Few Republican politicians are interested in wrecking the economy with pointless climate regulations. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be pressured into less harmful but equally pointless regulations, such as carbon capture and storage.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently unveiled a series of bills aimed at spending taxpayer money on carbon capture and storage research, subsidizing ongoing capture and storage, and promoting the so-called Trillion Trees Initiative.
The bills are the Republican response to polls reporting that young GOP voters favor some sort of climate action. But none of these bills and no form of carbon capture will accomplish anything — including appeasing climate activists.
First, the United States could stop emitting carbon dioxide today and for the remainder of the century, and there would only be about a 2% difference in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This will not discernibly alter the Earth’s climate.
Next, although tree planting might seem like a perfectly eco-friendly and nonpartisan way to capture carbon dioxide, it just isn’t so. Trees and reforestation actually contribute to climate warming, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, which climate alarmists rely on as representing the consensus on climate, released a report last August stating that because trees darken the Earth’s surface and therefore decrease the reflection of solar radiation back into space, the planting of trees in the Northern Hemisphere actually contributes to the greenhouse warming effect.
So apparently, rather than legislating a Trillion Tree Initiative, the GOP would have been better off offering a Paul Bunyan Initiative.
For decades now, oil drillers have used carbon dioxide captured from power plant smokestacks to produce otherwise hard-to-get-at oil. The process, called enhanced oil recovery, makes perfect economic sense on its own without any climate consideration. But the $35 per ton subsidy that drillers get certainly sweetens that deal. McCarthy’s new legislation would sweeten the subsidy to $43.75.
And here’s the rub: When the oil produced by enhanced recovery is burned, the carbon emitted is greater than the amount of carbon used and stored underground to produce the oil. So carbon capture and storage via enhanced recovery actually increase carbon dioxide emissions — and taxpayers are subsidizing this under the guise of fighting climate change.
The Bush and Obama administrations have already wasted billions of dollars on projects to capture carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks in hopes of pipelining the captured gas underground for perhaps hundreds of miles to inject the carbon dioxide underground and store it in saline formations. The projects either never got off the ground or captured very little carbon dioxide at an extremely high cost.
The new Republican legislation would also fund research and development of something called “direct air capture” of carbon dioxide. Think giant vacuum cleaners that suck in outdoor air and chemically remove the compound from the air. Occidental Petroleum is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a direct air capture facility. It hopes to be able to capture 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2022.
Even if this project succeeded, the reality is that humans emitted 55.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2018 — and that figure is only going up, according to the U.N. It would take about 22,000 plants of the sort that Occidental is building, each costing hundreds of millions of dollars, to offset human emissions to reach “carbon neutrality.”
Carbon capture and storage is essentially physically, financially, and politically impossible. But climate activists and renewable energy rent-seekers would never accept it anyway, since their goals are political power and getting rid of fossil fuels, respectively. That is a reality Republican politicians should capture and store for future use.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, served on the Trump EPA transition team, and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (Bench Press, 2016).
