Bringing Britain's Energy Woes to America?

Bringing Britain’s woes to America?
 
Will Biden-AOC energy policies do to Americans what UK climate obsession is doing to Brits?
 
Paul Driessen
 
Virginia enacted a Clean Economy Act; other states have implemented similar laws. AOC demands a national Green New Deal; President Biden is imposing one via executive decree. The United Kingdom is determined to reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions; the European Union is pursuing a Green Deal.
 
All these policies send energy prices rocketing upward, eliminating jobs and killing people. Instead of reducing emissions, they simply move them overseas, where they combine with massive air and water pollution, habitat destruction and wildlife decimation – as China and other countries burn more coal, oil and gas every year, to improve their people’s living standards ... and to mine and process raw materials for the wind turbines, solar panels and battery modules they manufacture for climate-obsessed nations.
 
The net result: Progress toward global Net Zero is zero – worse than zero – and all the lost jobs, rising poverty, reduced living standards and policy-driven deaths are for nothing.
 
President Biden wants hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2035, and elimination of all fossil fuel extraction and use by 2050. That means no gasoline or diesel vehicles; no natural gas to power factories or heat, warm water and cook in homes, hospitals and businesses; no petrochemical feedstocks for fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals and thousands of other essential, everyday products.
 
All US energy will be provided by wind, solar and battery power – millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of battery modules, sprawling across continental United States and along its coasts. Petrochemicals will come from crops planted on millions of acres of former wildlife habitat.
 
To drive this extreme agenda, Team Biden has canceled pipelines, leases and permits; pressured banks to stop lending money for drilling; and issued scores of regulations that delay and drive up costs for fossil fuel projects – while making it easy for industrial-scale wind and solar installations to get permits. Prices for energy, transportation, food, services and used cars predictably shot up. Inflation and consumer prices reached 40-year highs.
 
Henry Hub natural gas prices doubled from $2.61 per mcf (thousand cubic feet or million BTUs) in November 2020 to $5.51 in October 2021, before falling to $4.75 in January 2022, as skyrocketing global prices spurred drilling, fracking and production on US state and private lands. Regular gasoline averaged $2.17 a gallon nationwide in 2020 – but hit $3.39/gal ($4.38 in California) in the same timeframe.
 
As Americans fret and fume over the needlessly high prices – and wonder what the future might hold – they can look to the UK and EU (a) to count their blessings for comparatively low prices today and (b) to ponder how continued climate-centric policies could impact American livelihoods and living standards.
 
Britain and continental Europe have already embraced a wind-and-solar future, closed coal and nuclear power plants, and banned fracking for the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet, while North Sea production keeps falling. They have reaped the whirlwind from those callously inept policies.
 
(It is illuminating and ironic that Russian organizations finance many US, UK and EU anti-fracking disinformation campaigns, funneling funds through a Bermuda law firm, a shell company and the Sea Change Foundation to the Sierra Club, Climate Action Network and other groups.)
 
Britain and Europe’s vaunted wind turbines have been generating electricity at a dismal 14% of “nameplate capacity” – providing power three hours a day, one day a week, four days a month, in short spurts, at completely unpredictable times. Their wintertime solar power has been equally sporadic and unpredictable. No modern society can function on such energy.
 
The huge gaps have been plugged with gas- and coal-fired generation, with much of the gas coming from Russia and the USA. But Asia also wants the gas, and Russia is playing Ukraine/Nord Stream 2 pipeline politics with its gas, tightening supplies as demand soars. UK and EU home and business gas and electricity prices are in the stratosphere – five to ten times the Biden Era prices Americans are paying.
 
Luckily for families and businesses, Britain’s Office of Gas & Electric Markets (Ofgem) regulates how much utility companies can charge. But that often means keeping household, hospital, school and business energy prices well below the utilities’ actual costs – with predictable results.
 
Experts say the average annual household bill of £1,277 ($1,755) could surge to £1,865 ($2,530) when the current price cap is raised in April 2022 – for homes and apartments that are much smaller than US counterparts, in a climate with much less extreme summer and winter temperatures than in much of the United States. Annual bills could exceed £2,000 ($2,715) or much more at Ofgem’s August review.
 
National Energy Action says this could put more than 6 million UK households (nearly one-fourth of all households) in “fuel poverty” – unable to afford proper heat, and often having to choose between heating or eating, even when cold indoor temperatures put their health and lives at risk.
 
For families that want budgetary certainty, the average 12-month fixed deal for a typical household now costs almost £2,500 ($3,430). But the UK’s second-biggest energy supplier’s most recent fixed-rate offer is almost £4,200 ($5,750)! That’s because natural gas and electricity generation costs are expected to keep rising – and because utilities must pay wind turbine operators “constraint payments” to turn turbines off whenever they generate more power than the grid needs and can absorb!
 
The month-ahead natural gas price at the Dutch TTF hub (a European benchmark for trading gas) recently hit €93.3 ($107) per megawatt-hour. That’s $31 an mcf – more than six times the January 2022 Henry Hub price. Just a month earlier, the European day-ahead gas price reached $61 per mcf!
 
No wonder 30 UK energy suppliers went bankrupt by the end of 2021 – leaving families and businesses scrambling to find new suppliers, at skyrocketing prices for heating and cooking. When utilities cannot charge customers anywhere near operating costs, they go belly-up.
 
No wonder two-thirds of UK renters struggle to pay their energy bills, and 400,000 more UK households were in danger of losing their gas and electricity provider before last Christmas. People are “genuinely terrified” about rising energy costs. Excess winter energy-poverty death tolls are likely to set new records.
 
Health and living standards in Britain and Europe will likely get far worse. In addition to insane energy costs, wages and environmental regulation costs are much higher than in Asia. Ceramic, steel, aluminum, automotive and other energy-intensive companies and industries are becoming uncompetitive. Manufacturing, jobs, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are just moving to Asia.
 
Climate and energy politics, combined with fierce global demand, make it unlikely that Europe’s energy prices will go down. And while the EU recently voted to define natural gas and nuclear power as “sustainable,” acquiring affordable gas and building new nuclear plants will take years and be battled every step of the way. Rolling blackouts could become as common as in California.
 
British politicians “rail at energy costs” and argue about trimming them at the margins, says journalist Madeline Grant, perhaps by reducing the 5% VAT on energy or the 25% green-social subsidy levies on electricity bills. But they “dare not question the green policies” that cause energy price increases, end up taking no action, and then slap hefty new “pollution taxes” on gas and diesel vehicles.
 
Britain and Europe need to drill and frack their vast shale deposits. Having shut down their older nuclear plants, they must start building small modular reactors. The rest of the developed world needs to take similar actions – and not only because China, India and the rest of the developing world are not about to give up fossil fuels and rely on unreliable wind and solar power, but to save jobs and lives.
 
