Ed. note: This call-for-support by Gregory Wrightstone in December 2020 is reproduced below given the importance of the CO2 Coalition in the climate debate, as well as its central participation in the Heartland Institute’s 14th International Conference on Climate Change. “The Great Reset: Climate Realism vs. Climate Socialism” begins tomorrow in Las Vegas.
The American oil and gas industries are facing an existential threat to their businesses with the presidency of Joe Biden.
In his “victory” speech on November 7, Biden stated, “America has called upon us to…[fight] the battle to save our planet by getting climate under control.” The Biden Plan includes long list of harmful proposals, including “denying federal permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and ensuring 100% clean renewable energy by 2035.”
Biden has made it abundantly clear with his cabinet picks that he intends to make you and your employees sacrificial lambs for the global climate cause, starting with John Kerry, who will be his new special envoy on climate.
…“Goodbye and good riddance to the most expensive, and the most useless clean coal facility ever built.” (Angus Harvey, below)
The quick fix of coal gasification and CO2 storage is all but dead. Projects will continue, and the subsidies will flow if Biden gets his way. But it is greenwashing and greenwasting.
The shiny star to be, Plant Ratcliffe, better known as the Kemper Project, a $6.7 billion integrated gasification power plant, was an experimental boondoggle from the start (mid-2010). The dream really ended years ago, with The Guardian reporting in March 2018:
…“This was the flagship project that was going to lead the way for a whole new generation of coal power plants,” said Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “If the initial project doesn’t work then who’s going to invest in any more like it?”
Company officials have blamed the failure on factors ranging from competition from tumbling natural gas prices to bad weather, bad timing and plain old bad luck.
“The explanation of [wind speed anomalies] points to the phenomenon called global stilling and it is related to #climatechange induced warming in the poles.” (Roberta Boscolo, UN World Meteorological Organization, below)
“… we were told not to worry … it would resolve itself, they said, either because wind is usually blowing somewhere, or through the development of electricity storage in giant battery farms. This was plain wrong.” (Matt Ridley, September 20, 2021)
The present UK/EU energy crises, expected to head into the winter, have much to do with forced energy transformation from coal/natural gas to wind/solar. After looking the other way, the mainstream media now recognizes the problem but is offering excuses.
Excuses, excuses. It’s COVID and an economic snap-back that was faster than expected, as well as poorly coordinated international energy planning, states Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.
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