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Kia ora, thanks for this, do you know what level of investment there is in technology and science that will allow the burning of fossil fuels to continue 'safely', versus technology and mechanisms that are predicated on the elimination of harmful carbon emissions? I mean, if this were an allegory, anyone would recognise straight away that trying to design a system to correct a flawed system, without addressing the reasons the system is flawed in the first place (i.e. overconsumption, waste etc), is just going to result in further and deeper flaws - and usually, in the case of an allegory, a grizzly death....!!

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I haven't looked at investment levels, but I have the impression that improving efficiency and reducing waste are not high on the agenda, to judge by the existence of things such as electric SUVs. I do worry that we are digging ourselves into a deeper hole too.

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This was really interesting, thank you. The greenwashing can be difficult to get around. I recently emailed Genesis to see what they're doing about reducing the burning of coal, and to their credit they did get back to me with some good information. But I find their explanation about using biomass at Huntly Power Station, and that this is "emissions friendly fuel" has me a little stumped. Is it really emissions friendly, when they still have to burn the wood to create the biomass?

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I think that there is a valid argument that burning biomass is better than coal, because when it was growing, the biomass sucked carbon from the atmosphere and so the carbon it releases when it burns is not extra carbon, as it is with fossil fuels. However it does depend on the agricultural system that the biomass comes from, because if, for example, it came from land that was deforested or ploughed, there may have been big releases of carbon from the soil in the process.

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Yes, interesting points. 🤔 in this case the biomass has come from overseas and been shipped into NZ, but the plans are to use offcuts from wood grown in NZ. Better than coal though, as you say.

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Hmm, shipping biomass from overseas doesn’t sound good. But if it was a use for forestry waste that would be really positive.

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Great article, as usual. The quote by oceanographer David Ho is particularly enlightening. And depressing. I'd not thought about how we store carbon dioxide after we've captured it -- thanks for enlightening me! There are so many factors involved that the general public just does not know, and we've blithely buried our heads as we chug along in our industrial lives...

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Thanks Heather. I found it fascinating to get my head around what might be involved in a system to remove carbon dioxide.

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Loved this, thank you for this overview Melanie. It is so abundantly clear that the vast majority of our energy in the climate space has to be directed towards reducing emissions - turning the heads of the general public towards niche, too-little-too-late technologies is a dangerous distraction from simple, cheap solutions that are already available to us, like maintaining (and ideally expanding) the forests we already have, and reducing transport emissions through mode shift.

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