Sunday, October 22, 2006

More Corporate Welfare


During her press conference on the Tories Hot Air Act Environment Minister Rona Ambrose tossed about the phrase CO2 sequestration It is experimental technology and it is being developed in Socialist Saskatchewan thanks to government funding.

Now this is interesting the guys who are making record profits want more government handouts to create Greenhouse Gas Technology. CO2 sequestration to be exact. And that is what the Tories Hot Air act promises, an infrastructure fund. A fund paid for by taxpayers, not by fining business or taxing them for their Greenhouse Gas emissions. More corporate welfare from the New Canadian Government just like the Old Canadian Government.

Alberta's booming oilpatch pleased with Ottawa's new clean air act
In April, Shell Canada CEO Clive Mather said the energy giant was in the early stages of lobbying officials in Ottawa and Alberta to develop a framework for an emissions market and help fund infrastructure to make such a project, commercially viable.

CO2 sequestration is being looked at not to reduce Greenhouse Gases, but as a way of extracting Methane gas from coal and for Natural Gas extraction. Business after all doesn't exist to be charitable or do good for the environment unless there is a profit in it.

Study Finds Plenty of Carbon Dioxide Storage Capacity Underground

Geologic sequestration refers to the process of permanent underground storage of carbon dioxide captured from sources such as coal-fired power plants, cement plants, and others manufacturing plants. Widespread deposits of shale are generally thought to be the seal or cap for deeper storage reservoirs that would prevent sequestered CO2 from leaking to the surface. Injection of CO2 into black gas-producing shales may have an additional value of enhancing the recovery of natural gas.

However as with so called clean coal technology this too is experimental and may not actually work.

US researchers who injected carbon dioxide in a depleted oil field in Texas found it caused the minerals underground to dissolve, raising fresh doubts about carbon capture and storage technology as a viable solution to global warming.


Of course that makes it a risky investment. Risk is of course something capitalists abhor, so pass it on to the taxpayers instead with a innovation fund as proposed by the Tories with their Hot Air Act. Which Shell lobbied for.

As my pal Larry Gambone calls it Socialism for the Rich. Public investment for private profit.

The irony in all this is that the forests in Canada are the largest carbon sink going, they actually scrub the CO2 out of the air, but are being destroyed for the sake of the lumber industry. Another of the contradictons of capitalism, which is not sustainable.

See:

Ambrose

Environment



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