Leading democratic

HARTFORD, S.D. — For more than a decade, the Midwest was the site of bitter clashes over plans for thousand-mile pipelines meant to carry crude oil beneath cornfields and cattle ranches.

Now high-dollar pipeline fights are happening again, but with a twist.

Instead of oil, these projects would carry millions of tons of carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to be injected into underground rock formations rather than dispersed as pollutants in the air.

What is playing out is a very different kind of environmental battle, a huge test not just for farmers and landowners but for emerging technologies promoted as ways to safely store planet-warming carbon.

The technology has generated support from powerful politicians in both parties, as well as major farming organizations, ethanol producers and some environmental groups.

Supporters, including some farmers who have signed agreements to have a pipeline buried on their property, frame the ideas being proposed by two companies as a win for both the economy and environment. They say the pipelines, boosted by federal tax credits, including from the Inflation Reduction Act that President Biden signed last year, would lower carbon emissions while aiding the agricultural economy through continued ethanol production.

But opponents are concerned about property rights and safety, and are not convinced of the projects’ claimed environmental benefits. They have forged unlikely alliances that have blurred the region’s political lines, uniting conservative farmers with liberal urbanites, white people with Native Americans, small-government Republicans with climate-conscious Democrats.

The result, both sides agree, is a high-stakes economic and environmental struggle pitting pipeline advocates against opponents who honed their political and legal strategies over nearly 15 years of fighting the Dakota Access oil pipeline , which has been in operation since 2017, and the Keystone XL oil pipeline , which was never built.

There is no question that technology exists to remove carbon from industrial sites and to transport and store it underground. Less clear: Is carbon capture really an effective counterweight to the overheating planet? And, if so, at what cost?

‘A very well-laid-out plan’

Orrin Geide, who raises corn, soybeans, cattle and bison near Hartford, S.D., has fought a pipeline before.

Nearly 10 years ago, Mr. Geide learned his land was on the route for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which carries oil from North Dakota to Illinois. He appeared with his sister in local news articles and pleaded with state regulators to block construction. He said he agreed to let the pipeline cross his land only when construction felt inevitable.

Now, Mr. Geide finds himself along another pipeline route, this time for an unfamiliar technology that he said feels even riskier than the oil flowing beneath his bison.

“If this goes through, I’ll have to rethink what the future will hold,” said Mr. Geide, whose farm is on the path for the roughly 2,000-mile pipeline proposed by Summit Carbon Solutions, which would carry carbon dioxide across five states to underground storage in North Dakota. If built, supporters say, it would be the largest such pipeline in the world.

When Dakota Access and Keystone XL were proposed years ago, they fused together a politically mixed band of farmers, Native Americans and environmentalists who waged a two-front war against the pipelines through relentless litigation and spirited protest.

Despite the obvious differences from oil pipelines, the new carbon pipeline proposals have mobilized some of the same activists and even involved some of the same acreage. While many landowners have signed easements for the carbon pipelines — access to more than 63 percent of land on the Summit route has been secured — others have refused.

This time, said Brian Jorde, a lawyer who represented Keystone XL landowners and now represents many farmers on the carbon routes, opponents have a playbook to guide them. Landowners have tried to prevent the pipeline companies from surveying their land, pressed county governments to enact moratoriums on carbon pipelines and signed up en masse to intervene in state permitting hearings.

“From being through an 11-year battle and all the twists and turns and the hundreds of lawsuits” on Keystone XL, Mr. Jorde said, “we’ve got a very well-laid-out plan.”

‘For the greater good’

In a world already being reshaped by climate change, the promise of carbon capture is tantalizing. The reality is complicated.

The idea behind the Summit pipeline is to take carbon dioxide from ethanol plants, where it is a byproduct of corn being turned into fuel, and transport it for underground storage. A similar project proposed by Navigator CO2 Ventures would keep some of its carbon above ground for commercial use and store the rest underground in Illinois.

“This is not just about the landowner that owns the land today, this is very much about a generational, transitional move,” said Lee Blank, the chief executive of Summit. He said he was making the case to farmers that carbon capture had the potential to “be as significant for the agricultural marketplace as the ethanol space was itself.”

The technology, if not the specific pipeline projects, has received support from several state-level Republicans, along with votes of confidence in Washington, where both the Trump and Biden administrations made building the pipelines more lucrative.

“It’s just for the greater good of our climate,” said Ron Alverson, a retired farmer in South Dakota who is on the board of Dakota Ethanol, which plans to use one of the pipelines to sequester carbon from its facility, and the board of the American Coalition for Ethanol.

