Dear President Trump, Please Make Carbon Capture Go Away
Climate hysteria is beginning to subside. Time to end the carbon capture scam.
https://spectator.org/dear-president-trump-please-make-carbon-capture-go-away/
Excerpt:
…..It’s obvious that movement has lost momentum. The election of Donald Trump was like a pin striking the global warming balloon, and now we can finally begin re-examining the things that were done inside that balloon.
And one of the most obvious changes that ought to be made is to stop confiscating taxes from productive Americans to pay for one of the least productive scams ever perpetrated on the public.
I’m talking about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a Rube Goldberg contraption of a process by which carbon dioxide is sucked out of industrial smokestacks and piped long distance into holes in the ground somewhere where it is then stashed away, presumably for eternity.
…..But what’s without a doubt true is that it’s an atrocious idea for your tax dollars to pay oil companies and others to bury the CO2 from hydrocarbon production, oil refining, and other industrial activity. And your tax dollars are pouring forth in a gusher on this.
Depending on what sort of facility we’re talking about, eliminating carbon emissions along the lines of the climate-hysterical Left’s “net zero” goals will add 20 to 90 percent to the operating expenses of an American industrial plant. To offset such a catastrophic burden, the feds created something called the Section 45Q tax credit, which was greatly expanded during the idiotic 2022 Inflation Reduction Act as part of the Team Biden Green New Deal scam.
Specifically, projects meeting prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements, the credit provides up to $85 per metric ton of CO2 captured from point sources and either stored geologically or used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) or other utilization (like, for example, synthetic fuels; you can create synfuels using CO2, but it’s a lousy way to make synfuels).
One of the lousier parts of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed earlier this year is that it increased the amount of the credit — from $60 per metric ton to $85 — that industry could get for “utilization” of CO2 as opposed to just burying it in the ground.
An even bigger scam, which is part of the carbon capture universe, is something called Direct Air Capture, which involves sucking air into giant carbon capture facilities, segregating the CO2 out, and piping it somewhere. Amazingly, the Big Beautiful Bill increased the subsidy for that boondoggle of an idea from $130 per metric ton of CO2 up to $180.
And all of these credits are transferable, because of course they are. So this is a big expansion of the whole “carbon credit” corporate welfare scam the enviro-Left has been running for decades.
And just more than $50 billion of your federal tax dollars are running out of the Treasury to subsidize this ridiculousness. And as of right now, it’s getting worse — just under $80 billion in carbon capture projects are currently on the books.
If ever there was something we could cut out of the federal budget, it’s this idiocy.
…..Running scams on the taxpayer, however, is not innovation.
And to describe how poisonous all this is, the reason the fresh carbon capture swag got into the Big Beautiful Bill was that the oil companies wanted it.
They’ve gone from fighting off the enviros who were trying to kill them and agreeing to build the stupid carbon capture projects so they could be left alone to produce fuel for our economy, to now wanting more subsidy money.
…..perhaps Team Trump could look at suspending these ridiculous tax credits for carbon capture. It’s pretty hard to see any benefit to them.