"How agricultural interests are teaming up with big oil to take advantage of tax credits meant to fight climate change—and what the backlash can tell us about the future of climate politics."
"One night in 2021, a farmer Steve Kenkel has known since childhood gave him a call. The farmer had news: there was going to be a CO2 pipeline coming through his property in Shelby County, Iowa.
Kenkel has lived in Shelby County for his whole life, on a farm that has been in his family for five generations. He’d been a county supervisor for years. He had no idea what his neighbor was talking about.
He called his fellow supervisors and his county auditor, who also were in the dark. A few days later, the Board of Supervisors got a letter from a company called Summit Carbon Solutions, informing them about a public hearing on the project.
“My neighbor got [the news] first,” Kenkel said. “At the time, it kind of threw a red flag up for me—but nothing like it does now.”
That phone call from a childhood friend would propel Kenkel into years of unexpected activism, and put his name on a lawsuit filed by a company founded by one of the most powerful men in Iowa. Summit Carbon Solutions is proposing to take advantage of tax credits, juiced up by the Biden administration to fight climate change as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, to pipe carbon dioxide from ethanol plants across the Midwest to be stored underground in North Dakota. Some of the men behind the project have close ties with powers in statehouses across the Midwest, and have seemed to some to be using those ties to seize land and push through a project that many people don’t want.
The opposition has leaked into national politics. In early October, former candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released a video onto Twitter/X, calling the Summit project “Kamala’s carbon pipeline climate scam.” Narrated by RFK Jr., the nearly half-hour-long video interviews affected farmers throughout Iowa, including Kenkel, in opposition to the project."
Molly Taft reports for Drilled December 5, 2024, with support from the Pulitzer Center.
Advertisement 
