Best Energy Picks - June 22, 2024

Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.

Jun 22, 2024

This week’s best energy picks:

New York Pols Want to Use Private Insurance As A Cudgel — Hold My Beer, That Looks Like Trouble on the Grid, Boys! — Bombshell Propaganda from UN Says 72% of World Wants No Fossil Fuels — How ESG Corrupts Our Civil Society — and much more.

New York Pols Want to Use Private Insurance As A Cudgel Against Fossil Fuels

This is outrageous abuse of the law and the power of elected officials. Imagine if your state legislature decided it didn't like single-family homes and outlawed the insuring of them by private companies. That’s what New York State politicians are proposing to do to perfectly legal natural gas, for instance. They want to use their power over private insurance companies as a cudgel against other private companies.

A new proposal in the New York Legislature would prohibit insurance companies from doing business in the state if they insure businesses that make over 10 percent of their money from fossil fuels. The bill, however, could backfire, encouraging insurers to vacate New York entirely rather than leave the lucrative industry.
"Within five years of the effective date of this article," the bill mandates, the "superintendent shall require any insurer doing business in the state to certify that they have divested" from "any company that derives ten percent or more of revenue from exploration, extraction, processing, exporting, transporting, and any other significant action with respect to oil, natural gas, coal, or any byproduct thereof."
Additionally, the law would force insurers to divest from any projects that are "intended to facilitate or expand" any "significant action with respect to oil, natural gas, coal, or any byproduct thereof."

**NY State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal (l) with the infamous D.A. Alvin Bragg (r) talking about hate crimes as Bragg routinely drops charges and against criminals and brought us the sham Trump trial**.

New York is not the only state currently attempting to implement backdoor restrictions against fossil fuels by warding off insurers. Since last year, the Connecticut Legislature has debated a proposal to enact a fee against insurance companies for covering fossil fuel projects.
These pieces of legislation aim to kneecap fossil fuel companies by undercutting their funding. The New York bill threatens would-be insurers of fossil fuel projects—for instance, pipeline construction and natural gas power plant production—with economic exclusion from the state.
"There's no real magic bullet to stopping the oil and gas beast," Pete Sikora, a climate director at New York Communities for Change, told New York Focus, "but to the extent that there is, it could be insurance….No insurance, no projects."
"Insurance is a very powerful cudgel," added State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D–Manhattan), one of the proposal's legislative sponsors.

This sort of abuse, if these despicable tyrants get away with this, will only get worse. And, they do hate your single-family homes, as they want everyone stuck in 15-minute cities living in multi-family dwellings where we can all be controlled. So, don’t be surprised when some corrupt pol comes along and says "nice home you have there, too bad it can’t be insured."

Hat Tip: S.H./T.Z.

Hold My Beer, That Looks Like Trouble on the Grid, Boys!

Isaac Orr, from Energy Bad Boys gave the keynote address at the Dairyland Power Cooperative Annual Meeting, where he discussed research on the impact of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations and the future of grid reliability.

When we ran a reliability analysis on EPA’s modeled MISO grid using historical fluctuations in wind and solar capacity factors and electricity demand, we determined the MISO grid EPA envisions would cause massive rolling blackouts…
The largest blackout event would be 25,900 MW, which would account for 19 percent of electricity demand in the region. This would leave 8.8 million people in the dark. Geographically speaking, the blackout would cause the states of North Dakota, Minnesota, parts of Western Wisconsin, and the part of MISO that covers Missouri to lose power at the same time.
The blackouts occur because the wind doesn’t show up to work. Using 2020 wind and solar capacity factors and electricity demand, we discovered a sustained wind drought where the wind was operating below EPA’s expected 14 percent capacity factors. You’ll see the blackouts spike as the wind dips down to just 4.2 percent of its potential output.

If EPA’s resource adequacy analysis in MISO was bad, EPA’s analysis for SPP essentially said: “Hold my beer.”
…EPA’s modeled SPP grid would cause 13 blackouts over the course of 13 days, which you can see in red in the graph above. The largest of these blackouts would leave 5.2 million people in the dark.

This is where green political correctness and the Big Green Grift are taking us.

Hat Tip: R.S./D.S.

Bombshell Propaganda from UN Says 72% of World Wants No Fossil Fuels

Talk about misinformation! I have a great friend who insists on sharing Microsoft Start articles with me and a handful of other friends. The only thing we recipients can’t agree on is whether it might be more useful to talk to a cat than read the MS blather. The most recent share from my friend is this nonsense:

Respondents from around the world echoed this call for governments to do more, with 80 per cent saying they want stronger action on climate change.
An even higher number - 86 per cent - want their countries to set aside geopolitical differences and work together on issues impacting our planet. In the EU, this number rose to 92 per cent.
Covering 77 countries and 87 per cent of the world’s population, the survey was jointly carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the University of Oxford in the UK.
It also asked respondents about topics like climate anxiety and the fossil-fuel phaseout. Here’s what it found.
The survey found that nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) of people around the world want to move away from fossil fuels quickly in favour of clean energy.

In the EU, this number rises to 77 per cent, showing widespread support for climate action, despite fears that the recent election results could stall progress of the Green Deal.

I always try to find the original source for any propaganda from the likes of the useless UN. My search took me to the full report, questions and all. What I found when I dug into the details were three major problems:

The questions were designed to push respondents into making their own judgments about “extreme weather" and whether it had gotten worse, setting the stage with non-scientific anecdotal conclusions of zero validity.
The questions then built on this bias, asking, for example, “How quickly should your country replace coal, oil, and gas with renewable energy, such as power
from the wind or sun?”
The demographic groups surveyed included mush-for-brains 15-17 year-olds with no relevant life experience.

That’s all you need to know to realize you might as well talk to the cat.

Hat Tip: J.C.

Biden Backcasts!

There is nothing Joe Biden does that is not intended to put America last:

As the U.S Chamber of Commerce has identified, the Department of Energy has seemingly sidelined gas projections from the U.S. Government’s own Energy Information Administration to use IEA data. However, many of the IEA projections are not forecasts based on practical assessments of future need but instead work backwards from decarbonization targets.
Backcasting is not the same as providing accurate forecasts of future need on which to base energy policy.
While climate targets are necessary to deliver the Paris Agreement, backcasting fails to account for the energy realities of growing, emerging economies. This runs the risk of creating a future shortfall of low-carbon gas…
U.S. gas producers already operate under one of the world’s most comprehensive and stringent methane management frameworks, established by the Environmental Protection Agency.

**Interior of LNG carrier: By Thinfourth - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14463336**

A comprehensive recent study by the Berkeley Research Group, underpinned primarily by methane emissions data from operations, demonstrates U.S. LNG is far cleaner than the coal currently being used for power generation in Asia.
The U.S. gas industry and its customers right now are facing uncertainty, the enemy of long-horizon investments with major capital outlays, such as those into LNG. An open-ended halt to approvals makes long-term decision-making on LNG infrastructure all but impossible.
U.S. LNG has already showed it can be a force for good from an energy security perspective, stepping up to stabilize Europe’s energy systems after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It can be similarly beneficial for allies in Asia, ensuring supply diversity, along with availability and affordability of gas that coal-dependent emerging nations are actively seeking.

What an absolute disaster the Biden Administration has been for America!

Hat Tip: D.S.