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Solar Wizard
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Can Solar & Wind Fix Everything (e.g., Climate Change) with a battery break-through?
- Thread starter svetz
- Start date
That is Leo. Won’t tell us what country it is from. Wonder why? Small hatter….and that link above in previous post is 100kWh battery pack exampleHow's it going Murphy?
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Churches in the U.S. seem opposed to climate change. The biggest institutions Catholics, Muslims, Jewish are all solidly on board (e.g., Pope slams climate change deniers as 'stupid'). AFAIK, denialism seems to stem mostly from the paid for campaign fossil fuel companies are apparently still waging campaigns that the science isn't settled and political lobbying.
The two aren't exclusive and good religions/ministers/priests encourage questions and discovery. Religion doesn't mean cult, brain-washing, or there's only one way to think about things. There are many interpretations to nearly every passage in the bible. It's also about community. Having questions isn't uncommon ; -). If they're persistent questions talk to someone (e.g., ministers/priests/rabbi) and ask if they have time to chat.
The bible is rather clear about homo. The ppl opposing the new green deal are those that you and your groups are stealing from for and ineffective plan that centers around scams and robbery of all americans. Climate change has definitely become political. Just like saying ppl that oppose Israel are antisemitics - disapprove of the jewish ethnostate being formed. You and your group are calling anyone pumping the brakes on crazy spending that involves all of us as Climate deniers. We can’t disagree aboutshit called antisemitic on one hand or climate denier on the other. As for religions if catholics knew how jews really view them as idol worshippers then there would be divide over it. Leave religion out unless you really want to put on big boy pants.
History of over population in florida and all the storms noted.
You need to move out of the swamp State because it is direct in path of storms. Climax
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Thanks for your reply Svetz,
I can understand why the top management and owners of fossil fuel companies are denying man made climate change, their incomes depend on it, shortsighted maybe as they could easily change jobs even IF their wages were reduced a little. (after the fist couple of hundred thousand dollars per year, it doesn't tend to make people much happier. A clear conscience might lead to a more enjoyable albeit temporary existence. I m not discounting that there might be some who believe they know more than 99% of climate scientist.
I am comfortable not following any of the religions, just like the followers of one religion are usually quite comfortable not following any of the other religions. I can look at the statistics and see that over time fewer people consider themselves religious and that most people accept man made climate change. I can also see that younger republicans agree with the science while most republican males over 50 disagree. The older they get the more likely it is that they disagree with the scientific literature.
My question is if the church leaders in the US are driving young people away from church with the denial of the sciences, not just climate science, rather than embracing science like the head of the Catholic church seems to do. Or is that just a coincidence.
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Solar Wizard
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts Dingdong.
Can you help me out? Are your Murphytard or Leotard(
)? <‐‐‐(A balet dress)Why did you get banned?
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Ah, church leaders and the young. One group that gets stuck in their dogma and the other that rebels as a natural part of finding their own way.
I can't speak to all church leaders, but the ones I know don't deny science. Quite the opposite. If you go to a religious wedding buy the minister/rabbi a glass of wine and ask your questions. You'll probably be able to sit back and watch them argue both sides.
Sabine just posted something in the same vein. Not about religion, but she sees accepted science dismissed as conspiracies because people don't have enough knowledge/training. I think that's wrong, but would be interested to hear what others think is the real problem.
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Canadians lose the protection of assessments
A Burst of Saharan Dust
Developing an Ad Hominem typology for classifying climate misinformation
How global innovators design a sustainable future
Why turquoise hydrogen will Be a game changer for the energy transition
Technoeconomic analysis for hydrogen and carbon Co-Production via catalytic pyrolysis of methane
Opinion: The papers above aren't new, but there isn't much discussion on them other than some car makers (e.g., Toyota and Honda) that seem committed to hydrogen. Is it VHS vs. betamax? Will EVs win because they have the lead on building out infrastructure? What do you think?
A Burst of Saharan Dust
Opinion: That real estate has been doing it for centuries... how is not underwater? Where does that 0.01% of a mountain/yr annually of dust end up? Saharan Dust & Hurricanes.
Developing an Ad Hominem typology for classifying climate misinformation
Opinion: We see the same things on the forums when the reasons for their beliefs are disproved. Can't prove your reasoning,? Call them a shill, accuse them of being involved in a conspiracy / coverup, make fun of them. Anything to distract from the reality of the situation. What's really amazing is that despite their lack of expertise how incredibly confident and vocal they are. I just put them on /ignore if they're breaking the forums rules and being rude to fellow members. That's not all deniers of course, most are just regular people and they frequently not only bring cool things to the thread, but also challenge some of the headlines I post.
