Just a prompt to explore the data behind unrealized energy conservation per capita. I think it might be the motivating, complementary piece for your argument to increase LNG production. I agree, we are very brainwashed into hating on natural gas and oil due to CO2 emission reduction targets. Here's an example: when I moved to Tucson, Arizona, I was besieged by solar rooftop panel installing companies. So, I interviewed a few, did the math, a lot of math, and realized that for $20K, I'd reduce my grid demand by about 50% max with the existing equipment at my home. I was using so much frickin' energy that my rooftop actually wasn't big enough to take me off grid...in Arizona. So, I switched to conservation. I replaced ALL my pool equipment, primarily the pump. Switched out all lights for LEDs. Ripped out the landscape lighting. Installed UV blocking window shades (99% of light energy blocked, cool to the touch). Our electricity consumption has gone down by over 50% since we moved in. This cost us about $4K. Strategic, well-thought conservation seems to me a very feasible thing to fund at the federal level (through tax rebates that already have precedent) and mitigate the continued use of carbon emitting LNG/oil energy sources in the medium term.
You are mostly talking about energy efficiency not conservation. Efficiency is replacing a incandescent bulb with an LED bulb. Conservation is turning a light off you don't need.
With $20K incl the large FTC, you should get a 10kw array. Which should generate about 45kwh/day in sunny Arizona. Assuming you have net metering you are saying your home used 90kwh a day which is pretty high, must be some home. USavg is 30kwh/day. Although in actual fact the 10kw array would only supply about 30kwh/day of your electricity consumption, the rest is coming from the utility.
Switching to LED lighting is so old by now, I'm surprised you weren't already all LED lighting. That's not efficiency, that's basic home maintenance.
Most households cannot achieve anywhere near 50% efficiency improvements and cannot afford the cost of that, struggling as they are to pay basic energy bills.
The best & most cost effective way to achieve energy inefficiency is to quit the wind & solar installations which are energy inefficiency on steroids. An efficient grid is a baseload power grid with efficient CCGT, supercritical coal, conventional hydro and nuclear power plants. Wind & solar destroy the efficiency of the modern grid.
Part of the problem is that it’s become a moral judgment question to use energy you’re paying for. That’s down to the climate religion folks. So I think he’s fine to cut consumption if he wants, for whatever reason. But if he doesn’t want to turn off his lights at night *and is willing to pay for it* I don’t see how that is different from owning a giant couch or a king-sized bed.
In other words, people attaching moral value to using less energy (not the Op, he didn’t say that) is the weird part. I am just saying is all.
That's very true. Iceland has the highest per capita energy consumption on Earth. Where the USSA it is 77,574 kwh in Iceland it is 170,041 kwh per person. They have ample geothermal energy and they are quite happy to use it.
And even worse the very ones touting all this energy scarcity, energy rationing agenda are the very ones flying all over the World in Private Jets, like Trudeau and John Kerry.
Excellent column and thanks for putting things into perspective. Currently, Alaska oil producers on the North Slope are forced to flare-off or re-inject trillions of cubic feet of NG byproduct. All they can do with this gas is to power their drill pads and platforms and pump stations. Alaska has been trying to get this tremendous endowment of natural gas to market for decades. We did it with our oil, so why can't we do it with our gas? We can't because of infernal EPA regulations for wetlands. About 60% of Alaska's surface is defined as one type of wetlands or another, placing severe restrictions and prohibitive costs upon development and imposing draconian penalties for inconsequential and mostly, unintentional violations. The compensatory cost of wetlands mitigation more than doubles the cost of pipeline construction, inclusive of all costs. Considering the recent failures of pipeline construction due to social/regulatory & now, executive obstruction, why would anybody invest in building and maintaining a gas pipeline in Alaska? Well, with current gas prices, maybe it's time to re-assess.
