The Growing Conservative Backlash Against Carbon Capture and Storage

Conor here: The following piece from DeSmog is an example of where left and right interests overlap, albeit for different reasons. Conservatives might oppose the carbon storage projects more because they require extensive government support in order to be viable while individuals somewhere on the left don’t want to support a boondoggle that does little to help the climate — and in reality is often used to help unlock even more oil:

CCS is an expensive tech that’s not really being used for the small sliver of instances where it might help but IS being used to produce more oil; it also requires a network of pipelines to move an incredibly poisonous substance around. @carolynsehn on @WeAreDrilled today: pic.twitter.com/kr849wzmXA

— Amy Westervelt (@amywestervelt) July 31, 2024

People — left or right — don’t want their land seized for pipelines. And they don’t want invisible poison clouds floating through their community — as happened in 2020 in Satartia, Mississippi. Details from Huff Post:

It was just after 7 p.m. when residents of Satartia, Mississippi, started smelling rotten eggs. Then a greenish cloud rolled across Route 433 and settled into the valley surrounding the little town. Within minutes, people were inside the cloud, gasping for air, nauseated and dazed.

Some two dozen individuals were overcome within a few minutes, collapsing in their homes; at a fishing camp on the nearby Yazoo River; in their vehicles. Cars just shut off, since they need oxygen to burn fuel. Drivers scrambled out of their paralyzed vehicles, but were so disoriented that they just wandered around in the dark.

The first call to Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency came at 7:13 p.m. on February 22, 2020.

“CALLER ADVISED A FOUL SMELL AND GREEN FOG ACROSS THE HIGHWAY,” read the message that dispatchers sent to cell phones and radios of all county emergency personnel two minutes later.

First responders mobilized almost immediately, even though they still weren’t sure exactly what the emergency was. Maybe it was a leak from one of several nearby natural gas pipelines, or chlorine from the water tank.

The first thought, however, was not the carbon dioxide pipeline that runs through the hills above town, less than half a mile away. Denbury Inc, then known as Denbury Resources, operates a network of CO2 pipelines in the Gulf Coast area that inject the gas into oil fields to force out more petroleum. While ambient CO2 is odorless, colorless and heavier than air, the industrial CO2 in Denbury’s pipeline has been compressed into a liquid, which is pumped through pipelines under high pressure. A rupture in this kind of pipeline sends CO2 gushing out in a dense, powdery white cloud that sinks to the ground and is cold enough to make steel so brittle it can be smashed with a sledgehammer.

While the following piece from DeSmog deals mostly with Canada, it mentions conservative opposition among a few politicians in the US. On the ground out in the US hinterlands, however, there has been major pushback (covered by NC last year) on efforts to build carbon capture pipelines through mostly red, rural areas of states like Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

By Geoff Dembicki, an investigative climate journalist based in New York City. He is author of The Petroleum Papers and Are We Screwed? Originally published at DeSmog.

Earlier this year a far-right group called Canada Proud began running Facebook ads to its more than 534,000 followers attacking the climate change technology favored by conservative leaders as well as the country’s largest oil and gas producers.

“Carbon capture is billed as a green technology that stops carbon from entering the atmosphere,” the ad explains. “But is it really good for the environment? As it turns out, not really.” The technology, Canada Proud claimed, “can poison groundwater, it can put carcinogens in the soil and even has a record of causing earthquakes.”

Major oil sands companies and their political allies in Alberta and Ottawa have for years pushed the opposite message — that carbon capture and storage, also known as CCS, is necessary to ensure the survival of oil and gas while also addressing climate change.

So far the loudest attacks against carbon capture have come from environmental groups and progressive politicians which see it as an expensive false solution to climate change that furthers our dependency on oil and gas.

But as more of these projects move forward, they’re also activating opposition from the right, creating new political divisions between establishment conservatives and groups attempting to catalyze grassroots anger towards expensive industrial megaprojects in rural areas.

