Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

The Politics of Carbon Capture Are Getting Weirder

The culture wars are threatening one of the few bipartisan areas of climate policy.

Ron DeSantis.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Carbon capture has always been contentious, but its biggest critics have traditionally been climate activists on the left. Now, in an unexpected twist, it seems to be getting caught up in the same conservative climate culture war that has overwhelmed electric stoves and ESG investing.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, took to social media this week to castigate the Republican supermajority in his state’s legislature for hosting a hearing on a bill about carbon sequestration. “Carbon sequestration is a scam!” he said in a pre-recorded video. “It’s part of climate ideology, and it should not be in law in the state of Florida, certainly should not be the work of a Republican supermajority.”

The video was uncanny. DeSantis sounded like the ideological activists he thought he was attacking. The idea of capturing carbon from industrial plants and storing it underground has long held bipartisan appeal among policymakers — attractive to Republicans in oil and gas states that want to keep those industries in business, and to Democrats as a way to reach across the aisle on climate solutions

The Florida bill in question isn’t just about carbon capture technology. It would create a carbon sequestration task force to make recommendations for how the state can increase carbon uptake in the environment — in trees, soils, and the ocean — in addition to using equipment to capture it and store it underground. These kinds of initiatives have long been popular with Republican policymakers, as well, in no small part because they can be pursued without talking about fossil fuels at all. During Trump’s first term, he championed the then-popular idea of planting a trillion trees as a climate solution.

In the video, DeSantis mischaracterizes the bill as calling for “injecting carbon into our soil, aquifers, and even our ocean floor,” conflating nature-based and technological storage solutions and making the legislation sound all the more threatening.

The video is not the only recent example of a prominent Republican coming out against carbon capture and sequestration. In March, Scott Perry, a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania, co-sponsored the “45Q Repeal Act” with Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California. The bill proposes killing the 45Q tax credit, a subsidy that pays between $60 and $180 for every ton of carbon pumped underground. The amount depends on from where the carbon was captured and whether it is simply sequestered underground or used to pump oil out of aging wells, a process called enhanced oil recovery.

Khanna and other Democrats have introduced bills to kill 45Q each year for the past several years, arguing that it was primarily subsidizing more oil production to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, fueling climate change rather than slowing it. But this is the first time a Republican has signed on as a co-sponsor. Perry painted the bill as a way to “reduce overregulation and fraud” and to help pay for the tax cuts that Trump has asked for. “The 45Q tax credit subsidizes technologies that serve no purpose beyond distorting energy markets,” states a press release from Perry’s office.

“It’s one of these, what we would call Baptist/Bootleggers type of coalitions,” David Reiner, a political scientist and professor of technology policy at the University of Cambridge, told me. “The people who hate climate change and the people who hate the idea that the way of solving climate change would be to engage the oil and gas industry.”

The environmental news outlet DeSmog has also reported on a growing conservative backlash to carbon capture in Canada, with a far-right group called Canada Proud running anti-carbon capture ads to its more than 500,000 followers on Facebook. “Carbon capture is billed as a green technology that stops carbon from entering the atmosphere,” the ads said. “But is it really good for the environment? As it turns out, not really.” Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and Food and Water Watch have been saying the same thing for years.

The rhetoric around carbon capture tends to oversimplify complex challenges into absolute statements. Critics say that carbon capture “doesn’t work” or is a “false solution.” Advocates say it’s “proven” technology that’s already avoided millions of tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere.

It’s true that to date, captured carbon has mostly been used to get more oil out of the ground. Oil and gas companies have thus far benefited more than people or the environment, despite their exaggerated advertisements saying otherwise. For many potential use cases, it’s far easier and cheaper to use renewable energy than capture and sequester carbon. The technology is expensive, and without heavy subsidies, it either isn’t economic or would increase energy costs. There are some cases, however, such as removing carbon from the atmosphere or decarbonizing cement production, where it could be one of the best solutions. The technology’s most progressive proponents often argue that the criticisms of carbon capture can be addressed with better policy. But there are no powerful political coalitions pushing for a different vision.

On the contrary, the most powerful proponents of carbon capture are pushing for more generous subsidies. In February, John Barasso, a Senator from Wyoming, introduced “The Enhancing Energy Recovery Act” with six Republican co-sponsors. The bill would expand 45Q so that all carbon sequestration projects, whether they increase oil production or not, qualify for the same amount of tax credit.

Reiner, the political scientist, mostly dismissed the significance of the DeSantis video to the broader policy debate around carbon capture. “Ron DeSantis doesn’t like carbon capture. Well, who cares?” he told me. There’s not much going on with carbon capture in Florida anyway. “The way the Senate works is it vastly over-represents the western, resource-rich states, all of whom have been very enthusiastic supporters of this,” Reiner said. “It’s very easy for Ron DeSantis to posture on this topic. It’s much harder to imagine that would gain a lot of traction in the Senate Republican leadership.”

