The Picayune | Advocate published a letter by our friend and hero Marion Freistadt. You probably know her as Penny. I bet she won’t mind us reproducing her letter here, as she was among the very first people to start work on building our coalition.
The EPA recently granted “primacy” to the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources for regulation of Class VI wells, used exclusively to sequester captured carbon
This occurred despite a flood of opposition and the abysmal record of LDNR in cleaning up an estimated 4,000 abandoned oil wells and preventing the Bayou Corne implosion. A teenager was killed on an abandoned oil well in 2021.
Carbon capture and storage sounds good: simply vacuum-clean the atmosphere. Yet it has been around for decades and has been minimally successful, except in the extraction of additional oil, thereby worsening the climate crisis.
There are many reasons that the technology will be harmful.
First, its purpose is to continue the burning of fossil fuels (as stated by U.S. Sen Bill Cassidy), exacerbating the climate crisis.
Carbon capture is expensive, energy-intensive and not effective. Yet the state, country and world are clamoring to jump on the carbon capture bandwagon and throw untold billions down the toilet. Louisiana and its industries are first in line with open hands.
U.S. taxpayers have already been paying for it in the form of the 45Q industrial tax credit. An industry that is 100% subsidized by the government is not an industry: It is a government handout program. A better solution is to stop emitting CO2.
Of the 22 (the highest in the nation) proposed carbon capture projects in Louisiana, none are intended to capture CO2 from existing point sources (a putative rationale): All are designed for new facilities, such as “blue hydrogen.” Spoilage of pristine Lake Maurepas with a carbon capture well is currently proposed.
Environmental and environmental justice analyses are legally required.
It will be cold comfort to activists and environmentalists in several decades when the false reality of carbon capture is finally accepted.
MARION ‘PENNY’ FREISTADT
New Orleans
