LA Governor & Industry: Climate Change Task Force
Edwards creates climate change task force
Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate 2/24/20
BATON ROUGE – Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration plans an expansion of coastal restoration and flood protection efforts that for the first time will target greenhouse gas emissions by Louisiana industry as a way to reduce future sea level rise.
“Louisiana will do its part to address climate change,” Edwards said Thursday. “Science tells us that rising sea level will become the biggest challenge we face, threatening to overwhelm our best efforts to protect and restore our coast. Science also tells us that sea level rise is being driven by global greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Democratic governor said he was forming a new Climate Initiatives Task Force that will come up with “next steps” for the state to take.
Edwards’ speech marked the first time a Louisiana governor had announced such intentions, according
to The New Orleans Advocate/The Times- Picayune. But the governor offered few specifics about how aggressive a line he would take toward reducing emissions.
“We are not announcing targets today, or metrics, and we are certainly not starting with a series of regulations,” he said.
Edwards praised Louisiana’s energy industry and stressed that the carbon reduction efforts would be as industry friendly as possible. “Our state economy, and the nation at large, depends on Louisiana’s strong industrial sector,” he said.
“We provide the energy and the petrochemical products the country runs on.”
Those industries also produce a lot of greenhouse gases, and amid a building boom, the numbers have been going up. In January, the Environmental Integrity Project reported that facilities in three industry sectors in 2018 emitted 764 million tons of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and other compounds linked to global warming. That was 8% more than in 2016.
New oil and gas production and new and expanded existing industrial facilities could add another 227 million tons of greenhouse gases a year to the atmosphere in Louisiana by 2025, an increase of almost one-third, the group said.
Global warming is linked to rising sea levels, among other problems.
Environmental Quality Secretary Chuck Carr Brown said the governor’s task force will determine the volume of greenhouse gases emitted by industry and other sources in the state, and then come up with ways to reduce them.
In what may be a sign that Edwards’ greenhouse gas reduction proposal is not overly aggressive, the plan was welcomed by the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, which represents mid-size and large oil and gas companies.
Tyler Gray, the group’s president, said in a statement the organization looks forward to “work collaboratively with the governor and his administration on his 2020 priorities, including efforts to continue reducing emissions and to protect our coast.”
Environmental groups praised the governor’s effort.
“The ambitious priorities outlined by Gov. Edwards today can have a lasting positive impact on Louisiana for generations to come,” said Steve Cochran, a vice president with the Environmental Defense Fund and campaign director for Restore the Mississippi River Delta.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on
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How Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both reject the reality of climate change
By Fred Hiatt Editorial page editor Opinions Feb. 23, 2020 at 4:32 p.m. CST
The survival of our planet as we know it is in danger.
We have at hand a bipartisan, rigorous plan to address that danger.
And now it is more than possible that we will end up with two presidential candidates who reject that plan in favor of two varieties of utter unseriousness.
The first is the denialism of President Trump. He either believes or cynically pretends to believe that climate change is not a threat. His administration has gravely aggravated the threat, for example by recklessly relaxing regulation of the super-warming gas methane.
The second version is the fantasy extremism of Sen. Bernie Sanders. He would prosecute oil executives “for the destruction they have knowingly caused” (he “welcomes their hatred”) and phase out carbon-neutral nuclear power. The Vermont independent would ban the fracking of natural gas, which is — if you control the methane emissions — a useful transitional fuel from dirty coal to clean wind and solar.
As though by magic, Sanders’s proposals will “dramatically decrease the cost of energy storage” and (why not?) make electricity “virtually free” after 2035 (though, sadly, we would still have to pay for “operations and maintenance costs”). All fossil fuels will be gone by 2030, the renewable energy that takes its place will be “publicly owned,” and — not to worry — the plan “will pay for itself over 15 years.”
Unfortunately, there is no magic wand to make such things happen, as Patrick Pouyanné told me last week. Pouyanné is one of those people whose hatred Sanders might welcome; he is chairman and chief executive of Paris-based Total, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies.
On a recent visit to Washington, Pouyanné himself did not seem particularly hateful; on the contrary. Unlike the U.S. president, he has no doubt that climate change is real and “a huge challenge for mankind.”
“I believe the scientists,” he said, and he favors a global (and corporate) evolution away from fossil fuels. He wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency to oppose Trump’s methane regulation rollback.
As an executive doing business in many countries, however, he is aware of some realities:
- Eighty percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels.
- Despite growing awareness, and the Paris accord, last year, coal use increased and forests (the best means to pull carbon out of the atmosphere) shrank.
- Close to 1 billion of the world’s 7 billion people have no access to electricity, and their governments are not going to be satisfied with that situation.
- When it comes to energy, every nation is concerned first with the security of supply; second with the cost of supply; and only third with its cleanliness.
- The technology does not exist today to allow a system to rely only on intermittent sources of energy such as wind and sunshine.
- Climate change is a global challenge, “and we do not have a global government.”
Pouyanné said a U.S. ban on fracking — or the jailing of oil executives, for that matter — would have little impact on climate change. Why? Because much of the world’s oil is located in poorer countries that depend desperately on oil exports, and they will gladly make up any shortfall.
