RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-6-29-and-the-winner-is-germany

Just over six months ago, in December 2021, I asked the question that was on the tip of the tongue of everybody who follows the subject of the ongoing massive “green” transition to fossil-fuel-free energy. Actually, that’s a lie. The question I asked was not on the tip of the tongue of everybody who follows the subject, or even of most of the people who follow the subject, for reasons that to me are completely inexplicable. The question was : “Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Green Energy Wall?”

The candidates that I nominated in that post as potentially the first to hit the “green energy wall” were California, New York, the UK and Germany. At the time, I thought it was obvious that one of those jurisdictions would hit the wall sooner than almost anybody expected. Indeed, I was quite bold in the short time frame that I predicted:

A prolonged period of unfavorable weather (calm and overcast) could cause a serious energy crunch to hit one or both of Germany or the UK as soon as this winter. Or they could get lucky and go another year or two.

Now here we are in June 2022, and I think it’s hard to deny that Germany has in fact hit the “green energy wall.” Let’s consider.

First, here is the definition of the “green energy wall” that I gave in the post:

[O]ne or another of [those states or countries] is highly likely to hit a “wall” — that is, a situation where the electricity system stops functioning, or the price goes through the roof, or both, forcing a drastic alteration or even abandonment of the whole scheme.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epas-de-facto-fracking-curb-permian-basin-environmental-protection-agency-ozone-11656109324?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Biden and his aides keep saying they’re doing everything they can to produce more oil and gas in the U.S. Apparently they think Americans aren’t paying attention, because his Administration keeps making rule after rule to throttle production.

The latest comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, which has announced it may soon deem parts of the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico in “non-attainment” with its ozone standards. Green groups last spring petitioned the EPA to do this to effectively force curbs on shale fracking. The Permian is currently the most productive, and cost-effective, oil shale reserve in the U.S. It accounts for 43% of U.S. oil production.

“The EPA’s process could interfere in the production of oil in Texas which could lead to skyrocketing prices at the pump by reducing production, increase the cost of that production, or do both,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote Mr. Biden this week. “Your administration’s announced action is completely discretionary. Thus, you have the power to stop it.”

Drilling produces volatile organic compounds (VOC) that create ozone when mixed with nitrogen oxides (e.g., from vehicles) and sunshine. EPA recently started using solar-powered air sampling systems to remotely measure emissions in the Permian. If EPA deems them too high, Texas and New Mexico would have to propose plans to reduce ozone, which would likely require limits on drilling.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/30/americans-are-collateral-damage-in-dems-insane-war-on-energy/

Maybe the Jan. 6 hearings are, as some assert, really about distracting Americans from the Democrats’ shocking policy failures. How else can one explain the refusal of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress to address our ongoing energy crisis?

And, no, it’s no exaggeration to call this a crisis. With consumer prices rising at a four-decade-high of 8.6% in the most recent year-over-year comparison, Americans are watching their standard of living fall fast.

A just-released national survey has found that 83% of U.S. households are cutting their personal spending and travel due to soaring inflation. These cutbacks are being driven almost entirely by energy costs, which have spiked nearly 35% in the past year.

The economic disaster Biden has created is ultimately a result of surging federal spending during the pandemic, foolish Fed policies that poured monetary gasoline onto a raging inflation fire, and the ongoing effort by Biden and the Democrats to punish the very companies that provide our energy, threatening them with smothering regulations, painful taxes and even public shaming.

Things have reached a fever pitch of late, with Democrats’ extremist anti-free-market green wing suggesting, as gasoline prices roar past $5 a gallon and cities across the nation face blackouts, we would all be better off if we just nationalized our oil and gas industry.

For the record, no we wouldn’t.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/epas-supply-chain-obstruction-refrigerants-disposable-cylinders-ban-shortage-worthington-china-11656450871?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The pandemic isn’t solely to blame for the broken supply chain. For America’s refrigeration and air-conditioning businesses, the main culprit is the Environmental Protection Agency.

