Steve Bannon to The New York Times:
“No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever. But Jill Stein’s people do."
Steve Bannon was bragging. The strategy was too manipulative and clever to keep secret. Defeat Biden by peeling off Democrats to third party candidates.
Fossil fuels are the tool to do it.
While Americans who follow politics are watching the courts, every day oil rigs are punching new holes in the Permian Basin, in Marcellus Shale, and the Bakken Formation. The work of the world continues. Gas stations will be open for business, selling Americans all the fuel they want. Even environmentalists drive cars.
The U.S. is energy independent. We have oil to export. We get so much natural gas as a byproduct of fracked oil production that in some places producers have to pay to have it taken away.
Biden doesn't get credit for the U.S. being the world's leading producer of both oil and natural gas. In the popular understanding of most Americans Biden is anti-fossil fuels and he has somehow weakened the industry. Most Americans presume prices are higher at the pump than they were four years ago because anti-fossil-fuel Biden has discouraged oil production.
Steve Bannon is right. The one group crystal-clear that Biden has not shut down oil and natural gas production is the climate-activist left. The big story is that the Inflation Reduction Act is an $800 billion green energy subsidy bill. The better-known story, though, is that to get the IRA passed he caved to Senator Joe Manchin on a West Virginia pipeline. Then Biden agreed to some oil leases on Alaska's North Slope.
Collin Rees, the program manager at Oil Change U.S., an environmental group, said,
“Not only is [Biden] shattering all his climate promises, he’s also just making a mockery of his environmental justice claims. With young people in particular, that to me is the biggest miscalculation here. Setting aside all climate arguments, I think you are absolutely losing the youth vote and doing it for very unclear gain.”
Strong words: "Mockery." "Absolutely."
All this is complicated by the fact that the largest domestic producers of natural gas include the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, and Colorado. Democratic politicians in those states need to defend local industries. It positions local politicians in opposition to the national party.
Natural gas is cheap again.
The environmental and climate activist left wants cheap, reliable solar and wind, and maybe even nuclear power, not an inexpensive fossil fuel. Natural gas prolongs the life of the fossil fuel industry. Its low price makes alternatives less competitive. Practical and economic reality run up against ideology and long-term goals. A new article of orthodoxy emerges: Slow or reverse the transition to natural gas, because long term it is no better than coal.
That is the political dilemma for Biden. The message that the administration is taking charge of bringing Americans cheap, abundant energy -- and new, well-paying blue-collar jobs in rural areas -- is at odds with the goals of a key Democratic constituency. This issue does not finesse well, with messages of "transition" and "bridge" fuels to buy time. Infrastructure lead times are measured in decades, so natural gas development is correctly understood to be kicking the can down the road for a generation. The left sees climate as a crisis demanding immediate action. Compromise and delay are death.
The result is the worst of both worlds for Biden politically. The general public thinks Biden isn't doing enough to bring energy prices down. The environmental left thinks Biden has sold out to Big Oil. Each group will receive targeted media confirming that opinion. Steve Bannon is on it. RFK Jr. and Jill Stein are standing by.
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21 comments:
Every dollar of those profits should go to alternative energy R&D. The entire industry should be put into service to a national emergency and fund a Manhattan Project with that goal.
We are dinosaurs, except they didn't see the asteroid coming...
The environmental and climate activist left--in America, anyway--is reflexively averse to nuclear power. Was it "The China Syndrome", and Three Mile Island? (Yet drive across Western Europe and note the uncontroversial prevalence of cooling towers). Since solar and wind are not cheap and reliable, nor likely to be in the foreseeable future, that leaves fossil fuels. American activists are part of the dilemma.
All of this ignores the fact that weaning ourselves from fossil fuels is in all our best interest. Our oil addiction is like a slow-acting fentanyl – it’s literally killing us. We are the proverbial frogs in the heating pot of water. Youth have the most to lose from it, so of course they’re more concerned. It’s their future being threatened; what do old farts care?
This is an example of a crisis that we should all be working together to alleviate, but what can you expect from a society that can’t even agree that a traitorous criminal should be tried for his crimes.
In the 70s I began to tackle to need to develop a cleaner, more environmentally focused society. Here are my thoughts on todays blog
Sources of energy to power a technological world are rapidly moving in the direction of greater reliance on electricity is obvious as you experience life in today's America. The transition to green renewable energy requires energy to produce the green alternative energy sources. None of which come without some to considerable environmental impact. Having the appropriate legacy fuel to power the transition is the key to reducing the amount of carbon dioxide to net zero going forward.
Currently nuclear energy and natural gas offer the fuel source to power the current ramp up to EV's and the manufacture of batteries to power EVs and to build the network of charging stations required. Counterintuitive as it might seem, as the infrastructure to supply EVs, solar panels, charging stations, battery storage facilities and backup come on line; that action will bend the output of carbon dioxide as green technologies replace the legacy sources for electricity production.
Two examples of the transition I describe are the removable the all the dams of the Klamath River with it's electric energy output replaced by two wind turbines; and, a 2,000 megawatt coal plant converted to high-pressure natural gas. Both actions had a net positive effect on the environment. Replacing the dams reclaim the natural environment of the river and show how legacy energy source will transition to green energy, in this case wind energy. Replacing coal with natural gas reduces the mining and transportation output of carbon dioxide by eliminating the effect of mining and transporting the coal to the plant.
The third point is we are no longer dependent on foreign sources for oil and natural gas coming from adversaries; and, we can supply our allies in time of need to stabilize the foreign markets along with our economy.
