Tag Archive for: energy

How We Can Get the Candidates Talking About America’s Energy Opportunity

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America has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to combine American innovation, American resources, and American freedom to create American energy abundance and become the world’s energy superpower, overtaking Russia and the Middle East.

In 20 seconds, you can tell our politicians, including the candidates that are completely ignoring this issue in the debates–this time to discuss Trump’s feud with Megyn Kelly–that you will only vote for candidates who will seize America’s Energy Opportunity.

Please do so at AmericasEnergyOpportunity.com.

For Energy Industry Employees

America’s Energy Opportunity affects all of us, but you most directly, along with the millions of people who work directly and indirectly with your industry.

Therefore, please tell your colleagues about this campaign. Here is a letter you can send.

Dear ______,

I would like to ask you to take three minutes to stand up for this industry in the upcoming elections.

As you know, last year was a difficult year for our industry, with many bankruptcies and massive job losses.

Unfortunately, Washington is considering many proposals to make it even harder for our industry to produce, move, and sell our product–proposals to tax hydrocarbons, stop hydraulic fracturing projects, and limit exports to our customers. That will mean more job losses, bankruptcies, and damage to our economy. And so far our industry has had no voice in the 2016 debates.

But a movement called America’s Energy Opportunity is fighting back.

At AmericasEnergyOpportunity.com there is a petition to our politicians to leave our industry free to create amazing prosperity for this country. If millions of people sign this petition we will prove to the candidates that we cannot be ignored this election.

Please take 3 minutes to read the petition and sign it–for the sake of your jobs, your families, and this country’s future.

Sincerely,

________

8 Speeches in 2 Days

Last week, I gave 10 speeches–including 8 speeches in 2 days. The 8 were all at one company. Those of you who signed up for this list, welcome.

Lately in my speeches I have been emphasizing, even more than I used to, that clear thinking and communication about energy issues requires the right starting framework. If in our thinking and communication we start with a framework based on human well-being and big-picture thinking, we come to the right conclusions and can explain them convincingly. If we don’t, our thinking is a mess and/or our communication is a mess.

For more on framing conversations the right way, see How to Talk to Anyone About Energy.

Thanks to everyone who came to my presentations last week, and the organizations in Mississippi who sponsored them. I met a lot of bright, motivated people whom I expect to become great energy champions.

New Blog Post by David Biederman: Fossil Fuels Make the Planet More Productive

From the latest blog entry:

“The fact is that when it comes to satisfying humanity’s basic needs, almost nothing is given, as almost everything must be created and produced. The arrangements of elements that make up the planet are not organized by natural processes to optimally support human life. Instead, work is required to transform the planet from an environment of scarcity to one rich with food, clothing, and shelter. The ability to do this work is made possible primarily by the fossil fuel industries?coal, oil and natural gas.”

Keep reading.

This Week’s Power Hour: Amanda Maxham on the Virtues of GMOs

On this week’s episode of Power Hour I talk with Dr. Amanda Maxham, Research Associate at the Ayn Rand Institute, about the incredible advances in genetic modification–and why our society is responding to them with fear and coercion rather than enthusiasm and freedom.

Listen to this episode.

Power Hour: Michael Lynch on Recent Oil Prices

On this episode of Power Hour, I talk to Mike Lynch, President of Strategic Energy & Economic Research, about the recent decline in oil prices.

Tune in.

As always, if you’d like to suggest a new guest for Power Hour, or have me appear on your show, you can send me an email at support@industrialprogress.net, or just reply to this one.

What Trump and Sanders Said about Oil Prices 4 Years Ago by Daniel Bier

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Remember when complaining about the price of gas was all the rage? The public discourse was awash in pseudo-psychology, hand-wringing about “peak oil,” and an array of conspiracy theories to explain why oil cost so much.

There was much ado about corporate “greed” (the cause of all life’s problems), hissing about “speculators,” nationalist chest-thumping about OPEC, self-proclaimed experts warning that Earth was out of oil, and many inarticulate suspicions about George Bush and Barack Obama.

Economists were pretty sure that the price of oil was related to supply and demand, but what did they know? One cantankerous socialist knew the truth:

Pump prices spiked 5% in the past month… Crude oil prices stood at $108 on Friday, up from only double digits at the beginning of the month. …

What’s the cause? Forget what you may have read about the laws of supply and demand. Oil and gas prices have almost nothing to do with economic fundamentals.

Fortunately, when he wrote that in 2012, Sen. Bernie Sanders was ahead of the game, having never read anything about supply and demand at all. Unencumbered by basic economics, he was able to see that Big Oil “gouging” and Wall Street “speculators” were to blame.

Remarkably, right around the time of the fracking revolution, the price of oil and gas started tumbling. I guess Wall Street’s heart grew three sizes that day.

But Sanders didn’t have the only theory. One super smart billionaire figured out that Saudi Arabia was the real problem:

Look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, “Fellas, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not going to do it anymore.”

When Donald Trump diagnosed this problem in 2011, his solution wasn’t just to “call Saudi Arabia” and tell them “you’re not going to raise that f***ing price!” No, he had a practical measure: seize Iraq’s oil fields. “To the victor belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it.”

It’s worth remembering this mass hysteria, although the situation today is somewhat different. The price of oil is below $30 a barrel. The International Energy Agency has warned that the world is now “drowning” in oil.

This week, the price for a particularly low-quality type of oil briefly dipped to negative fifty cents a barrel. That is, producers actually had to pay the refinery to take their oil. Has greed been abolished from the land? Maybe. But there’s also a sensible explanation: the high-sulfur oil is expensive to transport and refine, but the producers still had to get rid of it somehow.