The projects, if built, would be a major expansion of the country’s existing network of more than 5,300 miles of carbon pipelines. Some along the routes question whether the technology is fully proven and safe, citing the explosion of a carbon pipeline in Mississippi in 2020 that led to the hospitalization of 45 people and a federal review of safety standards.

“If one of them breaks, there’s absolutely nothing I can do but turn tail and run and hope to hell I don’t die,” said Donald Johnson, a chief of the volunteer fire department in Valley Springs, a small town along South Dakota’s border with Minnesota, near where the Navigator pipeline would run.

There has been a growing sense among landowners that leaders “of both of our parties are screwing us with this deal and looking the other way,” said Chase Jensen, an organizer and lobbyist for Dakota Rural Action, an agriculture and conservation group that opposed Keystone XL and is against the carbon pipelines. Some landowners who supported the oil pipelines, he said, were reconsidering those views in light of the carbon projects.

“Irrespective of what’s in the pipeline, they suddenly come face to face with the principle of it: that no one should be forced to accept a project if they don’t want it if it’s not a public utility,” Mr. Jensen said.

The climate argument is a particularly hard sell among the holdout landowners. Some farmers interviewed for this article said they did not believe the science behind climate change, while others acknowledged global warming but questioned whether carbon pipelines were really going to make much of a difference.

“It’s an absolute boondoggle,” said Betty Strom, who owns farmland along the Summit route in Lake County, S.D.

Ms. Strom, whose husband was a science teacher, said she worried about the climate and believed “we’re going to lose our planet” without urgent action. But she did not believe that carbon pipelines were part of the remedy.

Environmental groups are also conflicted, varying widely on whether carbon pipelines could be part of a solution.

Some groups, including the National Wildlife Federation , are at least somewhat supportive of the technology, calling for carbon capture as part of an “all-of-the-above” approach to reducing emissions. Others, including Food & Water Watch and the Sierra Club , dismiss the projects as blatant “greenwashing” that could lead to profit for energy companies contributing to global warming without addressing the root causes of climate change.

‘Why do they have a right to come in?’

Karla Lems is a rural landowner, a conservative Republican and a newly elected member of the South Dakota House of Representatives. She is also a vocal opponent of carbon pipelines.

Ms. Lems, who owns land along both the Navigator and Summit routes, said she did not see the merits of the projects and did not appreciate “private companies coming in and saying, ‘Well, you know, if we get the permit that we’re asking for, we’re going to roll through here whether you like it or not.’”

It was that question of property rights that resounded with opponents, including across political lines. Even some supporters of the projects said they were sympathetic to those concerns.

Though both Navigator and Summit have said they want to reach agreements with landowners, providing cash and legal guarantees in exchange for the right to bury and maintain their pipelines, the companies have also made clear that they would be willing to use eminent domain if state permits were granted and negotiations reached an impasse.

In an agriculture-dependent region where farmers’ ties to their land often stretch back generations, the right to decide what goes in a field and what does not is sacrosanct.

Farmers are far from unanimous, though. Scores of them have already signed easements, and some are actively cheering on the projects.

“We haul all of our corn to ethanol plants and we need this market, so we want to secure this for the long-term future,” said Kelly Nieuwenhuis, a farmer in northwest Iowa who signed agreements with Summit and Navigator and who is also a director at an ethanol plant. Though he said he understood the property rights arguments, Mr. Nieuwenhuis said he was confident “that they’re going to have this project done right — the safety equipment is going to be there.”

As negotiations continue with individual landowners, the debates over the pipelines’ fates are shifting to state legislatures and permitting boards.

Bills that would make permitting or construction of pipelines more difficult were introduced this year in Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota, all Republican-controlled states. One such bill sponsored by Ms. Lems passed the South Dakota House but failed to advance in the Senate.

Just like with the oil pipelines, both sides have already proved they are willing to go to court to press their arguments.

“It’s kind of David vs. Goliath, that’s how I feel,” Ms. Lems said. “Because they have the money. They have the backing. And it may come down to moving it through the court system and seeing what the court would do with it.”

WASHINGTON — President Obama made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address , setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

The central place he gave to the subject seemed to answer the question of whether he considered it a realistic second-term priority. He devoted scant attention to it in the campaign and has delivered a mixed message about its importance since the election.