Otherwise, Britain’s Christmas just past will be its, Europe’s and America’s Christmas future, forever. Scrooge learned from Marley. Will Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, AOC and their lot learn from reality?
 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. 

Charles' Comment:  There seems to be no end to the destruction of lives and society that radical environmentalists and the believers in the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis work with so much dedication to accomplish!

Diogenes searching for honest policies by Paul Driessen

Renewable energy is defective solution in search of a problem, money and power

Paul Driessen

The Greek philosopher Diogenes reportedly carried an oil lamp during the daytime, the better to help him find an honest man. People everywhere should join Congress and the Trump Administration in search of honest energy and climate policies – as too many existing policies were devised by special interests seeking money and power, and often using imaginary problems to justify their quest.

The health and environmental impacts from fossil fuels are well documented, though often exaggerated or even fabricated by activists, politicians, bureaucrats and companies with lofty agendas: securing climate research grants, and mandates and subsidies for renewable energy projects to replace fossil fuels; reducing economic growth and living standards in industrialized nations; and redistributing the world’s wealth, fundamentally transforming the global economy, and telling impoverished countries what kinds of energy and what level of economic development they will be permitted to have. 

More often than not, proponents justify these agendas by insisting we must prevent dangerous manmade global warming and climate chaos, prevent unsustainable resource consumption, and safeguard people against purported technological risks. My multiple articles on the catechism of climate cataclysm … sustainability realities, absurdities and duplicities … and selective application of precautionary pabulum address the conceptual fallacies of these interchangeable, agenda-driving mantras.

All three are routinely defined, twisted, used and abused to block technologies that activists despise, and promote technologies and policies that advance their agendas and fill their coffers.

But beyond their glaring, often insurmountable conceptual problems are the practical issues. With what, exactly, will these agitators replace fossil fuels? Applying the same health and environmental standards they use against oil, natural gas and coal – just how clean, green, Earth-friendly, sustainable, climate-stabilizing, healthy, and human rights/social justice-oriented are their renewable energy alternatives?

If their alternatives are so wondrous, why do they still need permanent mandates, renewable portfolio standards, investment tax credits, production tax credits, feed-in tariffs, myriad other subsidies, exemptions from endangered species and other regulations, and laws requiring that utility companies buy their electricity whenever it is produced (even if it is not needed)? Why must they build and run fossil fuel “backup” power plants for the 50-85% of the time that wind and solar are not producing?

The following brief examination will hopefully guide more rigorous analyses of the impacts of these “technologies of the future” – aka wind, solar and biomass technologies that served mankind rather poorly for countless generations, until the fossil/nuclear era began, and now are supposed to serve us once again.

Probably the biggest single problem with any supposedly renewable, sustainable alternative is its horrendously low energy density: the amount of energy produced per acre. We can get far more electricity or fuel from a few dozen, hundred or thousand acres of oil, gas or coal production operations than we can from millions or tens of millions of acres of renewable energy projects.

Moreover, fossil fuel operations can often be conducted in the middle of farm fields or wildlife habitats – or the land can be reclaimed and returned to those uses once the energy has been extracted. Offshore oil and gas platforms actually create thriving habitats for marine life. Most renewable energy operations displace food crops or destroy wildlife habitats – and must do so in perpetuity.

And so we have corn as high as an elephant’s eye, across an area the size of Iowa (36 million acres) to produce ethanol that replaces 10% of US gasoline but also requires vast quantities of water, fertilizer, fuel and pesticides to grow the corn and turn it into fuel – instead of feeding hungry people.

We find bright yellow canola fields across more millions of acres in Montana, Saskatchewan, Germany and elsewhere, to produce biodiesel – and still more acreage devoted to switchgrass for ethanol and algae ponds for “advanced biofuels.” In Brazil, it’s millions of acres of sugarcane for ethanol, and millions more for other biofuels from palm oil, from areas that once were rainforests, “the Earth’s lungs,” as environmentalist groups like to say. Once teeming with wildlife, they are now monoculture energy plantations – so that we don’t have to desecrate Mother Earth by drilling holes in the ground to produce oil and natural gas: nature’s own biofuels, created over millions of years and stored for mankind’s benefit.

Of course, when these expensive, environment-intensive alternatives are burned, they send more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the same as fossil fuels do – on top of the CO2 that was burned by fuels and released from soils and clear-cut trees to produce the “climate-friendly renewable” energy.

Meanwhile, American and Canadian companies are cutting down millions of acres of forest habitats, and turning millions of trees into wood pellets that they truck to coastal ports and transport on oil-fueled cargo ships to England – to be hauled by truck and burned in place of coal to generate electricity. The pellets cost more than coal (which Britain still has in abundance), so utility companies receive huge taxpayer subsidies to make up the difference. One power plant received £450 million ($553 million) in 2015.

The financially and environmentally unsustainable scheme is justified on the ground that trees are renewable; so the scam helps Britain meet its climate change and renewable fuel obligations under various laws and treaties. Even though the trees-to-pellets-to-power process emits more carbon dioxide and pollution than coal-based power generation, the “wood fool” arrangement is considered to be “carbon neutral,” because growing replacement trees over the next century or two will absorb CO2.

If this sounds freaking dishonest and insane, it’s because it is freaking dishonest and insane. Diogenes must be turning summersaults in his grave. But there’s more.

On top of all this biofuel lunacy, we also have tens of thousands of wind turbines towering above fields, lakes, oceans and homes – butchering millions of birds and bats, and impairing the health of thousands of humans whose wellbeing is sacrificed to Big Wind profits. We’ve also got millions of solar panels sprawling across countless acres of desert and grassland habitats, to produce well under 1% of the world’s electricity. Their expensive, intermittent power reaches distant urban areas via thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines. They all require greenhouse gas-emitting backup power plants.

Those turbines, panels, transmission lines and backups require millions of tons of steel, copper, concrete, rare earth and other exotic metals, fiberglass and other materials – much of it produced under nonexistent health and environmental laws in faraway countries, where injury, illness, child labor and death run rampant … and are ignored by local, national and United Nations authorities and human rights activists.

Removing all these worn-out turbines and solar panels will cost billions of dollars that state and federal governments don’t have, and developers have rarely had to cover with bonds. 

Finally, the energy produced from all these “planet-saving” enterprises is far more costly than what could be produced using fossil fuels. Poor families are hit hardest, as they must spend a much larger portion of their incomes on energy than middle class and wealthy families. Businesses, factories, hospitals and schools also face rising energy costs, and must lay off workers, reduce services or close their doors.

