Another excellent "Report," Thom ! With my increasingly cynical-yet-realisitic view of things
political, I might add that a new SCOTUS decision throwing governmental rule-making back to
Congress means anything that the House passes--and they've done wonders passing a lot of
measures, yeh?--will end up in the Senate graveyard (per Moscow Mitch) where a filibuster awaits.... unless the Dem's can find a will and a way to do away with it. Things look rather bleak.....eh?
I also notice that even the "liberal" media is pushing the low Biden ratings of late....and contributing to the fatalism that many of us democracy-supporters currently feel about the midterm election coming up. But then I'm reminded of your favorite saying, Thom: "Despair is NOT an option !"
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."- Lobbyist Grover Norquist
I learned that quote from Thom. Whether pulling dollars from programs or killing off agencies they are determined to deconstruct the federal government that our founders created to "promote the general welfare".
Killing in the form of drowning is going to happen, just not in the way their ignorant ideology thinks it will be. Throw in the rest of the climate crisis and it's going to be drown, burn, etc for everyone, including their own progeny. This will be their legacy, and they will be hated now and in the future.
Thom, you are flat out wrong. Well, partially wrong. Well, you nailed the motives but don't have details right. Oh and you used "it's" incorrectly. Thanks, I find my fingers typing "it's" when I meant "its" fairly often but I catch most. Glad to see you miss it at least once.
Anyway, I'm an oilfield consultant and the work of oil service companies is more than 50% wind these days.
FYI, oil companies are simply energy investment banks these days. Like health insurance, only applied to a commodity. Today, XOM and CVX consist of a minimum number of maximum skilled experts - talented folks but not many people - they have to hire out almost everything. Before they get a lease, they hire a company to do seismic surveys. They usually have serious expertise in-house to choose where to bid. After they get the lease, they hire companies to do bottom surveys, drilling, setting platforms, choppers, everything. Basically, oil companies are project managers hiring all the talent and bankers paying for it. They honestly don't care what project they do if it has high return. They drill for oil because of their expertise, but most of the staff at oil companies are Engineers, and Engineers are just as happy doing a wind farm as drilling.
Back on topic, the industry magazines were 95% oil ten years ago, 5% offshore wind or sewage outfall drilling or other industries requiring similar talents. Today the magazines are showing more than 50% offshore wind installation. Oil hasn't vanished but it's much reduced.
Oil companies are working with equipment vendors as well. For example, electric cars are great and the way to go LONG TERM, but very few people living paycheck to paycheck can afford to throw away their 1995 beater and buy a Tesla. Being real instead of ideal, it's also FAR less pollution to run these fossil fueled cars to death - WAY more carbon is used making them than running them. As an Engineer who's worked in 150 countries, I can also tell you that any fossil fueled car taken off the streets quickly goes onto a ship to a small but not wealthy country. I worked with a Dutch guy who shipped used cars from Miami to Curacáo monthly. He made money doing it but his main goal was allowing everyone in the Caribbean who needed a car to drive a newer, cleaner car.
I mentioned some months back about the major oil companies developing clean fuels. We now have a number of ships and drilling rigs running on a diesel/ammonia mix, with the goal 100% ammonia, which can be made from AIR. Turkey just announced a major oil support vessel project where all the vessels will be fueled by Turkish Methanol, 100% renewable plus profits will stay in Turkey.
The other article I read in my oil magazines referred to agriculture. Right now, John Deere equipment runs 24/7 during harvest, diesel powered. Changing to electric is possible, but again, do you really think Cargill will simply throw away hundreds of diesel powered harvesters? I guarantee they will buy more Senators instead. What we need to do is replace the diesel. When they wear out, Deere will offer the new electric harvesters and farmers aren't stupid, they understand maintenance and will immediately notice it has 10% of the parts of the diesel machine.
The oil patch has jumped into wind like nothing in our history. Oil isn't the problem. The problem is calls to quit using oil tomorrow. That would be great, but it would cause world wide food riots.
