Don’t be surprised at this, but your tax dollars are being spent to subsidize a burgeoning industrial complex bent on producing… nothing of value.

Welcome to the world of carbon capture and sequestration, which is modern capitalism’s answer to Holland’s 17th-century tulip craze.

In case you’re thoroughly unfamiliar with all this, here’s a quick synopsis: chemical plants, oil refineries, and other manufacturing and industrial facilities generally emit carbon dioxide either directly out of smokestacks or indirectly due to using a lot of electricity.

And carbon dioxide has gone from being a necessary ingredient for human life to, apparently, a dangerous pollutant which is responsible for Planet Earth heating up to the point where it won’t be able to sustain civilization in a dozen years.

They’ve been saying this for well more than a dozen years, you know, but just trust them… that doomsday clock is going to start any time now. (RELATED: Dangers of Global Governance: UN Aims for Global Carbon Tax on Shipping)

What we don’t know is when or if carbon dioxide will poison the planet to the point where the Earth becomes a hothouse, but we do know that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a real effect.

And not a particularly poisonous one.

In 1975, carbon dioxide was measured at 331 parts per million as a fraction of the gases making up our atmosphere. Today, the number is 420 parts per million. That would seem like a significant increase, but it’s an absolute blip on the screen. 420 parts per million is a whopping .0042 percent of the atmosphere, and given that 78 percent of it is nitrogen and 21 percent is oxygen, we’re really not talking about a significant presence here.

And yet, while the global Left has been screeching about the deleterious effects of carbon dioxide, the 27 percent increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is making this a greener planet. For example, the Earth’s vegetated area gained 5 percent more leaf cover from 2000 to 2020, equivalent to adding greenery the size of the Amazon rainforest.

More plant food means more plants. It means less deserts. It means better crop yields and therefore more food, more habitat area for animals and a healthier planet.

We think that the planet is a little warmer than it was in the late 19th century, but we really don’t know that because the methods used for measuring temperature now are totally different from what they were 150-200 years ago. So much so that if you’re trying to gauge a change in average global temperature of, say, 1.1 degrees Celsius over two centuries as significant, you can’t really claim you should be taken seriously.

And while these same people estimate that increased vegetation absorbs about half of the carbon dioxide fed by that increase, let’s not pretend that the global warming crowd has really proven their case.

Which is why in America and lots of other countries, the steam has come right out of the “climate change” alarmist narratives. People don’t really care. (RELATED: The Real Climate Change Disaster)

Oh, but the elites do. They sure love that climate change story, and in Europe, they’re so enamored of it that virtually the whole continent has committed to something called Net Zero. Which, for the unwashed, is a commitment to produce no more carbon dioxide through human endeavors than is currently being produced. (RELATED: Climate ‘Changists’ Cashing In, European-Style)

That means fewer people, fewer livestock, fewer pets, fewer cars with internal combustion engines, and fewer factories.

It also means a lot less electricity.

Something amazing happened a week ago in Spain. Just a couple of days after the government there bragged about running the entire power grid for a brief time on “renewable” energy, meaning no power generated by coal or natural gas or other hydrocarbon-based fuel (though there are those who will tell you that oil and gas are actually renewable; rather than the products of rotted dinosaurs, they’re actually produced by chemical processes deep under the earth), the entire grid went down all over the Iberian Peninsula. (RELATED: Chronicle of an Ideological Blackout)

From a lack of inputs.

Anyone who knows anything about power generation will tell you that your baseload power supply cannot be variable. No electric grid can survive without fairly severe damage unless there is a constant supply of electric power to charge that grid. So when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, if you don’t have enough power not dependent on those things going into your grid, it’s… bad.

I mention this because the Europeans, who are at this point utterly incapable of avoiding stupid, self-destructive policies, have abandoned coal power plants, and in most places they’ve abandoned nuclear power as well. They’re covering the continent with wind turbines and solar panels and finding out that what comes from that is sky-high electric rates, deindustrialization, and a rotten quality of life. (RELATED: Germany’s Suicide Pact with Green Ideology)

In the name of the planet, which is increasingly covered with leaves.

While the Chinese build a coal-fired power plant on every street corner and are busily burning American coal to run those plants and pump out all the increased CO2 that the Euros are so virtuously foregoing.

Yes, it’s very dumb. It turns out the Euros are actually exporting this stupidity.

Now we go to natural gas.

Because they won’t use coal to power the grid and because they need some sort of feedstock for baseload power, the Euros are becoming very, very good customers for natural gas. That’s one reason that despite the whole continent screaming at Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, and intermittently demanding American troops to land in Kyiv and start World War III, the Euros are actually spending more buying Russian oil and gas than they are in helping the Ukrainians hold off the Russian army.

The answer to this, of course, is to buy natural gas from the good old U.S. of A. We’ve got as much or more of the stuff as the Russians do, we have a hell of a good delivery apparatus given our well-developed pipeline infrastructure, and we’re building out liquefaction and transport facilities at a breathtaking pace so that American liquified natural gas can begin powering the industrialized world at a lower carbon footprint than coal ever will.

But that isn’t enough for the Euros, who still think natural gas is dirty.

And now we come to carbon capture.

