Derec
Contributor
Cornyn is a puppet of the oil and gas industry. He is one of the earliest climate change deniers.
That may be true, but it does not mean Deb Haaland's extremism in the opposite direction is any better.
I do not think anybody thinks that.Despite what many people think, the Department of the Interior is not supposed to be servant of any natural resource extracting industry.
And just because DOI is "not supposed to be servant of any natural resource extracting industry", does not mean it is supposed to be ideologically opposed to them either.
This polarization of US politics is a real problem, and it includes energy policy.
On one hand you have climate change deniers, on the other hand you have those who want to ban oil and gas yesterday. Neither are good positions and switching between the two extremes when party controlling the presidency changes hands is giving the whole country whiplash. It didn't use to be quite this bad on energy policy. When Obama took power in 2008 it was still possible for him to advocate a sensible "all of the above" approach to energy policy. But even by the time his presidency ended, the Democratic Party moved so far to the left that this was no longer a feasible position for Obama to maintain, unfortunately.
Contrary to what many on here think, I do believe climate is a serious and important issue. But it is also a very complex one, and not amenable to simplistic, ideological solutions.
Electric cars have a lot of potential, but they are still only about 2% of new car and light truck sales, and vehicles these days easily last 15-20 years based on miles driven. That means that we will need oil for the foreseeable future and that means we will also need oil pipelines like DAPL and KXL.
Same with natural gas. Many US households use natural gas for heat, but the largest users are actually electricity generation and industrial use, often as synthesis reagent.
It will take decades to eliminate the need for natural gas, and in the meantime, we need fracking wells and gas pipelines.
Unfortunately, the alleged environmentalist activists in the Democratic Party and on the Left in general have a major hate boner for oil and gas, and especially for pipelines for some reason. To the extent that they oppose, and frequently protest (often violently) against any oil or gas pipeline.
If they really wanted to make the biggest impact on climate and the environment in general, supposed environmental activists would be focusing on coal, not oil and gas.
Coal is far more carbon intensive than natural gas and it is also much dirtier, emitting toxic substances like sulfur, mercury and uranium. Yes, a coal-fired power plant releases much more radioactivity than a nuclear power plant.
Also, coal is mostly used for power generation, and its use has been going down in favor of natural gas for years now, thanks to plentiful fracked gas.
Thus, efforts to derail US gas production by attacking fracking and pipelines is counterproductive environmentally.
So why are environmentalist activists relatively silent on coal? I think it is because they are really watermelon environmentalists - green on the outside, but red on the inside!
Oil and gas have a mythology (not unnervingly so) associated with rugged capitalism, and in the US particularly with Texas/Western oil and gas entrepreneurs and captains of industry.
On the other hand, coal mining is a big component of the mythology of the actually existing socialist countries in Eastern Europe as well as for socialists in places like UK - look no further than the politics surrounding the UK coal miner strikes, including the last big one in 1984-85.
That's a big reason why for example socialist Jeremy was in favor of reopening closed coal mines while opposing fracking for natural gas.
And don't get me started on the whole issue of irrational and ideologically driven opposition to nuclear power!