Tag: fossil fuel

Commentary: Alternatives to Wind and Solar Energy

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Power plant

If the delusional but dead serious demands coming out of the international climate crisis community are to be believed, and as documented in the earlier two segments of this report, achieving universal energy security in the world will require wind energy capacity to increase by a factor of 60, while solar capacity increases by a factor of 100. The mix between wind and solar can vary, of course, but the required overall increase is indisputable. As noted in Part One of this report, that would be a very best-case scenario, where extraordinary improvements in energy efficiency meant that total energy production worldwide would only have to increase to 1,000 exajoules per year, from an estimated 600 exajoules in 2022.

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Common Themes on Energy Policy Emerge Among Republican Presidential Candidates

Just the News

by Kevin Killough   In the past few years, America has seen high inflation rates and a faltering economy that some observers say will go into a recession. The latest conflict in the Middle East could likely pose a significant disruption in global energy supplies. Where the GOP contenders stand on energy policies will likely weigh heavily on voters’ decisions in 2024. Just The News highlights the key points the top Republican candidates have made with regard to energy policy during their campaigns. Donald Trump When former President Donald Trump, the current leader in the 2024 presidential race, sat down with Association of Mature American Citizens’ (AMAC) Rebecca Weber and Just The News’ John Solomon, he said that at the end of his term in 2020, America was energy independent. “We didn’t need anybody’s energy. We didn’t have to give them arms or armies. We didn’t have to guard anybody. We didn’t have to keep the Gulf open. We were totally set,” Trump said. In another six months, Trump said, the U.S. would have been energy dominant, meaning it would be the largest producer and exporter of oil and gas in the world. Trump told Weber and Solomon that unleashing American oil is key to the country’s economic…

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Montana Judge Rules in Favor of Climate Activists in First-of-its-Kind Trial

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On Monday, a far-left climate activist group scored a legal victory when a judge in Montana ruled in their favor, declaring that state agencies are legally obligated to protect citizens from so-called “global warming.”

As ABC News reports, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley determined that the state of Montana’s current policy of evaluating requests for fossil fuel permits is unconstitutional, as it does not include a provision forcing agencies to consider greenhouse gas emissions. If it stands, it could set a similar precedent for the entire country.

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Republican AGs Push Back Against ‘Reckless’ Plan from Biden’s EPA That Could Further Hobble American Coal

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by Nick Pope   Several state attorneys general are engaging in legal battles against President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine whether or not his administration will be able to impose its costly plan for implementing a regulation designed to further incapacitate the American coal industry. Multiple states have already achieved early success in their legal challenges against the EPA’s federal implementation plan (FIP) for meeting ambient ozone standards of the 2015 National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), the implementation of which could further restrict coal-fired power generation in 22 states, according to the FIP’s Federal Registry entry. Numerous state attorneys general are seeking to follow their own state implementation plans (SIPs) rather than the comparatively restrictive FIP the EPA wants to impose in order to have the states meet the ambient ozone standards. “President Biden doesn’t care if his radical agenda undermines our economy. His EPA’s reckless regulation will wreak havoc in the Commonwealth, forcing the shutdown of many of Kentucky’s coal-fired power plants—killing jobs and raising utility rates for Kentuckians—while further undermining American energy independence,” Republican Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. Kentucky’s challenge has so far resulted in a stay against the EPA’s disapproval of its SIP, a…

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Pennsylvania Localities Benefitting Substantially from Gas Extraction Fee

Bradley Vasoli

While Democrats insist Pennsylvania misses out on revenue from natural gas extraction, a Pittsburgh nonprofit’s analysis published on Thursday observes drilling impact fees yielded $2.25 billion through 2021.

Since the boom in hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), the horizontal drilling technique gas companies use to access the vast reserves of fossil fuel from the Marcellus Shale sedimentary rock formation, many politicians have eyed an extraction tax. Instead of such a tax, former Governor Tom Corbett (R) and a Republican-led legislature levied an impact fee in 2012, with revenues going to localities largely to mitigate fracking-related environmental disruption. In the new policy brief from the Allegheny Institute (AI), the think tank’s executive director Frank Gamrat detailed those revenue gains. 

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Electricity Prices Jumped More than Double that of Inflation Last Year, Consumer Index Shows

Just the News

Prices for electricity in the United States soared well above overall inflationary levels last year, putting an added squeeze on consumers already reeling from significantly inflated costs of most consumer goods.

