RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/30/americans-are-collateral-damage-in-dems-insane-war-on-energy/

Maybe the Jan. 6 hearings are, as some assert, really about distracting Americans from the Democrats’ shocking policy failures. How else can one explain the refusal of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress to address our ongoing energy crisis?

And, no, it’s no exaggeration to call this a crisis. With consumer prices rising at a four-decade-high of 8.6% in the most recent year-over-year comparison, Americans are watching their standard of living fall fast.

A just-released national survey has found that 83% of U.S. households are cutting their personal spending and travel due to soaring inflation. These cutbacks are being driven almost entirely by energy costs, which have spiked nearly 35% in the past year.

The economic disaster Biden has created is ultimately a result of surging federal spending during the pandemic, foolish Fed policies that poured monetary gasoline onto a raging inflation fire, and the ongoing effort by Biden and the Democrats to punish the very companies that provide our energy, threatening them with smothering regulations, painful taxes and even public shaming.

Things have reached a fever pitch of late, with Democrats’ extremist anti-free-market green wing suggesting, as gasoline prices roar past $5 a gallon and cities across the nation face blackouts, we would all be better off if we just nationalized our oil and gas industry.

For the record, no we wouldn’t.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/06/demolishing-infinite-co2-argument-daniel-greenfield/
Bromley’s argument is important and a reminder that this is a manufactured crisis that is being used to massively enrich some investors while impoverishing millions, and that is being used as a vehicle to radically transform society, that claims to have science on its side, when it actually does not.

A crisis requires a perpetual atmosphere of fear and the insistence that things are getting worse and worse all the time.

“We have already poisoned the atmosphere, we have to repair and heal the Earth and the only way to do that is to remove carbon dioxide permanently,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm bizarrely claimed as part of Biden’s ‘Earthshot” to destroy America’s economy and turn the rest of it over to Communist China.

Bud Bromley makes an important point in his analysis of CO2 levels.

As Ron Clutz summarizes, “Those committed to blaming humans for rising atmospheric CO2 sometimes admit that emitted CO2 (from any source) only stays in the air about 5 years (20% removed each year)  being absorbed into natural sinks.  But they then save their belief by theorizing that human emissions are “pulses” of additional CO2 which persist even when particular molecules are removed, resulting in higher CO2 concentrations.  The analogy would be a traffic jam on the freeway which persists long after the blockage is removed.”

“A recent study by Bud Bromley puts the fork in this theory.  His paper is A conservative calculation of specific impulse for CO2.”

 “In the 2 years following the June 15, 1991 eruption of the Pinatubo volcano, the natural environment removed more CO2 than the entire increase in CO2 concentration due to all sources, human and natural, during the entire measured daily record of the Global Monitoring Laboratory of NOAA/Scripps Oceanographic Institute (MLO) May 17, 1974 to June 15, 1991.  Then, in the 2 years after that, that CO2 was replaced plus an additional increment of CO2,” Bromley notes.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2022/06/17/the-democrats-capricious-energy-policy-has-been-a-disaster-n1606007

Democrats have spent decades warning that the United States must stop using the most efficient and affordable energy sources or it will be consumed by heat waves, fireballs and cataclysmic weather events. Every flood, every hurricane — every natural event, really — is now blamed on climate change. We have burdened our children with an irrational dread over their future. Then again, many in The Cult of Malthus won’t even have children.

So, why, if we’re on the precipice of this apocalypse, if saving the planet trumps every other concern, is President Joe Biden begging everyone to drill? On the days Democrats aren’t blaming Vladimir Putin for rising gas prices (a cost the president not long ago argued was worth paying for “freedom”), they’re blaming oil companies for profiteering. Wednesday, as the national average hit $5.014 (nearly $2 higher than last year), Biden sent letters to refining companies threatening to once again abuse his executive powers if they do not immediately alleviate high prices — a political appeal to the imaginary “greedflation.”

Biden, who promised a 100% “clean-energy economy” with “net-zero emissions” in a couple of decades, now demands energy companies, already at utilization rates above 90%, invest tens of billions more in new drilling infrastructure, when everyone knows that tomorrow, when prices recede, Democrats are going to go right back to passing laws and regulations that undercut their business. Today, Democrats demand CEOs spend more; tomorrow, they will promise to “hold oil executives accountable” and drag them in front of congressional committees where they will be scolded by economically illiterate windbags.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/06/green-doctors-suitable-cases-for-treatment/

On climate, a lot of medicos are out there on the nuttiest end of the doom spectrum. But I had no idea their hysteria could even out-do and embarrass Greenpeace, The Guardian and Tim Flannery’s Climate Council.

Last month three anaesthetists published a peer-reviewed paper in Australasian Anaesthesia  discouraging birthing mothers from using nitrous oxide for pain relief. The trio warn, “While it may be innocuous for the pregnant woman and unborn baby, that is certainly not the case for the environment.”

About 200,000 Australian pregnant women per year choose the help of nitrous oxide.[1] The learned paper wants them to use more climate-friendly pain-killers, and/or epidurals, hypnobirthing, massage, acupuncture, and Tens — elaborate equipment called “Transcutaneous electric nerve stimulator”. They’re all costlier, but hang the expense.

I hasten to add that two of the trio of authors are females, albeit gung-ho for purported planetary healing. Dr Alice Gynther is from Western Health Melbourne and Fiona Pearson from Sunderland Royal Hospital UK. The lone male Forbes McGain of Western Health is a stalwart of Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA). I’ll chart DEA’s extremism later in the course of my obstetric odyssey.[2]

These three mothers’ helpers write

By educating medical staff and pregnant women about the carbon impact of N2O, ensuring that it is delivered and used as efficiently as possible and considering the use of more carbon-friendly alternatives, we can reduce GHG emissions from the labour ward and help to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ensuring that midwifery, obstetric and anaesthetic staff are aware of the environmental impact of N2O is crucial…

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=93183ec05c

What I call the “energy storage conundrum” is the obvious but largely unrecognized problem that electricity generated by intermittent renewables like wind and sun can’t keep an electrical grid operating without some method of storing energy to meet customer demand in times of low production. These times of low production from wind and sun occur regularly — for example, calm nights — and can persist for as long as a week or more in the case of heavily overcast and calm periods in the winter.

