Kansas Energy Council Scrubs Global Warming From Website

onNov 27, 2007 @ 11:23 PST

Things are getting a little silly in Kansas after a recent decision by the state government to not allow a proposed expansion of a coal-fired electrical generation plant to go ahead.

First we had a “concerned citizens ” group pop up calling themselves “Kansans for Affordable Energy.” The KAE ran ads claiming that by not allowing the expanded coal facility it would somehow open the doors to foreign natural gas exporting countries like Venezuala, Iran and Russia.

The ad featured photos of Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladamir Putin with the caption “Why are these men smiling.”

Now that’s a cute piece of fear mongering. But it wasn’t KAE who picked up the bill for the ads, it was coal giant Peabody Energy and the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation (who lost the expansion bid).

They also forgot to mention that three-quarters of Kansas natural gas is imported from Canada.

Things got even sillier this week when the Kansas Energy Council, a government appointed group charged with developing a long-term energy plan for the State, made a decision to remove a paper from their website outlining the science of global warming and possible solutions.

Here’ the offending paper (pdf). Not much to it really, other than a few statements that would probably irk the energy-sector heavy members of the Kansas Energy Council.

Things like:

“To put it into a global perspective, if Kansas were an independent nation, it would rank as the 44th largest emitter of carbon into the atmosphere, just after Iraq.”

And,

“The newest information evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change leads the Panel to conclude with very high confidence that climate change is caused by human activities.”

I guess its much easier to ignore such realities than it is to deal with them.

By Kevin Grandia

Kevin is a contributor and strategic adviser to DeSmog. He runs the digital marketing agency Spake Media House. Named a “Green Hero” by Rolling Stone Magazine and one of the “Top 50 Tweeters” on climate change and environment issues, Kevin has appeared in major news media outlets around the world for his work on digital campaigning. Kevin has been involved in the public policy arena in both the United States and Canada for more than a decade. For five years he was the managing editor of DeSmogBlog.com. In this role, Kevin’s research into the “climate denial industry” and the right-wing think tank networks was featured in news media articles around the world. He is most well known for his ground-breaking research into David and Charles Koch’s massive financial investments in the Republican and tea party networks. Kevin is the first person to be designated a “Certified Expert” on the political and community organizing platform NationBuilder. Prior to DeSmog, Kevin worked in various political and government roles. He was Senior Advisor to the Minister of State for Multiculturalism and a Special Assistant to the Minister of State for Asia Pacific, Foreign Affairs for the Government of Canada. Kevin also worked in various roles in the British Columbia provincial government in the Office of the Premier and the Ministry of Health. In 2008 Kevin co-founded a groundbreaking new online election tool called Vote for Environment which was later nominated for a World Summit Award in recognition of the world’s best e-Content and innovative ICT applications. Kevin moved to Washington, DC in 2010 where he worked for two years as the Director of Online Strategy for Greenpeace USA and has since returned to his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.