I’m not sure if you all are keeping up with the grifters lately, but there’s a lot going on and a lot of money going into it. In fact, the sucking sound you hear isn’t that nasty CO2 being siphoned from the air to save all of us.

Oh, no, no, no.

That’s the sound of your standard of living and the taxes you pay being vacuumed by climate cultists just as fast as they possibly can, before someone puts the brakes on the whole cha-ching climate train chicanery.

“Surely, Beege, you exaggerate.”

AU CONTRAIRE

Let’s start with one-point-two-BILLIONWITHAB- dollars for a couple prototype “carbon vacuums.” Cool, huh?

'Slow global warming'?

It can't even be measured. https://t.co/X8TjHz3zeJ

And even if you believe the climate hoax, there is no way that the amount of CO2 that can be sucked out of the air for $1.2 billion would make the slightest difference.https://t.co/RqhcIoGgIF

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) August 13, 2023

They look way futuristic, huh?

The Biden administration is betting big on giant carbon-sucking vacuums as a climate solution, announcing that it will help jump-start two mammoth projects in Texas and Louisiana that will be a global testing ground for the new technology.

The move positions the United States as a leader in trying to mitigate emissions by installing hulking, costly machinery that aims to pull greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere and bury them underground. The Texas project, led by the Occidental Petroleum Corp., also known as Oxy, already ranks as one of the world’s largest experiments in “direct air capture.”

It will share $1.2 billion in Energy Department funding with a Louisiana project and be designated the nation’s first “hubs” for developing and testing the machinery, administration officials announced Friday morning.

“These hubs are going to help us prove out the potential of this game-changing technology,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said during a call with reporters. She said that when the projects are fully operational, they could remove an amount of carbon emissions from the atmosphere that is the equivalent of taking a half-million gas-powered cars off the road.

“Help us prove” coming out of Granholm’s mouth should chill every taxpayer to the bone. She also has one of the storied names in Southern Democratic politics helping her in the project as a “senior advisor to the president” – none other than former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu. Nothing says “fiscal responsibility” like having a New Orleanian politician with his hands anywhere near your funding (That’s a truism there, cher.). And there’s plenty of money fixin’ to be thrown around.

Money on stuff that, so far, doesn’t work.

…The technology, though, remains relatively untested. There are only a handful of direct air capture machines running worldwide at present, and the amount of emissions that they capture is negligible. A U.N. panel rattled the fledgling carbon removal industry in May with a report that warned the vacuums “are technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks.”

But since when does “not working” have anything to do with buying it anyway? Plus, we’re putting the first ones in Texas (they hate those people) and Louisiana (those people are too poor to piss and moan about it and Landrieu lagniappe?), so if they blow up, or are a complete bust, no worries.

ONWARD, CLIMATE SOLDIERS – SPEND SPEND SPEND

…The Biden administration plans to award a total of $3.5 billion to direct air capture hubs across the country. There are at least 11 projects vying for the cash infusion.

As we look into these big suction machines, one asks, “Where does the carbon dioxide go?” Like emptying a vacuum canister of dust and doghair, if you are actually pulling something out of the air, then there must be something tangible to discard, no?

Well, yes. And that’s where utilizing natural or building underground facilities, or coming up with alternative “storage” methods come into play.

…DAC employs a chemical process to separate CO2 from the air. Facilities can then store CO2 underground or put it into carbon-containing products like concrete that prevent the gas from getting back into the atmosphere.

These are the first commercial-scale DAC projects in the US. They’ll each be capable of removing more than 250 times as much CO2 from the atmosphere than the current largest DAC location, according to the DOE. Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive and its partners are building the Texas facility. The company’s CEO says that, when the project is fully operational, it has the potential to remove up to 30 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.

There does seem to be a teensy bit of hypocrisy involved here, as well. If you’ll remember, the Biden administration and climate cultists believe fracking is “bad” because the process extracts oil and gas from the earth under pressure, replacing the fossil fuels extracted with a water, sand and chemical mixture.

Here, in a federally sanctified and financed operation, it seems to me they would be filling the earth with carbon dioxide and the chemicals used to extract it from the air. Leads one to ask, what are those chemicals? [See update below – Beege]

According to my cursory research, carbon capture technology uses something called “amine based solvents,” the most common being monoethanolamine (MEA). As a “Molecule of the Week” entry, MEA doesn’t come off as very friendly.

Ethanolamine, formally 2-aminoethanol, is a viscous, alkaline liquid with an unpleasant, ammonia-like odor. It is miscible in all proportions with water and several oxygenated organic solvents, including methanol, acetone, and glycerol. As the hazard information table shows, it is hazardous to humans and the environment.

…Ethanolamine has several important industrial uses: as a “scrubber” to remove carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other acidic pollutants from waste gas streams; as a starting material for manufacturing surfactants, chelating agents, and even pharmaceuticals; as an agent for softening leather; and as an additive for controlling pH in industrial water streams.

Now, I’m not a chemist – I just play one at HotAir. But that sounds, oh, I don’t know…more badder than fracking?

Joe says fracking is bad, but pumping CO2 into the ground is good. https://t.co/NTIH4usOuj pic.twitter.com/BBqt44lPXY

— Frog Capital (@FrogNews) August 14, 2023

One of these things is very much like the other in operation, if not in particulars. It’s always amazing what climate types can revile or justify in the name of their game, depending on what suits their purposes at the time.

And their pocketbooks.

I don’t know about you, but they can’t shut all this boondoggley BS down a second too soon for me.

UPDATE: As I said, I’m not a chemist, but I do listen when people who are in the industry point out when I go astray, and a very helpful fellow on X just did so with regard to the MEA. So I am including his expert info here, to wit – it will not be going into the reservoirs underground with the CO2.