If the plan is to power the entire United States by wind and solar facilities, and if we assume that wind and solar facilities will be built sufficient to generate energy equal to usage over the course of a year, we then need to do a calculation of how much storage would be required to balance the times of excess production against those of insufficient production in order to get through the year without blackouts. The challenge of getting through an entire year could require far more storage than merely getting through a week-long wind/sun drought, because both wind and sun are seasonal, producing much more in some seasons than others.

Previous posts on this blog have cited to several competent calculations of the amount of storage needed for different jurisdictions to get through a full year with only wind and sun to generate the electricity. For the case of the entire United States, this post from January 2022 describes work of Ken Gregory, who calculates a storage requirement, based on the current level of electricity consumption, of approximately 250,000 GWH to get through a year. If you then assume as part of the decarbonization project the electrification of all currently non-electrified sectors of the economy (transportation, home heat, industry, agriculture, etc.), the storage requirement would approximately triple, to 750,000 GWH.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-censorship-phase-two-gina-mccarthy-social-media-biden-white-house-11655156191?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Progressives first demanded that social media platforms silence critics of climate alarmism. Now White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition.

A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by our contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership.

Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.” “Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” Ms. McCarthy said in an Axios interview last Thursday. “What the industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”

Ms. McCarthy cited the week-long power outage in Texas in February 2021. “The first thing we read in the paper was” that the blackouts occurred “because of those wind turbines,” she said. “That became the mantra.” In fact, most of the media immediately blamed climate change and fossil fuels.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/the_green_new_deal_crashes_into_the_rocks.html

What a surprise!  Carbon-based energy is much more important than we were led to believe.  A slight reduction in domestic resource development has sent seismic shock waves throughout our economy.  Bottom line: Folks are often willing to go along with calls for sacrifice… unless and until they are made to really suffer.

Michael Crichton’s next-to-last novel, State of Fear, is about politically motivated weather exaggeration.  The real meat, however, is in his epilogue.  It is there that he explains how the perceived intelligentsia is particularly susceptible to fads and hoaxes.  His prime example is Eugenics, the early 20th-century movement to prevent the further “mongrelization” of the human race and the increase in the numbers of “inferior” beings.  Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood to further this cause. Adolf Hitler went even farther in his pursuit of the same goal. These so-called smart people were either unaware of, or failed to grasp, the basic biological principle of hybrid vigor (heterosis).  It so happens that reproductive mingling between previously isolated gene pools tends to produce healthier, more vital individuals by bringing new DNA combinations into the mix. 

The obvious question is: how will this all play out?  The corrupt news media will likely go even farther in its over-the-top hysterical portrayal of ordinary weather events, trends, and hiccups.  As in Crichton’s novel, what used to be a typical seasonal phenomenon – hurricanes — are now being portrayed as cataclysmic events, even though the last 140 years have seen no significant trend up or down in frequency.  And yet, the EPA claims the opposite, even though most of its sources show stability instead.  That’s what you get when you rely on corrupt government scientists.  Meanwhile, the damage being done by suppressing the use of carbon-based energy will continue, though defections from this dogma have begun, out of obvious necessity.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/13/is-it-unethical-to-buy-a-vehicle-powered-by-a-lithium-battery/

With numerous State Governor’s having issued executive orders to phase out the purchasing of gasoline driven cars within the next decade or so, and the automobile manufacturers efforts to phase into only manufacturing EV’s here’s some food for thought about the lack of transparency about “Clean Energy Exploitations”.

The top image below is an oil well, where 100% organic material is pumped out of the ground, taking up around 500 to 1000 square feet. Then it flows in pipelines safely transporting the oil to refineries to be manufactured into usable oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products for society, and into transportation fuels needed by the world’s heavy-weight and long-range infrastructures of aviation, merchant ships, cruise ships, and militaries.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-crusade-for-green-energy-oil-venezuela-saudi-arabia-solar-panels-cost-emissions-11655038751?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Biden’s energy program is crystal clear: an all-of-government assault on the domestic fossil-fuel industry to further a green agenda. But its economic and political fallout is a muddled contrast. The Biden plan distorts or undermines so many other domestic and international priorities that it is in dire need of a midcourse correction.

The administration’s efforts, led by climate czar John Kerry and propelled by the progressive wing of Mr. Biden’s coalition, have included curtailing new leases for drilling, preventing new pipeline development, and expanding the areas off-limits for production. The Securities and Exchange Commission has discouraged new financing of fossil-fuel projects. New automobile mileage standards and increased mandates for ethanol blending in gasoline are part of the program. Pressure to phase out coal-fired electricity production and thwart new mining projects also contribute to the higher prices deemed the best tool to force the transition to a green-energy infrastructure.

To avoid the political brunt of historically high consumer energy prices, the administration apparently is considering allowing more exports of oil by Iran, as it is for Venezuela. It is also tolerating the somewhat inconsistent application of oil and gas embargoes on Russian supplies and increased purchases by China and India.

Despite the urgent global need to displace supplies of Russian oil and gas, encouraging domestic production of these fuels isn’t part of the administration’s response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. And pressure on domestic production undermines other administration initiatives, such as rebuilding the manufacturing sector, creating jobs, strengthening supply-chain resilience, and weakening dictatorial adversaries such as Iran and Venezuela.