Posted on 02/23/2024 5:13:11 PM PST by Twotone
Carbon sequestration has become Republicans’ most popular answer to climate change, with GOP governors across western states pumping massive stores of concentrated CO2 into underground chambers. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, who chairs the Western Governors Association, currently leads the charge to his state’s detriment as a carbon-powerhouse and leading coal producer.
Last week, lawmakers in Wyoming heard from members of the CO2 Coalition who challenged Governor Gordon’s pledge to decarbonize the energy-intensive state with carbon capture programs. Dr. William Happer, the founder of the CO2 Coalition, compared such efforts to a “religion” before the Senate Agriculture, State and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee.
“If you look around, you need something bigger than yourself to make your life worthwhile: Happer said. “What’s bigger than saving the planet? The problem is the planet doesn’t need saving.”
The hearing featured testimony from Happer along with the coalition’s executive director, Dr. Gregory Wrightstone, and Frits Byron Soepyan, a chemical engineer with the non-profit. Other members of the CO2 Coalition’s board who did not testify at the hearing include Drs. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, and John Clauser, a current Nobel laureate in physics honored at the White House last spring.
“Let me just address this 1.5-degree narrative,” Wrightstone said.
It’s already warmed 1.2 degrees. So, of that 1.5, it’s warmed 1.2. So, what they’re telling you is beware of three-tenths of a degree centigrade of warming which equates to half a degree Fahrenheit. It’s just changed half a degree Fahrenheit in this room recently, you’ve never noticed it. It wouldn’t trigger the thermostats on or off. It changes more than half a degree Fahrenheit between 11 a.m. and noon on almost every single day, and if you’re that worried about half a degree Fahrenheit of warming, you can move 19 miles farther north and your average temperature will drop half a degree Fahrenheit. That’s what they’re warning us about.
Last week’s proceedings were held in response to Gordon’s decision to back out of a debate with the coalition he had agreed to in November.
“It is no secret that many legislators disagree with the governor and his stance and policies regarding CO2,” said Sen. Cheri Steinmetz, the chair of the committee. “However, this meeting is strictly about CO2 and related policy issues, and in no way intended to be personal in any way to the governor.”
The forum was orchestrated to protest Gordon’s “decarbonizing the West” initiative that was declared a top priority while head of the Western Governors Association. In a speech at Harvard University last fall, Gordon, who presides over the nation’s leading coal producer, boasted, “We are the first state that has said we are going to be carbon negative.”
“You can’t really do that without direct air capture or somehow doing carbon capture and sequestration,” Gordon said, betting success on a new technology embraced by Republican governors across the country. The Wyoming governor doubled down on the initiative with an interview on “60 Minutes” pledging “aggressive” action, and other governors are following suit.
Last year, Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy introduced a legislative package to “capitalize on carbon markets” with carbon capture programs, “particularly in Cook Inlet.”
In North and South Dakota, landowners have faced eminent domain lawsuits as a major carbon capture company constructs a more than 2,000-mile pipeline across the upper Midwest. Carbon capture projects have been championed by the states’ Republican governors, Doug Burgum and Kristi Noem.
“Today, we’re on our way toward achieving carbon neutrality as a state by 2030, thanks to our extraordinary capacity to safely store over 252 billion tons of CO2, or 50 years of the nation’s CO2 output,” Burgum said last year. “And in the process, we can help secure the future of our state’s two largest industries, energy and agriculture.”
Last summer, Wyoming struck a bipartisan partnership with Colorado to expedite development of carbon capture technology, and Idaho Gov. Brad Little joined Gordon at a “Decarbonizing the West” workshop in Boise in December.
“Natural sequestration is a critical component of decarbonization efforts,” Little said. “Healthy forests, soil, and rangelands can sequester enormous amounts of carbon. However, when those resources are poorly managed the opposite can be true … Decarbonization is also creating new opportunities for agricultural producers, for whom carbon sequestration can generate additional revenue while reducing emissions.”
Carbon sequestration, however, doesn’t come without risk. Residents in rural Mississippi have first-hand experience of what can happen when things go wrong. Carbon Catastrophe
An explosion three years ago filled the air of Yazoo County in central Mississippi with a dense concentration of carbon dioxide that caused mass poisoning. More than 200 people were forced to flee, and at least 45 wound up in the hospital. Cars were stuck as inoperable because of the lack of oxygen in the air, disrupting emergency services.