The impacts ricochet throughout communities and nations, adversely affecting living standards, nutrition, health and life spans. We are reminded once again: Corporate fraud affects a limited number of customers; government and activist fraud affects every taxpayer, citizen and consumer.

The essence of all these renewable fuel programs is embodied in the notion that we must capture methane from cow dung, to safeguard Earth’s climate from this “potent greenhouse gas.” The operable term is BS.

The US Congress and Trump Administration could become world leaders in returning honesty and sanity to energy, climate, economic and environmental discussions and policies. Let’s hope they do.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

This post was made at Paul Driessen's request.

Pipeline and Coal-Fired Power Plant Alarmism

In view of the recent controversy about the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Paul Driessen post I just recently put up called Pipeline Anarchy, I want to refer back to a post of mine in November 2011 called Democrat Socialism, Energy, and Pipeline Hysteria.  One of the points I made was that the U.S. was already extensively filled with oil and gas pipelines.  Many of them were old and were not nearly as safe as the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline or as the Dakota Access Pipeline.  It makes little sense to prevent the building of these pipelines on safety or environmental grounds, since they are improvements in the system.  I also pointed out that most any aquifer was already crossed by less superior pipelines.  Now we learn from Driessen's article that the Dakota Pipeline in the only area unconstructed is running parallel to an already existing pipeline.

From my earlier post:

In 2009, there were 148,622 miles of oil and oil product pipelines in the U.S.  There were also 1,539,911 miles of natural gas pipeline in the U.S.  The Keystone XL project wanted to add 1,661 miles of oil pipeline to this massive network of pipelines.  Some of the major pipelines now in existence are shown in the map below.

The green-coded pipelines are major oil pipelines, the red lines are major gas pipelines, and the blue lines are product pipelines. 

Returning to the present:

The pipeline case in which a safer pipeline is denied while less safe ones continue in use has an interesting parallel in the case against coal fired power plants.  The Obama EPA established a regulation that required power plants to release much less mercury than they do into the atmosphere.  The claim was that despite the low concentrations of mercury, a pregnant woman eating a constant diet of fish from nearby rivers might suffer some health problem based on cherry-picked studies of islanders who ate nothing but seafood from the ocean with its 200 ppm of mercury.  There have long been recommendations that pregnant women not eat too much seafood, as an abundance of caution.  But, pregnant women are presumably thought incapable of following a similar recommendation for avoiding too much fish from rivers as an abundance of caution.

See my posts Coal-Fired Power Plants Produce Insignificant Mercury and Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants.  It is clear that many areas of the country should be evacuated due to the overwhelming concentrations of mercury from natural sources of mercury, such as the mineral cinnabar if the mercury from coal-fired power plants is a problem.  If it is safe to live in much of the American Southwest and the southern Great Plains states, then it is generally immaterial whether one lives near a coal-fired power plant as far as mercury exposure is concerned.

It is also of no significance that coal-fired power plants produce more carbon dioxide than do natural gas power plants or than wind generators do for reasons described in Why Greenhouse Gas Theory is Wrong -- An Examination of the Theoretical Basis.

But, we must have many horrors, terrors, and alarms from which ever bigger government can pretend to save us.

26 Nov 2016:  10 other fossil fuel pipelines cross the Missouri River upstream from the Dakota Access Pipeline already.

Only 8 Years Ago Alarmists Were Sure the U.S. Was Out of Gas

Many environmentalists and anti-business people in the U.S., most centered in the Democrat Socialist Party, were sure that the U.S. production of oil and gas was going to rapidly dwindle.  It was one of their many reasons for attacking U.S. oil companies as dinosaurs of the past.  It was time to make these dinosaurs extinct, at least with a government-controlled and accelerated culling and size-reduction plan.  Oil and gas when burned both produced the fatal gas carbon dioxide, which was claimed to be slowly or not so slowly killing the planet.  We were told that the only energy that made sense was the so-called renewable energy sources of windmills, photovoltaic devices, and all sorts of plants grown for fuel.  These people backed Obama for the presidency in 2008 and were rewarded as he allowed less and less production of oil and gas on the incredible acreage of federal lands and in the many off-shore areas controlled by the federal government.  Meanwhile, windmills and photovoltaic device arrays were offered subsidies and mandates with claims they would replace coal, oil, and gas in large part soon.

Because the renewable sources of energy proved, as I and many others said they would, to be expensive and unreliable, they have effectively proven to be non-renewable.  Investments in these energy sources have often failed and when they did not, it was only because of the subsidies and mandates that they managed a slow growth in energy output capability.  Let us compare the oil dinosaur in vigor:

The production information is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  The year at the bottom of the dip is 2008 when production was 1,829,985,000 barrels of oil, well down from the maximum production in 1970 of 3,517,450,000 barrels.  As the fracking revolution in oil production began, Obama was off-setting its initial gains by restricting oil production on federal lands.  In 2011, however, fracking oil production on private lands really took-off.  In 2015, oil production in U.S. fields was back to 3,436,515,000 barrels of oil.  Now, with the blessed end of the Obama Regime and the apparent desire of OPEC to give up its ruinous price war on oil, there is nothing to keep oil production in the U.S. from continuing to increase.  An end to the suppression of U.S. energy production heralded by the Trump administration and a Republican Congress as well, will be a great boon to the U.S. economy.

The story of shale oil production in the U.S. is shown below:

U.S. oil production already appeared certain to soon exceed that at its prior peak of 1970.  But at some point the Bakken and Eagle Ford and other known shale oil fields are likely to see lowered production.  Will other undiscovered oil fields take their place?  Yes!

In September, Apache Corp. announced that it Alpine High field in an area of the Permian Basin in West Texas holds 1.1 - 2.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil at current prices.  This area had been drilled many times by other companies with no finding of economically recoverable oil.

Then comes the blockbuster announcement by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that the Wolfcamp Shale in the Midland Basin portion of the Permian Basin has 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil at current prices and 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  Compare this to the largest oil producing field in North America, the Prudhoe Bay field of the north slope of Alaska with the 12 billion barrels of oil produced over 43 years.  The largest producing field in the Lower 48 is the East Texas oil field, which has produced 7 billion barrels of oil since the early 1930s.  The Wolfcamp Shale is now expected to produce nearly 3 times the oil of the Bakken - Three Forks capacity according to the USGS assessment in 2013.  The Wolfcamp Shale capacity is nearly 19 times that of the Eagle Ford field according to its 2012 assessment by the USGS.

Over time, the USGS estimates prove to be low due to increased knowledge about the oil field geology and to improvements in extraction technology.  How true this is, is clear from the fact that Midland, Texas is well within the Wolfcamp Shale area.  This huge discovery is entirely based on new technology, not on a failure of many an oil company to examine the area for its oil possibilities. Recall that George W. Bush spent his oil years in Midland, which had been an oil center prior to his arrival.

