CONTENT CREATION & ADMIN
11/09/25

There’s a point in every controversial project when the fight stops being about the steel in the ground and becomes about the people in the room. Summit Carbon Solutions has reached that point.

And let’s be clear: Summit is not a utility. It is not a public-private partnership. It is not a publicly traded company accountable to the transparency of markets. Summit is a private-equity vehicle — built to secure land, transport CO₂, and harvest federal tax credits.

No market buyer.
No open commodity system.
No traditional infrastructure justification.

Just a private company trying to use government force to access private land in order to collect government-created revenue.

And that’s the problem.

Rural landowners don’t see a carbon pipeline.
They see a tax-credit extraction business that needs their soil to cash in.

A Fresh Paint Job — Same Crew in the Cabin

Summit is rolling out new messaging, new tone, new “listening tours.”

Sure, a few new faces have been sent to the meetings.

But look past the gloss and it’s the same machine:

The same strategists.
The same lawyers.
The same consultants.
The same political hands behind the curtain.

You can repaint the pipe — but if it’s the same crew holding the brush, nothing changed.

Anyone who’s lived around agriculture, oilfields, or rural small business knows the rule:

If the crew didn’t change, the culture didn’t change.

Summit isn’t trying to restore trust — they’re trying to reset the scoreboard without replaying the tape.

The Candidate Moment: Quiet Words and Loud Subtext

Diplomatic language. Poll-tested posture.

But the real story isn’t what he said —
it’s what has been said around him and on behalf of Summit for the past two years.

The resistance hasn’t been about pipelines — it’s been about consent, property rights, and the abuse of eminent domain for private benefit.

Because while the candidate speaks softly, the orbit around Summit has spoken loudly.

These labels came from:

• Political allies and operatives
• Industry-aligned voices and lobby networks
• Public-funded “awareness” programs and talking points
• State employees tasked with “educating” the public
• PR campaigns and narrative contractors
• Institutions positioned alongside Summit’s interests
• Individuals connected to the company’s influence orbit

In other words —
the same political and professional ecosystem that now claims it wants to “partner” with landowners was the one attacking them for defending their private property.

And here’s the part most national audiences don’t know:

Many of the same landowners spent months organizing a good-faith “come-together” carbon conference — a room where Summit Carbon Solutions, landowners, and carbon-industry leaders could finally sit across the table and talk honestly about land rights, safety, and project transparency.

Momentum was building. Speakers were confirmed.
Hotel blocks were booked and deposits made.
Even Summit executives were expected to attend.

Then, suddenly, it collapsed.

State-aligned actors — including individuals who would later appear in the Governor’s Mansion email chain — stepped in. Public dollars flowed to a PPP. In the same week, every major speaker pulled out. And instead of joining landowners at a public event, Summit’s allies and industry leaders were quietly diverted to a private, invitation-only dinner at the Governor’s Residence alongside top oil executives.

So while rural families set out folding chairs and arranged name badges hoping to build trust, the decision-makers were eating walleye and bourbon caramel under chandeliers — engaged in a different conversation entirely.

Then-Governor Doug Burgum — now nominated to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Interior — hosted fossil-fuel executives including Chris Wright and Harold Hamm during the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in May 2024, according to emails obtained via public records requests. That same week, the grassroots carbon conference collapsed as its executive speakers, corporate sponsors, and government guests quietly migrated to the Governor’s VIP invite-only dinner.

While landowners were setting up folding chairs, the public-private suits slipped off to a private dinner — in a mansion the taxpayers paid for.

You can’t call landowners “partners” while locking them out and raising a toast behind closed doors.

And you don’t get to smear people as radicals, then return for trust like nothing happened — just because your heavy-handed plan blew up.

For landowners, property rights aren’t a partisan sport. Forced access and public shaming weren’t tactics on a chessboard — they were real threats to real lives.

Let’s be clear:

The same voices still aligned with Summit are the ones who spent years calling rural landowners “domestic terrorists” and “left-wing extremists.”

These weren’t policy disagreements.
They were deliberate reputation strikes against the very communities Summit now claims it wants to “partner” with.

Verbal daggers and polarizing labels leave scars — especially when thrown from media platforms paid for with taxpayer-influenced subsidy dollars.

And here’s the irony:

Rural conservatives were labeled eco-extremists for defending private property.

Imagine explaining that to a fourth-generation farmer who has voted for limited government and private-property defense his entire life.

This isn’t just tone-deaf.
It’s cultural vandalism.

A Company That Misread the Room — and the Country

Summit’s leadership should recognize the gravity of what they’ve done.

This isn’t about opposition to a pipeline.
It’s about opposition to compulsory participation in a government-invented revenue scheme disguised as infrastructure.

Summit does not operate in a competitive energy market.

