Tag Archives: Fossil fuels

Is Going Green Really Worth It? By Rick Mills

Posted on January 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

Many things look good until you see how much they cost. From Rick Mills at mishtalk.com:

That’s the question Rick Mills at “Ahead Of The Herd” addresses in his most recent column.

Ahead Of the Herd

Headlong Into Electrification

This is a guest post. Everything that follows is by Rick Mills and does not necessarily reflects my views.

I find the ideas presented by Mills to be well presented and worthy of consideration.

Damn the consequences, Rushing headlong into electrification, the West is replacing one energy master with another, says Rick Mills.

Emphasis in Italics Mine, Bolding His.

The United States and its allies, such as Canada, the UK, the European Union, Australia, Japan and South Korea, face a dilemma when it comes to the global electrification of the transportation system and the switch from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy.

On the one hand, we want everything to be clean, green and non-polluting, with COP26-inspired goals of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050; and several countries aiming to close the chapter on fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, including the United States which is seeking to make half of the country’s auto fleet electric by 2030.

Yet many of these same countries are continuing to go flat-out in their production of oil and natural gas — considered a bridge fuel between fossil fuels and renewables, wrongly imo, for environmental reasons — a/ because they want to be energy-independent; and b/ because they have to. Germany is a good example of a country that tried to switch too soon to renewable energy, retiring its nuclear and coal power plants, only to find that the wind and sun didn’t produce enough electricity. Germany is now having to rely on Russian natural gas and the burning of lignite coal to keep the lights on and homes/ businesses heated throughout the winter.

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Net Zero by 2050? Here’s What It Takes To Get It, by Chris MacIntosh

Posted on December 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Net zero by 2050 isn’t going to happen. From Christ MacIntosh at internationalman.com:

Net Zero by 2050

Here is what a reasonably objective study from the Geological Survey of Finland concludes on just how much more electricity generation will be required to retire natural gas and coal…

The answer: a stink load!

But you need batteries to provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Here is an indication of just how much materials would be required to produce all these batteries:

We won’t hold these estimates against the author as there are a number of variables involved. But you get the basic point: there aren’t enough materials on the planet to achieve this dream. It’s a grand absurd delusion!

We wouldn’t worry about natural gas and coal being phased out just yet.

The Net Zero is Just Plain Virtue Signaling.

What is virtue signaling? A form of moral grandstanding in which a viewpoint or answer is calculated to “look good,” thereby making the object or speaker appear virtuous to others, rather than being chosen because it is strictly honest.

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EU Official Warns Of ‘Rolling Blackouts’ As Energy Crisis Worsens, by Tyler Durden

Posted on December 1, 2021 | 1 comment

It could be a disastrously cold winter in Europe. Too bad they’re substituting unreliable renewables for reliable fossil fuels and nuclear power. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Europe’s energy crisis is about to get a whole lot worse as the Northern Hemisphere winter is just weeks away. New risks are emerging across the continent that households and companies might have to scale back on power use or even plan for rolling blackouts.

There is no immediate fix to the energy crisis that comes from the supply side, with Russia’s Gazprom, the largest supplier of natural gas to Europe, only pumping what it has. At the same time, EU stockpiles remain well below trend.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mario Draghi said Italy’s government is ready to combat soaring energy prices for households, according to Bloomberg.

“We set aside 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in June and over 3 billion euros in September,” Draghi said. “We are now taking steps in the budget and are prepared to continue doing so, with particular attention to the most vulnerable.”

“Given the current energy supply system, a blackout cannot be ruled out” across Europe, Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said, adding that “it’s important to neutralize the impact of increased energy bills on households and companies in the fairest way possible.”

Even before the winter season arrives, cold weather is driving energy prices across Europe to record highs. The massive rally in European gas prices is not diminishing anytime soon. Gas prices at the Dutch TTF hub, the benchmark gas price for Europe, jumped to €100 per MWh, adding more pressure on households who are already dealing with rapid food and shelter inflation.

