Natural Gas Now Best Picks – September 16, 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’s natural gas best picks: CCP gets grift from us, there is no climate emergency, there is no hope for New York and much more.

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

Chinese Communists Gets Grift from Us!

How much worse can it get as our government tries to kill of natural gas and throw money into corrupt corporatist schemes? This much worse…

Some politicians are taking notice of the absurdity of subsidizing a Chinese technology company, Gotion. The electric vehicle battery maker is linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and it recently inked a deal with the State of Illinois to build a $2 billion plant in Illinois.
However, the insane size of the subsidies being granted remains to be recognized.
On Wednesday, two members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, imploring her and Congress to take immediate action to stop the CCP from exploiting U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Note strange image on right from Gotion website banner. Looks like Pac Man on the attack. And, what’s the deal with the stark empty corridor.

The letter from committee Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) specifically addressed a very similar Gotion battery production project in Michigan, and the same issues apply to the Illinois project.
The letter documents connections between Gotion and the CCP:

Gotion High-Tech Co. is a PRC company that has direct ties to the CCP and state-owned financial institutions. Gotion has been an active participant in the PRC-based version of the “Thousands Talent Program,” a program the FBI itself says encourages theft of trade secrets and economic espionage. Gotion has established multiple “Communist Party Units” within its operations and has publicly sought PRC provincial government support for its desire to expand its operations overseas. Even when courting major Western investment, Gotion has been adamant about retaining PRC-based control, including requiring that Volkswagen give up part of its voting rights, despite Volkswagen acquiring over 25 percent of the company. [Footnotes omitted.]
“It is perplexing,” says the letter, that the U.S. government would perpetuate China’s domination of key technology “by actively supporting CCP-backed companies expanding their foothold in the U.S. market, especially in a crucial sector such as lithium-ion battery manufacturing.”
Perplexing, indeed.
Equally perplexing is the sheer size of the subsidies, regardless of the recipient. Gotion is qualified to receive $7.5 billion of federal tax credits over five years, as we wrote Wednesday.That’s in addition to $536 million of incentives awarded by the State of Illinois for the Illinois plant, which is expected to employ 2,600 workers. So, Gotion will be gifted over $8 billion for a factory that will cost only $2 billion.

Natural gas is the solution to our energy issues and had largely addressed them prior to Joe Biden, but now he wants to destroy natural gas along with oil, and give away the store to the Chinese Communist Party. There is no better evidence of his Manchurian candidate status. He is owned by the CCP because of the tens of millions he and his family took from China against our interests.

Hat Tip: R.N.

There’s No Climate Emergency,
Although That’s Biden’s Excise for Attacking Natural Gas

The suggestion that the debate is over is the biggest lie promulgated by climate cultists, as this article certainly shows:

There’s no climate emergency. And the alarmist messaging pushed by global elites is purely political. That’s what 1,609 scientists and informed professionals stated when they signed the Global Climate Intelligence Group’s “World Climate Declaration.”
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the declaration begins. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

The group is an independent “climate watchdog” founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and Marcel Crok, a science journalist. According to its website, the organization’s objective is to “generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change as well as the effects of climate policy.” And it does so by objectively looking at the facts and engaging in scientific research into climate change and climate policy.

The declaration’s signatories include Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, meteorologists, professors, and environmental scientists worldwide. And when a select few were asked by The Epoch Times why they signed the declaration stating that the “climate emergency” is a farce, they all stated a variation of “because it’s true.”
“I signed the declaration because I believe the climate is no longer studied scientifically. Rather, it has become an item of faith,” Haym Benaroya, a distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers University, told The Epoch Times.
“The earth has warmed about 2 degrees F since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but that hardly constitutes an emergency—or even a crisis—since the planet has been warmer yet over the last few millennia,” Ralph Alexander, a retired physicist and author of the website “Science Under Attack,” told The Epoch Times.
“There is plenty of evidence that average temperatures were higher during the so-called Medieval Warm Period (centered around the year 1000), the Roman Warm Period (when grapes and citrus fruits were grown in now much colder Britain), and in the early Holocene (after the last regular Ice Age ended).”
The climate emergency is “fiction,” he said unequivocally.

A lot of us have known this for a very long time but there are trillions to be made grifting off global warming scares, so the scam continues and Joe Biden does what he can to grease the skids by attacking natural gas on every front.

Hat Tip: D.S.

New York Has No Hope!

New Yorkers elect the worst sort of rulers:

New York is Exhibit A of a current crisis-in-waiting. At the State level, Governor Hochul has committed to closing all of the State’s fossil fuel electricity plants by 2030. Current New York State summer installed capacity is 37,520 MW, or 37.5 GW. Of that, about 60%, or more than 22 GW, consists of natural gas facilities, which are capable of running nearly all the time and ramping up to maximum output when most needed. Based on National Grid’s projection of 57% increased demand by 2035, New York should be planning to have 37.5 GW x 1.57, or almost 59 GW of always-available capacity on hand by that year. Yet the only significant plans for additional capacity by 2035 consist of about 9 GW of offshore wind, and another 1.25 GW to come from a transmission line to bring hydropower from Quebec. (In recent weeks, all of the offshore wind developers have demanded major contract price increases of 50% and up, failing which they threaten to walk off the job.)

Storm over New York’s energy future!

Something here does not remotely add up. If New York state succeeds by 2030 in closing its natural gas plants — the plants that account for 60% of the State’s generation capacity — that would bring our total installed capacity down from 37.5 GW to as little as 15 GW. But we need almost 60 GW to meet projected demand. And that’s 60 GW that can be called on any time as needed to meet peak usage. The 9 GW of projected offshore wind turbines wouldn’t make much of a dent even if they operated all the time and could be dispatched to meet peak demand, which they can’t. Instead, they will operate only about a third of the time, and at their own whim. At best they will provide about 3 GW on average, when what we need for this full electrification project is more like 45 GW of dispatchable power to add to our existing hydro and nuclear.
The New York Independent System Operator, which is well aware of this gigantic contradiction, talks vaguely of something they call a “dispatchable emissions-free resource” to fill the enormous gap. Other than nuclear, which is blocked, that is something that is a pure fantasy and does not exist.