But just a few years ago, it would have been almost unthinkable for refineries to actively discourage oil production. At $140 a barrel, almost any kind of oil is worth refining. And here’s the upshot: it was precisely those high prices that prompted the massive investment in production, exploration, and innovation that led to fracking, the shale revolution, and today’s tumbling prices. It was greedy, profit-seeking oil companies who drove the price of oil down over 80% from its peak in 2008.

It’s important to grasp these lessons now, because at some point, the price of oil — or some other commodity — will rise again, and we will be greeted by the same parade of doomsayers, conspiracy theorists, and would-be regulators that we endured for the last decade.

They’re not gone, they’re not even hiding — they’re leading the race for president.

Bonus economics of gas story: On Monday, local news in Michigan reported that a bidding war between a couple of gas stations briefly resulted in prices below 50 cents a gallon. To understand just how weird this is, the wholesale price of gasoline is about $1.

Is this another sign of irrational generosity sweeping the petroleum industry? No. Gasoline is retailed at razor thin margins; gas is typically about 70% of a station’s revenue, but only 30% of its profit. Gas stations actually make most of their money selling food, cigarettes, and bottled water inside.

Occasionally, gasoline is used as a loss leader: stations will sell gas for cheap (even at a loss) to bring people to the pump, where they can then make more money selling high-margin items like bottled drinks and tobacco.

Daniel BierDaniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

Marco Rubio’s Recent Climate Change of Heart ‘Disingenuous’

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ken fieldsNEW YORK, NY /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — In response to Marco Rubio’s recent campaign event in New Hampshire where the candidate appears to have made a climate change of heart and has called for America to be “number one in wind, and number one in solar, and number one in biofuels, and number one in renewables, number one in energy efficiency. Let’s lead in all of these things,” independent presidential candidate Ken Fields (pictured right) responded by saying:

“For someone who has so vehemently opposed any acknowledgement of the scientific consensus backing the evidence of human-caused climate change due to our planet’s reliance on fossil fuels, Rubio’s change of heart seems disingenuous at best. He has voted against energy efficiency and clean energy tax incentives. It’s hard to believe him.”

When pressed for further comment, Fields stated, “The recent and continued volatility in global oil markets should be evidence enough that energy security is not simply a matter of having and exploiting our own fossil fuel resources, but rather being completely independent of fossil fuels altogether.”

Fields officially launched his campaign last week on January 8th, 2016. His platform revolves around his slogan, “Greatness Must Be Earned” and to do great things, he has advocated the transition to 100% renewable energy for the country over the next 20 years. His policy plan includes, but is not limited to, creating the public and private mechanisms to encourage and nurture the financial markets to participate, a tax holiday for repatriated corporate capital that is invested in renewables and a carbon tax and dividend plan.

For further information on his policies and positions feel free to visit www.kenfields.net.

How to Win Hearts and Minds: From Energy Supporter to Energy Advocate

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In the 2016 election I want to make energy abundance a winning issue—which means that more candidates run on and win on a platform of energy abundance, in contrast to the energy poverty policies many of today’s candidates advocate.

Chances are that if you are on this list, you do, too. But what can you do?

In the next several months out I’ll be rolling out a national energy campaign to impact the 2016 election. But in the meantime, and to prepare for that, there’s a lot you can do to make yourself, your loved ones, or your company incredibly effective at winning hearts and minds on energy.

To understand how, it’s important to understand the 3 key transformations that energy influencers can go through:

  1. From supporter to advocate
  2. From advocate to champion
  3. From champion to thought-leader

Today I’ll discuss the transformation from supporter to advocate.

From Supporter to Advocate

Energy Supporter: An individual who is generally in favor of the most important sources of energy abundance, including fossil fuels, but lacks the motivation and/or capability to persuade others in favor of energy abundance.

Energy Advocate: An individual with the clarity, confidence, and motivation to persuade others in favor of energy abundance.

To become an advocate, an energy supporter requires a) dramatically increased clarity and b) effective tactics to communicate with different audiences.

Clarity is the most important. If you are clear enough about a moral issue you will inevitably become an advocate if not a champion.

Thus, our number one recommendation is to read and/or assign The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which clearly and systematically lays out the moral case for energy abundance in general and fossil fuel energy in particular. In addition, we produce a large amount of online content delivered via social media, email, and websites to enhance clarity on the most current controversies. (See our Facebook, Twitter, and website.)

As a supporter pursues dramatically enhanced clarity, it is important that they simultaneously learn the art of communication—particularly one-on-one communication.

For various reasons there are very, very few individuals who are effective at changing people’s minds on energy one-on-one, so I am currently developing a course called “How to talk to anyone about energy,” available in the next month. If that interests you, let me know, and I’ll prioritize it even more.

In the meantime, we have several online lectures and papers about how to reframe the debate, including “The Key to Winning Hearts and Minds” and “Arguing to 0 vs. Arguing to 100.”

For examples of what’s possible, see the Hearts and Minds section of this newsletter.

If you are a company trying to turn supporters into advocates, and I believe every company should, it is important to motivate employees to learn about the case for their industry—and how to make it. One way to do this is to hold a speech in front of a large group of employees, ideally broadcast to the entire company. Depending on what makes sense for a company, we offer several free video speeches to show, remote speeches and Q&A, or in-person speeches. This gets everyone motivated and gives a common frame of reference. Combined with employee copies of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels which, in bulk, can include a custom page with a message from your company, you are certain to empower a large percentage of your employees to go from supporters to advocates. If you haven’t read it, make sure to check out the story of how Pioneer Resources did just this.

