A mental model for thinking about highly emitting industrial processes

Chris posted this in his listening notes on the Zero Carbon Cement episode of the Volts podcast. It's a brilliant mental model for thinking about how to decarbonise highly emitting process, and so I'm capturing it to refer back to later.

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You can think of some important, but polluting processes like having a leaky tap. It’s really handy to have taps, but when they leak, it causes as a mess if we’re lucky, and at worst causes significant damage to our surroundings.
We can’t get rid of the tap, so we have three options:

• Fix the leak – we can fix the leak, so when we use the tap, it no longer leaks all over the floor. In climate terms, this is a bit like redesigning a process or activity to no longer emit needless carbon.
• Put a bucket under the tap – if we don’t want to do that, in the short term, we can put a bucket under the tap to catch the leak. We still need to dispose of the water that builds up, and it doesn’t address the root cause, but if you don’t want to change much about your tap, this is a measure some people take. In climate terms, this is like point source capture on a process that emits carbon – like putting a scrubber on a smokestack, and so on. It’s a bunch of hassle to clean up, but slightly better than the third option
• Keep using the tap, and let it pour all over the floor and then clean up the mess with a mop and bucket – if we don’t want to do either of the options above, one option is to mop up all the water over the floor. This means we change the original activity even less, but now we have to spend loads of time and energy mopping up water and disposing of it, instead of doing useful stuff. In climate terms, this is like Direct Air Capture – now we’re spending loads of energy trying to collect the carbon in a really spread out, diffuse form, before we can even think about disposing of it safely.

I really like this model, because it really highlights how wasteful the second two options are, and that there needs to be someone doing a bunch of wasteful busywork, caused entirely because we are deliberately choosing to avoid fixing the leak. It’s also really easy to picture – almost no-one likes mopping stuff up if it’s avoidable.