Green Scare: Its About The Money, Not The Earth

Now that the Obama administration is serious about cap and trade, and all of the side benefits for campaign contributors who will broker the carbon credits, who really stands to gain from Earth saving green coal technology? No one. And that's why just about all the major green enviro groups are out there protesting a modern, capture and sequester plat in New Jersey.

Just think of all the poor brokers on Wall Street without a carbon credit to trade in the future. If green coal has a future, then these guys stand to lose billions of dollars in fees. No politician ever made a living with a solved problem.

To whit:

Clean Coal? Not Here, Thanks [William Tucker]

There’s another article in yesterday’s New York Times worth noting. On the Metropolitan page, Peter Applebome recounts a bitter public debate going on now in Linden, N.J.

It seems a farsighted power company named PurGen wants to build a 750-megawatt coal plant with complete carbon capture and storage, commonly cited as one of the major breakthroughs needed to fend off global warming. The plant, on an old DuPont site, would capture 90 percent of its carbon-dioxide exhaust, liquefy it, and pump it through 70 miles of pipeline to an offshore rock formation near Atlantic City, where it would be permanently sequestered. Almost any environmental group you can name lists “carbon capture and storage” as one of its highest priorities in reducing carbon emissions.

So who is opposing the plant? The Sierra Club of New Jersey, the New Jersey Environmental Federation, the Edison Wetlands Association, the Arthur Kill Watershed Alliance, and every other environmental organization within driving distance. They’re not being nice about it, either. The Sierra Club calls the project “A $5 billion Ponzi scheme that not only won’t work but will lead to environmental disaster.” Edison Wetlands says it’s “A recipe for another Exxon Valdez toxic catastrophe.” The Environmental Federation is telling local residents, “The worst polluters continue to put Linden in their crosshairs, but this time the stakes are even higher.”

“Support globally, oppose locally.” That should be the motto of the environmental movement.

Look, the political establishment already has plans for the hundreds of billions of dollars in carbon tax credits. From the campaign contributions to the earmarks back home, there are a lot of people invested in the non-solution solution.

This kind of problem solving will not be appreciated by anyone in Washington and will be punished summarily. Of course, this is not a shock to anyone paying attention...if this was about carbon and saving the earth, Obama would have started a "Manhattan Project" for nuclear power plants. But he didn't and I don't know of any of the environmental groups pushing for Nuclear Now.

This whole carbon thing is starting to feel like one of those Soprano episodes at the construction site in New Jersey, complete with fat guys in lawn chairs.