Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona and one of her party’s only holdouts on President Biden’s sprawling budget bill, has cultivated a profile in Congress as a business-minded centrist.
But her refusal to raise tax rates on high earners and major corporations to pay for Mr. Biden’s plan is pushing Democrats toward wealth taxation and other measures once embraced only by the party’s left flank.
The frenzied search for new paths around Ms. Sinema’s tax-rate blockade has cheered liberals but raised serious qualms among more moderate Democrats, who now openly say they hope that Ms. Sinema’s business allies will pressure her to relent once they — and she — see the details of the alternatives that she is forcing on her colleagues to pay for around $2 trillion in spending on social programs and anti-climate change initiatives. …
(I think we’re going to hear soon enough, ‘Oh, yeah.
I am against that too. Why wouldn’t I be?’, from Sen Sinema.)
Former U.S. Democratic Senator and current MSNBC Political Analyst Claire McCaskill says her sources on Capitol Hill are telling her that Arizona Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has agreed to a plan that would fund Pres. Biden’s infrastructure and social agenda. Democrats on the Hill tell reporters the framework for that Biden agenda deal could come soon.
(AP) — Deadline driven, President Joe Biden brought two pivotal senators to his Delaware home Sunday for talks aimed at resolving the disputes that have stymied the Democrats’ wide-ranging social safety net and environmental measure at the core of his domestic agenda.
Beyond the domestic timetable, Biden is pressing for progress so he can spotlight his administration’s achievements to world leaders at overseas summits that get underway this week.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she expected an agreement on a framework by week’s end, paving the way for a House vote on a separate $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill before next Sunday, when a series of transportation programs will lapse.
“That’s the plan,” she said.
The White House said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., came to Biden’s home in Wilmington, where he was spending the weekend, for the session but did not immediately provide a statement detailing what was discussed. …
A half-hour’s drive from Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik, one happens upon a scene straight out of a science fiction movie: Plumes of white steam billow above the Hellisheiði volcanic region. The air is suffused with the unmistakable stench of sulfur — several thermal springs, their mineral-rich waters a favorite of local bathers, are nearby. The rays of a waning sun are no match for the thick cloud cover that hangs over the rough terrain on a crisp early autumn day.
It is here that the future and the present collide in a structure about two stories high. This is the Orca Plant, the world’s largest facility for capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air and storing it deepunderground. The steam we see is being released into the sky from geothermal drilling sites. The captured CO2 is mixed with water and injected into those holes in the ground.
The Orca Plant, built, owned, and operated by the Swiss company Climeworks, kicked into whirring, carbon-sucking life last month, fueled by geothermal energy from Iceland’s ON Power. While Orca is not the first of its kind in the world, its size and potential have sparked expectations for a revolution in CO2 capture and storage, as well as hope for our rapidly warming planet.
Set on just over 18,000 square feet of Mordor-like volcanic terrain, Orca’s eight CO2 collector containers frame the plant’s central processing facility and capture carbon dioxide through a two-step process. First, fans — which sound as if a giant flock of birds is passing overhead — draw air into the collectors. Next, carbon dioxide is captured by solid sorbents, a type of filterinside the collectors. Once the sorbents are saturated with CO2, the fans stop, the collectors close, and the temperature inside the chamber increases to between 176 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Heating releases the carbon dioxide, which is collected as pure, concentrated gas.
From there, Carbfix, a division of ON Power and an expert in rapid underground mineralization,mixes this captured carbon dioxide with water and pumps it deep into the earth beneath metallic geodesic domes that surround the plant. There, in the underground volcanic basalt rock, the greenhouse gas will be transformed by natural processes into mineralized rock that will stay underground permanently. The mineralization process can take up to two years. …
The Orca Plant is an open-air lab, of sorts. Its CO2 capture capacity is modest, at 4,000 tons per year, an amount dwarfed by the 36 billion tons the earth’s humans released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels in 2018. But Orca could also be a cause for great optimism, the beginning of the beginning of humankind’s bid to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Climeworks’ co-founders, German engineers and entrepreneurs Jan Wurzbacher and Cristoph Gebald, say their goal is to equip as many countries as possible with their machines and use the basalt underground capacity that exists around the world for storage.
An abundance of geothermal energy helped fuel Iceland’s transformation away from total dependence on oil in the 1970s. An economic renaissance followed. Electricity production in Iceland ranks alongside tourism, fishing, and aluminum production as a top industry. Three-quarters of the country’s electric power comes from hydroelectric plants, and the rest comes from geothermal plants. Icelandic households are nearly all heated by warm underground water. …
In addition to having the economic power to fund bold climate initiatives and the green energy to operate them, Iceland has another asset: widespread popular resolve to effect change. Over the past two decades, the nation’s education system built climate awareness into its curriculum, and it is producing the next generations of engineers, scientists, and activists who will make the climate crisis their focus. Iceland is also preparing the way for the rise of carbon capture and storage technology. “An explosion is coming,” Carbfix’s executive director, Edda Sif Pind Aradóttir, says. “The technology is here. Now we need to effect a massive increase in our capacities.”
What’s next? Carbfix has its sights set on an ambitious project named Coda Terminal. Beginning in 2025, a specialized port in the southeast of Iceland, near Keflavik International Airport, will become the destination for Northern European ships to deliver their countries’ captured CO2. The starting capacity is projected to be 300,000 tons of CO2 per year. A gradual increase is alsoprojected, and the company hopes to be storing three million tons of captured carbon from all over Europe by 2030.
For the last five years, photographer Matjaž Krivic and I have been chronicling this transformation in Iceland, as well as efforts being made in countries all over the world, for our latest book, “Plan B: How Not to Lose Hope in the Times of Climate Crisis.” In the photo essay that follows, we take you inside the Orca Plant. With COP26, the UN’s annual climate change conference, set to begin on Oct. 31, we find ourselves embracing a state of mind that has, until now, eluded us: hope for the future of our planet. …
Sinema’s Tax-Rate Blockade Prods Democrats Left Toward Billionaires’ Tax
(I think we’re going to hear soon enough, ‘Oh, yeah.
I am against that too. Why wouldn’t I be?’, from Sen Sinema.)
(But wait… There’s more!)
Sinema has agreed to a plan to fund Biden agenda
(So says Claire McCaskill.)
(Where was Sen Sinema?)
Biden, key senators huddle in Delaware as Democrats drive toward budget deal
These machines could save the world
Boston Globe – October 24
The world’s largest carbon capture plant is seizing the imaginations —
and sparking the hope — of climate activists, entrepreneurs, and scientists.