Red States, Defying Reality, Are Reclassifying Gas as a “Green” Fuel
In Louisiana, natural gas—a planet-heating fossil fuel—is now, by law, considered “green energy” that can compete with solar and wind projects for clean energy funding. The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry last month, comes on the heels of similar bills passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. What the bills have in common—besides an “updated definition” of a fossil fuel as a clean energy source—is language seemingly plucked straight from a right-wing think tank backed by oil and gas billionaire and activist Charles Koch.
Louisiana’s law was based on a template created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that brings legislators and corporate lobbyists together to draft bills “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” The law maintains that Louisiana, in order to minimize its reliance on “foreign adversary nations” for energy, must ensure that natural gas and nuclear power are eligible for “all state programs that fund ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives.”
Louisiana state Rep. Jacob Landry first introduced a near-identical bill to the model posted on ALEC’s website and to the other bills that have passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. (The Washington Post reported in 2023 that ALEC was involved in Ohio’s bill; ALEC denies involvement.) Landry, who represents a small district in the southern part of the state, is the recipient of significant fossil fuel-industry funding—and he co-owns two oil and gas consulting firms himself. During his campaign for the state Legislature, Landry received donations from at least 15 fossil-fuel-affiliated companies and PACs, including ExxonMobil (which has also funded ALEC) and Phillips 66. Those donations alone totaled over $20,000.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/red-states-louisiana-indiana-ohio-tennessee-reclassify-gas-green-energy-fuel-greenswashing-alec/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
It always amazes me how cheaply these traitors sell us out.
That's only the public money. Who knows how much dark money they got for it.
Reminds me of when Sam Bankman Freid (FTX Crypto guy) said he was surprised it only cost him lile $50k to buy off a politician or something. And the Oceangate CEO apparently said that if someone complains about the safety of his sub he'll just "buy a senator".
I can't remember where I was reading this but being cheap to purchase is by design.
If politicians were expensive to buy, the public outcry would be significantly higher and would also incur more scrutiny. So there is this balance of bribing a politician vs their voters being upset that their politician taking too much money. Oddly there doesn't seem to be a floor of "our politician can be bought too cheaply."
The other side of this is that until Citizens United is overturned, there is no limit to how much a company can spend on special interest groups. This is where politicians fear the most. If they don't go along with whatever issue, then they have to raise more money to run for re-election, which puts more pressure on them to accept the bribe in the first place.
TL;DR: money in politics is killing our democracy
Oh honey that was just the disclosed amount donated. Under the table I'm sure he copped another 10 million to his offshore accounts. You know, a drop in the bucket of Exxon mobil's quarterly profits.
And remember, billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by spending money that they didn’t think would result in more money coming back to them.
"Fossil fuels come from the Earth, so they're green"
Every fucking day since 2016 it get's harder and harder to come up with any remotely believable satire. There's just no way of joking about reality, because that would require actually subverting expectations or exceeding norms to absurd levels, and that's actually happening constantly in real life, making it not-fun
Came across this theory recently. Seems to provide insight to today.
http://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%20Stupidity.pdf
by their logic, cyanide is also green and harmless since it comes from plants and is renewable.
sounds like they should show us themselves that it's green
Leafy greens have cyanide and are green, so cyanide is greenn. Duh.
What are you, a stupid progressive?
Next thing you'll be telling me the Earth is round lol
#/s
(and the "/s" is necessary)
of course the earth is round.
And hollow.
and we live on the interior of its shell, with the sun in the middle. Thats why things fall down, cause the earth spins and pushes us down into the ground!
The stars and night sky are just the lights from the people on the other side!
So instead of gravity, it's centripetal force? New crazy theory just dropped.
This is old though. Hollow world has been a thing since the 70s at least.
whats old is new again, baby.
now I gotta find me some bellbottom jeans.
1870s you mean
Our adaptability is off the charts though. Like cockroach levels of crazy. Like crazier, probably, as a species, but just not as individuals.
It's just gonna be a really fucking bad time for the guys in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. I don't think it's gonna satisfy anyone's Fallout fantasies tbh.
I get why you deleted the reply. I'm equally confused.
It's not funny anymore because it's true.
Eh.
Surface and shallow water life will suffer, but there's plenty of life beyond that bigger than tardigrades that will supplant us eventually.
It’ll probably be some algae in Pripyat that’s adapted to eat radiation and this planet is actually Krypton just way before anyone starts flying with the power of the sun
All this for donations equivalent to the price of a used Toyota Camry? What a cheap suit Landry is.
Is it a bad thing that I read this as “cheap slut”?
I had to deal with this shit in my environmental studies class in uni. Apparently the forestry industry has been promoting their own brand of propaganda that says burning wood, the most greenhouse-gas-producing fuel on the planet, is environmentally friendly because it is "renewable".
