Arthur Dent wrote:
If scrubbers are feasible, then they are fine. Otherwise, the refining industry is driven by the markets for their products. If there are refining outputs that have literally no value outside burning, then some sort of disposal is needed. Disposing them by dumping them in the atmosphere is no longer acceptable.
That's not the reality of refining crude oil though. A barrel of oil (depending on the type) generally breaks down as such:

You don't really get to decide what molecules come out of the barrel. That leaves a lot of products that are used in large quantities today for energy production - gasoline, diesel, LPG's, jet fuel - that you suggest should not be "burned" into the atmosphere, but rather disposed. It's disingenuous to say those products have no value but burning - that burning creates significant amounts of energy, that the modern world absolutely depends on. I'm not sure how excited any of us are to hop on a battery or nuclear powered jumbo jet to fly to Europe. We're going to need some pretty big batteries to power cargo ships across the Pacific.
There's a market aspect of this too. If you were only to use, say, 10% of that barrel for usable products, the cost of those products is going to escalate dramatically. Crude oil is still expensive to produce. Even the easiest access (Saudi Arabia) has a ~$25 per barrel cost to lift. The market pays what it does for that oil because refiners and petrochemical companies can sell all the pieces of that barrel.
Yes, a lot of petrochemicals can also be refined in higher percentages from condensate / wet gas and natural gas sources, but not all. There's an argument for "well, we didn't always use oil", but we also didn't have a society full of plastics and other synthetic materials.
Here's an additional graphic from the Economist with some good breakdowns (spoilered for size):
As for scrubbers, there have been pretty significant breakthroughs in recent years. I would not be surprised at all if we are able to have a market ready solution for zero emission gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2030. Industrial scale applications are getting closer too.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying "100% of national power generation from renewable sources" (along with decarbonizing all industries and transportation) is an unnecessarily impracticable goal. We can aim for a higher percentage from renewable sources (even 50% in 10 years would be an incredible accomplishment), and attempt to eliminate the environmental/climate impact from non-renewable sources. That's achievable, practical, and while still politically difficult could still potentially make it through legislation. Maybe that's the intent of "decarbonizing" = zero net emissions and I'm overreacting, but I currently read it as "keep it in the ground".