The Consumer Price Index Summary released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics this month showed the 12-month average price of electricity last month jumping a whopping 14.3 percent, more than double the 6.5 percent of overall price increases.

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U.S. Officials Set to Announce Fusion Energy Breakthrough: Report

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U.S. government scientists have recently managed to make significant progress toward successfully utilizing fusion energy, according to The Financial Times.

Scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California managed to create net energy gain via a fusion reaction in the past two weeks, the FT reported Sunday, citing three people with knowledge of the experiment. Researchers have been attempting to produce more energy than they burn during fusion reactions, which power the sun, for 70 years; however, no reaction has produced more energy than it burns until now.

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Ohio State Senate Passes Bill Recognizing Natural Gas as Green Energy, Facilitating Drilling on State Lands

Bradley Vasoli

The Ohio State Senate this week passed a bill deeming natural gas a form of “green energy” and eased the leasing of state lands by fossil-fuel companies. 

Sponsored by state Representative J. Kyle Koehler (R-Springfield), the measure’s main feature is an unrelated agricultural policy reducing the minimum number of poultry chicks that can be sold or transferred in Ohio from six to three. Lawmakers embraced that change based on the advice of the poultry industry and that of adults supervising children in 4-H agriculture programs who want to make smaller purchases for their farm projects. 

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Republican Treasurers Pull $1 Billion from BlackRock over Alleged Anti-Fossil Fuel Policies

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exterior of BlackRock

Republican state treasurers are withdrawing $1 billion in assets from BlackRock’s control due to the asset manager’s alleged boycott of the fossil fuel industry, according to the Financial Times.

Republican South Carolina State Treasurer Curtis Loftus is pulling $200 million from BlackRock by the end of 2022, and Louisiana treasurer John Schroder said on Oct. 5 that he is divesting $794 million from the company, according to the FT. Utah treasurer Marlo Oaks said he removed $100 million in funds from BlackRock’s control, and Arkansas treasurer Dennis Milligan pulled $125 million from the company in March.

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Small Businesses Struggle to Survive in Biden’s Economy: Poll

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Small business owners are increasingly pessimistic about U.S. economic conditions and overwhelmingly support an expansion of domestic fossil fuel infrastructure, the latest polling data showed.

Just 27% of small business owners agreed the economy was in “good” or “excellent” condition, according to a Job Creators Network Foundation poll released Friday and shared with The Daily Caller News Foundation. The figure represented the lowest rating of the current economic situation among small business owners since the group began the poll a year ago.

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With Gas Prices at Historic Highs, Biden Calls for Raising Taxes on Oil Drillers

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President Joe Biden’s budget proposes to scrap more than $45 billion in fossil fuel subsidies, his administration’s latest attack on the beleaguered industry.

The White House budget will remove more than a dozen fossil fuel industry tax credits, increasing the federal government’s revenue by an estimated $45.2 billion between 2023-2032, according to the proposal published Monday. The administration explained that the proposal was written to prevent further fossil fuel investment.

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Environmentalists Are Making Putin Stronger Than Ever

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U.S. environmental policies pushed by the Biden administration and aimed at dramatically curbing domestic fossil fuel production have given Russian President Vladimir Putin more power on the world stage.

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has blocked domestic pipelines, ditched drilling projects, proposed sweeping regulations on the fossil fuel industry and attempted to ban oil and gas leases on federal lands while pledging to decarbonize the grid by 2035. But Biden has also turned to the Middle Eastern oil cartel the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia, asking the countries to increase their production of oil and natural gas respectively.

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OPEC Scraps April Meeting but Keeps Oil Cuts in Place

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Reuters   Oil producer group OPEC on Monday scrapped its planned meeting in April and will decide instead whether to extend output cuts in June, once the market has assessed the impact of U.S. sanctions on Iran and the crisis in Venezuela. A ministerial panel of OPEC and its allies recommended that they cancel the extraordinary meeting scheduled for April 17-18 and hold the next regular talks on June 25-26. The energy minister of OPEC’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, said the market was looking oversupplied until the end of the year but that April would be too early for any decision on output policy. “The consensus we heard… is that April will be premature to make any production decision for the second half,” the Saudi minister, Khalid al-Falih, said. “As long as the levels of inventories are rising and we are far from normal levels, we will stay the course, guiding the market towards balance,” he added. The United States has been increasing its own oil exports in recent months while imposing sanctions on OPEC members Venezuela and Iran in an effort to reduce those two countries’ shipments to global markets. Washington’s policies have introduced a new level of…

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