Welcome to the carbon looney bin

When more than a year ago I wrote how the EU was scheming to make carbon emissions more expensive by reducing the availability of its top industrial scourge, carbon permits, and creating an artificial shortage to push prices higher, I thought I was predicting a bleak future. Today, I stand corrected.

The EU is actually scheming a bleaker than bleak future, in which carbon dioxide will not simply be an expensive by-product of energy generation. It will be an expensive commodity that must be used. Or else.

Not only does the EU want to turn CO2 into a commodity but it wants to turn it into a heavily regulated commodity because it’s really serious about net zero, nay, sub-net zero.

This is the gist of a paper that will be officially made public tomorrow by the Commission, along with another highly fascinating document but more on that later. The paper, leaked to Euractiv, lays out a plan for turning CO2 into a tradable commodity and building a whole market around it. A heavily regulated market. Really heavily regulated. Because that’s the only way such a from-scratch, totally homemade, market could come into existence.

Called “industrial carbon management”, the plan aims to combine carbon permits with carbon capture, including direct-air capture, and storage or reuse. And it’s urgent, because “the EU will need to be ready to capture at least 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030” and “up to 450 million tonnes by 2050,” per the paper.

For context, the EU generated 2.73 billion tonnes of CO2 back in 2022, down from 3.76 billion tonnes in 1990 — its base year for carbon reduction targets.

Post-2050 comes the sub-zero stage of the EU’s transition plan that will require lots of direct-air capture. Not a single gram of CO2 is to be allowed to fly into the air without attempting to capture it and store it or use it.

Now, I’m all for reuse and recycling, as most of you know. But what the EU is planning is effectively creating a whole new industry… that happens to require a massive new infrastructure. Yep, you guessed it. Pipelines. Lots of them. And even more regulations. Because apparently a market is not worth having in Europe unless it is regulated to the gills and then some.