In this newsletter:
1) UK companies collapse at fastest rate since financial crisis as energy bills soar
The Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2022
2) Rolls-Royce boss Warren East: Net Zero is a pain
The Times, 7 October 2022
3) Facing risk of blackouts this winter, the UK will drill for more oil
CNN Business, 7 October 2022
4) Net Zero energy: UK winter blackouts warning if energy imports dry up
The Times, 7 October 2022
5) Marc A. Thiessen: With so much untapped U.S. oil, why does Biden beg dictators to add production?
The Washington Post, 7 October 2022
The Washington Post, 7 October 2022
6) Biden, Venezuela and the Oil Dictators
The Wall Street Journal, 7 October 2022
The Wall Street Journal, 7 October 2022
7) BlackRock faces more ESG fallout as Louisiana pulls $794 million
Bloomberg, 5 October 2022
8) US coal prices top $200 as world’s energy desperation intensifies ahead of winterBloomberg, 5 October 2022
The Epoch Times, 5 October 2022
9) Germany finally says the F-Word: ‘Fracking’
The Wall Street Journal, 6 October 2022
The Wall Street Journal, 6 October 2022
10) Andrew Urban: It’s the politics, stupid
Spectator Australia, 6 October 2022
Spectator Australia, 6 October 2022
Full details:
1) UK companies collapse at fastest rate since financial crisis as energy bills soar
The Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2022
UK companies are collapsing at the fastest rate since the height of the global financial crisis as surging energy bills drive thousands of firms out of business.
There were more than 5,600 insolvencies in England and Wales in the second quarter – the highest level since 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The sharp rise in energy bills was cited as the biggest problem for businesses, while difficulties paying debt, rising costs of raw materials and supply chain disruptions also took their toll.
While the squeeze on finances has hit all businesses, construction, retail and accommodation and food services suffered the highest number of insolvencies in the first half of the year.
The Government has outlined support to help companies and public sector bodies struggling with their energy bills. However, the scheme for businesses will run for only six months, unlike the two-year programme aimed at households.
Insolvencies slumped in 2020 as the Government rolled out support to protect businesses during the pandemic. But the number of failures has since spiked sharply as companies grapple with fresh challenges even after lockdowns ended.
The madness of the Biden Administration’s energy policy has been horrifying to watch, like a car crash except all Americans are passengers. The latest bizarre twist is that the White House may ease sanctions on Venezuela and its dictator Nicolás Maduro in an effort to increase the supply of oil on the global market.
The Journal reports that the U.S. is “preparing to scale down sanctions” on Venezuela’s nasty regime so Chevron Corp. can resume pumping oil. The move is contingent on the Maduro government entering good-faith talks with the political opposition, which is an oxymoron.
“There are no plans to change our sanctions policy without constructive steps from the Maduro regime,” Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, told the Journal. But the regime has never been willing to concede anything to the opposition. The likeliest result would be that Mr. Maduro opens talks, the U.S. eases sanctions (after the November election), and the talks go nowhere.
The Venezuela gambit is part of the Biden Administration’s rolling dictator tour to encourage more oil supply anywhere except in America. President Biden tried courting the Saudis, but this week they and OPEC+ chose to reduce production by two million barrels of oil a day. The Iran nuclear talks are supposed to liberate Tehran’s oil production, but the mullahs won’t take yes for an answer and are holding out for more U.S. concessions.
That leaves Venezuela, whose production and sales have fallen off a cliff thanks to its own socialist mismanagement and the sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration. Lifting sanctions now on the mere hope of political concessions in Caracas would reward the regime for impoverishing its people and creating a refugee crisis in the region. It isn’t clear how much or how fast Venezuelan oil, which is a hard-to-refine kind of heavy oil, could reach the global market. But Mr. Biden is desperate to reduce American gasoline prices.
Meanwhile, the Administration is hinting that it could allow the Justice Department to file an antitrust suit against the OPEC+ cartel for fixing prices. This might be politically satisfying, but the Saudis and its Gulf allies could easily retaliate by cutting production further and hurting U.S. consumers.
In response to this week’s OPEC decision, some politicians are also threatening to withdraw U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Reps. Tom Malinowski (D., N.J.), Sean Casten (D., Ill.) and Susan Wild (D., Pa.) declared that “it is time for the United States to resume acting like the superpower in our relationship with our client states in the Gulf.” If you want to drive the Saudis further into the arms of Russia and the Chinese, keep this up, guys.
All of this international drama, and growing American economic vulnerability, could have been avoided if the Biden Administration hadn’t made a policy of waging war on the domestic U.S. oil-and-gas industry. The White House blames the industry for high gas prices while it does everything it can to make drilling more difficult and financially risky.
As an act of strategic self-sabotage, this is matched only by Germany’s determination over two decades to make itself vulnerable to Russian natural gas.
Amid a war in Europe, a global energy crisis, and a risk of a global recession, a serious U.S. Administration would do everything in its power to encourage more domestic energy production. This Administration would rather make America more dependent on the “constructive steps” of dictators.
8) US coal prices top $200 as world’s energy desperation intensifies ahead of winter
The Epoch Times, 5 October 2022
U.S. coal prices soared past $200 per ton last week, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Spot Central Appalachia coal prices climbed to $204.95 per ton for the week ended Sept. 30, up more than 3 percent from the previous week. That’s the highest price since 2005.
Newcastle coal futures, the benchmark for Asia, touched a record high of nearly $450 per ton, before easing to around $400.
Domestic coal production has been holding steady. EIA numbers show that U.S. coal output totaled 12.1 million short tons, up 1.9 percent year over year. In addition, year-to-date coal production totaled nearly 438 million short tons, up close to 4 percent from the same time a year ago. (A short ton, or just ton in the United States, equals 2,000 pounds. A long ton, used in the UK, is 2,240 pounds.)
In 2021, coal represented more than one-fifth (22 percent) of U.S. electricity generation, behind natural gas (38.3 percent). By comparison, wind and solar accounted for just 9.2 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively, last year.
But the fuel source has been surging on strengthening global demand, particularly as the Northern Hemisphere braces for cold and snowy weather.
Global Energy Demand Crunch
S&P Global data note that total spot transaction volumes rose 22 percent in the third quarter, up from the April–June period.
In July, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected in a market update that worldwide coal consumption would return to all-time highs in 2022.
“Global coal demand is being propped up this year by rising natural gas prices, which have intensified gas-to-coal switching in many countries, as well as economic growth in India. Those factors are being partly offset by slowing economic growth in China and by the inability of some major coal producers to ramp up production,” the IEA stated in its report.
Indeed, Chinese coal imports slumped about 15 percent year over year in August. Beijing’s zero-COVID strategy has resulted in lockdowns in multiple pockets of the country, which has weakened economic growth and applied pressure on demand for a broad array of commodities, from soybeans to crude oil to coal.
