This commentary is by Jim Hurt, a resident 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 carbon dioxide crisis.
A lucrative compromise on climate policy can begin the process of reunion. Hundreds of thousands of construction and farm jobs are at stake.
The new Inflation Reduction Act climate law all but reverses the Supreme Court’s backward EPA 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, carbon dioxide 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 reusing their carbon dioxide at the point of emission to make synfuels and many other products.
Renewables are only zero-emission except for the carbon dioxide to build them. They do not actively or directly remove carbon dioxide from air. Hemp removes carbon dioxide better than trees via photosynthesis. CO2 removal can and must be profitable or 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.
Ideally, CO2 reduction at the point of emission should come hand in hand with active removal of CO2 from the sky simultaneously and profitably. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and 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 air as soon as possible.
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 CDR 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 needs to reach net-zero long before 2050 or by at least 2035. Sooner would be better.
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 GNP.
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 out west and wild east — for example, for hurricane relief and reconstruction programs. Irrigating deserts will help cool climate significantly and boost food and biofuel crops, such as 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 — white folk too — in support of free and fair elections.
Be that as it may be, Gov. Scott, Vermont utilities and the Climate Council should unite behind a profitable carbon dioxide removal plan. CO2 can be reused to make hydrogen, synfuels and other products — plastic, concrete, fertilizer, graphite, graphene and carbon fiber.
Paving the way, Switzerland’s EPFL reports that a graphene filter can lower the cost of CO2 capture to $30 per ton. SkyNano claims its 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 accelerate distributed renewables that, in turn, support electric vehicles and heat pumps. The ever-useful switching yard is key to integrating new inputs, such as local solar farms and MW-scale storage.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy is allocating $3.5 billion for direct air capture, even though that process is still too expensive. Some Department of Energy money should go to projects that cultivate hemp biofuels, like Canada, to remove carbon dioxide from the sky and capture their CO2 at the point of emission to make hydrogen and synthetic fuels and feedstocks.
Vermont and Vermont utilities should seek Department of Energy support to repurpose Vermont’s wood plants and Vermont Yankee both to reduce carbon dioxide at the point of emission and remove it from the atmosphere at the same time. That will set a good example to the nation, world and Joe Biden too.
