RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/28/a-sneaky-way-to-end-fossil-fuel/

When candidate Joe Biden promised while on the campaign trail that “we’re going to end fossil fuel,” could anyone have guessed that emptying the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve was part of the plan? Maybe Biden had that in mind all along – enact policies that raise the price of gasoline, dip into the reserves to lower prices for consumers, then finally wring them dry for, putatively, the same reason. That’s one way to get rid of quite a lot of fossil fuel.

The federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve is “the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil,” says the Energy Department. It was created in 1975 by the Energy Conservation Act, “primarily to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products and to carry out obligations of the United States under the international energy program.” The oil is stored in underground salt caverns at four sites along the Gulf Coast. Initially planned to hold up to 1 billion barrels of petroleum, the authorized storage capacity, at 714 million barrels, is a bit short of that. Still, says the Energy Department, this “makes it a significant deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool in foreign policy.”

The SPR was never intended to be a political chip, to be tapped into by a president who wants to temporarily push down gasoline prices to gain votes.

Nor was it to be used as a means to end fossil fuels, a Democratic Party dream that would be a long national nightmare for the country.

The Biden administration has authorized two releases from the country’s petroleum reserves. Last week it announced the sale and liquidation of 1 million barrels from the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve, established after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy damaged refineries and terminals, and left “some New York gas stations without fuel for as long as 30 days.” The Energy Department says this “solicitation is strategically timed and structured to maximize its impact on gasoline prices, helping to lower prices at the pump as Americans hit the road this summer.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/17/bidens-7-5-billion-ev-charger-plan-backfires-spectacularly/

At a Rose Garden event this week, President Joe Biden bragged that “Thanks to my Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we’re building a network of 500,000 charging stations all across America.”

This is about as believable as the story of his uncle’s cannibalistic demise.

The truth is that Biden’s five-year, $7.5 billion effort to jump-start the development of electric vehicle charging stations is doing the opposite. The money has so far produced only eight new charging stations in two years. The overall growth rate in EV charging stations has slowed since he signed that bill. And earlier this month, Tesla gutted its EV charger efforts, dealing the entire scheme a huge blow.

In other words, this is shaping up to be a massive waste of taxpayer money.

The slow rollout of the Biden-approved EV stations is in part due to cumbersome rules and regulations required to access the money. That’s no surprise.

But it’s actually having a broader negative impact, slowing the growth of EV stations overall.

In the two years before Biden signed that infrastructure bill, the number of EV charging stations grew by roughly 20,000, according to data compiled by the Department of Energy. In the two years since, just 16,000 stations went online, even as EV sales accelerated. The result is that the ratio of charging stations to EVs is about half what it was in 2021. The administration says not to worry, because the buildout will soon take off. We aren’t holding our breath.

But even if the stations do start to roll out, these numbers don’t account for the large number of charging ports that aren’t working at any given time because of communication failures, power outages, software bugs, or other problems with the complicated tech.

A survey by J.D. Power found that almost 21% of drivers using public charging stations reported malfunctions. And when a Wall Street Journal reporter went around to 30 fast-charging stations in the Los Angeles area, she encountered problems at more than 40% of them.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/15/biden-to-ruin-thousands-of-miles-of-land-for-green-energy-scheme/

The Biden administration has announced plans to despoil thousands of miles of land throughout the United States with new corridors for wind and solar transmission lines. In addition to stretching across thousands of miles of land in length, the Department of Energy reports the transmission-line projects may be up to 100 miles wide. The transmission lines, which are necessary to deliver wind and solar power from rural wind and solar projects to distant population centers, will destroy an enormous amount of open spaces and wildlife habitats. The Energy Department is tapping into $4.5 billion to make the project happen.

States whose lands will be affected include Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Much of the land will be in migratory bird corridors and sensitive ecological habitats.

The scope of land development for these projects highlights some of the many environmental shortcomings of wind and solar power. Land conservation used to be a primary component of environmentalism. However, wind and solar power are the worst offenders among energy sources. Scientists at Harvard University report that converting existing electricity generation from conventional sources to wind power would require covering one-third of America’s landmass with wind turbines. That number would grow to one-half of America’s land mass under the Biden administration’s plans to electrify transportation vehicles. Necessary transmission lines, like the ones just announced by Biden’s DOE, would defile immense amounts of land in addition to the wind turbines themselves.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/14/scientist-or-activist-with-climate-its-often-hard-to-tell-the-difference/

Last week, Nature magazine allotted space to a researcher who wrote about “​​the importance of distinguishing climate science from climate activism.” While surprising, it is nonetheless encouraging. It’s well past the time the zealots in white coats were outed for who they are.

Ulf Büntgen, affiliated with multiple universities, wrote that he is “concerned by climate scientists becoming climate activists,” and is also “worried about activists who pretend to be scientists,” because doing so “can be a misleading form of instrumentalization.”

