Labour has been sucked in by the carbon capture ‘con’

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Energy secretary Ed Miliband has spent £22bn on carbon capture and storage (PA)

Labour’s decision to spend £22bn on carbon capture and storage is the first major misstep from a government many of us in the global South had hoped would bring climate action and credibility to the world stage (“Ed Miliband: Finally, Britain has entered the ‘clean energy’ age”, Friday 4 October).

Instead, it reveals that Ed Miliband and Keir Starmer are dancing to the tune of the fossil fuel industry and wasting huge sums of public money that is urgently needed elsewhere.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – in which carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas plants are captured and buried underground for eternity – is not a new, shiny technology; it’s a failed con propped up by the fossil fuel industry that has been around for 50 years.

Despite the time and money spent so far trying to make it work, it has never been shown to be cost-effective at scale anywhere in the world.

At the time of last year’s Cop28 climate summit in Dubai, there were 42 operational commercial CCS projects across the world, with the intended capacity to store 49 million tonnes of CO2 annually – about 0.1 per cent of the world’s roughly 37 billion tonnes of annual CO2 emissions. The mirage of CCS has been pushed by the big polluters for decades because they see it as their excuse to keep digging up and burning their dirty energy.

What is so galling is that it should be the fossil fuel companies spending this money, considering it is they that directly benefit from the technology. The false promise of an impending CCS breakthrough distracts from the real solutions of investing in renewables, improving energy efficiency and keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

The executives at Shell, BP and Exxon must be laughing at Labour ministers declaring they are going to get tough on climate change while effectively giving the fossil fuel industry a huge subsidy to keep on polluting. The only thing being captured through CCS is Labour ministers by the fossil fuel industry.

There is still time to reverse this decision and invest that money where it can have a real, lifesaving impact to deliver a safe and prosperous planet for us all.

Mohamed Adow

Power Shift Africa, Nairobi

Charity shops should not be responsible for our hospices

Our hospice sector is going through a funding crisis – and the government has failed to provide the support it needs. Research shows that last year, more money was spent in hospice charity shops than hospices received from the government (“Hospices relying on greater income from charity shops than government funding”, Monday 7 October).

Charity shops would have to sell 5,375 pairs of jeans to fund a palliative care nurse for a year and 43,000 blouses to provide a patient with a hospice bed for the same period of time.

While this is proof of the invaluable support provided by retail staff and their generous customers, charity shops should not be responsible for plugging the £60m funding gap each year within the sector.

It’s time to hold the government to account for its outdated funding model and call on them to do better for those in need of end-of-life care and their loved ones.

Sarah West

Hospice UK, London

No more arms to Israel 

What Hamas did on 7 October 2023 was horrific. What Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently did, and continues to do, to Palestinian civilians – and now to Lebanese civilians – was, and is, also horrific (“Could the unremitting fury over October 7 be the end of Israel?”, Monday 7 October).

In the year since 7 October, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been murdered, countless families’ lives ruined, children mutilated and orphaned; a whole state has been destroyed. Netanyahu’s actions do not come close to self-defence. Rather, his response has always been one of spiteful revenge and an opportunistic land grab neither directed towards securing the release of the poor hostages, but all to save his political skin.

The response of the West has been woeful. Criticising him and his warmongering government has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with ensuring the rule of international law. Our unquestioning support for Netanyahu must end.

We must not send arms to Israel while Netanyahu is in power.

Beryl Wall

London

School’s out of the question

VAT on private schools may be a win for Labour, but it is a loss for thousands of children and their hardworking parents (“School VAT tax raid to go ahead, insists Bridget Phillipson” Monday 7 October).

I cannot believe that our government can do this to 555,000 children and their parents. It is double taxing – and very unfair.

My daughter works 12 hours a day to pay for her two children’s private school fees. She pays her income tax and her national insurance – why should she also now pay VAT on the school fees?

If Labour had to bring in this cruel tax, surely they could have given parents three or four years’ warning so that children halfway through their education did not have to be disrupted. It’s wrong!

Jean-Anne Bartlett

Cambridge

Too snap happy

Roel Lameris wonders why people want to splash their daily activities, including pictures of their children, on Facebook (Letters: “Anti-social media”, 8 October).

It’s very simple – it’s called showing off. It’s tedious and competitive and should be curbed during childhood.

Penny Little

Great Haseley, Oxfordshire