Vacuuming the World’s Wallets

,,,a precise operation performed on a subjective input does not produce an objective output.
It produces subjectivity in a lab coat.

Charles Rotter

Here’s another episode of my endless, some would say Sisyphean task of exposing absolute crap masquerading as SCIENCE and showing why targeted cuts in funding for such endeavors is not only good, but essential if scientific research is ever to regain institutional credibility.

“Vacuuming the Sky? Metaphorical Framing in News Coverage of Carbon Dioxide Removal Methods,” published in May in the journal Environmental Communication by five scholars at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is one of those pieces of crap. It is a supposed to be a serious, careful, methodologically fastidious study of a question that does not matter, conducted with great rigor in order to avoid the question that does.

ABSTRACT

Discussions of proposed climate solutions, such as carbon dioxide removal (CDR), are multi-layered and contested. This study examines the role that metaphors play as frame devices in news coverage (2018–2024) about CDR. Using critical metaphor analysis, we examined 257 articles from major UK, US, and Canadian news outlets to identify and interpret contrasting metaphorical expressions from journalists and their sources, including industry, science, and civil society. We find that a wide range of source domains, including references to, e.g. historical events, household objects, crime, religion, and medical analogies, is used to metaphorically frame CDR. These metaphors reflect actors’ competing ideologies and interests, rooted in hopeful rational-optimist and socio-ecological visions. We also discuss how metaphor use could influence public engagement and policy and reflect on how language might oversimplify or obscure critical aspects of the technology.

The authors read 257 news articles about carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, from UK, US, and Canadian outlets between 2018 and 2024, and catalogued the metaphors. This is not a caricature. That is the study. Using a technique called critical metaphor analysis, run through a dictionary-based identification procedure, a semantic tagging system, and coding software, they extracted 284 metaphors and sorted them into source domains: household objects, money and commerce, crime and war, religion, medicine, magic and fiction. All of this apparatus was brought to bear in order to establish, among other things, that a journalist once called direct air capture a “vacuum cleaner.”

It is worth slowing down on the machinery, because it is not incidental to this paper. It is the paper’s claim to be science rather than opinion, and it is a magic trick that a great deal of social science performs as a matter of routine.

The apparatus reports its success as a coefficient. The coders’ agreement was scored with a statistic called Krippendorff’s alpha, which measures how often two people working from the same codebook attach the same label to the same passage. That is a measure of agreement. It is not a measure of truth. Two astrologers handed an identical rulebook for sorting strangers by zodiac temperament could reach a perfectly respectable alpha, and it would tell you only that they had been trained to see the same things, not that the things were there. Agreement certifies that the coders share a lens. It says nothing about whether the lens shows anything. Reliability is not validity, and no quantity of the first ever adds up to the second.

To be fair, an intercoder check is not worthless. It guards against a single reader freelancing, imposing one idiosyncratic reading and calling it data. But watch what happens in this paper when the agreement comes back too low. The first pass produced an alpha of 0.66, which the authors themselves call merely “moderate.” A researcher who believed these categories carved nature at its joints might have treated that as a result: the domains are fuzzy, the judgment “is this a metaphor, and from which domain” is genuinely contestable, careful readers diverge. Instead the response was to run additional rounds of coding, discuss the discrepancies, refine the codebook, and keep going until the two coders converged at 0.8, whereupon the scheme was pronounced reliable. For sorting the metaphors into source domains, the same procedure, halted at 0.7, was declared “sufficient.”

That is the whole method in miniature. When two people disagreed about a subjective judgment, the paper did not conclude that the judgment was subjective. It coached the two people toward agreement and then reported the agreement as validation. That is not measuring a coastline. It is two surveyors arguing about where the coast begins until they agree to say the same number, and then publishing the number to two decimal places. The coefficient at the end does not certify that the metaphors belong to the domains. It certifies that the second coder was successfully trained to think like the first.

This is the load-bearing pretense, and is not unique to these authors. It is business as usual across a wide stretch of social science. Take an act of interpretation, reading meaning into text, which is exactly as subjective as it sounds, and dress it in the borrowed wardrobe of measurement: coders, codebooks, coefficients, thresholds, reliability scores. The arithmetic is impeccable.

But a precise operation performed on a subjective input does not produce an objective output. It produces subjectivity in a lab coat.

You can calculate, to as many decimals as you like, the average of a room’s opinions about a painting. The number will be exact, and it will tell you nothing about the painting.

Their headline finding is what they call a “framing asymmetry.” Industry sources and most journalists describe CDR with hopeful metaphors: a “journey,” a “moonshot,” an “Amazon pick-up package service” for carbon dioxide, a “one click” app to offset your emissions, a “vacuum cleaner,” a “sponge,” an antacid for the ocean. Critics and some scientists describe it with darker ones: a “fig leaf,” an “alibi” for continued pollution, “papal indulgences,” “a new form of colonialism.” The authors’ concern is that the hopeful metaphors are winning, and that this “depoliticizes” the debate, forecloses “open-ended ethical debate,” and, in their words, aligns with “neo-liberal capitalist ideology.”

Notice what is not in that list of concerns. Not the second law of thermodynamics. Not the cost per ton. Not the energy budget. Not the scale. The word “thermodynamics” does not appear in the paper. “Energy” appears mainly as a thing that a bad metaphor is said to “obscure.” The question of whether the vacuum cleaner actually works is not merely unanswered. It is ruled out of scope by design.

Here is the part that should make an honest reader put the paper down and stare at the wall for a moment. The authors are right about the vacuum cleaner. They say so plainly: calling direct air capture a “vacuum cleaner” obscures “its current high energy and water demands, the challenges of long-term storage” and shifts attention away from the source of emissions. That is a genuinely good observation. It is, in fact, the whole ballgame.