That Nature would allow something bordering on blasphemy in the climate cult to appear in its pages is rather remarkable. We thought the publication had hopelessly and forever been lost to wokeness and global warming fanaticism, that objective science had been abandoned in exchange for following the progressive agenda.

Not that anyone would consider Büntgen to be a “climate denier,” an ugly label the media, activists and politicians attach to skeptics of the global warming narrative. He references “the many threats anthropogenic global warming is likely to pose on natural and societal systems” and seems troubled about “the continuous inability of an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle global warming, despite an alarming recent rise in surface temperatures and associated hydroclimatic extremes.”

Yet he is evenhanded enough to point out a “​​quasi-religious belief” instead of an “understanding of the complex causes and consequences of climate and environmental changes undermines academic principles.” He suggests that “climate science and climate activism should be separated conceptually and practically,” and insists that “the latter should not be confused with science communication and public engagement.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-11-even-stupider-than-the-stupidest-litigation-in-the-country

I have had several posts on a collection of related cases that I have called “The Stupidest Litigations In The Country.” These are cases where climate hysterics have sued oil and gas producing companies, or the federal government, or both, seeking various extreme punishments ranging from massive damages up to and including an order to end all production of fossil fuels. The asserted grounds vary somewhat from case to case, but a central theme is a claimed constitutional right to a “clean and healthy environment.”

My last update on these cases was a post on April 9. A main subject there was the lawsuit of Juliana v. United States, which is one of the cases where the federal government is the defendant and the goal is to require it to force an end to the production of fossil fuels. The occasion for the post was that, nine years into the litigation, the federal defendant had just launched its third effort to get the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to end the case on the ground of “non-justiciability” — that is, to get the court to rule that such an issue of society-wide energy policy is not a proper subject to be decided by a court. Instead, the Department of Justice was arguing, this sort of question must be left to the political branches of government, that is, legislatures and executives. (On May 1, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit in fact ordered that the Juliana case be dismissed. We’ll see if that sticks. The plaintiffs still have a few litigation options left, including seeking “en banc” review from the full Ninth Circuit, and seeking review from the Supreme Court.)

Meanwhile, be careful what you wish for. If the decision to blame energy-producing companies for everything wrong with the environment is to be left to the political branches, what’s to stop those political branches from jumping into this act?

In the last few days, the legislature in the state of Vermont has done just that. NBC News has the story on May 7, with the headline “Vermont passes bill to charge fossil fuel companies for damage from climate change.”

It looks like little Vermont (population about 650,000) is going to step up to save the planet where all the big players like the federal government and California have failed. The idea here is that the state will force the fossil fuel producers to pay damages to compensate for any losses attributable to “climate change.” If you believe that all extreme weather is the fault of “climate change” (and it appears that they do believe that), then this could add up to some enormous sums. From NBC:

Vermont lawmakers passed a bill this week that is designed to make big fossil fuel companies pay for damage from weather disasters fueled by climate change.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/11/greta-thunberg-and-the-greatest-of-all-heresies/

The other day, as environmental hero/prophetess Greta Thunberg donned a keffiyeh and joined the pro-Hamas protests in Malmo, Sweden, social media blew up with its usual mix of angry condemnation and fierce support. “How could she?” countless posters tetchily demanded, only to be met, in response, with the equally peevish “How could you?” With a few notable exceptions, most observers missed the obvious point that of course the erstwhile environmental activist was protesting the Jewish “oppressors” and supporting their poor, Palestinian victims; of course she took to the streets with neo-Marxist identitarians to demand “justice” and an end to “colonialism;” of course she has and will continue to embrace every subversive left-wing liberationist cause. How could do otherwise? After all, these causes are all interconnected, if not wholly identical.

Interestingly, some otherwise keen political observers are only now coming to the conclusion that Marxism is not economic in nature but religious and that it does not stand on its own as a unique and discrete phenomenon but is interconnected with all of the other anti-realist, quasi-religious utopian endeavors that have accompanied its rise over the last nearly two centuries. Marxism, for all its destructive murderousness, is but one component—albeit the dominant component—of the enduring effort to update and replace the moral system that was undermined and largely abandoned in the West with the Enlightenment.

Perhaps the greatest and least appreciated analysis of what we would broadly call “the left” is that which appears in Chapter 6 (or 7, depending on the edition) of Hilaire Belloc’s 1938 classic The Great Heresies. It is “The Modern Phase.”

Belloc is careful in his presentation of this heresy to clarify that it is not merely Communism or “Bolshevism” that constitutes this perversion of Catholicism but the broader “Modern Attack.”  Nevertheless, it is clear that he has in mind what we know today as “the left.”  Moreover, it is clear that he sees this “religion of man” and its ill-defined “spiritualism” as both an obvious Catholic heresy and the greatest and deadliest of them all.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/03/heres-how-we-know-the-climate-crisis-is-not-about-the-climate/

Carbon dioxide is a pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency says. It’s been drilled into us for more than 30 years that we have to cut our CO2 emissions if we don’t want the world to end too soon. But we know that the climate scare is in no way related to protecting the sky. The data tell us so.

