white sky thinking

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/business/carbon-capture-bp.html?referrer=masthead

you will need to copy that link if you wish to access this...

which is part of what triggered this line of thought...elon musk has hopped on the "carbon capture" bandwagon saying he'll put up $100 million prize for the "best" carbon capture technology...exxon mobil is dumping $3 billion into developing the same sort of technology, and bp amoco is working on building a test system in brittan to "...divert pollutants before they can escape and bury them deep in the ground where they can do no harm."...why? guilty conscience over years of producing the raw materials for those "pollutants"? and are they sure that by burying them "deep under ground" 1.) that they won't escape, and 2.) that they won't do any "harm" once they are there? no cognitive buias at work here? they have a handle on all the variables? conscience has little to do with it...bp's test area, "...is home to one of the country's largest clusters of polluting factories and refineries. by linking them together, collecting all their emissions, and charging them a fee, bp hopes to achieve the sufficient scale to make a profitable business of tackling the pollution."...ah...a "fee"..."profitable business"...no conscious ameleoration of past behaviors in capitalism...profit...self-interest ( if cars actually do go electric how is bp going to stay in busines? )...consequentialism...there's the cognitive bias ( and "linking them all together"? what could go wrong? )...screw the unseen variables, there's money to be made...what is the sequestered carbon returned on carbon created in this? "bp and its partners propose to build a very large electric power station fueled by natural gas. the plant would help replace brittan's aging fossil fuel burning power stations." what? when did natural gas cease bing a fossil fuel? something counterintuitive i am missing? cleaner than coal perhaps...still a fosssil fuel...and if it is scalable and actually works will it create a sort of jevon's effect...less carbon in the atmosphere and we can burn more carbon and hold station...a zero sum game? all these plans for increasingly complex systems of environmental control are a hallmark of the anthropocene...human efforts to control their environment have led to conditions that require more elaborate ( and costly ) control..things like stratospheric geoengineering that would turn the blue sky white...humans cannot acept their limitations or leave anything alone...they may become part of the sixth extinction yet.