Carbon capture is not the answer to the climate crisis

The Observer is correct to highlight the urgency of the climate crisis and the signal this year’s devastating hurricane season sends (“Hurricane Milton is a portent. But it’s not too late”). But your conclusion that carbon capture and storage is the “last option” is misleading, defeatist and dangerous.

Carbon capture has a 50-year record of failure. In a half century, the industry has captured a minuscule proportion of global emissions and left a trail of failed projects and wasted public money in its wake. The fossil fuel industry knows CCS is not the answer, yet it keeps pushing it as a distraction tactic to delay the transition to clean energy. The irony is that the very industry you suggest should be paying for cleaning up emissions is instead pocketing billions in public money for failed CCS. Money that should go to transitioning to renewable energy solutions.

Supporting Ed Miliband’s recent announcement to waste £22bn of public money on the fossil fuel industry’s snake oil of carbon capture and blue hydrogen is a shocking misread of the facts.

If CCS is the “weapon” this editorial claims, it is, at best, a very expensive butter knife. We must not give up on the only solution to climate change that works: phasing out fossil fuels.
Rosemary Harris
Brighton

Sex is a privilege, not a right

While some might consider Philippa’s response to be pragmatic, there are times in life where a compromise is not the only answer (“Ask Philippa: my partner wants more sex and more enthusiasm from me”).

Being pestered for sex is annoying but what is described is emotional manipulation. Anyone who rates their partner’s performance in a derogatory manner must firstly understand that their whims are a privilege and not a right.

Women have the agency to choose what they do with their bodies without having to manage their partner’s sulky inability to handle “rejection”. Philippa’s advice may well pave a path to resolution but, by omitting this basic starting point, it undermines everything we seek to teach young people about consent.
Mona Sood
Southend-on-Sea, Essex

Don’t blame headteachers

Anna Fazackerley reports that headteachers feel “under pressure to turn around a national crisis in school attendance” (“UK academies ‘very sorry’ for policies saying pupils must attend when unwell”). How are they supposed to do this when the reasons for this crisis are largely outside their control? It is not headteachers but politicians who have ensured that school has increasingly become an unsatisfactory experience.

The reasons for so much pupil dissatisfaction include: lack of resources; an inappropriate curriculum, the teaching of which is almost entirely geared to external examinations; the disappearance of practical and creative activities; an increase in bullying and feelings of inadequacy promoted by social media platforms; overworked and exhausted teachers who have no time to deal with these problems or even recognise, let alone attend to, the needs of individual children and who increasingly leave the profession at the first opportunity. If the government wants to improve school attendance, it should start by reforming the hopelessly outdated policies that it has inherited.
Michael Pyke
Shenstone, Lichfield, Staffordshire

Israel’s doomed strategy

As a big fan of Kenan Malik, I’m disappointed by his adoption of a plague-on-both-your-houses narrative concerning the crisis in the Middle East (“Israel is not ‘saving western civilisation’. Nor is Hamas leading ‘the resistance’”). While Israel had, until 7 October, attempted to “favour” Hamas to divide the Palestinian resistance and undermine popular support for the secular PLO, it was a strategy doomed to fail.

Israel’s success at co-opting the Palestinian Authority into doing its security bidding is in stark contrast to its failure to “tame” Hamas despite its successive brutal assaults since 2006, culminating in the current slaughter of civilians, first in Gaza and now in Lebanon. Even after a year of carnage, 70% of Gazans approve of the 7 October attack and Hamas’ role in the war, according to the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research. Like it or loathe it, Hamas continues to offer the only serious resistance to Israeli occupation.
Andy de la Tour
London N6

Meloni on the bandwagon

Re “The 1970s communist hero inspiring Italy’s youth – and its resurgent far right”: Giorgia Meloni writing in the visitor book at the Enrico Berlinguer exhibition in Rome that Berlinguer had a “political story” and that “politics is the only possible solution to problems” is a brazen attempt to suggest through association that she is like him: a good politician. It’s a shame that, in this postmodern age, the present prime minister of Italy is drawn to him now for purely expedient reasons and without taking on any of his politics.
Tristan Moss
York

Megaphone bigotry

Sonia Sodha is right to argue that Kemi Badenoch is brighter than her “cartoon villain” depiction allows and has greater appeal than her divisiveness suggests (“Kemi Badenoch is no cartoon villain. Labour underestimates her at its peril”).

It is also true that Conservatives have a better record than Labour of promoting minority ethnic and female MPs to high office. Not all of Badenoch’s detractors have a problem with “rightwing politicians of colour, particularly women”, or are exclusively on the left. Badenoch attracts dislike because her negative focus on the vulnerable in general, and minority ethnic groups in particular, is obsessive, while her party hopes her ethnicity offers insurance against reproach. This enables the right to dispense with dog whistles and, instead, delight in her megaphone bigotry.
Paul McGilchrist
Cromer, Norfolk

Rave, yes. Rap, no

While we should all support artistic freedom and challenging societal expectations through art, we have to maintain a certain standard of artistic merit in our productions (“Artistic freedom in our theatres is being lost to fear and self-censorship”). Stef O’Driscoll’s Manchester rave scene/Shakespeare mash-up was an intriguing concept. However, a rap would be contextually strange and any reference to Israel-Gaza would be completely foreign. I’ve been to my fair share of Manchester rave nights and not once have I witnessed any raver seek to engage another in a discussion of Middle East politics amid the drum’n’bass.
Michael Bennett
Manchester