“Change will not come from changing the source of supply,” he said. “You have to reduce demand.”
Which brings us back to the plan, put forward this month by the Climate Leadership Council, that would actually work. Supported by energy companies (including Total) and environmental groups alike, it would impose a steadily rising tax on carbon. That would lead to reduced consumption and increased innovation in alternatives, including battery storage for solar and wind power. To get buy-in from industry, the plan would do away with a lot of regulation — but only so long as emissions were, in fact, going down.
By imposing a tariff on imports from countries without similar carbon taxes, the plan would pressure those countries to follow suit. And the tax would be politically palatable, because every dollar would be returned in equal shares to taxpayers — with 70 percent of U.S. households ending up better off.
“A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary,” several thousand economists, including virtually every prominent economist to have served in Democratic or Republican administrations, said in a statement.
It should be encouraging, then, that when The Post asked the Democratic candidates whether they would support setting a price on carbon, almost all either said yes (Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer) or maybe (Elizabeth Warren). There were two naysayers: Tulsi Gabbard and Sanders.
It should be encouraging, but it won’t be — if both parties end up with nominees who each, in his own way, rejects reality.
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Permalink Reply by Dion Warr, CPL on
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Skip:
Large multinational energy companies also have interest in being in the lead in the transition to non-carbon-based energy:blunting competition from smaller E&P companies ill-equipped to bear the cost of regulatory compliance during a "forced" transition period make their booked reserves higher in value as well as higher in probability to not become sequestered or "left in the ground". Being recognized as an "environmentally responsible" organization also diffuses the spotlight of harsh regulation (in theory) - demagogues like Sanders will not be averted by such overtures but many steward-minded moderates likely would be.
Sanders' proposals are little more than fantasyland with a dash of Robin Hood thrown in for good measure. My guess is that the "returned taxes" will be phased out rather dramatically above the lower and middle-working classes, unavailable to the upper-middle classes and above ("the lucky 30% of U.S. households") and perhaps even borne in some part by commercial users in an effort to "ration" power consumption. Also, how will "renewable power" become "publicly owned"? Nationalization? Does Mr. Sanders suffer from the delusion that end-user electric power is significantly generated by municipal power plants and distributed via a "national grid"? Or will the "smart grid" be a "single-payer" grid? Or does he just surmise that, like many naive Americans already believe re: the national food supply, that energy "comes from the supermarket"??
Lastly, emissions per capita in the US are going down, probably at a rate better than most of Europe (shutting down European nuclear baseload has to made up by more than just solar panels). But with no buy-in from Asian nations (India, China), the rest of the world would have to make up more that half of any proposed reduction scheme until the proposed CO2 apocalypse. As Pouyanné notes, criminalizing carbon marketing in the developed world will do little to stem the rise of usage of the developing and underdeveloped nations.
P. S. I won't even begin to bring up the mountains of tailings and industrial waste already being produced in the manufacture of "clean energy" for which the mainstream press seems to have a perpetual blindspot.
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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on
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Dion:
You seem to be under the illusion that Senator Sanders would be able to garner sufficient congressional support to enact his energy policies. The percentage of "hard green" Democrats in congress is quite small. I also think it is premature to award him the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. Claiming to ban fracking nationally is like claiming to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it. I can assure you that neither of those things is happening nor will they every happen although both claims do have attraction for certain political bases and tend to garner a lot of media attention.
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Permalink Reply by Dion Warr, CPL on
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Skip:
I believe I did characterize his proposals (in part) as "fantasyland".
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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on
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Only in part. I suggest that we characterize them as total fantasy. Fracking will end when the market dictates. And one day, it will.
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Permalink Reply by John Denison on -
This is what a moderate governor like John Bel Edwards can accomplish. His initiative would be dead in the water without industry support.
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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on
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I agree, John. However, for me, the more important development here is that the industry is finally coming around to the realization that they have a lot to lose by continuing to deny climate change and fight any legislation directed at addressing it. The industry needs to be part of the debate and advocate for actions that they can accommodate and which the general public will view as a reasonable response. Louisiana is a special case in several respects. The state budget and many jobs depend on the industry writ large, not just O&G but all associated chemical and refining sectors. Emissions are the obvious primary focus but cleaning up the land and water need to be a priority also. That should be done incrementally over time but starting ASAP. The state has about 4,000 (4,117 at least count) "orphan wells". That number grows each year even as some on the number are properly plugged and abandoned and removed from the list. Orphan wells represent an environmental hazard, as opposed to fracking which does not.
https://www.fox8live.com/story/36750057/zurik-orphan-wells-and-the-...
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Permalink Reply by Greg Whitson on
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As I take it there are no actions that can be done by the land owner?
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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on
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Greg, if you are referring to orphan wells, you can check the state list of orphan wells to see if a well you are interested in is included. You can also contact the head of the Office of Conservation, Inspection and Compliance Division, to request a well be included or investigated.
http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/index.cfm?md=pagebuilder&tmp=home&...
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