I’m sorry to have to tell you this, child, but politicians and government leaders and corporations and the media WILL lie to you.
They do it all the time. Sometimes blatantly, but often cleverly, selecting pleasant words to deceive and manipulate...
Using the word “clean” in terms like “clean energy” and “clean technology” is a great example of an attempt to use language to create reality. I describe the use of the word “clean” in these terms as thought-terminating dogma because it hides the material realities of what so-called clean energy and clean technologies actually require.
When people read the term “clean technology,” they assume it means that the technology is good or will somehow “save the planet.” They don’t think any further about what that technology might involve, because the word “clean” has stopped them from looking more deeply at the issue.
A recent article about direct air capture (DAC) technologies — “massive facilities that remove carbon dioxide from the sky” — says the Biden administration is providing over a billion dollars in grants for this new “clean technology industry.”
Being generous about the meaning of “clean,” we understand that “clean” is applied here because these machines capture more CO2 than they emit as they are running and, at a few facilities, store that CO2 in the ground. (To date, most DACs have not stored the CO2, but rather sold it to — smack your forehead now — oil companies for “enhanced oil extraction,” a process that obviously renders the DAC technologies moot in regards to “saving the planet from climate change.”)
To build the DAC technologies requires mining materials (and destroying the land in the process), refining those materials, manufacturing the machines, installing them, and supplying energy to keep them running— a whole lot of energy, because they are energy intensive technologies. Each one of these steps creates CO2 emissions.
By using the word “clean,” corporations and the Biden administration are hoping to create the illusion that DAC technologies will somehow solve climate change. Never mind that to capture annual global CO2 emissions would require over three million of these machines. Oh, the profit incentives for that industry!
Corporations can win big on both ends of this game: They get paid to emit CO2 into the atmosphere — by extracting fossil fuels and other materials, and selling these materials and the products they make from them — and get paid to make and install DAC technology to pull that CO2 from the atmosphere and store it or use it to extract more materials.
If the word “clean” is used often enough, by corporations that wish to profit from extraction and from the products they manufacture, by government administrations that enable these corporations by writing laws and supplying incentives to support their activities, and by the media reporting on all this, then eventually the public comes to believe DACs and other so-called clean technologies are indeed clean.
What the general public understands to be clean might be very different from the reality, but say it often enough — “clean, clean, clean!” — and you can convince yourself that all these technologies being described as “clean” appear out of thin air without even a smudge of dirt from the land destroyed to build them or a single molecule of CO2 emitted in the process.
That's just one part of a long and wickedly satirical essay titled: "A Guide to Being Delusional."