Great, we'll all be dead from global warming but at least in theory the trees that burned down from the wildfires could have reabsorbed that carbon over a couple centuries.
Literally anything is sustainable by this argument, what are you even talking about?
I think that is precisely the point they were making.
No matter how I read it, it sounds like you're saying "it's sustainable under the right circumstances" and I just don't see how that's useful to even acknowledge.
Yeah, we do it in the UK too. "Biomass" is just impatient coal.
Burning wood is green iff the wood was harvested from trees planted for this purpose and all equipment used in the process from planting to harvesting to processing is entirely running on renewable energy.
Seems like it'd be easier to just use solar power and heat pumps for heating
I feel like the bigger issue is all the CO2 emitted from burning literal carbon. Using fossil fuels is just burning trees with extra steps (millennia of burial and compression).
The difference is that the carbon in the wood is in the short carbon cycle while the fossil fuels were sequestered. Carbon wise it doesn't matter if the tree burns or rots (ok rotting does keep some of it in life and soil, but burning leaves some as char).
See I think that's the forestry industry propaganda that's somehow made its way into environmentalist circles.
The differences you cite are irrelevant in the fight against global warming, where burning wood is the absolute worst. The carbon cycle doesn't matter in the context of how much CO2 are we putting in the atmosphere now, today. It takes too long to matter.
Nah, the particulates emissions and VOCs from burning wood is still very bad at scale. "Green" doesn't really mean anything, I think by definition, since Big Oil was watered it down so much. Similar to the word woke, socialism, etc.
It's at least true that biofuels made from fast-growing crops like soy or sugar cane are carbon neutral (if you assume the farm equipment also runs on biofuel and no other petroleum-derived inputs are used) because they're part of the short-term carbon cycle, right?
If so — if the cut-off for "renewable" is definitely longer than a year, definitely shorter than millions of years, and apparently also shorter than hundreds of years — then I'd like to know where scientists (not industry shills) have decided it actually lies. Would the forest industry's position be valid in the context of e.g. a slash pine tree farm?
Honestly, I'm inclined to see a very strong distinction between burning wood and burning fossil methane, as long as you're not talking about chopping down an old-growth forest or something like that. (And as long as the methane you're comparing to isn't from a short-term cycle source like landfill gas, for that matter.)
We can grow and burn the soy or the sugar cane or the trees faster than they can sequester it back into the ground.
That doesn't make any sense. Where's the carbon the next year's crop needs to grow coming from, if not from re-absorbing that released from burning the previous year's crop?
I'm not talking about trying to make it carbon-negative, just carbon-neutral. Plant->sky->plant-sky->plant->sky etc.
The soil.
They don't get all their carbon from the air.
Yes, buut forestry industries (at least in the US) are pretty sustainable, from what I've seen.
In other words, at least there's a nugget of truth under the lie.
They won't be when they all burn before they can be harvested due to global warming-induced forest fires.
So, if the fed government can sue CA, claiming that states cannot impose additional requirements on egg production because of a federal-level definition + the supremacy clause, how can these states reclassify gas as 'green energy', since the grids are inter-state electrically connected, and the Fed has to set the standard for inter-state commerce?
Or perhaps I'm just reaching to far expecting some kind of consistent application of the law. shrugs
There is no law, only Trump's will and wealthy interests
In the Un-United States of Trashcanistan? Lol.
All they know how to do is lie and be violent
You just described fascists.
Corruption this raw unfiltered and cheap makes you wonder how much time needs to get wasted until we outlaw buying politicians again.
Buying politicians is here to stay unless we want to do the violent revolution thing.
Sorry.
There is a whole group of people that really believe that the concept 'perception is reality' is a permission to make up the truth. In other words they believe if they tell a lie enough that it will become reality.
So far, they seem to be right.
Reality always comes crashing down on those who ignore it.
There will be a reckoning. But it'll be far too late and the ones primarily responsible won't be held accountable.
The reckoning will be all of us suffering together, but not equally.
In no way.
Alright, I gotta hand it to them; this is by far one of, if not THE DUMBEST THING I've ever fucking read. It takes SKILL, DEDICATION, AND HARD WORK to be THIS fucking stupid. I'm genuinely impressed at how hard they've worked to divorce themselves from reality, it's truly a marvel of cognitive restructuring. I'd say there's no way they can top this, but we all know that they'll find one in the next month, and it'll make me question my sanity once again. Congratulations.
Fascism.
But they don't like green energy. Why would they ruin as perfectly good fossil fuel that way?
And then the same people will turn around and look you dead in the eye and say "the left can't even define what a woman is"
Are they at least adding green colouring..?
Only on St Patrick's Day.
