Dear President Trump, Please Make Carbon Capture Go Away | The American Spectator

You might not have noticed this, but in the run-up to next week’s climate confab in Brazil, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates put out a memo that largely repudiated most of the narratives underlying the global warming hysteria the Left has foisted on the developed world since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.

The memo is 17 pages long, and while it still contains a lot of crackpottery — it’s written by Gates, after all, and he might be the world’s most prominent psychopath — it’s essentially a baseball bat to the knees of the climate hysterics who have spent a lot more than the last 12 years telling everyone the world was going to end in 12 years thanks to climate change. (RELATED: Bill Gates and the Redemption Racket)

It’s obvious that movement has lost momentum. The election of Donald Trump was like a pin striking the global warming balloon, and now we can finally begin re-examining the things that were done inside that balloon.

And one of the most obvious changes that ought to be made is to stop confiscating taxes from productive Americans to pay for one of the least productive scams ever perpetrated on the public.

I’m talking about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a Rube Goldberg contraption of a process by which carbon dioxide is sucked out of industrial smokestacks and piped long distance into holes in the ground somewhere where it is then stashed away, presumably for eternity. (RELATED: Carbon Capture: The Scam Agreed Upon)

Brine formations. Played-out oil wells. You name it.

Bear in mind that carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas in our atmosphere. It’s a trace gas, with concentrations well below one half of one percent of the air around us — better than three-quarters of which is nitrogen, by the way.

And contrary to the screaming of the well-paid global warming shills, there is no definitive showing that more carbon dioxide in the air means more global warming. It’s a “greenhouse gas,” meaning that it will trap the earth’s heat and stop it from leaving the atmosphere, but as there is a just-near-negligible amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the effect of a little more CO2 in the air is also negligible.

Interestingly, though, there is a non-negligible effect of having a bit more carbon dioxide in our air over the past few decades. And it turns out it’s a good thing.

Our planet is lusher and greener now than it was a half-century ago. We’ve gained practically an entire continent full of greenery. It turns out that plants with more access to carbon dioxide need less water to grow, and so having more CO2, even if it’s just a 10th of a percent change in the atmospheric makeup, is making deserts recede into grasslands and forests.

Our country is exceptionally green, so you’ll know. And that means our farms are exceptionally productive. We’ve already cut down a lot on the CO2 emissions of our industrial sector over the past few decades — though, to some sad degree, it’s the result of exporting a lot of that sector to China, whose CO2 emissions are off the charts, along with real pollution, the global warming hysterics can’t seem to get too worked up about.

One wonders if it’s a good idea to sequester carbon from an environmental perspective. Maybe it’s better to feed the trees with it.

But what’s without a doubt true is that it’s an atrocious idea for your tax dollars to pay oil companies and others to bury the CO2 from hydrocarbon production, oil refining, and other industrial activity. And your tax dollars are pouring forth in a gusher on this.

Depending on what sort of facility we’re talking about, eliminating carbon emissions along the lines of the climate-hysterical Left’s “net zero” goals will add 20 to 90 percent to the operating expenses of an American industrial plant. To offset such a catastrophic burden, the feds created something called the Section 45Q tax credit, which was greatly expanded during the idiotic 2022 Inflation Reduction Act as part of the Team Biden Green New Deal scam. (RELATED: Trump Reloads an ‘America First’ Energy Agenda While Reasserting Sound Science)

Specifically, projects meeting prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements, the credit provides up to $85 per metric ton of CO2 captured from point sources and either stored geologically or used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) or other utilization (like, for example, synthetic fuels; you can create synfuels using CO2, but it’s a lousy way to make synfuels).

One of the lousier parts of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed earlier this year is that it increased the amount of the credit — from $60 per metric ton to $85 — that industry could get for “utilization” of CO2 as opposed to just burying it in the ground.

