To the editor:

I have some questions for the authors of the 3-6-2025 articles on promoting the $8.9 billion, 2,500 mile long CO2 pipeline:

1. Who ultimately pays for this project? Farmers? Ethanol plants? Summit Carbon Solutions? Or the American taxpayer?

2. ” But for ethanol plants to stay competitive, they need carbon capture.” Please elaborate on who is offering the higher ethanol price to the ethanol plants, what their projected usage volume will be, and why?

3. “The company’s pipeline would transport planet-warming emissions from dozens of ethanol plants in five states for burial deep underground in North Dakota.” How do you know that man-made CO2 is warming our planet?

In addition to my 9-28-2021 and 9-21-2022 letters explaining why man-made CO2 has no impact on climate, I’ll now add a newer back-up: The April 19, 2023, issue of AAAS Science reported that high-resolution satellites had recently found more than 19,000 new under-sea volcanoes, bringing the total to over 43,000, of which only about 16,000 have been charted by ship and submarine sonar. So, we really don’t have a good handle on total carbon dioxide pumped into the ocean. And how do you measure the carbon-dioxide tonnage coming off of the tens of thousands of under-sea volcanoes?

Along with carbon dioxide, these volcanoes and the 40,000-miles of mid-ocean mountain ridges pump enormous amounts of heat into the ocean; we don’t have a good handle on that quantity either. All that hot water is being moved by ocean currents, but all those mountains create vortices that shift water in directions we don’t fully understand — and that can have an enormous effect on global climate. Global warming is driven by under-sea volcanoes; hot, 40,000-mile-long mid-ocean mountain ridges and rifts, ocean currents, and the amount of sunlight penetrating Earth’s surface. Man’s puny 0.0016% of the total atmospheric gases is a non-player.

Phil Drietz

Delhi