Republican Gov. Jeff Landry needs to take the next step and ensure Louisiana doesn’t throw away good dollars after bad as an extension of his Governors’ Coalition for Energy Choice.
Last week, Landry as co-founder of the group announced its initial formation. Ten governors, all Republicans, pledges in their states’ policy-making to ensure continued energy choice, minimize permitting and other regulatory barriers, limit expensive energy mandates, focus on affordability and reliability of energy infrastructure, and coordinate to manage positively energy resources and the environment. It is a natural outgrowth of his articulated “all of the above” strategy to maximize energy availability at minimal cost, which other members also have enunciated.
Which, of course, brought apoplexy onto climate alarmists, who perceive this sentiment as empowering the production of fossil fuels, contrary to their faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and neglecting government assistance to ultra-expensive renewable energy consumption as well as to fund research to make it only overly-expensive. That would include the $25 million Louisiana taxpayers already sank into something called H2theFuture, which snapped up $50 million in federal taxpayer dollars to start up.
H2theFuture plans to spend the haul on research, business development, workforce training and public-private partnerships dedicated to advancing use primarily of hydrogen as a fuel source, but more generally any renewable form of energy. Awarded two years ago, the group recently moved to breaking ground on a facility to accomplish that.
The successful grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, part of the free-for-all Washington Democrat spending spree as a mini Green New Deal derivative of the wasted resources behind the American Rescue Plan, leans heavily into highly questionable narratives. It uncritically accepts CAGW in that to forestall this assumes ineluctably will decimate the fossil fuel industry while necessitating the ramping up of renewable fuel production no matter the cost. It justifies the move as well by an appeal to wokeism, equating the fossil fuel industry as discriminatory against racial minorities both in terms of employment and spillover effects. It alleges that some forms of renewable energy already are cheaper than fossil fuels and that hydrogen inevitably will come down dramatically in cost. It claims its efforts are part of the state’s policy-making and will receive a 20 percent state match.
That last assertion, which may have been somewhat true back during the grant writing phase when Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards was in office, is anything but today. Landry through neglect of Edwards’ Climate Initiatives Task Force has made a dead letter its product by which the groups claims hydrogen specifically and renewable sources generally have policy-making priority, its Priority Climate Action Plan issued literally as Edwards left the building. Nor can it expect Landry to let any more money go out the door on this grant, implying that if the federal government gives out $50 million more, it has to stand on its own after that.
Reality negates any belief that fossil fuel production will decrease in any way. Not only are the largest economically developed nations’ publics rejecting widespread substitution of renewable for fossil fuel resources, but that transition is finding little traction in the U.S. as well as spending on that is falling far short of what alarmists says is needed. And freedom’s enemies aren’t cooperating, either: as the West saddles itself with huge monetary burdens to deal with a non-crisis, Red China continues to roll out a buildup of all forms of energy to free itself from dependence on the West and its allies, but particularly of fossil fuel usage the carbon output of which has overwhelmed the reduction in the West’s output through grossly expensive renewable subsidization.
Nor is the shibboleth true that if renewable sources aren’t cheaper than fossil fuels now, they will be. Given the intermittent nature of renewable energy (a lesser degree with hydraulic, and with the only real exception the rare geothermal sources) and the prohibitively expensive nature of battery storage – at present, because of this the U.S. has enough battery capacity to store all of seven minutes worth of renewable-generated energy – fossil fuel-generating sources must be on hand and up and running in addition to wind and solar sources. Very much for that reason, natural gas and the like will continue operating for decades to come, meaning there is no decline into insignificance for Louisiana’s carbon-based energy industry, but rather ongoing expansion.
And hydrogen certainly won’t change that. Worldwide, hydrogen projects are being curtailed or abandoned because the product is enormously expensive even after years of research trying to bring that cost down. If the group can find ways to decrease costs, fine, but that needs to be market-driven without taxpayer help.
When analyzed under the harsh glare of the real world, almost nothing that justifies the grant holds up, except as a money pit that will do little to change reality or to help Louisiana in any way. Throwing more state taxpayer money at garbage-in-garbage-out things like this is a ridiculous waste, and Landry’s announcement that reality will take precedence over ideology in the state’s energy policy-making, along with other like-minded states, indicates he and his Republican allies controlling the state Legislature won’t make that mistake.
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