How global innovators design a sustainable future
Why turquoise hydrogen will Be a game changer for the energy transition
Technoeconomic analysis for hydrogen and carbon Co-Production via catalytic pyrolysis of methane
Opinion: The papers above aren't new, but there isn't much discussion on them other than some car makers (e.g., Toyota and Honda) that seem committed to hydrogen. Is it VHS vs. betamax? Will EVs win because they have the lead on building out infrastructure? What do you think?
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svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Off topic, but interesting viewpoint in terms of ways businesses bamboozled people and governments. That the advertising was paid for by the big companies when they knew it couldn't work is probably the strongest argument.
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svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
The Green Premium
TommySr
Solar Enthusiast
svetz, IMO it's a people problem, with a being top of the food chain added on top.
if we were rabbits we would act differently, a rabbit will run at the snap of a twig every time, even
old rabbits that never lost a tale will run at the hint of danger, most people are not like that. I'm
sure there are people still walking around with masks on their faces, not a lot, but some. them
same ones when they hear a tornado warning are in the basement, me I'm opening my garage
door sitting on a lawn chair watching the show, I bet when there a hurricane warning or even
evacuation orders some people will just weathering the storm.
what convolutes things even more is the "you only life once" mind set, add in "not my problem"
IMO it's a people thing.
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Solar Wizard
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When the obviously false predictions fail to materialize over and over svetz.
You know, when the hypothesis is tested and is found to be incorrect, your kind goes back pretends they made a different prediction.
They are liars who want money and power.
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Solar Wizard
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A good example is claiming that due to "climate change", hurricanes and tornados have gotten worse.
Their evidence for the worsening is the fact that dollars spent cleaning up have gone up.
Wording like "America suffered more billion dollar climate-related disasters in the last 3 years than at any other in history"
This obvious implication is that climate change is making the weather worse.
No, it's just that inflation has increased the cost of clean-up and the increase in population means tornadoes are more likely to hit a house rather than just pass through an empty field.
The actual data shows hurricanes and tornadoes are the same they have always been and some data sets show they have become less in intensity/frequency.
For instance Svetz, why don't you tell us about drought situation out in California?
/https%3A%2F%2Ftf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffiler_public%2Fff%2F7d%2Fff7dbcb4-e132-4453-9041-bb2a48ddfd63%2Fgettyimages-1482357347.jpg)
www.smithsonianmag.com
Their evidence for the worsening is the fact that dollars spent cleaning up have gone up.
Wording like "America suffered more billion dollar climate-related disasters in the last 3 years than at any other in history"
This obvious implication is that climate change is making the weather worse.
No, it's just that inflation has increased the cost of clean-up and the increase in population means tornadoes are more likely to hit a house rather than just pass through an empty field.
The actual data shows hurricanes and tornadoes are the same they have always been and some data sets show they have become less in intensity/frequency.
For instance Svetz, why don't you tell us about drought situation out in California?
California's Long-Dry Tulare Lake Has Returned
Record-breaking snowpack and storms have flooded hundreds of acres of agricultural land in the state's San Joaquin Valley
www.smithsonianmag.com
svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Always. Roughly a 16% chance to take a direct hit here historically, but easy to not have basic services (e.g., power, medical) for days even with a miss. I don't always evacuate when instructed to do so because sometimes it just doesn't make sense (e.g., the evacuation route is threatened by the storm). It is important to get the tourists out though, most don't have the knowledge, pantries, or emergency supplies to sustain them.
"I've Been Totally Ghosted": After Install, Solar Panels Become Maintenance Nightmare
The green new deal and switch to "alternative' energy looks like it's going exactly as planned: costing the taxpayer trillions of dollars and generally pissing everybody off.
That was the case with a number of solar panel owners who are now finding it difficult to get their panels serviced, according to WBAL TV.
Solar panel installation is touted as offering benefits like reduced energy costs, environmental friendliness, and significant rebates. However, many homeowners have discovered a concerning issue within the industry: addressing technical problems can be exceedingly challenging -- if not outright impossible.
Those interviewed shared experiences with various solar providers, each facing prolonged unresolved issues.
Tom Lucas, who installed solar panels in 2018, initially saw higher electricity production. Yet, by 2022, 20% of his system failed, leading to considerable losses. Despite having a 25-year warranty from Invaleon Solar Technologies, the issue remains unaddressed.
