Not quite so fast, let’s take a step back, take a deep breath, and look at things a bit more objectively.

In October 2011, the Government of Alberta launched a massive advertising campaign on TV and in the press promoting the ostensible benefits of a number of carbon capture and storage projects that are largely funded by Alberta taxpayers and to a smaller extent out of federal tax revenues.

The October 26 issue of the Edmonton Journal included “A SPECIAL SECTION by the Calgary Herald in partnership with the Government of Alberta”, comprised of a collection of articles from various sources printed on a total of six full-sized pages.

Here is just one of those stories: “[1] Taming CO2 crucial to our future“, by Brian Burton, for the Calgary Herald.

I agree to some extent with the assertion in the title of that article, but from a perspective that is opposite to the intended meaning.  CO2 doesn’t need to be tamed.  It is a benign, beneficial but nevertheless vitally essential atmospheric trace gas without which life as we know it would not exist on Earth. Globally, the man-made portion of atmospheric CO2 comprises about three percent of annual CO2 emissions.  The remaining 97 percent of CO2 emissions are from natural sources.  For starters, every human alive breathes out about 1 kg of CO2 each day.

The portion of Alberta CO2 emissions that is to be captured and stored is a minuscule fraction of global man-made CO2 emissions. Even if atmospheric CO2 levels were to drive and control climate trends, the fraction of CO2 captured and stored in Aberta would be so small that it would not ever be possible to measure how that would influence global climate trends.  If anyone ever calculated what the impact of our CCS schemes would be, the results of such calculations must be extremely disappointing, as they have not been published or mentioned in the main-stream media.  Aside from that, the “evidence” of the benefits of reductions in man-made CO2 emissions only exists in computer models.  There is no measurable evidence in the real world that proves that there is any substance to the claims made in the theory that reductions in Alberta CO2 emissions will have any measurable impact on global climate trends.

Those are just some of the circumstances of the context in which Alberta’s efforts at attempting to use CO2 capture and storage as a thermostat for global climate control take place.  Still, far from objectively addressing any of those circumstances, the Government of Alberta ignores and does not even mention them.  That is so because of the main premise of the theory of sucessful propaganda expressed by one of its masters:

“The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision. …

“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction. …

“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan….

“The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.” —Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter VI

One may well wonder why the Government of Alberta is waking up to the reality that if the propaganda that supports CCS schemes is not being promoted, all CCS schemes may well and most likely flop.  The CCS schemes are expensive white elephants that cannot come to life, exist and operate without massive government subsidies.

Page 2 of the Edmonton Journal’s special October 2011 section on Carbon Capture and Storage boasts that “Alberta Leads the Way: Pioneering province first to put money behind CCS projects and a levy on carbon emissions”, but I see nothing laudable about a scheme to waste $2 billion through blowing CO2 down Mother Earth’s derriere.  Alberta may lead the way now, but it was one of the last to jump on the wagon and may well be one of the last to jump off.

I have no intention of presenting here even only a partially complete list of CCS and green energy boondoggles, but let’s at least look at a couple of recent news items in that regard:

1.) In Scotland: “Longannet carbon capture and storage project is no more”, October 22, 2011
http://lce.folc.ca/2011/10/22/longanet-carbon-capture-and-storage-project-is-no-more/

2.) In West-Virginia: “High costs bury AEP’s carbon burial plan”, July 16, 2011
The king wears no clothing, but it is even worse that he can’t afford to pay for being made to look like a naked fool.
http://lce.folc.ca/2011/07/16/high-costs-bury-aeps-carbon-burial-plan/

It seems to me that just as the Nazi propaganda machine went into high gear and intensified its efforts the more elusive Hitler’s dream of his 1000-year Reich became, so the CCS and alternative energy  schemes will be promoted ever more intensively the more their objectives prove themselves to be unattainable.