“Big polluters must be rubbing their hands in glee that carbon market mechanisms, which further dilute the already weak and inadequate Paris emissions targets, are back on the agenda,” said Dipti Bhatnagar, Climate Justice and Energy Program coordinator for Friends of the Earth International ….

The groups condemned [carbon offsets] as “commodification of the Earth” that enables “climate-destroying business as usual under the pretense of climate action.”

A carbon tax? Emissions trading? Carbon offsets?

Forget all that: climate activists wants something much more comprehensive.

Think global statism from source to sink, even if that means the carbon police ringing your doorbell to make sure you are not using natural gas or firing up the outdoor grill. Remember what Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, opined back in 2015?…

“A recent Politico article on the bad messaging of Democrats on climate and energy, Democrats Bite on Burgers and Straws–and Republicans Feast, is fair warning. It is high time the hometown paper of the center of the oil and gas industry stop the blatant bias against the very energies that consumers naturally prefer.”

There is no representation for conservatives or libertarians on the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle. So when it comes to energy, fossil fuels (because of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions) are seen as the enemy of the climate rather than a greening agent; protection against heat, cold, and precipitation; and a first responder after weather extremes.

Mineral energies in capitalist settings have much to do with the precipitous drop of climate-related deaths in the last century–and are essential to human betterment going forward.…

“Wind turbines’ poor capacity to provide electricity was exposed last month, when [my home town in southern India] Tamil Nadu faced an unforeseen energy shortage due to a dwindling coal supply. The state had unscheduled power cuts for the first time since 2015.”

“Energy from wind turbines dropped 37 percent this year because of heavy monsoon rains. But heavy monsoon rains are not abnormal! They are blamed simply because they interrupt the turbines. Before the era of wind turbines, the rains were just as severe, but they didn’t interrupt power generation.”

India is coal country with a 76 percent market share for the indigenous fuel. But authorities are pushing uneconomic renewables as part of a green central planning plan.

This tension between economic energy and politically correct energy came into focus with a recent electricity panic in my city located in southern India.…

“Imagining a low-carbon world, then, means reevaluating our conception of freedom itself.”

– Audrea Lim, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” Dissent, Spring 2018.

Audrea Lim in a recent issue of Dissent (a quarterly magazine for Left Progressivism) penned an essay, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” The journalist/editor at Verso Books offers a rather bizarre view of the energy world. She writes in part:

Why is it so much easier, as the saying goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? …. The most straightforward answer to the question, perhaps, lies in the sticky substance that fuels capitalism as we know it, and is daily bringing us closer to the apocalypse of the [doomsday] preppers’ imagination: oil.

“The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use,” writes the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty in a seminal essay collected in Energy Humanities.…