In our next newsletter, I’ll discuss the transformation from energy advocate to energy champion—an individual with a high level of clarity, confidence, and motivation who reaches dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of others.

Power Hour: Steve Hayward on All Things Energy

On the latest episode of Power Hour, “polymath” Steve Hayward and I have a free-flowing discussing of the global energy landscape, from Russian gas to US solar.

Download Episode 118 with Steven Hayward

Subscribe to Power Hour on iTunes

As always, if you’d like to suggest a new guest for Power Hour, or have me appear on your show, you can send me an email at support@industrialprogress.net, or just reply to this one.

Asia Will Build 500 Coal-Fired Power Plants This Year No Matter What the U.S. Does

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Two stories about coal use in Asia highlight the futility of EPA’s efforts to reduce global carbon emissions by straightjacketing the U.S. economy with draconian carbon regulations.

First, there’s The New York Times story that China has been using more coal than anyone thought:

China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, has been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the government previously disclosed, according to newly released data. The finding could complicate the already difficult efforts to limit global warming.

Even for a country of China’s size, the scale of the correction is immense. The sharp upward revision in official figures means that China has released much more carbon dioxide — almost a billion more tons a year according to initial calculations — than previously estimated.

The increase alone is greater than the whole German economy emits annually from fossil fuels.

…

The new data, which appeared recently in an energy statistics yearbook published without fanfare by China’s statistical agency, show that coal consumption has been underestimated since 2000, and particularly in recent years. The revisions were based on a census of the economy in 2013 that exposed gaps in data collection, especially from small companies and factories.

Illustrating the scale of the revision, the new figures add about 600 million tons to China’s coal consumption in 2012 — an amount equivalent to more than 70 percent of the total coal used annually by the United States.

To borrow from the management mantra, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

China has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions from a peak level “around” 2030–assuming anyone knows how much is being produced by then.  However, this pledge isn’t anything exceptional. It’s “little more than business as usual,” writes the Institute for 21st Century Energy’s Stephen Eule. “In other words, the Chinese have committed to doing what they are doing already.”

The second story is that Asia’s appetite coal for it isn’t letting up [h/t GWPF]:

While much attention has been given to a potential peak in China’s coal demand and worries about emissions, in Asia alone this year power companies are building more than 500 coal-fired plants, with at least a thousand more on planning boards. Coal is not only cheaper than natural gas, it is often available locally and has no heavy import costs.

…

“Electricity is increasing its share in total energy consumption and coal is increasing its share in power generation,” said Laszlo Varro, head of the gas, coal and power markets division for the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Some of the biggest growth in coal use is in India, where it meets 45 percent of total energy demand, compared with just over 20 percent each for petroleum products and biomass/waste.

“We’re absolutely sure India’s coal demand will continue to grow,” Varro said.

Coal will continue to be used in developing countries because it’s a cheap source of electricity. To think U.S. negotiators at upcoming climate talks in Paris will be able to convince China and India to abstain from using cheap energy to better the lives of their citizens is living in a fantasy world.

These facts won’t stop the Obama administration from touting EPA’s Clean Power Plan as the United States’ key contribution to the Paris talks. For them it’s full speed ahead to push aside cheap and abundant coal as a source of electricity no matter the costs to our economy.

As Eule writes:

What’s more of a mystery is why the administration is content to throw away the United States’ energy edge in favor of an agreement that will put us at a competitive disadvantage for no discernible environmental impact. In fact, when other nations choose not to impose carbon restrictions as stringent as those in the U.S., we will be likely to see “carbon leakage,” where emissions are not reduced at all, and instead simply moved (along with the jobs that come with them) to our global competitors.

RELATED ARTICLES:

New York Attorney General Tries to Criminalize Scientific Dissent on Climate Change

Spooking Small Businesses: Scary Regulations Lurking in Washington by J.D. HARRISON

The Wide Canyon Between Carbon Regulations and the Real World by  SEAN HACKBARTH

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of a coal-fired electric power plan in Datong, China. Photo credit: Stefen Chow/Bloomberg,

Poll: 78% of Colorado voters favor increased U.S. oil and natural gas development

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DENVER, Colorado /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — For the 2016 election, 68 percent of registered Colorado voters say they are more likely to support a candidate who supports producing more oil and natural gas, according to a new telephone poll conducted for the Colorado Petroleum Council (CPC) by Harris Poll among 604 registered Colorado voters.

“This poll shows that energy is a top issue for voters next year because it plays a key role in job creation and economic growth,” said Tracee Bentley, executive director of the CPC. “Colorado voters understand the opportunities that pro-development policies create and the need for an all-of-the-above energy policy that helps produce more domestic energy and lower energy costs for American consumers.”

Seventy-eight percent of registered Colorado voters support increased production of oil and natural gas resources located here in the U.S., and the poll also found that:

  • Majorities of Republicans (95 percent), Independents (84 percent) and Democrats (69 percent) say that producing more oil and natural gas here in the U.S. is important to them.
  • Majorities of registered voters believe increased access could help:
    • create jobs (85 percent),
    • strengthen energy security (83 percent), and
    • lower consumer energy costs (79 percent).

“Candidates in tomorrow’s debate should take this opportunity to discuss the smart energy policies that concern Coloradans, growing our nation’s still shaky economy, creating well-paying jobs and maintaining our nation’s global energy leadership,” said Bentley. “That includes expanding access to domestic oil and natural gas resources, ending the ban on crude oil exports, repealing the RFS, approving the Keystone XL pipeline, and reining in duplicative and unnecessary regulations.”

