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Al Gore Said Something Funny at COP28

The former U.S. Vice President invoked Dickens in an interview with Bloomberg.

Former Vice President Al Gore at COP28.
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Al Gore is done mincing words. In a TED Talk this past July titled “What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know,” the former U.S. Vice President and long-time climate champion took aim at the major oil and gas producers. “They have used fraud on a massive scale,” he said. “They’ve used falsehoods on an industrial scale. And they’ve used their legacy political and economic networks, lavishly funded, to capture the policymaking process in too many countries around the world.”

So you can imagine how he might feel attending COP28 in a petrostate (the United Arab Emirates), hosted by a petroexecutive (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber), surrounded by petrorepresentatives (more than 2,400 of them).

Gore expressed some of his frustration to Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi in an interview for the Zero podcast. The COP requirement that all nations reach consensus gives oil and gas-producing nations too much power, he said roughly eight minutes into the interview. Except he said it funnier than that:

“The situation that leaves our world community in is that we have to beg for permission from the petrostates. ‘Please, sir, may we protect the future of humanity?’ ‘No, sorry.’”

You can find more excerpts from the interview here or listen to the full episode below.

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Sparks

This Natural Gas Plant Is a Poster Child for America’s Grid Weirdness

Elgin Energy Center is back from the dead.

A gas plant.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

At least one natural gas plant in America’s biggest energy market that was scheduled to shut down is staying open. Elgin Energy Center, an approximately 500 megawatt plant in Illinois approximately 40 miles northwest of downtown Chicago was scheduled to shut down next June, according to filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and officials from PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest regional transmission organization, which governs the relevant portion of the U.S. grid. Elgin’s parent company “no longer intends to deactivate and retire all four units ... at the Elgin Energy Center,” according to a letter dated September 4 and posted to PJM’s website Wednesday.

The Illinois plant is something of a poster child for PJM’s past few years. In 2022, it was one of many natural gas plants to shut down during Winter Storm Elliott as the natural gas distribution seized up. Its then-parent company, Lincoln Power — owned by Cogentrix, the Carlyle Group’s vehicle for its power business — filed for bankruptcy the following year, after PJM assessed almost $40 million in penalties for failing to operate during the storm. In June, a bankruptcy court approved the acquisition of the Elgin plant, along with one other, by Middle River Power, a generation business backed by Avenue Capital, a $12 billion investment firm, in a deal that was closed in December.

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Donald Trump.
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“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”

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What Would Trump Do About Climate Change? Something About the Mayor of Moscow’s Wife.

Hunter Biden also made an appearance in Trump’s answer to the debate’s one climate question.

Donald Trump.
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Well, it happened — over an hour into the debate, but it happened: the presidential candidates were asked directly about climate change. ABC News anchor Linsey Davis put the question to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and their respective answers were both surprising and totally not.

Harris responded to the question by laying out the successes of Biden’s energy policy and in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act (though she didn’tmention it by name). “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” Harris noted.

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