The Future Of Energy: One Of These Things Is Not Real

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  • As we all know, making predictions can be difficult, especially about the future. On the other hand, sometimes it’s just a question of distinguishing reality on the ground from pure self-delusion.

  • At the moment, we have two visions competing to be the reigning official prediction of the future of energy. One of those visions, foreseeing the rapid demise of fossil fuels, is on full display even as we speak in a virtual summit put on by the American Clean Power Association.

  • The summit began today and is running for four days, through Thursday June 10. The speakers are a who’s who of “clean energy” glitterati, starting with essentially all the leading U.S. Democratic pols. OK, President Biden is not speaking; but then, he doesn’t get out much these days in his dotage. But the speaker list includes both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, as well as all the leading Biden admin “climate” officials (Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Climate Envoy John Kerry, White House Climate Czar Gina McCarthy} and plenty of representatives of “woke” corporate America (e.g., Andrew Steer of the Bezos Earth Fund, Anne Finucane of Bank of America). And on and on.

  • You get the idea. These people are our betters, and to the extent they are not actually the “experts” themselves, we can be sure that they are tightly tied in to the true experts by direct brain connections.

  • The other vision of the future of energy can be called the “reality on the ground.”

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Don't Get Discouraged About The Preposterous Plans To Eliminate Fossil Fuels

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Don't Get Discouraged About The Preposterous Plans To Eliminate Fossil Fuels

  • It’s easy to get discouraged about the “climate” scare, otherwise known as the socialist takeover of everything under the cover story of a faux moral crusade to “save the planet.” Sometimes it seems that all you can hear are preening politicians and academics and journalists and “scientists” shouting about the immediate “existential crisis” that requires the prompt end of fossil fuels and that your energy use (but not theirs) must be severely restricted.

  • Just today, UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a statement warning that the next ten years are our “final chance” to avert a “climate catastrophe”:

  • We are rapidly reaching the point of no return for the planet. We face a triple environmental emergency — biodiversity loss, climate disruption and escalating pollution. . . . Science tells us these next 10 years are our final chance to avert a climate catastrophe. . . .

  • The few people pushing back get shouted down and drowned out. How could this possibly end well?

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California May Be Crazy In Its "Climate" Initiatives, But New York Wants To Be Even Crazier

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California May Be Crazy In Its "Climate" Initiatives, But New York Wants To Be Even Crazier

  • In the competition among the states to establish progressive and “woke” bona fides, California and New York run neck and neck for the lead positions. In no field is this more true than in the area of “climate change,” which as progressive public policy turns into a program to drive up the cost of energy, suppress fossil fuels and anything else that works (nuclear), and demand creation of a new fantasy energy system based on the wind and the sun.

  • In recent years, California has seemed to pull well ahead of New York in the accumulation of climate virtue. California has been aggressively building wind and solar generation facilities ever since 2002. In 2018, thinking that the way to achieving lower carbon emissions is to cover the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, California upped its game with a bill known as SB 100, having the official title “The 100 Percent Clean Energy Act of 2018.”

  • Among other things, SB 100 called for a 100% carbon-emissions-free electricity sector by 2045. Meanwhile, the California Energy Commission reports that in 2020 California achieved a level of 36% of its electricity generation from renewables.

  • So are we here in New York just going to stand around and let our butts get kicked by these upstarts? No!

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The Current Legal Onslaught Is Unlikely To Limit World Oil Production Significantly

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  • As you may be aware, a big part of the recent strategy of environmental activists supposedly to address “climate change” has been a multi-front legal onslaught against the major oil producing companies. The onslaught has included everything from hundreds of lawsuits in as many jurisdictions, restrictive new laws, regulatory initiatives, proxy contests, and much else.

  • The past few days have brought news of what may appear to be a couple of major victories by the activists. In the U.S., insurgent shareholders on May 26 scored a victory in a proxy contest involving ExxonMobil, successfully electing two directors (out of twelve) to the board of the company. Separately, on the same day, in a lawsuit brought in the Netherlands by Friends of the Earth, a court in The Hague ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions by some 45% by 2030.

  • Various media sources, including the Wall Street Journal at the two links above, are reporting these developments as significant defeats for the oil and gas industry, and even as harbingers of its impending rapid decline in the face of mounting legal obstacles. But is such a decline really likely?

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“No Evidence Covid-19 Came From a Lab”: The Media Blow Another Hole in Their Credibility

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  • For a full year, the official media narrative was that there was “‘Exactly Zero’ Evidence Covid-19 Came From a Lab.” (That from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in May 2020) To suggest any such evidence might exist was a pure conspiracy theory. The scientific community had come to a consensus on the subject, one that had been fact checked by multiple independent news sources such as the Washington Post and Politifact.

  • It’s funny how many big news stories, especially those that may be politically sensitive, get framed with this type of hyperbolic language: “Fact-checked. We are absolutely certain, without a doubt, that there’s nothing more to see here.” That’s especially true if the story might lead a remotely curious person to question the official narrative.

  • But that makes it more important than ever that we keep paying attention. In the case of the Covid-19 lab leak, there is an abundance of articles from last year to this year that show the media’s 180 degree pivot.

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"Defund The Police": Maybe The Most Counter-Productive Progressive Policy Yet

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  • One of the big themes of this blog over the years has been chronicling the counter-productive results of various progressive government schemes for perfecting the world — everything from “anti-poverty” programs, to “affordable” housing, to energy restrictions in the name of the “climate,” to punitive tax rates on high earners, and so on and on.

  • My general observation has been that all of these things inevitably fail to ameliorate the problem they are supposed to address, and instead bring about gradual economic and societal decline in the jurisdictions that try them. Decades into the effort, places that have continuously followed the progressive prescriptions have turned into what I have called the “basket case” cities — cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and many more, that have seen a long term of premium taxes and large “caring” bureaucracies, but accompanied by inadequate private investment, shortage of good jobs, declining populations and high rates of crime and violence.

  • But at least the declines of these places have generally been gradual — often so gradual that the people living through the decline can barely perceive it. Not so with the latest progressive fad, the movement to “defund the police” and otherwise withdraw political support for assertive policing, theoretically replacing that with some kind of “new paradigm” of social workers or something.

  • The defunding movement, and related initiatives, has been followed by sudden and dramatic jumps in the rates of violent crime, particularly murders, in the progressive jurisdictions. The overall result has been thousands of additional deaths, mostly of young black men. This could be the most counter-productive progressive policy yet.

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