Commentary
One of the worst movies ever made–apart from the bottomless pit of direct-to-video fare—has got to be 2003’s “The Core,” starring Hilary Swank and the insufferable Stanley Tucci. Swiping the Booby Prize long held by 1977’s “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” this “save the planet from itself” journey to the soft Tootsie Roll center of the earth was
voted by scientists as having disregarded science more than any other major film.
But the story of building a vessel to burrow down below to fix a global magnetic field gone awry stumbled into getting one thing right: drilling is the answer.
“No new fossil fuel production starting today” is required to save the earth, hard-left “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Detroit Democrat, ludicrously
claimed to banking executives during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee on Sept. 22, before asking them if they were following a policy “against funding new oil and gas products.” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon responded, “Absolutely not. That would be the road to hell for America.”
To which Tlaib sneered back, “Yeah, that’s fine,” and ranted that everyone who gets a student loan taxpayer bailout should take their money out of Chase, telling Dimon, “You obviously don’t care about working-class people, frontline communities like ours that are facing huge amounts of high rates of asthma, respiratory issues,” and cancer. According to Tlaib, anything other than no more oil and gas “defies all logic and scientific evidence at our disposal.” And if banks don’t stop financing fossil fuels, “then regulators, including the Federal Reserve and Congress, must step in and make them.”
Back home last week, Tlaib’s constituents in Detroit attended an urgent
town hall meeting. Not to address cancer or asthma or going green ASAP, but in regard to more immediate causes of death and distress to the community. “I observed two young men with Uzis. One killed the other one,” Detroiter Glenda McGadney related. “And this was two Sundays ago.” She called it something “I thought I would never see in my entire life. I’m traumatized.”
The 221 killings in the Motor City so far this year, with a little more than three months left to go, are actually looked at by local officials as
good news—because there were 309 homicides last year and 323 in 2020. Still, Tlaib apparently thinks having the Federal Reserve become the green police will make up for
de-funding the real police and leaving innocent black and brown people unprotected from violent criminals.
As an enemy of the working class, it’s odd the way Dimon’s bank, the largest in America, with branches in all 48 contiguous states, provides more than 250,000 working men and women with livelihoods. According to Indeed.com, Chase
pays an average of $59,000 a year to banking associates, about $10,000 above the national average. And it boasts a $30 billion “racial equity commitment” to “close the racial wealth gap.” That sounds like a page torn from the Squad’s “woke” manifesto, and yet all those billions doesn’t buy Dimon any relief from being pilloried as a robber baron cannibalizing the proletariat. Neither did Chase’s
$335 million bond issue—the bank’s fourth since 2012—which finances cancer research at the City of Hope Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, long ranked as one of the top cancer research hospitals in the world.
Dimon obviously really does care about the broader American society very much, and has proved it with deeds and dough, not the declamations and diatribes of Washington’s left. Now, Dimon is
warning that “the world needs 100 million barrels effectively of oil and gas every day. And we need it for 10 years,” that it will require “proper investing in the oil and gas complex,” which “is good for reducing CO2,” as proved by high oil and gas prices recently spurring much of the world to
turn back to dirtier coal. Dimon pointed out that from China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam to fully industrialized nations like France, Germany, and the Netherlands, CO2 emissions are worsening.
Carbon Capture Is an Energy Policy
Advances in carbon capture and storage technology, paired with fracking, point the way to sensible energy policies for the coming decades, as opposed to the fanaticism of Tlaib and the White House. Even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018
conceded that carbon capture must be an element in global energy policies going forward. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency,
calls carbon capture “a necessary bridge between the reality of today’s energy system and the increasingly urgent need to reduce emissions.”
It is a procedure that utilizes biomass to absorb CO2 as it grows, injecting it into deep geological formations. The first large-scale direct air-capture plant may open in the United States next year, capturing up to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide annually for use in enhanced oil recovery.
Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, one of the pioneers of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is committing $250 million toward a $4.5 billion carbon-capture project to utilize a 2,000-mile pipeline that will dispose of 8 million of tons of CO2 by injecting it a mile underground in North Dakota.
“Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing gave us the American energy renaissance,” Hamm declared of the work done over the last decade or two. “We used ingenuity to get the hydrocarbons out of the earth. There’s no reason why we can’t use the same skills to put the carbon back in.”
Far from Tlaib’s claims, the world won’t reach any green future destination without being fueled by lots of “black gold.”
