Best Energy Picks - April 27, 2024
Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.
This week’s best energy picks:
Luxury Beliefs Don’t Change the Facts — And, Here Come the Fire Police! — Marcellus Shale Reduces Pollution As Much As 96% — Solar Glut Imperils the Big Green Grift — and much more.
Luxury Beliefs Don’t Change Facts
Luxury beliefs are critical to grasping the political turmoil we are ever experiencing. Trust-funder desperation for respect is behind almost all extremism, not only climate extremism, but on every other score as well.
Perhaps all this climate complaining is simply virtue signaling, in a world where feelings matter more than facts. The detachment from the physical processes of basic living—energy, materials, transportation, and in complicated monetary economies, money—has made many people ignorant, taking for granted the lifestyles we live and the standards of living we have. It has allowed us to start thinking foundational and civilization-carrying systems like money, fossil fuels, or commercial institutions are optional—a mere matter of ideological choice between good and evil people. They’re not.
I’m reminded too of luxury beliefs, a somewhat hyped concept coined by Rob Henderson, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge and author of the recent book Troubled. Henderson transfers Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption”—the purchasing of expensive, often seemingly useless goods with the purpose of flaunting one’s wealth—to the moral and political domain. A luxury belief, like a conspicuous good, is acquired in order to impress others, and is designed to “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while inflicting costs upon the lower classes.”
Luxury beliefs don’t make much sense and don’t have staying power in the real world of atoms and temperature, of nature and starvation. But we’re so far detached from the world that physically supports us—so rich, so deluded, so well off—that we’re willing to believe (and by extension willing to experiment with) the very systems that uphold our existence…
The good news is that those systems are remarkably resilient and these voices might still be all “tawk,” as Nassim Taleb would say.
The popular energy-finance Substack Doomberg made a similar observation in February, listing two paragraphs’ worth of major events that happened from 1971: oil crisis, Iran-Iraq, Kuwait wars, Middle Eastern conflicts, the Asian and peso and ruble financial collapses, the terrorist attacks, Libya-Syria-Ukraine, the global financial crisis, and covid. Through all of them, as tumultuous as they seemed at the time and as relevant as they remain in the political consciousness, the world’s total energy consumption is a straight line through all of it. Here’s their graph:
…Eighty-five percent of the globe’s primary energy consumption comes directly from fossil fuels—the same it was over thirty years ago when I was born. You can speak beliefs about climate change, about noncredible, net-zero policy goals (always with years suspiciously ending in zero or five), about reducing reliance on fossil fuels, or about how “clean” renewable energy is. You can throw government money at it, pass laws, or pontificate in the high courts, legislative auditoriums, or the public square, but you’re just not changing that. You can’t change that.
It is wise to keep these basics in mind as we deal with all the madness that constantly swirls around us; the madness of those incapable of doing anything real.
Hat Tip: R.N.
And, Here Come the Fire Police!
A version of Fahrenheit 451 seems to have arrived in Britain, where, as Mark Steyn has opined, everything is policed except crime.
I remember that growing up, my parents would light the fire on Christmas. We would listen to Christmas music and snuggle up in front of the fire. Now, if you light a fire, you are destroying the planet, and that is grounds to fine you. I suppose if your house burns down, insurance companies will not pay because it increases climate change, and you should not benefit from that.
In South Gloucestershire, England, the City Council has approved the introduction of financial penalties in the district’s smoke control area. In the name of improving air quality, lighting a fire releases harmful pollution by burning wood, which can cause health problems. You will be fined £300 pounds for harming the environment.
We have some severe problems. Most of us laugh at the climate change zealots and how stupid they are to not even look at history thatcClimate has always changed. The sad part is that one of the lessons a friend of mine who became the mayor of a major city taught me was one of my first lessons in politics. I asked him why the city had to respond to a bunch of nuts protesting in front of his house. He said they bring the news, and you are forced to respond to their nonsense even when you know it makes no sense when they have the press in their pocket.
These climate nuts have the press and the politicians in their back pocket.
Well, yes, they do but let’s remember how it happens. Climate zealotry is enabled by people who throw money at the cause. It might be a power hungry mad man such as George Soros or his spoiled brat son who envisions himself as some sort of Joker. More likely, though, it’s some NGO run by 4th generation trust-funders or a hedge-funder invest in the Big Green Grift. The hedge-funders know the only way to keep the trillions in direct and indirect subsidies coming their way is to keep the pressure on public officials by putting them in the news.
Hat Tip: D.S.
Marcellus Shale Reduces Pollution As Much As 96%
The term ‘emissions’ has, unfortunately, come to be a stand-in for CO2 emissions, which may not even matter. It’s the other emissions that clearly matter and look what the Marcellus Shale has done for them:
Partisan divides remain for Pennsylvania’s energy future, but the state’s electric grid keeps posting drops in emissions.
PJM, the 13-state grid that stretches from Illinois to North Carolina, noted a trend that’s continued for two decades: dramatic declines in pollutants.
“From 2005 to 2023, carbon dioxide emission rates fell 43% across PJM’s footprint. Emission rates for nitrogen oxides declined 90%, and the rates for sulfur dioxide dropped 96%,” a press release from PJM says. “This decline has occurred as competitive wholesale electricity markets continue to encourage the entry of new technologies, and lower-emitting, more efficient resources replace older, less efficient units.”