The CPC is a division of API, which represents all segments of America’s oil and natural gas industry. Its more than 625 members produce, process, and distribute most of the nation’s energy. The industry also supports 9.8 million U.S. jobs and 8 percent of the U.S. economy.

Methodology

The study was conducted October 15-18, 2015, by telephone by Harris Poll on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute among 604 registered voters in Colorado, with a sampling error of +/- 4 percent. A full methodology is available upon request.

“What America is Thinking on Energy Issues” is a public opinion series provided by API, offering data to inform policy discussions and ensure policymakers and others know Americans’ perspectives on key energy issues.

RELATED ARTICLE: Obama’s carbon reduction plan under attack from 24 states and Republicans

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of a Colorado oil drilling rig is via Facebook.

Four Fallacies that Fracktivists Use to Scare You

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To make intelligent decisions about the future of energy, we need to think big-picture—to look carefully at the benefits and costs to human life of every course of action. Unfortunately, in today’s energy debate we are taught, with politically incorrect forms of energy such as fossil fuels, to only look at the negative picture—often highly exaggerated or taken out of context.

How do we identify and counter this cultural bias against fossil fuels? That’s the topic of my latest Forbes column:

There are at least four common fallacies used to discourage big-picture thinking and breed opposition to fossil fuels. These are things to be on the lookout for when you follow the cultural debate; they are everywhere, and all four are used to attack what might be the most important technology of our generation: shale energy aka “fracking.”

The largest fossil fuel controversy today, besides the broader climate change issue, is fracking—shorthand for hydraulic fracturing—one of several key technologies for getting oil and gas out of dense shale rock, resources that exist in enormous quantities but had previously been inaccessible at low cost.

Fracking has gotten attention, not primarily because of the productivity revolution it has created, but because of concerns about groundwater contamination. The leading source of this view is celebrity filmmaker Josh Fox’s Gasland (so-called) documentaries on HBO. Looking at how these movies have affected public opinion is an instructive exercise.

License to Kill: Wind and Solar Decimate Birds and Bats

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According to a study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, every year 573,000 birds (including 83,000 raptors) and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines — 30 percent higher than the federal government estimated in 2009, due mainly to increasing wind power capacity across the nation.[i] This is likely an underestimate because these estimates were based on 51,630 megawatts of installed wind capacity in the United States in 2012 and wind capacity has grown since then to 65,879 megawatts. And, at one solar power plant in California, an estimated 3,500 birds died in just the plant’s first year of operation.[ii]

Over the past five years, about 2.9 million birds were killed by wind turbines. That compares to about 800,000 birds that a Mother Jones Blog estimated to have been killed by the BP oil spill that occurred in April 2010[iii]—5 years ago–despite not all of them showing visible signs of oil.[1] Nevertheless, BP was fined $100 million for killing and harming migratory birds due to that oil spill. In comparison, the nation’s wind turbines killed more than 3 times the number of birds than did the BP oil spill over the past 5 years. And, wind turbines routinely kill federally protected birds and eagles.

Since the study estimating bird and bat deaths was completed based on 2012 wind capacity data, U.S. companies have installed more wind power due to federal and state incentives such as the Production Tax Credit that provides 2.3 cents per kilowatt hour of wind generated power over the first ten years of operation. Since 2012, the United States added over 14,000 megawatts of additional wind capacity with total wind capacity at 65,879 megawatts as of the end of 2014 — 16 times higher than wind capacity in 2001.[iv]

The Ivanpah Solar Power Plant

The Ivanpah solar power plant is a 377 megawatt solar facility located in the Mojave Desert in California and is owned by Google, BrightSource Energy, and NRG Energy. The facility has 350,000 heliostat mirrors that reflect heat toward central towers and scorch hundreds of birds in midair—turning birds into “streamers.” Ivanpah is the largest power tower project in the world and it has received a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.

The mirrors at Ivanpah span across an area four times the size of New York’s Central Park and focus sunlight onto receivers atop three 45-story power towers, boiling a liquid that turns turbines to create electricity. Fish and Wildlife Service officials warned that Ivanpah may act as a “mega-trap,” where insects attract small birds that are killed or incapacitated by the solar flux. Those birds attract larger predators thereby creating a food chain vulnerable to injury and death.[v]

The facility is estimated to have killed 83 different species of birds. The most commonly killed birds were mourning doves (14 percent of fatalities), followed by yellow-rumped warblers, tree swallows, black-throated sparrows and yellow warblers. Of the birds that died from known causes, about 47 percent died from being toasted by the heat of the solar flux. Just over half of the known deaths were attributed to collisions.

Ivanpah is testing ways to reduce bird deaths, including with software to reposition the heliostats to reduce the level of elevated flux and minimize collisions; installation of light-emitting diodes that are not attractive to insects and help reduce the prey base for birds; anti-perching devices; and the use of avian deterrents like foul smells and the sounds of predators.

