I can’t really write this piece, certainly not today. But apparently, not writing it isn’t an option either. My apologies for the complicated knots that the following presents and stumbles on but fails to unravel. There isn’t any closure here but I don’t think there are any dragons either.
For the climate resource Drilled, Molly Taft has written an incredible profile of a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline by Summit Carbon Solutions.
How agricultural interests are teaming up with big oil to take advantage of tax credits meant to fight climate change—and what the backlash can tell us about the future of climate politics.
You should go read it. It has everything: the Inflation Reduction Act, John Birch Society, Sierra Club, debates about the proper measurement of hospitalizations from a CO2 pipeline accident in the Satartia, Mississippi, Trump funders, Big Oil, ethanol debates, local community meetings and state preemption, and enhanced oil recovery.
It’s posted under the tag “false solutions,” but the essay is nuanced in its discussion. The basic idea is that corn ethanol plants would pump some of their CO2 into the pipeline that would then be stored in North Dakota, earning money through IRA sweetened tax credits of $85/ton. The main climate problem with these pipelines is that we probably don’t need this ethanol in a decarbonized world. As she writes:
Climate advocates have long pointed out that corn-based ethanol is exponentially less efficient as an energy source than solar or wind. Last year, more than 200 science faculty at 31 colleges and universities across Iowa signed a statement noting that a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of corn-based ethanol.” There are currently tens of millions of acres of corn going toward ethanol production in the U.S., which has an impact on soil, water, and chemical usage as well as emissions.
So, building expensive infrastructure using government funds to (partially — again, read the piece!) capture carbon from a dirty industry rich enough that the company can earn profits isn’t good. But in a deeply decarbonized world, we are almost certainly going to have more carbon dioxide pipelines because we will want to sequester carbon underground and the places of collection and depositing are not always aligned. And perhaps building these pipelines will lower the cost of future extensions to projects that are more reasonable to expect to persist in a decarbonized world (steel, cement, DAC).
The pipeline’s main economic problem is that as described, the only source of revenue for the pipeline is the government, which would pay for sequestering the carbon. There’s no natural market here (the EOR discussion is interesting, but even there it seems as if the government revenue would dominate).
Ok, this is all great but it is in her excellent conclusion (my emphasis added) where we get to issues that have occupied me a lot lately:
As the country speeds up the renewable energy transition, there’s been a troubling rise in local opposition stymying solar, wind, and other renewable energy projects that could help break our addiction to fossil fuels. From some climate spaces, there’s been a corresponding rise in focus on this opposition as the product of fossil fuel money—astroturfing false concerns in favor of blocking climate progress.
There is undoubtedly climate denier money at play in many of these battles: moneyed interests working for polluters have managed to amplify misinformation around offshore wind projects, while journalists have also uncovered specific instances of fossil fuels paying for messaging campaigns against renewable energy.
But painting all opposition to any climate solution as bought and paid for by fossil fuels misses the nuances of situations like Summit: how industrial climate solutions with their roots in making profits for polluters can sow doubt among the people whose buy-in is needed—especially when it involves untested and unregulated technologies. It misses how the politics of climate action are getting stirred up from their stasis over the past decade, and are getting murkier as so-called climate solutions begin to present financial opportunities for big businesses. And it misses how oil companies and other polluters need the public to buy into the idea of addressing climate now that they are profiting by painting themselves as part of the solution, pushing for technologies that will help them continue to maintain the status quo for decades to come.
The key line for me is what I bolded above this, and I’d make the following edit: industrial climate solutions with their roots in making profits [for anyone] can sow doubt among the people whose buy-in is needed. Yes, some people come to hate wind farms because they saw some fossil-fuel company propaganda about them first, on infrasound or something else, but these people have real preferences and are frustrated about what might be constructed in their backyards (to me two obvious differences between solar and wind that favor the former are that it is quiet and short compared with the megastructures that are contemporary wind turbines, vastly expanding what the backyard of a wind farm is compared with a solar farm).
Because the pipeline’s main political problem is that people don’t want a potentially dangerous pipeline running through their farms, past their schools, behind their houses, and so on. Given that, as I’ve written here a dozen times, decarbonization is principally about clean electrification, and “clean electrification” is really about installing huge amounts of renewable electricity generating and storage capacity and then hooking it up to the grid, fighting climate change is going to involve a lot of people’s backyards. We can’t just pretend that this doesn’t matter or that if we somehow got rid of fossil fuel companies that the resistance to renewables would evaporate. It’s also the case that “getting rid of fossil fuel companies” really means killing off demand for their products by the millions of machines that run on them and the people who rely on those machines to live their lives.
