Environmentalists used to love natural gas—so long as it was expensive and used in part as a backstop for intermittent wind and solar power. Now that it is suddenly cheap and practical for baseload generation, environmentalists are changing their minds. Politico’s Bob King noted this about-face in a mid-February story, “Greens Sour on Natural Gas.” The Environmental Defense Fund, ProPublica, and the Sierra Club are suddenly voicing opposition to the expansion of natural gas use. King quoted Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope calling for phasing out natural gas use in the United States entirely by the year 2050, and Sierra’s deputy executive director Bruce Hamilton said, “We want people to know that natural gas is not a clean fuel.” As recently as a December appearance with me on CNBC, Hamilton endorsed using “clean” natural gas “for a very long time.” You might call this the theorem of environmental duplicity: namely, there is no form of “clean” or “alternative” energy that environmentalists won’t decide to oppose if it becomes practical and affordable on a large scale.
It's almost like they want high energy prices to justify government intrusion into our lives (to enforce Green ideas about how we should live).