The world needs Alaska's oil and it needs our natural gas, too. If the Biden people can't see this, then they have to go. A modern pipeline will not impact the ecosystem to any significant degree. Wildlife populations along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline have, in general, flourished since construction. As an example, while helping with a Rhino project in Zimbabwe (30 years ago), I met a bird consultant for WWF. In the 1970s, when the Alaska pipeline was undergoing permitting, he worked for Audobon conducting an independent survey and study of bird populations along the proposed easement. He predicted massive disruptions to many species of birds. Several years after construction, he returned to the same sites and re-surveyed local bird populations. He found their numbers had increased, most likely due to new nesting habits. They were nesting on the unburied sections of pipeline where the nests were safe(r) from fox, raptors, and other predators. D'Oh!
Back to Alaska gas and pipeline construction. We pretty well have all the engineering problems licked. The resource is huge. The reasons and excuses for not putting that gas to work to help 'our democracy' and to help our friends during tough times are all lousy and specious. When everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. We need to do this to 'save our democracy'. We can see what happens when critical resources run short. It doesn't take long for things to start falling apart. Why, even that darling forest elf, Greta Thunberg, has jumped the shark and is now demanding nuclear power and more natural gas production. Like I say, when the utility bill triples, minds will change. We need a change in direction on national energy policy because the current leadership is utterly failing.
Greta Thunberg is now demanding nuclear power and more gas production?!? I don't think so.
The current regime in the USSA has the same energy policy as Germany, Australia, Canada, Belgium, most other Western nations. This is no coincidence. Centralized powerful forces are dictating this energy insanity. This is obviously and overtly a deliberate effort to create energy poverty, deindustrialization, degrowth and social unrest in Western once-called democracies.
“The energy crisis and the climate crisis have the same solution!” shouted Thunberg to a cheering audience in Germany, many of whom had glued themselves to a nuclear plant at risk of premature closure. “We need to immediately expand the use of nuclear power and natural gas to prevent the burning of garbage, wood, and coal!”
I read that and was astounded as well until I read the next paragraph:
"I’m kidding, of course. No, what climate activists have actually done is the exact opposite.
Biden, Trudeau, Thunberg, Greenpeace, WWF, Extinction Rebellion, AOC, Sierra Club, and NRDC are all doubling down on their efforts to shut down nuclear power plants and natural gas production...."
Great article. There is a more nuanced problem with the lack of additional federal leases. Most oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico extend across many contiguous Federal leases. Oil companies map oil and gas fields using 3-D seismic data that covers hundreds of miles. If an oil company has only one Federal lease on a possible oil field they map, but the possible oil field extends under three or four contiguous federal leases that the company does not have, the company will never drill their one Federal lease. It would be completely irrational for them to do so. If the company were to drill their one lease and actually make a discovery as they hope for, they have “de risked” the offsetting continuous leases. Other oil companies then become aware of the oil field on the offsetting leases by virtue of the discovery made on the first lease. Federal leases are always open to all for competitively bid. Thus when the offsetting Federal leases are put up for sale, they sell for thousand of times a normal lease because they have a proven oil field under them. No company is so irrational as to prove up many federal leases they don’t have by drilling an extremely expensive ($20MM) exploratory well on the one lease they have, knowing full-well that if it is successful, the oil field extends under federal leases they do not have.
I wish I could do the Vulcan Mind Meld and visit the "thinking" of my well-educated liberal friends to understand how they rationalize this Biden attack on organic energy while also opposing nuclear. I can only see four options:
1) Their craving for political validation is so strong that they are comfortable in consequential widespread human harm if it will result in them feeling politically victorious. In other words, they know what they are advocating is nihilistic, but they are good with it.
2) They really don't understand the consequences of their ideological agenda, but are activists anyway.
3) They actually believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and is an immediate existential threat that will destroy the natural world and thus warrants change that will result in copious human misery and suffering.
4) They believe they are part of the ruling class vested in the globalist Great Reset project and support the crippling of western small business and working class democratic power, and that requires the scarcity of cheap and plentiful energy to keep punching down the small business and working-class economic opportunity that would otherwise exist.
No matter which of these four explanations, it is clear to me that the holders of them need to be neutralized and neutered.
It's all about #4. #1-#3 may be true to some degree but that is just rationalization, convenience. Though it's not that they "believe" they are part of the ruling class, they "know" they are paid minions of the ruling class, doing their dirty work to achieve the oppressive Great Reset total wealth transfer plan.