Fines for Killing Birds

Besides BP being fined $100 million for killing and harming migratory birds during the 2010 Gulf oil spill, in 2009, Exxon Mobil paid $600,000 for killing 85 birds in five states and PacifiCorp, which operates coal plants, paid more than $10.5 million for electrocuting 232 eagles that landed on power lines at its substations. The first wind farms to be fined took place in November 2013 when Duke Energy paid a $1 million fine for killing 14 eagles and 149 other birds at two wind farms in Wyoming from 2009 to 2013.[vi] To date, no solar facilities have been fined. The fines are related to protections in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. The death of an eagle or other protected bird is a violation of federal law, unless a company has a federal permit.[vii]

The Obama Administration on December 9, 2013, finalized a regulation that allows wind energy companies and others to obtain 30-year permits to kill eagles without prosecution by the federal government. The American Bird Conservancy filed suit in federal court against the Department of the Interior, charging it with multiple violations of federal law. [viii] Nonetheless, the Shiloh IV Wind Project in California, for example, received a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service allowing it to kill eagles, hawks, peregrine falcons, owls and songs birds while not being subjected to the normal prohibitions afforded under the federal Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Treaty Act.[ix]

Other Bird and Mammal Deaths

According to a 2014 study by federal scientists in the journal The Condor: Ornithological Applications, building collisions are estimated to kill 365 million to 988 million birds annually in the United States. And, according to a 2013 report from scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and FWS, stray and outdoor pet cats kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals, mostly native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles, annually. But these deaths do not excuse the wind and solar industry’s killing of birds. Unless, of course, BP and ExxonMobil should be excused as well–instead of playing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

Conclusion

Despite bird and bat deaths at wind and solar farms, few have been fined for violating the law while oil and electric generating companies have paid heavily for such violations. It will be interesting to see if this will change as the wind and solar industries grow.

[1] In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service reported only 6,147 birds killed. Seehttp://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/pdfs/ConsolidatedWildlifeTable041711.pdf

[i] Daily Caller, Wind Turbines Kill More Birds Than the BP Oil Spill, April 20, 2015,http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/20/wind-turbines-kill-more-birds-than-bp-oil-spill

[ii] Greenwire, 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah ‘power towers’ in first year, April 24, 2015,http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2015/04/24/stories/1060017406

[iii] Mother Jones, The BP Oil Spill Happened 5 Years Ago Today. We are Still Paying the Price., April 20, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/04/five-year-anniversary-deepwater-horizon-bp-spill

[iv] American Wind Energy Association,http://www.awea.org/Resources/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=5059

[v] National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, Avian Mortality at Solar Energy Facilities in Southern California, http://www.eenews.net/assets/2015/01/19/document_gw_03.pdf

[vi] Forbes, Republicans Develop an Interest in bird deaths, March 29, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2014/03/29/republicans-develop-an-interest-in-bird-deaths/

[vii] The Christian Science Monitor, Eagle Deaths: Unprecedented $1 million fine for Wyoming wind farms, November 23, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2013/1123/Eagle-deaths-Unprecedented-1-million-fine-for-Wyoming-wind-farms

[viii] American Bird Conservancy, American Bird Conservancy Sues Feds Over 30-Year Eagle Kill Rule, http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/140619.html

[ix] Master Resource, Wind Power Slaughter, July 16, 2014, https://www.masterresource.org/cuisinarts-of-the-air/windpower-slaughter-shiloh-1/

Electricity from New Wind Three Times More Costly than Existing Coal

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WASHINGTON – The Institute for Energy Research released a first-of-its-kind study calculating the levelized cost of electricity from existing generation sources. Our study shows that on average, electricity from new wind resources is nearly four times more expensive than from existing nuclear and nearly three times more expensive than from existing coal. These are dramatic increases in the cost of generating electricity. This means that the premature closures of existing plants will unavoidably increase electricity rates for American families.

Almost all measures of the cost of electricity only assess building new plants–until now. Using data from the Energy Information Administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, we offer useful comparison between existing plants and new plants.

America’s electricity generation landscape is rapidly changing. Federal and state policies threaten to shutter more than 111 GW of existing coal and nuclear generation, while large amounts of renewables, such as wind, are forced on the grid. To understand the impacts of these policies, it is critical to understand the cost difference between existing and new sources of generation.

The following chart shows the sharp contrast in the cost of electricity from existing sources vs. new sources:

LCOE press png

Click here to view the full study.

This study was conducted by Tom Stacy, a former member of the ASME Energy Policy Committee, and George Taylor, PhD, the director of Palmetto Energy Research. The source of the calculations used in this study is a compilation of data reported by the generators themselves to FERC and EIA.

The Poor Need Affordable Energy by Iain Murray

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Affordable energy is fundamental to what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Fact” of the explosion of human welfare. It remains central to the reduction of absolute poverty. Yet, some Western governments are working to increase energy costs, purportedly to combat global warming.

What they are really combating is prosperity.

This is perverse and regressive. In America and Europe, energy takes up a much larger share of poor households’ budgets compared to other income brackets. For instance, a household with an annual income between $10,000 and $25,000 spends well over 10 percent of its budget on energy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And a January 2014 study for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity found that “households earning $50,000 or less spend more on energy than on food, spend twice as much on energy as on health care, and spend more than twice as much on energy as on clothing.”

Increasing the cost of energy also harms people’s health. That’s because energy use is so fundamental to modern life that it can take precedence over other household expenses — including health care. The National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association found that an increase in energy costs led 30 percent of poor households to reduce purchases of food, 40 percent to go without medical care, and 33 percent to not fill a prescription.

The term “fuel poverty” describes households in cold climates that are not able to keep their home warm at an affordable cost. The primary causes of fuel poverty are low income, poor insulation, and high energy prices. Eight percent of households in Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom suffer from some form of fuel poverty, according to the European Union’s European Fuel Poverty and Energy Efficiency consortium project. In the UK, where there is much more data owing to an official designation of fuel poverty, a household is defined as fuel poor if it has to spend 10 percent of its income on essential energy services; 20 percent of households meet this definition.