Much of this regional drop has been driven by pollution reductions in Pennsylvania with the switch from coal to natural gas. Though Gov. Josh Shapiro has proposed an energy plan to tax pollution more heavily and encourage renewable energy, the lion’s share of electricity production in the commonwealth still comes from natural gas and nuclear energy, with coal still a bigger source than solar or wind energy.
Natural gas producers say the rise of fracking has driven emissions reductions.
“Accounting for nearly half of PJM’s generation capacity, abundant and clean Pennsylvania natural gas is driving significant air quality improvements in the power sector while also providing critical resilience to the grid,” Marcellus Shale Coalition President David Callahan said. “The data is clear.”
The gains, he said, haven’t been a result of state policy demands.
“Market-based solutions have led to these notable achievements, all of which should ensure that natural gas has a leading role in our energy future,” Callahan said.
Future reductions, however, could stagnate. State policy and issues with building more gas pipelines has meant production in Pennsylvania has been somewhat stagnant as production grows in Texas and Louisiana. Additionally, the Biden administration has put a pause on LNG exports.
As the data shows, there is no substitute for results as much as asshat politicians and useful idiots try to tell us otherwise.
Hat Tip: S.H. / J.W.
Solar Glut Imperils the Big Green Grift
There is so much revealed in this story (emphasis added):
Several of the largest American solar manufacturing companies are demanding aggressive action against cheap imports, arguing in a petition filed Wednesday with the Commerce Department that firms in four Asian countries are illegally flooding the U.S. market with Chinese-subsidized panels…
The complaint comes amid a glut of solar panels on the global market that has driven prices down by 50 percent over the past year, with the International Energy Agency projecting prices will fall even further. Manufacturers are currently making two solar panels for every one that is getting installed, according to the IEA…
“We are seeking to enforce the rules, remedy the injury to our domestic solar industry and signal that the U.S. will not be a dumping ground for foreign solar products,” said Tim Brightbill, an attorney for the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, the group of U.S. firms that filed the petition…
But the petition is also renewing tensions in the American solar industry, as installers of panels and developers of large solar farms warn that placing restrictions on imports could hurt consumers and raise prices. If the petitioners succeed, companies that buy solar panels from businesses in any of the four nations cited could be subject to steep penalties, which federal trade officials could enforce retroactively.
The industry only recently emerged from a bruising battle over the enforcement of trade laws, after the administration found Chinese companies were illegally sidestepping them by producing panels in China but then finishing assembly in other countries to avoid tariffs…
Their petition was immediately opposed by major clean energy groups in the United States that represent the full spectrum of companies in the industry, and not just manufacturers…
The backlog of solar panels stockpiled in U.S. warehouses is so large that it could fulfill a year and a half of demand, according to the IEA. The manufacturing firms that filed the petition say imports of panels into the United States last year exceeded installations by more than 25 gigawatts — roughly the amount of power produced by 25 large nuclear plants.
The glut comes after billions of dollars in new U.S. tax incentives triggered a solar manufacturing boom in this country. The incentives were meant to muscle solar production away from China and back to the United States. They have led to the groundbreaking of new plants and a resurgence in solar cell production, a key part of the industry that had been almost entirely ceded to China and other countries…
Earlier this year, a company called CubicPV, which had backing from Bill Gates, scrapped its plan to build a factory that would make solar wafers — a key component in the panels — citing rapidly sinking prices in the market.
What a disaster this Biden attempt to intervene in the market has proven to be. Even Mr. Corporatist himself, Bill Gates, has dropped out. China is eating Joe Biden’s lunch because they can. He knows the communists can destroy him any time they want after the deals the Biden Crime Family made with them. So, he cannot do much to stop the cheap imports.
Yet, they are already destroying his plan to make panels here as demonstration of the green economy he promised; a plan to which he is devoting billions and billions of our money to bring about. And, to top it off, solar projects aren’t coming that fast anyway due to local opposition and lack of grid capacity to even accept them! It’s a SNAFU like none other.
Hat Tip: T.Z.
And, Briefly:
Bombshell Study: Carbon Emissions Cannot Cause Global Warming, from D.N.
Pope Francis Declares 1,600 Scientists ‘Stupid’ in Yet Another Gaff, from W.D.
Another Meter Of Snow Hits The Alps, from S.H.
Sowell on Moral Superiority, from T.Z.
Vineyard Wind Asks for Authority to Kill More Whales, from D.S.
Biden Backs Rooftop Solar With $7 Billion Giveaway, from R.N.
Offshore wind Pile Driving Boat Clearly Violates Federal Law, from K.L.
#Energy #NaturalGas #BestPicks #Climate #GreenEnergy #Money #Power #China #Solar #Fireplaces #Biden #GlobalWarming
The wood fire ban is interesting since much of Britain’s renewable power is generated from burning wood pellets from clear cutting pine forests in the US grinding the wood into pellets and shipping the pellets to the UK. Works great until you’ve cut down all the trees, which England did before they discovered coal.
I wonder where the Biden Millions are stashed? Offshore?