The recent appearance of a shift in GOP rhetoric on climate has apparently sent a chill down the spine of paid deniers, who are seeing their decades of work begin to unravel. For example, Benjamin Zycher of the tobacco, Koch, Exxon and other industry-funded American Enterprise Institute recently sounded an alarm for deniers in RealClearMarkets.
If Republicans begin following SC Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent recommendation to come up with their own climate policy to fight off the Green New Deal, Zycher argues, then “they will be stuck with the underlying assumptions about climate phenomena, and they will have no principled answer” to calls that climate change needs to be addressed.
Standard denier lies aside, on the main point, Zycher is right. Once Republicans accept that fossil fuels are causing climate change, it becomes hard to support policies that continue to allow for burning them. But Zycher assumes the GOP will stick to principled answers. This has already proven naive, since acknowledging climate change hasn’t stopped politicians from putting forward policies that deceptively claim to address climate change while in fact facilitating further fossil fuel use.
And the fossil fuel industry is starting to play the same game too. The natural gas industry released a report this week that tries to show how natural gas can be part of a clean energy future. As one might expect, it makes some incredibly questionable assumptions, ignores some important points, and, like all good propaganda, undermines the very clean energy future it claims to support.
The headline of Jenny Mandel’s coverage in E&E captures exactly the talking point the industry wants: “natural gas is a destination fuel, not a bridge.” But if it isn’t just a bridge fuel that kills off coal before handing the energy baton to renewables, we have to question whether that is actually a desirable destination.
The report looks at two possible futures that natural gas can be a part of, one where only current policies are continued, and another a so-called rapid renewables scenario, where half of America's electricity is from renewables by 2040. The problem is that such a goal is not even close to compatible with the 1.5C target set forth in the Paris Agreement that calls for 45% emission reductions by 2030, and 100% clean energy by 2050, in order to prevent literally millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in damages.
The supposedly clean energy future the report imagines for gas is one that is, in fact, not that clean, and certainly not clean enough to avoid further climate catastrophes. Yes, natural gas can be part of a lower-carbon future, but not the zero-carbon future we need to protect the public and planet. Because instead of reducing emissions, recent pollution data shows that natural gas use is increasing greenhouse gas emissions, even outweighing the reduction in emissions when a gas plant replaces a coal one. How can natural gas be a climate solution if it’s leading to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions?
The report also makes some amazingly pessimistic assumptions about batteries, claiming that they won’t be viable until something like 2035. This conveniently ignores the fact that renewables + batteries are already competing on cost with gas power plants. Is it fair to assume the technology won’t improve for another twenty years?
Obviously not, but why would we expect anything else from the industry? After all, it’s in a fight for its very survival.
So yes, the weight of the science on climate change and the evidence of a melting Arctic and burning forests, of sea level rise and seasonal shifts, are playing out before our eyes. But that doesn’t mean the fossil fuel industry is just going to dismantle itself for the good of humanity.
Instead, it will try to make it seem like fossil fuels are still, somehow, compatible with a clean energy future, and invoke an ideal clean future while aiming to undercut that very outcome. Dig into the details of either the industry’s reports or the Republicans’ climate policies and you’ll no doubt have many of the same questions we posed here.
But don’t bother asking them, because in the words of Zycher, “they will have no principled answer.”
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