Despite this, Western governments are pursuing policies to increase energy prices. President Obama said during his first election campaign that electricity rates from coal would “necessarily skyrocket” under his policies; this may finally come to pass under his EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan. In Western Europe, energy costs have increased due to a combination of renewable energy subsidies and mandates, bans or moratoria on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), hostility to nuclear energy, and Russia’s control of natural gas supplies for much of the continent’s eastern half.

Despite the president’s policies, US energy markets have shown that innovation beats regulation every time. Even though huge swaths of American energy resources are locked up under untouchable federal lands, energy production has boomed over the past decade, thanks to the development of horizontal drilling and improved hydraulic fracturing techniques. These technological advances have led to lower electricity prices from natural gas. And subsurface property rights have benefited both urban and rural households through royalty payments for energy production on their land.

Moreover, as gas became more affordable, it led to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, thanks to energy innovation, America met the emissions targets set for it in the Kyoto Protocol, without any need for burdensome laws and regulation — or for the Kyoto Protocol itself. Whatever you think of the need for carbon emissions reduction, energy innovation is achieving that goal.

This is all to the good, but more energy innovation is possible. They key is greater liberalization. America should free up federal lands to energy development, rather than pickle them in regulatory aspic. Europe could enjoy its own energy boom by approving hydraulic fracturing.

Reducing artificially high energy costs is the first step in tackling fuel poverty. In America, the market is alleviating the burden of energy costs on poor households, even as the government goes the wrong way. That shows us the way forward for tackling the much greater problem in the developing world.


Iain Murray

Iain Murray is vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Is John Kerry a Moron?

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John Kerry testifying before Congress on Vietnam War.

I can recall John Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State, from the days he testified to a congressional committee and slandered his fellow soldiers as the spokesman for Veterans Against the Vietnam War in 1971. I was appalled then and my opinion of the man has not changed since those days. I opposed the war, too, but I did not blame it on the men who were conscripted to fight it, nor did I believe the charges he leveled against some of them.

These days Kerry is engaged in securing an agreement with the Iranians, if not to stop their program to make their own nuclear weapons than to slow it to a later date. Never mind that the Iranian government is listed by our own government as a leading sponsor of terrorism worldwide or that they have signed such agreements in the past and then tossed out the inspectors.

Kerry is convinced that the Obama administration can get an agreement that is, in his own words, “not legally binding”, nor is it a treaty that the U.S. Senate would have to vote for or against. In point of fact, President Obama can make the deal—sign the agreement—just as Presidents have done for over two hundred years. It can then be abrogated by whoever the next President will be.

Why Obama and Kerry are doing this defies my understanding. It gives the Iranians more time to reach nuclear capability. It is opposed by every nation in the Middle East. It puts every nation within reach of Iran’s missiles at risk and it virtually guarantees the destruction of Israel, a goal of Iran’s Islamic Revolution from the day it was born. Kerry is negotiating with people who took our diplomats hostage in 1979 and have played a role in the deaths of many Americans since then.

Is John Kerry a moron? I think so.

I asked myself this question in regard to another area of U.S. policy which the Secretary of State is also championing even if millions around the world have concluded otherwise.

On March 2nd, Kerry addressed the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C, telling them what he has been saying in many forums. Let us understand that “climate change” is the name being used to replace “global warming”, because the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the past 18 years or so. And let us understand that “climate change” has been happening for 4.5 billion years.

Kerry said, “So when science tells us that our climate is changing and human beings are largely causing that change, by what right do people stand up and just say, ‘Well, I dispute that’ or ‘I deny that elementary truth’?”

The problem with this is that human beings are not causing the planet’s climate change. Forces far greater than humans are involved, not the least of which is the Sun.

As for science, its most fundamental methodology is to constantly challenge the various ‘truths’ put forward as theories until they can be proved to be true by being independently reproduced. Nothing about the “global warming” theories has been true. All of the computer models on which it was based have been proven inaccurate. In some cases, they were deliberately rigged.

On television meteorologists remind us that every day, indeed, from morning to night, the temperatures of the area about which they are reporting are in a constant state of change. They show us satellite photography and mapping that demonstrates how dynamic the weather is on any spot on Earth. The climate, however, is measured in decades and centuries. Every one of the doomsday predictions of the global warming “scientists” and propagandists have been wrong.

The enemies of the use of energy to enhance and improve the lives of the residents of Earth began to claim in the 1970s and 80s that carbon dioxide (CO2) was threatening the climate.

At best, CO2 is a very minor element of the Earth’s atmosphere, about 0.04%, which gets it rated as “a trace gas.” As such, it plays no role with regard to the climate.

Kerry asserted that climate change is “one of the biggest threats facing our planet today” and should be ranked with terrorism, epidemics, poverty and nuclear proliferation…” Oh, wait! Isn’t this the same Secretary of State negotiating with Iran to allow it to become a nuclear power?

And what “solution” does he offer to reduce the “threat” of climate change? Kerry urged that the U.S. transition away from “dirty sources of energy” such as coal, oil and natural gas.

Writing in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley noted that “In 2015, about 87% of the energy that the world consumed came from fossil fuels, a figure that—remarkably—was unchanged from 10 years before. This roughly divides into three categories of fuel and three categories of use: oil used mainly for transport, gas used mainly for heating, and coal used mainly for electricity.”

Fossil fuels have made the difference between modern life and burning cow dung to cook dinner. A billion people on Earth still do not have electricity.

Less obvious, but significantly more threatening is the White House effort to get the U.S. signed up for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its International Climate Justice tribunal. This is a follow-up to the 1977 Kyoto Protocol that was unanimously rejected by the U.S. Senate. Why? Because such treaties threaten the sovereignty of the U.S. and, just as importantly, because the entire United Nation’s climate program is a huge fraud.

