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GOP Members Tout Fossil Fuels In Egypt Climate Talks
- By The Financial District
- Nov 14, 2022
- 2 min read
Members of a Republican Congressional delegation took the stage at this year’s UN climate talks to tout the benefits of fossil fuels — a bold move at a meeting in Egypt that’s all about curbing carbon emissions for the good of humanity, Frank Jordans reported for the Associated Press (AP).
Photo Insert: Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, said it would be wrong to demonize fossil fuels.
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that heat-trapping gases such as those released from the combustion of coal, oil and gas are pushing up global temperatures, thereby causing sea-level rise, extreme weather and species extinctions.
Yet, Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, said it would be wrong to demonize fossil fuels. “I think we need to decide as a world: Do we hate greenhouse gas emissions or do we hate fossil fuels,” said Curtis, who is known for founding the Conservative Climate Caucus. “It’s not the same thing.”
Like Curtis, Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., suggested fossil fuels can be a form of clean energy, if only the carbon released by extracting and burning them could be captured and stored safely.
“One of the things we ought to be doing is not attacking oil and gas, it’s to be attacking the emissions associated with it, to where it can be indistinguishable from other renewable energy technologies,” he told an audience in the US pavilion at the climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh.
This, Graves argued, would make fossil fuels “an arrow in the quiver as we try to address our objectives of energy affordability, reliability, cleanliness, exportability and security of supply chain.”
House Republicans’ views are likely to become more important given the expected turnover of the House to Republican control.
The comments echo industry efforts in recent years to separate carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in public perception. Andrea Dutton, a professor of geoscience and MacArthur Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that’s not possible.
