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 [pictured], who chairs the Western Governors Association, currently leads the charge to his state’s detriment as a carbon powerhouse and leading coal producer. [emphasis, links added]
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. …
“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.”
‘Decarbonizing The West’
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 two states’ Republican governors, Doug Burgum and Kristi Noem. …
“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.
Read full post at The Federalist
he Leave it in the ground idiots when their paying Higher Prices to keep their home warm after they were told the world would be too hot and Hollywood Witless Wonder Redford who said Fossil Furls are Cooking the Earth after he can done TV ads for United Airlines Its time to Fly
Most politicians are grifters always scheming to validate their “public service”. These “do-gooders” always ban, regulate, tax, legislate and adjudicate themselves more prestige, power and money. The climate change/CO2 canard was concocted to facilitate the goals and aspirations of the uber-politicians; Globalist Grifters. It doesn’t surprise anyone a RINO governor would pursue the fool’s errand of atmospheric carbon capture. Climate change is no longer a scientific issue, it’s political meaning the fight is against you and me.
I have to apologize for our governor of Wyoming he is nothing but term limited politician who is trying to find a way to extend his career. I have always believed that the carbon sequestration is nothing but a modern con job filling corrupt politicians and businessmen scraping for dollars.
“…a dense concentration of carbon dioxide that caused mass poisoning.”
Carbon Dioxide gas is NOT “poisonous”, any more than nitrogen, 80% of the ‘air’ we breath in. But neither of them ‘support’ life, that’s the task of Oxygen.
(The recent execution of a criminal ‘by nitrogen’ was horrifying. He took 20 minutes to die, and witnesses reported “He suffered”.)
Exactly Graham McDonald … Lack of oxygen kills. Carbon dioxide does not. carbon monoxide will kill but again, if it is replacing life serving oxygen.
God did not create this world to crash, he made it to live. Man keeps thinking man can do it better. Never worked that way before, why would it now?
Symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include headaches, dizziness, weakness, vomiting, chest pain, and confusion. Excessive exposure to CO can lead to severe heartbeat irregularities, seizures, unconsciousness, and even death.
In cold weather, do not bring a charcoal BBQ into the house to keep warm. It amounts to suicide.
The CO2 content in exhaled breath can be as high as 40,000 PPM, and that gives some insight into just how high CO2 concentration would have to be such that a relatively fit human couldn’t flush it from their bloodstream. That level, of course, varies by person, but it’s generally in the area of 45,000 PPM.
Back during the cold war, I worked on a submarine in which its CO2 scrubber and oxygen generator broke mid-mission… we couldn’t surface because we were on-station in a Russian port (Kamchatka Peninsula) at the time, watching them do test-launches of a new weapon from periscope depth. CO2 concentration reached 12,000 PPM. It got so bad that cigarette lighters wouldn’t light, matches would light but not stay lit, cigarettes that you managed to get lit with a match wouldn’t stay lit unless you actively sucked on them. But we had acclimated to it, and had no problems.
After we left station and ventilated, though, that first breath of fresh air was heaven… actually got a head-rush from it.
The scientist in me requires that I set things straight. Remember the Apollo 13 movie where they were threatened by too high of concentration of carbon dioxide until the adapted some filters? That was based on fact. They did have enough oxygen. At 100,000 ppm for only a few minutes can cause loss of consciousness. The lethal level is 150,000 ppm. Such concentrations only happen with rare and extreme events such as the carbon dioxide fountain in Lake Nyos.
There’s a man-dug tunnel in Switzerland joining two villages on opposite sides of a mountain. It dips down in the middle. A man can walk through with no problem, a dog can’t make it.
On the north side of Mammoth Village, California, there are some large holes in the ground. Signs: “Do Not Enter”. Yup, carbon dioxide. The entire area is volcanic.
In another life I was a reactor operator on our nuclear powered subs. Ours is a self-contained system that must deal with things like oxygen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide as well as fresh water. We created fresh water in a steam-powered desalination plant. That fresh water was used for all typical uses but also used to create O2 via separating the oxygen from the hydrogen which was then bubble overboard.
Since smoking was allowed back then (mid-70’s thru early-80’s for my time in the service) CO was created (other processes also create CO) so we had a CO-burner that was essentially like a car’s catalytic converter that would convert the CO into CO2. That unit was very hot to allow the conversion. Since we are in a closed system we needed to control the CO2 levels so we had a CO2 scrubber that will take CO2 out of the air and bubble it overboard. However our CO2 levels were much above the about 420ppm that exist right now but not at the dangerous levels you mention. Somewhere around 10,000 ppm as I recall.
Were you on a boomer or fast-attack? I was a MM Nuke from mid-80s to early-90s. The SSN-688 Los Angeles-class fast attacks generally ran about 5000 ppm unless something went wrong with the monoethanolamine CO2 scrubber. The main problem on my sub (which I described in a prior comment) was that our oxygen generator was down, we’d burned through all our oxygen candles and our O2 tanks were exhausted. I’m not sure what level of O2 one has to get to where lighters won’t light, but we hit it.
Our CO was always taking ops for other subs, so we spent more time at sea than any other sub at the time… one time we were at sea for so long that we started out eating steak and lobster, and by the end we were down to eating saltine crackers, 3-bean salad and reconstituted powdered mayonnaise. LOL
After that, we pulled into port and reprovisioned… had so much food that the entire Engine Room Lower Level was stacked with food… you had to actually walk on planks put over the food to do rounds. Then we left a week later and spent another 9 months at sea.
It is obvious that by pursuing carbon sequestering Gov. Mark Gordon and others are hoping to keep coal production in their states going. There are number of problems with this, the main one is that they have brought into the climate change fraud. At 420 ppm we are way beyond the saturation point of carbon dioxide and adding more will have negligible impacts on warming. A full scale carbon capture coal power station has not been built and if they become reality the cost of their power will be very high. Their only advantage is they work when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. When there are vast quantities of carbon dioxide the explosion in Yazoo County is not the worst that can happen. Lake Nyos in Africa released a huge quantity of carbon dioxide killing 1,746 people. Humans, live stock, and insects dropped dead where ever they were.
There is no need to sequester carbon dioxide, but for those who can’t see the climate change fraud for what it is, plants will happily volunteer to trap the carbon. They have been doing so for hundreds of millions of years. All that needs to be done is take measures to slow the rotting of some of the organic material so less CO2 is returned to the air.