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Biden’s Baffling Oil Policy Faces Backlash From All Sides, by Irina Slav

Posted on November 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Why should Biden’s energy policies be any less baffling than any of his other policies? From Irina Slave at oilprice.com:

  • President Biden is in a tight spot when it comes to energy
  • The White House continues to face critique from both environmentalists and the oil and gas industry
  • If energy demand continues to grow at the current pace, switching from pragmatism to an all-out renewables agenda will be a huge challenge

President Joe Biden and his administration hardly planned for everything that happened this year. In fairness, no administration could have planned for it: soaring oil and gas demand, tight supply, rising prices fueling inflation that has quickly gone from nothing to worry about to the biggest worry for many.

Yet that’s not the worst of it for the Biden administration. The president came into office with the pledge to set the United States on a course towards a lower-carbon energy future. This would have been a challenging task even under the best of circumstances, the U.S. being one of the biggest polluters in the world. With the energy crunch, the task becomes almost impossible.

It is no wonder, then, that when Biden started calling on OPEC to boost crude oil production, nervous about rising gas prices at American filling stations, he instantly attracted accusations of hypocrisy. After all, he was pushing an energy transition agenda, he was clearly not in favor of boosting domestic oil production, and one of the first executive orders he signed was the one that killed the Keystone XL pipeline.

The White House’s climate envoy, John Kerry, got asked about Biden’s energy policy at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last week. How could the president urge OPEC to pump more oil while campaigning for the phase-out of fossil fuels, the media asked Kerry.

“He’s asking them to boost production in the immediate moment,” Kerry said in response, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal. “And as the transition cuts in, there won’t be that need as you deploy the solar panels, as you deploy the transmission lines, as you build out the grid.”

Kerry’s statement is in line with Biden’s own defense of his latest moves in the energy area.

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David Stockman on the GreenMageddon… Part 5

Posted on November 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

The final article of David Stockman’s series thoroughly debunking green mythology. From Stockman at internationalman.com:

Editor’s Note: Right now, the global elite and world leaders are coming together at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow to address the “problem” of climate change.

Washington, DC, insider David Stockman debunks the narrative and offers a comprehensive look at the climate change agenda, including what it means for you.

Below is the final part of David’s article series.

GreenMageddon is no hyperbole. It’s is the virtually certain outcome of attempting to purge CO2 emissions from a modern energy system and economy that literally breathes and exhales fossilized carbon.

Indeed, the very idea of converting today’s economy to an alternative energy respiratory system is so far beyond rational possibility as to defy common sense. Yet that is exactly where the COP26 powers that be and their megaphones in the MSM are leading us.

In the first place, it needs be understood that the climate change advocates essentially lie about how much “green energy” we now use and therefore the scope for energy supply system displacement of fossil fuels which would be required to get to net zero CO2 emissions by 2050.

For instance, it is commonly claimed that 12% of US primary energy consumption (2020) is accounted for by “renewables”, implying that we are off to a decent start in eliminating the fossil fuel dependency of the system.

Actually, no—not even close. That’s because “renewables” and green energy defined as solar and wind are not remotely the same thing.

According to DOE, the US consumed 11.6 quads (quadrillion BTUs) of renewables in 2020, but 7.3 quads or 63% of that was accounted for by old-style non-fossil fuels including:

  • Hydroelectric: 2.6 quads;
  • Wood: 2.5 quads;
  • Biofuels: 2.0 quads;
  • Geothermal: 0.2 quads

Of course, there is nothing wrong with these non-fossil fuels and in some cases they can be quite efficient. But they are not part of the “green solution” to displace some or all of the 73 quads of fossil fuels consumed in 2020 because most of these sources are tapped out or not desirable to expand.

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David Stockman on the GreenMageddon… Part 4

Posted on November 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

Part 4 of David Stockman’s debunking of green mythology. There’s a lot of mythology to debunk. The fifth and final installment comes to tomorrow. From Stockman at internationalman.com:

GreenMageddon
 

Editor’s Note: Right now, the global elite and world leaders are coming together at the UN Climate Change conference in Glasgow to address the “problem” of climate change.

Over the next couple of days, Washington DC insider David Stockman will debunk the narrative and offer a comprehensive look at the climate change agenda, including what it means for you.

Below is part four of David’s article series.

The chart below dramatically underscores why the CO2 witch-hunt is such a deadly threat to future prosperity and human welfare. To wit, even after decades of green energy promotion and huge subsidies from the state, renewables accounted for only 5% of primary global energy consumption in 2019 because:

  • They are still very un-competitve (high cost) relative to the installed base of fossil, nuclear and hydroelectric energy; and,
  • They do not really even account for the 5% share reflected in the chart in terms of ability to delivery work to the economy owing to intermittency of wind and solar power and the fact that by convention government scorekeepers gross-up renewables-based electrical power delivered to end-users to account for transmission and distribution (T&D) losses in the electric power grid.

By contrast, the 84% share attributed to oil, natural gas and coal is actually far larger in practical terms as we look into the future. That’s because most of the prime hydro sources have been tapped out long ago and are therefore not a meaningful source of growth. During the last 10 years, for example, US hydro-power output has only increased from 275 billion KWh to 288 billion KWh or by barely 0.24% per annum.

Likewise, nuclear power capacity outside of China stopped growing decades ago due to massive political and regulatory resistance. Germany, for example, is in the process of closing its last nuclear plants from a fleet that once generated 170,000 GW hours annually (2000) and is now generating only 75,000 GW hours, with a zero target by the year 2030. Even in the US, nuclear power remains dead in the water, with annual output rising from 754 billion KWh in 2000 to just 809 billion KWh in 2019.

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David Stockman on the GreenMageddon… Part 2

Posted on November 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Part 2 of David Stockman’s debunking of green mythology. From Stockman at internationalman.com:

GreenMageddon

Editor’s Note: Right now, the global elite and world leaders are coming together at the UN Climate Change conference in Glasgow to address the “problem” of climate change.

Over the next couple days, Washington DC insider David Stockman will debunk the narrative and offer a comprehensive look at the climate change agenda including what it means for you.

Below is part two David’s article series…

The assembled governments of the world meeting in Glasgow for COP26 are fixing to declare war on the backbone of modern economic life and the abundance and relief from human poverty and suffering with which it has gifted the world. We are referring, of course, to its agenda to essentially drive fossil fuels—which currently make up 80% of BTU consumption—from the global energy supply system over the next several decades.

All of this is being done in the name of preventing global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels.

But when it comes to the crucial matter of exactly which pre-industrial baseline level, you can see the skunk sitting on the woodpile a mile away. That’s because, as we showed in Part 1, global temperatures have been higher than the present—often by upward of 10–15 degrees Celsius—for most of the past 600 million years!

Moreover, during the more recent era since the great extinction event 66 million years ago, the decline in temperatures has been almost continuous, touching lower than current levels only during the 100,000-year glaciation cycles of the last 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene ice ages. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, the Climate Howlers have chosen to ignore 599,830,000 of those years in favor of the last 170 years (since 1850) alone.

They actually put old William Jennings Bryan of the Scopes Trial to shame. At least he thought the world was 6,000 years old!

Still, the juxtaposition of the temperature record of the last 66 million years and the sawed-off charts of the climate alarmists tells you all you need to know: to wit, they have simply banished all the “inconvenient” science from the narrative.

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COP26 & The Great Reset: The Not So Glorious Prospect of Owning Nothing and Passing a Cold, Dark Winter, by Cynthia Chung

Posted on October 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

A bunch of heads of state are meeting in Scotland to determine how to extend the misery they’ve instituted. From Cynthia Chung at strategic-culture.org:

Either you go along with the green program (that ignores nuclear as green) or you don’t get credit. Which is a policy that will, and is, quite predictably driving up energy prices.

There is a bit of panic flapping about over the number of heads of state who will not be attending, in person, the COP26 Conference that will be held starting on All Hallows’ Eve and lasting till November 12th.

The reason for the panic is because, in case you have been living in some bunker underground, we are in the midst of a very serious energy crisis along with hyperinflation, and there are growing murmurings that the very policies that COP26 wants to maximize to full throttle at this conference, are at the very source of what is causing this energy crisis.

It is no secret that there will be the very vigorous attempt to strong arm the heads of state that do end up attending this conference into signing onto these fully maximized COP26 policies which are likely to only exacerbate the problem, with the projection that citizens across Europe are expected to spend a very cold and dark winter this year….during what we are told is an ongoing pandemic….and this apparently an acceptable thing.

Goldman Sachs has recently released a report confirming these fears, and warning that there is a blackout risk for European industry this winter. This is most certainly highly likely, however, the reason for why this is likely to occur is where the truth of the matter is getting very muddied. The thing is, such outright lies are rather easily verifiable, if one takes the time to look into things past your favourite echo chamber of MSM parroting mouthpieces.

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Here’s Why the New Climate Agenda Could Lead to an Energy Crisis of Epic Proportions, by Chris MacIntosh

Posted on October 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Markets smoothly make the transition from older products to new ones, governments do not. A lot of people may freeze if its a cold winter because governments are trying to force a transition to renewable energy sources that have serious disadvantages compared to what they’re supposed to replace. From Chris MacIntosh at internationalman.com:

energy crisis

We’re going to eliminate your food now so that you can eat something else in the future that we have not yet got available.

What could possibly go wrong? But that is what is effectively happening in the energy market.

“California energy regulators approved energy efficiency standards aimed at vastly expanding the use of electric appliances for space and water heating in new homes and businesses, in a shift away from using fossil fuels to heat and cool buildings.”

Congress is pushing to end all oil drilling in most US offshore waters, thwart potential mining in the western part of the country, and invest billions of dollars in conservation. This is a $31.7 billion measure, approved 24-13 by the House Natural Resources Committee, and would also impose new fees on oil and mining companies while “funding drought relief, conservation, and other programs.”

This sounds like a boondoggle if ever there was one.

It is now set to be folded into a broader multi-trillion-dollar “social reform and climate change bill” that is taking shape in the House.

I am quite sure they’ll slip this bill in under a seven-foot stack of paper, which all these pointy shoes will sign without even reading.

And we’ll march onwards towards a truly epic energy crisis.

They are pushing this agenda in what they are calling “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to advance a bold, ambitious investment in the people of the United States.

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Nationalism to Confront Globalism in Glasgow, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on October 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

Green piety goes out the window when people are freezing. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“Extraordinary, isn’t it? I’ve been hearing all about COP,” said the queen to the duchess of Cornwall. “Still don’t know who is coming. … We only know about people who are not coming. … It’s really irritating when they talk but they don’t do.”

Queen Elizabeth II was expressing her exasperation at the possible number of no-shows at the U.K.’s coming climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Among the absentees may be Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country generates more carbon dioxide than the U.S. and EU combined.

Behind the queen’s exasperation, however, lies a political reality.

Nations like China are discovering that meeting goals for cutting carbon emissions can stall economic growth to where the regime itself is at peril.

Forced to choose between what is best for the country now and what is better for mankind in some indeterminate future, leaders are putting the needs of the nation today over the call of the world of tomorrow.

As the countdown to Glasgow proceeds, China’s energy situation is described by The New York Times:

“China’s electricity shortage is rippling across factories and industries, testing the nation’s status as the world’s capital for reliable manufacturing. The shortage prompted the authorities to announce on Wednesday a national rush to mine and burn more coal, despite their previous pledges to curb emissions that cause climate change.

“Mines that were closed without authorization have been ordered to reopen. Coal mines and coal-fired power plants that were shut for repairs are also to be reopened. Tax incentives are being drafted for coal-fired power plants. … Local governments have been warned to be more cautious about limits on energy use that had been imposed partly in response to climate change concerns.”

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