Natural gas and oil pipelines, no; unicorn fart ga$, yes.
/A pipe full of nothing but profits
Daniel Horowitz:
Think climate communism is relegated to California and the Democrats? Think again. It is rearing its ugly head in the Dakotas and upper Midwest more than anywhere else in the country. Not only are these red-state governments spending a ton on green energy, they are grabbing private property for the “carbon capture and sequestration” scam to build pipelines and caves underground, not to allow oil and gas to flow, but to magically capture carbon – all for a lie. Where is the outrage?
Thanks to the federal and state governments monopolizing the public square to perpetuate the carbon climate lie, companies like Summit Carbon Solutions have been able to take a maniacally uneconomical idea and potentially make it profitable. The endless tax credits, worth as much as $210 billion over the next 15 years, proposed in the “Inflation Reduction Act” last year were the icing on the cake. Now this company, controlled by well-connected GOP donors in the region, is going ahead with construction of a 2,000-mile pipeline, not for oil and gas, but to senselessly sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. It will be routed through Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, and North Dakota, supposedly transporting CO2 emissions from Midwestern ethanol plants to North Dakota just northwest of Bismarck, where they will be stored underground in very expensive infrastructure.
h, and there is the storage issue. As Robert Bryce observes, “We would need to find an underground location (or locations) able to swallow a volume equal to the contents of 41 oil supertankers each day, 365 days a year.”
Moreover, some estimate that carbon capture and storage would ultimately produce more CO2 through the process than the amount actually stored. One estimate is that 101,822 tons of captured CO2 would produce 120,400 tons of CO2.
Yet Republicans are completely bought into this scam because the government has made it profitable in the short term for special interests. Why has Governor Noem remained so silent? Well, the petition for condemnation on this particular eminent domain demand was signed by Aaron Scheibe, Noem’s former chief of staff, and Brent Koenecke, current treasurer of the South Dakota Republican Party.
And so on.
This is a project that will produce nothing of value except profits for politicians and their friends. But that’s okay, in fact, that’s the point: the fact that the pipeline will be carrying a useless substance rather than the energy that would power our country just proves how pure our motives are. Woodrow Wilson dragged us into WWI and became the darling of the early progressives by loudly announcing that the United States had no national interest at stake in a Europan war, we were joining in the fight to save the world for Democracy. That standard of nobility rmains the progressive touchstone today.