Lucas commented: "I've been totally ghosted. All I want is a working system. To me, even though I'm generating some electricity, it's not right."
Lucas added: "They're a sales-oriented company. All solar companies are. They want to sell the next job. They want to get that installed and move on to the next sale. They're not service-oriented."
Steve Pilotte, an early solar adopter, has experienced ongoing problems since 2009. His current provider, Sunrun, has been unresponsive in fixing an inverter issue that started in 2020, despite multiple technician visits.
"Once again, in 2022, I followed up with them. And then 2023. And January 2024. I'm totally lost. I've never experienced a situation like this in my life."
Mike Rice, who leases from Spruce Power, saw his electricity costs drop significantly until 2023 when his meter malfunctioned. Despite the fault, Spruce has not compensated him for the energy lost during peak production times.
"No one called me to tell me my system is out. Not even credits. I'd just take credits so I can offset my future bills, but they won't do that," Rice said.
"I think they're more interested in putting solar up than repairing it," he concluded.
Green Blob Tells Government to Spend £30 Billion on Machine to Remove CO2 From the Air
A story in the Telegraph last week featured a report by Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) which recommended the Government commit to a £30 billion project to pull CO2 from the air. According to the report, Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) machines sited across the east coast could separate the greenhouse gas from air and pump it to underground storage facilities, thereby helping the U.K. to meet its ambitious 2050 Net Zero target. Not only is this extraordinarily expensive idea pointless in itself, it exposes the equally pointless and expensive constellation of publicly-funded lobbying organisations.
According to ESC, “carbon capture in its various forms is a critical component of a low-cost energy transition”, and “without it, at scale, we risk non-compliance with our Net Zero requirement”. And here is the thing that would, were such things subject to public debate, cause millions of people to scratch their heads. So what if the U.K. does not comply with its Government’s self-imposed target? What is the ‘risk’? And why should the public fork out billions of pounds merely for a daft machine that serves no function other than help a Government achieve its ambition that nobody else really cares about?
Madder still, the ESC admits that DACCS “remains unproven at scale”. This raises two important problems.
First, if something has yet to be proven at such a gigantic scale, any estimate of its cost is both for the birds and in all probability, like all Government-backed projects such as HS2 and wind power, will exceed those estimates. Government vanity project HS2, for example, originally had a similar estimated cost of £37.5 billion in 2009 prices. But by 2020, estimates put the cost well north of £100 billion.
Second, it shows yet again that no government, no political party, no MP or peer, no think tank or its wonks, no academic at a lofty research outfit, no green lobbyist or campaigner, and no journalist has any idea how Net Zero will be achieved, but nonetheless nearly all of them fought for such targets to be imposed on us.
It is a problem known as putting the cart before the horse. And it is a characteristic of all climate-related policies that they are driven by ambition, not reality. Not even ESC can explain what DACCS is, how it will work or how much it will cost. All they really know is that it will be required to remove 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year from 2050 – approximately a tenth of the U.K.’s current domestic annual emissions.
Vanity and intransigence drives this irrational push for solutions to non-problems. Air capture of CO2 serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It won’t make a dent in atmospheric CO2 concentration. It won’t change the weather. It won’t make anyone’s life better. And it won’t stand up to any meaningful cost-benefit analysis. £30 billion, roughly equivalent to £500 per head of the population, could do vastly more good were it to be spent in countless other ways, from healthcare through to addressing genuine environmental issues such as water quality. Of course, not spending the money on such contraptions would likely do more good by leaving that much money in people’s pockets to spend how they see fit.
The Telegraph spots the problem. DACCS plants “would need to be powered by wind, nuclear or solar energy so as not to generate as much CO2 as they save”. A fleet of green generators would be working to power the DACCS plants, merely to hit targets. Recent studies show that existing DACCS technology is extremely inefficient, requiring a whopping 2,500 kilowatt hours to isolate just one tonne of CO2. To extract 48 million tonnes of CO2 would therefore require power stations with a capacity of 14 gigawatts – that’s more than four times the capacity of Hinkley Point C. That nuclear power station itself, dubbed at the time “the most expensive power station in the world”, was initially estimated to cost £26 billion but more recent estimates are putting the cost closer to £46 billion. Thus the cost of a widespread DACCS project – with batteries included – is likely to be in the order of seven times greater than ECS claim. And we have not yet even considered the operating cost.
