The Madness Continues Apace

 The madness continues apace.  The "woke" want to keep the normals on their heels to prevent us from figuring out that the whole "woke" agenda is a scam designed to enrich the "woke" at the expense of everyone else.  A couple of cases in point:

The Biden administration now wants to ban gas stoves according to an article at American Action News entitled Biden's Gas Stove Ban Is A Bigger Deal Than Democrats Think: This Business Owner Could Lose His Business. The owner in question is restaurantuer Stratis Morfogen who claimed on Tucker Carlson Tonight last night that switching to electric would reduce production by 40% and increase prices by 60%. The claim by the US Product Safety Commission that gas stoves are a health hazard is pure hogwash. Gas stoves have been in use in the United States since the early 20th century and they are just now claiming unhealthy air quality from these stoves? Please.

Then there is the hairbrained scheme to capture carbon dioxide, liquify it, and store it underground. At the American Thinker today, John M. Contino tells us about it in an article entitled Carbon Capture Is A Woke Fantasy.

Let's say you're brainstorming with some friends, trying to figure out how to cash in on the woke green wave. It would probably not occur to the less boldly imaginative among us to propose 1) capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from agricultural areas covering five Midwestern states (see map from a corporate website here), 2) dehydrating and compressing it into liquid form at various capture locations, 3) transporting it via brand new pipelines, and 4) sequestering it into its permanent rocky tomb a mile beneath the surface, safe from climate change, nuclear war, and all but the most severe cosmic catastrophes. As a bonus, liquid CO2 that survives burial has commercial industrial applications, like dry ice for food preservation or creating cloudy or foggy effects for Hollywood productions. It's also used in fire extinguishers and to carbonate soft drinks, and it is even an important cooling agent for cryogenic freezing, as was done, for example, to Ted Williams and his son John Henry.

If you're wondering where the money comes from for these enterprises, the Department of Energy has announced many tens of millions of dollars in funding for research and implementation of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects. Additionally, carbon credits for industry are shaping up to be a powerful incentive for generating private and public investor capital.

Where to start...

First of all, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been much higher than today, and contrary to St. Greta of Thunburg, the planet did not burn to a crisp, and life went on. A Forbes article, no conservative site, points to levels as high as 4,000 ppm in the past, compared to 400 ppm today. Then there are volcanos, which emit more carbon dioxide than human activity.

Second are the benefits of CO2 to plants. First plants grow bigger and faster with higher CO2, which is why green house growers pump it in to their green houses. Plants also need less water when living under higher CO2 levels. So more CO2 helps to overcome desertification. Shouldn't that please environmental wackos?  After all, they blame deserts on us too.  Levels as high as 600 to 800 ppm would not be harmful to us.

Third, there is the cow flatulence nonsense. Cows, and other livestock, including you and me, fart. Cows fart a lot because they eat a lot of low nutrion feed like pasture grass. But they do not add to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere because they are just part of the carbon cycle. The grass breaths in CO2. It then strips off the oxygen, breathing that out so we can breath. The grass meanwhile uses the carbon as building blocks to form the celluose that is the backbone of blades of grass. The cow eats the grass, and releases the CO2 back to the atmosphere, so it can be utilized by more grass. Nature thus recycles the same CO2 in a great circle of life.

So what happened to the 4,000 ppm of CO2 that existed during the Precambrian period 500 million years ago? Most of that is sequestered in the vast layers of limestone around the earth. It was layed up by trillions of shell forming creatures in the ocean that died, and left behind thick layers of limestone. Indeed, these little creatures turn out to be a more productive way to sequester CO2 that the multibillion dollar Navigator project mentioned above.

Sequestering CO2 by liquifying it, and storing it underground is just a waste of money that serves no purpose except to enrich already rich people more at your a my expense.