At current prices, the Wolfcamp Shale oil is worth about $900 billion.  Pioneer Natural Resources has drilling rights on 785,000 acres within the large field.  ConocoPhillips has Wolfcamp Shale holdings of 1.8 billion barrels.

I am sure that President Trump will be very happy to claim credit for all the new jobs that will be produced by the production of the Wolfcamp Shale!  Assuming he does not act as Obama has to try to suppress oil production, I suppose we will have to give him a portion of the credit, though in a healthier context we would give all of the credit to the oil field innovators and production experts of our wonderful private sector.

Europe, Where Mineral Rights Belong to the State, Cannot Frack

In most of Europe, the mineral property rights and sub-surface property rights of land belong to the state, not the landowner.  Consequently, the landowner is only hurt if minerals or oil or natural gas are extracted from his property.  This makes it politically impractical to extract minerals or oil or gas from most of the land. 

Consequently, the hydraulic fracturing now common in the United States is not helping the Europeans at all to free themselves from a heavy dependence on Russian natural gas.  Because of fracking, made possible by mineral rights ownership being commonly in the hands of the landowner in the U.S., the United States passed Russia in the production of both oil and natural gas last year.  But Europe remains in a state of dependence on Russian natural gas.  The most dependent countries are those of Eastern Europe such as the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Poland, which Russia pressured in 2006, 2009, and 2015 with reductions or interruptions in their natural gas supply.

Obama Cannot Kill King Coal

Some time ago I wrote an article called King Coal Will Continue to Rule the World.  To follow up on that with aspects of the current situation let us note that:

• Japanese demand for natural gas increased greatly following the Fukushima disaster.  This fueled an increase in natural gas prices throughout Asia and Europe.
• With natural gas prices so high in Europe, where little fracking is taking place, natural gas is affordable for energy production for electricity only during peak demand periods.
• What is affordable in Europe and elsewhere is American coal.  US coal exports increased from 50.1 billion tons six years ago to 129 billion tons.  This is an increase by a factor of 2.57 times!
• If you buy into the garbage idea that man's CO2 emissions have a catastrophic impact by causing severe global warming, is it really better that US coal be burned around the rest of the world and not in the electric generating plants of the US?  Does it really make sense for us to increase our electricity costs by not using coal so the rest of the world can lower their costs by using American coal?
• If you believe that coal-fired power plants produce very harmful emissions such as mercury and sulfur, is it better to have our coal burned in power plants most of which are not as well scrubbed as our power plants?  Of course, I have shown that mercury is not the problem our EPA has made it out to be here and here.

Fracking - Its Water and Land Use Advantage

Deroy Murdock has an interesting article on fracking and its green advantages on the CFACT website.  Fracking is often denounced because of its use of water to fracture deep shale formations to allow trapped natural gas to flow to the collection pipe.  Yet, compared to many other sources of energy, especially many favored by so-called greens, fracking actually uses very little water.  See the amazing comparison chart below and evaluate for yourself how distorted a viewpoint many so-called greens and environmentalists promulgate.

So contrary to the impression many people have, fracking uses far less water to produce a million BTUs of electricity than do nuclear power, coal, corn ethanol, or soy biodiesel.  But note that natural gas, nuclear power, and coal all use vastly less water than do the so-called renewable energy fuels.

Let us look at the land use comparison as well:

Once again, natural gas as a source of energy does best with respect to land use.  Note that nuclear energy and coal use less land than any of the so-called renewable energy sources, especially less in the case of solar and wind energy.

Murdock also points to the "Cuisinart" nature of the wind generation farms with respect to birds and bats.  Some versions of solar energy plants that use mirrors to concentrate solar light deal out death to birds by frying them.  So wind and solar have a wildlife cooking theme, leaving fracking with a wildlife preservation advantage.

Of course none of this would matter if fracking had proven a significant cause of ground water contamination.  Even the EPA with its determination to undermine fossil fuels as energy sources has not been able to document any significant ground water contamination.

Still another concern with solar and wind power generation is the fact that these plants are usually far from population centers and due to their low-density energy generation over a large plant area, they have a huge copper wire requirement.  In addition, each wind power generator uses about 3 tons of copper in its pick-up coils in its electrical transformer.  Given the increased cost of copper in recent times, this large copper requirement is not an insignificant cost factor in the price of electricity from solar or wind energy plants.

King Coal Will Continue to Rule the World

The renewable energy, non-fossil fuel phantom is not about to replace Coal as the King of World Electric Power Generation.  The Western European attempt to replace coal with wind energy and solar power has only proven what was perfectly obvious:  They are unreliable and very expensive.  They are threatening Germany and other nations with severe winter power inadequacies and these are continuing to mount.  Industry is fleeing Germany for less expensive and more reliable electricity power.

The problem is not just that wind and solar power generation plants themselves are unreliable and expensive.  Because these power sources are unreliable, they have to be backed up by natural gas power plants, which can be tuned to higher or lower power outputs relatively rapidly, unlike coal-fired power plants.  The late start and the resistance to the development of shale oil and gas fields by using the well-proven frakking technique has left Europe with only high cost natural gas, much of which is imported from Russia.  The use of coal provides much less expensive and very reliable electric power, but also produces more of the falsely accused CO2 villain.

The European Union has regulations that were designed to reduce CO2 emissions which discouraged coal use altogether and limited natural gas power plants to standby duty, only to be turned on when the wind did not blow or blew too hard.  But, natural gas power plants are too expensive to keep running at less than about 57% of their capacity.  The result is that 60% of European natural gas electric power plants will be closed by 2016.  Power outages will become a frequent occurrence.  It will be miserable for residences and businesses will go out of business or move to other parts of the world.  Many of the big European businesses will continue, at an accelerated pace, to move more manufacturing operations to the US, where power is still more reliable and less expensive in many states despite Obama's best efforts to drive prices sky high.

Idiot European Union regulations or not, Europe will have to build more coal-fired power plants at some point.  According to the World Bank, in 2011 world-wide electric generation plant capacity was just over 22 trillion KWH or 22 billion MWH.  The presently known proposed building plans for coal-fired electric power plants are summarized in the schematic map below.  The 1.4 billion MWH of plants proposed will be a about a 6.4% increase in electric power generation capacity.  The biggest two contributors by far to this increase are China and India.  But, Russia, Turkey, and Vietnam are a distant 3, 4, and 5 by rank.  In Europe, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany are ranked 1, 2, and 3 with their proposed coal power plant increases.  Ukraine and Poland rightly have no qualms about this, but Germany is being driven to it out of necessity.

