THE NEXT GIGANTIC ISSUE.

[pelmet]

It seems that the green transition advocates are hyping hydrogen at our saviour while we close down our reliabe energy sources. Here is an interesting article about it. People grasping at straws.....

Doubts surface over hydrogen as an energy and heating source
Daniel J. Graeber - Yesterday 1:38 p.m.

Sept. 27 (UPI) -- With the British economy struggling under the strains of high energy bills, a review of the scientific press found that hydrogen, a potent energy carrier and a darling of those supporting the transition away from fossil fuels, is not suitable as an alternate source of heating.

A review of dozens of scholarly articles on hydrogen as an alternative energy source finds it is not suitable as an option for heating.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has added a war premium to the price of major commodities such as wheat, crude oil and natural gas. That is a particular problem for the economies of Europe, which rely heavily on Russian natural resources.


Canadians Are Rushing To Join
In part due to the increase in the price of commodities, the British economy may already be in recession. The Guardian newspaper noted Tuesday that hydrogen advocates have been busy pressuring the ruling Labor party to do more to support the nascent technology in an effort to lower overall emissions and promote affordability.

But a review of 32 independent studies on the use of hydrogen, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Joule, found hydrogen is not suitable for heating.

"Instead, existing independent research so far suggests that, compared to other alternatives such as heat pumps, solar thermal, and district heating, hydrogen use for domestic heating is less economic, less efficient, more resource intensive, and associated with larger environmental impacts," Jan Rosenow, the lead author of the review, wrote.

Hydrogen production processes are characterized according to a color spectrum. Most hydrogen today is known as "grey" hydrogen, which draws on methane, a compound that contains four hydrogen atoms. That, however, emits greenhouse gases.

"Blue" hydrogen still uses natural gas, but includes ways to capture the emissions. "Green" hydrogen, meanwhile, uses renewable energy to power what's known as an electrolyzer to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but critics say that energy would be used more efficiently in other applications.

"So-called blue hydrogen can never be zero carbon," Rosenow added.

Rosenow, who is the European director of the Regulatory Assistance Project, told The Guardian that hydrogen at first glance seems like an attractive alternative given that it's the most abundant element in the universe.

"The reality is that significant technical alterations are needed, including the pipework in homes, and that it will cost people a lot of money to keep warm," he told the newspaper.

But hydrogen technology is gaining traction in sectors such as aviation and the maritime shipping industry, which is obligated to cut back on its emissions under a U.N.-backed protocol.

James Earl, the director of gas at Britain's Energy Networks Association, took a measured approach. He told The Guardian that no alternative is perfect and no single technology can decarbonize the economy.

"We need to look at hydrogen, electrification and other technologies all as part of the mix," he said.

[pelmet]

Meanwhile.......

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/video/on ... ory=foryou

Perhaps I will stay on oil.

[pelmet]

Waveriders squander a trillion dollars of wealth to canada and lose a chance to reduce carbon emissions as well....

Opinion: Unleash the Montney: Canada’s world-class gas field is waiting to be tapped

Straddling the B.C.-Alberta border lies the most valuable Canadian resource you’ve never heard of: the trillion-dollar Montney Formation, a giant gas field the size of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia combined. Its potential is huge but its future is uncertain. With the federal government’s proposed emissions cap, it may remain a sleeping giant.

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The Montney Formation is a colossus, bigger even than the U.S.A.’s renowned Marcellus field, which helped set off the shale revolution. Largely overlooked before the innovation of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling made it economically viable to exploit, it is now tapped to supply the nascent west coast LNG industry.

Its features make an oil geologist’s heart sing. It is huge; 130,000km2 to be exact. It is very thick; over 300m in some parts. And it is over-pressured, its hydrocarbons packed in like sardines. This all adds up to enormous reserves: a gas-in-place endowment of 1,965 trillion cubic feet (tcf), of which more than 449 tcf is recoverable with today’s technologies.

To get a handle on those numbers: Canada currently uses about 3.2 tcf a year so the Montney could supply us for over a century. And it contains the full spectrum of hydrocarbons: not only copious amounts of methane but a rich complement of natural gas liquids such as propane and butane and billions of barrels of oil to boot.

Next year it is expected to generate around $36 billion in revenues, more than four times what we saw with this year’s record potash production. Yet this is a fraction of its potential because the ability to get it to market is severely constrained.

