National Spotlight On Wyoming Gov. Backing Out Of Carbon Debate

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon's announcement at Harvard University that he plans to steer his home state to "negative CO2" emissions, and his subsequent refusal to debate his own political party on the issue is slowly gaining national attention.

One recent opinion column stated:

Gordon Was Standing Tall In The Saddle Until He Backed Down
Guest columnist Gregory Wrightstone writes, “Gov. Gordon was standing tall in the saddle when he accepted an invitation to debate publicly his so-called carbon-negative policy in a state heavily engaged in the production of fossil fuels. However, he ultimately backed down.”

Most major news outlets have yet to pick up the story. But it is working its way up the chain of news outlets and opinion columnists.

Another news outlet writes:

Wyoming governor’s speech erupts into a fight over the future of fossil fuels, and carbon capture.

To reach the goal of making human-caused carbon dioxide emissions neutral by 2050, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that 70 to 100 of these facilities will have to come online every year for the next 27 years.

“The numbers are just astronomical.

This just isn't going to happen.

We're never gonna get anywhere close to these kinds of numbers,” Steve Goreham, author of “Green Breakdown,” told JTN.

Wyoming's Governor Mark Gordon received a “no confidence” rebuke from the Wyoming Republican Party over comments he made about climate change at Harvard University.

Gordon spoke about Wyoming's commitment to reaching "carbon negative" CO2 emissions.

Despite the rebuke, the governor did not budge from his “decarbonization” ideals when speaking on Monday at the Western Governors’ Association meeting in Jackson.

But is "Net Zero" or "Carbon Negative" even worth it?

Not only has it been shown that CO2 is greening the Earth and good for the planet, but achieving a "net zero" state would not be cheap.

In an email, Harvard Physicist Lubos Motl warned that Net Zero would not be “cheap and easy.”

He called the idea naïve and “completely insane”.

Dr. Molt was not calling out Wyoming's Governor Gordon by name, but what the governor has been advocating falls within the realm of what Dr. Molt was writing about.

Globally, the costs would be economically ruinous and explosive in terms of financial and social cohesion.

Some people claim promoting Net Zero would be totally easy and cheap, below $2 trillion (total integrated expenses) – as long as we built a bunch of nuclear power plants. But such claims are completely insane.

All electric cars is basically impossible. (Physicist Lubos Motl ).

Below are a few excerpts from what Dr. Molt wrote in his Email.

Every forcedly shut down power plant – whether it runs on coal or uranium – is a huge waste of money.

Equally importantly, for Net Zero, it totally fails to be enough to replace the power plants.

The replacement of cars by electric vehicles is basically impossible in the decades to come. The market already shows that the demand for EVs has almost evaporated. Instead of the promised exponential growth, the EV makers are probably facing a decline. It is no surprise.

...even if we find huge new lithium reserves, they will get more expensive to mine because we must dig deeper, and we may run out of copper, cadmium, something else. And it is just cars.

 

Then you have the cows with the methane etc.

Net Zero is insane with nukes or without is elementary science and economics.

The real battle is against lunatics

The appropriation of science and the ‘science’ brand by climate alarmist crackpots has been a huge blow to civilization.

It is BS that the CO2 is behind the bad individual weather events or extremes and pretty much everyone understands that 1-2 deg C of (uniform) warming per century is not a problem.

What is terrible is that CO2 has been irrationally blamed for storms and other things that have existed on Earth for billions of years.

 

Luboš Motl is a physicist at Harvard University.