Given the coal-fired power plant plans of China, India, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, South Africa, and the US, the contribution of Germany would have no significant impact on global warming, even if the failed hypothesis of CO2 emission catastrophe were true.  Obama's madmen and madwomen at the EPA are trying to nix the US building of such power plants and may succeed for awhile.  Eventually, we will learn what Germany is in the process of learning.

China is talking about trying to reduce its coal-fired power plant contribution to its increasing power needs.  However, the projected 2030 electric power plant generation capacity in 2030 is expected to compare with that of 2006 as shown below:

So in 2006, China had a 2.77 trillion KWH capacity and by 2030 it is expected to have an 8.55 trillion KWH capacity.  This is a 3.1 times increase.  Try as China may, the only way that can happen is if the use of coal powered plants greatly increases.  The 2006 coal-fired power plant capacity was 2.19 trillion KWH and it will expand in 2030 to 6.41 trillion KWH.  This is a 2.9 times increase!  The 2030 coal-fired power plant capacity of China will be the equivalent of nearly 30% of the present total world electric power generating capacity.

It is a very good thing that the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming has failed.  The world is not going to be able to avoid the continued and even the increased use of coal.  If it tried, that would be a catastrophe.  The global warming alarmists time is drawing to a close.  King Coal will remain well ensconced on his throne.

European Energy Silliness: Wood is Top Renewable Fuel

Despite the huge investments in wind and solar renewable energy in Europe, the top form of renewable energy is wood biomass.  About half of Europe's much hyped effort to advance renewable forms of energy has wound up in wood fuel according to the 6 - 12 April issue of the Economist.  Even in Germany, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption is wood.  In Poland and Finland, 80% of the renewable energy is from wood.

Wood, unlike wind and solar, is at least reliable.  The EU effort to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 is impossible based on wind and solar.  Wood makes this possible.

Coal-fired power plants have been under pressure due to the production of carbon dioxide, which according to fable will cause catastrophic man-made global warming.  So, the power companies with coal-fired power plants like wood because they can easily modify a coal-fired power plant to mix in 10% wood pellets.  In Great Britain, power plants are given a huge subsidy to use wood and this is causing a number of coal-fired power plants to convert to wood use.

So much wood is being used for fuel that Europe is importing considerable wood.  In 2012, Europe used 13 million tonnes or 13 billion kilograms.  A tonne is a metric ton or 2204.6 pounds.  Europe is expected to use 25 to 30 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2020.  In 2010, wood pellet imports increased by 50%.  Global trade in wood pellets is expected to shoot up from about 10 to 12 million tonnes now to about 60 million tonnes by 2020.  Much of this wood comes from western Canada and the southern U.S.

Consequently, prices for wood are rising rapidly.  Wood pellet prices rose from $116 a tonne in August 2010 to $129 a tonne in December 2012.  Prices of hardwood from western Canada rose by 60% since the end of 2011.  These wood price increases have contributed to the closing of about 20 large saw mills making particle board in Europe over the last five years.  The higher prices are creating difficult times for pulp and paper companies, as well as furniture makers.

Burning wood pellets in coal-fired power plants makes no sense at all.  It was early on claimed that burning wood was carbon neutral, since as the trees grew, they removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  There are many problems with this.  If you use hardwood pellets from western Canada, the output of CO2 from coal-fired plants using 10% wood pellets occurs now and it may take 100 years of new trees growing in western Canada to remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as is being emitted now.  In addition, making the wood pellets uses considerable energy and transporting them from North America to Europe uses still more.  It has been calculated that with the British subsidy of 45 Pounds per MWH of electricity, switching from gas to wood saves one tonne of CO2 emission at a cost of 225 pounds.  That is very expensive for an idea based on a failed hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and a bad accounting of the total carbon dioxide emissions due to using wood pellet as fuel.

There are other considerations.  Land not used to grow trees can be used for other purposes that have value.  Taxpayers have to pay the subsidy money.  Consumers pay higher electricity costs, as well as higher particle board, paper, cardboard, board, and furniture costs.  They are forced to do this on the basis of a false hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and concern for fossil fuel supplies in the face of the huge supplies of coal and natural gas now made available by hydraulic fracturing technology.

European socialism can sure cause Europeans to pursue and enforce some very silly ideas.

Obama NASA Adjusts Temperatures Again to Increase Rate of Rise

The claim that global temperatures are rising at unprecedented and disastrous rates due to fossil fuel use lies at the root of numerous Obama policies harmful to our economy.  Among them are:

• Forcing coal-fired power plants to implement much more rigorous efforts to remove trace amounts of mercury and to sequester CO2 emissions.  Though these regulations are not to take effect until after the election, they are forcing the shutdown of power plants and coal mining operations now.
• The refusal to approve the building of the Keystone XL pipeline.
• The slowdown and minimization of permits to develop oil and gas on federal lands, which are extremely large areas of the Western US.
• The prohibition of offshore leases off the Pacific, Atlantic, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico.
• New federal regulations on fracking which were issued in April.
• New regulations on emissions from refineries, causing them new expenses.
• The new CAFE requirement that cars and light-duty trucks must average 54.5 mpg by 2025.
• Heavy subsidies for electric cars that no one wants even given the subsidy, thereby forcing DOD and other government agencies to buy these undesirable cars.
• Heavy subsidies and mandates requiring the use of electricity from wind, solar, biomass and other green energy which are greatly increasing electricity costs and decreasing the electric grid reliability.

These policies are all made to seem more justified if the rate of the temperature increase in the more recent years can be enhanced and prior temperatures can be suppressed.  In light of this, Randell Hoven very recently discovered that NASA changed their database of global temperatures, once again, going back to 1880.   Some time between early July and September 2012, NASA changed the entire temperature record going back to 1880, with no announcement and no statement with the database.  The biggest changes were to the data prior to 1963 and those changes were generally decreases in the temperature.  The post-1963 temperatures were mostly increased.  This caused the 131-year trend to increase from 0.60 to 0.64 C per century.  While this is a small change, it replicates many earlier temperature adjustments, which generally depressed the earlier temperatures and raised the more recent temperatures.  There appears to be a systematic bias in the temperature adjustments.

Note that the direction of these changes seems very improbable. One would think one of the biggest effects that would require temperature adjustments would be the urban heat island effect.  The population around the world has generally increased greatly since 1880, so there should be downward corrections to compensate for that effect on weather stations in populated areas as the populations grow.  The urban heat island effect adjustments should be all the greater on recent temperature data since many rural temperature stations have been removed from the sensing system and urban stations are now a much increased fraction of the stations submitting data.  Among my earlier posts dealing with the problems of urban heat island effects and adjustments to skew the record toward greater relative temperature increases in recent times are those here, here, here, here, and here.

