By James A. Merchant
In Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff’s “The Revolutionary Samuel Adams,” essayist, organizer and politician Samuel Adams is credited with leading political protests and civil disobedience opposing the taking of colonists’ rights, especially the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the Tea Act. King George III and his government ministers dismissed these petitions and protests as the work of “farmers.”
Adams organized gatherings of Massachusetts’s town representatives and committees of correspondence between the colonies, presaging the two Continental Congresses. Seeking to repress a mounting rebellion, the British government installed troops and barricaded the Boston Harbor. The “farmers” became minutemen, the first shots of the American Revolution were fired and the colonies united.
Standing up for citizen rights is bedrock of being a U.S citizen — regardless of the oppressor.
Those of us who studied agricultural health and safety in the 1980s, when we worked with independent, progressive and cooperative Iowa farmers, then observed the rapid progression to corporate industrial farming in the 1990s to the present day. The vast majority of the once-independent poultry and livestock farmers are now contractors with large national and multinational meat corporations, two of which are owned by foreign entities — Smithfield Foods, Inc. wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese WH Group, and JBS USA Holdings Inc., wholly owned subsidiary of Brazilian JBS S.A. The late ISU agricultural economist Neil Harl concluded that the effect of such monopolies has turned once independent farmers into “serfs,” relatively “powerless pawns.” Served by agricultural commodity associations and state Farm Bureau Federations, industrial agriculture, or Big Ag, is remarkably unified in its messaging as it exerts its political sway with muscle and money over farm state politicians, federal and state governmental agencies, farm state universities, most county supervisors and many captive farmers.
Several sources of Iowa environmental pollution and public health information, to which the public has a right, have disappeared. Those defunded by the state include the air pollution monitoring program for CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations, conducted via contract with the University of Iowa State Hygienic Laboratory, the ISU Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and most recently the UI water monitoring system and data platform (thanks to ISU for keeping it funded for one more year). Iowa has an estimated 15,000 CAFOs, but there is no requirement for the hundreds of small, but still hazardous, CAFOs to file a manure management plan or to be location approved via Iowa’s badly flawed Master Matrix. Through successive ag-gag and anti-nuisance suit legislation, Iowans’ right-to-know and ability to bring property right suits have been essentially eliminated.
Now, Summit Carbon Solutions is busy suing counties and politicking for the use of eminent domain to force farmers and other rural land owners to allow a high pressure liquefied CO2 pipeline to be trenched across their land. CO2 is an odorless, colorless, heavier than air asphyxiate gas that, according to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), is immediately dangerous to life or health at 50,000 parts per million. The risk is not theoretical — pipelines fail.
A 2020 breach of a 24 inch CO2 pipeline in Mississippi resulted in a 40 foot deep crater and a ground-level plume that extended a mile to a small town resulting in hospital visits by 45 individuals. As a former US Public Health Service officer who was on call during the Three Mile Island crisis, was the CDC lead officer during the eruption of Mount St. Helens with over 50 lives lost, and on-site physician dealing with coal mine disasters, my perspective is what should be guarded against is the catastrophic event.
Given the level terrain of the proposed pipeline, there is a very real pipeline rupture asphyxiation risk from a colorless, odorless, heavier than air plume killing people, livestock, and poultry. Also anticipated is loss in property values, compromised economic development by affected communities, compaction of soil, and disruption of drainage tiles. Plus, CO2 pipelines require millions and millions of gallons of water that drought stricken Iowa does not have to give.
It is therefore refreshing, and not surprising, that farmers and other rural landowners have become organized and are now asserting their property rights in opposition to the Summit CO2 pipeline. Even some Iowa legislators are opposing this scheme that would make rich pipeline investors filthy rich, even after sharing Inflation Reduction Act CO2 sequestration dollars with the biofuel industry. The rapid transition of the public and commercial fleets to electric vehicles, which pits the biofuel industry against Big Oil’s deeper pockets, sharper elbows, more energy per gallon (but more carbon), and a robust extant infrastructure, is indeed an existential battle for the biofuel industry — not, whether it can be served by a CO2 pipeline.
Many, I among them, believe biofuel production, with its substantial environmental and soil degradation costs, should not guide US policy. But, biofuels do contain less carbon, and its production is supported by current federal law, regulations, and Biden administration policy. However, biofuel production produces significant global warming CO2 emissions that should be captured for the public good. This does not require a hazardous pipeline. Rather, biofuel facilities could capture CO2 in pressure tanks and more safely, inexpensively and quickly transport liquefied CO2, by biodiesel or EV tanker truck or biodiesel rail, to North Dakota to sequester deep below ground. A second option, coming soon, is production of “green methanol”using CapCO2 Solutions’ “methanol modules.” According to the company, sequestration of CO2 thereby could qualify for Inflation Reduction Act dollars that would pay for the $12 million modules, while producing methanol for sale to produce a range of products including plastics, paint, insulation, cosmetics as well as a potential source as a renewable fuel.
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