Natural Gas Now Best Picks – July 22, 2023

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

…

Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.

This week: green jobs that cost $7.7 million each to create, the big lie about the costs of renewables vs. natural gas, getting rid of air conditioning and more.

Look for these stories below, including links to the original articles!

Subpar Green Jobs Cost $7.7 Million Each to Create
(Using Our Money in A Case of Corporatism on Steroids)

Robert Bryce points out absurdity of green energy policies that do nothing but reward corporatists is sole focus is living off the sweat of our brows paid in taxes to pay for this nonsense.

Those “green” jobs you’ve been hearing about don’t come cheap.
Thanks to the staggering amounts of money that’s being doled out under the Inflation Reduction Act to incentivize the production of electric vehicles, America’s biggest automakers — General Motors and Ford Motor Company — are building battery factories. Those new factories, one in Spring Hill, Tennessee (GM) and the other in Marshall, Michigan (Ford), will create a total of about 4,200 new jobs. But creating those jobs will cost federal and state taxpayers nearly $22 billion. Thus, each new “green” job at the GM plant (which the company is developing with Korea’s LG) will cost taxpayers $7.7 million. Each job at the Ford plant will cost some $3.4 million.

Do the math. It will take 167 years just to break even before applying a discount rate and assuming the green worker pays all his or her income back in taxes!

Those are the findings of a scathing new report published a few days ago by Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that tracks corporate welfare. The report also found that another plant, being built in Jeffersonville, Ohio by LG and Honda, will create 2,200 jobs, each of which will cost taxpayers some $4.3 million. Further, as can be seen in the graphic below, which I pulled from the report — “Power Outrage: Will Heavily Subsidized Battery Factories Generate Substandard Jobs?” — the average wage at the factories will be about $46,000 per year or about $22 per hour. That’s far less than the wages paid to top union members who work at GM’s engine and transmission plants who earn about $31 per hour.

Are trade unions beginning to notice the Biden Administration doesn’t give a damn about them? Well, one certainly hopes so, but trade union leadership is refusing to see or listen as this story about the pipefitters, of all people, illustrates. Union membership, though may have a different opinion than leadership, as has often been the case and, hopefully, will be again. Indeed, natural gas success depends on it.

Hat Tip: S.H.

No, Joe, You Are Lying Again and Believing It

No one has told more lies and believed them than Joe Biden, of course, but this one is widely believed by enemies of natural gas, too, and about natural gas.

In his recent address, President Joe Biden claimed that “wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil.”
This is flat-out wrong…
These “significantly cheaper” sources only manage to be so when we’re paying indirectly for subsidies to make them cheaper. On top of that, this fact merely discusses the ways in which the prices of energy are otherwise distorted through various laws and incentives. The United States Department of Energy lists 1,854 different laws and incentives currently on the books. There are so many various government interruptions in the market that when I first attempted to download the dataset to look at the laws currently in place, it crashed my computer. Energy is one of the most highly regulated markets in existence, all to create the appearance that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels…
Why do supposed alternative energies need so much subsidization if they are so much cheaper? This leads to the second fact that is often ignored in this discourse: “Contrary to claims of lower costs, the places that use the most solar and wind on their grid tend to have the highest electricity costs.”

Source: Statista

This is the case because even if one were to concede that wind and solar are cheaper than coal and oil (they are not) and if one were to concede that this is happening in a free market (it is not), it would still be missing part of the picture. Even if wind and solar somehow were to have lower money costs, they make up for it in the cost of their diluteness and their intermittency…
However, the costs do not stop there. They are intensified by the even-worse cost of intermittency…
Wind and solar are not cheaper than coal and oil. They require massive subsidization to even compete, and on the back of that massive subsidization, they are still too diluted and require the support of fossil fuels in order to remain reliable.

Yes, the notion that wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels such as natural gas is a big lie; a very big lie.

Hat Tip: D.S.

It’s All Guilt Unloading and Virtue Signaling, Then?

Well, yes it is:

The lifestyle of voters who believe humans are destroying the planet is often indistinguishable from that of those who believe manmade climate change is a hoax. This suggests one of two things: Either climate alarmists don’t actually believe the planet is doomed (or at the very least they aren’t nearly as confident in that belief as they claim to be), or they truly believe the planet is doomed but aren’t willing to inconvenience themselves in any meaningful way.
Neither explanation presents climate hysterics in a positive light. Living in a manner consistent with one’s proclamations requires sacrifice, and who needs that when you can sport beliefs like fashion accessories and enjoy the perks of trendy moralism without the hefty price tag? This window-dressing approach to morality offers Gucci fashion at Goodwill prices…
The parties will probably never agree on an approach, but I eagerly await the day when every climate alarmist practices what he preaches. If the leftists next door have one of those yard signs proudly staked on their front lawn that lists a variety of hollow political slogans including “we believe science is real,” at the very least they should downsize, get rid of their air conditioning, and use valuable lawn space not for bragging about the supposed moral character of their household, but for growing all their own food.

That last paragraph is very well said isn’t it? It reminds of this from our natural gas battles of a few years ago: