Last November, the FWB Tea Party was a few months ahead of time by hosting a rally to protest Cap and Trade. Well it was bad news then, and it’s bad news now.

We will be building on our success in fighting the EPA overreach in our State and fighting this bill.

For instance, the President’s Budget Director, Peter Orszag, when, as director of CBO, stated under “a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices. Such price increases would stem from the restriction on emissions and would occur regardless of whether the government sold emission allowances or gave them away.”

While many concerns have been expressed over this proposed redistribution of wealth scheme, I am more concerned about the so called environmental provisions in the bill.

For instance this bill calls for something called “carbon sequestration”. What is that you say?
First, the language from the bill itself says: ‘‘(2) CARBON SEQUESTRATION.—The term
8 ‘carbon sequestration’ means the act of storing carbon
9 dioxide through physical, chemical, or biological
10 processes that can prevent the carbon dioxide from
11 reaching the atmosphere.’’;

18 SEC. 1412. SPECIAL FUNDING PROGRAM FOR DEVELOP
19 MENT AND DEPLOYMENT OF CARBON CAP20
TURE, SEQUESTRATION, AND CONVERSION
21 TECHNOLOGIES.

Note the word “development” in lines 18 and 19. They are trying to create a system which does not exist, when energy sources such as nuclear and natural gas are currently proven and available.

According to Sally Benson, Professor, Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University.
“The goal of carbon sequestration is to permanently store the carbon dioxide, permanent meaning very, very long-term, geological time periods.”

In short, they propose to capture CO2 emissions and inject them back into geologic formations such as deep saline or depleted oil and gas reservoirs, as these are layers of porous rock underground that are “capped” by a layer or multiple layers of non-porous rock above them.

What remains undetermined is if this by product will leech into water supplies or be re-released into the atmosphere, thereby negating the whole argument behind the program in the first place.
On the Department of Energy website, http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/carbon_seq/index.html, you can find more information, but I encourage you to read closely for words like “experimental”. Note the attention paid to reassuring the public that safeguards exist. First, for safeguards I point residents of the Northwest Florida to words like “blowout preventer” a word that hardly anyone was familiar with prior to the blowup of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig.

But don’t take my word for it, let’s see why Greenpeace, yes Greenpeace, is against this program: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/new-greenpeace-report-exposes

We will continue to fight this bill. We are organizing a delegation to speak to Sen. Nelson (D-FL) who has expressed concerns over other provisions within this bill.

Write your editors. Share emails. Tell others of the environmental threat contained within this bill – let’s fight this bill on the science, or lack of it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 at 7:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.