To the editor,
The concept of ‘false solutions’ to climate change has been on my mind for some time now, and I am aware that the carbon pipeline proposed by Summit Carbon Solutions is one of those false solutions.
Now, the pipeline’s new path will take it very near to the farmland that I inherited in Greene County’s Grant Township. It is time that I speak up.
The proposed pipeline with the purpose of capturing carbon dioxide emitted from ethanol plants and transporting it hundreds of miles away to be stored underground – termed, carbon capture and storage – is a very narrow and inefficient way to addressing the critic issue of climate change. In fact, climate change is rarely even mentioned as a goal for this technology.
What this pipeline would do is use massive amounts of energy to build the pipeline, condense the CO2 into a liquid, and maintain the transporting pipeline. In the process, huge amounts of water would also be needed every year. Its investors would benefit from tax credits and even the possibility of using this carbon to extract more oil from the ground instead of storing it.
Does this make any sense? No.
The broader issues we need to address and find solutions for include how we use our land and other natural resources. As a landowner, I am concerned about the future health of our farmland and our planet.
By building this pipeline, and others like it, we will be saddled with a continuation of the kind of technology-and-chemical dependent agriculture that is destroying those precious resources, eliminating farmers, and causing our rural communities and small businesses to disappear.
It is easy to see. Farm fields are getting bigger, farm equipment is getting more expensive, and farmers are becoming fewer in number every year. As an Iowa State ag economist told me a few years ago, “it is the nature of agriculture to consolidate.” With this line of thinking, farms will soon be managed by computer from far away with a few employees left here in our rural counties. A local farmer-member cooperative is so intent on expanding its embrace of technology that its CEO announced that he sees data as becoming more valuable than the crop. All this leaves the remaining farmers with no choice but to produce as much as possible regardless of the social and environmental impacts.
I ask again, does this make sense?
There are better ways to reduce greenhouse gases through agriculture. We need an agriculture system that will use natural resources with care and respect, bring back biodiversity, implement ecologically sound practices, and provide a dignified income to the farmer through fair prices for their products. But we can’t begin to find solutions and imagine the changes that need to take place by allowing investors in false solutions to make decisions for our future.
Patti Naylor, Churdan, IA
President, Family Farm Defenders
