Biden’s Dangerous Carbon Credit Boondoggle vs. the Natural Solution

The Benefits of Regenerative Agriculture, Part 2

By Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos and Nancy Owens, The Kennedy Beacon

Even if they don’t believe that human-induced climate change is a problem, leaders in Big Oil enthusiastically support “Green New Deal” expensive carbon capture projects that are being built to pull carbon out of the air and inject it underground. What could be the motive? 

In a September 2023 op-ed in Newsweek,independent candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes that the huge projects are “boondoggles” and land-grabs, using eminent domain laws in novel ways to capture private property in order to develop the projects. Kennedy also identifies the real solutions to carbon pollution:

If political leaders were really interested in battling dangers from changing climate, they would end the obscene subsidies to the carbon industry and spend the carbon capture money to help … farmers to protect wetlands and forests and transition to regenerative agriculture.

President Joe Biden, who claims that climate change is one of his highest priorities, wants to continue injecting taxpayers’ money into these dubious “Green New Deal” projects that are generally led by the same massive corporations that produce massive carbon emissions in the first place. According to Kennedy, “The ‘public need’ to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a fraudulent pretense” for a land grab that funnels public money towards building these unproven carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities.

The Natural Solution: Regenerative Agriculture

Modern industrial agriculture, known as “Big Ag,” uses large machinery and artificial fertilizers and is a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. As described in part 1 of this series, such practices strip the organic matter from the dirt that would otherwise naturally store carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere.

Big Ag Treats Us Like Dirt: Why Kennedy Believes Regenerative Agriculture Can Make Americans Healthy Again

Natural regenerative agricultural practices could sequester over a billion additional tons of carbon each year, according to a group of scientists writing in Frontiers in Climate. “These [carbon] sequestering practices act by increasing the rate of input of plant-derived residues to soils and/or by reducing the rates of turnover of organic [carbon] stocks already in the soil.” 

Vegetation naturally pulls carbon from the air through photosynthesis and then drives it into the soil through its roots. Carbon in the soil also leads to better water retention. The study adds that, “There is a strong scientific basis for managing agricultural soils to act as a significant carbon sink over the next several decades.”

The “Green” – as in “Money” – New Deal 

Kennedy has come to the conclusion that “powerful vested interests are now hijacking the climate emergency – as they do with every crisis – to shift wealth upward and impose totalitarian controls.”

Despite the proven benefit provided by the regenerative agricultural practices that increase the amount of organic matter in farm fields and pastures, most politicians support investment in the unproven experimental method of carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities.

CCS is expensive and poses a risk to public health and the environment. The technology involves compressing liquified CO₂, transporting it through a vast network of pipelines, and injecting it into porous rock and underground aquifers. CCS can also be utilized for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

The Biden administration promotes carbon credits and offsetting, which is the gamification of environmental stewardship and thus encourages people to try to game the system. Issuing carbon credits tends to reward investors in this “green growth” model, but it does not reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

In fact, Kennedy writes, “Carbon capture, it turns out, is a scheme for propping up dirty energy. Currently, 95 percent of carbon capture and storage capacity is used for enhanced oil recovery.… The projects are, therefore, paradoxically likely to increase net carbon emissions.”

CCS Technology Does Not Deliver

Stratos in Ector County, Texas, is the world’s biggest CCS facility to date. The project was initiated by Occidental Petroleum in 2023 and recently became a joint venture with BlackRock. Covering about 100 acres and expected to cost $1 billion, the Stratos plant combines direct carbon capture (DAC) with CCS (= DACCS). Currently under construction, it is expected to capture 0.5 million metric tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere annually, to be injected into underground saline formations at the site. 

However, CCS is an unproven technology; there is a lack of reliable evidence that captured CO₂ will remain underground, and for how long, and CCS has failed to deliver on expectations. The Kemper facility in Mississippi is a great example, as reported by Geoengineering Monitor, of a major failure that cost taxpayers billions of dollars and delivered nothing. According to Food & Water Watch, “out of nine large-scale projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), only two remain operational.”

Despite these issues, the number of CCS projects is growing, and they are expensive. The REPEAT Project estimated that the Inflation Reduction Act investment in CCS would grow to $20 billion annually by 2030.

Exploding CCS Facilities

CCS can be extremely dangerous when things go wrong. In 2020, a CO₂ storage pipeline operated by Denbury Gulf Coast Pipelines LLC (later acquired by ExxonMobil) exploded and, as Justine Calma reported in The Verge, engulfed the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, “in a green haze, leaving many residents convulsing, confused, or unconscious.” Its impact on public health was serious. Julia Simon reported on NPR that “45 people were hospitalized. Cars stopped working, hobbling emergency response. People lay on the ground, shaking and unable to breathe.”

