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South Dakotans successfully fought back against a law that would have made it easier to permit and build.
South Dakota voters have rejected a ballot measure that would have eased the permitting process for a highly contentious carbon dioxide pipeline. The planned $8 billion project, developed by Summit Carbon Solutions, would carry CO2 captured from ethanol plants to sequestration wells in neighboring North Dakota. But if the company had been banking on legislative relief for its siting challenges, it will have to figure out a new plan to move forward.
Referred Law 21, as the measure was called, was a citizen-led veto referendum on a bill that passed the South Dakota legislature and was signed by the governor in March. The bill would have preempted all local land use regulations and ordinances related to the siting of carbon dioxide pipelines and other transmission infrastructure, including power lines. Full authority to permit these projects would have been handed to the state’s utility commission, an elected three-member body that regulates utilities.
Summit Carbon Solutions is trying to build what would be the largest pipeline designed to carry carbon dioxide in the United States. From a climate perspective, putting debates on land use and local control aside, the calculus of the project is complicated.
Ethanol refineries are ripe for carbon capture — they emit a very pure stream of CO2 that is technologically easy to capture, and it’s better that it be buried underground than dumped in the atmosphere. But the long term prospects for ethanol in a low-carbon future are murky at best, and investing $8 billion in carbon capture and pipeline infrastructure could help justify its continued use over other, potentially better solutions. Though it’s clear electric cars will eventually crowd out ethanol from the passenger vehicle fuel market, some advocate for the industry to pivot to aviation fuel.
The pipeline faces opposition throughout the Midwest from a diverse coalition of stakeholders, including landowners in the pipeline’s path, environmental groups like the Sierra Club that oppose carbon capture in general, and Republican legislators who question the project’s merits on the grounds that climate change is merely a “hypothesis.” Though CO2 pipelines generally have a good track record for safety, a high-profile rupture in Mississippi in 2020, which sent 45 people to the hospital, has also amplified concerns.
At least five municipalities in South Dakota have passed rules governing the siting of the pipeline, Chase Jensen, a senior organizer for the environmental nonprofit Dakota Rural Action told me on a call last week. For example, Minnehaha County, the home of Sioux Falls, adopted setback rules last year that require pipelines to be laid 330 feet away from residential areas, businesses, and churches. An ordinance in Lincoln County requires 1,855 feet, and prohibits construction on sites of historical or archeological significance.
“Everybody who's going to make a buck from the future energy transition is licking their chops at this,” Jensen said of Referred Law 21, which would have preempted these ordinances. “It's a lot easier to just make campaign donations to three public utility commissioners than the 300-plus county commissioners across the state.”
The bill signed into law in March was painted as a compromise. Though it weakened local control, it gave counties the ability to charge pipeline companies a tax of $1 per linear foot of pipe installed. It also included a so-called “Landowner Bill of Rights” that enshrined certain protections like ensuring the pipeline’s developer is liable for damages caused by the project, and designating a minimum depth at which the pipeline must be buried.
But Jensen and others who opposed argued it didn’t offer landowners anything new — some of its provisions are already afforded by South Dakota law, and others had already been negotiated with Summit Carbon Solutions. Jensen pointed out that the utility commission already has the ability to override local ordinances if it finds them to be overly restrictive.
Now, with control over pipeline siting back squarely in the hands of local authorities, the future of the Summit project in South Dakota is unclear. The utility commission already rejected the company’s initial application for construction permits last year; Summit has since altered its route and reapplied.
Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia Law School, told me it was difficult to take away a clear message from the fight, in part because CO2 pipelines have strange politics. Coalitions for and against them don’t break down over party lines or traditional groups like environmentalists versus fossil fuel companies. Some climate advocates, as well as experts in the U.S. Department of Energy, say we’ll need to build many thousands of miles of new carbon pipelines in order to help us sequester carbon captured from industrial facilities and from the atmosphere.
The specific arguments over the Summit project may not apply to projects proposed elsewhere, Lockman told me, but its fate could still have ripple effects. “Any kind of high profile failure might make investors a little bit more leery to participate in this kind of project,” he said.
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“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.