Over the last three calendar years, 2021, 2022, and 2023, “​​​​no country has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other major nation on a per capita basis,” the Committee to Unleash Prosperity tells us.

“Even though our GDP is about 50% higher than China’s, our per capita emissions are roughly the same,” says the group.

The data also tell us that though China’s emissions grow every year, “ours have come down every year over the last decade.”

Yet the U.S. is continually singled out as the worst greenhouse gas offender, while China – and India – escape the wrath of the klimate kooks, from Greta Thunberg to Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who actually “praised China’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/30/it-would-be-foolish-to-end-fossil-fuel/

Let’s say tomorrow, or in 10 years or even 15, that by some feat of magic that wind and solar could fully power the global economy. We could then stop extracting oil and the natural gas that’s a byproduct of drilling. Right?

No, it wouldn’t work that way – because it can’t.

Even in a world that ran entirely on renewable energy, it would still be necessary to drill for crude. Why? Because of, as Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock was told 1967’s “The Graduate,” plastics.

“There’s a great future in plastics,” Mr. McGuire, a family friend, told Ben at his college graduation party.

More than a half century later, none of us can imagine our lives without plastic and other products made from the oil refining process.

We’ve heard the argument that we should be moving toward an economy in which we drop the fuels for transportation and power plants and drill only enough to make plastics and other products of modernity. It’s made by those who believe they’re always the smartest person in the room but don’t know what they don’t know.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-magical-thinking-behind-the-energy-transition

The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time. For progressive politicians here and in Europe, the “energy transition” has achieved totemic status. But it is fundamentally a claim that depends on assessing the future of technology.

While policies can favor one class of technology over another, neither political rhetoric nor financial largesse can make the impossible possible. Start with some basics. It’s not just that currently over 80 percent of our energy needs are met directly by burning oil, natural gas, and coal—a share that has declined by only a few percentage points over the past several decades; the key fact is that 100 percent of everything in civilized society, including the favored “green energy” machines themselves, depends on using hydrocarbons somewhere in the supply chains and systems. The scale of today’s green policy interventions is unprecedented, targeting the fuels that anchor the affordability and availability of everything.

In the U.S., the energy-transition policies center around the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the most ambitious industrial legislation since World War II. Both critics and enthusiasts note that the budget figure advertised when the legislation was passed—$369 billion—isn’t close to the real cost. A comprehensive Wood MacKenzie analysis shows that the Green New Deal’s price tag is closer to $3 trillion.

And that’s not all. Through regulatory fiat, the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly announced rules effectively mandate that more than half of all cars and trucks sold must be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2032. That will demand, and soon, the complete restructuring of the $100 billion U.S. automobile industry. At the same time, an EV-dominated future will also require hundreds of billions more dollars in utility-sector spending to expand the electric distribution system to fuel EVs. Added to that, among other similar administrative diktats, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s newly released “climate” disclosure rules (temporarily on hold) are intended to induce investors to direct billions of dollars toward energy-transition technologies. This rule will entail tens of billions annually just in compliance costs, never mind the shifts to investments it will create.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/19/could-evs-compete-in-a-true-free-market/

It seems we’ve reached “peak EV,” with sales in trouble and assembly line workers losing their jobs. The hard truth is electric vehicle sales would have never reached the level they have if the government had not trespassed into private matters.

The EV troubles are all around. Sales are slowing. Unsold cars have piled up in lots. Surveys plainly indicate that fewer Americans want them. In response to dramatically slowing sales, Ford announced last fall that it was delaying $12 billion in EV investments. Which should surprise no one, considering that the company lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023.

At roughly the same time, General Motors walked away from its EV strategy. Mercedes was excited about its new EVs just a few months back but learned that customers weren’t thrilled about about them. Earlier this year Hertz decided it would dump as many as 20,000 of its EVs. Now Tesla is laying off 10% of its global workforce, meaning around 14,000 former employees will be looking for new jobs.

Rivian is also dropping one-tenth of its workforce. The company’s share price fell 15% when the announcement was made. Production at Lucid, another EV startup, is expected to be “much lower than Wall Street’s expectations,” Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, BYD, the Chinese EV maker that’s heavily subsidized by Beijing, has seen a sharp fall in sales.

For years EV sales have been propped up like a corpse by public policy. The incentives to buy what are considered zero-emission automobiles but clearly are not come at an obscenely high cost. Research by the Texas Public Policy Foundation found that “nearly $22 billion in federal and state subsidies and regulatory credits suppressed the retail price of EVs” by an average of nearly $50,000. Or put another way, “the average model year 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners.”