And here’s the twist. I think some (maybe a lot?) of the fighting that is taking place between more IRA-friendly climate folks and those on the climate left (see the Bluesky blowup over this NYT oped) has to do with beliefs about the politics of enemies and of blame and what kinds of coalitions we’re going to need to get used to in navigating the climate crisis. This is almost certainly really delicate ground with weird interpersonal dynamics that I’m not going to wade into. Kamala Harris lost, the Orange Man won, and people are upset. When people are upset, they blame people. And there is a massive circular firing squad with almost every piece of the intra-Democratic coalition looking at each other, pointing, and pulling the trigger.
Blame
I love this from Sec. General Guterres and used it to open my Politics of Climate Change lectures back at Cornell.
“We are in the fight of our lives. And we are losing. Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
—Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General, Nov. 2022
And then I’d offer the following.
My question for you is: Who, exactly, is it that we are fighting? The oil company executive? The frequent flier? The muscle car driver? The beachfront property owner? The coal miner—in America or China? The guy who just bought a new natural gas furnace because his old one failed in the middle of winter and he couldn’t afford an electric heat pump (or one wasn’t available or his house wasn’t well-insulated enough or…)? Vladimir Putin of Russia or Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia? Xi Jinping of China?
Or is it not right to think about a traditional enemy here but something else, more abstract: a fight against human nature, human greed, the status quo, complacency? Are these fights that we can win?
In fact, who is this “we” that Guterres is referring to, anyway? Maybe you feel as if you are in a fight. Maybe Guterres does as well. Do your parents? When you walk out of this lecture hall and see others here on this campus walking around – do they seem like they are in a fight? Do the people you watch on youtube/TikTok?
Maybe you don’t feel as if you’re in a fight. Maybe you’re taking this class to try to understand why some of your friends do feel like that.
Maybe you’re taking this class to try to understand why some of your friends feel like society is doomed, that’s there’s nothing to do. That planning for the future, having kids, say, is silly. That the die has been cast. Maybe you feel this way sometimes too.
This class is about these questions – not just at the level of people in the room not just as individuals, but communities, states, countries, and the planet. Companies and consumers and lobbying and activism and protest. It’s about how we heat our homes – now and how we might in the future and why it’s hard to change things and the errors that we can make when we try.
It’s about power, about coercion, and cooptation, and convincing. It’s about ideas, institutions, and innovation. But it’s about idiots too. It’s about a lot of things. More than anything, it’s about helping you come to your own answers—what are your priorities? What tradeoffs make sense to you?
I think the reality here is that we are fighting and our foot is on the accelerator. It’s not just Taylor Swift or the Kardashians and yes, obviously there are wide swaths of the global population that are not reading this missive that produce essentially 0.0% of emissions that are only feeling the car zoom towards hell and bear no responsibility, but I’m typing this at my home in wonderful, walkable Washington, DC, and this is what my grid looks like.

Cleaning up that grid (rather than dumping tons more gas onto it to help data centers churn through their matrix inversions) is going to take massive amounts of political lifting. And it’s going to require people of different belief systems working together.
But remember that’s just one part of the US grid, which is just one part of this country’s emissions, which are only about 12% of global emissions. I’m relatively sanguine about the global energy transition, not in the sense that it is fast enough (how can that be when Afghanistan and Pakistan flooded years ago now, as Seville did this summer, and as Malibu burns today), but in the sense that it is continuing, perhaps even gaining momentum or turning a corner.
And so I can understand the frustration activists feel when residents of Bidenland trumpet the IRA as the most important climate action that the world has ever seen, but I also understand its advocates rolling their eyes when the climate left gets mad that Harris never talked about the climate when their own communications about the IRA were full of bile for what surely was half a loaf.
And so we’re going to have to get used to working together with odd bedfellows, as it were.
On abundance, I’ll just say that it seems like an attractive concept to be associated with, but your mileage may vary.
Ok, as promised, I can’t tie this up nicely. We’re in the middle of a muddle, with uncertainty around the corner. There’s more to be said, and there’s more to listen to. But let me end by saying I tend to come down close to where Advait Arun does, at least today.
In fact, I ended that first lecture with Kate Aronoff’s essay as well.