This is what John Kerry wants the U.S. to agree to, just like the Iran deal, and just to be sure the U.S. Senate, as mandated by the U.S. Constitution, doesn’t have a say in it, he and the President are calling these deals anything other than a treaty.

Is John Kerry a moron? Maybe not as dumb as he seems to be, but surely cynical and devious.

Unfortunately, he is the Secretary of State.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

RELATED ARTICLE: California Dem Warns of Global Warming-Induced Prostitution

Obama Wants to Close Off Energy-Rich Stretch of Alaska to Development

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Pultizer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin, wrote in the New York Times that global energy markets are at an inflection point. The role of the world’s “swing producer” has swung to the United States:

By leaving oil prices to the market, Saudi Arabia and the emirates also passed the responsibility as de facto swing producer to a country that hardly expected it — the United States. This approach is expected to continue with the accession of the new Saudi king, Salman, following the death on Friday of King Abdullah. And it means that changes in American production will now, along with that of Persian Gulf producers, also have a major influence on global oil prices.

Even though hydraulic fracturing had led this shale boom, conventional oil production is still important.

This makes the Obama administration’s request to close off a big portion of Alaska’s energy reserves to development especially disappointing:

President Barack Obama is proposing to designate the vast majority of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a wilderness area, including its potentially oil-rich coastal plain, drawing an angry response from top state elected officials who see it as a land grab by the federal government.

“They’ve decided that today was the day that they were going to declare war on Alaska. Well, we are ready to engage,” said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and chair of the Senate energy committee.

The designation would set aside an additional nearly 12.3 million acres as wilderness, including the coastal plain near Alaska’s northeast corner, giving it the highest degree of federal protection available to public lands. More than 7 million acres of the refuge currently are managed as wilderness.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the area has over 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

The wilderness designation will require Congressional approval—not likely with this Congress. However, the Washington Post reports that the Interior Department will take action to limit energy development there [H/t Noah Rothman]:

While Congress would have to approve any new wilderness designation, Interior will immediately begin managing the iconic area under the highest level of protection the federal government can offer.

President Obama, who has not been to ANWR and ironically filmed his announcement on the fuel-guzzling Air Force One said, we must ensure “that this amazing wonder is preserved for future generations.”

In contrast Jonah Goldberg, someone who has visited ANWR, had a different description of the area where oil development would take place:

The oil is on the coastal plain at the very top of ANWR on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And that ain’t beautiful. Believe me. Winter on the coastal plain lasts for nine months. Total darkness reigns for 58 straight days. The temperatures drop to 70 degrees below zero without wind chill. This is the time of year when the oil companies would do almost all of their work; when nary a caribou nor any other creature would be dumb enough to venture out on to the frozen tundra for long. Regardless, ANWR’s summer is no picnic either. The coastal plain is covered in a thick brick of ice for much of the year. When it melts, it creates, well, puddles. Lots and lots of puddles – and mud. This provides the lebensraum that mosquitoes and other flying critters need to stretch their wings.

But back to the President. In last week’s State of the Union Address he took credit for the oil and natural gas boom, but the facts tell a different story. Under his watch, oil and natural gas development has decreased on federal lands while increased on private and state lands. In fact, his administration has put up barriers to energy development. The ANWR proposal is the latest.

The administration is expected to release a draft of its offshore lease plan. That may include allowing energy development off the Atlantic coast. Such a decision will be welcome for its economic and job growth and bipartisan support, but it will further confirm how incoherent the President’s energy policy is.

Obama’s War on U.S. Energy

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September 19th was an anniversary you did not read or hear about in the nation’s news media. It marked six years—2008—since the first permit application for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was submitted to the federal government. Can you imagine how many jobs its construction would have created during a period of recovery from the 2008 financial crisis? President Obama is universally credited with delaying it.

Thomas Pyle, the president of the American Energy Alliance, pointed out that World War II, the construction of the Hoover Dam, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition all took place in less time. In a September Forbes article, he noted that “Earlier this year a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 65 percent of Americans support building the pipeline, while only 22 percent oppose it. In Washington three-to-one margins are usually referred to as mandates.”

In contrast, in March 2013 the then-Interior Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, boasted “In just over four years, we have advanced 17 wind, solar, and geothermal projects on our public lands.” It is not these projects that Americans depend upon for energy. The opposite is a stark explanation why coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy remain the heart blood of the economy.

AA - Keytone in Perspective

Infographic courtesy of UTA Consultants. For a larger view click on the image.

The Daily Caller reported in July that the “U.S. Bureau of Land Management is currently sitting on a backlog of 3,500 applications that need approval to move forward on drilling for oil and natural gas on federal land,” just part of Obama’s war on U.S. energy.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, fossil fuels met 82% of U.S. energy demand in 2013.

Petroleum, primarily used for transportation, supplied 36% of the energy demand in 2013. Natural gas represented 27%. Coal represented 20% and generated almost 40% of all electricity. In the six years since Obama took office that is a loss of 10%!

The much ballyhooed “renewable sources” of energy, justified by the false claim that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming or climate change, are a very small part of the nation’s power providers. Wind power represented 1.6% and solar power represented three-tenths of 1%! Hydropower supplied 2.6% making it the largest source of so-called renewable energy.

Politically, it has been Democrats advocating renewable sources and siding with the President’s delay of the oil pipeline and the Environmental Protection Agency’s assault on coal-fired plants to produce electricity. By contrast, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has been busy putting forth legislation to fix aspects of our energy problems and needs.

