Dear Editor:
“No eminent domain for private gain” is a message that over 80% of SD residents and landowners support. Landowners and farmers with farming backgrounds and pedigrees second to none are fighting to protect their constitutional rights. They are fighting back against a pipeline that will carry CO2, an asphyxiant, that will kill. They are wanting to protect their rural assets from a corporation with foreign investments. Summit Carbon Solutions (SCS) is seeking to bury a pipeline on private property crossing fields, acreages, streams, roads, pastures, feedlots, and tree groves. These same landowners and farmers have organized public forums and meetings, attended PUC and legislative hearings, and formed a legal team to protect their rights as SD residents. They have done so donating their own time, money, and travel expense.
SCS has no real concern for the environment. In fact, they have no real endeavor to help ethanol other than using ethanol plants as a means to pirate onto private land holdings to build their project. Their only end goal is to obtain lucrative tax credits, a program of tax spending, that causes you to pay more taxes and future generations to carry larger debt.
In the last few months, SCS has tried to rebrand itself as pro SD, pro Ag. But it is still the same out- of -state LLC that dragged over 160 landowners into condemnation court in 2023. It is the same company that continues to do away with local control and sue counties. It is the same company that has hired dozens of lobbyists to sabotage the law-making process for their own greed. In the meantime, landowners and farmers are torn between trying to being present in Pierre while balancing the need to care for their own families and livestock. Sadly, SCS has convinced several legislators to carry propaganda much like paid employees or agents. The amount of expensive advertising that allies of SCS are spending is in direct proportion to the greed and chaos that SCS carries as public garbage.
The real answer to carbon capture is the land itself. Healthy soil and plants are the true carbon sink. The ethanol industry can take two paths. Either carry the carpet bagging of SCS to grab expensive tax credits thus continuing more chaos as they seek to do now. Or build cooperative actions among farmers and community residents as they have done in past. We all know that the right answer lies with our own farmers not an out of state corporation. The South Dakota way is building within while respecting neighbors, friends, and fellow residents.
Sincerely,
Charlie Johnson