That makes its location the icing on the cake. Encompassing Fort St. John, Dawson Creek and Grande Prairie, the Montney is in oil country, close to service companies, equipment and experienced labour. But most strategically it is in Canada’s northwest corner, giving it access to Asia, the world’s biggest and fastest growing energy market, where benchmark natural gas prices are far higher than they are in Canada.

The chattering classes in eastern Canada may hem and haw over whether exporting LNG across the Atlantic has a business case. But on the Pacific side, the business case is obvious: Asia has an energy-hungry population of 4.7 billion people, which by 2050 will grow by another 800 million people — more than the populations of the U.S. and EU combined. The consultancy S&P Global estimates Asia’s LNG demand will more than triple between now and 2030, and continue growing, albeit more slowly, from there.

What’s more, the distance of most major Asian markets from northwest B.C. is half that from the Gulf of Mexico, the cradle of American LNG exports. And if we do not provide LNG to countries such as Japan, Korea, China, India, Malaysia and Indonesia, they will have to resort to Russian supplies.

First Nations in the area — from production in Treaty 8, to the pipeline route, to the west coast export terminals — are heavily involved and positioned to benefit in the tens of billions of dollars from the play.

If there is a hydrocarbon development anywhere else in the world that makes more economic, environmental and political sense, I have yet to hear about it. But for Ottawa, it seems, any Canadian fossil fuel project is a bad project. The federal government proposed in July a policy to cut oil and gas sector emissions by 42 per cent in just eight years. That would all but ensure the Montney’s vast reserves stay in the ground: we cannot build an entire LNG sector from scratch while simultaneously slashing emissions domestically.

On this point, the government should be more forthcoming with Canadians. If the environment minister sees a path forward for the Montney that is compatible with the emissions target, he should show that math. If not, he should let Canadians know the implications of the government’s proposal: it keeps over a trillion dollars worth of natural gas in the ground, gas the world desperately needs that would reduce global emissions by helping offset less clean energy sources.

The Montney is a gift from the gods, able to provide the world with affordable, reliable, low-emitting energy for decades to come. But alas it is in Canada. And because of that, it may well remain a geological marvel instead of an economic one

[pelmet]

The foolish people can't comprehend that they are not helping our environment, only our enemies who take advantage of faulty thought process.......

NP View: Well done everyone, we’ve let China become the real energy superpower
Opinion by National Post View - 13h ago

Western governments have repeatedly ignored warnings that assaults on fossil fuels would hobble their economies and make them more dependent on foreign dictatorships, while doing little to curb global warming, because developing countries would not follow suit. Those warnings are proving to be true, as China in particular exploits the West’s green obsessions.

For years, China has been busy building coal plants, at home and abroad, while western countries have shuttered coal generators and spent vast fortunes on renewables. Beijing’s rhetoric changed a year ago, when President Xi Jinping told the UN General Assembly that his country would no longer “build new coal-fired power projects abroad.”

Since that time, however, a new report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) found that China has completed 14 coal-fired power plants on foreign soil, with another 27 set to become operational soon.

Much of this was likely unavoidable, given that they were already under construction at the time of Xi’s announcement. Another 26 plants were officially cancelled, though most of them were scrapped by their host countries, or over other concerns, such as poor economics or local opposition. The real test of China’s commitment will be what it does with an additional 49 coal generators that are in the pre-construction phase.

On the domestic front, China — the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and largest consumer of coal — made a series of announcements last year promising to decrease its reliance on coal over the next five years. Again, it’s track record thus far has been a bit of a mixed bag.

According to CREA , Chinese coal-plant permits increased in the first half of 2022, though “announcements of new projects, construction initiations and completions slowed down.” At the same time, investments in coal-fired generators and blast furnaces “continue at a high level that is not aligned with China’s carbon goals.”

Likewise, data from Global Energy Monitor shows that China has 196,777 megawatts worth of coal-fired generating capacity that has either been announced or approved, and another 93,777 megawatts under construction. If the new plants all come online, they would represent a 27 per cent increase in China’s coal generating capacity.

Odds are that China will either conveniently ignore its previous climate commitments, or make a big show of how it is turning its back on dirty coal, while quietly working behind the scenes to use the move to its benefit. Indeed, at this point, there should be little doubt that the Chinese Communist Party’s feigned interest in emissions reduction has more to do with giving China an economic advantage than some altruistic desire to spare the planet from climate change.

