RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-magical-thinking-behind-the-energy-transition

The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time. For progressive politicians here and in Europe, the “energy transition” has achieved totemic status. But it is fundamentally a claim that depends on assessing the future of technology.

While policies can favor one class of technology over another, neither political rhetoric nor financial largesse can make the impossible possible. Start with some basics. It’s not just that currently over 80 percent of our energy needs are met directly by burning oil, natural gas, and coal—a share that has declined by only a few percentage points over the past several decades; the key fact is that 100 percent of everything in civilized society, including the favored “green energy” machines themselves, depends on using hydrocarbons somewhere in the supply chains and systems. The scale of today’s green policy interventions is unprecedented, targeting the fuels that anchor the affordability and availability of everything.

In the U.S., the energy-transition policies center around the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the most ambitious industrial legislation since World War II. Both critics and enthusiasts note that the budget figure advertised when the legislation was passed—$369 billion—isn’t close to the real cost. A comprehensive Wood MacKenzie analysis shows that the Green New Deal’s price tag is closer to $3 trillion.

And that’s not all. Through regulatory fiat, the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly announced rules effectively mandate that more than half of all cars and trucks sold must be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2032. That will demand, and soon, the complete restructuring of the $100 billion U.S. automobile industry. At the same time, an EV-dominated future will also require hundreds of billions more dollars in utility-sector spending to expand the electric distribution system to fuel EVs. Added to that, among other similar administrative diktats, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s newly released “climate” disclosure rules (temporarily on hold) are intended to induce investors to direct billions of dollars toward energy-transition technologies. This rule will entail tens of billions annually just in compliance costs, never mind the shifts to investments it will create.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/19/could-evs-compete-in-a-true-free-market/

It seems we’ve reached “peak EV,” with sales in trouble and assembly line workers losing their jobs. The hard truth is electric vehicle sales would have never reached the level they have if the government had not trespassed into private matters.

The EV troubles are all around. Sales are slowing. Unsold cars have piled up in lots. Surveys plainly indicate that fewer Americans want them. In response to dramatically slowing sales, Ford announced last fall that it was delaying $12 billion in EV investments. Which should surprise no one, considering that the company lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023.

At roughly the same time, General Motors walked away from its EV strategy. Mercedes was excited about its new EVs just a few months back but learned that customers weren’t thrilled about about them. Earlier this year Hertz decided it would dump as many as 20,000 of its EVs. Now Tesla is laying off 10% of its global workforce, meaning around 14,000 former employees will be looking for new jobs.

Rivian is also dropping one-tenth of its workforce. The company’s share price fell 15% when the announcement was made. Production at Lucid, another EV startup, is expected to be “much lower than Wall Street’s expectations,” Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, BYD, the Chinese EV maker that’s heavily subsidized by Beijing, has seen a sharp fall in sales.

For years EV sales have been propped up like a corpse by public policy. The incentives to buy what are considered zero-emission automobiles but clearly are not come at an obscenely high cost. Research by the Texas Public Policy Foundation found that “nearly $22 billion in federal and state subsidies and regulatory credits suppressed the retail price of EVs” by an average of nearly $50,000. Or put another way, “the average model year 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/electricity-prices-biden-green-energy-labor-department-2b4ea2cb?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Do White House officials pay electric bills? They strangely keep saying the President’s climate agenda is reducing electric-power rates even as the cost of running your dishwasher is sky-rocketing, as illuminated by the Labor Department’s consumer-price index.

The nearby chart shows the average change in electricity prices over the last decade. Electric rates remained relatively flat in the seven years before President Biden took office, rising 5%. Thank cheap natural gas. Yet since January 2021 electricity prices have soared 29.4%—about 50% more than overall inflation.

By our calculation, electricity prices have increased 13 times faster under Mr. Biden than across the previous seven years. His policies aren’t entirely to blame. But most of it is a result of the left’s climate agenda, and the price increases will get worse.

Federal regulations, renewable subsidies and state green-energy mandates are forcing fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to retire prematurely. Solar and wind need backup from so-called peaker gas plants, usually at a hefty premium. During power shortages, spot prices can hit $10,000 per megawatt hour compared to $30 to $60 on a normal basis.