Another great example of poor governance. Never in my lifetime, being a baby boomer, did I think I would ever read the people of Europe would suffer from the cold in winter - from a self inflicted wound.
LED bulbs don’t tolerate cycling off and on as well as incandescent. They cost more to buy. I’m gradually having to replace them. We were sold a disappointing bill of goods. Much like the pig- tail bulbs a few years back. LED bulbs flicker right out of the box. We turn out lights not being used. We’re gradually replacing our wasteful outdoor LED fixtures that burn all night—not when activated by motion.
LED lights killed our local manufacturers and are costing American consumers thousands of dollars to replace every year or so while saving a few pennies; meanwhile plants in China are churning out trillions of bulbs many of which end up in landfill along with the face masks—yet another fraud.
Not to mention the desecration of millions of acres of land in developing nations to produce our EV batteries. An interim step using CNG to power autos while less wasteful batteries are developed would make more sense. But climate change is not about sense—it’s about panic and mass hysteria. Michael is 100% correct.
Seriously, are people just now starting to realize what Michael is saying is true? There must be a lot of really uninformed people out there, because I have known this for decades now. If people are really that uninformed or that propagandized to believe the Democrats aren't in a full frontal assault on our energy infrastructure, then we are doomed to have serious worldwide energy crisis very soon. And this will bleed over into the transportation and food sector as well. You get the government you deserve. America deserves the Bidens and all the whacko climate activists he has placed in key positions of power. Now they infect our corporations, universities, the media and the arts. Perhaps they can never be ridden from our society and we can watch in real time as the US goes the route of Germany and becomes de-industrialized right before our eyes.
I hope you are right, but I don't think you are right. My optimism is gone and I don't think elections are going to change what is happening. too many people want it to continue, so that is why I say we deserve it.
It is obvious to any non-environmental whacko that Biden and the democrats and their supporters in the republican party are intent on driving the world into collapse which is the only way their Marxist goals of world central government can be met. That the survival of the human race is endangered by their strategy is too bad. But that is in line with their father.
So.... if we had an administration full of humanitarian- entrepreneurs, who were more interested in saving human lives than "saving" the planet (for the moment) Biden could have been a hero?
Why are tech site operators so attached to their preferred narratives that they refuse to tolerate any dissident thoughts, or even proven facts? Most of the rest of us can talk with people who hold different views -- and sometimes even change our minds.
The globalist ruling class, which I guess includes all the usual ghouls from the WEF (UN bureaucrats, Wall St banks and investment cos, international finance and corporations), plus the American ruling elite centered in the Democratic party (legacy media, academia, NGOs, and Big Tech etc) received an existential shock in 2016 with first Brexit then Trump.
They are not going to risk losing control again. From now on they will own The Narrative, they will own every entity that pumps out The Narrative (who move in lockstep), they will own the government (whether they win elections or not), they will own the internet, and they will own the planet (they do already, they just want to protect themselves from any future shocks.)
Dissenters like Mike Shellenberger will be deplatformed, hobbled w charges of "Dis/Misinformation", attacked w reputational smears by the trained attack dogs of the media, and if worse comes to worse, treated like the Canadian truckers and have all their bank accounts locked.
Well said. This is someone who knows what is going on behind the facade created by the MSM. It's all theater. First the Ruling Cult of Psychopaths decide their plan for the World. And then they invent various narratives to facilitate their plan. We are not privy to their plans so we have to figure it out from the fake narratives their minions in the media pump up with ridiculous fervor.
Because they are useful idiots for the propaganda they have been fed in college. If you look at all these climate whaco's they are all in their 20s and 30s. The people need to be drummed out right now or we will face the consequences.