Let's switch ASAP to clean fuel, and THEN start the move to new tech. I can't tell you just how much more reliable, efficient, and profitable this will be if we have time to ease into the new tech rather than cold turkey hop off our machines which were designed to replace a HORSE into machines designed to replace a machine designed to replace a horse. Let us start with the goal and design machines that accomplish the goal the best way, not the way we've used for a century with just a new motor.
The Supreme Court’s West Virginia decision involving carbon emissions from fossil fuel power plants, makes it clear that the Trump reconstituted Court is changing norms in pursuit of its more partisan agenda. Last week’s Dobbs decision struck down the 50-year women’s rights (Roe) precedent. Now, faced with grave economic and public health consequences resulting from climate change, the Supreme Court went to unusual lengths to inject itself into a non-existent case. EPA withdrew its 2015 Clean Power Plan and EPA stated its intent to draft a new rule. Previous Supreme Courts would refrain from involvement until any new rule goes through the rule-making process, including public comment and likely judicial review.
Central to the Court’s reasoning for pulling this 2015 rule from its coffin was the argument of cataclysmic energy market disruption and economic burden. The Court ignored the observable reality that the coal-fired power industry has achieved the expected emission reductions in dead 2015 rule and is moving to less expensive alternatives than the high cost of using coal. The power industry is shifting to more efficient generation assets, using customer demand management to reduce generation, and substituting less expensive wind and solar energy sources. Recent Supreme Court decisions are departing from past legal predictably, public sentiment, observable facts, even when dealing with important issues such as woman’s rights and health, and now the existential threat of global warming to public health. The Supreme Court’s ignoring the observable facts shows its inability to substitute its judgement for the judgement of the legislative branch and executive branch experts. EPA should continue to use the Congressionally granted flexibility in the Clean Air Act under today’s circumstances to protect the environment and public health.
I like all the other comments so far, BUT am greatly troubled by the fossil fuel industry's turning to wind power as its chief contribution to lowering carbon emissions. It is happening for two reasons:
(1) it has a good greenwashed look
(2) the more dependent on wind and solar the energy sector depends, the more it will rely on natural gas as backup. Already you see commercials promoting natural gas as a perfect companion to wind power--some of the commercials have wind turbines in the visuals. Natural gas is a splendid "dispatchable" energy source, because power can be ramped up in less than an hour. Obviously it has to be ramped up every 24 hours at nightfall wherever there's high dependency on solar. It can also be ramped up easily at cloudy times and when the wind becomes insufficient to keep up with demand (the latter occurred in an offshore wind facility in Great Britain when wind speeds dropped below expectations for the whole month of July a few years ago).
This is exactly why Germany has been put in such a bind by Russia (the source of most of its natural gas) not only because they use natural gas for heating, but also it has been used in a decade-long crash program to shut down nuclear power plants and replace them with wind and solar. The result of Germany's crash program is that they have lowered their carbon emissions from the energy sector only slightly over ten years, and their per capita emissions are still more than twice the emissions from France, whose energy sector is largely powered by nuclear. And Germany's electricity prices are way higher than France's. Germany's answer to the squeeze on Russia's natural gas is to get more natural gas from elsewhere, and--irony of ironies--turning back to coal! yes, the dirtiest emitter of all! All the while refusing to reopen nuclear power plants.
California is in a similar bind, pushing wind and solar while buying power from sources outside the state who are primarily fossil fuel burners in order to meet demand. Their proposed solution is to invest in storage--and if you want to consider big environmental impact, just do research on what it will take to build up the amount of batteries to keep the lights on when it's dark or wind speed drops. They are already having blackouts along with soaring electricity prices, and there's a shortage of lithium which is getting worse. These are the real-world consequences of heavy investment in renewable energy sources, as opposed to the dreams of renewable energy advocates (I understand the dreams! I used to have them!)
The more electric vehicles get put on the road, the greater the demand will be for round-the-clock baseload power--the kind that fossil fuels and nuclear but not wind and solar provide.
