By now, everyone is experiencing the consequences of President Joe Biden’s war on fossil fuels. From horrendously high gasoline prices to the cost of cooling and heating homes and businesses, people are suffering the consequences of Biden’s Green New Deal enthusiasm. Of course, high energy prices are a significant cause of inflation. The production and transportation of goods and services require fossil fuels, for the most part. Food prices have been particularly inflated, as anyone who has been to the supermarket can attest.
Carbon capture has often been touted as an alternative to dealing with climate change that does not involve laying waste to the fossil fuels industry with the attendant misery inflicted on consumers. Whether it is developing power plants that capture carbon dioxide instead of belching it into the atmosphere or finding ways to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, such as by planting trees or through more exotic methods such as Project Vesta’s “green sand” approach, carbon capture holds a great deal of promise.
MIT Technology Review recently related another carbon capture project that recruits agriculture for the task of fighting climate change. A research group out of Berkeley, California, called the Innovative Genomics Institute is using a gene-editing tool called CRISPR to alter food plants to absorb more carbon dioxide, further decreasing the amount in the atmosphere. As a happy side effect, the researchers believe that the altered food crops would grow faster, thus increasing crop yields.
The institute’s initial efforts will focus on rice, whose genome is well understood, as well as sorghum. Presumably, if the process can be shown to work, it can be expanded to other crops, such as wheat and corn. The initial experiment will cost $11 million and will last for three years.
Making food crops engines of carbon capture is not the entire solution to climate change. But it is a more sensible part of it than waging war on the fossil fuel industry and hoping people will be forced to buy expensive electric cars because gasoline is near $5 a gallon on average — and much more in liberal states such as California.
It has become conventional wisdom that the Democrats are in for a red wave of a shellacking in the midterm elections. The recent election to Congress of Mayra Flores, a Mexican-born Republican from a Hispanic-majority district in South Texas, is seen to be a prelude to the coming electoral massacre that the Democrats face. Biden’s recent exhortation of the oil companies to increase production, which his very policies have been designed to prevent, is a futile and panicky attempt to stave off disaster.
Nothing can save congressional Democrats. But Biden will be afforded the same opportunity to reboot his administration that former President Bill Clinton had after the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. The first two years of the Clinton administration consisted of attempts to pass liberal policies, such as an abortive healthcare reform bill championed by then-first lady Hillary Clinton. After 1994, Clinton pivoted toward the center and declared that the “era of big government is over.” His presidency featured a number of successes, at least until the Monica Lewinsky affair blew it up.
In 2023, seeing many of his liberal allies involuntarily retired to the private sector, Biden could declare, “The era of the Green New Deal is over.” Then he could rescind his executive orders that have placed a boot on the neck of the fossil fuel companies and pivot toward encouraging carbon capture, including the idea of turning food crops into carbon sinks.
The progressive Left will not be happy with anything that does not destroy the fossil fuel industry. The anti-GMO crowd will be especially irate. But Biden, because of his advanced age, is not likely to run for president successfully again. That fact will be oddly liberating to a man who has sought the presidency for decades only to acquire it in the winter of his life. Going out with a winning policy would be legacy-making, not to mention good for the country. Biden could spend the rest of whatever years he has left appreciating that.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration titled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars, and Beyond, and, most recently, Why is America Going Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