Denbury had two other blowouts in Mississippi, according to Dan Zegart in HuffPost: one in 2007 that was contaminated with hydrogen sulfide – a deadly gas that likely worsened residents’ symptoms and also accounted for the gas cloud’s odor and greenish color – and one in 2013 that lasted more than six weeks and contaminated the air with “unsafe levels of both CO₂ and methane.”

Sartartia, Mississippi, CO₂ pipeline explosion, February 22, 2020. Photo credit: Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

For its 2020 pipeline blowout, Denbury was handed the second largest civil penalty in the history of the Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and had to pay $2,868,100 for noncompliance associated with the failure of the pipeline.

These dangerous examples have not stopped the expansion of these projects. In Iowa in 2022, residents and environmental groups opposed plans to build massive pipelines to transport CO₂ released from ethanol plants to underground storage sites in North Dakota and Illinois. Alejandra De La Garza reported in Time that residents were concerned about “the risk of dangerous CO₂ leaks” and propping up “an obsolete, high polluting ethanol industry while trampling on local farmers who will have to allow developers to build through their land.” The pipeline developer, Summit Carbon Solutions, indicated that it would file eminent domain paperwork in order to obtain the private land it needs to construct the pipeline, ignoring the residents’ rights and concerns.

Who Profits from These Boondoggles?

CCS facilities present tremendous profit potential for the same multinational corporations that already exploit the environment for maximum profit. According to a 2022 study, “One of the major beneficiaries of the [$370 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022] is likely to be the technology known as carbon capture, utilization and storage, or carbon capture, utilization and sequestration,” aka CCUS, which uses captured CO₂ for fracking and other purposes. 

Institutional investors include BlackRock, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, along with the multinational power-generation and industrial agriculture companies (the major contributors to the current pollution crisis). These corporate giants stand to benefit the most from this extremely expensive, unproven, risky CCS technology that is heralded as a solution to excessive CO₂ emissions. It’s a solution that Peter Donovan of the Soil Carbon Coalition describes as merely appearing to solve a problem, and merely appearing to do good.

In August 2023, Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive was one of two projects selected for up to $1.2 billion in funding from the US Department of Energy for its South Texas DAC Hub project, billed as the “world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history.” BlackRock will invest $550 million in the project, according to Reuters correspondent Sabrina Valle.

1PointFive has also recently joined forces with the company Carbon Engineering, following Occidental Petroleum’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Carbon Engineering last August. As reported by John Vidal in The Guardian, Carbon Engineering was founded in 2009 with seed money from Bill Gates and Canadian oil sands billionaire Norman Murray Edwards, which exemplifies the revolving door between polluters and the beneficiaries of this supposed pollution-reduction technology.

A Self-Serving Racket

Politicians consistently gravitate to failed pseudo-solutions that involve spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money while also generating enormous profits for the multinational companies tasked with executing their agenda. Too many politicians fail to focus on finding real answers to the root causes of our environmental problems.

Investors in these CCS projects get carbon credits to offset their emissions, but atmospheric carbon is not reduced.

Kennedy Is Unique among Politicians in His Support of Natural Carbon Capture 

Kennedy advocates changing our approach, quite literally from the ground up, to create a better and healthier model through promoting and supporting regenerative agriculture and natural carbon capture. 

Changing the country’s industrial Big Ag system would surely involve bringing legal challenges against some of the most powerful multinational corporations in the world. Kennedy has a decades-long track record of success fighting corporate polluters and pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy has spent the majority of his adult life fighting corporate abuse and diving into the science and data to help find the best solutions to ensure a healthy population, a healthy environment, and – especially – healthy children. Investing in and changing agricultural models to create a more sustainable and healthy system would address these three goals simultaneously, while also allowing the earth to perform its natural function of cycling CO₂ through our ecosystem, as it is meant to do. 

In part 3, I interview Brian Alexander, a rancher in Kansas who is using cows to sequester carbon the natural way.

Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos studied government at Georgetown University and interned for several Democratic elected officials and their campaigns, and other affiliated groups. He then earned a master’s degree in urban studies in France, where extremely strict COVID-19 lockdowns led to his political reawakening and inspired him to try to help fix the broken two-party system. 

Nancy Owens, MA/MHA, researcher, editor and writer is a member of The Kennedy Beacon staff and an advocate for health freedom, environmental stewardship, and healing the political divide.