And having written that sentence, having placed their finger directly on the beating heart of the matter, what do the authors do? They file it under “naturalizing the technology within benign frames of reference,” note that cleanliness carries “implicit normative meanings,” and move on to the next metaphor. They noticed that the machine might not work, and concluded that the problem was the marketing.

Since the paper treats the energy and water and storage and cost as someone else’s department, allow me to visit that department, because it is not far away and the lights are on.

Carbon dioxide is about 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, roughly one molecule in 2,500. Pulling it back out means forcing enormous volumes of air across chemically active surfaces and then spending energy to release the captured gas. This is not an engineering detail that a cleverer startup will optimize away. It is a floor set by physics: separating a dilute substance from a mixture costs work, and the more dilute it is, the more it costs. Real systems land well above that floor. Mature solid-sorbent designs run on the order of 2,000 to 3,000 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 captured, and that is before you compress, transport, and inject it.

Now the economics. Mammoth, the Climeworks plant in Iceland, is the largest direct air capture facility in the world, with a nameplate capacity of 36,000 tons of CO2 per year. Its cost per ton is, by the company’s own description, closer to $1,000 than to $100. The aspiration, someday, with scale that does not yet exist, is $400 to $600 a ton.

And now the scale, which is where the metaphors go to die. In its first full year of operation, Mammoth was reported to have captured about 105 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Not per day. For the year. That is roughly one three-hundredth of its nameplate, and it is a rounding error against the roughly 40 billion tons the world emits annually. Every direct air capture plant ever built, across every company and every year combined, has removed a quantity of CO2 that vanishes into the noise of global emissions. To reach even one billion tons a year of removal, the low end of what the models assume, you would need thousands of plants the size of the one that captured 105 tons, consuming hundreds of terawatt-hours, comparable to doubling the electricity consumption of a mid-sized industrial country.

These are the facts that the “vacuum cleaner” metaphor obscures. The authors knew the metaphor obscured something. They just never looked to see what it was.

You might think a paper this alert to hidden framing would eventually turn that lens on itself. It does, briefly, and the result is instructive. The authors treat the critics’ metaphors, “colonialism,” “papal indulgences,” “fig leaf,” not as framing to be interrogated but as “moral recontextualization,” a phrase that means the critics are simply telling a deeper truth. The optimists’ metaphors are ideology. The critics’ metaphors are insight. The same analytical machine that finds sinister depoliticization in a “vacuum cleaner” finds only moral clarity in “a new form of colonialism.”

This is not a subtle bias. The paper’s objection to CDR optimism is not that it is physically unfounded, which it largely is. The objection is that it is insufficiently political, that it “aligns with neo-liberal capitalist ideology,” a diagnosis the authors reach by leaning on Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s “The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late.” There is a genuine irony buried here. A skeptic and an eco-Marxist could look at Mammoth’s 105 tons and its thousand-dollar tonnes and agree that direct air capture at scale is a boondoggle. But the skeptic gets there through the spreadsheet and the second law, while this paper gets there, or rather almost gets there, through a complaint that the metaphors are too fond of markets. The correct conclusion, reached for a reason that has nothing to do with whether the thing works.

The paper’s most revealing passage is one the authors clearly meant as a mark of scholarly conscience. They worry, out loud, that by using the term “carbon dioxide removal” at all they “might foreground solutions-oriented thinking,” and that “researching and analyzing CDR in the first place may contribute to its further legitimation.” Sit with that. The researchers are concerned that the act of studying a subject lends it unearned credibility, and they are concerned about this while studying it. This is not analysis. It is a field so convinced that words are the real terrain that it has frightened itself with its own vocabulary.

A neutral reader might point out that this is a communication paper, that metaphor is its lane, and that asking it to evaluate the thermodynamics of direct air capture is like asking a music critic to fix the piano. Fair enough, and if the paper had stayed in that lane I would have no quarrel with it. Cataloguing how a technology is described is a legitimate thing to do.

But the paper does not stay in its lane. It renders a verdict. It says the optimistic framing “obscures” the real issues, “forecloses” debate, and “marginalizes questions of systemic change.” Every one of those is a substantive claim that the optimism is unwarranted. And you cannot call a metaphor misleading without knowing what reality it is failing to convey. “Misleading” and “obscuring” are not properties of language alone; they are claims about the gap between the words and the world. The authors assert that gap on every page while refusing, on principle, to measure it. They want the authority of the word “obscures” without the work of finding out what is being obscured. The paper frets that optimism has turned the public question into “how fast to innovate” rather than “whether to deploy.” Meanwhile it has quietly foreclosed the only question that settles the matter, which is whether the machine can ever remove carbon at a price and a scale that a civilization can afford, by deciding in advance that the interesting object of study is the adjective and not the apparatus.

The “vacuum cleaner” metaphor may well be misleading. But it is misleading because a plant the size of a small industrial yard in Iceland removed about a hundred tons of carbon dioxide in a year, at something like a thousand dollars a ton, while the world put out forty billion. It is not misleading because it “depoliticizes systemic change” or serves the wrong ideology. The physics is the critique. The economics is the critique. The metaphor is a distraction, and a paper that studies the distraction with a straight face, while saying the physics under someone else’s job, has produced a perfect artifact of a discipline that believes if we could only agree on a prettier picture, the kilowatt-hours would sort themselves out.

When the so-called science advocates and researchers squeal like stuck pigs whenever there’s a hint of scrutiny in funding, this is another example that should be put in front of them.