Just a prompt to explore the data behind unrealized energy conservation per capita. I think it might be the motivating, complementary piece for your argument to increase LNG production. I agree, we are very brainwashed into hating on natural gas and oil due to CO2 emission reduction targets. Here's an example: when I moved to Tucson, Arizona, I was besieged by solar rooftop panel installing companies. So, I interviewed a few, did the math, a lot of math, and realized that for $20K, I'd reduce my grid demand by about 50% max with the existing equipment at my home. I was using so much frickin' energy that my rooftop actually wasn't big enough to take me off grid...in Arizona. So, I switched to conservation. I replaced ALL my pool equipment, primarily the pump. Switched out all lights for LEDs. Ripped out the landscape lighting. Installed UV blocking window shades (99% of light energy blocked, cool to the touch). Our electricity consumption has gone down by over 50% since we moved in. This cost us about $4K. Strategic, well-thought conservation seems to me a very feasible thing to fund at the federal level (through tax rebates that already have precedent) and mitigate the continued use of carbon emitting LNG/oil energy sources in the medium term.
You are mostly talking about energy efficiency not conservation. Efficiency is replacing a incandescent bulb with an LED bulb. Conservation is turning a light off you don't need.
With $20K incl the large FTC, you should get a 10kw array. Which should generate about 45kwh/day in sunny Arizona. Assuming you have net metering you are saying your home used 90kwh a day which is pretty high, must be some home. USavg is 30kwh/day. Although in actual fact the 10kw array would only supply about 30kwh/day of your electricity consumption, the rest is coming from the utility.
Switching to LED lighting is so old by now, I'm surprised you weren't already all LED lighting. That's not efficiency, that's basic home maintenance.
Most households cannot achieve anywhere near 50% efficiency improvements and cannot afford the cost of that, struggling as they are to pay basic energy bills.
The best & most cost effective way to achieve energy inefficiency is to quit the wind & solar installations which are energy inefficiency on steroids. An efficient grid is a baseload power grid with efficient CCGT, supercritical coal, conventional hydro and nuclear power plants. Wind & solar destroy the efficiency of the modern grid.
Part of the problem is that it’s become a moral judgment question to use energy you’re paying for. That’s down to the climate religion folks. So I think he’s fine to cut consumption if he wants, for whatever reason. But if he doesn’t want to turn off his lights at night *and is willing to pay for it* I don’t see how that is different from owning a giant couch or a king-sized bed.
In other words, people attaching moral value to using less energy (not the Op, he didn’t say that) is the weird part. I am just saying is all.
That's very true. Iceland has the highest per capita energy consumption on Earth. Where the USSA it is 77,574 kwh in Iceland it is 170,041 kwh per person. They have ample geothermal energy and they are quite happy to use it.
And even worse the very ones touting all this energy scarcity, energy rationing agenda are the very ones flying all over the World in Private Jets, like Trudeau and John Kerry.
Right! Great points.
Just outsource all usa MFG to CHINA#1 where it can done with cheap coal energy and the usa stays clean with no jobs.
Excellent column and thanks for putting things into perspective. Currently, Alaska oil producers on the North Slope are forced to flare-off or re-inject trillions of cubic feet of NG byproduct. All they can do with this gas is to power their drill pads and platforms and pump stations. Alaska has been trying to get this tremendous endowment of natural gas to market for decades. We did it with our oil, so why can't we do it with our gas? We can't because of infernal EPA regulations for wetlands. About 60% of Alaska's surface is defined as one type of wetlands or another, placing severe restrictions and prohibitive costs upon development and imposing draconian penalties for inconsequential and mostly, unintentional violations. The compensatory cost of wetlands mitigation more than doubles the cost of pipeline construction, inclusive of all costs. Considering the recent failures of pipeline construction due to social/regulatory & now, executive obstruction, why would anybody invest in building and maintaining a gas pipeline in Alaska? Well, with current gas prices, maybe it's time to re-assess.
The world needs Alaska's oil and it needs our natural gas, too. If the Biden people can't see this, then they have to go. A modern pipeline will not impact the ecosystem to any significant degree. Wildlife populations along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline have, in general, flourished since construction. As an example, while helping with a Rhino project in Zimbabwe (30 years ago), I met a bird consultant for WWF. In the 1970s, when the Alaska pipeline was undergoing permitting, he worked for Audobon conducting an independent survey and study of bird populations along the proposed easement. He predicted massive disruptions to many species of birds. Several years after construction, he returned to the same sites and re-surveyed local bird populations. He found their numbers had increased, most likely due to new nesting habits. They were nesting on the unburied sections of pipeline where the nests were safe(r) from fox, raptors, and other predators. D'Oh!