An even bigger scam, which is part of the carbon capture universe, is something called Direct Air Capture, which involves sucking air into giant carbon capture facilities, segregating the CO2 out, and piping it somewhere. Amazingly, the Big Beautiful Bill increased the subsidy for that boondoggle of an idea from $130 per metric ton of CO2 up to $180.

And all of these credits are transferable, because of course they are. So this is a big expansion of the whole “carbon credit” corporate welfare scam the enviro-Left has been running for decades.

And just more than $50 billion of your federal tax dollars are running out of the Treasury to subsidize this ridiculousness. And as of right now, it’s getting worse — just under $80 billion in carbon capture projects are currently on the books.

If ever there was something we could cut out of the federal budget, it’s this idiocy.

How did any of this get off the ground? Fear.

The Left has been demanding for decades that we get off “fossil fuels” as the main source for meeting our energy needs, but those in their camp with functional brains have always understood that’s never actually going to happen. Just look at Europe and its blackouts and economic collapse, and you can see what trying to ban hydrocarbon energy looks like. (RELATED: EU Climate Goals: Pure Placebo Politics)

But while they couldn’t get rid of fossil fuels, what these villains could get away with was shackling the productive parts of the energy sector with their enviro-scams. In the case of carbon capture, essentially, the oil and gas industry was told that if it wanted to continue drilling for black gold, it would waste money on these carbon capture projects.

And with those subsidies, it turns out doing stupid things like running a pipeline from an oil refinery to a hole in the ground miles away in order to rob the trees of food is a profitable racket.

It would be different if there were an actual use for CO2. As said above, you can make synfuels with it, and there are people out there using it to make concrete. Somebody not long ago announced they’d figured out how to make cellulose out of CO2, and if that can be done in a way that scales up and makes a profit without getting mailbox money from Uncle Sam, great.

The trees might not like it, but there isn’t anything wrong with innovation.

Running scams on the taxpayer, however, is not innovation.

And to describe how poisonous all this is, the reason the fresh carbon capture swag got into the Big Beautiful Bill was that the oil companies wanted it.

They’ve gone from fighting off the enviros who were trying to kill them and agreeing to build the stupid carbon capture projects so they could be left alone to produce fuel for our economy, to now wanting more subsidy money.

The signs say Don’t Feed The Bears. This is why.

And in state legislatures all over the country, there are Republican legislators voting for the carbon capture idiocy because the oil company lobbyists are begging them.

Until the constituents start hearing about things like eminent domain for carbon pipelines running through their property. Then it gets sticky. Now, opposition to this stuff is turning into a conservative litmus test, and politicians who had been making votes trying to keep domestic energy production alive amid the onslaught of the little Bidens and their depradations are being hammered as RINOs.

We have a case of this going on in Louisiana, and it’s one of the dumber things you’ll ever see; there’s a candidate running on carbon capture with no record on the issue, trashing ideological allies who also oppose it. But that only makes it obvious the best way to approach carbon capture and keep it from tearing the GOP apart in the next election cycle’s primaries is just to get rid of the whole thing.

There are growing voices talking about the potential harm to the environment that these projects pose. You wouldn’t think there would be much; after all, it’s just CO2.

But one of these pipelines burst in Sartartia, Mississippi, a few years ago, and dozens of people got sick. You don’t really want to breathe in a cloud of CO2. That’s what you breathe out, not in.

What’s also not known is what happens when CO2 in large concentrations interacts with groundwater after it’s been pumped into these reservoirs.

CO2 and water combine to make carbonic acid. That’s a weak acid, and in fact, it’s what they use to put the fizz into soda drinks. It’s also the active ingredient in why you can pour Diet Coke on the chrome bumper of your car and watch it clean the dirt off.

Maybe having your tap water come out as Perrier is a bad thing. Maybe it’s not worth it to spend billions of dollars of your tax money to find out, especially when the feds can’t balance a budget.

While this dumb government shutdown continues — I’m thinking it’ll end soon, but that’s for another column — perhaps Team Trump could look at suspending these ridiculous tax credits for carbon capture. It’s pretty hard to see any benefit to them.

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