A story in the Telegraph last week featured a report by Energy Systems Catapult which recommended the Government commit to a £30 billion project to pull CO2 from the air.
So what if the U.K. does not comply with its Government's self-imposed target? What is the 'risk'? And why should the public fork out billions of pounds merely for a daft machine that serves no function other than help a Government achieve its ambition that nobody else really cares about?
Government vanity project HS2, for example, originally had a similar estimated cost of £37.5 billion in 2009 prices.
All they really know is that it will be required to remove 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year from 2050 - approximately a tenth of the U.K.'s current domestic annual emissions.
Air capture of CO2 serves no useful purpose whatsoever.
To extract 48 million tonnes of CO2 would therefore require power stations with a capacity of 14 gigawatts - that's more than four times the capacity of Hinkley Point C. That nuclear power station itself, dubbed at the time "The most expensive power station in the world", was initially estimated to cost £26 billion but more recent estimates are putting the cost closer to £46 billion.
The even crazier idea of pulling CO2 - which is still a trace gas at just 400 parts per million - from the air and then burying it underground faces a similar future.
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