International experts asked to make carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a worldwide industrial tool for combating climate change have criticized the idea, the finance and the politics now engulfing it.

“It’s a scandal that CCS has been left out of the (Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism),” said John Ashton, the United Kingdom’s Special Representative for Climate Change. He was talking told a CCS conference in Oslo, where world science and political leaders have gathered since Wednesday.

The Kyoto CDM financially rewards emissions-curbing projects in the developing world by the amount of carbon-dioxide they keep out of the atmosphere. Rich countries and industries can meet their Kyoto targets by buying carbon credits from CDM project owners.

Yesterday, Nobel Laureate Dr. Rajendra Pachauri also attacked CCS’s being left out of CDM, and suggested it might have been included had the United States and Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol and applied its economic incentive, CDM.

Another CCS expert said the CCS experts themselves were running the risk of being part of the problem and of unleashing a public backlash against the industrial process for cleaning up emissions.

“There are barriers to establishing CCS that have not been heard,” said Heleen de Coninck, manager of the Energy Centre of the Netherlands, a European pioneer in the study of CCS’s politics and economics.

“There is no CCS storage potential worldwide,” de Coninck said, adding, “And CCS is not carbon-neutral without perhaps biomass added.” De Coninck also warned that CCS experts were starting to show signs of “Group Think”, a condition where critical voices are not heard against the powerful group voice.

“The public needs an independent expert community that improves, not promotes the technology,” she said, adding, “Engage the public “for real”.” The public was already against some CCS projects in the Netherlands, while in China, an increasingly vocal public was demanding CCS even at smaller industrial plants that were known polluters.

Ashton and de Coninck’s comments followed an appeal by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso who said “CCS can contribute to the recovery of the European Union economy.”

CCS technology is seen granting a powerful economic edge to all can control it, and Barroso was careful to remind many in Oslo from the developing world that “technology transfer” was also seen.