Let’s not be fooled again — support property rights and vote against Referred Law 21 to stop CO2 pipelines

North Carolina recently had a 1,000-year rainfall and flood.  A week and half later, Hurricane Helene caused another 1,000-year flood in North Carolina.  Ten days after that, Hurricane Milton caused a 1,000-year rain and flood event in Florida. Seeing a pattern?

The human species has shown a collective lack of survival instinct, so it keeps burning the fossil fuels that we have known for 50 years is what’s causing all these changes and killing nature. If you had too much CO2 inside your house, you would immediately do something about it, for the sake of your children at least. The human species is not collectively intelligent enough to understand that the Earth is our house.

The executives of the big oil companies have known all this, too. In fact, it was their studies in the late 1970s that determined that the burning of oil products was damaging to the environment. If you knew that what you were doing would end up harmful to your own grandchildren, wouldn’t you stop doing it? You could use all the profits you’re making to segue into something less damaging and still control the future market.

Instead, they doubled down. And have used those profits toward a long-term misinformation campaign to keep us all stupid. And it has worked. Over 50 years later we are burning more fossil fuels than ever.

So what just happened in North Carolina and Florida can no longer be judged on the old models. It is no longer 1,000-year events. It’s beginning to happen on a regular basis worldwide.

Now they are using their massive profits to fool us even more. They’ve invented the CO2 pipeline idea and they’ve begun bullying rural South Dakota in order to get their way. They’re filing lawsuits and threatening to use eminent domain against one landowner after another, even though the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) rejected their proposal last year. The PUC turned them down a year ago.

But the huge money they have to throw around has gotten into the Legislature and that body manufactured a bill they call the Landowners Bill of Rights.

That bill, which is now on the November ballot, is called Referred Law 21 and it’s actually a pipeline bill of rights. It’s been referred to the ballot by 31,000 signatures of South Dakota landowners who can see right through it.

If the carbon pipeline was carrying CO2 that has been captured out of the atmosphere, beginning to draw down all that we’ve put up there in the past 50 years … that would be wonderful. We’d happily vote for that.

Instead, big oil’s clever ploy is to get the CO2 from current fossil fuel smokestacks. And they can then claim, “Hey, look at us! Ain’t we great environmentalists?”

Their carbon pipeline is only meant to allow them to keep on burning the fossil fuels we all know are killing nature, and the planet … and us.

Let’s not be fools again. Vote no on 21.

And start paying attention to those 1,000-year events which are starting to happen every year now.

Van Carter of Sioux Falls is a retired broadcast journalist and environmentalist who published a green website for 15 years. This essay originally appeared on the Change Agents website.