This commentary was written by Jim Hurt of Woodstock.
News flash: Enlightened Republicans have been sighted deep in the forest, traveling in dense packs with Bigfoot and other tree huggers who are guiding them gently back into the light. These tired huddled Conservatives are yearning to be free of Trump’s shadow. They actually want to save democracy, climate, forests, economy and Ukraine with a free market, free enterprise, for-profit solution to our CO2 crisis. After six years in the wilderness, they just want to get along to make America great again as it was before Trump divided our country.
To be honest, though, we were hardly “great” before Trump thanks to the history of racism but we had a shot at greatness and may still again after Trump is gone. An intelligent compromise on climate policy can help begin the process of reunion.
Ideally, CO2 reduction at the point of emission should come hand in hand with the active removal of CO2 from the sky simultaneously and profitably. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP26 say we need to reach net-zero globally by the early 2050s, which is far too slow. Then they say we need to begin carbon dioxide removal from the air as soon as we can.
McKinsey Sustainability, which reviews IPCC papers, put it like this; “The IPCC’s latest report outlines the scale of the challenge, saying that limiting warming to 1.5C translates into around 6 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide removal per year by 2050. To put this into perspective, that is more than all the petroleum produced today, a monumental endeavor.” Indeed, to attain that carbon dioxide removal goal, the world has to reach net-zero emissions long before 2050 or by about 2035.
The new IRA climate law all but reverses the Supreme Court’s backward Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling on power plants just in time. Recent advances in chemistry, agriculture and renewable energy technology now make it profitable to renovate and transform all central plants into negative emission, power and storage stations. Instead of closing coal, gas or wood plants due to age, CO2 and competition from solar and wind, they can be turned into utility-scale, fully renewable, power and storage stations that make clean watts, green hydrogen and synthetic fuels.
Much profit can be had by cultivating hemp biofuels, as Canada is doing, and then reusing CO2 emissions to make synfuels and other products. Solar and wind are zero-emission except for the gas to build them. They do not actively or directly remove CO2 from air. Industrial hemp removes CO2 better than trees via photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide removal can and must be profitable or it will not help save us in time. The EPA now cannot force utilities to shift to solar and wind. Utilities can still make the shift themselves for profit with EPA guidance and Department of Energy support with carbon dioxide removal included.
Again, speaking of MAGA, one way to make America great for the first time perhaps is to create green jobs for all kinds of Americans, including immigrants. We mustn’t let these good desperate people get away without exploiting them as future citizens, voters, taxpayers, consumers, workers and community developers. They’re good for gross national product. Immigrants are still the life’s blood of our not-yet-great nation. They, too, deserve a Green New Deal to retrain them as farmers, foresters and firefighters.
Irrigating deserts will help cool the climate significantly and boost food and biofuel crops, i.e. hemp. Hemp is also food for milk and bread. Carbon forests need protection to expand. Besides, except for Native Americans, we are a nation of immigrants and their children after all.
America can be great like never before if we unite with native people and immigrants and all kinds of Americans in support of free and fair elections. Climate justice and civil rights will only come hand in hand. These truths can blow away the dumb rage of Trumpism and Putinism at the ballot box, even if Attorney General Merrick Garland fiddles as Trump burns the clock. Need we ask, what is Garland doing that he might have done a year ago? What about Jan. 6? Adam Schiff wants to know. Isn’t that even more important than secret documents at Mar-a-lago?
Be that as it may, Gov. Phil Scott, the Climate Council and Vermont utilities should now support a profitable carbon dioxide removal plan. CO2 can be reused to make H2, synfuels and other products, i.e. plastic, concrete, fertilizer, graphite, graphene and carbon fiber.
Paving the way, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne reports that a graphene filter lowers the cost of CO2 capture to $30 per ton. SkyNano claims their process is “profitable based on the value of the output product from CO2” — carbon nanotubes. Tax incentives are a trivial bonus.
Moreover, central power and storage that is clean and green can only benefit distributed renewables that, in turn, support electric vehicles and heat pumps. The ever-useful switching yard is key to integrating new inputs, i.e. local solar farms and megawatt-scale storage.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy is allocating $3.5 billion for direct air capture, even though it is still too expensive. Some DOE money should go to projects that cultivate hemp biofuels to pull CO2 from the sky and then capture their CO2 at the point of emission to make hydrogen and synthetic fuels and feedstocks. Vermont and Vermont utilities should seek DOE support to renovate the state’s wood plants and Vermont Yankee both to reduce CO2 at the point of emission and remove CO2 from the atmosphere at the same time. And that will set a good example to the nation, the world and Joe Biden, too.