The Profitable Cult of Climate Change By James Reed

If the corporate elites, like Bill Gates, who are now born-again environmentalists, were really serious, they could do much to reduce the dreaded carbon emissions. Bill Gates could easily prevent the clearing of rainforests with financing of alternative industries for people in the Amazon and Borneo. The use of careful burning could reduce forest fires in California and Australia, but the environmentalists will not allow it, so each year there is devastating bushfire damage, doing more damage. And if environmentalists were really serious about reducing emissions, the they would be open about the enormous emissions needed to set up and maintain the renewable energy infrastructure, and would examine nuclear.  But, none of these things are done.

The conjectured reason for this paradox, is that for the corporates, climate change represents a new area to make a dollar, even though some industries, such as the fossil fuel industries, will suffer. The corporates are not a totally unified force. But for the woke, the beat goes on. Thus, for the Left, environmentalism channels the powerful emotions that lead young people to embrace socialism, giving the young the equivalent of a religion. There are all the ingredients, with sin, being producing carbon dioxide, the devil, being the West and white people, and redemption, being Green socialism. It is all as dangerous as it can get, but conservatives are not fully aware of how deep this all goes.

https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/a-remunerative-religion

“In the year 1986, when I was sixteen years old, I founded the Save the Earth Club, which I believe was the first high school environmental organization in Texas. Dallas in those days was heavily influenced by the oil industry, and a lot of people thought I was unhinged. Maybe I was. At any rate, my adolescent brain was given to apocalyptic images of planet earth and all of its beautiful forests, oceans, and creatures going up in smoke. If only humanity weren’t so terribly selfish, greedy, and wasteful, I thought. Then we would all be saved and live in harmony with nature instead of dominating and exploiting it.

Looking back, I believe I was in the grip of powerful yearnings for absolution, salvation and redemption. And boy, was I a sucker for anyone who claimed to offer a solution. I gave much of my spare money to Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other environmental non-profit organizations. During my freshman year in college, I worked for Greenpeace in Boston as a telephone fundraiser, and I briefly contemplated dropping out of college to become a full time Eco-Warrior.

Greenpeace got its start protesting atomic bomb testing and the commercial whaling industry. I thought of this last night when I saw a news report about humpback whales washing up on the New Jersey Shore in an area where preparations are underway for a large-scale, offshore wind farm.

A bit of learning that ultimately helped me to overcome my attachment to the Environmental Cult came from my high school physics teacher, who did an excellent job of explaining the Laws of Thermodynamics and the related law of the Conservation of Energy. I remain grateful to him, because his lessons later spared me from the monstrous ignorance that now shapes public perceptions of so-called Renewable Energy.

Consider the energy required to build a single large wind turbine. First there’s the site preparation with excavators and bulldozers (burning diesel). Turbines in the 1 to 2 MW range typically use 130 to 240 m3 of concrete for the foundation. This means: 1). Excavating and hauling cement, sand, and gravel for concrete (burning diesel) 3). Hauling concrete to site (diesel). 4) Laying concrete foundation (diesel).

This is just the foundation. Then you get into the massive, energy intensive business of building and hauling the gigantic turbine blades. Mining and refining and manufacturing all of the steel for the blades and the copper power cable. Miles of the latter must be run underground in order to connect the turbine to the power grid. On and on it goes.

Then there’s the terrible inefficiency of wind turbines—which only deliver significant power to the grid for a relatively small period per year—and their short lifespan of around 20 years, at which point they must be dismantled and the giant blades hauled off and buried. Finally, wind turbines are murderous for migratory birds and (if suspicions prove to be correct) migrating whales. Compared to natural gas—an abundant, high density, clean-burning energy mass that can be efficiently transported through existing pipelines—wind turbines are of abysmal utility.

Examine any major “Climate Initiative” and you’ll see that it doesn’t square with math and the Laws of Thermodynamics. If the mega billionaires of the world really want to reduce the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, they would get serious about economic investment in tropical nations that continue to clear rainforest for palm oil plantations and other low-yielding economic activities. Bill Gates could easily scratch a check for the entire palm oil industry of Borneo, thereby saving its rainforests and orangutans from incineration.

If the State of California were serious about preventing carbon from entering the atmosphere, it would start MANAGING its forests through judicious logging in order to prevent massive forrest fires. According to a recent LA Times report, the 2020 California wildfire season wiped out TWO DECADES of California emission reduction efforts. And yet, instead of managing their forests, California’s imbecilic politicians are now chattering about banning natural gas stoves.