State net-metering programs also subsidize people with solar panels for excess power they remit to the grid. People without solar then pay more for the grid’s fixed costs, which are also growing as more renewables are added. In California an average customer without solar pays 10% to 20% more to subsidize solar.

The costs of hardening the grid to support the government’s green energy transition are also increasing, including new high-voltage transmission lines, power transformers and battery storage. The Biden Administration’s electric-truck mandate alone will cost utilities $370 billion to upgrade their networks. Utilities will pass on their increasing costs to customers over time.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-4-9-the-latest-on-international-efforts-to-save-the-planet-through-climate-litigation

When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.” In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”

Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon. Surely, no court would take this seriously. But then, one must take account of the powerful religious hold that the claims of the climate cult have over all those on the political left, not the least over many judges. And then there’s the excitement for a lonely small-town judge of potentially getting to run the entire country by decree without having to go through the bother of getting elected to anything.

So just because this litigation was stupid would not mean that it would have no chance of success. Also, keep in mind that the environmental left has near infinite resources, and never gives up.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/10/democrats-evs-and-tyranny/

Why do Democrats insist on forcing consumers to make choices they don’t want? Americans are making it clear they don’t want electric vehicles, yet Democrats won’t give up their mandate zealotry. Are they driven by authoritarian urges?

A poll taken last month shows that 48% of consumers would not consider buying an EV. That’s up seven percentage points from last year. Only 35% of those who responded to the Gallup poll said they might consider buying one, down from 43% just a year ago. A mere 9% said they were seriously considering an EV purchase. That portion was 12% in 2023.

Yes, EV ownership has increased. In 2024, 7% of Americans own a battery-powered car. Last year only 4% owned an EV.

But this combined with a growing resistance is an indicator that the demand is reaching a peak if it hasn’t already. After all, there are only so many consumers willing to buy an expensive, unreliable, grid-draining and destructive automobile merely for the privilege of demonstrating their green street cred and moral superiority. There are quite a few shallow people in this country but not enough apparently to keep the market warm.

Even with the rank of Democrats – whose positions are built on political superficiality – the EV fever has broken, with 27% saying in 2024 they would not buy an EV compared to 17% last year. Among independents, the “would nots” have grown to 47% from 38%. (A thanks to Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell for asking Gallup to break down the responses by party.)

Which is why the Biden administration and nearly half the states have to force EVs on the people.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/08/gretas-class-war/

It was like a case study in indifference. There was privileged Gen Zer Greta Thunberg and other Euro eco-brats smiling and flicking peace signs as they called on the Dutch government to stop subsidising fossil-fuel companies. Meanwhile, the Dutch people, very few of whom are the offspring of opera singers with the ear of the world media, are suffering one of the largest spikes in energy prices in all of Europe. Their bills are through the roof. They’re reeling from the ‘pain of high energy costs’, as some in the media describe it. And yet in sweeps giggling Greta and her barmy eco-army to agitate for less government backing for energy production, which would likely hike the price even more.

Rarely has the blinkered vanity, the sheer social apathy, of the green movement been so starkly illustrated. It was on Saturday that Greta and chums made their haughty demands of the Dutch government. In a protest at The Hague, hundreds of supporters of the upper-class death cult Extinction Rebellion marched behind a banner saying ‘STOP FOSSIL SUBSIDIES’. Some of the more spirited of these marchers against modernity, including Greta, broke away from the protest and headed to the A12 highway with the intention of blocking it. Because apparently it’s not enough to hit the pockets of the good people of the Netherlands – no, you have to ruin their weekend travel plans, too. Cops intervened and Greta and others were arrested for the crime of impeding a highway.

