On the national television news last night there was a report
about the fires near Yosemite Park.
A homeowner, a fire disaster victim, was being interviewed and
it was what one would be expected in this type of an
interview. She had lived in this area home
for more than 25 yrs. and had experienced fires before but the
magnitude of this fire was unique and formidable.
Then something unexpected happened. She looked straight
into the camera and demanded that the coal industry in
West Virginia and those who use that coal come out to Yosemite
to fight the fires that burning coal is responsible for.
Her
direct correlation of the fires, climate crisis and coal use
made sense but it was the shouldering of responsibility that struck
me.
That is similar to the use of ethanol in the California low
carbon fuel incentive. We rural Iowa residents are now buried in
corn fields and that
in itself is not so bad but the massive fossil fuel energy it
takes to grow that corn, the water pollutants that fill our
waterways and flow to the delta basin,
and the depletion of soil nutrients due to the monoculture
approach to agriculture, should be bad enough to influence ethical
decisions about LCF. Now add to
that the dynamic and destructive changes that a Hazardous
High-Pressure Critical State Carbon pipeline brings into the rural
area. The construction alone wipes
old tree growth, eliminates wildlife habitat, creates an
industrial Zone replacing the rural landscape. It makes living
within miles of a CO2 pipeline a
daily gamble on you and your family's safety. All this CO2
pipeline business is being driven, not by brilliant and ethical
environmental reasoning, but by the 45Q
tas credits and the low carbon fuel standards credits. The
ethanol plants are still producing their coal fired plant emissions
and capturing a very small amount of
their corn processing emissions to receive their "credits". The
resulting energy intensive, power consuming pumping stations then
transport the CO2 to where it
is sequestered or resold as EOR(enhanced oil recovery) to
produce either a cloud below the surface whose permanent storage is
suspect or produce more fossil
fuel to burn. The news coverage of the Western US fires reminds
the rest of the country that we are living in a climate crisis
right now. This reminder repeats itself
as tornados, floods, droughts and other weather phenomenon
threaten the Midwest. Now add to that the dangers of
transporting the compressed carbon.
I wonder if some night you will be watching the evening news and
someone from Iowa will be interviewed about the hazardous CO2
pipeline that ruptured,
injured and killed in a rural community. Maybe that person
will look straight into the camera and demand that the California
LCFS panel come to Iowa to help
bury the dead, help the injured and begin the clean-up of
another disaster. A man-made disaster. One that could have
been avoided by better ethical
environmental decisions.
I urge the panel to consider the costs of ethanol production. It
far outweighs the decision to continue support for the fossil
fuel and the ethanol industries. A new age is upon us now. We
must take bold actions in our move toward clean energy.