U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has been, for several years now, tied with Greta Thunberg as the most outspoken global leader in his attacks on the fossil fuel industry. (He memorably told oil industry executives, for instance, that “your core product is our core problem.”) And his introductory remarks at COP 28 this week were no exception.

“Earth’s vital signs are failing,” said the man with the best mandate to actually speak for the Earth. “Record emissions, ferocious fires, deadly droughts and the hottest year ever.”

But when he got to specifics, Guterres was even more on point. “The science is clear,” he said. “We must accelerate a just, equitable transition to renewables.”

I want to focus on one word in that litany: “abate.”

What Guterres is trying to head off is the fossil fuel industry scam de jour decade. It’s abundantly clear that coal, oil and gas are breaking the climate system; it’s also abundantly clear that the people who own coal, oil and gas reserves don’t care. In an effort to keep burning them, so they can continue to collect the returns, they propose building vast engineering projects alongside fossil-fuel generating plants, to capture the carbon dioxide from the exhaust stream. That is, they want to “abate” the damage of their product.

Activists have been demanding a fossil fuel phase out, but the power brokers—U.S. climate envoy John Kerry chief among them—have been offering instead a phaseout of “unabated” fossil fuel.

It doesn’t really work—one attempt after another has been abandoned, and Stanford’s Mark Jacobson has shown why in a series of seminal papers. As the New York Times explained earlier this year, “after taking into account the energy used to capture and isolate CO2 from flue gas at a fossil fuel-burning industrial plant, the carbon capture system would reduce the plant’s net emissions by only 10 to 11 percent, not the estimated 80 to 90 percent cited by proponents.”

But even if you could physically make it work it would still be absurd, at least on our planet, which in 2023 has figured out how to cheaply capture the power of the sun to produce energy. If coal or gas-fired power is already considerably more expensive than solar energy, imagine what happens to that cost differential if you add an enormous complex of pipes and pumps to take the co2 and pump it off to some abandoned salt mine for storage.

In fact, the cost of doing this is so prohibitive that no coal or oil or gas company or utility wants to pay for it themselves—instead, they use their political power to make taxpayers foot the bill, so they can keep selling their product. In order to secure Joe Manchin’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden had to lard it with........

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