Back to Alaska gas and pipeline construction. We pretty well have all the engineering problems licked. The resource is huge. The reasons and excuses for not putting that gas to work to help 'our democracy' and to help our friends during tough times are all lousy and specious. When everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. We need to do this to 'save our democracy'. We can see what happens when critical resources run short. It doesn't take long for things to start falling apart. Why, even that darling forest elf, Greta Thunberg, has jumped the shark and is now demanding nuclear power and more natural gas production. Like I say, when the utility bill triples, minds will change. We need a change in direction on national energy policy because the current leadership is utterly failing.
Greta Thunberg is now demanding nuclear power and more gas production?!? I don't think so.
The current regime in the USSA has the same energy policy as Germany, Australia, Canada, Belgium, most other Western nations. This is no coincidence. Centralized powerful forces are dictating this energy insanity. This is obviously and overtly a deliberate effort to create energy poverty, deindustrialization, degrowth and social unrest in Western once-called democracies.
See Schellenberger, here, 10/8/2022:
“The energy crisis and the climate crisis have the same solution!” shouted Thunberg to a cheering audience in Germany, many of whom had glued themselves to a nuclear plant at risk of premature closure. “We need to immediately expand the use of nuclear power and natural gas to prevent the burning of garbage, wood, and coal!”
I read that and was astounded as well until I read the next paragraph:
"I’m kidding, of course. No, what climate activists have actually done is the exact opposite.
Biden, Trudeau, Thunberg, Greenpeace, WWF, Extinction Rebellion, AOC, Sierra Club, and NRDC are all doubling down on their efforts to shut down nuclear power plants and natural gas production...."
Well, that makes no sense, but is perfectly in character with those people.
Great perspective and very well-said.
Great article. There is a more nuanced problem with the lack of additional federal leases. Most oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico extend across many contiguous Federal leases. Oil companies map oil and gas fields using 3-D seismic data that covers hundreds of miles. If an oil company has only one Federal lease on a possible oil field they map, but the possible oil field extends under three or four contiguous federal leases that the company does not have, the company will never drill their one Federal lease. It would be completely irrational for them to do so. If the company were to drill their one lease and actually make a discovery as they hope for, they have “de risked” the offsetting continuous leases. Other oil companies then become aware of the oil field on the offsetting leases by virtue of the discovery made on the first lease. Federal leases are always open to all for competitively bid. Thus when the offsetting Federal leases are put up for sale, they sell for thousand of times a normal lease because they have a proven oil field under them. No company is so irrational as to prove up many federal leases they don’t have by drilling an extremely expensive ($20MM) exploratory well on the one lease they have, knowing full-well that if it is successful, the oil field extends under federal leases they do not have.
Thus the need for more leases.
I wish I could do the Vulcan Mind Meld and visit the "thinking" of my well-educated liberal friends to understand how they rationalize this Biden attack on organic energy while also opposing nuclear. I can only see four options:
1) Their craving for political validation is so strong that they are comfortable in consequential widespread human harm if it will result in them feeling politically victorious. In other words, they know what they are advocating is nihilistic, but they are good with it.
2) They really don't understand the consequences of their ideological agenda, but are activists anyway.
3) They actually believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and is an immediate existential threat that will destroy the natural world and thus warrants change that will result in copious human misery and suffering.
4) They believe they are part of the ruling class vested in the globalist Great Reset project and support the crippling of western small business and working class democratic power, and that requires the scarcity of cheap and plentiful energy to keep punching down the small business and working-class economic opportunity that would otherwise exist.
No matter which of these four explanations, it is clear to me that the holders of them need to be neutralized and neutered.
It's all about #4. #1-#3 may be true to some degree but that is just rationalization, convenience. Though it's not that they "believe" they are part of the ruling class, they "know" they are paid minions of the ruling class, doing their dirty work to achieve the oppressive Great Reset total wealth transfer plan.
