Summary/Abstract
This paper responds to Tara Righetti and Madeleine Lewis, who analyze the legal and policy implications of CCS to figure out how to operationalize CCS in underground formations (i.e., pore space) owned by the federal government. This Response argues that the choice of how to price federal pore space for CCS is unavoidably a policy choice, and that current public lands law and its insistence on fair market value are extremely poor mechanisms for making and expressing national-level policy decisions regarding this inherent risk-risk analysis in the development of CCS.
The response then notes that CCS in federal pore space is not only technically, but also legally complicated. It is so legally complicated, in fact, that this Response suggests that an entirely new legal regime might be necessary both to allow CCS storage in federal pore space and to rationalize and clearly state federal policies regarding climate change mitigation, the promotion (or not) of CCS, and the legacy of the nation’s public lands in the Anthropocene.