RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/07/plastics-and-such-the-labor-of-the-virtuous-n1643700

EXCERPT:

Some time back, I had an interesting conversation with the friendly manager of our village garbage dump, who confided that the ordinances requiring the separation of the various kinds of refuse into separate bins and pits were nothing but bureaucratic nonsense coupled with public virtue-signalling. It made no ultimate difference to the disposal process, which I had long suspected to be the case. Though I knew that my efforts to relieve Janice of superfluous labor were likely non-starters, I had thought the words of an authority, a veritable scholar of waste management, on the question might have an effect. It was not to be. Tins, milk cartons, wine bottles and plastic containers of every conceivable stripe continued to be scrubbed to a high polish, and placed into the appropriate Tuff-Guy kitchen bags before ending their now immaculate existence in one of six different dumpsters. My argument was dismissed as typically male indifference to the niceties of household maintenance. Women always know better.

Writing in City Journal, John Tierney points out that even Greenpeace now claims that recycling is a dead end. Recycling plastic waste is environmentally harmful to reprocess, is contaminated by toxic materials, and is not economical, apart from being hopelessly impractical and labor-intensive. Sending such waste materials to landfill is both cheaper and provably less harmful to the environment, though it will inconvenience those who “perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement, a sacrament of the green religion.” Tierney does not mention the scandal of polypropylene Covid masks, which not only do not prevent virion transmission and lead to hypoxia and fungoid diseases, but will eventually find their way to marine waters and can take centuries to degrade. They cannot be recycled.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-closing-argument-higher-energy-prices-11667845918

It’s midterm campaign season and U.S. voters are clearly upset about the cost of energy. So it’s especially odd that just before Election Day President Joe Biden is emphasizing his opposition to cheap fuel. Perhaps voters can find cause for some modest hope in a CNN finding that many of Mr. Biden’s recent public statements are false.

As for the president’s promotion of energy scarcity, Haley Brown and Ben Kesslen report for the New York Post:

President Biden repeatedly said “no more drilling” and tripped onstage when he joined Gov. Kathy Hochul in Yonkers on Sunday in a last-ditch effort to help her try to stave off GOP challenger Lee Zeldin…
“No more drilling,” Biden snapped at a climate protester who was heckling him.
“There is no more drilling. I haven’t formed any new drilling,” Biden said.
A confused-sounding Biden tried to assuage the protester and return to his speech.

Whether he was confused or not, it wasn’t Mr. Biden’s only recent message of energy paucity. A Journal editorial notes:

Every so often President Biden blurts out what he really thinks, even if it’s politically or diplomatically embarrassing. He did it again Friday when he said his Administration will shut down coal plants across America…
Mr. Biden’s campaign remarks in Carlsbad, Calif., were supposed to be about the semiconductor bill and his “unity agenda.” But during a riff on Democrats’ tax and climate spending bill, he let slip that “we’re going to be shutting [coal] plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”

Those worried about the possibility of limited energy supply and therefore an expensive winter may cling to the hope that the President was speaking untruthfully, a not infrequent occurrence. Recently this column noted the valiant effort by the New York Times to frame numerous presidential falsehoods as an element of Mr. Biden’s grandfatherly charm.

Now from CNN of all places comes an acknowledgment that the President’s false claims are hardly confined to self-aggrandizing whoppers about his biography. It seems the fibs are embedded throughout his policy message as he seeks to help Democrats hold on to their congressional majorities. A CNN headline announces: “Fact check: Biden’s midterms message includes false and misleading claims.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-6-understanding-biden-administration-energy-policy

Politicians have long been known for having a loose relationship with the truth. Generally, that takes the form of exaggeration or hyperbole. But the latest craze among Democrats is just making flatly contradictory statements.

In this category, it’s hard to top the performance of Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman on Saturday night, when he uttered this immortal quote:

I run on Roe v Wade. I celebrate the demise of Roe v. Wade. That’s the choice that we have between us, in front of us.”

Video at the link if you don’t believe it. Clearly, Fetterman is not all there mentally.

But how different is that, really, from Joe Biden on energy policy? The main difference that I can find is that there does not appear to be an example where Biden has so clearly contradicted himself in consecutive sentences uttered to the same audience on the same night. But his various statements on energy policy are at least as contradictory as Fetterman’s on abortion. Consider a few from Category A and Category B.

Category A.

Biden at a February 2020 rally: “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels. . . . That’s okay. These guys are okay. They want to do the same thing I want to do. They want to phase out fossil fuels, and we’re going to phase out fossil fuels.”

Biden at a March 15, 2020 CNN debate with Bernie Sanders: “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. [It] ends.”

