Guest post from former Congressman Steve King
President Benjamin Harrison signed the Indian Appropriations Act into law in 1889 and on April 22, around noon, a gunshot triggered the race for 2 million acres of land. The Oklahoma Land Rush had begun! One hundred and thirty-four years later, on August 16, 2022, President Biden unleashed a beast when he signed the inappropriately named amendment to Biden’s Build Back Better law — the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — and began the carbon fever for taxpayer gold. !
Like most moments of high drama caused by parchment and pen; the origins, motives, dynamics and players are behind the curtains at the levers, manipulating the machinery of government. The beast we are fighting is the Green New Deal, the progeny of the European Green Deal, nurtured and probably conceived in Davos, Switzerland, at Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF). The notorious enemy of a legitimate civil society, George Soros, regularly takes center stage there.
Rubbing between Schwab and Soros, we find Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest investment firm in the world, managing more than ten trillion dollars in global investments. Fink also sits on the Board of Trustees of the WEF, on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations and Tsinghua University…in Beijing. Carbon indices, Cap-and-trade and CO2 credits are always on this globalist’s tool belt,“I believe that decarbonising the global economy will create the greatest investment opportunity of a lifetime.”. Black Rock by Larry Fink provides investment capital driving the 2100 kilometer Heartland Greenway CO2 Carbon Capture Use and Sequestration (CCUS) project.
Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Top carbon solutions, is the other major player in the race for hundreds of billions of We the People’s tax dollars. His proposal is to build 2,000 miles of high-pressure CO2 pipeline. Summit would then pump its CO2 into deep wells near the oil fields near Bismarck, North Dakota. BlackRock’s destination for the liquid CO2 would be deep wells near the oil fields south of Springfield, IL.
Summit proposes capturing 12 million tons of CO2 at 32 ethanol plants in five states. BlackRock would collect 15 million tons from 21 ethanol plants https://hartlandgreenway.com/. A third and shorter pipeline system is proposed by Wolf, a Canadian company. The wolf proposal is for 280 miles of high-pressure CO2 pipeline collecting 12.6 million tons of CO2. Their destination for deposit would be close to BlackRock’s.
On a hot summer day in 1988, Dr. James Hansen before Congress dire implications for the entire biology of a warming planet. Hansen’s testimony is credited in the United States with launching the Global Warming movement – now Climate Change. His gloomy forecasts mobilized governments, academics and Global Warming entrepreneurs. Just a year earlier, the World Economic Forum (WEF) was born from its environmental roots in the European Management Forum. Science, politics, economics and untold billions of dollars have been flung across the planet ever since. The WEF demonstrated their ability to promote a first-world movement to reset Earth’s thermostat.
Larry Fink, custodian of BlackRock’s $10 trillion, has caused the waters to swirl at the WEF, internationally and in the United States. When the entire European Union, the global elites, the WEF, the President of the United States and the Democratic majorities in Congress all march in sync and sing in cadence, that is the sound of a massive transfer of wealth. And in this case, it’s all sunk money. George Soros and Larry Fink own the Democratic Party when it comes to the Green New Deal and Klaus Schwab has their back and the playbook.
Summit CEO Bruce Rastetter, former Iowa ethanol magnate and current Brazilian ethanol magnate, smoked public dollars ahead of triggering IRA legislation. He enacted a broad and complex plan to manage all potential barriers to his proposed 2,000-mile high-pressure CO2 pipeline.
Rastetter bets on having the leverage to “put in the fix”. To know that the governors and governments of five states will guide you through the brambles and lift you over the hurdles is a demonstration of a range of influence hitherto unparalleled in the upper Midwest. Rastetter made sure to cover every base. Former Governor of Iowa and current Secretary of the USDA Tom Vilsack’s son, attorney, Jess, is, not coincidentally, Summit’s general counsel. Former Governor Terry Branstad is the senior policy adviser to Rastetter. The faces of the Summit team are the faces of a political campaign in Branstad.
How much money will it take to mobilize the moguls of Davos and Brazil into fully-fledged presses in six states with a myriad of legal, regulatory, and constitutional barriers?
After talking to policy makers in every legislative arena, it is clear. None of the policy players has a handle on the size of the coffers about to be poured into the outstretched hands of Fink and Rastetter. This pair of moguls never mention the money they’ll make, so let’s do a little math with their published numbers and include the Wolf numbers as well.
The 45Q credit pays $85 per ton of CO2 captured. The three projects published their CO2 sequestration forecasts on their websites. Their projections total 39.6 million tons x $85\ton = $3.366 billion per year. The 45Z credit, the “clean fuel production credit,” is aimed at each eligible plant and pays up to $1.00 per gallon of ethanol produced. Actual ethanol production will be lower, but projected ethanol production is calculated based on plant capacity, with a ratio of 360 gal\MtTn CO2. The capacity of the ethanol plant is 14.256 billion gallons = dollars\year at $1.00 per gallon, with top negotiators reportedly claiming 60% of the 45Z credit. The federal government’s projected annual outlay on the two moguls is $8.127 billion, with Wolf raising the remaining $3.793 billion. The total share for all ethanol plants contracted with the three CO2 pipeline companies is estimated at $5.702 billion. The total expected annual settlement to the U.S. taxpayer for these three projects is $17.622 billion per year.
The paragraph above contains the data and calculations that the public has requested from the CO2 pipeline companies. The numbers are astonishing. Even worse is the calculated and ruthless trampling of the constitutional property rights of the owners of the best farmland in the world. Rastetter and Fink use complicit state governments and courts to facilitate eminent domain. The 5th Amendment to our US Constitution reads: “…nor shall private property be used for public use without just compensation. It was unthinkable to the framers of our constitution that private property would be seized for private use and profit with the consent of complicit state governments.
There were legislators in Iowa who kept their oaths to the Constitution, and we are grateful to them. In March 2022 it was clear that the fix was in. It wasn’t hard to predict. For two back-to-back sessions, the Iowa legislature has deliberately and deliberately walked slowly on any piece of legislation that might have protected the property rights of those in Rastetter’s and Fink’s path. Two legislative sessions ended with the adjournment,”sinus diewithout a single piece of property rights protection legislation being seriously considered in the Iowa Senate.
The Senate found the time and interest to confirm two of Governor Reynolds’ handpicked appointments to the Utilities Board. These two unscreened accelerated appointments are now vested with the power under Iowa law to confer eminent domain authority. They would insist that they will be informed, both parties will read and listen, and make an unbiased objective decision. We already know their decision. The rest is a charade orchestrated by the “Puppeteer of the Prairie” and the “Wizard of Davos” who plan to fight their way through farms and property rights in five states.
Congressman Steve King (Retd)
Iowa District #4
2003-2021
Chair; Operations and Oversight Subcommittee of House Agriculture Committee
Chair; Constitution Subcommittee on House Judiciary