Powerless Advocacy
There’s a dubious push on for the United States to turn everything electric, no matter the expense—or even the feasibility. This is not a grassroots effort. It comes from the richest and most passionate in our society, from the ones who won’t feel the pinch of substantially higher costs on a daily basis.
Energy reporter Robert Bryce has been writing about this story for some time, describing where the money comes from for these green advocacy campaigns. The desired policies in this case involve banning the household use of natural gas—one of the energy sources for heating in America that is comparatively efficient and cost-effective. The activist organizations lobbying the political system and the voting public want the production and use of natural gas to be abolished.
As part of their project, these billionaire-funded groups have been trying over the last few years to have gas appliances like home heating furnaces, water heaters, and kitchen ranges made entirely illegal. They are behind campaigns for cities and states to ban the installation of natural gas lines to households.
Here’s how Bryce reports the situation:
The electrify everything movement is fueled by massive contributions from some of the world’s richest people, including Michael Bloomberg, John Doerr, and Laurene Powell Jobs. Numerous climate-focused NGOs, including the Sierra Club (2022 budget: $168 million) and Rocky Mountain Institute (2022 budget: $117 million), as well as dark-money entities like Climate Imperative and Rewiring America, are leading the attack against gas stoves and the direct use of gas. In 2022, Climate Imperative — headed by veteran climate activist Hal Harvey and two former Sierra Club employees, Bruce Nilles and Mary Anne Hitt — had revenue of $289 million. For comparison, the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, had revenue of about $37 million that year.
The campaign organizations have very deep pockets and are very well connected among the American political leadership classes. It is accurate to describe them as “dark money” groups since their exact donation sources are not disclosed—and aren’t required to be. It is also accurate to describe some of them like Sierra Club and Greenpeace as rich, multinational corporations, since their budgets and spending for advocacy far exceed that of actual industry. If terms like “dark money” and “multinational” are meant to invoke mysterious political power and ominous activity, they should apply no matter what their efforts inhabit on the political spectrum.
For some reason, some of the wealthiest activists have come to believe that the planet can only be rescued if everyone is forced to use only electricity for everything: not just the standard stuff you might plug into a wall outlet, but also home heating and motor vehicles. The electricity itself is meant to come from a vastly expanded network of solar panels and wind turbines, each of which requires many more acres being devoted into power generation—in this case, power plants that have been ideologically whitewashed, or, as critics say, “green-washed”: given a seal of environmentalist approval for their good intentions. Solar panels and wind turbines, after all, are presumed to be free of ecological harm, despite the fact that their manufacture and installation require more mining and other habitat despoliation than the energy infrastructure that has existed heretofore.
In an earlier article tracing the source of the gas-ban advocacy, Bryce made this point regarding the expenses of converting everything over to electricity only:
Indeed, it’s clear that banning natural gas will mean higher costs for consumers. Last March, in the Federal Register, the Department of Energy published its annual estimate for residential energy costs. It found that on a per-BTU basis, electricity costs about 3.5 times more than natural gas. It also found that gas was, by far, the cheapest form of in-home energy, costing less than half as much as fuels like kerosene, propane, and heating oil.
That means that efforts to ban natural gas are, in practice, an energy tax on the poor and the middle class.
The other option for avoiding higher energy costs for heating, of course, is for more Americans to move to the Sunbelt to escape regions with prolonged winter cold seasons. Will the southern parts of Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, and all of Hawaii be able to accommodate all 350 million Americans, including those coming out of the cold?
Who would move to the sunbelt were it not for air conditioning, which also requires a lot of energy? If you look at the growth of southern cities, there is an obvious link to the advent of air conditioning. So, it seems your question should really be, is there room for 350 million of is in an even narrower belt where the needs for heating and/or AC are not so great?
The comparison between the green funding and industry are eye-opening. Thanks.
This weekend I participated in a workshop conducted by Braver Angels, a grassroots organization that's working to help bridge the political divide in this country. It was an interesting day and I learned quite a bit. The biggest learning for me, but which really wasn't a surprise, is that having face to face conversations with people with different viewpoints provided what I call several aha moments, realizing that they aren't evil, or stupid, and aren't trying to ruin the country; there's actually a lot of common ground. We want mostly the same things for ourselves and our families, even if we might have different ideas on how to achieve them. Another non-surprise for me is that the online world is doing a lot of harm. Watching or listening only to our preferred but often biased news media outlets, then trading opinions (and jabs) anonymously on social media from the safety of our screens, solves nothing and only adds to the divide. I've shared this before but one big change I've made is that I haven't watched any TV news or opinion shows for about three years, and I'm very selective in what I read, and I think both have helped me find balance and moderate the way I think about views that might be different than mine. Anyway, I recommend taking a look at Braver Angels if you care about stuff like this. I'd be happy to share more about my experience if anyone's interested. PS A new phrase keeps running through my mind: politics isn’t life. Let’s not get too wrapped up in it. https://braverangels.org/