Ed. note: Jim Clarkson, a longtime critic of public utility regulation, as well as the capture of regulators by the regulated in the Southeast power market, penned this mock interview about the Kemper County coal-gasification-and-capture boondoggle. The original $2.4 billion project reached $7.5 billion before abandonment. The plant now runs as combined-cycle natural-gas plant. Other problems and issues with Kemper are described here (2016) and here (2019) and here (2020).
Joe Anchorman: Good evening. The top story we are following tonight concerns a power plant being built in Mississippi, where a carbon capture technology is being attempted to meet political goals.
Southern Company, a large utility holding company, had cut a deal with the Environmental Protection Agency to demonstrate an expensive, but impractical, technology so the EPA can claim it is feasible enough to require its use for all new coal generators.…
Continue Reading“[My] early writing was from a viewpoint that there was an ocean of BTUs beneath our feet, and what was high cost and supplemental today would become low cost and conventional later. I ‘trusted’ human ingenuity. I turned out ‘right’ for the wrong technological reason: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.”
Any intellectual is interested in what is written about him or her, whether it be in the newspaper or an essay, book, or doctoral dissertation. In my case, being of 66 summers, and having a lot of scholarship under my belt, I do not worry much about the momentary ad hominem stuff. But for the record, I am eager to correct with facts and interpretation as needed.
This brings me to a dissertation, “Limits and Cornucopianism: A History of Neo-Liberal Environmental Thought, 1920–2007” (New York University: 2019).…
Continue Reading“What we are seeing in my county right now is that developers are coming in and asking for 50 acres to put up a solar [or] wind farm…. If the developers got their way in all my surrounding townships, we would have 12,000 acres of solar on some of the best farmland in the United States. It’s monstrous.”
It is still possible to get two sides of the story regarding renewable energy. You just need to read the bottom half first. And correct a few things.
I was reminded of this when reading a pro-renewable piece by Stacy Gittleman, “The Role of Wind and Solar in the Future of Power” (August 24, 2021), the cover story of Downtown Newsmagazine.
Backdoor is better than nothing to shake up the puff narrative.…
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