Carbon capture schemes carry grave risk of injury and death when they fail

Only the government, either through unparalleled incompetency or premeditated ruin, could take a naturally-occuring, non-pollutant gas colloquially known as the “building block of life” and pervert it into a toxic threat that maims and kills.

Last Wednesday, the outlet Canada’s National Observer published an article by John Woodside reporting on the nation’s full-steam-ahead implementation of “carbon capture” and sequestering schemes, and posed this question: “Is anyone paying attention to the risks?”

Well, if Woodside is asking this in reference to the bureaucrats in government, a guilty-until-proven-innocent paradigm is apropos, and the answer is a resounding “no.” If he’s asking it in general, well, how asinine, because of course people are paying attention to the risks—we’re called critical thinkers, and we are the canary in the coal mine (literally).

Woodside opens his piece by retelling a brush-with-death event the residents of Satartia, Mississippi experienced when a CO2 pipeline failed and burst, releasing highly concentrated amounts of the gas into the area that created a “menacing fog” which rolled into the valley. From his article:

Within minutes of breathing the air, residents choked and dropped to the ground. Nearly 50 people were hospitalized.

First responders didn’t know the calamity was caused by a carbon dioxide pipeline failing, but clues were there as they struggled to get to the scene. Gas-powered vehicles couldn’t move, and some people lay in the streets struggling to breathe. Jack Willingham, the emergency director for the town’s county, told NPR, ‘It looked like you were going through the zombie apocalypse.’ And he told HuffPost that despite the disaster, the village was in fact lucky because if the wind had blown differently or the incident had happened when people were sleeping, there would have been deaths.

Woodside explains that CO2 displaces oxygen, and because it weighs more than air, the “massive white cloud” of concentrated gas didn’t dissipate, but rather “settled on the ground.” Luckily for the Satartians, the circumstances precluded a deadly fallout; however, Woodside also relays the tragic story of 1,700 Cameroonians who perished when a natural calamity known as the Lake Nyos disaster struck, releasing highly-concentrated amounts of CO2 into the immediate area. What should apparently only be the rarest of natural disasters (recorded only twice in human history), may become commonplace thanks to the “green” agenda forging ahead despite all reason, logic, and common sense. As Woodside writes:

When CO2 pipelines fail, they can fail catastrophically, putting human lives in danger. Experts say this risk isn’t widely understood, even as governments plot a huge CO2 pipeline expansion as part of their carbon capture plans.

And furthermore, under Justin Trudeau and his leftist cohorts, “there are no dedicated regulations guiding CO2 pipelines” at any level of the Canadian government. With the promise of taxpayer dollars, and a guarantee of no accountability, I can only imagine what these carbon capture companies run by amoral greenies will do….

Lastly:

Centre for International Environmental Law campaign manager Jane Patton told Canada’s National Observer safety concerns over CO2 pipelines are a pressing issue that is not widely understood. That lack of information is especially worrying given that in Canada and the United States, where she’s based, tens of thousands of kilometres worth of CO2 pipelines are planned to be built as carbon capture becomes more central to the governments’ greenhouse gas emission-cutting strategies.

To transport CO2, its transformed from a gas to a liquid by putting it under high pressure, she explained. ‘Because the [CO2] running through the pipeline is kept in that super high-pressure state, if and when failures happen in the pipeline, it all comes rushing out in this great blast.’

So, to answer Mr. Woodside’s questions, yes, people are paying attention to the risks, but it’s the political conservatives, not the greenies ramrodding leftist climate change policy through government… which is why we constantly say these people have any place in the political arena. Pushing policy without understanding the consequences? Willful ignorance should be shamed, not rewarded. We conservatives have repeatedly sounded the alarm to warn the public that the “green” agenda is nothing but destruction and communism, but… we’re usually denigrated as “conspiracy theorists.”

Again, only government policy could take a non-pollutant gas crucial to a thriving cycle of life, harness it, and make it a threat to life itself.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.

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