Carbon Sequestration, Lap Band Surgery and the Seductive Allure of the Grand, Deferred Solution

There's a paper out (discussed here) which claims that (according to the Guardian):

[G]overnments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the "totally erroneous" premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University

We'll see if this actually kills support for CCS, but even before the paper came out, the popularity of the idea was a clear example of Grand Deferred Solution Syndrome (GDSS).

GDSS actually requires at least two solutions. The non-GDSs need to be simple, practical, available for immediate implementation, with high likelihoods of success. The GDS (usually produced by a marketing department or think tank, though spontaneous GDS formation has been observed) does not need to be simple or practical. Its implementation date should be distant and open-ended and its likelihood of success can be anywhere from small to negligible. Sufferers of GDSS will opt for for the GDS even when its chances are one or more orders of magnitude lower than any of the non-GDSs.

Notable examples of non-GDSs include carbon taxes, plug-in hybrids and diet & exercise.* Notable examples of GDSs include fuel cell cars, liposuction and about twenty percent of solutions using the phrase "market forces."

Almost everyone has suffered a few bouts of GDSS, but cases involving climate change may be reaching pandemic proportions.


* This does not apply to those suffering from certain diagnosed medical conditions and eating disorders. For those people, extreme measures may be the only reasonable option.