Just last week, China’s lead climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, accused the West of failing to live up to its commitments, saying that, “The climate policies of some European countries have shown a backswing,” while China’s efforts stand in sharp “contrast with the European Union.” The goal: Xie hopes to make a massive wealth transfer of $100 billion a year from advanced economies to developing countries, like China, a central plank of the upcoming COP27 conference.

Meanwhile, while advocates of the rapid decarbonization of industrialized economies have been arguing for years that the jobs lost in emissions-intensive industries, like oil and gas, will be replaced with a wealth of new “green jobs,” it appears as though a good deal of them have gone to China.

This was a strategic move that has seen China playing both sides — benefiting from cheap, but incredibly environmentally damaging, coal-generated power, while simultaneously securing a near monopoly on the production of solar panels and rare earth elements, which the West relies on to produce clean energy and electric vehicles.

As of last year, China controlled a whopping 75 per cent of the global solar panel market. And according to InfoLink, a Taiwanese renewable energy consulting firm, European imports of Chinese photovoltaic modules increased 137 per cent in the first half of 2022, compared to a year earlier, as it looks for ways to offset reduced supplies of Russian gas.

“With Europe importing 80 per cent of its solar panels from China, dependencies would merely shift from imported oil or gas to imported solar equipment, leaving much to be desired when it comes to the solar sector as a genuine source of energy security and strategic autonomy,” reads a European Parliament backgrounder from July.

In other words, not only has Communist China managed to gut western manufacturing, at least in part due to its policy of maintaining lax environmental standards to keep costs low while the West crusades against global warming, it has also managed to ensure that Europe’s energy fealties have merely shifted from one dictatorship to another.

There is a lesson in this for Canada, whose Liberal government has turned its back on its predecessor’s efforts to position the country as an “energy superpower” and ensure North American energy independence.

As a result, Canada has seen a steep decrease in investment in the oil and gas sector — from $81 billion in 2014, to an estimated $32.8 billion this year — while Middle Eastern countries like Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates ramp-up production to meet European and global demand. And somehow, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau still thinks there isn’t a “ business case ” for exporting LNG to Europe.

As many have been warning for years, the Liberals’ full-throttled embrace of global warming fanaticism has come at the cost of our economic fortunes and national unity, with Alberta feeling increasingly disenfranchised within Confederation. Then again, these are issues that have never been of much import to the Trudeau dynasty.

[pelmet]

Imagine if Canada was a good country(which seems to be important for much of its citizens to believe) and helped save lives with LNG. Instead they are making Canada a bad country....

Rahim Mohamed: Trudeau's antipathy to LNG exports is costing lives in Asia
Opinion by Special to National Post - 7h ago

Liquified natural gas (LNG) has been in the news a lot lately.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol during a news conference in Ottawa on Sept. 23, 2022. Yoon is aiming to cut coal dust emissions by over 30 per cent in Korea. As the world’s fourth-largest producer of natural gas, Canada is in a position to help, writes Rahim Mohamed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol during a news conference in Ottawa on Sept. 23, 2022. Yoon is aiming to cut coal dust emissions by over 30 per cent in Korea. As the world’s fourth-largest producer of natural gas, Canada is in a position to help, writes Rahim Mohamed.

Staring down the barrel of what’s expected to be uncommonly cold winter, with no end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict in sight, panicked European governments are looking to Canada to provide them with an emergency lifeline by accelerating the development of five LNG export facilities along our Atlantic coast. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been characteristically non-committal, despite direct appeals from such European leaders as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, insisting that he doesn’t see a strong “business case” for exporting LNG to Europe.

While we should absolutely help our European allies where feasible, they are ultimately in a crisis of their own making; the result of decades of misguided “green” energy policies and, in some cases, shady business dealings with such Russian energy giants as Gazprom (ex-German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took a job with Gazprom just weeks after stepping down from the chancellorship in 2005). Europe cast its lot with Russian natural gas and now must live with the consequences of this calamitous decision.

There is, in fact, a much stronger moral case for exporting Canadian LNG across the Pacific to markets in East Asia, a fact that came to light during Alberta’s recent energy-focused trade mission to South Korea, led by Premier Jason Kenney.

The “Miracle on the Han River” — South Korea’s rapid ascent from obscure East Asian backwater to world-class economy — is the single most dramatic economic success story of our time. Over the past half-century, South Korea has single-handedly proven that Malthusianism is a false hypothesis. Korea is a top-10 global economy built almost entirely on human endeavour. It is home to one of the world’s most skilled workforces and a global R&D powerhouse, currently leading the way in the development of hydrogen-powered transportation.