Hoven notes that despite the temperature changes, the first 8 months of 2012 make it the tenth hottest year in the 131 year record, every month of 1998 was hotter than the corresponding month of 2012, except for tied records in May, and the global trend since 2002 is one of cooling.  And Antarctica has the highest sea ice record ever observed.

The pressure on the Obama NASA to make temperature adjustments to help justify his many economy killing actions might well be very severe in these final weeks before the November election.  At this point, after years of opaqueness on the part of the Obama administration, it is no surprise to have another surprise adjustment of the temperature record to hype the alarmist claims of catastrophic man-made global warming.  After all, one really does need a justification for putting hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of people out of work or preventing them from getting the jobs that would be created if we took good advantage of America's abundant fossil fuel energy resources.  For more on how abundant our fossil fuel resources are, see here, here, and here.

Government Centrally Planned Economy Continues to Kill Job Recovery

The July 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report of the Household Survey without any seasonal correction of data, revealed a loss of 76,000 jobs in July compared to June.  This was rarely reported in the mainstream media.  The nominal, though rather meaningless, unemployment rate went up from 8.43% to 8.56%.  The percentage of the population with jobs dropped to 58.81% from 58.89% in June.  The headline statistic reported by the mainstream media was that 163,000 jobs were added in July.  This was based on seasonally adjusted data from the Establishment report, but there are problems with the seasonal adjustments in this unprecedented recession and there are a record number of self-employed people these days since they cannot find jobs otherwise.  Many of those self-employed people decided in July that they were not really effectively employed any longer.  They had tried self-employment in desperation and failed in the uphill struggle with the Obama economy.  To take the fate of these people into account, we need to examine the Household Survey data, as I have been doing all along in this unprecedented and never-ending recession.

The number of missing jobs is calculated based on the employment workforce of January 2000 when many quality jobs were available and the unemployment rate was 4.04%.  The workforce then was 67.49% of the total non-institutional civilian working age population.  The number of missing jobs in July 2012 is slightly lower than it was in July 2011 by 256,000 jobs, but it is higher by 696,000 jobs than it was in the miserable month of July 2010!  In two years of supposed recovery the number of missing jobs has actually increased by almost 700,000.  This is not a real recovery.  It is all smoke and mirrors.  The percentage of missing jobs compared to those wanted went up from 12.74% in June to 12.86% in July.

Biomedical and diagnostics companies such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Stryker, Covidien, Abbot Labs, Qiagen, Invacare, GE, SurModics, WorldHeart Corp., the Cordis Div. of Johnson & Johnson, C. R. Bard, BioMerieux, Celera, Cardo Medical, Resetta Genomics, and Care Fusion are all laying off employees, many citing the 2.3% tax on all revenues, not profits, from biomedical devices and on clinical testing in ObamaCare, or more accurately, ObamaUncaringTax.

Defense companies are doing the same in anticipation of the large cut-backs in defense spending brought on by the sequestering of defense funds as the Democrat Senate has failed to produce a budget in the entire presidency of Obama, or over 1203 days or 3.3 years.  This budget is required by law for very good reasons, but this Senate is lawless.  A recent study by George Mason University scholars calculates that the sequester cut-backs in military equipment purchases and R&D will result in the loss of about 1 million jobs.  Because the reduction in funds begins on 2 January 2013 and the WARN Act requires companies making large layoffs to give employees 60 days notice, these reductions will substantially have to occur by 3 November 2012.  Identifying the victims and processing such large numbers of lay-offs takes a massive amount of management time and hurts productivity.  The best way to handle such a process is to begin paring employees early, which many of these companies have been and continue to do.  Most of these cuts have nonetheless not yet been announced or made.

The Obama and EPA war on fossil fuels also is killing jobs.  Coal mines are closing and coal-fired electric power plants are closing.  Some railroad jobs will be lost as a result.  Because electricity costs are going up substantially as a result of losing low-cost coal-fired power plants and the mandates for very expensive wind and solar power, many businesses have higher costs and cannot hire added employees or are losing those they had.  The Obama restrictions on offshore and federal lands drilling and exploration for oil have caused many potential jobs to be lost in those activities.  America has an incredible portion of the world supply of coal, oil, and natural gas.  Feeder and long-distance oil pipelines have also not been built, which would have provided many jobs.  Refinery expansions and new refineries are badly needed, but regulations make such investments very hard to make.  This is another lost opportunity and results in higher fuel costs for transportation and higher plastic costs as well.  These higher costs inhibit the growth of many companies and add to reductions in consumer disposable income.  This senseless Obama vendetta has cost Americans many, many jobs.

Good government does not steal so much money and other resources from the productive private sector.  Good government is minimal government and serves only to protect the sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and the pursuit of happiness.  Such legitimate government makes way so that a robust private sector can produce a cornucopia of jobs, products, services, and ideas.  The illegitimate Obama government is greatly inhibiting the private sector and preventing the private sector from generating this abundance of wealth.  The role of government in producing jobs is simply to get out of the way.  That is a fact the Democrat Socialists will never understand.  If you want jobs and a healthy economy, this Obama administration and this Democrat Senate must be dismantled as a result of the November election.

The Real American Energy Opportunities

Gasoline prices are rising at the gas pumps and look as though they will continue to do so for some time.  There are many predictions that the price of regular gas will rise above $4.00 a gallon.  The present recession occurred when it did because a sudden oil price surge was the pin that popped the housing credit balloon.  Ten of the eleven U.S. recessions since the end of WWII were precipitated by a sudden rise in oil prices.  In addition to the instability of the Middle East and the fact that Obama by design has no foreign policy to deal with it, Obama is determined to force fossil fuel prices upward drastically.  Such an action must have an effect similar to an international upsurge in the price of oil.  Our fragile economy may not be able to survive his efforts to rapidly reduce the use of coal, to virtually end exploration and drilling for oil and gas in America and its waters, to penalize CO2 emissions, and to misdirect the economy into expensive and unreliable wind and solar generated electric power.  It will certainly not prosper and generate the millions of jobs we desperately need it to, especially in view of our huge national debt and the unfunded looming liabilities for Social Security and Medicare for the retiring and politically blind Baby Boomer generation.

