Best Energy Picks - June 29, 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:
An Overdue End to Four Decades of Bureaucratic Fishy Business! — “Managed Retreat” from Coastal Areas? Another Land Grab? — Renewables Pushback? “Come on Man…That Can’t Be Right!” — Politicians Want to Throw Good Money After Bad on Green Energy — and much more.
An Overdue End to Four Decades of Bureaucratic Fishy Business!
It’s about time! The Chevron case unleashed bureaucrats in the EPA, the DRBC and hundreds of other agencies to expand their authority with no accountability to lawmakers or the citizenry. Now, a lawsuit from the fishing industry has brought it to an ignominious end:
The overturning of Chevron has significant implications for the U.S. energy policy landscape. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed sweeping reforms to power plant emissions rules, requiring coal plants that intend to remain in operation through 2039 to reduce CO2 output by 90% using carbon capture and other technologies. These measures must be implemented by 2032. Analysts largely agree that this task would be too onerous for most plants to remain economic, and the majority of coal operations would be forced into premature retirement. The rule also requires any newly constructed natural gas plants to similarly reduce emissions by 90% through capture and sequestration, compared to a baseline of currently operating plants.
The EPA has recently issued rules that tighten tailpipe emissionsrequirements for internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, as a market intervention strategy to encourage manufacturers to phase out conventional cars in favor of electric and plug-in hybrid models. EPA efficiency standards for a slew of home and commercial appliances and electronic devices are also currently in the works.
Similarly, this year the Securities Exchange Commission finalized disclosure rules requiring large accelerated filers (public float of at least $700 million) to report their Scope 1 and 2 emissions on official filings. These disclosures are nominally intended to provide information on corporate environmental stewardship to potential investors.
Now, in light of the Supreme Court’s Chevron ruling, the implementation of such agency rules is in jeopardy. While the Court’s opinion clarified that past precedents where the Chevron doctrine was successfully applied will not be readjudicated, any case brought before the courts going forward will be obliged to disregard these precedents. The reversal of four decades of administrative law policy thus provides fertile ground for industry and lobbyists to attack the merits of rules issued by the EPA, SEC and others.
The sad part is that the three Democrat justices still voted no, showing they have never ever given a damn about democracy despite their phony primal screams about it today.
Hat Tip: K.L.
“Managed Retreat” from Coastal Areas? Another Land Grab?
This isn’t your grandmother’s flood insurance program like we have in the U.S., which provides for flood insurance for existing homes in floodplains. No, this is about making homes uninsurable and effectively forcing people out of them on the basis of rising future sea levels that somehow never seem to scare elites out of building or buying along the coasts:
Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future.
The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid.
We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world.
The sinister scheme in question, called “Managed Retreat”, has been exposed by independent researcher Kate Mason on her excellent Substack blog aimed at “deconstructing 4IR narratives.”
The idea is that exaggerated “modelling” of the imagined effects of “climate change” is being used to define certain areas as unsuitable for human settlement.
Working hand in hand with the state is the insurance industry – long a central part of the corrupt criminocratic empire – which deems homes in these areas to be “uninsurable.”
Banks are also playing their part (of course!) saying they are unwilling to provide mortgages for these “uninsurable” properties.
In her latest article, Kate refers to a TV report about Kensington Banks, near Melbourne city centre, which has been newly declared a flood zone.
She writes: “Property prices are expected to plummet by 20 percent. I think that’s rather conservative – who is going to buy in a flood zone? Unless it’s a developer who will raze it all to the ground and build a Smart Resilient complex”.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, residents are up in arms about attempts to impose “retreat” from coastal areas under the pretext of a predicted rise in sea level.
This has all the earmarks of another elitist land grab, similar what the Rockefeller family has done for over a century to make wildernesses for their own enjoyment.
Hat Tip: D.S./D.N./J.B.
Renewables Pushback? “Come on Man…That Can’t Be Right!”
But, it is correct, as Columbia University, the Rockefeller-funded center for developing and distributing climate crisis propaganda, itself admits. No doubt, it does so with a view toward shutting down all opposition:
“Significant” local opposition to solar and wind projects increased by 29 percent last year, as cities and counties passed restrictions on the renewable sources, according to a new report from Columbia University researchers.
In total, the study documented 378 solar and wind projects nationwide facing significant opposition, which researchers from the university’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law defined as being challenged by organized groups, circulated petitions, lawsuits or public administrative proceedings. That compares with 293 projects in 2022.
study also found a dramatic increase in local laws or resolutions seeking to “block, delay or ict renewable energy.” It identified 395 such restrictions, a 73 percent increase from 2022. The local provisions — which were mainly adopted by city and county governments — ranged from temporary moratoriums on new solar projects to rules that keep arrays at a distance.
No one wants these projects near them. The opposition is intensifying because state governments are trying to quell it by refusing to give the projects the same scrutiny as other non-renewable projects. It isn’t working. Where there is scrutiny they can get approved. I know because I ‘ve been involved in some, but you can’t force them onto communities. That’s the problem with the entire climate con.
Hat Tip: R.N.
Politicians Want to Throw Good Money After Bad on Green Energy
This is a nice summary of where we are on the energy transition, which has been a bonanza in the hands of irresponsible self-serving politicians and the grifters to whom they’re been throwing our money and that of our great-great-great-grandchildren:
The current plan underpinning the green-energy transition mostly insists that pushing heavily subsidized renewables will magically make fossil fuels disappear. During past additions of a new energy source it has been “entirely unprecedented for these additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources.”
Invariably, the new energy source would need to be better or cheaper. Solar and wind fail on both counts. Unlike fossil fuels they produce energy only according to the vagaries of daylight and weather. At best they are cheaper only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The rest of time they are expensive and mostly useless.
When we factor in the cost of four hours of storage, wind and solar energy solutions become uncompetitive with fossil fuels. Achieving a sustainable transition to solar or wind would require orders of magnitude more storage, making these options unaffordable.
Solar and wind are almost entirely deployed in the electricity sector, which makes up a mere one-fifth of all global energy use. We are struggling to find green solutions for most transportation and haven’t even begun to address the energy needs of heating, manufacturing or agriculture. We are all but ignoring the hardest and most crucial sectors like steel, cement, plastics and fertilizers.
McKinsey & Company estimates that achieving a real transition would cost more than $5 trillion annually. This splurge would slow economic growth, making the real cost five times as high. For rich-world voters, the annual cost could be more than $13,000 a person. Voters are unlikely to welcome that pain.
To Sum It Up: When politicians say the green transition is here, they are really asking voters to support throwing more good money after bad. We need to be smarter.
If there were ever a better case for term limits, I don’t know what it would be.
Hat Tip: S.H.
And, Briefly:
Stellantis Threatens to Pull Out of UK Over EV Sales Mandate, from T.Z.
Climate-Change Hysterics May Be Wrong, But They’re Not Sorry, from S.H.
Climate Alarmists Tell Us Food Favorites That May Soon Be Extinct, from J.C.
Climate Action Must Move On; There’s Not Enough Money, from I.S.
Climate Change an ‘Existential Threat?’ - Not at the Paris Olympics, from D.B.
China Is The Big Winner Of North American EV Policies, from R.B.
How Companies Are Starting to Back Away from Green Targets, from S.H.
#Energy #NaturalGas #BestPicks #Climate #GreenEnergy #Money #Power #Electricity #Solar #GlobalWarming #Wind