I anticipate the outcry against nuclear--"well what about the waste?" Well what about it? First, in the U.S. most of it is stored in casks on site awaiting a permanent storage location once nuclear waste hysteria finally dies down (assuming the nuclear industry improves its public relations and educational programs--hard hill for them to climb because they are mostly engineers who don't understand why the public doesn't understand scientific facts, and they are poor at marketing). Secondly, if a safe natural repository such as Yucca Mountain is not available for political reasons, we can bore deep holes in the earth to put it such as Norway is now engaged in. Boring deep holes is expensive, but not as expensive as the brownouts and blackouts that are going to occur if reliance on intermittent energy sources continues to build.
I see I'm going on so long I may have already lost half my readers to deep-rooted anti-nuclear bias, so I'll end with this for the rest of you with open minds: PLEASE read the book "Why We Need Nuclear Power: the Environmental Case" by Michael H. Fox (available online at reasonable prices and maybe in some bookstores). That book is what turned me around 8 years ago from being rabidly anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear. Fox is a guy who taught at Colorado State, and much of his research was on the effects of radiation on living cells, and he will tell you some actual scientific truth about nuclear power plant accidents. If you don't have a few hours for that, you can go to YouTube and check out one of Michael Shellenberger's videos such as the 20-minute-long "Why I Changed My Mind about Nuclear Power." (Shellenberger is a long-time environmental advocate)
Of course the fossil fuel companies don't want to invest in nuclear because it is in direct competition with them, but some with deep pockets are sure to invest big-time once they see the handwriting that is already on the wall.
One last few words: I am not completely against solar and wind--if I could afford it I'd put solar panels on my roof (I live in central Virginia where the offsets on costs you get from a solar installation are pretty much a wash and take years to accrue . . . everyone I know who is installing solar in their home is an upper-middle class person with plenty of discretionary capital lying around). But where generation from these intermittent sources goes much higher than 50% of the grid's electric energy supply, that economy will be in deep trouble--unless of course it keeps sucking masses of natural gas out of the ground, pipelining it all over creation, and . . . burning it.
The decades long momentum that the team consisting of the Republican party, corporate lobby agents, Republican governors, Republican think tanks and, of course, and conservative voters of all shapes has been very successful; mostly because we the voters from the center and the far left have failed to listen to, and work on effective consensus strategies. US voters have been lazy and the whining has not been productive. 300 million voters can rise and contribute $25 per month to get vote by mail systems in place, just as Oregon has done for Mr. Hartman's current residence and neighbors. Senator Biden, Senator Sanders and Senator Warren keep believing that the 2-party system will work in the US; most of us KNOW that both parties are bought and paid for and that we need a 3rd party called CommonSense USA. Just look at the damage that the Democratic party did with Presidents Clinton and Obama! It's shameful not to accept some of the blame for allowing all our media, all our health care and most of our food chain to be owned by less than 10 corporate groups. And it's shameful to not accept part of the blame for all our young people owing almost two (2) trillion US dollars in student loans. It is really time, perhaps, to NOT vote for any career incumbent politicians EVER. That's term limits and may introduce an attitude of service. Finally, buy Noam Chomsky's Who Rules the world; it's a shameful indictment of the boomer generation and a prayerful investigative analysis of what we ought to be doing, together.
Mr. Hartman's citation:
The United States (with 4 percent of the world’s population) has produced more greenhouse gasses than any other nation and continues to be one of the planet’s major emitters.
Blowing up the EPA’s CO2 rules would guarantee the future profits of the fossil fuel industry — the group that partially bankrolled Gorsuch, Roberts, Barrett, Alito, and Kavanaugh’s ascent to the Court — and also speed up the destruction of our atmosphere and the life on Earth it supports.
My bet is that if they’re going to do this (the New York Times this week is speculating it’s probable) in the West Virginia v EPA ruling that’s expected any day, and that they’ll drop the decision on the same day as their abortion or gun rulings, guaranteeing that most people won’t hear a thing about it.
Keep an eye on this decision: it’ll probably get no meaningful media coverage because it seems so bureaucratic and administrative (and may be buried in abortion or gun control news).
