The Department of Energy’s latest outreach to communities about carbon capture and removal projects has angered local environmental justice campaigners, who say critical voices are being sidelined.
The agency will fund workshops next month in three Texas communities that could soon neighbor DOE-backed projects to suck heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the air or capture it from industrial smokestacks for underground storage. The meetings, facilitated by educational media company Climate Now, aim to educate the public and answer questions on the emerging technologies.
“I think a lot of the goal of these types of workshops is, one, to dissuade some of the misinformation, and to provide the experts who know about the technology and how it works, and who can answer key questions from the community,” said Emma Crow-Willard, communications leader at Climate Now.
But environmental justice advocates say the workshops should include voices from the community — including those who question the safety of carbon capture and carbon removal. Instead, they say, the agency’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has focused on shoring up support for the billions of dollars that the 2022 climate law invested in carbon management.