American energy policy is absolutely critical and should be founded upon the following facts:

• Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a scientifically failed hypothesis.
• Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but is plant food which will only promote plant growth should its concentration in the atmosphere continue to increase due to the warming of the oceans since the end of the Little Ice Age.
• It is not practical and economic for the U.S. to pursue energy independence.  We presently import over 60% of the crude oil we refine.  This imported crude and other petroleum products cost $453 billion in 2008.  Decades of Presidential declarations of our pursuing energy independence have failed to make progress toward the goal.
• The best way to assure the availability of adequate oil and gas supplies is to have as many sources of them in as many areas of the world as possible.  The resulting competition for income will do more to relieve price and availability concerns than any other approach to the problem.
• Presently, 77% of wold oil reserves are owned or controlled by national governments, some of which are unfriendly and many of which are subject to instabilities.  Nationalized oil companies are also inclined to be inefficient, often under-capitalized, and to lack innovation.
• The U.S. has 22.6% of the known world reserves of coal, which leads the world.  Russia has 14.4% and China has 12.6%.  In 2010, despite increases in natural gas use for electric power generation in the U.S., coal still produced 45% of American electric power.  Coal power stations require scrubbers and generate fly ash, but their problems are exaggerated by many environmentalists and Progressive Elitists.
• Ethanol additions to gasoline only provide corn-growing farmers and ethanol refiners with welfare payments and drives food prices upwards.  Ethanol provides neither net energy nor pollution benefits, despite claims years ago that it did both.
• Wind generation and solar power plants are very expensive and exist on the power grid only due to government mandates and subsidies.  These power sources have little utility except in remote locations far from the electric grid or for temporary setups to avoid power hookups.  They are also unreliable and use the land inefficiently.  When on the grid, they require expensive gas-fired power plant back-up.
• The U.S. has huge oil and natural gas reserves compared to those acknowledged by the U.S. government.  The government estimated that Alaska's Prudhoe Bay held 9 billion barrels of oil, but it has already produced 15 billion barrels and is still producing.  The Bakken Formation of North Dakota and Montana is now thought to have up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil, but the government had previously thought it had 25 times less than this amount.  Much of America is effectively unexplored for oil and gas and there are many, many areas worthy of exploration and development.  This situation exists because the government has not allowed exploration in many areas.

Let us discuss a few of the exciting oil and gas opportunities that the U.S. has, if only the Obama gang were not so determined to stifle them.

Northern Economics and the University of Alaska - Anchorage's Institute of Social and Economic Research has just recently released a study concluding that Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf could make Alaska the 8th largest oil-producing region in the world.  This would place it ahead of Nigeria, Libya, Russia, and Norway.  Alaska could produce 10 billion barrels of oil and 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  About 55,000 new jobs would be created and add payroll of about $145 billion nationally.  Because oil royalties are very high, government revenues through the year 2057 would be increased by $193 billion.  The operating life of the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System would be extended by such production.

The development of the many oil shale deposits in the United States holds huge promise and were recently discussed in the Investor's Business Daily article A Shale of Difference.  The known shale oil deposits are shown in the map below:

Late in his presidency, George Bush opened up 2 million acres of federal lands in the Green River Formation to possible development for shale oil and tar sands.  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of Obama's cadre has refused to allow this to happen, claiming that the leases must be reviewed.  Of course environmental groups have also filed federal lawsuits to prevent its development.  The area is thought, by the U.S. Geological Survey, which commonly makes underestimates, to hold 1.5 trillion barrels of oil.  This is six times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and would supply the U.S. with enough oil for 2 centuries of use!  But, despite the recession and the soaring costs of oil, the Obama cadre sees only reasons to prevent the development of this oil source.  After all, it would only make it too easy for Americans to pollute the atmosphere with CO2!  The consequences of such wrongheadedness mean that we will not be producing 2 million barrels of oil a day from oil shale fields as we could have been doing by 2015.  That production would have exceeded the production of the Gulf of Mexico prior to the Deepwater Horizon event.  The now booming Bakken formation of North Dakota could have had some good company and America could have been much richer and had many more jobs.

An ICF International study claims that opening up the federal waters off the Pacific Coast, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico Coast, and the Atlantic Coast for development of oil fields would increase domestic oil production by nearly 1 million barrels a day and 3 billion cubic feet of gas a day.  Allowing efficient and innovative American oil and gas companies to tap these resources as the economics allows would provide a strong steadying hand to the problem of oil and gas availability and price stability for Americans.  The benefits for the American economy over the next several critical decades would be huge.

Yet faced with an exemplary environmental track record in recent years, a fragile economy due to many government interferences, a 13% real unemployment rate with many more Americans underemployed, a lack of good jobs for those without a college degree, an entire Middle East unstable and in revolt, and all of these opportunities for wealth creation, our Progressive Elitist overlords have decided we are best put on a severe energy diet.  Energy Deprivation is Good, say our all-knowing federal and many state masters.

We the People clearly need to mount an Energy Plenitude is Good campaign!  Drill, Baby, Drill!!!!

The Villainy of Businessman T. Boone Pickens

One of the great problems with a mixed economy having a substantial private sector and an overblown government sector, is that businessmen lacking in morals can readily use the government to grant them profits through the government monopoly on the use of force that the businessman cannot gain in competition in a free market. In particular, there are many such immoral businessmen taking advantage of the many energy subsidies and mandates that Congress has been giving out for a very long time. For example, there is the egregious case of the ethanol subsidies and mandates that I have often harped about.

T. Boone Pickens has joined the Orren Boyle and James Taggart crowd of Atlas Shrugged. Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's Lobbying Editor, has written an excellent column on Pickens and "the Pickens Plan," called Congress gives your money to T. Boone Pickens. The small Washington Examiner has become a very good paper for excellent columnists, while the once very good Washington Times has lost much of its value since undergoing a change of editors.

Senators Robert Menendez (D, New Jersey), Orrin Hatch (R, Utah), and Harry Reid (D, Nevada) introduced a bill this last week to provide a $100,000 tax credit for the construction of each natural gas filling station and to double the very big subsidy for buying a natural gas car.

The methane-powered Honda Civic costs nearly $10,000 more than the regular Civic. The savings from using natural gas rather than gasoline does not begin to pay for this initial purchase cost difference. Natural gas cars are already subsidized, since the 2005 energy bill already gives tax credits for natural gas cars. The House version of the bill provides $30 million per year for research on natural gas cars.

Pickens founded and partly owns Clean Energy Fuels Corp. It builds natural gas fueling stations and it is a leader in transporting natural gas. He also has invested in V-Vehicle Company, which makes natural gas cars. Pickens is a wind generator investor as well and that industry also exists on subsidies and mandates. Since 1992, he has been lobbying Congress for natural gas subsidies.

Timothy P. Carney is a columnist worth following. Let me offer some quotes that indicate clearly how he thinks:

Perversely, his recent shift—from selling stuff (such as oil) that people want to buy, to selling stuff (like gas cars and wind power) that people buy only when it’s subsidized or mandated—has elevated Pickens’ reputation from greedy capitalist to world-saver.