I think this might be right. The anti-Brexit class.
all of the above
Another great example of poor governance. Never in my lifetime, being a baby boomer, did I think I would ever read the people of Europe would suffer from the cold in winter - from a self inflicted wound.
LED bulbs don’t tolerate cycling off and on as well as incandescent. They cost more to buy. I’m gradually having to replace them. We were sold a disappointing bill of goods. Much like the pig- tail bulbs a few years back. LED bulbs flicker right out of the box. We turn out lights not being used. We’re gradually replacing our wasteful outdoor LED fixtures that burn all night—not when activated by motion.
LED lights killed our local manufacturers and are costing American consumers thousands of dollars to replace every year or so while saving a few pennies; meanwhile plants in China are churning out trillions of bulbs many of which end up in landfill along with the face masks—yet another fraud.
Not to mention the desecration of millions of acres of land in developing nations to produce our EV batteries. An interim step using CNG to power autos while less wasteful batteries are developed would make more sense. But climate change is not about sense—it’s about panic and mass hysteria. Michael is 100% correct.
Seriously, are people just now starting to realize what Michael is saying is true? There must be a lot of really uninformed people out there, because I have known this for decades now. If people are really that uninformed or that propagandized to believe the Democrats aren't in a full frontal assault on our energy infrastructure, then we are doomed to have serious worldwide energy crisis very soon. And this will bleed over into the transportation and food sector as well. You get the government you deserve. America deserves the Bidens and all the whacko climate activists he has placed in key positions of power. Now they infect our corporations, universities, the media and the arts. Perhaps they can never be ridden from our society and we can watch in real time as the US goes the route of Germany and becomes de-industrialized right before our eyes.
Electron Fr@ud is a Moral Sin which is Decades of PAIN 1960 Nixon vs Kennedy
I hope you are right, but I don't think you are right. My optimism is gone and I don't think elections are going to change what is happening. too many people want it to continue, so that is why I say we deserve it.
It is obvious to any non-environmental whacko that Biden and the democrats and their supporters in the republican party are intent on driving the world into collapse which is the only way their Marxist goals of world central government can be met. That the survival of the human race is endangered by their strategy is too bad. But that is in line with their father.
True dat.
It is Fox News but good description of NRDC https://www.foxnews.com/politics/green-group-influencing-biden-admin-deep-ties-chinese-government
So.... if we had an administration full of humanitarian- entrepreneurs, who were more interested in saving human lives than "saving" the planet (for the moment) Biden could have been a hero?
Why are tech site operators so attached to their preferred narratives that they refuse to tolerate any dissident thoughts, or even proven facts? Most of the rest of us can talk with people who hold different views -- and sometimes even change our minds.
The globalist ruling class, which I guess includes all the usual ghouls from the WEF (UN bureaucrats, Wall St banks and investment cos, international finance and corporations), plus the American ruling elite centered in the Democratic party (legacy media, academia, NGOs, and Big Tech etc) received an existential shock in 2016 with first Brexit then Trump.
They are not going to risk losing control again. From now on they will own The Narrative, they will own every entity that pumps out The Narrative (who move in lockstep), they will own the government (whether they win elections or not), they will own the internet, and they will own the planet (they do already, they just want to protect themselves from any future shocks.)
Dissenters like Mike Shellenberger will be deplatformed, hobbled w charges of "Dis/Misinformation", attacked w reputational smears by the trained attack dogs of the media, and if worse comes to worse, treated like the Canadian truckers and have all their bank accounts locked.
Well said. This is someone who knows what is going on behind the facade created by the MSM. It's all theater. First the Ruling Cult of Psychopaths decide their plan for the World. And then they invent various narratives to facilitate their plan. We are not privy to their plans so we have to figure it out from the fake narratives their minions in the media pump up with ridiculous fervor.
This is why Bitcoin.
Because they are useful idiots for the propaganda they have been fed in college. If you look at all these climate whaco's they are all in their 20s and 30s. The people need to be drummed out right now or we will face the consequences.
They employ activists.