Some of the bills that were introduced included H.R. 2728: The Protecting State’s Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act; H.R. 3: The Northern Route Approval Act (regarding the keystone XL Pipeline; H.R. 1900: The Natural Gas Pipeline Permitting Reform Act; H.R. 2201: The North American Energy Infrastructure Act; and H.R. 6: The Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act, intended to expedite the export of liquefied natural gas to our allies around the world. The global market is growing at a colossal pace.

These bills will likely all die in the U.S. Senate, controlled by the Democratic Party. The Nov 4 midterm elections can change that if enough Republicans are elected to gain control.

It’s not just natural gas that is helping the economy improve. The Financial Times reported in late September that “The U.S. is overtaking Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of liquid petroleum, in a sign of how its booming oil production has reshaped the energy sector.” Why? “The U.S. industry has been transformed by the shale revolution, with advances in the techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling enabling the exploitation of oilfields, particularly in Texas and North Dakota.”

The only places you won’t find oil drilling are on federally controlled lands. The same holds for coal and natural gas.

This is in keeping with a virtual war on U.S. energy waged from the White House. Consider what we have witnessed:

  • Obama has refused to let the Keystone XL pipeline be built.
  • Billions wasted on loans to renewable energy companies, many of which like Solyndra and Solar Trust of America went bankrupt.
  • Obama made electric cars like the Chevy Volt part of his energy policy, providing subsidies but their high cost and low mileage capacity has resulted in few sales.
  • Obama and the EPA advocated a cap-and-trade tax on greenhouse gas emissions when there has been no global warming for 19 years and carbon dioxide plays no role whatever in the Earth’s climate.
  • The Obama administration terminating the construction of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada despite nearly $15 billion already spent on this necessary repository.

These are just a few examples, but in the meantime, the U.S. still requires that a valuable food commodity, corn, be turned into ethanol, an automotive fuel additive, that (a) reduces the millage in every gallon and (b) increases its cost at the pump. As Seldon B. Graham, Jr., a longtime energy industry consultant and observer, notes that “Ethanol production peaked in 2011 at 6% of total oil demand.” Favoring replacing imported foreign oil with American oil, Graham says “Americans would have saved $64.7 billion on the oil price since 2009.”

Americans are afflicted by a President and his administration that for political and environmental reasons are costing them trillions in needless, senseless energy costs, loans and subsidies, and efforts to impose laws that have no basis whatever in science.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

ACTION ALERT: Stand Up for Florida Energy Independence!

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Pictured: New oil rig, North of Gum Slough, Big Cypress Swamp, Florida circa 1935

Oil and natural gas have been safely produced in Florida since the 1940s, with over 4.6 billion gallons from Southwest Florida area alone. Floridians consume over 26 million gallons of gasoline and diesel per day, and the majority of the state’s electricity is generated from natural gas. Florida has a long history of responsible energy production, which can continue for decades to come, enhancing the energy security for Floridians and all Americans.

Florida Energy Citizens (FEC) states, “An oil exploration well is under consideration in the Collier County, Florida Big Cypress Swamp area. The proposed well has been approved by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s following reviews by the U.S. EPA, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Parks Service, Florida Department of Transportation, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Florida Department of State Historical Resources Division, Florida Division of State Lands and the FDEP Environmental Resources Permitting Program Division, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, and the South Florida Water Management District.”

Opponents of this particular energy development, according to FEC, are spreading a variety of falsehoods about hydraulic fracturing, even though the permit involved does not involve the technology. As the facts clearly show, however, fracking does not harm drinking water. This is something that is acknowledged by a variety of experts, including EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. As she points out, “There’s nothing inherently dangerous in fracking that sound engineering practices can’t accomplish.”

FEC notes, “Oil and natural gas has been safely produced in Big Cypress Swamp area over the past 70 years. There has not been even a single instance where fracking in this area (or anywhere around the nation) has been proven to harm groundwater. Further, the location is an agricultural field which is perfect for siting as it is away from the more sensitive everglades area and impacts are reasonable in respect to the nature, character, and location of the affected property.”

There is no reason for the Big Cypress Swamp Advisory Committee to rule against the oil exploration well permit already issued by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The facts show that this is merely another project in the area’s long history of safe energy production. We need this energy production to continue in order to grow our community’s economy.

FEC warns, “Floridians need to see through the misinformation about fracking and approve this permit.”

If you wish you may send an email to the Big Cypress Swamp Advisory Committee. Click here to tell the members of the Big Cypress Swamp Advisory Committee your position on energy production in Florida!

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Ten Bills, Ten Solutions to save America

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Russ Vought, Political Director for Heritage Action for America, notes, “During the State of the Union address, President Obama called for 2014 to be a year of action. We agree, but Americans deserve action that will take the nation in the right direction. That’s why, with no clear goals or mandate from the Washington Establishment, we hosted the first Conservative Policy Summit.

On February 10th, Heritage Action brought together leaders to highlight conservative bills that would improve the lives of hardworking Americans. 10 speakers. 10 solutions.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/26d0H5Wl43M[/youtube]

Conservatives must lead through action. And we are. Heritage Action brought these leaders together on February 10th. The Conservative Policy Summit highlights the bills they have introduced, showing Americans a winning conservative reform agenda. Watch important discussion about our nation’s most pressing issues and learn about the conservative answers.

 

Privacy – Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ)
Social Welfare – Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) 
Health Care – Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) 
Health Care – Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN) 
Energy – Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Housing – Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)
Transportation – Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA)
School Choice – Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC)
Higher Education – Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)
Religious Freedom – Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID)

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Claude Covo-Farchi. The use of this image does not in any way that suggests that Covo-Farchi endorses Heritage Action or the use of the work in this column. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.