South Korea has even made its mark on global popular culture. Korean films, serialized dramas and pop music entertain millions across the world — including many here in Canada.

One need only look northward across the 38th parallel, to the impoverished hermit kingdom of North Korea, to understand the power of education, free markets, and good governance as conduits of modernization.

So what explains why thousands of Koreans each year — many of them children — still die prematurely from respiratory ailments linked to coal dust? The number of coal dust related fatalities across the Asia-Pacific region is close to one million per year.

Korea’s political and business leaders are clear-eyed about the public health consequences of the country’s continued reliance on coal and are eager to bring global LNG players to the table. Rookie president Yoon Suk-yeol has already signalled a strong commitment to this course of action, promising to cut coal dust emissions by over 30 per cent in his first term.

Canada has been slow to answer the call.

Until recently, Canada has not even been on Korea’s radar as a potential player in its LNG market. Last month’s trade mission gave Canadian business leaders a rare opportunity to engage directly with Korean corporate leadership on energy issues, generating substantial headway for LNG and other Canadian energy products. We must act now, while there is still momentum for further co-operation between Canada and Korea in the energy sector.

Canada, the world’s fourth-largest producer of natural gas, is in a position to help Korea totally eliminate coal dust emissions, saving thousands of lives in the process. Unfortunately, the Trudeau government’s anti-pipelines policy prevents us from doing so.

To be crystal clear, Canada is complicit in the premature deaths of thousands of children in Korea and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

Natural gas is superior to coal in every way. It burns cleaner, emits fewer greenhouse gases, and poses virtually no risk to the public. Canada’s continued unwillingness to assist South Korea and our other Asian-Pacific allies in reducing their dependency on coal is neither ecologically nor morally defensible.

It is morally unacceptable that coal dust still kills a million people each year in the Asia-Pacific region; and especially shocking that coal dust is still a major risk to the public in a developed country like Korea. Canada has the power to greatly reduce this death toll, yet has chosen to stay on the sidelines.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

[rookiepilot]

This transition, which I believe will happen, has been BRUTALLY managed.

[pelmet]

This transition, which I believe will happen, has been BRUTALLY managed.

Yet the foolish people keep voting for it.....because the world is coming to an end.

The world is waking up to the fact that the climate policy goal of achieving “net-zero” CO2 emissions brings crippling economic pain. Fossil fuel prices shot up by 26 per cent across industrialized economies last year and will rise globally by another 50 per cent this year. Politicians blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the long-term trend stems mostly from governments demonizing fossil fuels while their societies remain dependent on them. Since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, global investment in fossil fuels has halved, inevitably driving up prices.

As fossil fuel prices climb, activists believe people will shift painlessly to renewable energy sources. But they’ve made a major miscalculation: renewables are far from ready to power the world. Solar and wind can only work with massive amounts of backup power, mostly fossil fuels, to keep the world running when the wind dies down, the sky clouds over, or night falls. Moreover, renewables mostly generate electricity, which is just one-fifth of our total energy use — the vast majority is non-electric like transport, industrial processes and heat.

That’s why the world still gets 80 per cent of its energy from fossil fuels, and renewables deliver just 15 per cent. There won’t be change any time soon — even the Biden administration expects the world in 2050 to be dependent on fossil fuels for 70 per cent of its energy.

But most “net-zero” policies try to force much greater reductions in fossil fuels, driving down investments and making them extremely expensive before alternatives can take over. That leads to worldwide pain, like the Northern Hemisphere winter we’re entering where Europe prepares for brownouts and two-thirds of the U.K. population is predicted to enter energy poverty.

Rich countries are showcasing the policies to avoid. Germany is on track to spend more than half a trillion dollars on climate policies by 2025, yet has only managed to reduce fossil fuel dependency from 84 per cent in 2000 to 77 per cent today. McKinsey estimates that getting to net-zero will cost Europe 5.3 per cent of its GDP in low-emission assets every year, or more than US$200 billion annually just for Germany. That is more than it spends annually on education and police, courts and prisons combined.

The United States has gone all-in on its own net-zero ambition with the most expensive climate change policy in its history. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration plans to spend $369 billion promoting low-carbon energy and electric vehicles. This vast expenditure will have a negligible impact on climate change: the money spent will reduce the global temperature rise unmeasurably, possibly by as little as 0.0005°C.

