Rumors surfaced earlier this year that our governor spoke at a private event with Bill Gates, promising him that Wyoming would not only be “carbon neutral,” but would become “carbon negative.”
At first I found these claims hard to believe as Wyoming is the largest coal producing state in America. Our state’s economy- and the nation’s energy supply- would need to be totally decimated for that to be true.
A “carbon negative” Wyoming means cold homes in the winter, unaffordable food prices, and 1970s-era gas lines– economy-wide.
Early this week, our governor made these same comments, this time to a liberal audience at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.
There he told the anti-fossil fuel academics that “we” in Wyoming are the “first” to say that “we will be carbon negative.”
Comments like this, from the governor of the second-highest energy producing state, to an anti-fossil fuel crowd at an anti-semitic institution just weeks after unprecedented attacks against our ally Israel, were embarrassing enough for national news outlets to take notice.
That’s because it is embarrassing for Wyoming’s governor to share with an adoring liberal audience his plans to totally upend Wyoming’s energy industry when he did not share these intentions with the energy producers back home when he ran for office.
It is embarrassing for the governor of Wyoming to give even an inch to the anti-fossil fuel crowd and their utopian view of green energy.
It’s embarrassing that our governor will share these plans with a Massachusetts audience, but has yet to share his green ideals with the folks in my community, Gillette, who are responsible for the lion share of Wyoming’s coal extraction.
It’s especially embarrassing, offensive even, for these comments to be made while Wyoming residents face a 30% increase in their power bills this year that are a direct result of the “carbon negative” policies touted by Governor Gordon.
These prices will soar even higher if the Bureau of Land Management gets its way in southwest Wyoming, as Biden wages his all-out war on our ability to extract and export energy from our state. Meanwhile, China builds over 200 coal fired power plants every year.
Those plants will burn Chinese high sulfur coal, but with a “carbon negative” Wyoming, China will laugh all the way to the bank while further polluting the air. So much for fighting for a cleaner climate.
Claims that our temperatures are rising at an unacceptable rate have been challenged by many in the scientific community for using bunk temperature collection methods– methods found to be unacceptable to the federal government’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for producing biased results.
Even so, why isn’t our governor telling the liberals at Harvard to put their efforts toward calling China to use our clean coal technology instead of dragging our industries down and hurting Wyoming and American citizens? It might be because Mark Gordon actually has a long, buried history of supporting anti-fossil fuel organizations.
Gordon was the treasurer for the Sierra Club in 1993. He was on the Board of Trustees for the Nature Conservancy, a purely anti-fossil fuel organization, from 2007 to 2012.
He has personally donated tens of thousands of dollars to left-wing, anti-fossil fuel causes. He hid this from the people of Wyoming, and now wants to take us down a path he never made known to us.
Governor Gordon needs to explain to the people of Wyoming why he is selling our economy and our livelihoods down the liberal river. The Wyoming Freedom Caucus has invited the Governor to give his Harvard speech to the people of coal country Gillette Wyoming, but we have yet to receive a response.
Rep. John Bear represents House District 31 in Gillette.