“It’s very interesting that groups like Canada Proud are seemingly mobilizing, or testing the waters to mobilize, against carbon capture and storage,” Bob Neubauer, an assistant professor in communications at the University of Manitoba who studies rightwing populism and climate change disinformation, told DeSmog.

“Their base doesn’t appear to be full of people who are excited about a technocratic post-carbon scenario,” he added.

Mobilize Media, the company behind Canada Proud, didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.

Rightwing Influencers Attack CCS

Dissatisfaction with the technology has been edging into the mainstream of rightwing discourse. “We might as well take tax money at gunpoint and burn it,” Canadian conservative influencer Jordan Peterson in February wrote on X to his 5.3 million followers in response to a CCS project in Wyoming.

U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been frequently interviewed on conservative media platforms, last year called carbon capture a “boondoggle.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran a failed primary campaign this year against Donald Trump for the Republican leadership, called pipelines in Iowa that can transport captured carbon to sites where it can be buried underground “the greatest violation of property rights.”

These tensions are growing in Alberta, the heart of Canada’s oil and gas industry, where a consortium of six top 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’s been blanketing the country in ads stating that “carbon capture is an important step towards carbon neutral resource extraction.”

Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith, who earlier this year shared a stage with Tucker Carlson and was recently interviewed on Peterson’s podcast, has announced taxpayer support of up to $5.3 billion for the plan. “Let me tell you, we are only going to strengthen the case for carbon capture, utilization and storage in the years ahead,” she said during an industry convention last year.

Grassroots Opposition Growing

Rural northern Alberta, where the project will be built, is definitely no hotbed of environmental activism. The region is home to an anti-renewable energy group called Wind Concerns whose leader earlier told DeSmog that climate science is “ridden with fraudulent data and outright lies.”

Yet locals there have created a new group called No to CO2 Landowners Group, which has teamed up with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and environmental organizations to oppose the Pathways Alliance carbon capture plan.

“Despite their claims, this is unproven technology with far-reaching implications into the future,” Amil Shapka, one of No to CO2’s representatives, has said. “With this being Canada’s largest CO2 pipeline and storage project, is our community ready for the potential health, safety and environmental risks to our water?”

The increasingly scrambled politics of carbon capture are now creating tensions at the national level in Canada. Because the federal Liberal government has proposed investment tax credits up to $10 billion to support the Pathways Alliance plan, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now associated with a mega-project opposed by some rural Canadians.

Pierre Poilievre Still Supports CCS

That’s 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 local environment and Canadians deserve affordable gas, groceries and heating,” the petition reads. “Therefore we, the undersigned, are calling on Justin Trudeau to STOP forcing expensive and destructive carbon capture on Canada’s energy industry.”

In reality, it’s the other way around. Oil producers have touted carbon capture to the federal government as “a major component” of their plan to address climate change, much preferable to other solutions proposed by the federal Liberals such as a cap on oil sands emissions.

And their policy preference — billions of dollars in taxpayer money to support carbon capture projects that can extend the oil and gas industry for decades — has been echoed by federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.

“We need to greenlight new green projects like nuclear power, hydroelectricity, tidal wave power, carbon capture and storage,” Poilievre said during an interview in May about his climate change plans.

That positive messaging on carbon capture isn’t ending up on Canada Proud, even though Poilievre several years ago hired Mobilize Media, the company behind the Facebook page, to promote his federal leadership campaign. (The Conservative Party of Canada didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about its current relationship with Mobilize). But Canada Proud continues to post pro-Poilievre content on its Facebook almost daily, including the Conservative leader’s frequent attacks on the country’s carbon tax.

Likely that’s because it’s easier to post anti-climate content for a far-right audience than anything supporting action, Neubauer said, especially when a majority of federal Conservative Party grassroots members have voted against a party proposal stating “climate change is real.”

“Canada Proud’s policy priorities [on this issue] seem to be completely out of step with the stated policy priorities of the Conservative Party and the leaders of the oil and gas industry,” he said. “But the rank and file of the conservative climate movement has been made so rabidly anti-climate action that there’s probably not a lot of upside to back CCS.”