They're after every industry, every piece of our industrial base
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Bloomberg’s foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, has poured in tens of millions of dollars to block the construction of 120 petrochemical plants in the U.S. During a Climate Forward event hosted by The New York Times, Bloomberg said he isn’t trying to “tell” anyone what to do, but is “trying to inform” the residents of the science. (RELATED: Dem Megadonor Funds Massive Campaign To Shut Down Key American Manufacturing Sector)
… The foundation launched the “Beyond Petrochemicals: People Over Pollution” campaign in September 2022 with the goal of stopping the expansion of petrochemicals and plastic pollution. The campaign targeted three geographic areas — Louisiana, Texas and the Ohio River Valley — to create stricter rules in an effort, it said, to prevent communities from suffering health problems caused by petrochemical production.
As Bloomberg continues to pour money into the petrochemical campaign, representatives from dozens of oil, gas and chemical companies have joined the Louisiana Industry Sustainability Council and criticized Bloomberg’s involvement, the NYT reported.
Petrochemicals are used to make a variety of everyday items, including clothing, cars, electronics, fuel, fertilizer and even equipment used in clean energy sources like solar panels. The global demand for petrochemicals remains high due to limited alternatives, but if production in the U.S. halts then many will look to other countries with fewer regulations, according to the NYT.
The petrochemical industry has generated more than $580 billion in revenue annually and is expected to grow to more than $1 trillion a year over the next 10 years, the NYT reported. The demand for plastics — the most common group of petrochemical products — has doubled since 2000 and has surpassed the demand for steel, aluminum and cement, according to the International Energy Agency.
The Bloomberg campaign has already had five successes by allocating grants to local activist groups and by providing multimillion-dollar donations to nonprofit law groups to stop construction at two natural gas facilities, an ethylene plant, a methanol plant and a plastics plant, according to the NYT.
It’s not just Bloomberg, of course — all the usual suspects are involved in this attack, including the Davos crowd and the various ultra-liberal foundations. But their combined efforts will pale in comparison to what our government has planned. Here’s a NYT article published two days ago and reprinted on a non-paywall site.
(As an aside, note how many absolutely bogus claims are asserted as fact in this “news” article)
Biden to Target Industrial Pollution in a 2nd Term
If President Biden wins a second term, his climate policies would take aim at steel and cement plants, factories and oil refineries — heavily polluting industries that have never before had to rein in their heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
New controls on industrial facilities, which his advisers have begun to map out and described in recent interviews, could combine with actions taken on power plants and vehicles during his first term to help meet the president’s goal of eliminating fossil fuel pollution by 2050, analysts said.
“If people look at what this administration has done on climate and say ‘This is enough,’ this country is not going to get to our goals,” said John Larsen, a partner at Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan [sic] energy research firm whose analyses are regularly consulted by the White House.
But talking about more regulations at the start of what promises to be a bruising election cycle is perilous, strategists said. In particular, the prospect of new mandates from Washington regarding steel and cement, the bedrock materials of American construction, could sour the swing-state union workers courted by Mr. Biden.
“If you are seen as imposing debilitating regulations on heavy industry that employs large numbers of people, you’re not only going to get a backlash from manufacturing, but labor as well,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist who ran former President Barack Obama’s campaigns. “How to do that without looking like you are stabbing these industries in the back, or in the front for that matter, is a real political challenge.” [In other words, how do we hide what we’re doing, and what we are planning?]
…. Collin O’Mara, chief executive of the National Wildlife Federation, and others believe that after Americans have sweltered through a summer of the hottest temperatures in recorded history, watched the nation’s deadliest wildfire in over a century decimate a Hawaiian island, inhaled wildfire smoke from Detroit to Atlanta, and experienced hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida coast, at least some voters will be ready to embrace more climate action.
A second-term Biden climate agenda would come after the president has already delivered transformative policies to reduce greenhouse gases generated by the United States, the country that has pumped the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
Last year, Mr. Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate law, which will provide at least $370 billion over the next decade for incentives to ramp up sales of electric vehicles and expand wind, solar and other renewable energy. Under Mr. Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed regulations, expected to be finalized next year, designed to compel the phaseout of gasoline-powered cars and coal-fired power plants.
Together, those policies could help cut the nation’s emissions nearly in half over the next decade, analysts say.
And yet, it’s not enough.
The United States and nearly 200 other countries agreed in 2015 to try to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, compared with preindustrial levels. Beyond that point, scientists say, the effects of deadly heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction would become significantly harder for humanity to handle. But the planet has already warmed by an average of about 1.2 degrees Celsius and the United States and other nations are far from meeting their goals.
As emissions in the United States decline from energy and transportation, the country’s two biggest sources of greenhouse gases, industry would become the most polluting sector of the economy. That makes businesses like steel and cement manufacturing — among the most difficult to clean up — the obvious target for the next round of climate regulation. (emphasis added)
At the White House, Mr. Biden’s climate team has already envisioned a multi-step plan to cut industrial pollution if he wins re-election.
The first step would use carrots, steering incentives from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act toward nascent technologies to help factories to reduce their carbon footprint.
For example, green hydrogen, a fuel produced by using wind and solar power, is muscular enough to run a steel mill but emits only water vapor as a byproduct. And cement production involves heating limestone and releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide, but several companies have been developing cement that does not emit carbon and may even absorb it.
The second step would be to try to compel global competitors to clean up their operations through a “carbon tariff” — a fee added to imported goods like steel, cement and aluminum based on their carbon emissions.
Congress would need to approve such a tax, which has support from Democrats and some Republicans. The European Union imposed a similar carbon border tax earlier this year.
To justify a carbon tariff to the World Trade Organization, the United States would likely have to impose the same type of taxes on industrial pollution at home. While efforts to impose a carbon tax have long been seen as dead on arrival in Congress, the administration could instead use its executive authority to impose new top-down regulations on industrial pollution by using the 1970 Clean Air Act, which formed the basis for its proposed regulations on cars and power plants.
…. At the Biden campaign headquarters in Wilmington, the messaging strategy steers away from regulations and instead highlights the impacts of extreme weather and climate denial on the part of Republicans.
Mr. Biden leaned into those themes at a Sept. 10 news conference, saying, “The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20 — 10 years. That’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.”
Recent surveys show that Americans are concerned about climate change and think the government and large corporations should do more to fight it, but opinion is mixed when it comes to specific policies.
In surveys by the Pew Research Center this year, 66 percent of adults said the government should encourage wind and solar energy while just 31 percent want the country to phase out fossil fuels. Respondents were divided on the question of whether the government should encourage the use of electric vehicles, with 43 percent saying it should, 14 percent saying it should not and 43 percent saying it should neither encourage or discourage.
While 54 percent of adults polled by Pew said climate change was a major threat to the country’s well-being, respondents ranked it 17th out of 21 national issues in a January survey.
…. The Biden campaign is betting that the real-time damage from weather disasters made worse by climate change will turn out one demographic the president especially needs — young voters in high numbers.
