Editorial: Pipelines will happen

Tom Dorr, a retired Marcus farmer and undersecretary of agriculture in the George W. Bush Administration, recently offered in an interview with the Cherokee Chronicle Times why he supports the Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline, and presumably others, planned for Northwest Iowa. Dorr argues that liquid C02 pipelines benefit the corn ethanol industry, essentially, and thus are a public good.

We will burn fuel for the foreseeable future, Dorr’s reasoning goes, so we might as well add value to our crops. A Republican, he claims Democrats in Congress cooked up carbon sequestration — capturing CO2 at ethanol plants, liquefying it and burying it underground in North Dakota or southern Illinois — and the tax credits that go with it. Let’s allow him that (although Congressional Republicans were complicit).

In fact, ethanol plants are belching out tons of carbon. If we can capture it and bury it, that’s better than doing nothing. Pipelines already lace Iowa for natural gas and fracked oil. The opposition is not so much to the pipeline as the price for right-of-way, for most.

“We can try to impede it.  That won’t stop it.  It will happen,” Dorr said.

That’s what we said years ago about the Dakota Access Pipeline. There was never any doubt that the Iowa Utilities Board would approve it. We have no doubt that the pipeline projects on the boards will clear the IUB as well, and will be empowered to use eminent domain to secure necessary easements.

A crowd showed up this week for the IUB meeting to protest the pipelines. The board did not regard their remarks as testimony. The question on eminent domain is the “public good.” Ethanol in Iowa has been ordained a public good. The Biden Administration promotes it to ease fuel prices. Hazardous materials already course under our feet.

Then there’s this: Bruce Rastetter is a Republican kingmaker. Summit has Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s son on board. Carbon sequestration is a thing, no matter that fuel consumption is bound to decline and those pipelines in the not-so-distant future will be empty or pumping water after we drain all of ours.

Dorr is right. The pipelines will get buried. The Iowa rainmakers will get theirs as we pretend that we are addressing the planet being on fire.