Conor here: The following piece from DeSmog is an example of where left and right interests collide, albeit for different reasons. Conservatives may be more opposed to carbon storage projects because they require massive government support to operate while people somewhere on the left don’t want to support a boondoggle that does little to help the climate – and in fact is often used to help unlock more oil:
CCS is an expensive technology that can only be used in a small fraction of the cases where it can help but IS has been used to produce more oil; and it requires a network of pipelines to achieve an incredibly toxic substance. @carolynsehn to @WeAreDrilled today: pic.twitter.com/kr849wzmXA
– Amy Westervelt (@amywestervelt) July 31, 2024
People — on the left or the right — don’t want their land taken for pipelines. And they don’t want invisible toxic clouds floating over their community – as happened in 2020 in Satartia, Mississippi. Details from Huff Post:
It was after 7pm when residents of Satartia, Mississippi, began to smell rotten eggs. Then a green cloud rolled across Route 433 and landed in the valley surrounding the town. Not many minutes later, the people were inside the cloud, panting and gasping in amazement.
About twenty people were defeated in a few minutes, and collapsed in their houses; at a fishing camp on the nearby Yazoo River; in their cars. Cars have recently shut down, as they need oxygen to burn fuel. The drivers crept out of their disabled cars, but were so confused that they wandered around in the dark.
The first call to the Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency came in at 7:13 pm on February 22, 2020.
“DRIVER ADVISED OF A GOOD SMELL AND A GREEN CHICKEN ON THE HIGHWAY,” read the message that dispatchers sent to the cellphones and radios of all the county’s emergency responders two minutes later.
First responders gathered almost immediately, although they were not yet sure what the emergency was. Maybe it was a leak in one of the nearby natural gas pipes, or chlorine in the water tank.
However, the first thought was not the carbon dioxide pipeline that cuts through the hills above the city, a distance of less than half a mile. Denbury Inc, then known as Denbury Resources, operates a network of CO2 pipelines along the Gulf Coast that inject gas into oil fields to extract more oil. Although ambient CO2 is odorless, colorless and heavier than air, the industrial CO2 in the Denbury pipeline is compressed into a liquid, which is pumped through pipelines under high pressure. A rupture in this type of pipe sends CO2 out in a cloud of dense, white powder that sinks to the ground and cools enough to make the metal smooth enough to be smashed with a hammer.
While the next piece from DeSmog deals primarily with Canada, it does address the ongoing opposition among several politicians in the US. In the lower US, however, there has been a major pushback (covered by NC last year) in efforts to build carbon capture pipelines in many red, rural states like Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
By Geoff Dembicki, a weather reporter based in New York City. He is the author of The Petroleum Papers and Are We Screwed? Originally published at DeSmog.
Earlier this year a right-wing group called Canada Proud began running Facebook ads to its more than 534,000 followers attacking climate change technologies favored by environmental leaders and the country’s biggest oil and gas producers.
“Carbon capture is billed as a green technology that keeps carbon out of the atmosphere,” the ad explains. “But is it really good for the environment? As it turns out, it isn’t. ” Canada Proud said this technology “can poison groundwater, can infect soil and has a history of causing earthquakes.”
The big oil sands companies and their political allies in Alberta and Ottawa have been pushing the opposite message for years – that carbon capture and storage, also known as CCS, is necessary to ensure the survival of oil and gas while addressing climate change.
By far the biggest attack against carbon sequestration comes from environmental groups and progressive politicians who see it as an expensive false solution to climate change that furthers our dependence on oil and gas.
But as more projects move forward, they have also sparked opposition from the right, creating a new political divide between human rights groups and groups trying to fuel anger against expensive industrial megaprojects in rural areas.
“It’s very exciting that groups like Canada Proud seem to be rallying, or testing the waters to rally, against carbon capture and storage,” Bob Neubauer, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Manitoba who studies rightwing populism and climate change disinformation, said. DeSmog.
