God Will Help Us Fix Climate Change, so ‘Drill Baby Drill,’ West Virginia Governor Says

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice stated that God will “give us time” to repair local weather change—“if” it exists, he emphasised—if the U.S. acts now to extend fossil gas manufacturing to answer the burgeoning vitality disaster because of the invasion of Ukraine. I can’t imagine I simply typed that sentence, however right here we’re!

The remarks got here throughout a public briefing Justice gave on Monday that was supposedly a covid-19 replace for West Virginia. After spending about 10 minutes speaking concerning the pandemic, Justice took a pointy pivot and began discussing the conflict in Ukraine and its implications for vitality within the U.S.—or, quite, what Justice thinks is occurring right here.

“Our coal miners, our gas workers, our oil workers, they get up every morning, they get their dinner buckets, and they go get dirty, don’t they,” he stated. “Oftentimes they’re doing stuff that is extremely risky.” After describing the current dying of a West Virginia miner, Justice lauded how coal miners “saved us in World War II and everything by giving us the coal that was mandatory to make steel, and absolutely preserved this country.” He then goes on accountable the Biden administration for “trying to extinguish them…Now all of a sudden we’re on the brink of World War III, maybe, and now who do they call? …They call screaming, ‘drill, baby, drill!’”

I’ll simply allow you to learn a (barely condensed) transcript of the place this goes subsequent, as a result of it’s actually a journey:

Absolutely right this moment in some ways, West Virginia, they might name on West Virginia, and West Virginia could also be very effectively the catalyst to cease quite a lot of the carnage, to bolster in some ways the truth that this nation ought to be completely unbiased. I completely stand rock strong in favor of all the choice energies. But I imagine it’s completely frivolous to assume that right this moment we are able to do on this nation or this world with out fossil fuels, and if we imagine that we’re going to have simply what the hand has dealt to us proper now. We’re going to have chaos, we’re going to have actual issues. … I imagine, and my perception as robust is it could be, or might be, I imagine with all in me, that we’ll have time and [God] will give us time as we go ahead. If there may be such a factor, and I underline if, if there may be such a factor as local weather change, I imagine that he’ll give us time and the good folks will repair it. But right this moment, right this moment vitality is getting used as a weapon. This nation, palms down, must be completely vitality unbiased. It is a crying, pitiful disgrace to see what has occurred underneath the Biden administration in making an attempt to utterly cripple us. We have develop into weak, have we not?”

Whew!

Other than giving God some severe credit score for his or her potential to un-fuck-up our shit—and coining the alarming phrase “on the brink of World War III, maybe”— Justice is performing some severe metaphorical lifting for the oil and gasoline business. The concept that fossil fuels within the U.S. must be completely unregulated and promoted with the intention to save us from an vitality disaster is one thing that the business has been screaming from the rooftops. But the truth, as most vitality consultants would level out, is far more difficult, particularly for the reason that U.S., as a world exporter of fossil fuels, has mainly tied itself to the volatility of the worldwide market. Even although the Biden administration has put quite a lot of phrases behind its local weather objectives, it has additionally given a hell of quite a lot of free rein to grease and gasoline drillers—to not point out that coal took a steep decline even underneath President Trump, who gave as many freebies to the dying business as he may.

There’s a specific irony to Justice, of all folks, portray miners as victims of some exterior mistreatment and speaking about how harmful their work is. Justice’s household owns dozens of coal mines throughout 5 Appalachian states, and these mines have some severe points. In 2014, two years earlier than Justice was elected governor, NPR reported that his mines owed round $2 million in excellent safety-related fines and had miner injury rates more than twice the national average. In 2019, NPR reported that those fines had ballooned to $4.3 million, accounting for nearly 10% of all excellent debt from coal mines in the complete nation.

“[Gov. Justice] and his family has simply chosen to disregard, flagrantly violate, continually violate and increasingly violate the rules of mine safety and the penalties of mine safety,” a former federal mine security official instructed NPR. (Justice’s household agreed to pay the outstanding fines in 2020.)

Justice’s mines even have loads of environmental violations: In November, the state of Kentucky fined Justice and his son virtually $3 million for not cleansing up some coal mines within the jap a part of the state. With mates like these, God and the “smart people” higher get to work quickly.