Welcome back to Drilled, I'm Amy Westerfeld. We are still working on this series I mentioned before,

denial to delay focused on the false solutions that fossil fuel companies are proposing to the climate

crisis. We've talked about LNG, we've talked about the role that management

consultancies play in pushing false solutions like carbon capture or hydrogen.

Today we're going to talk about carbon capture.

I've been working on a story about carbon capture for the last couple months that we are co-publishing with Vox and I gotta say it's kind of made my head explode.

It's one of those things where I kept looking at it and thinking it can't possibly be as much of a scam as it seems like it is.

And then every single expert I would talk to would make me feel like it was even

more of a scam. That's definitely true of the person you're going to hear from today.

Carolyn Raffinsberger, who's an environmental lawyer

and the executive director of the Science

and Environmental Health Network.

Carolyn introduced me to a bunch of experts,

but talking to her was a great way to kind of get overall

context on how exactly we got to where we're at with carbon capture, why it's been such a focus as a climate solution when even in the best case scenario, which is nowhere near our reality, it could only ever help with about 2% of global emissions. And yet we're dumping billions

and billions of taxpayer dollars into it. Why? How did we get here? And what role

did oil companies play in all of it? One thing that has

suddenly made fossil fuel companies very interested in carbon capture over the last

few years is the 45Q tax credit. This pays companies for capturing and

storing CO2. It started out in 2008 paying $10 for every metric ton of carbon sequestered. In 2018, that

number increased to $50 and the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022

bumped it up to $85 per metric ton. That increase was negotiated by Senator Joe Manchin. It was one of several

...