In Louisiana, natural gas—a planet-heating fossil fuel—is now, by law, considered “green energy” that can compete with solar and wind projects for clean energy funding. The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry last month, comes on the heels of similar bills passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. What the bills have in common—besides an “updated definition” of a fossil fuel as a clean energy source—is language seemingly plucked straight from a right-wing think tank backed by oil and gas billionaire and activist Charles Koch.
Louisiana’s law was based on a template created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that brings legislators and corporate lobbyists together to draft bills “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” The law maintains that Louisiana, in order to minimize its reliance on “foreign adversary nations” for energy, must ensure that natural gas and nuclear power are eligible for “all state programs that fund ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives.”
Louisiana state Rep. Jacob Landry first introduced a near-identical bill to the model posted on ALEC’s website and to the other bills that have passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. (The Washington Post reported in 2023 that ALEC was involved in Ohio’s bill; ALEC denies involvement.) Landry, who represents a small district in the southern part of the state, is the recipient of significant fossil fuel-industry funding—and he co-owns two oil and gas consulting firms himself. During his campaign for the state Legislature, Landry received donations from at least 15 fossil-fuel-affiliated companies and PACs, including ExxonMobil (which has also funded ALEC) and Phillips 66. Those donations alone totaled over $20,000.
Bring back Clean Lead!
Alright, I gotta hand it to them; this is by far one of, if not THE DUMBEST THING I’ve ever fucking read. It takes SKILL, DEDICATION, AND HARD WORK to be THIS fucking stupid. I’m genuinely impressed at how hard they’ve worked to divorce themselves from reality, it’s truly a marvel of cognitive restructuring. I’d say there’s no way they can top this, but we all know that they’ll find one in the next month, and it’ll make me question my sanity once again. Congratulations.
We had a
goodrun.Best of luck to whatever the tardigrades evolve into after a few billion years… if any of them survive the hellscape we’re turning our planet into.
Eh.
Surface and shallow water life will suffer, but there’s plenty of life beyond that bigger than tardigrades that will supplant us eventually.
Hopefully. But I’m not about to pretend I know where the positive feedback loops we’ve unleashed will go. Maybe the climate starts to improve a few decades after we’re all gone; maybe the greenhouse effect becomes so intense that planet earth becomes molten.
Even extremophiles have their limits - we may well have set Earth on a trajectory that ends in absolute lifelessness. Hopefully not. Probably not. But we’ve taken the keys to the planet and drove it off a cliff… whether or not anything can be made from the wreckage remains to be seen. But not by us.
It’ll probably be some algae in Pripyat that’s adapted to eat radiation and this planet is actually Krypton just way before anyone starts flying with the power of the sun
“Fossil fuels come from the Earth, so they’re green”
Every fucking day since 2016 it get’s harder and harder to come up with any remotely believable satire. There’s just no way of joking about reality, because that would require actually subverting expectations or exceeding norms to absurd levels, and that’s actually happening constantly in real life, making it not-fun
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I get why you deleted the reply. I’m equally confused.
It’s not funny anymore because it’s true.
And so is extinction! Nothing more natural than extinction: pretty much every species ever evolved has gone extinct or is on its way now!
Human ingenuity is a hell of a thing, but it isn’t impossible for us too. I don’t feet it ir reasonable to put human extinction on the table now, but if we burn all known fossil fuel reserves it is, maybe if we continue on our current trajectory into 2100 it will be.
Our adaptability is off the charts though. Like cockroach levels of crazy. Like crazier, probably, as a species, but just not as individuals.
It’s just gonna be a really fucking bad time for the guys in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. I don’t think it’s gonna satisfy anyone’s Fallout fantasies tbh.
by their logic, cyanide is also green and harmless since it comes from plants and is renewable.
sounds like they should show us themselves that it’s green
Leafy greens have cyanide and are green, so cyanide is greenn. Duh.
What are you, a stupid progressive?
Next thing you’ll be telling me the Earth is round lol
#/s
(and the “/s” is necessary)
of course the earth is round.
And hollow.
and we live on the interior of its shell, with the sun in the middle. Thats why things fall down, cause the earth spins and pushes us down into the ground!
The stars and night sky are just the lights from the people on the other side!
So instead of gravity, it’s centripetal force? New crazy theory just dropped.
This is old though. Hollow world has been a thing since the 70s at least.
whats old is new again, baby.
now I gotta find me some bellbottom jeans.
Don’t worry, the Supreme Court just gave the okay for slashing 1400 education department jobs and reducing funding.
In no time at all, our population will be so dumb that it won’t matter what words we use to describe anything!
Came across this theory recently. Seems to provide insight to today.
http://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer - Theory of Stupidity.pdf
I’ve been reading Bonhoeffer recently. His work is very much relevant right now, and quite depressing.
I remember when ohio wasn’t like that. I miss the purple state I grew up in
All they know how to do is lie and be violent
You just described fascists.
Ah yes. Stupidity knows no bounds.
Those donations alone totaled over $20,000.
It always amazes me how cheaply these traitors sell us out.
Reminds me of when Sam Bankman Freid (FTX Crypto guy) said he was surprised it only cost him lile $50k to buy off a politician or something. And the Oceangate CEO apparently said that if someone complains about the safety of his sub he’ll just “buy a senator”.