We are in a bridge building phase to the future as we build our infrastructure to support a carbon neutral society. The US is positioned to be a leader and the visionary in this process for the entire planet.
So, you want dangerous power plants regulated by the government you hate. Got it.
Oh, you forgot to mention Japan's nuclear problems.
There, I reminded you.
Well, you have 1/3 of society so hateful and ignorant that it acts against its own interests to damage their home planet.
You can't fix stupid but, unfortunately, you have to share the planet with it.
👆Perfect example of energy problem in America; our illustrious energy expert ‘Mc’ reminding us how dangerous energy plants are with respect to nuclear ones…I’m guessing. The reality is that nuclear energy is the safest energy producer in the history of energy. His example: Japan has been restarting (restarted) her closed nuclear stations for years now precisely because she has no other viable indigenous energy production to speak of other than imported oil.
Nevertheless, none of this matters because it’s impossible to reverse the climate crisis and man’s ultimate demise albeit it would be a good moral and profitable idea to try.
What is this 2k megawatt coal to gas plant you speak of? If you live in Med your power likely comes from 2600 megawatts of pure coal from the Jim Bridger plant in Wyoming or one of pacific corp’s other coal colleagues. Maybe even via an NV Energy product exchange…also coal.
Pacific Corp is a coal company no ifs ands or buts about it.
The third party people remind me of the old expression, "Cutting off your nose to spite your face." We all have our important, pet issues. But is it worth possibly throwing the election to the orange maniac? Really??
Someone can vote for President Biden and still work for change. Most readers of this blog are familiar with Rolling Stones song: "You can't always get what you want...you get what you need."
The all-renewable electrical future has a problem: electricity is not produced when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Battery storage could fill that gap, except that the amount of batteries required would be prohibitively expensive, and environmentalists would never allow the mining needed to produce the raw materials for those batteries. Just look at the opposition that has already arisen to the new American lithium mine being proposed.
In addition, our current electrical grid cannot handle the increased demand that would be produced by replacing all our vehicles with electric ones, to say nothing of the new demand caused by training AI neural networks in giant server farms. And the regulatory nightmare of trying to build anything in America these days means that grid capacity cannot possibly increase at the speed needed to support the electric future.
Nuclear would help, but environmentalists are viscerally opposed to nuclear for irrational and emotional reasons that nonetheless carry political weight.
Even leaving politics aside, there is no way to satisfy the demands of the environmental left. Doing so would require repealing the laws of physics. So Biden is in a fix; all he can do is cosmetic handwaving that many in his base will see through.
But allowing energy prices, and particularly gasoline prices, to rise would be a political death sentence. No amount of political tap dancing is going to square this circle.
The US is not Japan.
Your "research" fails to account for waste.
Next!
I heard a reliable commentator say today that all of the nuclear waste in this country could be contained on a football field to a depth of 6 feet. This is not an insurmountable problem. It’s not even a big problem.
It’s just an emotional/psychological problem in the minds of people who don’t understand the technology. It’s too bad, because it’s keeping a useful technology from being used to ameliorate global warming, which those same people really want to happen.
The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the irrationality.
Jim Bridger is converting to natural gas and has built an additional 600 Mw unit on site. Coal handling facilities are shutting down as units 1 and 2 are converted. Units 3 and 4 will be completed by 2030.
People object to renewable energy under the assumption that its current development can't meet our needs. When automobiles were first developed, they didn't meet everyone's needs either but guess what – research and development continued and soon they did.
As for nuclear energy, we already have over 90,000 metric tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the US, including spent fuel and other material. It remains deadly for about 10,000 years and we still haven't figured out what to do with it, so it sits in aging temporary containers, some of which have already begun leaking.
The fallacy is that we have to figure out what to do with the nuclear waste so that we can forget about it and it will be safe forever. That’s not practical.
What to do with the nuclear waste is simple: put it someplace sensible and keep an eye on it.
At the moment, we have it scattered around in casks that are in places that aren’t especially sensible. But even in this situation, there are no problems, just occasional things we need to do to keep problems from developing.
Nuclear waste is a simple problem with an easy solution that is totally obscured by anti-nuclear, unscientific hysteria.
That’s all planned or ‘pre-construction’ aka not happening or not happening anytime soon. WHO can forget the 1000 xtra wind megawatts blowhard Buffet talked about ~4 years ago? You’ve got to stop believing in the dream and look at the reality.
RE:
"As for nuclear energy, we already have over 90,000 metric tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the US, including spent fuel and other material. It remains deadly for about 10,000 years and we still haven't figured out what to do with it, so it sits in aging temporary containers, some of which have already begun leaking."
Perhaps we could use some of those R&D dollars to develop a safer way to dispose of that nuclear waste?
Put the payload into a rocket we fire into the sun? The amount of waste is miniscule by comparison to what the sun emits each day.
Or perhaps not. Not as easy to do as it sounds:
Right, disposing of nuclear waste is no big deal - just stash it and keep an eye on it for 10,000 years. We aren't having any problems with it now - never mind what you read about Hanford.
Hanford is a whole different kind of problem. They had no idea what to do with nuclear waste back then, or whether it would cause long-term problems. They didn’t store it competently. We know better now, and we know how to fix Hanford. All it takes is.$$$.
And let’s remember that Hanford resulted from the Manhattan Project, an emergency wartime project that allowed us to develop nukes first, and saved probably 1 million American soldiers’ lives by forcing Japan to surrender.
There’s no problem with keeping an eye on the nuclear waste for as long as we need to. Besides, it’ll provide jobs.
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