How a Secret Vote by U.N. Scientists Legitimized Carbon Capture and Skewed Decades of Climate Policy

Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica From the series Carbon Captured: How the fossil fuel industry influence climate research , an investigation from ProPublica and Drilled In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change. To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work. Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested.