Greens hate hydrocarbons but open warfare is breaking out in their ranks as the world outside their luxury millenarian cult realises it is impossible to run a modern industrial society without hydrocarbons. In the U.K., the penny is finally dropping that gas is the only realistic backup to an electricity system powered by unreliable breezes and sunbeams. But at the same time the mad Miliband crew is closing down local oil and gas exploration, and step forward Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell University who claims transportable American liquified natural gas (LNG) has a bigger ‘carbon’ footprint than coal. The Guardian was all over an early draft of Cornell’s work which helped support last year’s pause by the Biden Administration of pending LNG export permits. LNG was described as a carbon “mega bomb”. Cornell’s work was funded by the billionaire Park Foundation which supports ‘progressive’ causes and divestment from oil and gas extraction. By a happy coincidence – such coincidences, of course, being common in the complex webs of the Green Blob – Park has given $650,000 to the Guardian over the last three years.
Pennies dropping over gas backup lie behind the recent decision by the U.K. Government to waste £22 billion capturing carbon dioxide and burying it underground. The sheer futility of this exercise is obvious to many since it will require enormous amounts of energy to capture and compress a gas that is likely to eventually seep out of any nearby cavernous hole in the ground. The whole exercise bears some similarity to the old lag Fletcher telling Prison Officer MacKay in the 1970 sitcom Porridge that the prisoners had hidden the earth from an escape tunnel by digging another hole to put it in.
In geological terms, pumping massive quantities of pressurised gas into the substrata may come with some risks. On August 21st 1986 there was a sudden release of 1.6 million tons of magmatic CO2 from the bed of Lake Nyos in Cameroon. Heavier than air CO2 fell on the surrounding villages and suffocated 1,746 people. The gas had accumulated under high pressure and could have been released by volcanic activity or a minor earth tremor. One of the first sites for U.K. CO2 storage is Liverpool Bay, while other locations around the country have been identified. No doubt strict geological guidelines will be observed to ensure CO2 does not escape in bulk, but over time conditions might change. The suggested threat from earthquakes was enough to ban onshore fracking in the U.K. and it will be interesting to see if similar concerns arise when many millions of tonnes of pressurised CO2 are being buried.
As we have seen, so-called climate ‘solutions’ such as carbon capture are hated by true green cult believers. The green billionaire activist unit Oil Change International (OCI) has described carbon capture as a “colossal waste of money”. In a recent detailed report, OCI noted past expenditure of $83 billion with a failure rate of over 80% in the U.S. “Carbon capture projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform,” states OCI.
The hatred arises because carbon capture is seen as legitimising the continued use of hydrocarbons. The less insane greens are finally realising that they cannot ban hydrocarbons altogether. This is due to the fact that half the world’s population would die without hydrocarbon-based medicine, fertiliser, waste disposal etc. But of course the true believers are right in that carbon capture is a colossal waste of money providing little more than a fig leaf to cover the continued use of oil and gas.
Then let us consider hydrogen, an explosive, expensive waste of money but favoured by many greens as a scalable alternative to oil and gas. The U.K.’s Royal Society said as much last year in a major report written by over 40 leading scientists. The Environmental Defence Fund, an influential Green Blob-funded activist and campaigning operation, thinks otherwise. In a recent paper, it noted that the higher combustion temperature of hydrogen produced more polluting nitrogen dioxide. In addition the gas is very light and easily escapes into the atmosphere. Chemical changes then produce pound for pound 37 times the warming of CO2. Inconvenient for alarmists, who haven’t yet worked out that the various warming gases in the atmosphere ‘saturate’ past certain levels, a suggestion backed up by 500 million years of climate observations.
In understanding these civil war battles that are breaking out in the green movement, the general public is hamstrung by a news blackout long imposed on all sceptical consideration of Net Zero and climate science. The BBC can broadcast a 40 minute antisemitic rant by the Iranian leader justifying the rape and slaughter of women and children in Israel, but it will not consider a single second of sceptical comment around the ‘settled’ science of climate change. It justifies the former with a free speech, need-to-inform argument, but withholds such an indulgence over Net Zero. As a result, a Potemkin village of fake science, fudged weather figures, ridiculous computer model attributions and predictions and Jim Dale/Dale Vince pronouncements are allowed to flourish with little or no push back permitted. Largely unreported are the increasingly vicious battles breaking out in the green movement as it continues on its handcart-to-hell journey.
If there is a pressing need to understand these internal green battles it is important to disclose the links that bind many of the participants together. Professor Howarth’s work is intent on demonising LNG for political purposes. Who is funding and publicising it is important information since it may well affect the future supply of LNG to a gas-starved Britain under a Harris Administration. Mainstream media are incapable of covering these issues since they are bound to a set reporting narrative with scepticism barred as ‘misinformation’. But who is saying what, why they are saying it and who is paying for them to say it are all important items of information in navigating the increasingly treacherous waters of green and Net Zero politics.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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