When I hear the word "abatement," I reach for my delete key

We are hearing a lot about unabated fossil fuels, and industry plans to abate carbon emissions with storage or capture. It's all a sham

Be sure to watch the Juice Media video at the bottom of the post. Some swearing.

In 1934 a German Nazi playwright wrote the phrase that has been loosely translated as “When I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun.” Others have alluded to it with phrases like “When I hear the words ‘healthy eating,’ I reach for my pork chop.” For me, after a few years of writing about the IPCC and reading its documents, my trigger word is “abatement.” I am apparently not alone.

Amy Westervelt of Drilled writes a post titled An “Unabated” Disaster in which she complains that COP28 president oil CEO Al Jaber uses this word a lot.

Amidst a lot of big talk about fossil fuel phase down was one little word that puts the lie to all of it: "unabated." Whenever Al Jaber makes a commitment to moving the world away from fossil fuels it comes with this caveat. "Unabated" refers to fossil fuels that don't have carbon capture or direct air capture associated with them. The idea being that those emissions are being taken care of, so no problem. Except...the data on these technologies is far from conclusive about their capacity to "abate" anything but fossil fuel companies' responsibility to do anything at all about climate change.

He is not the only one. The entire fossil fuel industry says they are going to abate their emissions with carbon capture of some kind. Nations use it; the Province of Alberta might as well change its name to Abate-a.

There is nothing new about it either; if you look at the 2022 IPCC Working Group III summary for policymakers, the document that all parties sign off every word, abatement is defined as “human interventions that reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are released from fossil fuel infrastructure to the atmosphere” and shows up 26 times. I wrote at the time on Treehugger:

Note the careful wording about abatement, rather than eliminating fossil fuel production. According to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, it used to say: "More efforts are required to actively phase out all fossil fuels in the energy sector.” This is one of those compromises with fossil fuel producers who claim that they can abate their emissions with carbon capture and storage (CCS).

The Greenpeace website Unearthed reported on a leaked version of the summary, finding that Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries stripped the report of language that talked about eliminating fossil fuels, and pushed what it called a “circular carbon economy” with direct air capture (DAC) and carbon capture and storage. (CCS) as abatement. But they note:

 Relying on the development of technologies like DAC and CCS would allow nations to emit more greenhouse gases now on the optimistic assumption that they could draw them out of the atmosphere later, opening up the possibility of bringing temperatures back to within the limits agreed in the Paris Accord. 

But it doesn’t work; that’s why you see headlines like “Western premiers push back as Guilbeault calls for 'phase-out of unabated fossil fuels'- they know that “unabated fossil fuels” are the only kind they have.

We do need some abatement, some DAC and CCS, but as Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown has noted, not for fossil fuels; there is just too much carbon to abate. He writes:

“Whatever carbon removal we might eventually develop should only be used to address the final, hard-to-abate emissions left after fossil fuels are phased out. Most of all, carbon removal should never be used as a substitute for cutting emissions, or to help delay phasing out fossil fuels.”

In an interview I did with Nick Aster of South Pole for Green Building Advisor, he said much the same thing.

“Their purpose is to offset what can’t be reduced. You take your measurements, you understand where you are, you set your goals, you determine what can be reduced, and then offsets are simply to cover that remainder.”

The fossil fuel industry is using the promise of abatement to continue business as usual and every time you see the word, we should recognize what it is for: to continue selling fossil fuels.

The industry doesn’t even hide it anymore; Jonathan Foley quotes the head of Occidental Petroleum, which just got a big whack of dough from Joe Biden to do CCS, and who let out the dirty little secret:

Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum (which just received half of the $1.2 billion in carbon capture funding), said that because of Direct Air Capture, “…we don’t need to ever stop oil,” and that the technology gives the industry “a license to continue to operate for…60, 70, 80 years…”. She says the quiet part out loud, without shame, and she’s not alone.

So whenever you see the word abate or unabated in any of its versions in any discussion of fossil fuels, recognize it for what it is: a lie, a sham, a diversion, a form of what climate futurist Alex Steffen calls Predatory delay. When you hear the word “unabated,” reach for something and smack it down hard.

The quiet part out loud.

I started this post with a discussion about the origin of a phrase and will end with a discussion of another. Amy Westervelt also uses the Vicki Hollub quote:

In case there was any doubt about that, Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub has been saying the quiet part out loud. "We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Hollub told an oil and gas conference in March. “This gives our industry a licence to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think is going to be very much needed.”

“The quiet part out loud” popped into my head when I first heard Hollub’s statement in Bloomberg. It is a great phrase, often applied to quotes from Donald Trump. It’s a perfect fit. I looked for the source, and according to the Language Log, it appears to be that it came from…The Simpsons. Mark Liberman writes:

This seems like the sort of phrase that might have its origins in the King James Bible or a Shakespeare play. But as far as I can tell, it originates in episode 18 of season six of The Simpsons, "A Star is Burns", which first aired on March 5, 1995:

[The jury members are casting their votes for grand prize at the Springfield Film Festival. Jay Sherman is dismayed that Mr. Burns' movie is drawing votes.]
Jay: How can you vote for Burns' movie?
Krusty: Let's just say it moved me… TO A BIGGER HOUSE!! Oops, I said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.

For more entertainment, Juice Media explains all: