On October 12th, 2009, United States Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wrote a letter to his international colleagues calling for swift action in curbing climate change through carbon capture and sequestration. He wrote, “[W]e must make it our goal to advance carbon capture and storage technology to the point where widespread, affordable deployment can begin in 8 to 10 years.” Chu concluded by stating that “[w]hile the challenge we face is enormous,… scientific innovation can provide the answers we need. This is an aggressive goal, but the climate problem compels us to act with fierce urgency.”
The factors necessitating change are all converging at one time–population growth, and the growth of industrialized societies throughout the world, increased carbon dioxide (“CO2”) emissions causing global warming. This combination of forces is leading to certain and powerful change. As John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and onetime President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted:
[B]ased on an immense edifice of painstaking studies published in the world’s leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, [the following are] conclusions about global climatic disruption-that it’s real, that it’s accelerating, that it’s already doing significant harm, that human activities are responsible for most of it, that tipping points into really catastrophic disruption likely lurk along the ‘business as usual’ trajectory, and that there is much that could be done to reduce the danger at an affordable cost if only we would get started….
As our world stands at the precipice of change and injury, a combination of different mechanisms will be necessary to stop it from rapidly continuing down the path toward destruction. Carbon capture and geologic sequestration (“CCS”) is a strategy that will likely be utilized, along with others, to change the world’s present course.
Make no mistake, CCS is just one piece of the puzzle necessary to avoiding the looming disaster in our planet’s future. But, especially in the short term, it could be a critical piece of that puzzle. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, recently passed by the House and currently being considered by the Senate, would support Secretary Chu’s request nationally by pledging investments in CCS technology and directing the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) to create a comprehensive strategy for its implementation. As Chu noted, such a program will have to be implemented quickly and on a large scale. If the United States follows its own call for action, there will be a need for a national CCS program in order to create the necessary infrastructure and regulations quickly and effectively. This Comment, while designed to specifically address eminent-domain issues, suggest a fresh legal perspective on CCS for the EPA to utilize in fulfilling the likely forthcoming congressional mandate to create a comprehensive strategy for a national CCS program.