It operates in a regulatory revenue environment where:

• Federal tax credits serve as the commodity
• Government mandates dictate demand
• State power pressures landowners
• Consent is optional, so long as eminent domain exists

This isn’t energy.
This isn’t capitalism.
This isn’t market function.

This is government-scripted finance being imposed on private landowners who had the audacity to say, “Wait a second — this is mine.”

And for that… they were treated as enemies.

That’s not a public-relations misstep.

That’s a moral error — and a strategic one.

If Summit wants to rebuild trust, it can’t just repaint the sign and polish the talking points.

It has to reckon with the fact that it tried to bulldoze both the land
and the people standing on it.

Their revenue pillars aren’t customers, energy buyers, capital markets, or commercial sales. They are:

• 45Q federal tax credits
• Federal ethanol mandates
• State incentives and administrative support
• Regulatory preference over community consent

They have never built a pipeline.
They have never sold CO₂ into a commercial market.
Their business model does not exist without government policy.

This is not traditional infrastructure.
It’s compliance monetization — profit engineered by statute, not performance.

And to make it work, the company must compel private land for a government-dependent business model.

That’s not capitalism.
That’s a private company attempting to borrow state authority to force participation.

It represents a radical deviation from the American tradition of property rights over political convenience.

The Cultural Turn: When “What’s Going On Here?” Becomes Extremism

Consider the landowner who looks out their kitchen window and sees unfamiliar survey trucks, heavy equipment, and strangers accessing their land.

They ask the most American question in existence:

“What’s going on here?”

The response?

Not transparency.
Not disclosure.
Not respect.

Instead, rural Americans defending their land have been labeled:

• “Domestic terrorists”
• “Eco-extremists”
• “Anti-pipeline radical leftists”

For exercising the same basic rights homesteaders, ranchers, and farmers fought to establish since the founding of this country.

We now live in a moment where taxpayer dollars help fund marketing and lobbying for a company that has never built a pipeline, whose revenue is entirely government-sourced — and those same public dollars echo through PR firms, political messaging, and institutional partners to smear the taxpayers themselves.

That is not public engagement —
it is public-subsidized narrative coercion targeted at private citizens.

Summit, is this your identity as a corporate actor?

Because it has been your operational posture.

Reputation is not reimagined through messaging.
It is rebuilt through admission, correction, and structural change.

If Summit seeks legitimacy, it begins not with a “new chapter” but with truth-telling about the last one.

Victim Theater in a Subsidy Economy

What may be most extraordinary in this entire saga is the rhetoric.

Listen closely to Summit executives and the public-funded institutions orbiting them:

They frame themselves as the victims.
They portray themselves as under attack.
They insist they need more government support, more state intervention, more public resources, and more regulatory shielding.

Not because the market demands their service —
but because the government created their business model and now must rescue it.

In any other era, the idea that private landowners are “radicals” and subsidy recipients are “victims” would sound like parody.

Today it is policy language.

And that reversal tells you everything.

This isn’t the free market versus environmental activism.

This is ordinary Americans versus a government-enabled revenue machine that cannot function without force, funding, and framing dissent as extremism.

You can build a market.
You can subsidize innovation.
But when a project requires coercion, public funds, political protection, and cultural shaming of landowners…

It isn’t energy.

It’s empire-building.

The Trust Ledger

Here’s what rural communities remember:

• Surveyors entering land without permission — even peering through windows
• Heavy equipment showing up like private farms were public staging grounds
• Private property treated not as a right, but a bureaucratic speed bump
• Officials and corporate reps suggesting landowners “don’t understand what’s best for them”
• A media and PR machine built not to inform, but to shame and silence dissent
• Government-funded voices and public employees dismissing citizens for simply asking questions
• Lobbyists and “public-private partnership partners” using ruthless messaging to enforce a narrative
• Closed-door meetings, political pressure, and behavior that would make Tammany Hall nod in approval

These aren’t anecdotes.
They’re lived experiences — witnessed, shared, documented, and remembered.

Because rural America does not forget who tried to take their land, and they especially don’t forget how they tried to do it.

Trust isn’t restored through new slogans.

In small towns, reputations travel faster than press releases, and folks don’t need PR firms to tell them what they saw.

Summit’s biggest land obstacle isn’t topography — it’s credibility.

The Investor Blind Spot

• Eminent domain without clear public need is legally vulnerable
• Rural backlash isn’t optics — it’s a force multiplier
• Political winds are shifting
• Regulatory confidence is crumbling
• Opposition isn’t fringe — it’s bipartisan, generational, and property-based

You can finance pipes.
You can’t finance trust.

Please see the sub stack for the rest of the story:
https://esguniversity.substack.com/p/summit-carbons-fresh-paint-problem?r=2cbt85&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true