Best Energy Picks - November 16, 2024

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

Nov 16, 2024

This week’s best energy picks:

Blue Collar Pennsylvania Votes for More Energy! — Climate Researchers Upset They Are Told to Be Objective! — “Drill, Baby, Drill” Won the Day! — Lithium-Ion Batteries Contaminating Water Supplies! — and much more.

Blue Collar Pennsylvania Votes for More Energy!

Pennsylvania, thank goodness, is still blue-collar enough to vote for economic development and energy security.

Pennsylvania's energy voters turned out strong, helping Republican Donald Trump form a massive red wave on election night.
Trump received more Republican votes in the state than any candidate ever. He tallied 3.48 million votes and, as a result, the accompanying 19 electoral votes.
His pro-drilling and anti-regulatory message hit home in rural areas of the state, as well as with working class residents and minorities…
This carried through on several key House races.
Ryan Mackenzie, 7th district, and Rob Bresnahan Jr., 8th district, each flipped Democratic-held seats. Mackenzie employed "America First" messaging and both candidates received the highest grade possible on The Empowerment Alliance’s (TEA) energy scorecard…

For those living and working in the Marcellus Shale regions this election was quite personal. And they voted as if their livelihoods were at stake.
Harris was destined to fail here. Her campaign devised a plan of what aides labeled "strategic ambiguity" on energy policy to avoid alienating environmental activists and moderate voters.
That just wasn't good enough. Pennsylvania voters are resilient, hard-working people — and are not uninformed. They saw through the smoke-and-mirrors facade and voted for candidates who are pro-energy and pro-economic growth.

Yes, Pennsylvania, unlike its neighbors in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and New York, still has a balance of rural and urban voters and, therefore, rationality prevailed.

Hat Tip: D.S.

Climate Researchers Upset They Are Told to Be Objective!

When stuff such as this happens, you know the jig is just about up:

Three climate researchers took to the pages of Nature to argue that objectivity in climate science is problematic because it hinders their political advocacy, which they argue is too important to deny. [emphasis, links added]
Therefore, the authors argue, the values of objectivity in scientific research should be reconsidered.
“The public has watched as national and sub-national governments have declared climate emergencies, all the while continuing to grant new permits for the extraction of fossil fuels, seemingly ignoring increasingly urgent scientific messages that this locks the world into passing 1.5 °C of warming above preindustrial levels by 2030, if not sooner,” the researchers explain.

While the researchers equate a refusal to stop the production of fossil fuels with ignoring science, energy experts argue these policies will result in enormous economic problems and widespread poverty.
The authors of the Nature op-ed, seemingly unaware or unconcerned with the impacts of such policies, argue that it’s unfair to expect climate researchers not to get emotional when governments don’t adopt these policies.
“Scientists who express their feelings and worries about climate change are often not encouraged by their colleagues and are instead expected to carry on without acknowledging or communicating the continued inadequacy of action required to secure a liveable and sustainable future,” the authors state.

Sicker and sicker, as a famous talk show host used to say…

Hat Tip: S.H.

“Drill, Baby, Drill” Won the Day!

Ed Ireland sums it up nicely…

Donald Trump won the election by a landslide because voters were sick and tired of the policies of the last four years. Trump promised to be the “disrupter-in-chief” by draining the swamp and changing how Washington works.
A critical focus of Trump’s plans is energy policy. He summarized his energy policy with the “drill, baby, drill” mantra and promised to implement policies that would significantly increase U.S. oil and natural gas production. He promised to unleash America’s energy potential by removing barriers to oil and gas drilling and production.

President Trump announced his first moves toward those goals today by creating the “National Energy Council,” headed by Secretary of the Interior nominee Doug Burgum. Politico wrote today that “a new National Energy Council will lead a multi-agency effort to boost U.S. energy production and eliminate regulations, a core policy plant from his campaign:”
…President Trump is off to a great start as the “disrupter in chief” of U.S. energy policy.

Well said!

Hat Tip: E.I.

Lithium-Ion Batteries Contaminating Water Supplies!

Since the discovery of GenX in the Cape Fear River in 2017, Lee Ferguson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University, has been a leading figure in sussing out other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) compounds in water supplies across North Carolina and the nation.

In a study published July 8 in Nature Communications, Ferguson and colleagues have identified the production and disposal of lithium-ion batteries as an increasing source of a troubling sub-class of PFAS contamination. Called bis-perfluoroalkyl sulfonimides (bis-FASIs), these chemicals show environmental persistence and ecotoxicity comparable to older notorious compounds like PFOA and GenX…
The researchers sampled air, water, snow, soil and sediment near manufacturing plants in Minnesota, Kentucky, Belgium and France. The bis-FASI concentrations in these samples were commonly at parts per billion levels. The EPA recently set the maximum level for similar PFOA and PFOS compounds a thousand times lower at four parts per trillion…

Toxicity testing demonstrated that concentrations of bis-FAS similar to those found at the sampling sites can change behavior and fundamental energy metabolic processes of aquatic organisms. Bis-FASI toxicity has not yet been studied in humans, though other, more well-studied PFAS are linked to cancer, infertility and other serious health harms.
“Our results reveal a dilemma associated with manufacturing, disposal and recycling of clean energy infrastructure,” said author Jennifer Guelfo, associate professor of environmental engineering at Texas Tech University. “Slashing CO2 emissions with innovations like electric cars is critical, but it shouldn’t come with the side effect of increasing PFAS pollution.”

This is yet another case of the negative impacts of green energy being ignored in the headlong rush to "decarbonize.”