“Even though it was once embraced by some environmentalists, ethanol has turned out to be much better at providing common ground for wildly disparate presidents than cutting greenhouse gas emissions.”
“From a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, the renewable fuel standard has been a bust.”
“In 2022, the current renewable fuel standard will lapse, and Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency will have to decide whether to maintain federal support for this hangover of the oil-soaked Bush era.”
– Tom Philpott, “Why Won’t Joe Biden Let Ethanol Die Already?” Mother Jones, February 16, 2021.
Progressives and D.C. environmentalists are very confused about energy. They don’t like nuclear, the only scalable alternative to fossil fuels. They dislike hydro power too, choosing some other priorities for dams other than CO2 reduction.
And on the transportation side, they don’t like the “renewable” alternative to gasoline and diesel, farm crop ethanol.
…“It’s unfortunate that the Georgetown [100 percent renewable] experiment went so quickly from being a success story to being something of a cautionary example,” said Adrian Shelley, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
“Gore wasn’t available for an interview with E&E News last week to discuss the electric situation in Georgetown [Texas].”
It was supposed to be green and cheap, a 25-year fixed-price contract for solar and wind beginning in 2018. Instead, as one news story in October 2019 reported: “After losing tens of millions of citizens’ money on a green energy gamble, city officials are trying to escape their self-inflicted mess.” How? By filing a lawsuit against its solar provider Buckthorn Westex to cancel its 25-year contract. A countersuit by Buckthorn followed.
…“… most folks don’t understand the reduced reliability of natural gas when temperatures hover below zero for long. Therefore, the most reliable source of energy, at least in Oklahoma, is coal.”
Just as Joe Biden was blathering about the “existential threat” from climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels to “green energy,” along came a frigid cold snap never experienced before by anyone alive today in states like Texas and Oklahoma.
Why are those two states significant? Of all the states, Texas is the largest producer of wind energy, and Oklahoma is second. Wind factories (not farms—those are where you grow crops and livestock), promoted by climate-change alarmists, failed miserably under such extreme cold temperatures. This should be a wakeup call to the dangers of the “Green New Deal” to America and its people.
…