CO2, otherwise known as carbon dioxide, is good for the earth. Climate change fanatics would have you believe that CO2 is somehow bad for our planet, but it is not. “Carbon pollution” was a term made up by environmental extremists, who have a political agenda to end CO2 emissions caused by combustion engines and the burning of carbon-based fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Not only is carbon dioxide good for us, it is also in short supply.

In 2021, when the Nebraska State Legislature voted to pass LB650, the Nebraska Geologic Storage of Carbon Dioxide Act, I was the only State Senator in the Unicameral Legislature who voted against the bill on Final Reading. I voted against the bill because it defied common-sense. Not only is it foolish to try to store carbon dioxide underground, we already knew at that time that plants need carbon dioxide to grow.

Carbon dioxide cannot be effectively stored underground. Since the passage of LB650 in 2021, we have learned a lot about storing CO2 underground. According to Steve Goreham, the author of Green Breakdown, CO2 always leaks back into the atmosphere, and no carbon storage facility in operation has ever been able to capture enough CO2 to make a difference in managing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. So, trying to store CO2 underground amounts to an exercise in futility.

Plants need carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is plant food. This is a basic fact of biology. Moreover, CO2 released from combustion engines and power plants has resulted in the greening of our planet over time. What the environmental extremists won’t ever tell you is that in 2016 a very important paper was published by 32 authors from 24 different institutions in eight countries, which analyzed satellite data from around the world and concluded that global green vegetation had increased by 14 percent over the course of the previous 30 years. A more recent study shows that 55 percent of the global land mass is now experiencing an “accelerated rate” of vegetation growth while only 7.3 percent of the earth’s global land mass is in decline or “browning.”

What all of this accelerated vegetation growth means is that the earth needs more CO2, not less. Contrary to popular opinion nowadays, the earth needs more carbon dioxide, but don’t take this from me; instead, listen to Dr. Roy Spenser, a former senior scientist with NASA, who said, “Though CO2 is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere.” Because Nebraska is largely an agricultural state, the corn, soybeans, and wheat that we grow in our state must compete for that “precious little” amount of carbon dioxide which remains in the atmosphere.

So, what about global warming? Won’t releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere cause global warming? Actually, just the opposite is true. It turns out that increases in vegetation growth on the earth have a cooling effect, rather than a warming effect. Another study released in February 2020 shows that the greening of the earth is now expected to offset 17 years of carbon emissions by the year 2100. That fact is now expected to put the earth’s carbon levels below the target set by the Paris Agreement.

The State of Wyoming is now getting out of the carbon sequestration business. Project Bison, a massive Wyoming carbon sequestration project slated to begin in 2025, was recently halted in that state. The primary reason for pulling the plug on the project was the EPA’s 1,020 page set of rules for governing power plants and the sequestration of carbon dioxide. Rather than making use of common-sense, the EPA, which is politically driven by the Biden Administration’s Green New Deal, is inadvertently regulating states right out of the business of carbon sequestration.

I share these things with you today in order to shed the light of truth on a political agenda, which actually has no good grounding in science nor in common-sense. Plants need carbon dioxide to grow just as humans and animals need oxygen to breathe. Denying trees and plants of their most essential life-giving chemical element is just a very bad idea, especially for Nebraska.