Bring back Clean Lead!
And Mercury enemas!
It’s got what plants crave
This is what you get when you give conservatives power.
Hopefully America remembers that going forward, but probably not.
Ah yes. Stupidity knows no bounds.
I remember when ohio wasn't like that. I miss the purple state I grew up in
This is what happens when you don't make words mean things. Evil people erode language until white is black is green and the empathetic are evil. And you're mired in an mud wrestling match with disingenuity, while evil's cronies shoot the audience.
But, but, it's natural!
Can someone with more knowledge than me explain why something like e85 isn't more universally accepted? I love the idea, works in all makes and years of cars (it's a myth that it doesn't work in old cars, it works fine if you upgrade the rubber), burns cleaner (maybe?), is somewhat renewable, supports farmers. However it's like 20% less efficient. But it's awesome for turbo cars and race engines too.
In my view I'd rather go down that route instead of batteries, where we are all forced to scrap millions of perfectly good cars, for battery cars that are like a throwaway phone, unrepairable and expensive, and controlled by the mfg/gov to do whatever they want.
Sure public transport is maybe better but not for large area places. We are always going to need cars.
Ethanol burns like crap, produces the same or more emissions than gasoline, and generally is a terrible fuel.
The reason we started making E85 was because there was concerns about not having enough gasoline production in the states. Then we discovered fracking, and we started to "drill baby drill".
Electric or Plug In Hybrids are a much better option. You can produce the fuel entirely with solar, wind, nuclear, etc. if you put your mind to it, they're much more efficient, and even accounting for the battery production emissions, they surpass greenhouse gas emissions within a few years of ownership.
Electric batteries are expensive and hard to fix, yes. This needs to be worked on. However, the cost of ownership is much lower, so you aren't "bleeding out" costs over time like an ICE. It's just a big "wham" for a batt replacement.
Also, an electric battery doesn't typically just go completely dead all at once. It loses 10-30% of it's capacity after the first 8-10 years. That means if you had 200 miles of range, now you have 140-180 miles of range. Unless the battery has a fault or the electrical system completely fails, this is fine. Most people drive less than 50 miles round trip for a commute. Even at double that, you still have 1/3 of your batt left.
If you're a two car family, IMHO, one fully electric and one plug-in hybrid is the way to go.
If you're a one car family who takes lots of road trips, plug-in hybrid. If not, all electric.
Also, it can be made from all-American corn, the most American of crops.
You might not be able to run cars on corn syrup, but you can run them on this.
Probably could run your diesel in vegetable oil made from corn, but yeah.....LOL
Because burning ethanol is both dirty and hot. The only reason ethanol is an option is because of corn subsidies. It is hard on the engine and not good for the environment.
Also, battery cars are not unrepairable and are only expensive because manufacturers are focusing on the high-end market. Batteries don't just die at 10 years. They are just below 80% capacity, which is not that bad. Also, batteries in cars can be replaced. It is expensive, but not that much more expensive than buying a new gas engine and replacing it in a car.
E85 is inefficient to make in the US because the climate isn't right to grow sugarcane (except in Hawaii and maybe south Florida, I guess?). I hear it works pretty well in Brazil, though.
The biofuel that makes sense for US farmers to produce is biodiesel, but unfortunately relatively few vehicles are diesel.
IMO biodiesel is the solution we should be pursuing for things like aviation, rural car owners, and as an interim fuel for long-haul trucking (until it can be abolished in favor of going back to trains) that are relatively hard to electrify.
I would say it is mostly an awareness thing. Electric vehicles are thought of as the best for the environment and people aren't really aware or don't care that they can cut their Co2 related output by about ~50% with their existing ICE vehicle. People just don't know that they can choose to use a different fuel and have environmental benefits that way because no one from the car makers to the gas pumps really advertised or educated them on it.
A few car makers did have branded Flex fuel cars but really they were only branded that way to take advantage of a poorly crafted government tax credit. Many existing cars that can run e85 have no indication that they can run it and run cleaner with it which can lead to less maintenance issues and make the mechanic's job easier.
With that said ethanol is in some respects a worse fuel, since it attracts water which doesn't play nice with burning and as you mentioned is not as dense, but it is a much better fuel from an environmental perspective. Neither of those issues are deal breaker's since you can just fill up a little more often or add a fuel additive occasionally to dehydrate the fuel.
I also think maybe the politics of farm subsidies for corn and ethanol are also somewhat of an issue, since massive government subsidies for corn growing and ethanol production are unfairly distorting the market quite a bit. But then again that's par for the course compared with oil.
I have heard that most of the producers of ethanol have been bought out and taken over by oil companies, so I wouldn't expect them to make a serious effort to promote it's benefits or compete well since the oil companies wouldn't like that.