Tag Archives: Fossil fuels

Arrogant Totalitarian Control, by Robert

Posted on March 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Biden administration intends to price fossil fuels out of the market in favor of renewables whose actual costs are higher than fossil fuels and lack fossil fuels’ benefits (e.g., they don’t stop working when the sun isn’t shining or the wind doesn’t blow). From Robert at iceagenow.com:

A war on reliable, affordable American energy – Increasing the cost of “fossil fuels” by 10 times, even 20 times (Gasoline at $30 a gallon? $60 a gallon?)

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“Within hours of taking office, President Biden resurrected the Obama era “social cost of carbon” Interagency Working Group – but with added directives that will easily let it concoct a final cost of $100, $150 or even $200 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuel operations,” writes Paul Driessen.

“The new directives include other greenhouse gases and totally subjective and malleable “considerations of environmental justice and intergenerational equity.” Climate “scientists,” modelers, economists, “ethics experts” and of course “diverse stakeholders” will participate in the process. Skeptics of dangerous manmade climate chaos can wade in as well, but their input will likely be ignored and canceled.

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Greta’s Nightmare, by Martin Armstrong

Posted on March 3, 2021 | 1 comment

So you wanna try to rid the world of fossil fuels? From Martin Armstrong at armstrongeconomics.com:

One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.
“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.
“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.
Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.
“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”
“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.
“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it”
“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.

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Fossil Fuels Aren’t Going Anywhere, by Irina Slav

Posted on February 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

The economics and limitations of renewable energy sources mean fossil fuels will be around for a long time. From Irina Slav at oilprice.com:

“There is no scenario where hydrocarbons disappear,” the chief executive of Baker Hughes, Lorenzo Simonelli, said during his keynote speech at this year’s annual meeting in the company. Like other executives from the industry, Simonelli acknowledged and welcomed the energy transition, but he noted that a 100-percent renewable energy scenario was simply not possible. There is plenty of evidence this is indeed the case, despite the hopes and ambitions of many environmental advocates.

These hopes and ambitions imagine a world where human activity is powered from electricity only, and this electricity in turn is being generated using only renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower.

Such a world, however, is unrealistic.

Take Germany, for example. The country, which is among the EU members with the most renewable energy capacity, produced very little solar energy since the start of this year. The reason: it’s winter. It is producing solid amounts of wind power, that’s for sure, but it is also generating power from the most despised fossil fuel of all: coal.

At the time of writing its carbon intensity was 264 grams of CO2 equivalent per kWh. That was comparable to the carbon intensity of another poster girl for renewables in Europe, Denmark, which is currently getting most of its energy from wind power.

So, it seems building renewable capacity in itself is not a silver bullet solution to the emissions problem. In fact, if you build it too quickly without adding substantial storage capacity, it could backfire. This was most recently evidenced by a narrow miss of a major blackout in Europe prompted by a minor problem at a Croatian substation that rippled through the continent, highlighting the importance of maintaining the grid at a constant frequency—something renewables cannot do because of their intermittent generation.

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Your life under the Green New Deal, by Robert

Posted on October 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

The Green New Dealers think it’s just a matter of passing the right laws and presto, we’ll be living in an environmental paradise. Like every other liberal pipe dream, this will end in disaster. From Robert at iceagenow.info:

Green New Dealers would bring our country its knees – except that they would get more money, power and control.
Please, please, please, you must read this.

Locking our nation’s abundant coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids in the ground would have far-reaching impacts that have (deliberately?) received little media attention.
The GND would control and pummel the jobs, lives, living standards, savings, personal choices and ecological heritage of rural, poor, minority, elderly and working classes.
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“Joe Biden doesn’t want to tell us whether he supports single-payer nationalized healthcare, packing the Supreme Court or eliminating the Senate filibuster,” writes Paul Driessen. “However, he has been open and consistent about supporting the Green New Deal, which would completely replace America’s fossil fuels with “clean, green” electricity and biofuel energy by 2035.”

