The Oxford-Trained Chemist-Turned-Journalist Defending Climate Capitalism

Akshat Rathi spoke with HuffPost about the evolution of climate denialism, and what the climate crisis means for democracy.

In May 2019, I flew to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to attend a conference on the future of carbon capture, the technology the oil industry was betting on to slash the climate impact of burning fossil fuels. Just six months after the release of a dire report giving humanity roughly a decade to halve emissions that were then still growing year over year, I braced myself for what I expected to be a roomful of unreformed climate deniers.

Instead, I spent most of two days listening to conversations detailing the surprisingly complex reality: technologies to keep carbon from leaving smokestacks and entering the atmosphere could actually work.

In particular, I heard Akshat Rathi, an Oxford-trained chemist and journalist, chat at length with Julio Friedmann, a former Department of Energy official-turned-academic now working to help commercialize the carbon capture tools he spent decades honing with federal research dollars. Rathi, who had written an acclaimed investigative series on the subject for Quartz, spoke of the actual science and hardware behind carbon capture — painting a broader picture that challenged many environmentalists’ blanket condemnation of the technology as a “false solution.”

From reading emissions studies and talking to modelers, it seemed obvious to me that the U.S. could not hit its emissions targets simply by strapping carbon capture equipment to aging coal plants. And I was sure that fossil fuel companies were dangling the technology’s still-unmet potential in front of policymakers to distract them from more promising solutions. But listening to Rathi and Friedmann made me realize how unlikely the U.S. is to meet its goals without carbon capture technology. It’s hard to see how we’d slash enough planet-heating pollution from heavy industry and other applications that can’t yet easily be swapped out for solar panels or batteries.

Moreover, the tools now used to capture CO2 at the source could lay the groundwork for the next generation of carbon capture tech: machines to essentially vacuum emissions out of the sky and bury them back underground.