The press is full of gushing reports of Greta’s arrest. The BBC features an image of its favourite prophetess of doom yelling something as ticked-off cops drag her away. Our heroine only wanted to ‘block… a main road’ in protest against the ‘Dutch government’s tax concessions for companies connected to the fossil-fuel industry’, the Beeb says. What a turnaround from its reporting on the revolting Dutch farmers who also blocked highways, though in their case in opposition to lunatic Net Zero policies rather than in favour of them. Back then, the BBC said farmers had ‘clogged up’ roads and ‘snarled up motorways’ and created an ‘unsafe situation’. So when workers hold up highways, it’s horrifying, yet when time-rich right-on youths do it, it’s heroic? We see you, BBC.

The truth is there was nothing admirable about Greta’s latest temper tantrum over fossil fuels.

Should Donald Trump be elected this fall, he should waste no time in reversing Joe Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. He not only overstepped his authority, he set the country directly on a course that will bring nothing but trouble.

Acting like the authoritarian that the Democrats and media claim that Donald Trump is, Biden, with a pen and maybe a phone, has ordered through his Environmental Protection Agency to issue a rule that will require Americans to replace their internal-combustion engine automobiles with battery-powered cars. The rule doesn’t require Americans to buy electric vehicles, nor does it directly outlaw the sale of automobiles that run on gasoline.

But in effect, it is a mandate and a ban.

Forcing the country into EVs is an egregious abuse of power by executive edict. Biden’s rule has been referred to, for good reason, as “a “crackdown on cars,” a “bloodbath” for consumers and an example of chutzpah. American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers wisely suggests that “the American people need to rise up against this rule and reject it.”

Yes, he has a financial interest in making that statement. But he knows, as do many, that the booted regulatory regime we’re living under “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans,” as Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University law professor, wrote in his 2014 book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-alarmists-bad-science-warming-temperature-05846239?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

I debunked research by the Federal Reserve and top academic economists on the economics of climate change. An author of a paper I debunked then said that three professors from Stanford and Berkeley had done a much better analysis of temperature and growth in an article they published in Nature. I took up the challenge and scrutinized their article. My critique appears in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.

The Nature article is in the top 0.1% of academic economics publications by citations, and it has received glowing press coverage. I downloaded their data and found that, as with the other articles I debunked, the results don’t hold up under scrutiny.

The authors claim that there is an optimal average temperature of 55.5 degrees Fahrenheit for economic growth. Countries colder or warmer than that grow more slowly. The authors then use one of the most extreme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates of warming up to the year 2100 and calculate for each country how much more or less growth that warming would cause. They then calculate the difference in world gross domestic product with warming and without.

Greenland, with an average temperature of 25 degrees, would benefit from warming. The U.S., average temperature 56, would be relatively unaffected. Niger, average temperature 83, would see lower growth from warming. Adding up all countries, the authors say warming would reduce world GDP per capita by 23%.

Every country, from St. Vincent in the Caribbean to China has the same influence on their result. Weighting by population nearly eliminates that result, and adjusting for correlated observations and dropping one or two unusual observations eliminates it completely. The observations aren’t independent, because countries clustered in regions and observations close in time have similar patterns of growth and temperature. An example of an unusual observation is Greenland in 1990. A large mine that generated 12% of Greenland’s GDP closed that year, and not because it happened to be 2 degrees cooler than normal.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/02/black-gold/

“So let’s be clear: Biden didn’t guarantee to only end fossil fuels, he promised to end life as we know it, and giving him another four years would move us closer to that disaster. Remember this when voting in November.”

In 2019, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Joe Biden promised to “end fossil fuel.” Not only has he failed to keep his promise, oil consumption has reached a new all-time high. For this we should all be thankful.

When a climate activist challenged him on that September day about his connections to the co-founder of a liquified natural gas company, Biden, as he has done throughout his career of “public service,” became Joe the Clown. Calling her “kiddo,” he told her to look into his eyes, then said “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

The ever-fawning-for-Democrats media called it an “intimate moment.”

But it was nothing more than a typical “Biden moment” on the campaign trail.

As noted, Biden has not ended fossil fuels nor has he set the country on a path in that direction. Domestic oil consumption hit 20.5 million barrels in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, after falling off in 2020, when the authoritarians demanded that we hide under our beds.

Global consumption has grown, too, reaching 99.6 million barrels a day. And it will continue to swell.