How to explain this nonsense? For starters, the Climate Cult is able to harness very powerful yearnings like those that gripped me when I was a dumb adolescent. Secondly, because profligate politicians with access to unlimited debt financing have gotten in on the act, the “Renewable Energy” industry has become an absolute bonanza.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/carbon_capture_is_a_woke_fantasy.html

“Let's say you're brainstorming with some friends, trying to figure out how to cash in on the woke green wave.  It would probably not occur to the less boldly imaginative among us to propose 1) capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from agricultural areas covering five Midwestern states (see map from a corporate website here), 2) dehydrating and compressing it into liquid form at various capture locations, 3) transporting it via brand new pipelines, and 4) sequestering it into its permanent rocky tomb a mile beneath the surface, safe from climate change, nuclear war, and all but the most severe cosmic catastrophes.  As a bonus, liquid CO2 that survives burial has commercial industrial applications, like dry ice for food preservation or creating cloudy or foggy effects for Hollywood productions.  It's also used in fire extinguishers and to carbonate soft drinks, and it is even an important cooling agent for cryogenic freezing, as was done, for example, to Ted Williams and his son John Henry.

If you're wondering where the money comes from for these enterprises, the Department of Energy has announced many tens of millions of dollars in funding for research and implementation of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects.  Additionally, carbon credits for industry are shaping up to be a powerful incentive for generating private and public investor capital.

Private industry is currently developing new processes/technologies to capture and sequester CO2 from ethanol fermentation plants.  Plans are underway for Colorado and Nebraska to pioneer this process, and to start burying CO2 from ethanol in 2024.  Ethanol production is a big business, consuming more than 40% (!) of the U.S. corn crop.  Last summer, to help lower gas prices, Biden increased the amount of ethanol that must be added to gasoline from 10% to 15%.  Ethanol's chemical composition is C₂H₅OH — almost a hydrocarbon itself, but for that outlying oxygen molecule.  Ethanol is corrosive to car engines, and its production results in a net loss of energy: "Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol ... [which] has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU."

The largest players in the CCUS business by far are the Darth Vaders of climate change: oil companies.  For decades, oil and gas producers have injected exhaust, like CO2, and water from well sites back into the wells to pressurize the rocks and stimulate production.  Today, however, carbon capture is being embraced by oil companies on a massive scale.  This from Investor's Business Daily:

A long list of energy industry leaders have lined up to both use and provide carbon capture services. Among them are Occidental Petroleum (OXY), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Air Products (APD) and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Also Talos Energy (TALO) and Denbury (DEN). They're pouring billions of dollars into developing a carbon capture market estimated at a modest $2 billion in 2021. ... Occidental estimates the carbon capture market will hit $50 billion a year by 2030. Exxon sees it going as high as $4 trillion by 2050. ... Current carbon capture revenues rely heavily on federal incentives. One important issue over the longer term is whether carbon capture can stand on its own as a viable industry. Another is if the technology will really help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Are oil producers simply using the net zero target to attract climate-sensitive investors' dollars? Or perhaps using it as a pass to keep producing oil in an era of rising restrictions?

Good questions.  Oil companies have been forced to embrace CCUS because of sustained, worldwide political and financial pressure to do so.  Regardless of the merits (or not) of carbon capture, oil companies are not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

These ambitious plans will require building pipelines to transport the liquid CO2 to the underground burial sites.  It is not anticipated that acquiring permits for these pipelines will pose any problems.  The state of Colorado, for example, enthusiastically supports new pipeline infrastructure for CCUS at ethanol facilities, but the state is actively moving to restrict any pipeline extension for natural gas:

There are thousands of miles of pipelines, which, daily, transport oil and gas to and from U.S. markets safely and efficiently.  New York will not allow a pipeline to traverse upstate N.Y. from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, and Massachusetts will not allow a pipeline to cross through MA into New Hampshire.  As a result, in New England, many households still heat their homes with expensive and relatively filthy fuel oil.  Then there are the 800,000 barrels of oil per day that could be flowing through the Keystone pipeline.

A scientist friend of mine characterizes hydrogen as the pennies of the universe, owing to the prodigious abundance of that element.  And he calls carbon the Swiss Army Knife of elements, because on a molecular level, it can combine with itself and other atoms in so many configurations that carbon is present in over 90% of the millions of compounds known to man.  Contrast the softness of pencil graphite with the thinness and tensile strength of graphene, up to the hardness of diamonds.  Combining these two elements yields hydrocarbons, and they account for a dizzying array of industrial, consumer, and medical products.”