Thanks are due to Rick Whitbeck for his more balanced opinion piece on Alaska LNG, essentially a rebuttal of Kay Brown’s view. To be certain, I had never thought of Brown as any sort of extremist. Yet her views on the recent Alaska LNG export decision were just that. Whitbeck properly challenged the question of whether “gap fuels” should be produced cleanly or in the worst possible way in foreign lands. Brown doesn’t seem to care, which is certainly extreme, in my opinion. The keys to our transition are “gap fuels,” as Rep. Mary Peltola called them after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to stop the Willow project.
They will be produced somewhere. So will the minerals Whitbeck mentioned, and they are the bigger problem. Did you know people with older electric vehicles cannot replace their old batteries with recycled units because we lack the capacity, and 90% of existing used batteries are moldering? Renewables aren’t renewable when they waste away in piles for no justifiable reason.
How about let’s get Earth-friendly and stop production and sales of new car batteries until the recycling backlog is resolved? Or maybe we go to the other extreme and simply ignore battery management as we did with lead-acid batteries? Seems we are in an extremely bad place, no matter how extreme your point of view. For example, why are we discussing LNG projects that aren’t going to happen financially?
— Lyle Anderson
Anchorage
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