4 minute read
Energy Policy
THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com. Thomas McArdle
Drill for a Greener Planet
Bank CEO says oil and gas investments would reduce carbon emissions
No new fossil fuel production starting today” is required to save the earth, hard-left “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Democrat who represents Detroit, ludicrously claimed to banking executives during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee on Sept. 22, before asking them if they were following a policy “against funding new oil and gas products.”
“Absolutely not,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon responded. “That would be the road to hell for America.”
To which Tlaib sneered back, “Yeah, that’s fine,” and ranted that everyone who gets a student loan taxpayer bailout should take their money out of Chase.
“You obviously don’t care about working-class people, frontline communities like ours that are facing huge amounts of high rates of asthma, respiratory issues, [and cancer],” she told Dimon.
According to Tlaib, anything other than no more oil and gas “defies all logic and scientific evidence at our disposal.” And if banks don’t stop financing fossil fuels, “then regulators, including the Federal Reserve and Congress, must step in and make them.”
Back home last week, Tlaib’s constituents in Detroit attended an urgent town hall meeting. Not to address cancer or asthma or going green ASAP, but in regard to more immediate causes of death and distress to the community.
“I observed two young men with Uzis. One killed the other one,” Detroit resident Glenda McGadney said. “And this was two Sundays ago.”
She called it something “I thought I would never see in my entire life. I’m traumatized.”
The 221 killings in the Motor City so far this year, with a little more than three months left to go, are actually looked at by local officials as good news—because there were 309 homicides last year and 323 in 2020. Still, Tlaib apparently thinks that having the Fed become the green police will make up for defunding the real police and leaving innocent black and brown people unprotected from violent criminals.
As an enemy of the working class, it’s odd the way Dimon’s bank, the largest in the United States, with branches in all 48 contiguous states, provides more than 250,000 working men and women with livelihoods. According to Indeed. com, Chase pays an average of $59,000 per year to banking associates, about $10,000 higher than the national average, and it boasts a $30 billion “racial equity commitment” to “close the racial wealth gap.”
That sounds like a page torn from the Squad’s “woke” manifesto, and yet all those billions of dollars don’t buy Dimon any relief from being pilloried as a robber baron cannibalizing the proletariat.
Now, Dimon is saying that “the world needs 100 million barrels effectively of oil and gas every day. And we need it for 10 years” and that it will require “proper investing in the oil and gas complex,” which “is good for reducing CO2,” as proved by high oil and gas prices recently spurring much of the world to turn back to dirtier coal.
Dimon pointed out that from China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam to fully industrialized nations such as France, Germany, and the Netherlands, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are worsening.
Carbon Capture Is an Energy Policy
Advances in carbon capture and storage technology, paired with fracking, point the way to sensible energy policies for the coming decades, as opposed to the fanaticism of Tlaib and the White House. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conceded in 2018 that carbon capture must be an element in global energy policies going forward.
Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, called carbon capture “a necessary bridge between the reality of today’s energy system and the increasingly urgent need to reduce emissions.”
It’s a procedure that utilizes biomass to absorb CO2 as it grows, injecting it into deep geological formations. The first large-scale direct air-capture plant may open in the United States next year, capturing up to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide annually for use in enhanced oil recovery.
Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources and one of the pioneers of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is committing $250 million toward a $4.5 billion carbon-capture project to utilize a 2,000-mile pipeline that will dispose of 8 million tons of CO2 by injecting it a mile underground in North Dakota.
“Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing gave us the American energy renaissance,” Hamm declared of the work done over the past decade or two. “We used ingenuity to get the hydrocarbons out of the earth. There’s no reason why we can’t use the same skills to put the carbon back in.”
Far from Tlaib’s claims, the world won’t reach any green future destination without being fueled by a lot of “black gold.”
