Farmers in Iowa are demanding safety data from a company planning to install a carbon-capture pipeline on their property.
The Moser family — Mary, Jamie, and Carmen of Palo Alto County — filed a brief Tuesday with the Iowa Utilities Board in regard to Summit Carbon Solutions, LLC. The company is planning a 2,100-mile pipeline to transport millions of tons of liquid carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from various ethanol plants in five Midwestern states to permanent underground storage in North Dakota.
The brief acknowledges that the Mosers, like many Iowa farmers, are concerned about damage to farm land should the pipeline be installed. But they also raise grave concerns about safety issues, saying the project is “hazardous” and poses “undue risk.”
“They take notice of the February 2020 pipeline leak in Satartia, Mississippi, where flooding caused the ground to shift and break a weld in the pipeline, releasing an explosion of ice and carbon dioxide,” reads the statement.
The Mississippi incident was indeed life-threatening. A dense cloud of the compressed, industrial CO2 descended on the town. People collapsed, car engines could not start, and 49 of the area’s 300 residents had to be hospitalized. The rest were evacuated.
To make matters worse, Mississippi authorities had to evacuate again the following October when another accident occurred while workers were repairing the original damage. That incident spewed even more CO2 , and many residents now live with residual lung, stomach, and neurological problems they never experienced before.
The Mosers are especially concerned about their land because it floods, just like the area near Satartia, Mississippi. They attached photos of their property and the adjacent county road washed out by flooding:
“The Mosers, all landowners in the vicinity of the proposed Hazardous Liquid Pipeline, and the public in general should know all possible hazards,” notes the brief. The family is demanding a “risk assessment and consequence analysis,” along with a “discharge plume model with risk assessment” to determine whether Summit “should even proceed” with its plans.
“The question at hand is whether a Hazardous Liquid Pipeline should be allowed, let alone where it should be located,” argue the farmers.
Summit Resistance
The company has already refused a July request from the Iowa Department of Justice Office of Consumer Advocate (OCA) for a risk assessment and consequence analysis and an emergency response plan. Their argument, according to the Moser brief, is that these documents “would be a guidebook for how to cause harm or damage” to the pipeline.
“The location of the Hazardous Liquid Pipeline will be well known,” counter the Mosers. Summit’s refusal “only heightens people’s concern about the safety” of the proposed project.
Nevertheless, Summit claims “that whether and/or where to locate” the pipeline is a matter preempted by federal law dealing with pipeline operation and emergency planning. The brief quotes the cited law, 49 U.S.C. § 60104(e), which states, “This chapter does not authorize the Secretary of Transportation to prescribe the location or routing of a pipeline facility.”
“The Mosers respectfully request the Iowa Utilities Board require Summit Carbon Solutions, LLC to provide Exhibits L1 [the risk assessment and consequence analysis] and L2 [the emergency response plan],” concludes the brief, “and to ultimately not approve Summit Carbon Solutions, LLC’s proposed Hazardous Liquid Pipeline.”
Oral Argument
The Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) “has primary jurisdiction over the routing-siting of hazardous liquids pipelines” in the state, according to its website. In early October the IUB scheduled a December 13, 2022 oral argument proceeding in regard to Summit’s pipeline, and invited Iowans to file briefs by November 10 if they wish to participate in the oral argument.
The three-member IUB has been confronted in recent months with plenty of opposition to carbon-capture pipelines from Iowa farmers and landowners. Summit is one of three companies working in the state to obtain pipeline permits. Navigator CO2 Ventures and Wolf Carbon Solutions are also planning projects.
Together, the three pipelines “would lay a total of more than 1,500 miles of pipe across the state,” according to Jared Strong of the Iowa Capital Dispatch. Summit spokesman Courtney Ryan said that as of August her company had finalized agreements with landowners of nearly 40 percent of its 680-mile Iowa route, indicating that a majority are opposed to the plan.
Many are worried about pipeline planners’ threats to request eminent domain if farmers do not grant voluntary easements. “Board members have repeatedly declined to publicly reveal how they might rule” on those requests, states Strong. “Eminent domain uses government authority to force property owners to accept easements on their property for projects deemed to be of public benefit.” Landowners argue that eminent domain should not be used to enrich private companies like Summit, Navigator, and Wolf. Invoking it now would be unprecedented, but pundits say it’s all according to plan.
Agenda 2030
“This pipeline project is part of the great plot I’ve been warning about for more than 30 years,” says Tom DeWeese, founder and president of the American Policy Center and a member of the National Council of The John Birch Society. “America’s farmers are now on the front lines of the ground war to force” the reorganization of private property under the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 program.
It is the latest iteration of the document known as Agenda 21, agreed upon by 50,000 delegates to the United Nations’ 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. DeWeese says that at the time UN officials dubbed it a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.” The UN-approved book Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet, explained that “effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.”
What sounded like apocalyptic fiction then has new meaning in a post-Covid world.
“The same scheme is repeated in Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, the Green New Deal and now the Great Reset,” DeWeese says. He told The New American that radical environmentalists have for decades been using fear of supposed man-man climate change to convince Americans to give up their rights.
Food insecurity and shortages are key to the plan, says DeWeese, and carbon capture pipelines forward those aims by destroying valuable farmland. “As less farmland is available, the Great Reset scheme is to grow most of our food inside factories, providing only synthetic substitutes such as the fake meat currently on the market,” he recently wrote for The New American. “It’s interesting to note that Bill Gates is right in the middle of this scheme. He’s been busy buying up millions of acres of farmland, and he’s one of the biggest promoters of synthetic beef.”
DeWeese’s comments may sound far-fetched, but recent history proves the Agenda 2030 goals have been put into practice many times on a micro-scale. In his latest book, End Game: COVID and the Dark State Quest for Bio-digital Convergence in a Transhumanist World, author Dennis Behreandt details how deadly famines imposed by communist dictatorships in Ukraine under Stalin, China under Mao Zedong, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and Ethiopia under Mengistu were microcosms of what Deep State planners have in mind for the world.
Major media blamed such woes on “capitalist greed” and “human degradation of fragile ecosystems.” On the contrary, each was a state-contrived artificial famine, and millions of lives were lost. Behreandt explains that these national oligarchies model “the kind that the West’s international elites desire to create on a global scale via the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset — key component parts of the Agenda 2030 plan that has emanated from the United Nations.”
In similar fashion, modern radicals blame industrialized society for so-called man-made climate change, using that as an excuse for insane plans to supposedly reduce mankind’s “carbon footprint” by capturing carbon dioxide and piping it underground. In the meantime, valuable farmland is destroyed, property rights are desecrated, and lives are imperiled. Infringement of constitutional rights is therefore the most dire safety threat of the pipelines. It is up to all Americans to stand against such violations before we lose our rights completely.
