After President Biden gave an inauguration speech filled with platitudes about unity, he signed a series of executive orders that ran against that sentiment. Among them was an executive order yanking the permit from the Keystone XL pipeline.
The Keystone XL pipeline would take oil from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The United States would acquire a source of oil from a friendly country and not from the volatile Middle East. Canada would get lots of money. America’s hard-won energy independence would be secured. The pipeline also created a lot of union, blue-collar jobs, the very sort Biden pretended to support.
The pipeline has been a cause celebre for the environmental movement ever since it was first proposed 15 years ago. Environmentalists and some Native American tribes have fought the project in the courts and on the picket lines, slowing it down. President Barack Obama denied the Keystone XL pipeline a permit that was required because it crosses international borders. President Donald Trump restored the permit. Now President Biden has taken it away.
Climate change is the reason given for the Biden action. However, halting the pipeline will not reduce carbon emissions at all. The oil will still be pumped out of the tar sands. Only it will be shipped using diesel fuel to the U.S. or China via train and tanker truck. The immediate real-world effect is that blue-collar union workers, energy consumers, and the nation of Canada have been thrown under the bus in order to assuage Sen. Bernie Sanders’s faction of the Democratic Party.
Imagine being Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, expecting better relations with the U.S. now that the Bad Orange Man is no longer president. No such luck.
In the meantime, in the town of La Porte, Texas, a company called NET Energy is getting ready to move to the next stage of its plan to solve climate change. For the past several years, NET has been operating a prototype of a natural gas power plant that emits zero greenhouse gases. It uses carbon dioxide to turn the generators using a technology called the Allam Cycle. It then sequesters the carbon dioxide for later sale to vendors for everything from carbon nanotubes to fuel to food.
As of last month, NET is ready to start selling commercial versions of its zero-emission power plants. The company’s CEO has announced the construction of four power plants, relatively small, producing 25 megawatts of power. These four will be the first of many. The technology is described as a game-changer that will make conventional natural-gas-fired plants obsolete. The plant in La Porte will be converted to run on renewable syngas.
The NET development points to a way that the Biden administration can more effectively fight climate change than the ham-handed banning of fossil fuel projects or Obama-era boondoggles such as subsidies to companies like Solyndra. Biden could advocate for a carbon tax. That way, private companies would have incentives for developing technologies that do not emit CO2 into the atmosphere.
The trick is that the government would not mandate what those technologies are. Some would build carbon capture plants such as those being developed by NET. Others would develop other technologies such as nuclear or renewables, including wind and solar. The rest might buy offsets such as planting trees or use the “green sand” technology Project Vesta is testing. The carbon tax would be offset by reductions in the income tax and, or, the payroll tax.
The main advantage of a carbon tax is that it is likely to get results. At the same time, it avoids economic dislocation, job loss, and sky-high energy prices. It uses the free market to get to the desired result of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
The disadvantage is that it does not provide politicians such as Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Biden a whip hand over private business. The Green New Deal would not be necessary. The political class would find that situation irksome and therefore is likely to oppose such a simple solution.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond.” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