Biden Executive Order, January 27, 2021: “The United States and the world face a profound climate crisis. We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lancets-heat-death-deception-united-nations-cop-27-cold-study-population-growth-technology-energy-climate-11667580996?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

As the United Nations’ annual global climate summit, COP27, nears, it’s important to look with skepticism at the academic reports many news outlets cite as evidence supporting radical climate policies. Too often, they use highly skewed data that seem to have been carefully selected to support aggressive environmental regulations. One recent and much-cited Lancet report appears deliberately deceptive.

The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades. That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicized the report, tweeting a link with a grave statement of his own, “The climate crisis is killing us. #COP27 must deliver a down-payment on climate solutions that match the scale of the problem.”

But while their model for heat deaths is based on solid academic research, the report commits an amateur statistical fallacy by blaming the increase in heat deaths on “rapidly increasing temperatures.”

Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide. The average deaths per year increased 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer. Measured across the same time span the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60%, or almost as much as heat deaths. When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/where-does-an-electric-cars-electricity-come-from/

Electric cars sales are up 66% this year.

President Joe Biden promotes them, saying things like, “The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified” and, “There’s no turning back.”

To make sure we have no choice in the matter, some left-leaning states have moved to ban gas-powered cars altogether.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning them by 2035. Oregon, Massachusetts and New York copied California. Washington state’s politicians said they’d make it happen even faster, by 2030.

Thirty countries also say they’ll phase out gas-powered cars.

But this is just dumb. It will not happen. It’s magical thinking.

In my new video, I point out some “inconvenient” facts about electric cars, simple truths that politicians and green activists just don’t seem to understand.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_democrat_war_on_fossil_fuels.html

On October 19, in the heat of an election campaign, President Biden told the American people, “We need to increase oil production.”  He went on to say, “My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production.”  It was a disingenuous statement from a man whose sense of reality, fact, and fiction have become an undecipherable narrative.  Biden failed to mention the executive order he issued which stipulates, “the Secretary of the Interior shall pause new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters.”  This pause is ongoing.  Biden uses the same executive order as an instruction to the secretaries of State, Treasury, Energy, Defense, and Homeland Security, “to organize and deploy the full capacity of its agencies to combat the climate crisis.”

Millions of Americans are employed by businesses supporting the fossil-fuel industry.  Others choose to invest in fossil-fuel businesses.  All Americans rely on fossil fuels to power their businesses, transportation systems, and utilities.  Democrats will destroy these people’s jobs, capital, and imperil the U.S. economy.  The Biden administration decreed that, “we must combat the climate crisis with bold, progressive action that combines the full capacity of the Federal Government with efforts from every corner of our Nation, every level of government, and every sector of our economy.”  By executive order Biden has weaponized the federal bureaucracy to destroy the fossil-fuel industry. 

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) makes the business of refining oil difficult.  The law provides broad powers to the EPA.  It “directs the EPA Administrator to revise regulations to ensure that domestic transportation fuel sold or introduced into commerce, on an annual average basis, contains a specified volume of renewable fuel.”  The George W. Bush Administration and a bipartisan majority in Congress enacted the EISA providing authority to the EPA to dictate terms for the blending of renewable fuels in refineries.

In 2021, 13.9 billion gallons of ethanol were blended into gasoline.  Unfortunately for refiners, they were mandated by the EPA to blend 20.17 billion gallons.  Since there was a shortfall in EPA mandated ethanol consumption in 2021, refiners had to purchase Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) credits to make up the difference.  Each gallon of ethanol produced as a biofuel for blending  comes with a D6 RIN.  Each refiner/blender has a quota imposed by the EPA based on its annual mandate and the production capacity of the refinery.  If the refinery blends more than its quota, the surplus RINS may be sold as credits on the market.  If the refinery blends less than its quota, it must purchase RINS to make up the difference.  If no RIN credits are available on the market, they may be bought from ethanol producers.  In 2021 refiners had to purchase RIN credits for 6.27 billion gallons of ethanol and other biofuels they did not consume.  RIN credit costs vary as they are part of a RIN market that fluctuates.  In 2021 D6 RIN costs ranged between $.20/gallon and $1.20/gallon. A conservative estimate of RIN credit costs to refiners in 2021 is $6 billion.  This cost is passed on to consumers in the price of gasoline.  If the cost can’t be passed to the consumer, it comes out of the refiner’s margin.  

https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-policy-for-dummies-windfall-tax-oil-companies-joe-biden-11667339340

President Biden has the worst energy policy since Jimmy Carter, so it was probably inevitable that he would disinter one of Mr. Carter’s worst ideas—a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. Doesn’t he know that when you tax something, you get less of it?