Mr. Obama is heading into the effort having extensively studied the lessons from his first term, when he failed to win passage of comprehensive legislation to reduce emissions of the gases that cause global warming. This time, the White House plans to avoid such a fight and instead focus on what it can do administratively to reduce emissions from power plants, increase the efficiency of home appliances and have the federal government itself produce less carbon pollution.

Mr. Obama’s path on global warming is a case study in his evolving sense of the limits of his power and his increased willingness to work around intense conservative opposition rather than seek compromise. After coming to office four years ago on a pledge to heal the planet and turn back the rise of the seas, he is proceeding cautiously this time, Democrats said, intent on making sure his approach is vetted politically, economically and technologically so as not to risk missing what many environmental advocates say could be the last best chance for years to address the problem.

The centerpiece will be action by the Environmental Protection Agency to clamp down further on emissions from coal-burning power plants under regulations still being drafted — and likely to draw legal challenges.

The administration plans to supplement that step by adopting new energy efficiency standards for home appliances and buildings, a seemingly small advance that can have a substantial impact by reducing demand for electricity. Those standards would echo the sharp increase in fuel economy that the administration required from automakers in the first term.

The Pentagon, one of the country’s largest energy users, is also taking strides toward cutting use and converting to renewable fuels.

Mr. Obama’s aides are planning those steps in conjunction with a campaign to build public support and head off political opposition in a way the administration did not the last time around. But the White House has cautioned activists not to expect full-scale engagement while Congress remains occupied by guns, immigration and the budget.

The president’s emphasis on climate change drew fire from conservatives. Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a group financed by the Koch brothers, who made a fortune in refining and other oil interests, criticized the speech in a statement. “His address read like a liberal laundry list with global warming at the top,” Mr. Phillips said. “Americans have rejected environmental extremism in the past and they will again.”

Still, Mr. Obama has signaled that he intends to expand his own role in making a public case for why action is necessary and why, despite the conservative argument that such changes would cost jobs and leave the United States less competitive with rising powers like China, they could have economic benefits by promoting a clean-energy industry. In addition to the prominent mention on Monday, Mr. Obama also used strong language in his speech on election night , referring to “the destructive power of a warming planet.”

Those remarks stood in contrast to Mr. Obama’s comments at his first postelection news conference, when he said he planned to convene “a wide-ranging conversation” about climate change and was vague about action. He is also expected to highlight his plans in his State of the Union address next month and in his budget plan soon afterward.

Beyond new policies, the administration is seeking to capitalize on the surge of natural gas production over the past few years. As a cheaper and cleaner alternative to coal, natural gas gives it a chance to argue that coal is less economically attractive.

After the defeat in 2010 of legislation that would have capped carbon emissions and issued tradable permits for emissions, Mr. Obama turned to regulation and financing for alternative energy. Despite the lack of comprehensive legislation, emissions have declined roughly 10 percent since he took office, a result both of the economic slowdown and of energy efficiency moves by government and industry.

The administration is discussing with Congressional Democrats, some of whom are leery of the issue because their states are home to coal businesses, how to head off a Republican counterattack on the new regulations. Democrats are paying particular attention to the likelihood of Republicans employing a little-used procedure to block new regulations with a simple majority vote.

Senate Democrats are also girding for a battle when Mr. Obama nominates a new head of the E.P.A. The agency, excoriated by Republicans as a job-killing bureaucracy, would take the lead in setting the new regulations.

The approach is a turnabout from the first term, when Mr. Obama’s guiding principle in trying to pass the cap-and-trade bill was that a negotiated legislative solution was likely to be more politically palatable than regulation by executive fiat. Now there is a broad expectation that he will follow up his first big use of the E.P.A.’s powers to rein in emissions — proposed rules last year for new power plants — with a plan to crack down on emissions from existing power plants.

According to estimates from the Natural Resources Defense Council , emissions from current coal-fired plants could be reduced by more than 25 percent by 2020, yielding large health and environmental benefits at relatively low cost. Such an approach would allow Mr. Obama to fulfill his 2009 pledge to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by about 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the group says.

“There’s a really big opportunity, perhaps bigger than most people realize,” said Dan Lashof, director of the defense council’s climate and clean air program.

The regulatory push will be particularly important because Mr. Obama has little prospect of winning as much money for clean energy as he did in his first term, with Republicans now in control of the House. Despite the renewed attention to climate change following Hurricane Sandy and record-high temperatures in the continental United States last year, there is little sign that the politics of the issue will get any easier for Mr. Obama.