Biden’s ‘Marxist’ Treasury nominee wants to bankrupt, ‘starve’ fossil fuel industry

By Thomas Catenacci

President Joe Biden’s nominee for a key Treasury Department role admitted that oil, natural gas and coal firms need to go bankrupt to prevent climate change, a resurfaced video showed.

“Here what I’m thinking about is primarily the coal and oil and gas industry. A lot of the smaller players in that industry are going to probably go bankrupt in short order, at least we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” Saule Omarova — who the Senate is considering to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — remarked in a clip uncovered Tuesday by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a conservative research group.

United States Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs

Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency within the Treasury Department

The comments were originally made during a March talk Omarova gave as part of the Jain Family Institute’s “Social Wealth Seminar” series.

Omarova has already been slammed by top GOP senators over her Marxist thesis paper which she has yet to share with the Banking Committee. She wrote the thesis, titled “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution,” while studying at Moscow State University in Russia decades ago.

“At the end of the day, these are people’s lives, people are going to lose their jobs because she’s going to support policies that are there to drive them out of work,” AAF Founder Thomas Jones told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.

“It’s people who are not going to be able to send their kids to college, who will not be able to make their mortgage payment because Saule Omarova has a classical Marxist view where she wants the government to run all sectors of the economy and part of that is implementing the Green New Deal,” he continued. “And you can only do that by destroying the oil and gas industry.”

In addition to her comments on bankrupting the fossil fuel industry, Omarova suggested that withdrawing investment from oil and gas firms would be beneficial, during a virtual roundtable hosted by the Jain Family Institute in May.

“So, the way we basically get rid of those carbon financiers is we starve them of their sources of capital,” she argued.

Omarova added that the government should stop “greenwashing,” or forwarding policies that only appear climate-friendly on the surface but are still harmful to the environment, and that leaders need to begin facing “difficult choices” on climate change policy.

During the same roundtable, she also criticized West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin for pushing back on left wing policies. Manchin “is supposed to be on the Democratic side,” she continued.

All 50 Republican senators are expected to vote against confirming Omarova, Axios reported Sunday. Three moderate Democrats reportedly shared their concerns with her nomination directly to the White House, multiple people familiar told Axios.

“I just don’t understand how the White House is going to go explain this to the Jon Tester’s or the Joe Manchin’s of the world, that she wants to bankrupt employers who employ a significant number of the constituents in their state,” Jones told the DCNF. “I think it’s unconscionable.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.

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Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Analogue Kid and United States Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs

2 thoughts on “Biden’s ‘Marxist’ Treasury nominee wants to bankrupt, ‘starve’ fossil fuel industry

  1. EXCERPT from:

    WIND AND SOLAR TO PROVIDE 30 PERCENT OF FUTURE NEW ENGLAND ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION
    https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/wind-and-solar-provide-50-percent-of-future-new-england

    Closing Down “Dirty” Fossil Plants

    Influential RE folks, using rules, regulations, and targets, forced utilities to become imprudent regarding reliability of production under all weather conditions.

    Accordingly, the UK, Texas and California had been closing down fossil plants, and building out wind and solar systems. Utilities took actions that greatly underestimated the risk to electricity production of too much weather-dependent wind and solar. All three had rolling blackouts, and 100% blackouts, that lasted several days, during weather events, similar to what had occurred in the past.

    1) The UK, due to long periods with minimal wind in the UK and nearby countries.
    2) Texas, due to a rare frost adversely affecting the outputs of gas plants and wind turbines
    3) California, due to high electricity demand during a US Southwest heat wave.

    The minds of RE folks, who often have no technical education, get infected by the “wishful thinking” syndrome.
    However, after some reflection of the physical realities of energy systems, that syndrome would immediately reveal themselves as irrational.

    However, because of group-think, and peer-pressure, and livelihood security, too few people dare speak out in opposition, and if they do, are squashed as heretics.

    UN Nuclear Chief Sees Atomic Energy Role in Climate Fight

    Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, sees near-zero-CO2 nuclear playing a key role regarding the world’s energy needs and CO2 reduction.
    RE folks have demonized nuclear, because of accidents and nuclear waste processing and storage.