There are meager commercial uses for carbon dioxide. It’ll go in fire extinguishers. There is some use for CO2 in refrigeration (though it’s nowhere near as useful as old-fashioned freon in that respect). It’s said you can combine CO2 with hydrogen to produce synthetic hydrocarbons like jet fuel, though that market can best be described as nascent. In the construction industry, the new craze is to pump CO2 into concrete, but there isn’t much evidence that CO2 makes concrete any stronger. It’s possible to use CO2 to make methanol, urea, and polymers, though again, that isn’t the only or best way to do those things. You can pump CO2 in high concentrations down into an oil well to generate increased oil recovery.

And yes, it’ll make carbonated drinks.

And that’s it. For a substance that is everywhere and which feeds plants, without which we can’t survive, there isn’t any reason to “capture” carbon dioxide. You can’t trap it and sell it.

But that didn’t stop the climate communists in the Biden administration from putting a subsidy on trying to do just that. The U.S. federal government supports carbon capture and sequestration through a combination of tax credits, grants, and funding programs aimed at reducing CO2 emissions to combat climate change. Primarily, this comes from something called the Section 45Q Tax Credit, which offers up a per-ton credit for carbon capture and sequestration.

That credit was set up in 2008. Then it was expanded in 2018, and expanded again in 2022 under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — which was the manifestation of much of the insane Green New Deal.

Industry pulled in about a billion dollars worth of 45Q credits from 2010-19. That number is projected to be $5 billion from 2023-27 thanks to Biden. (RELATED: Getting Back to an ‘America First’ Energy Policy)

They’re building carbon pipelines all over the country now, and they’re also creating injection wells to pump carbon into the earth. This is happening because oil and gas companies now believe, based on the numbers Biden laid down in the stupid Green New Deal bill in 2022, that they can get a double win with oil exploration and production — namely, making real money pulling oil and gas out of the ground and then fake money in generating 45Q credits for sequestering the CO2 that their oil and gas produces.

Which isn’t great news for the tree community, but in any event, there are now billions of dollars being spent to lay down an entire infrastructure to trap carbon dioxide which generally can’t be used for any viable economic purpose other than to placate left-wing lunatics who think a 1 degree increase in global temperatures over the next 100 years is an existential crisis for humanity.

It’s the Ernie Hudson job interview scene from Ghostbusters being played out on a macro scale…

This is why the oil and gas industry in America, which is anxious to displace Russia as the supplier of choice to Europe and other markets, is all about carbon capture.

Are they doing carbon capture projects in Russia right now? Please.

Are they doing them in the Middle East or North Africa, other places with large oil and gas production? Kind of, but not really. It’s more like they’re talking about carbon capture rather than actually doing it, with three projects currently underway and 15 more “planned.”

We’re the people who can sell “green” oil and gas now.

But in three to five years, when the power grid failures like the one last week in Spain keep happening again and again and the grid in Europe begins to collapse, absolutely no one there will give a fig about carbon capture or Net Zero. They will buy all the natural gas we can sell them, and they’ll be building natural gas-fired power plants everywhere they can, because those are generally cheap to build, quite effective in producing electricity, and squeakily clean from an environmental perspective.

And we’ll have spent billions on these carbon-capture projects, paid for by profits from supplying the world with energy, which suddenly have zero practical use. They’ll have been indulgences, in a couple of senses of the word.

Is this a disaster? It’s an irritant. Nothing about any of this is productive. It’s a massive waste of money — but at the end of the day, it’s a waste of the Euros’ money. President Trump endorsed all this carbon capture nonsense because he looked at the numbers and recognized there was more economic worth in building all this stuff as a requisite for winning the LNG and oil trade than there is in getting rid of the stupid subsidies for it.

At least for now.

But are we creating an environmental mess by pumping that CO2 into the ground?

Nobody knows.

The virtually certain thing is that eventually, the CO2 being pumped into those wells is going to find a way to interact with the groundwater. Mix carbon dioxide with water and you get carbonic acid, which isn’t all that poisonous a substance. Could there be some places where you’re essentially going to get Perrier water on tap? Maybe.

Then again, we’ve never done this experiment at scale. Will injecting untold tons of CO2 into the ground cause earthquakes? Will pipeline leaks bathe whole locations in enough carbon dioxide to poison the folks?

That happened in Sartartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a 24-inch CO2 pipeline broke during a mudslide. Some 45 people were hospitalized, with symptoms including dizziness, shortness of breath, convulsions, unconsciousness, and foaming at the mouth, consistent with CO2 poisoning (asphyxiation from oxygen displacement) and possible hydrogen sulfide exposure. The air reportedly had a green haze to it that smelled like rotten eggs.

Nobody can really say how risky this all is. But what I can predict is that in five years we’ll go back to feeding the plants with harmless atmospheric carbon dioxide, and those carbon capture projects will sit idle, having served their uses of feeding the egos of virtual-signaling leftists and fattening the bank accounts of rent-seeking oil industry players.

It’s a scam agreed upon, and everybody’s getting a piece. Hopefully, when the modern-day tulip craze is over, we’ll learn some lessons from this.

But probably not.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: The Utter, Complete, and Glorious Evisceration of the Legacy Propaganda Press

Shri Thanedar’s Shameless Stunt

The Bell Is Tolling for Puffed-Up, Arrogant Propagandists at CBS