“He and other GND proponents want us to believe this can be done quickly, easily, affordably, ecologically, sustainably and painlessly. My article this week presents the facts about what this “total energy and economic transformation” would actually do. It’s all pain for no gain.”

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How Renewable Energy Models Can Produce Misleading Indications, by Gail Tverberg

Posted on October 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

Renewable energy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and it probably never will be. From Gail Tverberg at ourfiniteworld.com:

The energy needs of the world’s economy seem to be easy to model. Energy consumption is measured in a variety of different ways including kilowatt hours, barrels of oil equivalent, British thermal units, kilocalories and joules. Two types of energy are equivalent if they produce the same number of units of energy, right?

For example, xkcd’s modeler Randall Munroe explains the benefit of renewable energy in the video below. He tells us that based on his model, solar, if scaled up to ridiculous levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a half-dozen of our neighbors. Wind, if scaled up to absurd levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a dozen of our neighbors.

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“Green” Socialism is Still Socialism, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on January 5, 2019 | 1 comment

Green socialism often combines bad science with bad economics. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

Upon taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives the first thing America’s Marxist Party did was to propose a Soviet-style, communistic destruction of American capitalism labeled a “Green New Deal.”  The Party chose as its spokesperson for this totalitarian venture a young woman named Sandy Ocasio who grew up in one of the wealthiest enclaves in America, Westchester County, New York, but who decided to lie about this to get into politics by calling herself “Alex from the Bronx.”  Sandy sounds like a poorly-educated-but-well-indoctrinated young communist with a ninth-grade mentality.  She proudly labels herself a “democratic socialist” but as Ludwig von Mises explained, there really is no difference between communism and socialism: they are both attacks on private property and economic freedom.  She seems clueless about just about everything she talks about in public, whether it is the Constitution, especially the economy, the structure of government, history, etc.  This is the person the American Marxist Party has chosen as its front person in its proposal to destroy American capitalism, prosperity, and the American dream forever—and to give itself totalitarian control over virtually all aspects of American life.

The first thing to understand about the proposed “Green New Deal” is that the first New Deal not only failed to end the Great Depression but made it more severe and longer-lasting.  Its only “success” was in creating endless patronage opportunities and levers of political bribery and extortion for the Democratic Party, opportunities that the Republican Party happily embraced whenever it could to expand its own power and wealth in the succeeding decades.  The proposed Green New Deal would do the same, only many orders of magnitude worse.

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Posted in Business, Cronyism, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Government, History, Politics, Science, Taxes, Technology

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Why Renewables Are Doomed and Fossil Fuels Are the Future, by James Delingpole

Posted on February 10, 2017 | Leave a comment

Fossil fuels will be with us for a long time, especially when renewables lose favor with, and subsidies from, governments. From James Delingpole at breitbart.com:

We’re on the verge of a new energy revolution. Except it’s the exact opposite of the one the “experts” at places like BP, the International Energy Agency and – ahem – the Guardian are predicting.

For years we’ve been assured by politicians, energy industry specialists and green advocates that renewables such as wind and solar are getting more and more cost-competitive while dirty fossil fuels are so discredited and wrong and evil we’ll soon have to leave them in the ground.

But to believe this you’d have to believe in a world where Donald Trump and Brexit hadn’t happened; where taxpayers were still prepared to bankroll, ad infinitum, the expensive, inefficient, environmentally-damaging produce of favoured crony-capitalists; where no one had access on the internet to articles showing how the whole climate change industry is such a scam.

That world doesn’t exist.

This is why we need to take with a massive pinch of salt, for example, the latest BP Energy Outlook 2017 which claims that renewables are set to grow and grow over the next two decades:

Renewables in power are set to be the fastest growing source of energy – at 7.6% per year to 2035, more than quadrupling over the Outlook period. Renewables account for 40% of the growth in power generation, causing their share of global power to increase from 7% in 2015 to nearly 20% by 2035.

It’s why we should laugh to scorn articles like this one in Vox boasting about how the US solar industry employs more people than the US coal industry.

To continue reading: Why Renewables Are Doomed and Fossil Fuels Are the Future

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