Billions of dollars continue to pour into nationwide campaigns to eliminate energy from fossil fuels.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he will drop another $500 million into an ongoing campaign to completely eliminate all coal-fired electrical generation and half of all natural gas-fired electrical generation in the U.S. by 2030.
This will bring Bloomberg’s total spending on his campaign to end coal and natural gas to $1 billion. In 2019, he pledged $500 million to crush all coal plants. So far, the campaign has been instrumental in closing 60% of them.
Bloomberg’s first donation, according to the Sierra Club, also was aimed at stopping American consumers from using natural gas as a transition fuel.
The United States now gets 20% of its electricity from coal, and nearly 40% more from natural gas.
If the billionaire gets his way, all American consumers will be forced to rely exclusively on intermittent wind and solar sources for all their energy needs.
According to Forbes, Bloomberg’s net worth is $94.5 billion, making him the seventh-richest person in the world.
Economic Shut Down
Jeff Wasserburger, who served in the Wyoming House of Representatives and Senate from 1995 to 2023, told Cowboy State Daily that Bloomberg’s campaign will destroy the U.S. economy.
“If you want to essentially shut down almost any industry nationwide, a great way to do that is to just cut off all the electricity produced by coal,” Wasserburger said.
While wind and solar energy are billed as the cheapest form of energy, the claim is based on a metric that the U.S. Energy Information Administration has called “misleading,” because it only looks at the value of the electricity produced over the lifetime of a wind and solar farm.
It doesn’t consider all the costs associated with placing wind and solar farms on the grid and making the electrical supply constant, which is necessary for any energy source to work properly.
This is why energy costs continue to climb the more wind and solar are added to the grid. Fossil fuels remain in high demand, and restrictions make it difficult for coal, oil and gas companies to produce enough supply to keep costs low.
Wasserburger said that an increasingly unstable electricity grid is going to become an even larger problem as the demand for electricity rises, with the electrification of cars and appliances.
“I don’t believe people are going to shut off their air conditioning. I don’t believe people are going to stop plugging in their cellphones,” he said.
Outspending
The global campaign to eliminate fossil fuels receives billions of dollars in funding from a wide range of sources, and the total of all those donations greatly rivals the amount spent by fossil fuel industry groups.
Here in Wyoming, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming and Wyoming Mining Association brought in $1.7 million in 2019, whereas the Wyoming Outdoor Council and Powder River Basin Resource Council brought in $3.1 million the same year.
Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, told Cowboy State Daily he wasn’t surprised by Bloomberg’s latest donation to his anti-fossil fuel campaign.
“The wealthy environmental elitists of this country outspend us tremendously,” Deti said.
Deti said that Bloomberg, like many of those who fund these campaigns, won’t have to worry about paying their electricity bills.
Besides massive spending on advocacy organizations, billions from anti-fossil fuel groups are going toward major media organizations.
The Rockefeller Foundation, which has nearly $4.5 billion in gross receipts and $7.5 billion assets, is providing funding to The Associated Press, the Guardian, and Covering Climate Now, an organization partnered with more than 500 media to promote anti-fossil fuel narratives across the globe.
