pathways demands that scientists, NGOs and serious politicians should be using distinct titles for them – for example “Carbon Dioxide Removal” [CDR] for the removal and storage of industrial point-source CO2 emissions, and “Carbon Recovery” for capturing carbon from the atmospheric CO2 stock into trees and plants and thence into productive sequestration in farm soils.

For Kerry and others to directly discourage what they call “CCS” is careless and grossly counterproductive since it also discourages the necessary and highly benign option of Carbon Recovery. The concerns about fossil-owned politicians using the adoption of CDCS as a delay on ending fossil fuel use are valid only until efficient disincentives are negotiated, such as putting a low ceiling on the percentage of national CO2e accounts at UN.FCCC that can be met by CDCS carbon credits. The fact that the costs of RE are steadily falling means that investing in fossil fuel usage plus verified carbon credits will become increasingly financially inefficient over time, thereby imposing on laggards the dire prospect of holding suddenly stranded assets.