In truth, if it goes as is now expected, it will evoke the last lines of e.e. cummings’ poem The Hollow Men:
Another excellent "Report," Thom ! With my increasingly cynical-yet-realisitic view of things
political, I might add that a new SCOTUS decision throwing governmental rule-making back to
Congress means anything that the House passes--and they've done wonders passing a lot of
measures, yeh?--will end up in the Senate graveyard (per Moscow Mitch) where a filibuster awaits.... unless the Dem's can find a will and a way to do away with it. Things look rather bleak.....eh?
I also notice that even the "liberal" media is pushing the low Biden ratings of late....and contributing to the fatalism that many of us democracy-supporters currently feel about the midterm election coming up. But then I'm reminded of your favorite saying, Thom: "Despair is NOT an option !"
I forgot to say thank you to Thom! Thank you--you expand my horizons with every report!
The inmates are in control!!
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."- Lobbyist Grover Norquist
I learned that quote from Thom. Whether pulling dollars from programs or killing off agencies they are determined to deconstruct the federal government that our founders created to "promote the general welfare".
Killing in the form of drowning is going to happen, just not in the way their ignorant ideology thinks it will be. Throw in the rest of the climate crisis and it's going to be drown, burn, etc for everyone, including their own progeny. This will be their legacy, and they will be hated now and in the future.
Thom, you are flat out wrong. Well, partially wrong. Well, you nailed the motives but don't have details right. Oh and you used "it's" incorrectly. Thanks, I find my fingers typing "it's" when I meant "its" fairly often but I catch most. Glad to see you miss it at least once.
Anyway, I'm an oilfield consultant and the work of oil service companies is more than 50% wind these days.
FYI, oil companies are simply energy investment banks these days. Like health insurance, only applied to a commodity. Today, XOM and CVX consist of a minimum number of maximum skilled experts - talented folks but not many people - they have to hire out almost everything. Before they get a lease, they hire a company to do seismic surveys. They usually have serious expertise in-house to choose where to bid. After they get the lease, they hire companies to do bottom surveys, drilling, setting platforms, choppers, everything. Basically, oil companies are project managers hiring all the talent and bankers paying for it. They honestly don't care what project they do if it has high return. They drill for oil because of their expertise, but most of the staff at oil companies are Engineers, and Engineers are just as happy doing a wind farm as drilling.
Back on topic, the industry magazines were 95% oil ten years ago, 5% offshore wind or sewage outfall drilling or other industries requiring similar talents. Today the magazines are showing more than 50% offshore wind installation. Oil hasn't vanished but it's much reduced.
Oil companies are working with equipment vendors as well. For example, electric cars are great and the way to go LONG TERM, but very few people living paycheck to paycheck can afford to throw away their 1995 beater and buy a Tesla. Being real instead of ideal, it's also FAR less pollution to run these fossil fueled cars to death - WAY more carbon is used making them than running them. As an Engineer who's worked in 150 countries, I can also tell you that any fossil fueled car taken off the streets quickly goes onto a ship to a small but not wealthy country. I worked with a Dutch guy who shipped used cars from Miami to Curacáo monthly. He made money doing it but his main goal was allowing everyone in the Caribbean who needed a car to drive a newer, cleaner car.
I mentioned some months back about the major oil companies developing clean fuels. We now have a number of ships and drilling rigs running on a diesel/ammonia mix, with the goal 100% ammonia, which can be made from AIR. Turkey just announced a major oil support vessel project where all the vessels will be fueled by Turkish Methanol, 100% renewable plus profits will stay in Turkey.
The other article I read in my oil magazines referred to agriculture. Right now, John Deere equipment runs 24/7 during harvest, diesel powered. Changing to electric is possible, but again, do you really think Cargill will simply throw away hundreds of diesel powered harvesters? I guarantee they will buy more Senators instead. What we need to do is replace the diesel. When they wear out, Deere will offer the new electric harvesters and farmers aren't stupid, they understand maintenance and will immediately notice it has 10% of the parts of the diesel machine.
The oil patch has jumped into wind like nothing in our history. Oil isn't the problem. The problem is calls to quit using oil tomorrow. That would be great, but it would cause world wide food riots.