However, that’s been offset by robust European demand. In the first half of the year, coal was Germany’s largest source of energy production, representing almost 30 percent, according to confirmed data from the Institute for Energy Research (IER). That’s a result of the European Union’s (EU) ban on Russian coal imports, forcing eurozone members to search for alternative sources. Moscow had provided approximately 70 percent of the EU’s thermal coal prior to the restrictions. In the first seven months of 2022, Australia exported 2.9 million metric tons of coal to Europe, up 73 percent from all of 2021.
European seaborne thermal coal demand is also forecast to increase 14 percent, or 12 million metric tons, in 2022.
“With many European nations increasing thermal coal use, an additional nine gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity has been made available to meet energy demands and make up for the decline in Russian energy imports. Coal prices are surging, but they are still more affordable than record-high gas prices,” Adam Woods, Wood Mackenzie’s senior research analyst, wrote in a recent research note.
It isn’t only European households that have been struggling. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association warned that more than 20 million U.S. households are behind on their utility bills. The organization estimates that the average cost of home heating during the winter season will rise more than 17 percent, to $1,202, the highest in a decade (pdf).
Electricity costs surged close to 16 percent on an annualized basis in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The situation could intensify, as coal-producing firms have been running at near maximum capacity without the infrastructure to boost output. Moreover, supply-chain snafus could prevent companies from even expanding production capabilities, experts say.
“The growing energy crisis created originally by the underperformance of renewable energy was exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, resulting in Russia’s closure of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline due to sanctions imposed by the West,” the IER noted last week. “But the high prices are caused by energy shortages, and Europe is looking for enough energy supplies to get through the winter.”
Full story
The Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2022
UK companies are collapsing at the fastest rate since the height of the global financial crisis as surging energy bills drive thousands of firms out of business.
There were more than 5,600 insolvencies in England and Wales in the second quarter – the highest level since 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The sharp rise in energy bills was cited as the biggest problem for businesses, while difficulties paying debt, rising costs of raw materials and supply chain disruptions also took their toll.
While the squeeze on finances has hit all businesses, construction, retail and accommodation and food services suffered the highest number of insolvencies in the first half of the year.
The Government has outlined support to help companies and public sector bodies struggling with their energy bills. However, the scheme for businesses will run for only six months, unlike the two-year programme aimed at households.
Insolvencies slumped in 2020 as the Government rolled out support to protect businesses during the pandemic. But the number of failures has since spiked sharply as companies grapple with fresh challenges even after lockdowns ended.
2) Rolls-Royce boss Warren East: Net Zero is a pain
The Times, 7 October 2022
The Times, 7 October 2022
The boss of Rolls-Royce has said he regretted signing up to a government-backed net zero initiative ahead of the Cop26 climate summit.
Warren East, the company’s chief executive, has tried to position the aircraft engine maker as a green leader by making engines ready for more sustainable fuels and successfully lobbying ministers to back his plans to build a number of small nuclear power stations.
But this week he told an audience of bankers, investors and business executives in London that he regretted making the company join the Race to Zero pledge because of the “burden of bureaucracy” it involved.
The campaign is a United Nations-organised initiative of thousands of cities, businesses and universities committing to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Organisations joining the climate coalition are only admitted after being vetted on their plans.
Under East’s leadership since 2015, Rolls-Royce has brandished its commitment to tackling emissions, recently announcing it would run business jets on hydrogen by the end of the decade. However, when asked this week what help the private sector needed to reach net zero, he railed at what he perceives as onerous reporting of emissions cuts.
“We need to make sure that policy provides industry with enough flexibility to be agile, to react as opportunities emerge, and as things change,” he told an audience at The Economist’s Sustainability Week conference in London.
“The very insistent measuring, reporting and spurious accuracy being demanded by the regulatory environment, it causes friction and it slows everything down.”
He added: “Sometimes, over the last couple of years since we did that [signed up to Race to Zero], I’ve regretted the decision, because of the burden of bureaucracy of reporting that’s associated with it.” He went on to say the “friction” of reporting on emissions was “a pain”.
Full story
Warren East, the company’s chief executive, has tried to position the aircraft engine maker as a green leader by making engines ready for more sustainable fuels and successfully lobbying ministers to back his plans to build a number of small nuclear power stations.
But this week he told an audience of bankers, investors and business executives in London that he regretted making the company join the Race to Zero pledge because of the “burden of bureaucracy” it involved.
The campaign is a United Nations-organised initiative of thousands of cities, businesses and universities committing to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Organisations joining the climate coalition are only admitted after being vetted on their plans.
Under East’s leadership since 2015, Rolls-Royce has brandished its commitment to tackling emissions, recently announcing it would run business jets on hydrogen by the end of the decade. However, when asked this week what help the private sector needed to reach net zero, he railed at what he perceives as onerous reporting of emissions cuts.
“We need to make sure that policy provides industry with enough flexibility to be agile, to react as opportunities emerge, and as things change,” he told an audience at The Economist’s Sustainability Week conference in London.
“The very insistent measuring, reporting and spurious accuracy being demanded by the regulatory environment, it causes friction and it slows everything down.”
He added: “Sometimes, over the last couple of years since we did that [signed up to Race to Zero], I’ve regretted the decision, because of the burden of bureaucracy of reporting that’s associated with it.” He went on to say the “friction” of reporting on emissions was “a pain”.
Full story
3) Facing risk of blackouts this winter, the UK will drill for more oil
CNN Business, 7 October 2022
CNN Business, 7 October 2022
The UK government could award oil and gas companies more than 100 new licenses to drill in the North Sea, as it looks for ways to bolster energy security amid a global supply crunch.
Launched Friday, the licensing round won’t lead to new UK production for several years. And when drilling does begin, Britain will still be dependent on energy imports, according to the government, leaving it vulnerable to soaring prices and supply disruptions of the kind that threaten blackouts this winter.
UK utilities company National Grid (NGG) warned Thursday that households and businesses could be left without power for up to three hours at a time in a worst-case scenario. It said it would take steps to mitigate the risk, including bringing old coal-fired power stations back online if necessary.
The latest licensing round won’t improve the immediate supply picture and could face a legal challenge from environmental activists. Greenpeace said that new oil and gas licenses were “potentially unlawful” and that it would be looking for ways to act.
“New oil and gas licenses won’t lower energy bills for struggling families this winter or any winter soon nor provide energy security in the medium term,” Philip Evans, energy transition campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said in a statement.
“New licenses — and more importantly more fossil fuels — solve neither of those problems but will make the climate crisis even worse,” he added.
Analysis by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), the regulator that grants licenses, shows the average time between discovery of oil and gas deposits and first production is close to five years, though that lag is “falling.”
In a statement on Friday, the NSTA said it will prioritize areas in the southern North Sea that can be developed quickly and where gas has already been discovered. Companies have until January 12 to apply for licenses, with permits expected to be issued as soon as the second quarter of 2023.
The NSTA said the licensing round has been subject to a “climate compatibility check” to ensure it aligns with the UK government’s commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It added that producing gas domestically has a much lower carbon footprint than importing it from abroad.
The International Energy Agency said last year that investment in new fossil fuel supply projects, including drilling for oil and gas, must stop immediately if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
The UK government set out plans earlier this year to generate 95% of Britain’s electricity from low carbon sources by 2030. The plan, which allows drilling for oil and gas, will also ramp up nuclear power and wind energy.
4) Net Zero energy: UK winter blackouts warning if energy imports dry up
The Times, 7 October 2022
Launched Friday, the licensing round won’t lead to new UK production for several years. And when drilling does begin, Britain will still be dependent on energy imports, according to the government, leaving it vulnerable to soaring prices and supply disruptions of the kind that threaten blackouts this winter.
UK utilities company National Grid (NGG) warned Thursday that households and businesses could be left without power for up to three hours at a time in a worst-case scenario. It said it would take steps to mitigate the risk, including bringing old coal-fired power stations back online if necessary.
The latest licensing round won’t improve the immediate supply picture and could face a legal challenge from environmental activists. Greenpeace said that new oil and gas licenses were “potentially unlawful” and that it would be looking for ways to act.
“New oil and gas licenses won’t lower energy bills for struggling families this winter or any winter soon nor provide energy security in the medium term,” Philip Evans, energy transition campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said in a statement.
“New licenses — and more importantly more fossil fuels — solve neither of those problems but will make the climate crisis even worse,” he added.
Analysis by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), the regulator that grants licenses, shows the average time between discovery of oil and gas deposits and first production is close to five years, though that lag is “falling.”
In a statement on Friday, the NSTA said it will prioritize areas in the southern North Sea that can be developed quickly and where gas has already been discovered. Companies have until January 12 to apply for licenses, with permits expected to be issued as soon as the second quarter of 2023.
The NSTA said the licensing round has been subject to a “climate compatibility check” to ensure it aligns with the UK government’s commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It added that producing gas domestically has a much lower carbon footprint than importing it from abroad.
The International Energy Agency said last year that investment in new fossil fuel supply projects, including drilling for oil and gas, must stop immediately if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
The UK government set out plans earlier this year to generate 95% of Britain’s electricity from low carbon sources by 2030. The plan, which allows drilling for oil and gas, will also ramp up nuclear power and wind energy.
4) Net Zero energy: UK winter blackouts warning if energy imports dry up
The Times, 7 October 2022
Britain faces rolling blackouts this winter if it cannot import enough energy from Europe, National Grid has warned as No 10 blocked a public information campaign to encourage people to consume less.
Millions of households could have their electricity cut off for three hours at a time if there is not enough gas to burn in power plants, forcing Britain to activate emergency plans for controlled disconnections of customers.
National Grid, which has drawn up plans to pay households with smart meters more than £10 per day to cut their energy use at peak times, warned that gas imports from Europe may be at risk because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, potentially jeopardising Britain’s energy security.
The government and the King would have to approve an emergency order to implement the blackouts. In an attempt to avoid them National Grid could pay millions of households to avoid using energy at peak times.
However, The Times has learnt that No 10 has rejected plans signed off by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the business secretary, for a £15 million public information campaign to encourage people to save energy. The campaign was “light touch” and included three central measures that could save people up to £300 a year — lowering the temperature of boilers, turning off radiators in empty rooms and advising people to turn off the heating when they go out.
Plans to advise people to turn down their thermostats were dropped after health officials warned of the risk to elderly and vulnerable people. Measures such as turning off the lights and electrical devices were rejected because of their relatively limited impact. The government-led strategy was referred to internally as the “energy demand reduction campaign”, and would have included broadcast and newspaper advertising as well as promotion on social media.
Rees-Mogg gave the green light to the plans in recent days but Downing Street blocked them today after being approached by The Times, arguing that the information was already publicly available elsewhere.
Liz Truss is said to be “ideologically opposed” to a public information campaign this winter amid concerns that it would be too interventionist. The prime minister said in her party conference speech that she would not tell people what to do. Rather than a new public information campaign the government is looking at “signposting” existing guidance.
One government source said that the campaign, which would have been framed around saving money, was a “no-brainer”, adding: “It’s a stupid decision. The campaign was entirely practical, it was about saving people money. It wasn’t about lecturing them.”
During the Tory leadership campaign Truss insisted that there would be no energy rationing if she became prime minister, a guarantee she refused to repeat today.
In Prague, where she is discussing the energy crisis with other European leaders, Truss was repeatedly asked about the possibility of energy shortages in the coming months. She insisted that Britain had a “good supply” and was in a “much better position than many other countries” but refused to guarantee that blackouts could be avoided. “What we’re clear about is that we do have a good supply of energy in the UK, we’re in a much better position than many other countries but of course there’s always more we can do,” she said. “I’m always looking for ways that we can improve the price for consumers.”
Full story
Millions of households could have their electricity cut off for three hours at a time if there is not enough gas to burn in power plants, forcing Britain to activate emergency plans for controlled disconnections of customers.
National Grid, which has drawn up plans to pay households with smart meters more than £10 per day to cut their energy use at peak times, warned that gas imports from Europe may be at risk because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, potentially jeopardising Britain’s energy security.
The government and the King would have to approve an emergency order to implement the blackouts. In an attempt to avoid them National Grid could pay millions of households to avoid using energy at peak times.
However, The Times has learnt that No 10 has rejected plans signed off by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the business secretary, for a £15 million public information campaign to encourage people to save energy. The campaign was “light touch” and included three central measures that could save people up to £300 a year — lowering the temperature of boilers, turning off radiators in empty rooms and advising people to turn off the heating when they go out.
Plans to advise people to turn down their thermostats were dropped after health officials warned of the risk to elderly and vulnerable people. Measures such as turning off the lights and electrical devices were rejected because of their relatively limited impact. The government-led strategy was referred to internally as the “energy demand reduction campaign”, and would have included broadcast and newspaper advertising as well as promotion on social media.
Rees-Mogg gave the green light to the plans in recent days but Downing Street blocked them today after being approached by The Times, arguing that the information was already publicly available elsewhere.
Liz Truss is said to be “ideologically opposed” to a public information campaign this winter amid concerns that it would be too interventionist. The prime minister said in her party conference speech that she would not tell people what to do. Rather than a new public information campaign the government is looking at “signposting” existing guidance.
One government source said that the campaign, which would have been framed around saving money, was a “no-brainer”, adding: “It’s a stupid decision. The campaign was entirely practical, it was about saving people money. It wasn’t about lecturing them.”
During the Tory leadership campaign Truss insisted that there would be no energy rationing if she became prime minister, a guarantee she refused to repeat today.
In Prague, where she is discussing the energy crisis with other European leaders, Truss was repeatedly asked about the possibility of energy shortages in the coming months. She insisted that Britain had a “good supply” and was in a “much better position than many other countries” but refused to guarantee that blackouts could be avoided. “What we’re clear about is that we do have a good supply of energy in the UK, we’re in a much better position than many other countries but of course there’s always more we can do,” she said. “I’m always looking for ways that we can improve the price for consumers.”
Full story
5) Marc A. Thiessen: With so much untapped U.S. oil, why does Biden beg dictators to add production?
The Washington Post, 7 October 2022
The Washington Post, 7 October 2022
Why is Biden begging foreign dictators to increase oil production? The United States is sitting on 264 billion barrels of untapped oil — more than any other country on the planet.
So, let’s get this straight: When the price of gasoline was going up this spring, President Biden blamed Vladimir Putin. Then, when prices went down this summer, Biden launched an all-out campaign to take credit. Now, gas prices are going up again, and the White House is — you guessed it — blaming Putin. Sorry, but before the war in Ukraine, Biden presided over the largest year-over-year gas price rise in at least 30 years. He needs to take responsibility for his role in driving up prices.
Case in point: After channeling his inner Jimmy Carter, and begging OPEC Plus to increase oil production, Biden suffered a diplomatic humiliation this week when the oil cartel announced it was cutting production by 2 million barrels a day — a move that the White House, in draft talking points obtained by CNN, called a “total disaster.”
Why was Biden rebuffed? Maybe because he promised that on taking office, he would make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah” and stop arms shipment to Riyadh — only to abandon those promises and fist-bump the Saudi crown prince while groveling for increased production. Or maybe because he spent his first two years in office distancing the United States from its Persian Gulf allies while desperately courting our enemy, Iran, in the hopes of striking a nuclear deal that would have given Tehran hundreds of billions of dollars to fund terrorism throughout the region and threaten the security of Gulf states. Whatever the reason, Biden’s oil production diplomacy failed miserably — and he owns that defeat.
Worse still, the Wall Street Journal reports, Biden is preparing to lift sanctions on Venezuela’s narco-socialist dictatorship to allow Chevron to resume pumping oil there, paving the way for a potential reopening of oil exports from Venezuela. So much for his promise to lead the forces of freedom in the “battle between democracy and autocracies.”
Why is Biden begging foreign dictators to increase production? The United States is sitting on 264 billion barrels of untapped oil — more than any other country on the planet. We should be unleashing our own domestic production, not asking Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to do so.
The White House said the OPEC Plus decision is “a reminder of why it is so critical that the United States reduce its reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels” by “increasing our reliance on … clean energy.” In fact, Biden’s war on fossil fuels at home has done more to make the United States more dependent on energy from foreign despots than any president in memory.
While President Donald Trump opened 100 million acres of public land and water to exploration, Biden has leased fewer acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling than any president since the end of World War II. He suspended all oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a drilling program approved by Trump.
This summer, Biden announced plans to block new offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as a backdoor plan to ban fracking in parts of the Permian Basin by using ozone standards to force Texas and New Mexico to curb oil drilling — a move that Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Tex.) warns would “jeopardize the production of 95,000,000 gallons of gasoline per day — 25 percent of our nation’s supply.” And Biden might be preparing to make things even worse, by implementing a ban on exports of gasoline, diesel and other refined petroleum products — a move that energy groups warn would backfire by reducing domestic refining capacity and further raising prices for U.S. consumers.
Here’s the dirty secret: Prioritizing climate change means that Democrats actually like high gas prices. They don’t like the political blowback. They no doubt wish gas prices were not rising alongside the largest rise in food prices since 1979, the largest rise in the cost of shelter since 1984, the largest drop in real wages in 40 years and the worst overall inflation in four decades — all of which threaten their congressional majorities in November. So they are taking temporary steps to reduce gas prices — such as opening up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, issuing a waiver allowing summer sales of higher-ethanol gasoline and begging foreign despots to produce more gas.
But as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg admitted on Fox News this week, they are only taking steps that will provide “short-term relief.” In the long term, Buttigieg said, “we’re all going to be better off when American-made clean energy is dominating the way that we fuel our transportation system.”
If Biden cared about reducing gas prices in the long term, he would be doing everything in the White House’s power to increase domestic oil and gas production. He’s doing the opposite. Because higher gas prices are part of their plan to force Americans to abandon fossil fuels. Just as government deliberately raised the cost of cigarettes to curb smoking, Democrats want to raise gas prices to curb our use of fossil fuels.
They don’t want to lose the midterm elections, so they are taking steps to try to temporarily lower prices. But Biden won’t do anything to increase domestic production in the long term. Because his overarching goal – as he promised during the campaign – is to “end fossil fuel,” regardless of the cost to our economic prosperity and national security.
So, let’s get this straight: When the price of gasoline was going up this spring, President Biden blamed Vladimir Putin. Then, when prices went down this summer, Biden launched an all-out campaign to take credit. Now, gas prices are going up again, and the White House is — you guessed it — blaming Putin. Sorry, but before the war in Ukraine, Biden presided over the largest year-over-year gas price rise in at least 30 years. He needs to take responsibility for his role in driving up prices.
Case in point: After channeling his inner Jimmy Carter, and begging OPEC Plus to increase oil production, Biden suffered a diplomatic humiliation this week when the oil cartel announced it was cutting production by 2 million barrels a day — a move that the White House, in draft talking points obtained by CNN, called a “total disaster.”
Why was Biden rebuffed? Maybe because he promised that on taking office, he would make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah” and stop arms shipment to Riyadh — only to abandon those promises and fist-bump the Saudi crown prince while groveling for increased production. Or maybe because he spent his first two years in office distancing the United States from its Persian Gulf allies while desperately courting our enemy, Iran, in the hopes of striking a nuclear deal that would have given Tehran hundreds of billions of dollars to fund terrorism throughout the region and threaten the security of Gulf states. Whatever the reason, Biden’s oil production diplomacy failed miserably — and he owns that defeat.
Worse still, the Wall Street Journal reports, Biden is preparing to lift sanctions on Venezuela’s narco-socialist dictatorship to allow Chevron to resume pumping oil there, paving the way for a potential reopening of oil exports from Venezuela. So much for his promise to lead the forces of freedom in the “battle between democracy and autocracies.”
Why is Biden begging foreign dictators to increase production? The United States is sitting on 264 billion barrels of untapped oil — more than any other country on the planet. We should be unleashing our own domestic production, not asking Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to do so.
The White House said the OPEC Plus decision is “a reminder of why it is so critical that the United States reduce its reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels” by “increasing our reliance on … clean energy.” In fact, Biden’s war on fossil fuels at home has done more to make the United States more dependent on energy from foreign despots than any president in memory.
While President Donald Trump opened 100 million acres of public land and water to exploration, Biden has leased fewer acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling than any president since the end of World War II. He suspended all oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a drilling program approved by Trump.
This summer, Biden announced plans to block new offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as a backdoor plan to ban fracking in parts of the Permian Basin by using ozone standards to force Texas and New Mexico to curb oil drilling — a move that Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Tex.) warns would “jeopardize the production of 95,000,000 gallons of gasoline per day — 25 percent of our nation’s supply.” And Biden might be preparing to make things even worse, by implementing a ban on exports of gasoline, diesel and other refined petroleum products — a move that energy groups warn would backfire by reducing domestic refining capacity and further raising prices for U.S. consumers.
Here’s the dirty secret: Prioritizing climate change means that Democrats actually like high gas prices. They don’t like the political blowback. They no doubt wish gas prices were not rising alongside the largest rise in food prices since 1979, the largest rise in the cost of shelter since 1984, the largest drop in real wages in 40 years and the worst overall inflation in four decades — all of which threaten their congressional majorities in November. So they are taking temporary steps to reduce gas prices — such as opening up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, issuing a waiver allowing summer sales of higher-ethanol gasoline and begging foreign despots to produce more gas.
But as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg admitted on Fox News this week, they are only taking steps that will provide “short-term relief.” In the long term, Buttigieg said, “we’re all going to be better off when American-made clean energy is dominating the way that we fuel our transportation system.”
If Biden cared about reducing gas prices in the long term, he would be doing everything in the White House’s power to increase domestic oil and gas production. He’s doing the opposite. Because higher gas prices are part of their plan to force Americans to abandon fossil fuels. Just as government deliberately raised the cost of cigarettes to curb smoking, Democrats want to raise gas prices to curb our use of fossil fuels.
They don’t want to lose the midterm elections, so they are taking steps to try to temporarily lower prices. But Biden won’t do anything to increase domestic production in the long term. Because his overarching goal – as he promised during the campaign – is to “end fossil fuel,” regardless of the cost to our economic prosperity and national security.
6) Biden, Venezuela and the Oil Dictators
The Wall Street Journal, 7 October 2022
The Wall Street Journal, 7 October 2022
The Biden administration wants more oil anywhere - except in America.
The madness of the Biden Administration’s energy policy has been horrifying to watch, like a car crash except all Americans are passengers. The latest bizarre twist is that the White House may ease sanctions on Venezuela and its dictator Nicolás Maduro in an effort to increase the supply of oil on the global market.
The Journal reports that the U.S. is “preparing to scale down sanctions” on Venezuela’s nasty regime so Chevron Corp. can resume pumping oil. The move is contingent on the Maduro government entering good-faith talks with the political opposition, which is an oxymoron.
“There are no plans to change our sanctions policy without constructive steps from the Maduro regime,” Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, told the Journal. But the regime has never been willing to concede anything to the opposition. The likeliest result would be that Mr. Maduro opens talks, the U.S. eases sanctions (after the November election), and the talks go nowhere.
The Venezuela gambit is part of the Biden Administration’s rolling dictator tour to encourage more oil supply anywhere except in America. President Biden tried courting the Saudis, but this week they and OPEC+ chose to reduce production by two million barrels of oil a day. The Iran nuclear talks are supposed to liberate Tehran’s oil production, but the mullahs won’t take yes for an answer and are holding out for more U.S. concessions.
That leaves Venezuela, whose production and sales have fallen off a cliff thanks to its own socialist mismanagement and the sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration. Lifting sanctions now on the mere hope of political concessions in Caracas would reward the regime for impoverishing its people and creating a refugee crisis in the region. It isn’t clear how much or how fast Venezuelan oil, which is a hard-to-refine kind of heavy oil, could reach the global market. But Mr. Biden is desperate to reduce American gasoline prices.
Meanwhile, the Administration is hinting that it could allow the Justice Department to file an antitrust suit against the OPEC+ cartel for fixing prices. This might be politically satisfying, but the Saudis and its Gulf allies could easily retaliate by cutting production further and hurting U.S. consumers.
In response to this week’s OPEC decision, some politicians are also threatening to withdraw U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Reps. Tom Malinowski (D., N.J.), Sean Casten (D., Ill.) and Susan Wild (D., Pa.) declared that “it is time for the United States to resume acting like the superpower in our relationship with our client states in the Gulf.” If you want to drive the Saudis further into the arms of Russia and the Chinese, keep this up, guys.
All of this international drama, and growing American economic vulnerability, could have been avoided if the Biden Administration hadn’t made a policy of waging war on the domestic U.S. oil-and-gas industry. The White House blames the industry for high gas prices while it does everything it can to make drilling more difficult and financially risky.
As an act of strategic self-sabotage, this is matched only by Germany’s determination over two decades to make itself vulnerable to Russian natural gas.
Amid a war in Europe, a global energy crisis, and a risk of a global recession, a serious U.S. Administration would do everything in its power to encourage more domestic energy production. This Administration would rather make America more dependent on the “constructive steps” of dictators.
7) BlackRock faces more ESG fallout as Louisiana pulls $794 million
Bloomberg, 5 October 2022
Bloomberg, 5 October 2022
Louisiana is pulling $794 million from BlackRock Inc. funds, saying the asset-management giant’s views on ESG investing are damaging to the state’s energy industry.
“Your blatantly anti-fossil fuel policies would destroy Louisiana’s economy,” Louisiana Treasurer John Schroder said in a letter Wednesday to BlackRock Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink. “Simply put, we cannot be party to the crippling of our own economy.”
Schroder said the assets would be liquidated by year-end and that his office has already divested $560 million from BlackRock money market, mutual and exchange-traded funds.
BlackRock had no immediate comment.
The move is part of a continuing backlash against New York-based BlackRock over its advocacy for sustainable investing. In Texas, some lawmakers are seeking to steer money away from BlackRock and other firms they deem harmful to oil and gas companies. Meanwhile, the company has faced criticism from environmental advocates for not doing more to combat climate change.
In a letter last month responding to criticism from Republican state attorneys general, BlackRock executives said they were “disturbed by the emerging trend of political initiatives that sacrifice pension plans’ access to high-quality investments -- and thereby jeopardize pensioners’ financial returns.”
Full story
“Your blatantly anti-fossil fuel policies would destroy Louisiana’s economy,” Louisiana Treasurer John Schroder said in a letter Wednesday to BlackRock Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink. “Simply put, we cannot be party to the crippling of our own economy.”
Schroder said the assets would be liquidated by year-end and that his office has already divested $560 million from BlackRock money market, mutual and exchange-traded funds.
BlackRock had no immediate comment.
The move is part of a continuing backlash against New York-based BlackRock over its advocacy for sustainable investing. In Texas, some lawmakers are seeking to steer money away from BlackRock and other firms they deem harmful to oil and gas companies. Meanwhile, the company has faced criticism from environmental advocates for not doing more to combat climate change.
In a letter last month responding to criticism from Republican state attorneys general, BlackRock executives said they were “disturbed by the emerging trend of political initiatives that sacrifice pension plans’ access to high-quality investments -- and thereby jeopardize pensioners’ financial returns.”
Full story
8) US coal prices top $200 as world’s energy desperation intensifies ahead of winter
The Epoch Times, 5 October 2022
U.S. coal prices soared past $200 per ton last week, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Spot Central Appalachia coal prices climbed to $204.95 per ton for the week ended Sept. 30, up more than 3 percent from the previous week. That’s the highest price since 2005.
Newcastle coal futures, the benchmark for Asia, touched a record high of nearly $450 per ton, before easing to around $400.
Domestic coal production has been holding steady. EIA numbers show that U.S. coal output totaled 12.1 million short tons, up 1.9 percent year over year. In addition, year-to-date coal production totaled nearly 438 million short tons, up close to 4 percent from the same time a year ago. (A short ton, or just ton in the United States, equals 2,000 pounds. A long ton, used in the UK, is 2,240 pounds.)
In 2021, coal represented more than one-fifth (22 percent) of U.S. electricity generation, behind natural gas (38.3 percent). By comparison, wind and solar accounted for just 9.2 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively, last year.
But the fuel source has been surging on strengthening global demand, particularly as the Northern Hemisphere braces for cold and snowy weather.
Global Energy Demand Crunch
S&P Global data note that total spot transaction volumes rose 22 percent in the third quarter, up from the April–June period.
In July, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected in a market update that worldwide coal consumption would return to all-time highs in 2022.
“Global coal demand is being propped up this year by rising natural gas prices, which have intensified gas-to-coal switching in many countries, as well as economic growth in India. Those factors are being partly offset by slowing economic growth in China and by the inability of some major coal producers to ramp up production,” the IEA stated in its report.
Indeed, Chinese coal imports slumped about 15 percent year over year in August. Beijing’s zero-COVID strategy has resulted in lockdowns in multiple pockets of the country, which has weakened economic growth and applied pressure on demand for a broad array of commodities, from soybeans to crude oil to coal.
However, that’s been offset by robust European demand. In the first half of the year, coal was Germany’s largest source of energy production, representing almost 30 percent, according to confirmed data from the Institute for Energy Research (IER). That’s a result of the European Union’s (EU) ban on Russian coal imports, forcing eurozone members to search for alternative sources. Moscow had provided approximately 70 percent of the EU’s thermal coal prior to the restrictions. In the first seven months of 2022, Australia exported 2.9 million metric tons of coal to Europe, up 73 percent from all of 2021.
European seaborne thermal coal demand is also forecast to increase 14 percent, or 12 million metric tons, in 2022.
“With many European nations increasing thermal coal use, an additional nine gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity has been made available to meet energy demands and make up for the decline in Russian energy imports. Coal prices are surging, but they are still more affordable than record-high gas prices,” Adam Woods, Wood Mackenzie’s senior research analyst, wrote in a recent research note.
It isn’t only European households that have been struggling. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association warned that more than 20 million U.S. households are behind on their utility bills. The organization estimates that the average cost of home heating during the winter season will rise more than 17 percent, to $1,202, the highest in a decade (pdf).
Electricity costs surged close to 16 percent on an annualized basis in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The situation could intensify, as coal-producing firms have been running at near maximum capacity without the infrastructure to boost output. Moreover, supply-chain snafus could prevent companies from even expanding production capabilities, experts say.
“The growing energy crisis created originally by the underperformance of renewable energy was exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, resulting in Russia’s closure of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline due to sanctions imposed by the West,” the IER noted last week. “But the high prices are caused by energy shortages, and Europe is looking for enough energy supplies to get through the winter.”
Full story
9) Germany finally says the F-Word: ‘Fracking’
The Wall Street Journal, 6 October 2022
Joseph C. Sternberg
A country used to buying gas elsewhere suddenly remembers there’s a lot in the ground at home.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has produced a string of surprising changes in Germany over the past seven months: substantially higher defense spending, delivery of lethal weapons to a combat zone, new realism on the limits of trade-based diplomacy.
But the surest evidence that Europe’s largest economy is veering into “signs and wonders” territory is that politicians are uttering with increasing frequency that dirtiest F-word of all—“fracking.”
Germany’s energy crisis is a crisis of choice, or rather a crisis of two choices, the second following directly from the first. The choice most German politicians seem to want to talk about is the second of the two, the choice to source so much of the country’s energy imports and especially natural gas from a single, unsympathetic vendor, Russia.
A solution to this problem is achievable without an excess of policy imagination or political skill. If importing gas from Russia no longer is an option, the gas will be imported from somewhere else. Pledges to accelerate construction of terminals to accept liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and Middle East have lent Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck of the Green Party an image of vigorous activity in pursuit of Germany’s voracious energy needs.
But Germany is as dependent as it is on foreign fuel only because of the first decision Berlin made: not to tap the country’s substantial domestic gas reserves, which by some estimates could satisfy much of Germany’s gas demands for the next two decades.
The manifestation of this choice was hostility to the hydraulic fracture, or fracking, technology that could tap Germany’s shale-bound gas reserves. Berlin in 2017 all but banned, on dubious safety grounds, the fracking techniques that could reach most of Germany’s gas.
Now some politicians are asking whether the country can afford to leave that gas in the ground. A split has opened within the unwieldy governing coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Two of the coalition’s three parties are staunchly anti-fracking—Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and Mr. Habeck’s Greens. The third, the free-market Free Democrat Party (FDP), is for it.
The FDP “supports the significant expansion of domestic gas production,” the party’s energy guru in Parliament, Michael Kruse, told a newspaper in June. Another party leader, Torsten Herbst, challenged the objections: “As scientific studies show, under modern safety standards fracking doesn’t cause any relevant environmental damage.”
Some opposition politicians are picking up the theme. Bavaria’s conservative state premier, Markus Söder, in late July posed the obvious question: “Wouldn’t it be appropriate for Germany to think about whether it wants to use its own gas capacity?”
That interview came with a broader, not-so-subtle point about energy trade-offs. Mr. Söder is cool on fracking in his own state of Bavaria, but keen on fracking in the northern state of Lower Saxony. Lower Saxony also happens to be the site of one of the three remaining nuclear reactors Berlin may keep running into next year, and the state is a hotbed of antinuclear resistance. Mr. Habeck currently plans to shut Lower Saxony’s reactor on schedule in December while keeping the other two plants (one of which is in Bavaria) running.
Mr. Söder’s fracking message is that the energy has to come from somewhere. One can extract it from shale or from the atom—Mr. Söder is enthusiastic about the atom—but not extracting Germany’s fuel resources is no longer an option. Message received, apparently. As of this week, even the left-leaning Spiegel news magazine found itself wondering why exactly fracking remains such a taboo ahead of state elections in Lower Saxony.
Don’t hold your breath for this debate to lead to German fracking any time soon. Opinion polling over the summer found only 27% of respondents supported fracking, compared with 81% support for more wind and 61% support for burning more coal as solutions to Germany’s looming energy crisis.
Yet don’t entirely abandon hope. The real surprise of that poll was that “only” 56% of respondents opposed fracking outright, with the remaining 17% undecided. This after voters have been bombarded for years with antifracking messages, and with fracking supporters launching the latest debate from a standing start. That the opposition isn’t near-universal suggests that the harsh realities Russia’s war has imposed on Europe may be opening the door to more skeptical thinking about German energy policy.
Germany is deciding if it wants to play a more active role in a range of foreign, security and economic policy debates around the world. Up to now, the idea that Germany is resource-poor seemed to underlie many foreign-policy discussions, and it encouraged Berlin to take supine positions. But this perceived resource poverty is more a form of learned helplessness than a geological reality. Whether Germany can wake up to this fact will shape what direction Mr. Scholz’s “turning point” ends up taking.
The Wall Street Journal, 6 October 2022
Joseph C. Sternberg
A country used to buying gas elsewhere suddenly remembers there’s a lot in the ground at home.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has produced a string of surprising changes in Germany over the past seven months: substantially higher defense spending, delivery of lethal weapons to a combat zone, new realism on the limits of trade-based diplomacy.
But the surest evidence that Europe’s largest economy is veering into “signs and wonders” territory is that politicians are uttering with increasing frequency that dirtiest F-word of all—“fracking.”
Germany’s energy crisis is a crisis of choice, or rather a crisis of two choices, the second following directly from the first. The choice most German politicians seem to want to talk about is the second of the two, the choice to source so much of the country’s energy imports and especially natural gas from a single, unsympathetic vendor, Russia.
A solution to this problem is achievable without an excess of policy imagination or political skill. If importing gas from Russia no longer is an option, the gas will be imported from somewhere else. Pledges to accelerate construction of terminals to accept liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and Middle East have lent Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck of the Green Party an image of vigorous activity in pursuit of Germany’s voracious energy needs.
But Germany is as dependent as it is on foreign fuel only because of the first decision Berlin made: not to tap the country’s substantial domestic gas reserves, which by some estimates could satisfy much of Germany’s gas demands for the next two decades.
The manifestation of this choice was hostility to the hydraulic fracture, or fracking, technology that could tap Germany’s shale-bound gas reserves. Berlin in 2017 all but banned, on dubious safety grounds, the fracking techniques that could reach most of Germany’s gas.
Now some politicians are asking whether the country can afford to leave that gas in the ground. A split has opened within the unwieldy governing coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Two of the coalition’s three parties are staunchly anti-fracking—Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and Mr. Habeck’s Greens. The third, the free-market Free Democrat Party (FDP), is for it.
The FDP “supports the significant expansion of domestic gas production,” the party’s energy guru in Parliament, Michael Kruse, told a newspaper in June. Another party leader, Torsten Herbst, challenged the objections: “As scientific studies show, under modern safety standards fracking doesn’t cause any relevant environmental damage.”
Some opposition politicians are picking up the theme. Bavaria’s conservative state premier, Markus Söder, in late July posed the obvious question: “Wouldn’t it be appropriate for Germany to think about whether it wants to use its own gas capacity?”
That interview came with a broader, not-so-subtle point about energy trade-offs. Mr. Söder is cool on fracking in his own state of Bavaria, but keen on fracking in the northern state of Lower Saxony. Lower Saxony also happens to be the site of one of the three remaining nuclear reactors Berlin may keep running into next year, and the state is a hotbed of antinuclear resistance. Mr. Habeck currently plans to shut Lower Saxony’s reactor on schedule in December while keeping the other two plants (one of which is in Bavaria) running.
Mr. Söder’s fracking message is that the energy has to come from somewhere. One can extract it from shale or from the atom—Mr. Söder is enthusiastic about the atom—but not extracting Germany’s fuel resources is no longer an option. Message received, apparently. As of this week, even the left-leaning Spiegel news magazine found itself wondering why exactly fracking remains such a taboo ahead of state elections in Lower Saxony.
Don’t hold your breath for this debate to lead to German fracking any time soon. Opinion polling over the summer found only 27% of respondents supported fracking, compared with 81% support for more wind and 61% support for burning more coal as solutions to Germany’s looming energy crisis.
Yet don’t entirely abandon hope. The real surprise of that poll was that “only” 56% of respondents opposed fracking outright, with the remaining 17% undecided. This after voters have been bombarded for years with antifracking messages, and with fracking supporters launching the latest debate from a standing start. That the opposition isn’t near-universal suggests that the harsh realities Russia’s war has imposed on Europe may be opening the door to more skeptical thinking about German energy policy.
Germany is deciding if it wants to play a more active role in a range of foreign, security and economic policy debates around the world. Up to now, the idea that Germany is resource-poor seemed to underlie many foreign-policy discussions, and it encouraged Berlin to take supine positions. But this perceived resource poverty is more a form of learned helplessness than a geological reality. Whether Germany can wake up to this fact will shape what direction Mr. Scholz’s “turning point” ends up taking.
10) Andrew Urban: It’s the politics, stupid
Spectator Australia, 6 October 2022
Biden’s latest doomsday threat underlines how the entire world has been subject to a massive sleight of hand by political operatives intent on changing the western world’s socio-economic structure.
When US President Joe Biden said ‘we don’t have much time’ at the UN National Assembly on September 21, 2022, it was in the context of the ‘threat of climate change’ also known as that mass delusion eating human intelligence.
He was reinforcing the (non-existent, unproven) threat of climate emergency in which planet Earth is facing imminent climate catastrophe. Funny that… 16 years ago, Al Gore said much the same thing during my interview with him at the Cannes Film Festival as he launched his film, The Inconvenient Truth. Gore called it a tipping point. It seems the tipping point keeps receding, always just a few years away…
But Biden’s latest doomsday threat underlines how the entire world has been subject to a massive sleight of hand by political operatives intent on changing the western world’s socio-economic structure. Back in the mists of time (over 30 years ago), the subject of global warming as an existential threat was launched not at an esteemed university or scientific institution like, say, a conference of geologists, but on the political platform of the US Senate. That was a bit of a giveaway but we missed it at the time.
Nor were we aware of the dishonest way the anthropogenic global warming scenario was launched. It was on June 23, 1988, in the US Senate committee with the testimony of James Hansen of NASA. To emphasise the ‘warming’ at the congressional session, Hansen’s Democrat ally, Senator Tim Wirth, scheduled the hearing on a day forecast to be the hottest in Washington that summer.
In addition, Wirth sabotaged the air-conditioning the previous night, hoping to ensure the TV cameras would show everyone sweating in the heat. Wirth told Deborah Amos (NPR News) in April 2007, how he did it: ‘What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot…’
Had I asked Bill Clinton about it, he might have given me a sardonic smile along with a version of his famous quip about the economy: ‘It’s the politics, stupid.’
Of course it is. There is no scientific evidence to support the claims on which so much of relevant policies have been formed. That’s not to mistake what is claimed to be ‘the science’ for genuine scientific evidence. If the IPCC had evidence that carbon dioxide was a driver of catastrophic global warming, we would certainly know about it. The evidence would be repeated by all the scientific institutions and organisations, showing how the 3 per cent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes Earth hotter while the 97 per cent naturally occurring carbon dioxide does not… And the world would not be convulsed with a debate that pits science against politics.
‘The science’ is a phrase peddled by those who have no idea about ‘the science’ or they would not keep using that hollow phrase. It’s a mantra, not evidence.
There is now a mountain of literature and many hundreds of climate scientists who have debunked the alarmist claims of a man-made catastrophe using the scientific method. They know not to conflate global warming (and cooling) cycles, known as natural climate variability, with fossil fuel emissions as the cause.
If you are shown a video or photo of a house on fire, your first question might be ‘how did that start’? If I were to tell you it was caused by the garden gnome, would you want to see some evidence? Juxtaposition is not evidence.
But logic and reason are out of place when it is the emotions that are stirred by the evangelists offering salvation with the promise of (heavily subsidised) renewables, illustrated by sun-drenched solar panels and slowly turning wind turbines. China has even overcome its irritation at Australia’s uppity insistence of a Covid investigation, continuing to supply all the solar panels we want…
The cloaking of an agenda of socio-political activism in ‘the science’ of climate change is a sleight of hand. Under this guise, all manner of behaviours and political decisions can be justified ‘to save the planet’. That’s a licence to curtail freedoms, shut down businesses and launch energy destroying policies – all pretty much without scrutiny.
Worse still, this blanket of hyper-fear has gripped all sides of politics, if not completely, certainly enough to smudge any differences. (In Victoria, for example, the Liberals infamously out-bid Labour in climate hysteria with an even higher emissions reduction target (50 per cent versus 43 per cent by 2030) – evidence of the effects of a mass delusion).
The edifice of (often manipulated) scientific justification for draconian, destructive policies such as financially favouring renewables against coal and gas, and forced behavioural changes, such as forcing citizens into electric vehicles, acts as a multiplier. Like compound interest, it builds on itself, capturing not only politicians but citizens, small companies, corporates, institutions, the public service – and most reprehensibly to adults, school children.
That is how society is fragmented and changed. That is a political objective, nothing to do with climate. Little wonder that politics is immune to actual scientific evidence about the climate. World leaders, like Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Australia’s Anthony Albanese, can safely spout absolute nonsense about climate, contradicting known data (for example, blaming extreme weather events on man-made warming) without being ridiculed. Well, not by the mass media of course, who have failed to recognise the parlour trick, along with the politicians.
It is not scientific disagreement that fuels the feral antagonism against those who challenge the ruling orthodoxy; it’s the questioning of a politically harnessed, quasi-religious belief. That belief in climate alarmism has resulted in the self-harming nature of current energy policies, depriving Americans, the Brits, and Australians of their energy-producing resources. We could say that it’s the stupid politics.
Andrew L. Urban is the author of the forthcoming book, Climate Alarm Reality Check – what you haven’t been told (Wilkinson Publishing).
Spectator Australia, 6 October 2022
Biden’s latest doomsday threat underlines how the entire world has been subject to a massive sleight of hand by political operatives intent on changing the western world’s socio-economic structure.
When US President Joe Biden said ‘we don’t have much time’ at the UN National Assembly on September 21, 2022, it was in the context of the ‘threat of climate change’ also known as that mass delusion eating human intelligence.
He was reinforcing the (non-existent, unproven) threat of climate emergency in which planet Earth is facing imminent climate catastrophe. Funny that… 16 years ago, Al Gore said much the same thing during my interview with him at the Cannes Film Festival as he launched his film, The Inconvenient Truth. Gore called it a tipping point. It seems the tipping point keeps receding, always just a few years away…
But Biden’s latest doomsday threat underlines how the entire world has been subject to a massive sleight of hand by political operatives intent on changing the western world’s socio-economic structure. Back in the mists of time (over 30 years ago), the subject of global warming as an existential threat was launched not at an esteemed university or scientific institution like, say, a conference of geologists, but on the political platform of the US Senate. That was a bit of a giveaway but we missed it at the time.
Nor were we aware of the dishonest way the anthropogenic global warming scenario was launched. It was on June 23, 1988, in the US Senate committee with the testimony of James Hansen of NASA. To emphasise the ‘warming’ at the congressional session, Hansen’s Democrat ally, Senator Tim Wirth, scheduled the hearing on a day forecast to be the hottest in Washington that summer.
In addition, Wirth sabotaged the air-conditioning the previous night, hoping to ensure the TV cameras would show everyone sweating in the heat. Wirth told Deborah Amos (NPR News) in April 2007, how he did it: ‘What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot…’
Had I asked Bill Clinton about it, he might have given me a sardonic smile along with a version of his famous quip about the economy: ‘It’s the politics, stupid.’
Of course it is. There is no scientific evidence to support the claims on which so much of relevant policies have been formed. That’s not to mistake what is claimed to be ‘the science’ for genuine scientific evidence. If the IPCC had evidence that carbon dioxide was a driver of catastrophic global warming, we would certainly know about it. The evidence would be repeated by all the scientific institutions and organisations, showing how the 3 per cent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes Earth hotter while the 97 per cent naturally occurring carbon dioxide does not… And the world would not be convulsed with a debate that pits science against politics.
‘The science’ is a phrase peddled by those who have no idea about ‘the science’ or they would not keep using that hollow phrase. It’s a mantra, not evidence.
There is now a mountain of literature and many hundreds of climate scientists who have debunked the alarmist claims of a man-made catastrophe using the scientific method. They know not to conflate global warming (and cooling) cycles, known as natural climate variability, with fossil fuel emissions as the cause.
If you are shown a video or photo of a house on fire, your first question might be ‘how did that start’? If I were to tell you it was caused by the garden gnome, would you want to see some evidence? Juxtaposition is not evidence.
But logic and reason are out of place when it is the emotions that are stirred by the evangelists offering salvation with the promise of (heavily subsidised) renewables, illustrated by sun-drenched solar panels and slowly turning wind turbines. China has even overcome its irritation at Australia’s uppity insistence of a Covid investigation, continuing to supply all the solar panels we want…
The cloaking of an agenda of socio-political activism in ‘the science’ of climate change is a sleight of hand. Under this guise, all manner of behaviours and political decisions can be justified ‘to save the planet’. That’s a licence to curtail freedoms, shut down businesses and launch energy destroying policies – all pretty much without scrutiny.
Worse still, this blanket of hyper-fear has gripped all sides of politics, if not completely, certainly enough to smudge any differences. (In Victoria, for example, the Liberals infamously out-bid Labour in climate hysteria with an even higher emissions reduction target (50 per cent versus 43 per cent by 2030) – evidence of the effects of a mass delusion).
The edifice of (often manipulated) scientific justification for draconian, destructive policies such as financially favouring renewables against coal and gas, and forced behavioural changes, such as forcing citizens into electric vehicles, acts as a multiplier. Like compound interest, it builds on itself, capturing not only politicians but citizens, small companies, corporates, institutions, the public service – and most reprehensibly to adults, school children.
That is how society is fragmented and changed. That is a political objective, nothing to do with climate. Little wonder that politics is immune to actual scientific evidence about the climate. World leaders, like Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Australia’s Anthony Albanese, can safely spout absolute nonsense about climate, contradicting known data (for example, blaming extreme weather events on man-made warming) without being ridiculed. Well, not by the mass media of course, who have failed to recognise the parlour trick, along with the politicians.
It is not scientific disagreement that fuels the feral antagonism against those who challenge the ruling orthodoxy; it’s the questioning of a politically harnessed, quasi-religious belief. That belief in climate alarmism has resulted in the self-harming nature of current energy policies, depriving Americans, the Brits, and Australians of their energy-producing resources. We could say that it’s the stupid politics.
Andrew L. Urban is the author of the forthcoming book, Climate Alarm Reality Check – what you haven’t been told (Wilkinson Publishing).
The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.
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