    Japan: Japan, with minimal domestic fossil fuel sources, adopted a new energy policy on October 22, 2021, that promotes nuclear and renewables as sources of clean energy to achieve the country’s pledge of reaching “carbon neutrality” in 2050.

    Vermont: Folks with RE business interests, financed a scare-mongering campaign for several years, to close down the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, to “make room” on the grid for their own expensive, highly subsidized wind and solar electricity. See URL

    The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, after producing at about 100% of design output for 500 days, would have a shut-down for a few weeks to refuel, then would produce at 100% of design output for another 500 days.

    The plant had proven itself highly reliable for decades, with an annual capacity factor of over 90%. In fact, the entire US nuclear sector has an annual capacity factor of over 90%, which proves it is highly reliable.

    Russia: Russia plans to build a fleet of floating nuclear power plants and on-shore installations, based on Russian-made small modular reactors (SMRs). These units will be available for deployment to hard-to-reach areas of Russia’s North and Far-East, as well as for export. Such power plants could be used all over the world, instead of CO2-emitting fossil plants.

    A Russian-built floating nuclear power plant is equipped with two KLT-40S reactor systems, each with a capacity of 35 MW, similar to those used on icebreakers. It is 144 m long and 30 m wide, and has a displacement of 21,000 metric ton.

    The project was started in May 2009. Reactors were installed in 2013. Since December 2019, the ship has been anchored at a dock in the City of Pevek, in northern Siberia, to provide electricity to power the ship and the entire town.

    Low-pressure steam exiting the low-pressure end of the steam turbine is used to produce hot water for domestic hot water and for building heating. The hot water is pumped, via underground piping, to a large number of nearby buildings, i.e., a near-zero-CO2, highly efficient (about 65%), DHW/district heating system.

    World Fossil Fuels Supply was 84 Percent of World Primary Energy in 2020

    Primary energy is used for all purposes by users, such as power plants, industrial/commercial entities, processing plants, farming, buildings, transport, etc., to produce goods and services, including for electricity.

    The percentage of fossil fuels of primary energy has remained about the same for several decades, even though wind and solar percentages have increased.

    In 2020, the percentages of the primary energy mix were:

    Coal, 27%; Natural Gas, 24%; Oil, 33%, a total of 84%, plus Nuclear, 4%; Hydro, 6%; Renewables, 5%, after more than 20 years of subsidies.

    Some of the primary energy, about 10%, is used for exploration, extraction, processing and transport to provide primary energy to users. That 10% of primary energy is often called “upstream energy”.

    For example, to produce ethanol from corn requires a very significant quantity of primary energy to produce a gallon of ethanol for blending with gasoline; the combustion CO2 of ethanol is not counted, as is the CO2 of burning biomass, because they are “renewable”, per international agreement.

    China Continues High Level of Coal Burning

    Despite various RE boosters, such as financial adviser Bloomberg, bragging about China’s wind and solar efforts, the reality is, almost 80% of China’s electricity growth is from fossil fuels, almost entirely coal.

    Because China is so big, that fossil growth is worsening its own air pollution, plus the air pollution around the world; the soot falls on snow/ice-covered areas; melting of snow/ice is much quicker.

    In one year, China added 460.2 TWh of fossil electricity, which is 3.9 times the annual electricity supply of NE, or 76.7 times the annual electricity supply of Vermont.

    From third qtr. 2020, to third qtr. 2021:

    Total electricity production growth was 586.9 TWh, up 10.7%, of which 460.2 TWh, or 78.4%, was from fossil fuels, mostly coal.
    Wind growth was 89 TWh, up 28.4%, from a low base
    Solar growth was 12.6 TWh, up 10.2%, from a low base.
    Nuclear growth was 33.2 TWh, up 12.3%, from a low base

    China plans to build 200,000 MW of near-zero-CO2 nuclear plants; about 150 units, each 2,350 MW, at about 75 sites, at a cost of $440 billion, by 2035

    Amortizing the capital cost at 3.5%/y over 60 years would be ($17,556,485,920/y) / (200,000 MW x 8,766 h/y x 0.90, CF) = $0.01113/kWh, about one third the cost of EU and US nuclear plants.

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