Let's switch ASAP to clean fuel, and THEN start the move to new tech. I can't tell you just how much more reliable, efficient, and profitable this will be if we have time to ease into the new tech rather than cold turkey hop off our machines which were designed to replace a HORSE into machines designed to replace a machine designed to replace a horse. Let us start with the goal and design machines that accomplish the goal the best way, not the way we've used for a century with just a new motor.
Thank you for highlighting this Thom, one more thing to stay on top of.
I smell burning flesh.
The Supreme Court’s West Virginia decision involving carbon emissions from fossil fuel power plants, makes it clear that the Trump reconstituted Court is changing norms in pursuit of its more partisan agenda. Last week’s Dobbs decision struck down the 50-year women’s rights (Roe) precedent. Now, faced with grave economic and public health consequences resulting from climate change, the Supreme Court went to unusual lengths to inject itself into a non-existent case. EPA withdrew its 2015 Clean Power Plan and EPA stated its intent to draft a new rule. Previous Supreme Courts would refrain from involvement until any new rule goes through the rule-making process, including public comment and likely judicial review.
Central to the Court’s reasoning for pulling this 2015 rule from its coffin was the argument of cataclysmic energy market disruption and economic burden. The Court ignored the observable reality that the coal-fired power industry has achieved the expected emission reductions in dead 2015 rule and is moving to less expensive alternatives than the high cost of using coal. The power industry is shifting to more efficient generation assets, using customer demand management to reduce generation, and substituting less expensive wind and solar energy sources. Recent Supreme Court decisions are departing from past legal predictably, public sentiment, observable facts, even when dealing with important issues such as woman’s rights and health, and now the existential threat of global warming to public health. The Supreme Court’s ignoring the observable facts shows its inability to substitute its judgement for the judgement of the legislative branch and executive branch experts. EPA should continue to use the Congressionally granted flexibility in the Clean Air Act under today’s circumstances to protect the environment and public health.
Climate Policy Insights Newsletter, Substack
I like all the other comments so far, BUT am greatly troubled by the fossil fuel industry's turning to wind power as its chief contribution to lowering carbon emissions. It is happening for two reasons:
(1) it has a good greenwashed look
(2) the more dependent on wind and solar the energy sector depends, the more it will rely on natural gas as backup. Already you see commercials promoting natural gas as a perfect companion to wind power--some of the commercials have wind turbines in the visuals. Natural gas is a splendid "dispatchable" energy source, because power can be ramped up in less than an hour. Obviously it has to be ramped up every 24 hours at nightfall wherever there's high dependency on solar. It can also be ramped up easily at cloudy times and when the wind becomes insufficient to keep up with demand (the latter occurred in an offshore wind facility in Great Britain when wind speeds dropped below expectations for the whole month of July a few years ago).
This is exactly why Germany has been put in such a bind by Russia (the source of most of its natural gas) not only because they use natural gas for heating, but also it has been used in a decade-long crash program to shut down nuclear power plants and replace them with wind and solar. The result of Germany's crash program is that they have lowered their carbon emissions from the energy sector only slightly over ten years, and their per capita emissions are still more than twice the emissions from France, whose energy sector is largely powered by nuclear. And Germany's electricity prices are way higher than France's. Germany's answer to the squeeze on Russia's natural gas is to get more natural gas from elsewhere, and--irony of ironies--turning back to coal! yes, the dirtiest emitter of all! All the while refusing to reopen nuclear power plants.
California is in a similar bind, pushing wind and solar while buying power from sources outside the state who are primarily fossil fuel burners in order to meet demand. Their proposed solution is to invest in storage--and if you want to consider big environmental impact, just do research on what it will take to build up the amount of batteries to keep the lights on when it's dark or wind speed drops. They are already having blackouts along with soaring electricity prices, and there's a shortage of lithium which is getting worse. These are the real-world consequences of heavy investment in renewable energy sources, as opposed to the dreams of renewable energy advocates (I understand the dreams! I used to have them!)
The more electric vehicles get put on the road, the greater the demand will be for round-the-clock baseload power--the kind that fossil fuels and nuclear but not wind and solar provide.