“Their base doesn’t seem to be full of people who are happy about the post-carbon situation,” he added.
Mobilize Media, the company behind Canada Proud, did not respond to inquiries from DeSmog.
Rightwing Influencers Attack CCS
Discontent with technology has been creeping into rightwing discourse. “We might as well take the tax money at gunpoint and burn it,” Canadian activist Jordan Peterson said in February. wrote to X to his 5.3 million followers in response to the CCS project in Wyoming.
US President Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is often interviewed on conservative social media, last year called carbon capture a “boondoggle.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran an unsuccessful primary campaign this year against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, called the pipelines in Iowa that would transport captured carbon to places where it could be buried underground “a huge violation of human rights.”
The tension is growing in Alberta, the heart of Canada’s oil and gas industry, where a coalition of six major oil sands companies known as the Pathways Alliance applied this spring for regulatory approval to build a $16.5 billion carbon capture and storage project. It was all over the country with ads that said “carbon capture is an important step toward carbon neutral emissions.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who earlier this year shared the stage with Tucker Carlson and was recently interviewed on Peterson’s podcast, announced up to $5.3 billion in taxpayer support for the program. “Let me tell you, we will strengthen the case for carbon capture, use and storage in the coming years,” he said during an industry conference last year.
Opposition from the Lower Rises
Alberta’s northern countryside, where the project will be built, is hardly a hotbed of environmentalism. The region is home to a renewable energy group called Wind Concerns whose leader previously told DeSmog that climate science is “full of bogus information and outright lies.”
However, locals there have created a new group called the No to CO2 Landowners Group, which has joined forces with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and environmental groups to oppose the Pathways Alliance’s plan to capture carbon.
“Despite their claims, this is an unproven technology that has a big impact in the future,” said Amil Shapka, one of the representatives of NO to CO2. “With this being Canada’s largest CO2 pipeline and storage project, is our community prepared to address the potential health, safety and environmental risks to our waters?”
The escalating politics of carbon capture is now creating tension at the national level in Canada. Because the Liberal government has proposed an investment tax of up to $10 billion to support the Pathways Alliance, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now associated with a major project opposed by some rural Canadians.
Pierre Poilievre Still Supports CCS
That has put carbon capture in the crosshairs of the anti-Liberal group Canada Proud, which has also launched an online petition against the technology. “Rural Canadians deserve a safe and clean environment and Canadians deserve affordable gas, groceries and heating,” reads the petition. “So we, the undersigned, are asking Justin Trudeau to STOP imposing costly and damaging carbon sequestration on Canada’s energy industry.”
In fact, it’s the other way around. Oil producers have touted carbon sequestration to the federal government as a “big part” of their plan to tackle climate change, which is better than other solutions proposed by the federal Liberals such as banning oil sands extraction.
And their policy choice – billions of dollars in taxpayer money to support carbon capture projects that could stretch the oil and gas industry for decades – was echoed by Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.
“We need to greenlight new green projects like nuclear power, hydroelectricity, tidal power, carbon capture and storage,” Poilievre said during a May interview about his climate change plans.
That positive message of carbon capture does not stop at Canada Proud, although Poilievre a few years ago hired Mobilize Media, the company behind the Facebook page, to promote his campaign for the leadership of the organization. (The Conservative Party of Canada did not respond to questions from DeSmog about its current relationship with Mobilize). But Canada Proud continues to post pro-Poilievre content on its Facebook page almost daily, including the Conservative leader’s frequent attacks on the country’s carbon tax.
That’s likely because it’s easier to send anti-climate content to a far-flung audience than anything that supports action, Neubauer said, especially when the majority of the Conservative Party’s grassroots members voted against the party’s proposal that “climate change is real.”
“Canada Proud policies that come first [on this issue] “It seems that it is completely inconsistent with the goals set by the Conservative Party and the leaders of the oil and gas industry,” he said. “But the rank and file of the conservative climate movement is so committed to anti-climate action that there’s probably not much against CCS.”