Worthington Industries is the only U.S. maker of lightweight recyclable cylinders for transporting refrigerants. Chinese manufacturers are our main competitors. In April 2021 the Commerce Department found that China acted illegally in subsidizing this market by selling at less than fair market value. Two weeks later the EPA made a surprise announcement that it would ban making nonrefillable cylinders in the U.S. starting July 1, 2025. This will result in shortages and higher prices.

Worthington’s cylinders are used by 99% of the nation’s heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and refrigeration industry. Each weighs about 35 pounds when filled; refillable cylinders, which the EPA permits, each weigh more than 50 pounds filled. The EPA’s ruling will require the industry’s 400,000 employees to carry the heavier cylinders up stairs to rooftop HVAC systems, threatening workplace injuries.

In 2020, Congress passed the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, a bipartisan law that authorizes the EPA to phase out hydrofluorocarbons—substances used for refrigeration with a high global-warming potential.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/06/demolishing-infinite-co2-argument-daniel-greenfield/
Bromley’s argument is important and a reminder that this is a manufactured crisis that is being used to massively enrich some investors while impoverishing millions, and that is being used as a vehicle to radically transform society, that claims to have science on its side, when it actually does not.

A crisis requires a perpetual atmosphere of fear and the insistence that things are getting worse and worse all the time.

“We have already poisoned the atmosphere, we have to repair and heal the Earth and the only way to do that is to remove carbon dioxide permanently,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm bizarrely claimed as part of Biden’s ‘Earthshot” to destroy America’s economy and turn the rest of it over to Communist China.

Bud Bromley makes an important point in his analysis of CO2 levels.

As Ron Clutz summarizes, “Those committed to blaming humans for rising atmospheric CO2 sometimes admit that emitted CO2 (from any source) only stays in the air about 5 years (20% removed each year)  being absorbed into natural sinks.  But they then save their belief by theorizing that human emissions are “pulses” of additional CO2 which persist even when particular molecules are removed, resulting in higher CO2 concentrations.  The analogy would be a traffic jam on the freeway which persists long after the blockage is removed.”

“A recent study by Bud Bromley puts the fork in this theory.  His paper is A conservative calculation of specific impulse for CO2.”

 “In the 2 years following the June 15, 1991 eruption of the Pinatubo volcano, the natural environment removed more CO2 than the entire increase in CO2 concentration due to all sources, human and natural, during the entire measured daily record of the Global Monitoring Laboratory of NOAA/Scripps Oceanographic Institute (MLO) May 17, 1974 to June 15, 1991.  Then, in the 2 years after that, that CO2 was replaced plus an additional increment of CO2,” Bromley notes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/team-bidens-endless-campaign-to-make-energy-expensive-11655848006?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

“Higher costs and more resources devoted to unproductive activity. Sounds like the perfect slogan for the president’s re-election campaign.”

Every week it seems the White House has a new political gimmick intended to suggest opposition to high gasoline prices. But beneath the public relations, voters should observe the broad administrative campaign to make energy more expensive. As if Washington doesn’t already have enough environmental regulators, Biden appointees with no expertise on the subject and no authorization from Congress are attempting to enact climate rules that don’t even appear to be legal. That’s the warning from former leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who must be wondering what on earth has become of the capital markets overseer they used to run.

Last week this column noted the pushback from Senate Republicans to a pending SEC rule that would impose on companies of all kinds vast new reporting requirements on global-warming risks. This is the Biden whole-of-government approach to discouraging the use of fossil fuels, forcing companies to publish more data that may have no impact on profitability but will be useful for climate activists seeking to attack business

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rich-worlds-climate-hypocrisy-energy-fossil-fuel-wind-solar-panel-india-poverty-power-battery-storage-11655654331?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The developed world’s response to the global energy crisis has put its hypocritical attitude toward fossil fuels on display. Wealthy countries admonish developing ones to use renewable energy. Last month the Group of Seven went so far as to announce they would no longer fund fossil-fuel development abroad. Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. are begging Arab nations to expand oil production. Germany is reopening coal power plants, and Spain and Italy are spending big on African gas production. So many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal that the nation will more than double its exports.

