Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon has agreed to debate his critics over his plans to turn a state reliant on fossil fuels “carbon negative.”
On Friday, 30 state lawmakers joined Secretary of State Chuck Gray to call on the two-term governor to debate the merits of the “carbon negative” policy he recently promoted in a speech at Harvard University.
“It is clear that we have a warming climate,” Gordon said at an event with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. “It is clear that carbon dioxide is a major contributor to that change. There is an urgency to addressing this issue and it isn’t only going to be solved by turning off fossil fuels.”
The Wyoming governor, who presides over the nation’s leading coal producer, boasted that “we are the first state that has said we are going to be carbon negative.”
“You can’t really do that without direct air capture or somehow doing carbon capture and sequestration,” Gordon continued.
The governor’s comments drew a swift rebuke from members of the state’s Freedom Caucus in the legislature and a vote of “no confidence” from the Wyoming Republican Party.
“As far as we know, the state of Wyoming has not unilaterally decided to wholly abandon our legacy industries, and this is not a decision that the governor can make- our state’s economy is not controlled by any elected official,” read a statement from the Wyoming Freedom Caucus.
“The governor is not capable of defining what ‘carbon negative’
