Well yeah, degrowth is a precondition to any of the mitigation technologies on that list. The water’s coming in into the boat way faster than we can bail, so the priority should be to plug the leaks.

The chart reflects the fact that CCS is an immature technology that will be a nice to have if we can drop the energy requirements and store carbon in a form that’s stable at normal room temperatures and pressures. There’s some bench-scale experiments that have had promising results to that effect, so I don’t see any reason not to fund that research. We spend more money on worse stuff by a country mile.

Plus, all the other bars on that chart have their issues. The mineral requirement to build transmission and storage infrastructure for wind and solar at current rates of energy demand growth will require massive increases in mining for copper and lithium. Agricultural carbon storage has error bars you could drive a truck through because no one can measure it. Attempts to pay farmers for soil carbon sequestration have been a mess and we’re not sure about what the turnover rates for soil carbon pools might be under a warmer and wetter climate. Forest preservation just avoids future emissions and many forests are switching from carbon sinks to sources as they catch fire.

Fuel switching to natural gas: A recent study suggests NG is probably worse than coal. Plus quantification of leakage is notoriously messy.

We’re kinda boned and CCS only really makes sense under FALGSC conditions, but it could help if we manage to pull out of our capitalist nosedive.