All this puts me in mind of those fun little clips of devices whose only function is to press a switch to turn themselves off. On Youtube, electronics hobbyists compete to build the most impressive ‘useless machine’. Here is one such contender.
The problem at its core is that publicly-funded organisations, though set up as ‘independent’ bodies run at arms-length from Government, are nonetheless wholly committed to political agendas. Seemingly intended to ‘drive prosperity’ through R&D, such a constellation of opaque agencies are tantamount to the Government picking ‘winners’, who invariably turn out to be abject losers, at vast public expense. There are no consequences for such wonks spaffing hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money on pilots that come to nought, or glossy reports that might just as well be case studies from Narnia. Criticism of ideas such as CO2 capture is excluded from academia and business because even if any critics were not already disinclined to apply for roles within the network, and were then not rejected for their obvious hostility to the dominant political culture of such bullshit factories, their politically inconvenient work would soon be shelved.
In other words, the green agenda has produced a useless machine whose only function is to produce designs for useless machines. The parent idea of DACCS, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), in which CO2 is taken from power stations, compressed and then stuffed under the sea, was an idea that attracted attention following the Climate Change Act. But despite the government offering a billion pounds in funding competitions to prove the concept, the project failed and today remains economically unproven. The even crazier idea of pulling CO2 – which is still a trace gas at just 400 parts per million – from the air and then burying it underground faces a similar future. Meanwhile, the U.K.’s climate agenda will run on, as usual, built on extremely expensive pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Nobody has any idea how to achieve Net Zero without destroying ourselves.
Climate Crisis Inc. Takes a Hit
Climate Crisis Inc., a nebulous, secretive but highly organized cabal of activist groups, NGOs living on dark money from billionaires and rest of the climate-crisis industry (see The Breakthrough Institute’s latest bombshell: The Climate Industry’s Misdirection Campaign by Jessica Weinkle), took a serious hit on May 1st: Ninth Circuit Dismisses Kids’ Climate Case (Again). (National Law Review).One of the several sub-departments of Climate Crisis Inc. (residing in the Propaganda Ministry thereof), Inside Climate News, bemoans this news in a piece titled: “Appeals Court Ordered the Dismissal of a Landmark Youth Climate Court Case”.
The “Landmark Youth Climate Case” is known as Juliana v. United States. The Wiki supplies a (not-necessarily unbiased) summary of the case here.
There are lots of viewpoints on the dismissal of the case, which is not quite final.
The Guardian: “Court strikes down youth climate lawsuit on Biden administration request”
Reuters: “US appeals court says kids’ climate lawsuit must be dismissed”
ABCNews: “Appeals court rejects climate change lawsuit by young Oregon activists against US government”
Politico/E&E News: “9th Circuit strikes down Juliana climate case a second time”
And it is about time, too! If you are a U.S. citizen, your taxes, which could have been put to some good use, have been being wasted defending this case, and others similar to it, all being financed and co-coordinated by Climate Crisis Inc..
The Biden Administration Ever More Delusional on Energy
Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiatives in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkably stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming from fossil fuels has remained nearly unchanged. EIA data here for 2022 (latest I can find) show about 79% of U.S. primary energy from fossil fuels, barely changed since Biden took office, and indeed very stable for decades.Perhaps this situation of stable energy production and consumption results because it reflects what markets and consumers want and need to satisfy their demand for energy. So do you think that the hyperactive regulators might just relax and let the consumers have what they want?
Unfortunately, that is not how this works. Even as the energy producers and consumers have figured out endless workarounds to avoid the fossil fuel suppression that the Bidenauts attempt to impose, the little regulatory tyrants have been busy preparing new bouts of punitive restrictions. Last week saw a round of some of the most sweeping regulatory edicts yet. The regulators really plan to put the people in their place this time.
In the new round, the regulators have gotten farther and farther away from anything realistic, anything consistent with the laws of physics or thermodynamics, anything that might actually work. We are now well into the world of fantasy and delusion.
On last Thursday (April 25), the Administration, via the EPA, announced a suite of no fewer than four final rules “to Reduce Pollution from Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants.” Essentially, this is the replacement for the Obama Administration’s so-called “Clean Power Plan,” that ordered a complete re-do of the electricity generation system to gradually shutter fossil fuel plants and replace them with unworkable “renewables.” That Plan got struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2022 for being far beyond anything the EPA was authorized to do under its statutes.
