No False Climate Solutions PA

Our story opens with our fossil fuel nemesis, Watery Green, riding a CO2 pipeline that is delivering carbon captured from a power plant to an injection well perilously close to a home. CO2 leaks are everywhere and that’s not a good thing for the people in the area since CO2 is an asphyxiant. Watery Green knows exactly how dangerous compressed CO2 is. He’s known for years, just as he’s known that his industry is causing global temperatures to reach dangerous never-before-seen levels. He doesn’t care, though, because there’s a fortune to be made from turning our subsurface into a CO2 waste dump.

Watery Green says he’s storing all of that CO2 permanently, but the leaks say otherwise. In fact, little is known about where or when CO2 will escape. Even though the industry has been doing something it calls Carbon Capture and Storage for several years, there was little emphasis put on the storage part until the industry realized pretending CO2 could be stored would give it license to keep on extracting fossil fuels. What the industry has really been doing is Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).

Turns out that when you pump a bit of CO2 into a depleted well, it’ll stir things up, loosening sticky oil that was never recovered during drilling. There’s no money to be made in capturing and disposing of a waste product. In fact, it’s expensive. It eats away at profits. The industry has turned to the public with its palm extended, making that case, and has received an obscene amount of our tax dollars for its effort, but another way to offset the cost of capturing carbon was to find a way to make it a marketable product. Enter EOR.

As the climate crisis made it increasingly clear that we have to stop producing and consuming fossil fuels, the industry started emphasizing the storage part of carbon capture and storage. They have little data to support their claims that they can permanently sequester CO2 underground since their only experience they have, and the only data they have, pertains to EOR. The problem is that EOR is about injecting a small amount of CO2 into a well; CCS is about injecting as much CO2 as possible.

PA’s legislators and Governor Josh Shapiro didn’t worry about the lack of data when they enacted SB 831, a bill introduced by head water carrier for the fossil fuel industry, Senator Gene Yaw. Now Act 87, the law opens the state to CCS. It shifts liability from the industry to the public at a time to be determined (like when something goes wrong), and it robs landowners of their subsurface rights by stripping them of the right to say no to storage under their property if enough landowners nearby say yes.

Before the vote on SB 831, we shared our concerns with legislators and Governor Shapiro. We told them that too little is known to expose us and our environment to such a dangerous and risky business. Our legislators headed out for their summer vacation as soon as the vote was cast. When they returned, we appealed to them again, making the case that a lot IS known about CCS that makes it an even less appealing option. We made our case in a brief they received upon their return to Harrisburg.

TAKE ACTION!

You can all be PA Climate Avengers too by taking the actions we’re organizing this month! For CCS week, we’re asking everyone to send a letter to their elected officials asking them to read our brief, Too Infrequently Asked Questions About Carbon Capture and Storage.

We’ve created a letter in Action Network you can send as is or revise as much as you like and the click to have it sent to the legislators who represent you and Governor Shapiro. CLICK HERE.