At the same time, Reiner said the Florida governor’s comments reflect this broader upheaval happening in areas where there once appeared to be consensus. For example, after Trump was elected, there appeared to be relative agreement that the Inflation Reduction Act was safe because of how much money it was sending to Republican districts. But then the Trump administration came in and immediately began trying to shut down many of the law’s grant programs — a course of action few had predicted, mainly because it’s likely illegal for the president to end grant programs without permission from Congress.

Now, Republicans in Congress are considering axing some of the law’s most beneficial clean energy tax credits to pay for Trump’s tax cut package. Billion-dollar mega-projects to capture carbon directly from the air in Texas and Louisiana have shown up on lists floating around the Hill of programs to kill.

Perhaps more striking than the DeSantis video was a re-tweet of it by Wayne Christian, a Republican on the Texas Railroad Commission. The Commission is a state body that regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas, but whose elected members regularly receive the majority of their campaign donations from the companies they regulate. “You’re right [Governor DeSantis]!” Christian wrote. “Carbon Capture & Sequestration is no different than Wind/Solar subsidies. CCUS is Big Oil placating the Left & taking taxpayer dollars to do so. Energy policies should be meritorious & about consumers.”

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Politics

Trump’s War Against Wind Energy: A Timeline

All of the administration’s anti-wind actions in one place.

Donald Trump and offshore wind.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration’s war on the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry has kicked into high gear over the past week, with a stop work order issued on a nearly fully-built project, grant terminations, and court filings indicating that permits for several additional projects will soon be revoked.

These actions are just the latest moves in what has been a steady stream of attacks beginning on the first day Trump stepped into the White House. He appears to be following a policy wishlist that anti-offshore wind activists submitted to his transition team almost to a T. As my colleague Jael Holzman reported back in January, those recommendations included stop work orders, reviews related to national security, tax credit changes, and a series of agency studies, such as asking the Health and Human Services to review wind turbines’ effects on electromagnetic fields — all of which we’ve seen done.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Spotlight

The Fate of Wind Energy in Arkansas Is on Eagles’ Wings

The Nimbus wind project in the Ozark Mountains is moving forward even without species permits, while locals pray Trump will shut it down.

An eagle, wind power, and Arkansas.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The state of Arkansas is quickly becoming an important bellwether for the future of renewable energy deployment in the U.S., and a single project in the state’s famed Ozark Mountains might be the big fight that decides which way the state’s winds blow.

Arkansas has not historically been a renewables-heavy state, and very little power there is generated from solar or wind today. But after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state saw a surge in project development, with more than 1.5 gigawatts of mostly utility-scale solar proposed in 2024, according to industry data. The state also welcomed its first large wind farm that year.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Hotspots

Offshore Wind Bluster Hits New England


And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Newport County, Rhode Island – The Trump administration escalated its onslaught against the offshore wind sector in the past week … coincidentally (or not) right after a New England-based anti-wind organization requested that it do so.

  • Over the Labor Day weekend, the Trump administration stated in a court filing that it planned to potentially redo the record of decision for Orsted’s SouthCoast wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, and yesterday, Justice Department officials said they would vacate the approval of Avangrid’s construction and operations plan for its New England 1 offshore project.
  • These announcements got a lot of media attention. Less focus was bestowed on what preceded these moves: Last week, the anti-wind organization Green Oceans partnered with four tribes native to the Northeast and together sent petitions to the Interior and Transportation Departments, as well as the Defense Department, calling for the “immediate suspension” of offshore wind in the region.
  • According to a press release, the petitions asked for projects under construction to stop work as well as called for an end to the operation of South Fork, a completed and operating wind farm off the coast of New York. The petitions rely largely on a national security rationale that mirrors the administration’s reasoning for halting work on Orsted’s Revolution Wind offshore project. (Orsted sued over that move today, by the way.)
  • We cannot say at the moment how much this specific maneuver mattered to an administration already hostile to offshore wind. But there’s reason to believe Green Oceans is an influential organization within Trump administration circles. Early this year I reported on a roadmap created by a constellation of opposition groups, including the head of Green Oceans, and submitted to the Trump transition team showing how the incoming administration could block offshore wind development. Several of the turns in that roadmap have ultimately come to pass.
  • We also now know that Green Oceans has been in direct contact with Trump officials about individual offshore wind projects. Last week, E&E News published internal emails that showed the organization obtained a meeting in May with senior Interior Department officials to discuss cancelling all current offshore wind leases held by developers.
  • At this juncture, it’s genuinely impossible to know how far Trump will go. But now we know the opposition to offshore wind is going for the Full Monty: shutting down operating projects on a national security justification.

2. Madison County, New York – Officials in this county are using a novel method to target a wind project: They’re claiming it’ll disrupt 911 calls.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow