A handful of wealthy polluting countries led by the US are spending billions of dollars of public money on unproven climate solutions technologies that risk further delaying the transition away from fossil fuels, new analysis suggests.
These governments have handed out almost $30bn in subsidies for carbon capture and fossil hydrogen over the past 40 years, with hundreds of billions potentially up for grabs through new incentives, according to a new report by Oil Change International (OCI), a non-profit tracking the cost of fossil fuels.
To date, the European Union (EU) plus just four countries – the US, Norway, Canada and the Netherlands – account for 95% of the public handouts on CCS and hydrogen.
The US has spent the most taxpayer money, some $12bn in direct subsidies, according to OCI, with fossil fuel giants like Exxon hoping to secure billions more in future years.
The industry-preferred solutions could play a limited role in curtailing global heating, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and are being increasingly pushed by wealthy nations at the annual UN climate summit.
But carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform, according to previous studies. CCS – and blue hydrogen projects – rely on