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In this podcast, Jason Bermas and Todd McGreevy discuss the Summit Pipeline agenda, which was passed on 25 June by the three members of the Iowa Utility Board. In order for Summit Carbon Solutions to build its carbon-capture-and-storage plant — its two-thousand-mile, multi-state plant, in which liquified CO₂ is carried via pipeline from an ethanol plant in Iowa to sites elsewhere, and (you are asked to believe) both satisfies existing energy concerns and reduces dangerous levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere — it needs to persuade the states involved to exercise eminent domain and secure the necessary land from private citizens who, inconveniently enough, happen to own it. So far, as Clark Kauffman of Iowa Capital Dispatch has reported, Iowa has signed off on the permits necessary for eminent domain to be enacted there. Meanwhile, the Dakotas have proved a tougher nut to crack. Whether Dakotan intransigence can be ascribed to a healthy skepticism of the whole capture-and-storage process and a leeriness of the safety concerns that the project raises (and, as Rochelle Arnold has noted, businesses like Summit tend to elide), or merely an insufficient amount of commercial pressure brought to bear on Dakotan attentions— or six of one, et al — what we are watching play out is another instance of “climate crisis” wolf-bait being tossed out to justify any number of extra-judicial actions taken by the state. This time, what’s actually at stake is the right of property-owners to maintain their fair-market asking-price on their land, and not have it driven down artificially by the mere possibility of eminent-domain interference.