The developed world became wealthy through the pervasive use of fossil fuels, which still overwhelmingly power most of its economies. Solar and wind power aren’t reliable, simply because there are nights, clouds and still days. Improving battery storage won’t help much: There are enough batteries in the world today only to power global average electricity consumption for 75 seconds. Even though the supply is being scaled up rapidly, by 2030 the world’s batteries would still cover less than 11 minutes. Every German winter, when solar output is at its minimum, there is near-zero wind energy available for at least five days—or more than 7,000 minutes.

This is why solar panels and wind turbines can’t deliver most of the energy for industrializing poor countries. Factories can’t stop and start with the wind; steel and fertilizer production are dependent on coal and gas; and most solar and wind power simply can’t deliver the power necessary to run the water pumps, tractors, and machines that lift people out of poverty.

That’s why fossil fuels still provide more than three-fourths of wealthy countries’ energy, while solar and wind deliver less than 3%. An average person in the developed world uses more fossil-fuel-generated energy every day than all the energy used by 23 poor Africans.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2022/06/17/the-democrats-capricious-energy-policy-has-been-a-disaster-n1606007

Democrats have spent decades warning that the United States must stop using the most efficient and affordable energy sources or it will be consumed by heat waves, fireballs and cataclysmic weather events. Every flood, every hurricane — every natural event, really — is now blamed on climate change. We have burdened our children with an irrational dread over their future. Then again, many in The Cult of Malthus won’t even have children.

So, why, if we’re on the precipice of this apocalypse, if saving the planet trumps every other concern, is President Joe Biden begging everyone to drill? On the days Democrats aren’t blaming Vladimir Putin for rising gas prices (a cost the president not long ago argued was worth paying for “freedom”), they’re blaming oil companies for profiteering. Wednesday, as the national average hit $5.014 (nearly $2 higher than last year), Biden sent letters to refining companies threatening to once again abuse his executive powers if they do not immediately alleviate high prices — a political appeal to the imaginary “greedflation.”

Biden, who promised a 100% “clean-energy economy” with “net-zero emissions” in a couple of decades, now demands energy companies, already at utilization rates above 90%, invest tens of billions more in new drilling infrastructure, when everyone knows that tomorrow, when prices recede, Democrats are going to go right back to passing laws and regulations that undercut their business. Today, Democrats demand CEOs spend more; tomorrow, they will promise to “hold oil executives accountable” and drag them in front of congressional committees where they will be scolded by economically illiterate windbags.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/06/green-doctors-suitable-cases-for-treatment/

On climate, a lot of medicos are out there on the nuttiest end of the doom spectrum. But I had no idea their hysteria could even out-do and embarrass Greenpeace, The Guardian and Tim Flannery’s Climate Council.

Last month three anaesthetists published a peer-reviewed paper in Australasian Anaesthesia  discouraging birthing mothers from using nitrous oxide for pain relief. The trio warn, “While it may be innocuous for the pregnant woman and unborn baby, that is certainly not the case for the environment.”

About 200,000 Australian pregnant women per year choose the help of nitrous oxide.[1] The learned paper wants them to use more climate-friendly pain-killers, and/or epidurals, hypnobirthing, massage, acupuncture, and Tens — elaborate equipment called “Transcutaneous electric nerve stimulator”. They’re all costlier, but hang the expense.

I hasten to add that two of the trio of authors are females, albeit gung-ho for purported planetary healing. Dr Alice Gynther is from Western Health Melbourne and Fiona Pearson from Sunderland Royal Hospital UK. The lone male Forbes McGain of Western Health is a stalwart of Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA). I’ll chart DEA’s extremism later in the course of my obstetric odyssey.[2]

These three mothers’ helpers write

By educating medical staff and pregnant women about the carbon impact of N2O, ensuring that it is delivered and used as efficiently as possible and considering the use of more carbon-friendly alternatives, we can reduce GHG emissions from the labour ward and help to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ensuring that midwifery, obstetric and anaesthetic staff are aware of the environmental impact of N2O is crucial…