So here is the new Rule covering the comparable subject. The title is “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” The document is 1020 pages long because, hey, we’re the EPA, and anything worth doing around here deserves a Rule of at least a thousand pages.
And how does this new Rule achieve the goal of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions”? You could probably spend all week trying to read the thing without ever figuring that out. EPA’s press release makes the following claim:
“EPA’s final Clean Air Act standards for existing coal-fired and new natural gas-fired power plants limit the amount of carbon pollution covered sources can emit, based on proven and cost-effective control technologies that can be applied directly to power plants.”
And what is the “proven and cost-effective control mechanism” they are talking about? The AP summarizes it here in a few words:
Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s the “capture of smokestack emissions” — otherwise known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. I had a post last August at the time this Rule had been proposed and comments were being received. In my August post I highlighted some of the comments, including those from the states of Ohio and West Virginia. Those comments made mincemeat of any possible claim that CCS technology was either “proven” or “cost-effective.” Not only has it never been proven, but it’s impossible for it ever to work economically. There are many long quotes from comments in that post. Here are just a few.
From the Ohio comment, page 4:
A study of 263 carbon-capture-and-sequestration projects undertaken between 1995 and 2018 found that the majority failed and 78% of the largest projects were cancelled or put on hold. After the study was published in May 2021, the only other coal plant with a carbon-capture-and-sequestration attachment in the world, Petra Nova, shuttered after facing 367 outages in its three years of operation. . . . [T]his [SaskPower] facility is the world’s only [remaining] operating commercial carbon capture facility at a coal-fired power plant. And it has never achieved its maximum capacity. It also battled significant technical issues throughout 2021—to the point that the plant idled the equipment for weeks at a time. As a result, the plant achieved less than 37% carbon capture that year despite having an official target of 90% . . . .
From the West Virginia comment, pages 24 – 25:
Take efficiency to start. CCS units run on power, too. An owner can get that power from the plant itself. But this approach makes the plant less efficient by increasing its “parasitic load”—and CCS more than triples combustion turbines’ normal parasitic load. . . . This is the cause the Wyoming study analyzed that showed installing CCS technology would devastate plants’ heat rates and lower net plant efficiency by 36%.
There is endless more of same. The fact is that CCS technology is neither “proven” nor “cost-effective.” It is nowhere after 30 years of trying because it cannot be done economically. It cannot be done economically because it is, in effect, a war against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To capture more and more of the CO2 from the plant takes more and more of the plant’s output of energy, until in the limiting case you use all the energy of the plant and still some small amount of the CO2 escapes. The whole idea of CCS is to avoid having the disorder of the universe increase by the method of putting sufficient energy into trying. Won’t ever work. See also, perpetual motion machines.
Well, the sensible comments have all been rejected and EPA has just gone ahead and done what it was always planning to do, which is to order up something that can’t ever work economically and can only result in forcing the closure of an energy system that works without any idea of something realistic to replace it.
The deadlines for this start around 2030. Most likely between now and then either the Supreme Court will strike this down, or we’ll get a Republican administration that will sweep it all away. In the meantime we have completely ignorant and tyrannical regulators ordering up an energy system that can’t possibly work and heedless of the enormous destruction that they will likely cause if not stopped.
And that’s only part of what these fools were up to last week on the energy front. Here from Wednesday (April 24) is a “Fact Sheet” issued by the White House on another totally delusional effort: “Biden-Harris Administration Sets First-Ever National Goal of Zero-Emissions Freight Sector, Announces Nearly $1.5 Billion to Support Transition to Zero-Emission Heavy-duty Vehicles.”
I’ve got some news for them: the freight transportation sector (trucks and railroads) is not going to convert to electricity any time soon. At least this announcement was not a regulation mandating the conversion, but only the supposed setting of a “national goal,” with no idea of how it could possibly be achieved or at what cost. The $1.5 billion mentioned is an irrelevant rounding error of a figure that maybe could buy 10,000 new electric trucks (in a sector with at least 3 million existing non-electric ones), and the 10,000 trucks would be mostly useless for the purposes in question.
These people become more and more detached from reality with each passing day. They seem to have no idea how much damage they are doing, and they don’t care a bit. Somehow they have convinced themselves that they are “saving the planet,” when if they could do even a little arithmetic they would know that their efforts cannot possibly move the needle on that effort. It’s just another week in the Biden Administration energy clown show.
