In Louisiana, natural gas—a planet-heating fossil fuel—is now, by law, considered “green energy” that can compete with solar and wind projects for clean energy funding. The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry last month, comes on the heels of similar bills passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. What the bills have in common—besides an “updated definition” of a fossil fuel as a clean energy source—is language seemingly plucked straight from a right-wing think tank backed by oil and gas billionaire and activist Charles Koch.
Louisiana’s law was based on a template created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that brings legislators and corporate lobbyists together to draft bills “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” The law maintains that Louisiana, in order to minimize its reliance on “foreign adversary nations” for energy, must ensure that natural gas and nuclear power are eligible for “all state programs that fund ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives.”
Louisiana state Rep. Jacob Landry first introduced a near-identical bill to the model posted on ALEC’s website and to the other bills that have passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. (The Washington Post reported in 2023 that ALEC was involved in Ohio’s bill; ALEC denies involvement.) Landry, who represents a small district in the southern part of the state, is the recipient of significant fossil fuel-industry funding—and he co-owns two oil and gas consulting firms himself. During his campaign for the state Legislature, Landry received donations from at least 15 fossil-fuel-affiliated companies and PACs, including ExxonMobil (which has also funded ALEC) and Phillips 66. Those donations alone totaled over $20,000.
This is what happens when you don’t make words mean things. Evil people erode language until white is black is green and the empathetic are evil. And you’re mired in an mud wrestling match with disingenuity, while evil’s cronies shoot the audience.
I hate the CCP but at least they don’t deny science.
Wtf is this shit lol.
We had a
goodrun.Best of luck to whatever the tardigrades evolve into after a few billion years… if any of them survive the hellscape we’re turning our planet into.
Eh.
Surface and shallow water life will suffer, but there’s plenty of life beyond that bigger than tardigrades that will supplant us eventually.
Hopefully. But I’m not about to pretend I know where the positive feedback loops we’ve unleashed will go. Maybe the climate starts to improve a few decades after we’re all gone; maybe the greenhouse effect becomes so intense that planet earth becomes molten.
Even extremophiles have their limits - we may well have set Earth on a trajectory that ends in absolute lifelessness. Hopefully not. Probably not. But we’ve taken the keys to the planet and drove it off a cliff… whether or not anything can be made from the wreckage remains to be seen. But not by us.
It’ll probably be some algae in Pripyat that’s adapted to eat radiation and this planet is actually Krypton just way before anyone starts flying with the power of the sun
Those donations alone totaled over $20,000.
It always amazes me how cheaply these traitors sell us out.
That’s only the public money. Who knows how much dark money they got for it.
Reminds me of when Sam Bankman Freid (FTX Crypto guy) said he was surprised it only cost him lile $50k to buy off a politician or something. And the Oceangate CEO apparently said that if someone complains about the safety of his sub he’ll just “buy a senator”.
I can’t remember where I was reading this but being cheap to purchase is by design.
If politicians were expensive to buy, the public outcry would be significantly higher and would also incur more scrutiny. So there is this balance of bribing a politician vs their voters being upset that their politician taking too much money. Oddly there doesn’t seem to be a floor of “our politician can be bought too cheaply.”
The other side of this is that until Citizens United is overturned, there is no limit to how much a company can spend on special interest groups. This is where politicians fear the most. If they don’t go along with whatever issue, then they have to raise more money to run for re-election, which puts more pressure on them to accept the bribe in the first place.
TL;DR: money in politics is killing our democracy
“Fossil fuels come from the Earth, so they’re green”
Every fucking day since 2016 it get’s harder and harder to come up with any remotely believable satire. There’s just no way of joking about reality, because that would require actually subverting expectations or exceeding norms to absurd levels, and that’s actually happening constantly in real life, making it not-fun
Don’t worry, the Supreme Court just gave the okay for slashing 1400 education department jobs and reducing funding.
In no time at all, our population will be so dumb that it won’t matter what words we use to describe anything!
Came across this theory recently. Seems to provide insight to today.
http://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer - Theory of Stupidity.pdf
I’ve been reading Bonhoeffer recently. His work is very much relevant right now, and quite depressing.
by their logic, cyanide is also green and harmless since it comes from plants and is renewable.
Alright, I gotta hand it to them; this is by far one of, if not THE DUMBEST THING I’ve ever fucking read. It takes SKILL, DEDICATION, AND HARD WORK to be THIS fucking stupid. I’m genuinely impressed at how hard they’ve worked to divorce themselves from reality, it’s truly a marvel of cognitive restructuring. I’d say there’s no way they can top this, but we all know that they’ll find one in the next month, and it’ll make me question my sanity once again. Congratulations.
All this for donations equivalent to the price of a used Toyota Camry? What a cheap suit Landry is.
Is it a bad thing that I read this as “cheap slut”?
But they don’t like green energy. Why would they ruin as perfectly good fossil fuel that way?
And then the same people will turn around and look you dead in the eye and say “the left can’t even define what a woman is”
Bring back Clean Lead!
I had to deal with this shit in my environmental studies class in uni. Apparently the forestry industry has been promoting their own brand of propaganda that says burning wood, the most greenhouse-gas-producing fuel on the planet, is environmentally friendly because it is “renewable”.
Great, we’ll all be dead from global warming but at least in theory the trees that burned down from the wildfires could have reabsorbed that carbon over a couple centuries.
Yeah, we do it in the UK too. “Biomass” is just impatient coal.
So, if the fed government can sue CA, claiming that states cannot impose additional requirements on egg production because of a federal-level definition + the supremacy clause, how can these states reclassify gas as ‘green energy’, since the grids are inter-state electrically connected, and the Fed has to set the standard for inter-state commerce?
Or perhaps I’m just reaching to far expecting some kind of consistent application of the law. shrugs
Corruption this raw unfiltered and cheap makes you wonder how much time needs to get wasted until we outlaw buying politicians again.
Buying politicians is here to stay unless we want to do the violent revolution thing.
Sorry.
