The head of natural gas pipeline company Kinder Morgan targeted anti-fossil fuel crusaders Tuesday, arguing environmentalists oppose natural gas despite supporting fracking in the past.
Kinder Morgan CEO Steven Kean told an audience at the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual conference that policy makers need to better explain the benefits of natural gas, which include, he said, dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
“It can’t be me. I’m a natural gas guy,” he told the audience of hundreds of energy executives and government officials. “When it comes to fighting global warming, we need more natural gas, not less,” Kean added.
“In the power sector, we are back to 1993 levels” on greenhouse gas emissions. “We’ve increased our generation by 25 percent while keeping that emissions level flat,” Kean continued.
He also suggested environmentalists should reconsider their opposition of natural gas development – after all, he said, there was a time in recent history when anti-fracking activists were proponents of natural gas.
“Maybe it’s just my perception, but earlier in my career I remember how supportive environmental groups were for natural gas,” Kean said. “That seems to have waned.”
Environmentalists like Bill McKibben, for instance, were in fact singing the praises of natural developers prior to campaigning against the hydraulic fracking industry in the early 2010s.
McKibben felt so strongly about a switch to natural gas in 2009 that he was willing to do a stint in jail in support of the cause.
He was one of several celebrity academics protesting on the front steps of the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. that year, hoping to influence policy makers to shift to natural gas.
“There are moments in a nation’s—and a planet’s—history when it may be necessary for some to break the law … We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested,” McKibben told reporters prior to the protest.
McKibben added: “[I]t would be easy enough to fix. In fact, the facility can already burn some natural gas instead, and a modest retrofit would let it convert away from coal entirely. … It would even stimulate the local economy.”
Yet today, McKibben has made hay on his protesting the natural gas industry, even blaming President Barack Obama for using natural gas production as a tool to give the economy a B12 shot in the arm.
Other environmentalist groups have followed suit.
California billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, for instance, is using his political action committee NextGen Climate to generate support for a policy forcing the U.S. to get 50 percent of its energy from wind and solar power by 2030 — compared with 10 percent last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Still, greens aren’t following in lockstep with Steyer, McKibben and their ilk.
“The science of climate change is such we have to move toward zero carbon sources of energy,” Mark Brownstein, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, told reporters Tuesday. “Is there a role for natural gas to help integrate renewables into the grid, while we wait for energy storage to scale and the transmission system to adapt? Yes.”
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