Sierra Club's Carl Pope Pushing Natural Gas
Thanks Rod Adams! It’s good to see the national director of the Sierra Club exhibiting rank hypocrisy by pushing the same natural-gas that killed six workers and destroyed a $1B facility only four weeks ago. The same national director of the Sierra Club who tells us in a recent Huffington Post article that nuclear power is too dangerous because there are a few picocuries of tritium in a well that no one drinks out of, even though your average “exit sign” in a building has about a billion times more tritium in it.
QUESTIONER: We also heard an emphasis on natural gas that I don’t recall from last year.
CARL POPE: The natural gas play has been moving. America has, actually, huge, recently-developed reserves of natural gas. It’s a much cleaner fuel than coal–less than 50% as much carbon. We can deploy it quickly, and as Boone Pickens likes to say, if we use it in our trucks and our cars, it saves us from importing foreign oil.
50% less carbon than coal, Carl? How about 100% less carbon than coal? Deployed quickly? I think they tried that in Connecticut and six of them ended up dead.
Makes you wonder why Carl Pope is fighting nuclear and pushing lethal natural gas?
Hmmm, let me try to help you out on that one:
$4.3M from the Pew (Sun Oil dynasty) Trust.
$3M from the Joyce Foundation – A Coal Industry supported outfit that heavily promotes Clean Coal technology – just like all the Coal Lobby groups are doing. Like that mountain top removal do you, Carl?
$2.3M from the Energy Foundation – another Oil Family funded operation.
$1.3M from the Turner Foundation – known as Ted “the Natural Gas King” Turner.
$710K from the Rockefeller Brothers fund – another Oiligarchy family.
relevant article: "The Wrong Kind of Green" by JOHANN HARIhttp://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hariWhy did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?[…]
I work with black shales doing research on the thermodiagenesis of organic matter to natural gas with chemical geothermometers. I can tell you while cracking this stuff to get clay fractions it is almost impossible and really does require alot of water and some carcinogenic chemicals that contain PAH's and bromine derivatives. There may be alot of natural gas in black shale basins, coal-bed methane and tight sandstone formations and basin centered systems, but it requires immense infrastructure to set it up. Nuclear reactors as they are built up today also require a runup of tens of billions $USD in infrastructure for mining, manufacturing components, etc. But the tradeoff is that we can use this natural gas for production of plastics and other goods that make modern life possible. Uranium and thorium really do not have a better purpose than to be "burned" in nuclear reactors. The real value of a barrel of oil when producing plastics is around $400, for a mmbtu of natural gas when producing polyurethane, cellophane, acetone it is around $25 as opposed to the current market price at less than $5.The value of nuclear power at even 1 cent per kwh of electricity in a closed nuclear cycle and only assuming 30% thermal efficiency makes the value of thorium or uranium $70,000/kg. That is literally twice the price of platinum.That is only for electrical power- with advanced reactors we will have 50-60% thermal efficiency, waste heat desalination hooked up to district heating systems, and hydrogen production using S-I thermochemical separation with high temperature waste heat. There is no way that natural gas can close the energy gap, unless of course we can extract methane hydrates effectively (which we will in due time), but these same "environmentalists" are opposed to such an advance.
As Rod Adams has famously quipped: "Perhaps you do have a cleaner fuel, (than coal) but can you burn it inside a sealed submarine?"BINGO!
The greens are sell outs. The same Carl Pope was also advising the residents of New Your and adjacent states to stop complaining about the pollution introduced to their water by natural gas extraction. He said that they have not paid their share of the price for clean energy… or some such oxymoron. My jaw dropped, a green boss telling us to put up with dangerous pollution? These guys are so sleek, they can make mafia bosses turn green with envy. I liked the numbers you provided, they explained a lot.