Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico led a student protest calling for the city of Austin to divest from a coal-fired power plant [pictured above], which remains the city’s single largest power plant and provides it with 10 percent of its electricity, previously unreported video footage unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon shows. [some emphasis, links added]
Talarico was one of three speakers at the October 2009 “Rise Up Against Coal” press conference, where he called on city leaders to phase out the Fayette Coal Power project in favor of solar energy.
Talarico, who introduced himself as “Jimmy Talarico” and a “University of Texas at Austin student government representative,” touted a resolution he helped pass that endorses a plan for the city to divest from the plant.
“It was a great success for environmentalists on campus … and also students who want to pay less with their energy bills and who want a sustainable economy and a Green Collar Economy when they come out of college,” he said, according to video footage posted at the time by an account affiliated with the left-wing environmental group Public Citizen.
Following the press conference, Talarico and the other students said they would enter Austin City Hall and lobby leaders directly to implement a “clean energy portfolio,” a plan that would lead to the shutdown of fossil fuels.
Talarico’s remark about a “Green Collar Economy” appeared to reference a 2008 book of the same name by Democratic political operative Van Jones. It was one of the first public pushes for a “Green New Deal,” with Jones calling for “transitioning from a pollution-based economy to a green economy.”
Former vice president Al Gore—a top proponent of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D., N.Y.) more recent Green New Deal proposal, which experts say would cost $93 trillion—praised the book for illustrating “the best solutions for the survivability of our planet.”
News of Talarico’s anti-oil student organizing comes as the Democrat runs for Senate as a supporter of Texas’s enormous oil and gas industry. On his website’s “Energy & Environment” section, Talarico touts the state’s status as “the energy leader of the world” and says he wants to “add to Texas’ hundreds of thousands of oil, gas, wind, and solar jobs.”
Last month, meanwhile, he released his “New American Dream” economic agenda, which calls to “partner” with the oil and gas industry as part of an “all-of-the-above” energy approach.
Those positions stand in stark contrast to Talarico’s work at the University of Texas at Austin and in the State Legislature, where he represents a portion of Austin.
Talarico, for example, introduced a March 2021 bill to “ensure every public school student in Texas has a strong science-based understanding of human-caused climate change and its consequences,” something he said would “inspire a new generation of climate activists.”
That same month, he introduced the Texas Climate Action Act, which would have required the state to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2030 and by 90 percent by 2050, figures that are nearly identical to Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
A year and a half earlier, in September 2019, Talarico marched in a “Youth Climate Strike” in which Texas students walked out of class to march to the Texas State Capitol as part of far-left Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays For Future” movement, the Free Beacon reported.
“So proud to stand with our young people during their Youth Climate Strike at the Texas Capitol,” Talarico wrote at the time in [Twitter and Facebook posts] that showed him posing with two young girls. “Students around the world are walking out of school to save our planet. It’s time for the grown-ups to follow their lead. #ClimateStrike.”
In a statement to the Free Beacon, Talarico campaign spokesman J.T. Ennis dismissed the video as a 17-year-old distraction. He did not address Talarico’s views on coal power.
Top: The coal-fired Fayette Power Project in Texas. Wikimedia Commons.
Read rest at Free Beacon
Just another “climate change” idiot.
Within 10 years, most people will begin to see the absolute folly of wind and solar, both of which will become environmental disasters.
It’s happening slowly in the U.S., thanks in large part to the election of Donald Trump. If Kamala were elected, she planned to double down on Biden’s “green” wankerisms. No such thing. You go green, you get a “dead” economy.