Oh honey that was just the disclosed amount donated. Under the table I’m sure he copped another 10 million to his offshore accounts. You know, a drop in the bucket of Exxon mobil’s quarterly profits.
That’s only the public money. Who knows how much dark money they got for it.
I can’t remember where I was reading this but being cheap to purchase is by design.
If politicians were expensive to buy, the public outcry would be significantly higher and would also incur more scrutiny. So there is this balance of bribing a politician vs their voters being upset that their politician taking too much money. Oddly there doesn’t seem to be a floor of “our politician can be bought too cheaply.”
The other side of this is that until Citizens United is overturned, there is no limit to how much a company can spend on special interest groups. This is where politicians fear the most. If they don’t go along with whatever issue, then they have to raise more money to run for re-election, which puts more pressure on them to accept the bribe in the first place.
TL;DR: money in politics is killing our democracy
This is what you get when you give conservatives power.
Hopefully America remembers that going forward, but probably not.
I had to deal with this shit in my environmental studies class in uni. Apparently the forestry industry has been promoting their own brand of propaganda that says burning wood, the most greenhouse-gas-producing fuel on the planet, is environmentally friendly because it is “renewable”.
Great, we’ll all be dead from global warming but at least in theory the trees that burned down from the wildfires could have reabsorbed that carbon over a couple centuries.
Burning wood is green iff the wood was harvested from trees planted for this purpose and all equipment used in the process from planting to harvesting to processing is entirely running on renewable energy.
Seems like it’d be easier to just use solar power and heat pumps for heating
Nah, the particulates emissions and VOCs from burning wood is still very bad at scale. “Green” doesn’t really mean anything, I think by definition, since Big Oil was watered it down so much. Similar to the word woke, socialism, etc.
I feel like the bigger issue is all the CO2 emitted from burning literal carbon. Using fossil fuels is just burning trees with extra steps (millennia of burial and compression).
The difference is that the carbon in the wood is in the short carbon cycle while the fossil fuels were sequestered. Carbon wise it doesn’t matter if the tree burns or rots (ok rotting does keep some of it in life and soil, but burning leaves some as char).
See I think that’s the forestry industry propaganda that’s somehow made its way into environmentalist circles.
The differences you cite are irrelevant in the fight against global warming, where burning wood is the absolute worst. The carbon cycle doesn’t matter in the context of how much CO2 are we putting in the atmosphere now, today. It takes too long to matter.
Burning wood is sustainable and if there weren’t 8 billion people on the planet that need temperature regulation it would have little impact on the environment. It’s always about scale.
Literally anything is sustainable by this argument, what are you even talking about?
Literally anything is sustainable by this argument
I think that is precisely the point they were making.
☝️
No matter how I read it, it sounds like you’re saying “it’s sustainable under the right circumstances” and I just don’t see how that’s useful to even acknowledge.
Yeah, we do it in the UK too. “Biomass” is just impatient coal.
It’s at least true that biofuels made from fast-growing crops like soy or sugar cane are carbon neutral (if you assume the farm equipment also runs on biofuel and no other petroleum-derived inputs are used) because they’re part of the short-term carbon cycle, right?
If so — if the cut-off for “renewable” is definitely longer than a year, definitely shorter than millions of years, and apparently also shorter than hundreds of years — then I’d like to know where scientists (not industry shills) have decided it actually lies. Would the forest industry’s position be valid in the context of e.g. a slash pine tree farm?
Honestly, I’m inclined to see a very strong distinction between burning wood and burning fossil methane, as long as you’re not talking about chopping down an old-growth forest or something like that. (And as long as the methane you’re comparing to isn’t from a short-term cycle source like landfill gas, for that matter.)
We can grow and burn the soy or the sugar cane or the trees faster than they can sequester it back into the ground.
That doesn’t make any sense. Where’s the carbon the next year’s crop needs to grow coming from, if not from re-absorbing that released from burning the previous year’s crop?
I’m not talking about trying to make it carbon-negative, just carbon-neutral. Plant->sky->plant-sky->plant->sky etc.
Yes, buut forestry industries (at least in the US) are pretty sustainable, from what I’ve seen.
In other words, at least there’s a nugget of truth under the lie.
They won’t be when they all burn before they can be harvested due to global warming-induced forest fires.
Are they at least adding green colouring…?
Only on St Patrick’s Day.
So, if the fed government can sue CA, claiming that states cannot impose additional requirements on egg production because of a federal-level definition + the supremacy clause, how can these states reclassify gas as ‘green energy’, since the grids are inter-state electrically connected, and the Fed has to set the standard for inter-state commerce?
Or perhaps I’m just reaching to far expecting some kind of consistent application of the law. shrugs
consistent application of the law
In the Un-United States of Trashcanistan? Lol.
There is no law, only Trump’s will and wealthy interests
And remember, billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by spending money that they didn’t think would result in more money coming back to them.
There is a whole group of people that really believe that the concept ‘perception is reality’ is a permission to make up the truth. In other words they believe if they tell a lie enough that it will become reality.
So far, they seem to be right.
Reality always comes crashing down on those who ignore it.
There will be a reckoning. But it’ll be far too late and the ones primarily responsible won’t be held accountable.
The reckoning will be all of us suffering together, but not equally.
In no way.