“Hostile takeovers” is an inaccurate term for what Pickens used to do. The management didn’t like them, sure, but the transactions in question consisted of shareholders voluntarily giving their stock to Pickens in exchange for Pickens’ money.

Pickens’ new bid actually is hostile. I don’t want to fund his windmills or methane cars. But if I refuse, the IRS will come after me. But instead of“greed” it’s dubbed as “green.”

Europe's Climate Change Leadership

In March 2007, the European Union pledged that by 2020 it would cut carbon emissions by at least 20% from 1990 levels, get 20% of its energy from renewable sources, and make energy efficiency improvements of 20%. Apparently, it was thought to be politically cute to aim for a series of 20% goals for 2020! Better to be cute than rational in politics.

My 14 November 2008 post addressed Europe's leadership also based on a commentary by Driessen. An article in The Economist in the 4 October 2008 issue adds some information on this issue. It says almost every European country is now complaining about their agreement. Britain says it cannot meet the renewable energy goal and Ireland wants protection for its grass-fed cows which emit large volumes of methane. But, most plaintively, the countries of Eastern Europe are worried and upset by these accords.

Poland gets over 90% of its electricity from coal-fired plants. They hope to replace the present power plants with clean coal technology and nuclear power in time, but they are worried about the intermediate timescale. UBS produced a report in February 2008 that the tax on carbon will be so high that 43% of Europe's coal-fired power plants will switch to natural gas. Well, Poland has huge coal reserves, but it has to import natural gas mostly from Russia! So, for understandable reasons of national security, it is very loathe to become dependent upon Russia for its ability to generate electricity. Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary joined Poland on 26 September to sign a joint declaration that the European climate change program would greatly increase their dependence on some countries for their natural gas supply. Apparently they did not have the gumption to state that it was Russia they were worried about.

The Eastern European countries have good reason to worry. In March 2007, the EU pledged "solidarity", a word so associated with socialism that it makes my stomach crawl, should energy supplies be cut-off. They called for increasing the energy supplier vendors and the Nabucco pipeline to bring gas from the Caspian Sea area without passing through Russian control. But, EU countries are individually making deals to undermine Nabucco, such as Germany supporting the Nord Stream gas pipeline deal with Gazprom. Europe's backbone was found to be a flimsy reed during the war in Georgia, with Russia's role as energy supplier being a part of the reason for European accommodation.

Russia is clearly doing everything it can to make Europe its energy hostage. Russia is investing in new pipelines to deliver gas to Europe. It is even trying to control a pipeline from Nigeria to Europe. It is also building a nuclear power plant in its little Kaliningrad enclave, the same one it is putting missiles in aimed at Europe, which is too big for Kaliningrad's needs. They plan to sell carbon-free electricity to Poland, Lithuania, and other nearby countries. Russia is clearly using energy as a means to control and intimidate Europe.

It sure would make more sense for Europe to take its chances that a little more CO2 will do less harm than being beholdened to Russia. If the earth should warm a few tenths of a degree, this would simply be the equivalent of moving a few miles to the south, while Russian control would be as chilling as moving to the North Pole.

Obama: I Want Electricity Costs to Go Up, Up

A tape from earlier this year has surfaced in which Obama pledges to make it so expensive to operate a coal-fired power station that anyone building one will go bankrupt. Presumably HIS plan to heavily tax plants for their CO2 emissions will bankrupt already built power plants as well. Those who mine coal and transport it will lose their jobs in droves. Such a tax will also have to apply to natural gas and to oil-fired power plants, though they emit somewhat less CO2 per BTU of energy. Perhaps this means that some natural gas and oil-fired power plants will survive the socialist Obama's attack upon industrial society and upon the comforts of our homes.

But, these costs have to be passed on to consumers, ....or, the electric companies will hemorage money and will soon be unable to keep generating electricity. Their electricity distribution systems will age and deteriorate. The power companies will not be able to afford to replace old transformers and old, corroded power cables. Power delivery will become ever more unreliable.

Presently, 50% of our electric power is generated from coal, which is also the cheapest source of electricity except for hydroelectric power. Natural gas produces another 20% of our electricity. What does Obama intend to replace 50 to 70% of our electricity generation plants with? Taxpayer subsidized wind and solar power! What a Joker you are Obama! Where is Batman when you need him?

Old people on fixed incomes will not be able to afford to cool and heat their homes. Obama will create new federal programs to provide heat and air-conditioning to those HE favors and the rest of us will be taxed and taxed to pay for their power use. American industries power costs will skyrocket and they will not be able to compete in the world market. The unreliable delivery of power will cost companies huge amounts of money in downtime, destroyed product, and procedures that will have to be redone. American jobs will disappear. A few jobs in alternative energy industries will be generated by tax subsidies, but millions more jobs will be lost. Americans will be hurting as much when they pay their electric bills each month as they did when they were paying $60 or more to fill up their car tank. Of course, with no drilling in the U.S. in places that actually have oil being allowed, the cost of filling your gas tank will increase again.

Why will we have these added taxes on the use of energy? The reason is a completely unproven hypothesis that CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic global warming. Well, we have had increased CO2 for the last 10 years and the temperature has not increased. In the history of the world, much higher CO2 emissions have often occurred during ice ages. Often times they occur as the result of a previous warming of the oceans, which then start emitting more CO2. In any case, most people would benefit from a slight warming, if it were to result. Growing seasons would be longer. Fewer people would want to move to Arizona and Florida. Some warming is not a catastrophe, contrary to the hype.

In fact, now that we are in a sunspot cycle with very low sunspot activity and the next cycle is likely to be long and of very low sunspot activity, the earth is much more likely to cool off. Such a low sunspot activity period is thought to have caused the Little Ice Age. It is particularly insane to pursue drastically damaging economic and tax policies with an already weak economy for the wrongheaded reason of preventing global warming when the earth is not warming and is probably going to be cooling!

Barack Obama is both insane and insanely destructive. HE is anti-capitalism and anti-individual. HE is thoroughly a dogmatic socialist with no understanding of reality. But, HE is a brilliant demogogue and a strangely effective liar. It is clearly a victory of our socialist public schools and our universities that HE is taken seriously and that HIS nonsense is not widely unmasked. Most of our younger people simply have no reasoning ability anymore and are easy victims to carnivores such as HIM. African Americans, who have largely adopted a culture with little regard for learning and knowledge, are following HIM in droves. Unfortunately, HE is so lacking in understanding and wisdom, that HIS presidency will soon be regarded by most as even worse than the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter. The first Black president will be so completely an otherworldly being that the apparent triumph for African Americans will be an American Tragedy. And this is a shame, especially since there are African Americans who would be good presidents.