“It looked like you were going through the zombie apocalypse,” a local emergency director told National Public Radio.
There are, however, risk-free alternatives to sequestering carbon to the construction of intrusive pipelines. In biological carbon sequestration, carbon dioxide is absorbed into soils, oceans, grasslands, and forests. Natural soil storage can be amplified with proper agricultural practices and responsible land management.
Hundreds of scientists, meanwhile, dispute the popular narrative that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere presents an urgent existential threat. Last summer, Clauser, one of the board members for the CO2 Coalition, became the second Nobel laureate to sign a 2019 declaration that the climate “emergency” is a myth. The declaration included more than 1,600 signatures and was organized by the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL).
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the statement reads. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
Atmospheric carbon has also been shown to proliferate forest growth, known as the “greening” effect. Vegetation happens to grow faster in regions with relatively high concentrations of carbon dioxide. Michael Shellenberger explained in his 2020 book Apocalypse Never, “From 1981 to 2016, four times more carbon was captured by plants due to carbon-boosted growth than from biomass covering a larger surface of Earth.”
and yet...
Why is there a CO2 supply shortage? The shortage in carbon dioxide in the US is due to multiple carbon dioxide suppliers suffering from gas contamination. For example, Denbury found out that their Jackson Dome Carbon Dioxide plant in Mississippi was contaminated with gas from an extinct volcano!Apr 24, 2023
Well, that governor is an idiot!
It’s not just our country.
The high IQ, big education intellectual leftists have assisted/enabled and/or ignored almost every atrocity on earth for well over 100yrs.
The lesson is if one wants to gas jews or castrate 8yos, corrupt the intellectual leftists and get away with anything.
Retard
and the sun
Putin could give the planet Gore fever.
Russia has lots of forests and coal.
100% “Decarbonizing” would kill all life on Earth but there would still be carbon everywhere.
C’mon, Wyoming! Give this douche nozzle the Cheney treatment.
*
Not at all. The best thing that could be done for for life on the planet is a rise in CO2. It won't really do anything to the climate.
I’m wondering if this governor of Wyoming, along with South Dakota and the other one; aren’t just in if for the carbon offsets and the money involved in getting credits from the government?
Mine a bunch of coal and make money. Burn the coal, capture the CO2 and make MORE money.
Any way you slice it it is a scam.
The planet has not been warming since the ‘90s, it is still way cooler than it was before the Little Ice Age and CO2 rises FOLLOWING a rise in temperatures it does not precede it.
I wonder if Mark Gordon is curious what it would look like if he were to remove all the carbon from a human.
An original freeper science fiction short story:
Somewhere in a dystopian future, the last few human scientists find themselves in a desperate rush to grow food to survive.
In their research they discover a censored report that says the reason crops have failed world wide is because of a lack of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere. Researching historical databases they find that governments of the past harvested CO2 from the atmosphere and stored it in locations underground in the northeast and the south.
The scientists are forced to make a decision in a panic. Do they go north or south to dig up the carbon and use it to grow a crop before the coming cold season, which will be the last winter for humanity on the planet if they fail? They choose south. They travel for days, reach the location and find only dried up fields. This is where the carbon is suppose to be stored, so they begin to dig.
After many days of scientifically solving the technical difficulties of a deep dig they finally strike pipes. With an incredible sense of relief they break open the pipes to extract the sequestered carbon dioxide. But as they do, their hope is met with disbelief and confusion. In the pipes they find absolutely nothing.
As the planting season slips from their fingers and the last hope for humanity dies they realize governments around the world never did what they said they were doing. No taxes were ever used to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The money was spent on other things. One of the scientists then ask if they never sequestered CO2 then it must have been present all along. If that was true then why couldn’t anybody grow food?
The group, coming to terms with their demise realize that it was never about carbon at all. It was about the economy the whole time. Governments around the world had intentionally and simultaneously killed their economies with this scientific lie about carbon dioxide. It was never science. It was the economy, stupid.
Climate scam on steroids these days, we are in for big trouble
For communists, “The Issue” is never the issue.
Fortunately for us, they have long since slipped up, inadvertently informing us of the TRUE issue behind the false “climate change” issue. That being global human depopulation.
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