Trump administration Secretary of Energy Rick Perry Credit: sportsblogs.star-telegram.com
WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s keynote speech at the World Gas Conference in June opened with a marching band and ended with an exhibition by the Harlem Globetrotters. It was a spectacle befitting the industry symposium, which kicked off with a reception featuring a violinist perched on a pedestal in a 20-foot-long dress and trumpeters bearing ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips banners on their instruments.
“We’re sharing our energy bounty with the world,” Perry gushed from a stage at the Washington Convention Center. “I wish I could tell you the entire world is on board. There is still this stubborn opposition to natural gas and other fossil fuels.”
Long undervalued, natural gas was once burned off indiscriminately as an unwanted byproduct of oil drilling. But the fuel’s fortunes have changed. Cooled to minus 162 degrees Celsius, natural gas condenses into a liquid marketed as a clean alternative to coal. In just three years, the U.S. has emerged as a top producer of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, selling shiploads of the commodity to countries such as China, which are seeking low-carbon […]
While living in Europe quite some time ago, a book written by an American became a massive hit across Europe Unable to find a willing publisher in the US, the rough title was America is burning. As I recall, the two parts I remember best were the one that laid out a theory about Kennedy’s assassination by a group of conspirators comprised of various high ranking military and heads of international corporations and men of great wealth. The second part that held my interest was about fossil fuel companies and their private armies which were deployed in foreign counties where oil was being extracted at the cost of human lives. Over the years, I’ve watched the ongoing toll fossil fuels have taken that has culminated in the greatest ‘largesse’ of all.. Climate Change that’s killing our planet and its inhabitants. Climate Change, which I was paid to research in the 70s for the first time. A task that was, to say the least, terrorizing. I ‘joked’ to the individual whose report I was laying the groundwork, that I should have asked for hazardous duty pay. That what I’d learned would haunt me for years to come.. Which, indeed it has. At one time, when integrity was still of some importance, there was an international high court – The Hague – which is where Nazis were tried after WWII. And if The Hague still had the gravitas it did then, I would recommend that the heads of fossil fuel companies be tried there and sentenced to life terms in service of finding ways to reverse the damage. To shut down the use of fossil fuels would require a massive public vow to cut back on the use of fossil fuels with the ultimate goal to cease all demands. But I think of WWII, a period of terrible darkness, fear, loss and despair. Of the astonishing alliances that together brought a fearsome enemy, the Nazis to their knees. But for whatever reasons, the vast populace of this once magnificent planet continues to place their necks under the guillotine in the belief that there is no hope. We’re all doomed. Which doesn’t set well with me. To wait for the blade to fall is a denial of joy, laughter, love; of courage, boldness, creativity and hope. It is self-destructive way of saying we are powerless. And I cannot help but think that those brave souls who went before us would be shocked and deeply saddened.