I anticipate the outcry against nuclear--"well what about the waste?" Well what about it? First, in the U.S. most of it is stored in casks on site awaiting a permanent storage location once nuclear waste hysteria finally dies down (assuming the nuclear industry improves its public relations and educational programs--hard hill for them to climb because they are mostly engineers who don't understand why the public doesn't understand scientific facts, and they are poor at marketing). Secondly, if a safe natural repository such as Yucca Mountain is not available for political reasons, we can bore deep holes in the earth to put it such as Norway is now engaged in. Boring deep holes is expensive, but not as expensive as the brownouts and blackouts that are going to occur if reliance on intermittent energy sources continues to build.
I see I'm going on so long I may have already lost half my readers to deep-rooted anti-nuclear bias, so I'll end with this for the rest of you with open minds: PLEASE read the book "Why We Need Nuclear Power: the Environmental Case" by Michael H. Fox (available online at reasonable prices and maybe in some bookstores). That book is what turned me around 8 years ago from being rabidly anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear. Fox is a guy who taught at Colorado State, and much of his research was on the effects of radiation on living cells, and he will tell you some actual scientific truth about nuclear power plant accidents. If you don't have a few hours for that, you can go to YouTube and check out one of Michael Shellenberger's videos such as the 20-minute-long "Why I Changed My Mind about Nuclear Power." (Shellenberger is a long-time environmental advocate)
Of course the fossil fuel companies don't want to invest in nuclear because it is in direct competition with them, but some with deep pockets are sure to invest big-time once they see the handwriting that is already on the wall.
One last few words: I am not completely against solar and wind--if I could afford it I'd put solar panels on my roof (I live in central Virginia where the offsets on costs you get from a solar installation are pretty much a wash and take years to accrue . . . everyone I know who is installing solar in their home is an upper-middle class person with plenty of discretionary capital lying around). But where generation from these intermittent sources goes much higher than 50% of the grid's electric energy supply, that economy will be in deep trouble--unless of course it keeps sucking masses of natural gas out of the ground, pipelining it all over creation, and . . . burning it.
The decades long momentum that the team consisting of the Republican party, corporate lobby agents, Republican governors, Republican think tanks and, of course, and conservative voters of all shapes has been very successful; mostly because we the voters from the center and the far left have failed to listen to, and work on effective consensus strategies. US voters have been lazy and the whining has not been productive. 300 million voters can rise and contribute $25 per month to get vote by mail systems in place, just as Oregon has done for Mr. Hartman's current residence and neighbors. Senator Biden, Senator Sanders and Senator Warren keep believing that the 2-party system will work in the US; most of us KNOW that both parties are bought and paid for and that we need a 3rd party called CommonSense USA. Just look at the damage that the Democratic party did with Presidents Clinton and Obama! It's shameful not to accept some of the blame for allowing all our media, all our health care and most of our food chain to be owned by less than 10 corporate groups. And it's shameful to not accept part of the blame for all our young people owing almost two (2) trillion US dollars in student loans. It is really time, perhaps, to NOT vote for any career incumbent politicians EVER. That's term limits and may introduce an attitude of service. Finally, buy Noam Chomsky's Who Rules the world; it's a shameful indictment of the boomer generation and a prayerful investigative analysis of what we ought to be doing, together.
Mr. Hartman's citation:
The United States (with 4 percent of the world’s population) has produced more greenhouse gasses than any other nation and continues to be one of the planet’s major emitters.
Blowing up the EPA’s CO2 rules would guarantee the future profits of the fossil fuel industry — the group that partially bankrolled Gorsuch, Roberts, Barrett, Alito, and Kavanaugh’s ascent to the Court — and also speed up the destruction of our atmosphere and the life on Earth it supports.
My bet is that if they’re going to do this (the New York Times this week is speculating it’s probable) in the West Virginia v EPA ruling that’s expected any day, and that they’ll drop the decision on the same day as their abortion or gun rulings, guaranteeing that most people won’t hear a thing about it.
Keep an eye on this decision: it’ll probably get no meaningful media coverage because it seems so bureaucratic and administrative (and may be buried in abortion or gun control news).
In truth, if it goes as is now expected, it will evoke the last lines of e.e. cummings’ poem The Hollow Men:
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star. …
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.