The High Price of Climate Alarm
It is with no small amount of pleasure that I found a media outlet acknowledging President Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies have increased American’s energy costs. The Dallas Express, a local online alternative news outlet, published a story titled “Energy Prices 30% Higher Under Biden Admin.” Unlike so much of the mainstream media, The Dallas Express didn’t expend ink trying to explain how consumers really don’t realize that the economy and their lives are better despite the higher prices, or that the costs Biden and company have added to peoples’ power bills are justified as a means of fighting climate change. Rather, the Express took a Joe Friday, “just the facts” approach, explaining:
Energy prices in the United States are wreaking havoc on budget-sensitive households, making it harder for families to save money or get ahead financially.
Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, Americans’ electricity bills have skyrocketed nearly 30%, or 13 times faster than in the previous seven years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest consumer price index data.
Despite the Federal Reserve holding interest rates steady since July 2023, inflation continues to pose a problem for policymakers and households.
“There is no improvement here, we’re moving in the wrong direction,” said Bankrate chief financial analyst Greg McBride in an interview with Fox Business. “The usual trouble spots persist—shelter, motor vehicle insurance, maintenance, repairs, and service costs. Add electricity to that list, up 0.9% in March and 5% over the past year.”
Part of the reason for the surge in energy prices is due to the push to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power plants with renewable subsidies and green-energy mandates.
Of course, The Heartland Institute has been on top of this story since Biden took office. We produced Energy at a Glance Documents in 2021 and 2022 detailing the Biden policies that have resulted in higher electricity, heating, and transportation fuel prices, and how much they went up. By our calculation, after less than 2 full years in office, Biden’s climate and energy policies hare increased average household energy costs by more than $2,300.
Interviewed for an Environment & Climate News story covering the lingering high prices energy prices in 2023, Gary Stone, executive vice president of engineering at Five States Energy, said:
The Biden administration has been a continually growing disaster for the domestic oil and gas industry. Using the ‘New Green Deal’ as a basis, they have halted or delayed drilling on federal lands, attempted to restrict drilling because of allegedly endangered species, cancelled pipelines, and restricted exports of crude and processed gas liquids.
While international oil politics, production, and pricing still control a significant portion of the market, there is no doubt the policies of the Biden regime have had a huge impact on prices.” Gas prices, for instance, were far lower under the Trump administration, crude oil prices were about $30 (per barrel) lower, and gasoline was around $2 per gallon less than now, all of which immediately rose under Biden.
Instead of encouraging domestic production as Trump did, the current regime is now implementing onerous methane-emission regulations and taxes that some sources estimate will result in the abandonment of as much as 30 percent of domestic wells and greatly increase the operating costs, and reduce the life, of the remaining producers. The Biden administration will serve the ‘green gods’ even if it bankrupts much of a major industry and greatly reduces the energy available to the country.
Of course those are just the direct energy costs to drivers, businesses, renters, and homeowners, not accounting for the ripple effect higher energy prices have on energy-intensive goods like food production and delivery, chemical production, and manufacturing.
Other rarely accounted for costs of Biden’s climate obsession—one not shared by the American public, according to recent polls—stem from government spending on Biden’s climate and energy policies. The costs of these programs are borne by taxpayers and future generations who will inherit the costs Biden’s energy policies are adding to the nation’s annual deficits and long-term debt.
How much are we talking about? Well, in early April 2024, the Biden administration granted outright more than $20 billion to unaccountable climate, finance, and community activist NGOs to promote green energy adoption across the country.
Author and energy analyst Robert Bryce has calculated that the subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar power alone have ballooned from an estimated $19.9 billion in 2015 to commitments of more than $425 billion by 2033, based on newly installed, approved, and anticipated wind and solar construction.
And, in December 2023, at a conference in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about the administration’s commitment to spend more than $1 trillion fighting climate change—less than the country spent on Social Security in 2023, but more than we spent on defense. This is likely an underestimate as past estimates of spending on these programs have repeatedly proven to be.
Government spending and regulations are a drag on the economy, basically a hidden tax, spending money on goods and services that consumers likely wouldn’t have freely chosen to spend their own money, or companies invested in, or banks financed, in a marketplace not directed by federal mandates or influenced by federal incentives: replacing market assessments of how to balance the concerns of climate change, energy security, and economic progress with spending decisions dictated by political overlords, their crony-capitalist allies, and climate scolds.
Any way you measure it, the price tag on Biden’s climate program on the American economy and its people is quite high and growing.
Sources: Climate Realism; The Dallas Express; Environment & Climate News; Energy at a Glance; The White House; Robert Bryce
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