COP28 seeks to stop U.S. natural gas production to lower world CO2 emissions while new EIA study shows natural gas reduced U.S. CO2 emissions

Carbon dioxide reduction has never been the goal of the COP meetings; reducing U.S. geopolitical power is the actual goal.

Lisa Badum, a member of the German Parliament and chair of its Subcommittee on International Climate and Energy Policy, left, and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who authored the Green New Deal, coauthored the COP28 petition to shut down U.S. natural gas production. (Getty Images)

The 28th meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties, better known as COP28, is held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In addition to the anti-fossil fuel climate conference being held in the country that is the seventh largest producer of crude oil in the world, attendance is twice that of previous meetings, with the bulk of additional attendees being people who are friendly to fossil fuels. Climate activists are openly saying these people should not be there, and their very presence threatens their goals of doing away with fossil fuels.

Highlighting this fact, Bloomberg Green observed that many of the thousands of climate activists at COP28 are irked by the fact that their least favorite person in the world, Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, is not only in attendance but is a keynote speaker. Woods is particularly disliked because of ExxonMobil’s decades-long “climate denialism and their unrepentant championing of the economic benefits of fossil fuels.”

Before the opening of the meeting, U.N. delegates were circulating a petition to shut down U.S. natural gas production. As reported by Fox News, Senator Ed Markey (D Mass) is among the lead architects of the effort, in addition to Lisa Badum, a German Parliament member leading her nation’s delegation at the summit, and Canadian Sen. Rosa Galvez. Markey, Badum, and Galvez sent the letter to other U.S. lawmakers and global representatives ahead of the COP28 climate conference, which kicks off Thursday in Dubai. The letter stated:

At COP26, the United States — along with 39 governments and institutions — signed the Glasgow Statement, pledging to prioritize the clean energy transition and end new direct public support for the international fossil fuel sector by 2022. This is the very least we can do, considering that even existing production capacities already exceed the limits set by the Paris Agreement.

Despite this, the United States is hurtling towards a massively harmful expansion of Liquefied Natural Gas infrastructure, it continues. Regrettably, there exist similar plans in many other countries — including in Germany, the U.S., and Canada.

The letter says that additional LNG capacity is “not needed.”

A few days before Markey coauthored the letter to stop U.S. natural gas production and LNG exports, the U.S. EIA report, “U.S. Energy-Related CO2 Emissions, 2022,” said that U.S. CO2 emissions have continued to decline since 2006 in large part due to the replacement of coal-fired electricity with natural gas-generated electricity:

We forecast the U.S. energy sector to emit about 4,790 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in 2023, a 3% decrease from 2022. Much of this decline results from lower electricity generation from coal-fired power plants due to higher generation from renewable sources such as solar power. We expect this trend to continue into 2024, with CO₂ emissions declining 1% relative to 2023.

The EIA data show that natural gas has been the driving force in reducing the U.S. power sector’s carbon dioxide emissions, making almost double the impact compared to renewable power generation.

My Take: The true goal of all COP meetings and the entire carbon reduction movement has never been about lowering CO2 emissions. Otherwise, the COP meetings would have focused on transitioning to nuclear power. The real purpose of the U.N.’s efforts is to redistribute wealth from Western countries, especially the United States. The COP meetings are anti-American in general and anti-American natural gas and LNG because American dominance in natural gas and LNG exemplifies America’s global geopolitical power.

The energy policy that should be pursued is natural gas to nuclear, which Robert Bryce popularized as N2N.

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