George Monbiot: Labour has been captured by carbon capture

Last week, Rachel Reeves stood up in parliament to announce a budget “investing in our future”. But the details the chancellor laid out in her red book show that she’s stuck in the past, with the government committed to blow £3.9bn next year on a fossil fuel swindle that will drive climate breakdown.

It’s the down payment on a hustle called carbon capture and storage (CCS) – a harebrained scheme to collect carbon dioxide emissions from industry and pump them into rocks under the North Sea – that is set to rack up costs of £21.7bn over the next 25 years.

That £21.7bn price tag only covers the cost of building the infrastructure – not for running it. And judging by decades of costly failures, it’s highly likely to increase.

But the real problem with CCS is that it’s an excuse for oil and gas companies to carry on producing fossil fuels. Labour’s CCS plan includes £1bn for making hydrogen from fossil gas – a technology that massively exceeds the low carbon hydrogen standard that is supposed to justify the whole project. Instead of accelerating decarbonisation, the government’s CCS con will lock in high emissions and fossil fuel dependency for decades to come.

And the government admits this in its own papers. Government subsidies are bound by a rule called “principle H” (PDF), which declares that “subsidies for the decarbonisation of emissions linked to industrial activities in the UK shall achieve an overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions”. But ministers say this rule is “not applicable” (PDF) to Labour’s CCS project, because the state will “subsidise the construction” of CCS plants but “not their operation”, so they don’t have to take the “increased upstream emissions of greenhouse gases” the plan will bring into account. This is not only wrong, it doesn’t make any sense. Ministers are spending £21.7bn on a racket that will increase emissions, and they know it.

When I asked the government for details of this absurd sham, it said there are “no viable alternatives” to CCS for “decarbonising key industrial sectors (eg cement)”. But why don’t we replace conventional cement with geopolymeric cement? Why don’t we make steel with green hydrogen? Why don’t we get rid of thermal power plants? The CCS ploy is based on assumptions that are already out of date and has been driven through before any attempt to work out if it’s even necessary.

All the documents the energy department provided to justify this botched blueprint were already published by the previous government. In other words, this is a Tory policy.

Reeves promised last week to “fix the foundations and deliver change”. But there’s no change from this deranged Tory disaster, there’s no change to the sinister influence of the fossil fuel industry and no change to the doublespeak that defends billion-pound handouts to firms that are wrecking the planet.

The chancellor has paid out the first £3.7bn of a £21.7bn white elephant that is supposed to cut carbon emissions. She might as well have spanked it all on tickets to see Taylor Swift.