Hansen Blames “Left's Climate Agenda” for Threat to Land Rights ... - Dakota Free Press
Hansen Blames “Left’s Climate Agenda” for Threat to Land Rights, Ignores Republican Profiteers Pushing for Eminent Domain for Carbon Dioxide Pipeline - Dakota Free Press
In the weekend funnies, Representative Jon Hansen (R-25/Dell Rapids) goes on Mike Lindell’s theocratic video channel and claims that “ the left’s climate agenda” is subordinating South Dakotans’ property rights to Summit Carbon Solutions’ private profit:
tweet, 2023.05.13.
I sincerely appreciate Representative Hansen’s opposition to the use of eminent domain for private profit. I just wish he’d stop framing the debate in his kneejerk partisan terms and level at his own party the criticism they deserve for supporting the theft of property rights to build their rich friends’ cash cow. To the extent that South Dakota Democrats may be called “Left”—and I’ll argue that nationally and globally, South Dakota Democrats stand mostly in the Center, though still well left of Hansen’s and Lindell’s far-right radicalism—South Dakota’s “ Left” spoke out regularly during the 2022 campaign against the use of eminent domain to build carbon dioxide pipelines while Hansen’s Republican Party leaders resisted such resistance and said eminent domain is necessary for the collective good. The former chairman of Hansen’s Republican Party, Dan Lederman, has lobbied county commissions to support the land-seizing pipeline. Lederman’s rich Republican friend Bruce Rastetter is the prime mover of Summit Carbon Solutions.
The “Left’s climate agenda” is certainly involved, in the form of the tax credits the Biden Administration is offering for carbon sequestration projects. But Lederman and Rastetter are the ones taking South Dakotans’ land rights away in order to fold those tax credits into their profit margins, and Republicans, including Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, fought to keep those tax credits off the chopping block of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt-ceiling kamikaze act.
Representative Hansen, I welcome your continued efforts to defend South Dakota landowners from the predations of out-of-state profiteers. But don’t let your message get lost in partisan sloganeering. South Dakota landowners can’t fight their enemy if they don’t know exactly who the enemy is. And in the case of Summit Carbon Solutions and its carbon dioxide pipeline, the enemy includes some of your most powerful Republican leaders.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”