YOU’RE NEVER ALONE WITH A SCHIZOPHRENIC: The Biden Admin Forced Gas and Coal Plants To Embrace Carbon Capture—Then Privately Told Climate Activists To Fight It.

Last April, the Biden administration finalized environmental rules that effectively force gas and coal plants to adopt carbon capture—an expensive and controversial process in which emissions are stored underground—or risk shutting down. Months later, in November, a senior Biden EPA official told activists to “keep fighting” an ExxonMobil carbon capture project in Texas, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The comments were made by Earthea Nance, who leads the EPA’s Region 6 office, at a meeting held on Nov. 18 in Jefferson County, Texas, according to contemporaneous notes from a meeting attendee reviewed by the Free Beacon. And they came in response to environmentalists’ protests regarding ExxonMobil’s proposed Rose Carbon Capture and Storage Project, which the EPA is tasked with permitting.

Nance’s comments are significant because the Biden administration forced gas and coal plants to embrace carbon capture in order to lower their overall emissions to acceptable levels under the EPA’s strict regulations—and companies who don’t comply with the regulations face hefty fines. According to the EPA, carbon capture and storage is a “key part” of the Biden-Harris administration’s goal to reach a net-zero emissions economy by 2050 and Congress earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to the EPA and Department of Energy to support such projects.

Related: A Farewell to Bidenomics—The Era of Economic Mismanagement Ends.