Natural Gas Now Best Picks – July 8, 2023

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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

This week: junk science that blinds ideologues, corporatism on parade through the UK and here, stopping Joe from declaring a climate emergency and more.

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

“Help, Global Warming Is Blinding Me!”

Junk science just won’t go away. Here is yet another example of supposed science that tells us nothing and is merely designed to create a headline with which to attack natural gas and other fossil fuels.

Climate change may be speeding up the rate of blindness, a study suggests.
Canadian researchers compared rates of vision problems among 1.7million people across all 50 states in the US.
They found those who lived in warmer regions were up to nearly 50 percent more likely to suffer serious vision impairment compared to those in cooler places…
Study co-author Esme Fuller-Thomson, a gerontologist at the University of Toronto, said: ‘With climate change, we are expecting a rise in global temperatures. It will be important to monitor if the prevalence of vision impairment among older adults increases in the future.’

…Scientists warned that the study was observational, meaning it could not prove that warmer temperatures were leading to vision problems. They said further research was needed.
But in the paper, the University of Toronto-led team suggested several hypotheses for how warmer weather was raising the risk of vision problems.

Get it? There is nothing here. It’s pure B.S., junk science that assumes global warming, relies upon that assumption to speculate on outcomes and the further relies upon subjective surveys for data. It’s embarrassingly unscientific but, nonetheless, achieves its purpose; that of generating a headline. It merely proves global warming is blinding ideologues to their own stupidity.

Hat Tip: R.N.

Corporatism on Parade

There is no better illustration of the corporatism behind “green energy” than this example from the UK, which perfectly describes what RGGI (and New Jersey offshore wind) is all about.

So, three renewable energy lobby groups in the UK wrote to the government basically demanding first, more money, second, a preferential treatment with regard to CfD auction prices, and three, more money. Openly. With no small amount of frustration with the government’s stinginess.
According to RenewableUK, Energy UK and Scottish Renewables, “The current emphasis on securing renewable capacity at the lowest possible strike price – minimising expenditure rather than maximising benefit – risks creating a less attractive investment environment in the UK.targets.”
The race to the bottom on strike prices incentivised by the current auction process is at odds with the reality of project costs and investment needs, jeopardising deployment.
Shall we all agree that it is a lovely little example of trying to spin a pretty desperate situation. And failing.
Because the moment you say that low price is not the most important thing, you bust the myth of cheap renewables and “costs are falling.”
Because the moment you say “the current auction process is at odds with the reality of project costs and investment needs, jeopardising deployment targets” you admit that the power you produce is not cheap and is only getting less cheap by the BoE rate hike.
As if giving away the game in general was not enough, the three associations propose specific ways, in which the government must give them more money. First, they propose a fatter budget for the next offshore wind power tender.
“The budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind alone would need to be at least two and a half times higher than its current level to maximise the capacity which could now be secured in this year’s auction.”
Well, isn’t this just the definition of affordable and costs-are-falling-and-wind-is-now-cheaper-than-everything-except-perhaps-solar? And this is only the start of the toddler industry’s demands…
They also want guarantees for those budgets and guarantees that the technologies will be deployed regardless of, well, everything: “This could be achieved by setting clear deployment targets and ringfencing budgets for each technology, to ensure that each secures a minimum amount of new capacity.”
The analogy that comes to mind is, for instance, tomato farmers telling the government it must mandate that people buy at least 1,000 tonnes of tomatoes every year otherwise they won’t be able to survive and that’s just not fair, so what if people don’t want tomatoes, and life’s too hard so give us some money.
The third demand… says that future “CfD parameters should reflect their economic environment more closely in terms of supply chain costs and interest rates.” Ahem

Let me translate: in an extension of the first demand, the industry wants guarantees that their future bids will not be judged on prices, which is how all bids everywhere are normally judged (excluding bribes and stuff like that), but on… I don’t know what, really.
I don’t know but Net Zero Watch does. In a release calling out the three wind associations, Net Zero Watch said that the third proposal comes down to “a revision to the auction rules so that the winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their “value” in contributing towards the Net Zero targets.”

Yes, this is the the whole point of the efforts to eliminate natural gas and other fossil fuels; to clear the field of opposition so these green-faced highway robbers can steal all the purses of those who remain. It’s corrupt, cynical and a huge threat to our energy security. The radicals and extremists doing their dirty work are nothing more than shills and distractions that enable the thievery.

Hat Tip: S.H.

Meaningless Legislation, But Important Message

Let’s be clear; the legislation discussed below is going nowhere. Even if, by some miracle, the legislation passed, Biden would veto it. Nevertheless, the effort is extraordinarily important in letting the public know what Biden is likely to do if re-elected, which is to declare a “climate emergency” and let the lockdowns begin again with both air and highway travel restrictions, 15-minute cities, EV mandates, massive additional subsidies for green eggs and scam, climate “disinformation” censorship, and killing of cows, promotion of bug diets and every other imaginable idiocy we see already in the Siri Lanka, the Netherlands and the UK. Think it can’t happen? Well, know one thought Americans would meekly submit to the insane, counterproductive COVID measures either, but we did it, which was exactly megalomaniacal elites such as Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates wanted.

House and Senate Republicans have introduced legislation to stop President Joe Biden from declaring a national emergency over climate change as his administration ramps up regulations targeting global warming.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has sponsored S. 2118, the “Real Emergencies Act.” The bill would clarify that the president does not hold the authority to declare a climate emergency.

In a statement, Capito said the Biden administration has governed “by executive overreach” on energy and the environment, making the United States less energy independent and spiking prices for consumers.

Yes, this legislation needs to debated and passed to make all Americans understand the the threat the Biden Adminstration represents. It is as radical as it could be short of declaring its own Marxism and the puppeteers controlling the man aim to use him to advance all the above insanities. It cannot go on and, yet, it will if this extremism is not exposed by advancing the proposed bill.

Hat Tip: D.S.