Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is desperate to save her at-large congressional seat and her Beltway perks. As chair of the House Republican Conference Committee, the third-highest position of leadership on the GOP side of the U.S. House of Representatives, she has enjoyed an elevated status, and has her eye on taking over Nancy Pelosi’s spot should Republicans take back control of the House. Conservatives have long seen Cheney as a liberal RINO (Republican In Name Only), but she really crossed a forbidden line by joining with the Pelosi Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump.
Now she is trying to buy back goodwill from the Wyoming Republicans by co-sponsoring a giant “green” federal boondoggle that would pour a bonanza of taxpayer dollars into Wyoming for “carbon capture.” Cheney has signed on as a co-sponsor of the Storing CO2 and Lowering Emissions (SCALE) Act introduced by Representative Marc A. Veasey (D-Texas).
On March 19, Cheney posted on her congressional website congratulatory comments from fellow RINOs and corporatists who stand to richly benefit if the SCALE Act passes. Cheney highlights their plaudits under the banner headline, “What They Are Saying: Key Leaders & Groups Praise Cheney’s Co-Sponsorship Of Legislation Supporting The Coal Industry.”
“Wyoming has always been a leader in Carbon Capture, Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS) and we are committed to making Wyoming the next state to have a CCUS facility,” Wyoming’s Republican Governor Mark Gordon stated. “Representative Cheney has once again demonstrated her leadership and dedication to Wyoming’s future with the introduction of the SCALE Act. I urge Congress to act upon the bill.”
“CO2 transport and storage infrastructure is an essential enabler for large-scale carbon capture and removal deployment in order to achieve economy-wide net-zero emissions,” said Richard Jackson, President of Occidental Petroleum. “We appreciate the leadership of Representative Cheney, and we look forward to working with her on this important issue.”
Dr. Steven M. Carpenter, director of the Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute in Casper, enthusiastically supports the legislation, noting that “Providing low-cost federal financing to build out large-scale CO2 transport systems together with saline geologic storage is an important and gubernatorially directed strategic opportunity for Wyoming.”
Carbon Capture: Corporate Welfare, Fascist Economics
With all due respect to the above-quoted Dr. Carpenter, the carbon-capture scheme may be “low-cost” to the favored beneficiaries, but not to the taxpayers who will pick up the tab. Like every other “solution” to the global-warming scam, Carbon Capture, Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS, also called carbon-capture-and-storage, CCS) is another gigantic fraud that would waste untold billions of tax dollars, tear up enormous swaths of the countryside for pipelines and facilities, and dramatically drive up energy prices — all for achieving a piddling reduction in atmospheric CO2, which is a natural gas that we exhale and that is beneficial to plants. CCUS is a classic government “solution” in search of a problem. In short, the CCUS folks say we must “capture” CO2 and then concentrate it into a liquid and transport it long distances in specially constructed pipelines to areas where it can be piped deep underground and stored permanently.
“The quantities of gases that CCS would need to handle are enormous and capital and operating costs will be horrendous,” notes Australian geologist Viv Forbes. “For every tonne of coal burnt in a power station, about 11 tonnes of gases are exhausted — 7.5 tonnes of nitrogen from the air used to burn the coal, plus 2.5 tonnes of CO2 and one tonne of water vapour from the coal combustion process. Normally these beneficial atmospheric gases are released to the atmosphere after filters take out any nasties like soot and noxious fumes.”
“However,” he notes, “CCS also requires energy to produce and fabricate steel and erect gas storages, pumps and pipelines and to drill disposal wells. This will chew up more coal resources and produce yet more carbon dioxide, for zero benefit.”
There are many problems with the scheme in addition to its exorbitant cost. As Forbes points out, “The real problems are at the burial site — how to create secure space for the CO2 gas. There is no vacuum occurring naturally anywhere on earth — every bit of space is occupied by solids, liquids or gases. Underground disposal of CO2 requires it to be pumped AGAINST the pressure of whatever fills the pore space of the rock formation now — either natural gases or liquids. These pressures can be substantial, especially after more gas is pumped in.”
“The natural gases in rock formations are commonly air, CO2, CH4 (methane) or rarely, H2S (rotten egg gas),” the geologist explains. “The liquids are commonly salty water, sometimes fresh water or very rarely, liquid hydrocarbons. Pumping out air is costly; pumping natural CO2 out to make room for man-made CO2 is pointless; and releasing rotten egg gas or salty water on the surface would create a real problem, unlike the imaginary threat from CO2.”
“Then there is the dangerous risk of a surface outburst or leakage from a pressurised reservoir of CO2,” says Forbes. “The atmosphere contains 0.04% CO2 which is beneficial for all life. But a CCS reservoir would contain +90% of this heavier-than-air gas — a lethal, suffocating concentration for nearby animal life if it escaped.”
22,000 CCUS Plants!
Steve Milloy at Junkscience.com points out that “The Bush and Obama administrations have already wasted billions of dollars on projects to capture carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks in hopes of pipelining the captured gas underground for perhaps hundreds of miles in order to inject the carbon dioxide underground and store it in saline formations. The projects either never got off the ground or captured very little carbon dioxide at extremely high cost.”
“Occidental Petroleum is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a direct air capture facility,” Milloy notes. “It hopes to be able to capture 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2022. Even if this project succeeded, the reality is that humans emitted 55.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2018 — and that figure is only going up, according to the United Nations. It would take about 22,000 plants of the sort that Occidental is building — each costing hundreds of millions of dollars — to offset human emissions in order to reach “carbon neutrality.” (Emphasis added.)
The cost and technological problems are displayed vividly in the Kemper power plant in Mississippi, a project launched to prove feasibility of CCS. “The project, owned by Southern Company, got $270 million in funding from the Department of Energy,” Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points out. “When construction began on the 582-megawatt, coal-fired facility in 2010 it was expected to cost $2.4 billion. Instead, costs ballooned to $7.5 billion. Last year, Southern canceled the project, sticking ratepayers with about $1.1 billion of those costs.”
Globalists Love CCUS Schemes
Carbon-capture schemes, like carbon credits and carbon taxes, are much-beloved by the globalists of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the European Commission, the Brookings Institution, and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including premier one-worlders Bill Gates and George Soros.
Representative Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney (longtime CFR member and former CFR director) is in step with the globalists on this and other crucial issues, most notably the globalist penchant for perpetual war and support for the crushing medical dictatorship being fastened upon us under the pretext of fighting the COVID “pandemic.”
Will Carbon Scheme Buy Back Voters?
Whatever jobs and financial benefits Cheney may be able to bring to Wyoming with the SCALE ACT, her impeachment vote and her vehement attacks on President Donald Trump will likely doom her house speaker dreams. In fact, she will almost certainly have a tough time getting reelected. Representative Cheney has stirred a giant hornet’s nest in the Cowboy State, bringing down virtually universal condemnation from Wyoming Republicans and calls for her resignation.
But, seemingly undeterred by the massive blowback, she has doubled down with her attacks, slamming Trump repeatedly for the January 6 “Capitol riot” and chastising him for challenging the legitimacy of the November elections. She also delivered a major victory to the “progressives” by bestowing validity on their “insurrection,” “terrorism,” and “white supremacy” charges against Trump and his tens of millions of supporters. Various estimates of President Trump’s January 6 rally put the number of his supporters in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, all of whom were completely peaceful. Only a small portion of the rally-goers went on to the Capitol, and only a tiny fraction of that minority actually went into the Capitol and engaged in the mayhem. (And at least some of those have turned out to be agent provocateurs from the Left). Nevertheless, Cheney has bolstered the Biden-Pelosi-Fake News talking points by inferring that all of the peaceful rally attendees are insurrectionists and stating that Republicans must “make clear that we aren’t the party of white supremacy” by denouncing the January 6 mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.
Cheney has also attacked Trump’s “America First” policy, claiming that his noninterventionist foreign policy ideas are “just as dangerous today as they were in 1940 when isolationists launched the America First movement to appease Hitler.” Cheney likely knows that such a charge is completely false. The America First Committee and its primary founder, John T. Flynn, were completely anti-Fascist, anti-Hitler, and anti-Mussolini. Flynn, a liberal journalist, had initially supported Franklin Roosevelt, but turned against him when it became apparent that FDR’s New Deal was aping the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini and the communism of Stalin. Flynn made this very clear in his books, magazine articles, newspaper columns, speeches, and radio broadcasts. His classic 1944 book, As We Go Marching, remains one of the most definitive exposés of the truly fascist policies of the Roosevelt administration. Flynn and the America First Committee (which grew to over 800,000 members nationwide) were noninterventionists, not isolationists. They supported normal trade and relations with foreign nations but were opposed to American intervention in foreign quarrels and foreign wars. They saw the horrible devastation of World War I and opposed American involvement in another European war. However, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Flynn disbanded the America First Committee and supported the war effort.
Liz Cheney is gambling that she can overcome her massive negatives with voters by providing huge federal bailouts to “woke” corporate greenies, with promises of trickle-down benefits to Wyoming middle-class workers and businesses.
Related articles:
National Review, CNN, WSJ: Backstabber Liz Cheney Is New “Hero,” “Conscience of GOP”
Liz Cheney Getting the Boot? Report: House GOP Ready to Strip Her of Chairmanship
It’s Time to Purge the GOP of RINOS. Start With Liz Cheney.
Biden Signs Flurry of Executive Orders Meant to Address Climate Change
House GOP Unveils “Carbon Capture” Plan to Combat Climate Change
