The $84 Million Tomb

If greenhouse gas is so bad, the logic goes, why not bury it?

The human species learned long ago to deal with various noxious products by putting them under the ground, like rotting corpses and decaying garbage. It's nothing more than recycling at its most primitive.

Thanks to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the giant and well-connected agri-business concern of Archer Daniels Midland has $84 million in Federal funds to construct an enormous tomb for the late, lamented CO2.

Bury the waste gas before it can escape into the atmosphere and there you are. Coal becomes clean and usable, and there's a lot of coal in southern Illinois. If the project can be made to work, then Illinois coal miners will have some work.

With the flurry to stimulate the economy, Mr. Durbin managed to squeeze a request for $1 billion of your taxpayer dollars into the plan, with an eye to fund another Illinois project that seeks to sequester CO2 emissions.

It's all a very expensive experiment, by the way. No one knows if CO2 can be made to stay under ground, or even if it can be made to stay under everyone's ground. What if soil is too porous in Nevada or too rocky in Tennessee? What if the tomb springs a leak and there goes all the CO2 out into the atmosphere?

What if the scientists are right and we're entering a period of global cooling due to sun spot activity? What if we're borrowing billions of dollars for a nonsense?

What if none of that matters as long as the Illinois coal industry gets a boost? It's all a matter of perspective, after all.