Wyoming Governor Being Surprisingly Sane On Climate, Wingnuts Outraged

Mark Gordon pledges state will become 'carbon negative' — but no timeline on that.

A coal train passes by a wind farm in Wyoming. 60 Minutes on YouTube

Wonkette’s editrix can sometimes be very brief yet eloquent in making story assignments, like this item in Wonkette’s assignments app: “wait Wyoming wants to go carbon negative? WHAT? dok.” That linked to a xweet from CBS’s “60 Minutes” about their most recent show, which did indeed feature this story on Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, who is pursuing renewable energy in his state because it’s good for bidness, and you’d have to be a fool not to notice that.

It’s all of 13 minutes, and the worst thing you can say about the story is that in attempting to fulfill its thesis statement that a conservative politician can be serious about climate — “Mark Gordon is trying to prove that it is possible to be both red and green” — “60 Minutes” is too credulous toward claims made by advocates for continuing the use of fossil fuels. (In that, it’s a bit like the UN climate summit that just closed.)

It would have been nice to see a more skeptical look at those claims, and at least a mention that most climate scientists say that the goal should be phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible while aggressively transitioning to renewables. Happily, the piece never slides over into greenwashing, either; Gordon really does seem committed to ramping up decarbonized energy in some very big ways.

As the segment notes, Gordon’s simple acknowledgment that climate change is real and caused by humans burning fossil fuels is pretty radical talk from a popular Republican governor — in a Western state that’s America’s top coal producer — to say nothing of his repeatedly stated pledge to make Wyoming not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative. That led the Wyoming GOP to hold a “no confidence” vote against Gordon, because OMG what if that led to coal companies losing even a cent? The resolution, just to prove it was written by Republicans in 2023, said Gordon’s climate policies were part of a “Socialist agenda.”

This is where we remind you that coal is simply too expensive to compete with natural gas (methane), and that renewables are already far cheaper than coal, and in many markets cheaper than gas too. Coal is a doomed energy source, and thank goodness.

Also, state Rep. John Bear (R), chair of Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus, bloviated in an email that “A ‘carbon negative’ Wyoming means cold homes in the winter, unaffordable food prices, and 1970s-era gas lines — economy-wide.” For good measure, members of the Freedom Caucus demanded that Gordon debate them over the causes of climate change, you coward, an invitation he politely declined.

The “60 Minutes” story notes that Wyoming is the planned site of a next-generation nuclear reactor, funded in part by a $500 million investment by Bill Gates, and that its newest wind farm will be its largest, and will be able to power some two million homes — in California, because Wyoming can’t use that much energy. Most impressively, the state managed to get a new transmission line approved to get that energy to California, a notable achievement because transmission has become the biggest roadblock in getting more clean power online.

The report’s enthusiasm for Gordon’s “all of the above” energy policies leads it, as we say, to be a bit too uncritical of some of the fossil fuel advocates it covers, like Dr. Holly Krutka, head of the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming, and, surprise, a former “Vice President for coal generation and emissions technologies” for Peabody Coal, the world’s biggest private coal company. (And bad guy in the John Prine song “Paradise.”)

Krutka is a big booster for carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it underground, while using some for industrial processes. Various technologies for capturing carbon are showing promise, but have yet to be deployed at scale. (If there’s a better general overview of the complex questions around CCS than this 2021 Mother Jones piece, I haven’t found it yet).

Unfortunately, the discussion of CCS — the not-here-yet tech that could make going “carbon negative” possible, if it works, never gets very far beyond “wouldn’t it be awfully expensive?” “Not as expensive than doing nothing.”

Worse, “60 Minutes” frames it mostly as a way of continuing to use fossil fuels while offsetting their carbon emissions. The segment never mentions the other answer, that transitioning to renewables entirely would be far less expensive than the pipe dream of trying to develop enough CCS capacity to keep using coal. And in a scenario where widescale CCS somehow becomes affordable, it would be better used to reduce atmospheric carbon, the only real hope of holding total global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial norms.

The closest 60 Minutes got to really challenging the CCS fanfiction was to ask Gordon, “You know there are a lot of naysayers who say that this is a pipe dream,” to which he replies that by golly, he’s gonna try it anyway, so maybe it’s not a pipe dream if it works.

But hey, for network TV news, this wasn’t a terrible story. And it’s far better to have Republicans like Gordon who recognize the need to decarbonize through expanding renewable energy, even nukes, at least as long as we don’t let them pretend that we can CCS our way out of the crisis.

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UN Climate Summit Agrees To Transition Away From Fossil Fuels. That's A First! Yes, There's Also A 'However.'

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[60 Minutes on YouTube / 60 Minutes transcript / CBS News / Mother Jones]

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