Bill Gates’s “Breakthrough Energy Ventures” has backed a startup called Graphyte that just pulled a George C. Parker on American Airlines. Parker was famous for selling the Brooklyn Bridge to rubes for large sums. As often as twice a week until, years later, he was finally sent to jail for life. We can only hope history repeats itself.
The startup is called Graphyte and it gathers agricultural residues like sawdust or tree bark that naturally soak up carbon dioxide, according to the WSJ. Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures backs Graphyte, which intends to seek funding from a newly launched U.S. government initiative that purchases carbon-removal credits. …
Graphyte has a facility in Arkansas that will use “crop and wood residues … that have already captured significant CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis,” according to the press release. “The biomass is then dried to prevent decomposition, converted into dense carbon blocks, wrapped in an environmentally safe polymer barrier, and monitored in a state-of-the-art underground storage facility.”
Brady will put some wood chips in the hefty bag, and Cletis will push some dirt over it with the blade they welded on the front of the lawn tractor. I jest. I’m sure that Graphyte’s state-of-the-art underground facility used no carbon in its manufacture or operation and that the net change in “emissions” will always appear to make their bank account more “green.”
Not that American Airlines doesn’t have the right to get taken. Aside from being a pointless exercise, carbon capture is the kind of con George Parker would have loved—one where you promise not to emit carbon or remove carbon-sinking wilderness in exchange for money. I was going to burn some tires, cut down some trees, and take a private Jet to Davos but decided to sell my not doing any of that as carbon reduction.
The list of places to which I am not traveling in exchange for money (as carbon offsets) is so extensive that after selling them, I’ll actually be able to afford to travel and will because, by that point, what I’m doing is far too important “for the planet” to be criticized by peasants.
And maybe George could fetch a few Federal Grants to support the work, and instead of being repeatedly arrested only to die years later in Sing Sing Prison, he’d have gotten book deals, big payouts on the lecture circuit, Cable News appearances, and perhaps – if he made a documentary about it – the Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his trouble.
I’m sure Graphyte will be a tremendous success if, by success, we mean greenwashing money from the hands of virtue-signaling corporations for personal profit, at least some of which will end up in the pockets of Bill Gates.
HT | Daily Caller