Sorry, rhetorical question. “Their profits are a windfall of war—the windfall from the brutal conflict that’s ravaging Ukraine and hurting tens of millions of people around the globe,” Mr. Biden said Monday of oil companies reporting strong earnings this year.

The reality is that their profits owe more to his Administration’s war on fossil fuels than Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion. Oil prices surged at the start of the war amid uncertainty about the impact of Western sanctions on Russian supply. But prices have moderated as China and India have continued to buy Russian crude at a discount, while markets have downgraded global economic forecasts amid central-bank tightening and Chinese lockdowns.

But gasoline prices remain relatively elevated because production, especially in the U.S., isn’t keeping up with demand. Recent refinery shutdowns in the U.S. and Europe have created a supply bottleneck, boosting refiners’ normally narrow margins. It’s no small irony that government policies and investor pressure to reduce production have inflated Big Oil’s profits.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/john_murawski/

As California, New York, and other states move to phase out the sale of gasoline-powered cars, public officials routinely echo the Biden administration’s claim that electric vehicles are a “zero emissions” solution that can significantly mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Car and energy experts, however, say there is no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle: For now and the foreseeable future, the energy required to manufacture and power electric cars will leave a sizable carbon footprint. In some cases hybrids can be cleaner alternatives in states that depend on coal to generate electricity, and some suggest that it may be too rash to write off all internal combustion vehicles just yet. 

Ashley Nunes, Harvard Law researcher: Buy a Tesla? “If you care about the environment, keep the Kia,” he says.
ashley-nunes.com

“I have a friend who drives a Kia he’s had for about 15 years,” said Ashley Nunes, a research fellow at Harvard Law School. “He called me and said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of buying a Tesla. What do you think?’” 

“I said, ‘If you care about the environment, keep the Kia,’” Nunes said. 

Nunes’ advice points to the subtle complexities and numerous variables that challenge the reassuringly simple yet overstated promise of electric vehicles. Few dispute that the complete transition to EVs powered by cleaner electricity from renewable energy sources will have a less dire environmental impact than today’s gas-powered automotive fleet. But that low-carbon landscape exists on a distant horizon that’s booby-trapped with obstacles and popular misconceptions. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-doomsday-is-nigh-again-united-nations-environment-climate-change-fossil-fuels-11666989086?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Human beings, the wretches, continue to disappoint the savants at the United Nations, and never more than on climate change. The global body announced last week that despite all of the world’s climate sacrifices and trillions of dollars in renewable spending, we’re all still doomed unless mankind makes radical changes in lifestyles and standards of living.

The 2015 Paris climate agreement required countries to commit to reducing their emissions to keep the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It’s already warmed about 1.1 degrees. Not that the alms offered up by President Biden and European leaders will do much good.

According to the U.N. report, all climate policies currently in place will result in warming of 2.8 degrees. Most countries haven’t implemented policies to meet their emissions targets. But even if they did, temperatures would still rise by 2.6 degrees. And if Western countries meet their “net-zero” goals? The world would warm 1.8 degrees.

Ponder that. Even if Europe and the U.S. banish fossil fuels from the electric grid, ban gas-powered vehicles, and find a way to capture CO2 from factories, the world still wouldn’t avoid the U.N.’s climate doomsday. One reason is that China, which emits two-thirds more CO2 than Europe and the U.S. combined, has only committed to peaking its emissions by 2030.

Thus, the U.N. report says drastic changes in human behavior are needed. To take one example, about a third of emissions come from the global food system. According to the report, about seven gigatons in CO2 reductions—roughly equal to those from today’s global natural gas production—by 2050 will need to come from people eating less meat.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=7648e06456

Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall.” But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy. A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your way. In the cul-de-sac you are trapped with no evident way of getting out. You might be in there for a long time.

This is where the UK finds itself today. For well more than a decade, they have been aggressively and intentionally pursuing the green energy fantasy. The Net Zero emissions target was made mandatory by legislation in 2019. They have built hundreds of wind turbines and solar panels, while at the same time closing almost all of their coal mines and coal power plants. That has left them largely dependent on natural gas to back up the intermittent renewables. They have plenty of natural gas right under their feet in a large shale formation, but for years they dithered about allowing fracking to produce the gas, and then in 2019 they imposed a blanket moratorium on fracking. With production from their North Sea gas fields declining, they must buy gas on the European market. And although they don’t buy much gas directly from Russia, the European market has been driven to great heights by the cutoff of Russian supplies. Result: average annual residential energy bills in the UK, which were around £1000 as recently as earlier this year, went up to about £3000 this month, and have been projected to go as high as £5000 by this coming April absent some sort of government intervention.