Little wonder that emerging economies are balking at the expectation they emulate these terrible policies. How they tackle climate change is vitally important because about three-quarters of all emissions in the rest of the 21st century will come from today’s developing countries — India and China and nations across Africa and Asia.

India has realized that trying to achieve net-zero carbon emissions “would entail astronomical costs” and would in fact require a “complete transformation” of its economy. In a scathing rejection, the environment ministry notes that doing so “could derail our development plans.”

In fact, India found that this policy would be so costly for the country that to even make a start on the process, New Delhi would need the West to pay one trillion dollars. India and other developing countries have also banded together to jointly demand another $1.3 trillion in “climate financing” every year by 2030, over and above what rich countries have already promised.

Emerging economies will not sacrifice poverty eradication and economic development to follow a net-zero policy approach that brings so much pain for so little climate reward.

In the absence of affordable, effective fossil fuel replacements, the climate policy espoused by advanced economies just means costlier power bills and lower growth rates, to achieve tiny changes in temperature rises.

Fortunately, there are far smarter alternative approaches. The best long-term strategy would be to dramatically increase investment in green energy research and development. This approach would be much more effective while likely being 10 times cheaper than the approach taken by North America and Europe. This also makes it much more plausible to be implemented by governments around the world.

Consider how the computer went from being incredibly rare and expensive to commonplace and cheap. Governments didn’t achieve this revolution by subsidizing every Western home in the 1960s or 1970s to install a massive, relatively inefficient computer in their basement. Breakthroughs were achieved by public and private expenditure on R&D leading to multiple innovations, which led to evermore technologies becoming commercially viable, driving even more research and production in a virtuous circle. That’s the example we need to emulate when it comes to green energy.

In rich countries today, energy policies that were designed to make fossil fuels expensive are now doing exactly what they were supposed to do. Sadly, this means great pain and a very bleak winter ahead. Other countries are wise to pay heed to this lesson, and we should all instead take the pathway of innovation.

National Post

Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.

[goingmissed]

Pelmet, your posts are starting to look more and more like John Swallow's hysteria.

[rookiepilot]

India must change.

In Delhi, the air is so bad it kills a lot of people. Its so bad — pollution closed the airport on multiple occasions, they went below minimums. From pollution.

I’ve been to China, same story, not quite as bad. Yellow looking air. Ugh.

China is investing a ton in solar. But all takes time.

[pelmet]

Pelmet, your posts are starting to look more and more like John Swallow's hysteria.

Is this hysteria or just examples of the complete stupidity of the greens.....They are desperate for more oil to be pumped but only from our enemies. How do people become so incredibly foolish? Oh, by the way, is copy and paste articles from mainstream media hysteria on my part. No, just shallow responses from those exposed as unable to think critically. They enrich our enemies which are an alliance of countries like Iram, Venezuala, and Russia and then say that I am hysterical.

Biden wants oil, but not drilling or pipelines


President Joe Biden campaigned on ending the Keystone XL Pipeline, and on his first day, he delivered. Biden also campaigned on “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” He has mostly lived by that promise, only opening up (limited) exploration after a court ruling forced his hand.

He has been consistently against drilling for oil or building the pipelines that would transport it.

But now that Biden desperately wants more oil in America, this anti-drilling position leaves him in a bind. How to get oil when you insist on leaving our oil in the ground?

Biden has a three-part plan for oil without drilling, and all three parts are bad.

First, Biden is repeatedly tapping the strategic oil reserve, announcing another 10 million barrels on Thursday. This puts the reserve at its lowest level in nearly 40 years, according to Sen. . Grassley (R-IA).

This is an act of desperation and a short-term fix, obviously timed to bring down gasoline prices the month before the midterm elections.

Second, Biden tried to lobby OPEC to increase oil production. Lacking any real leverage, OPEC said no.

And so enter Act Three in this oily play for drill-less oil. This act is set in Venezuela. Biden is reportedly lifting sanctions on Venezuela’s corrupt and oppressive government so as to allow Chevron (a company to which he has very interesting connections) to drill there.

It’s all deeply embarrassing for the Biden administration. Captive to an environmental movement that wants to end drilling in the U.S. based on a dream of a zero-carbon future, Biden is now reaping what he sowed.

The irony is that Biden knows (or used to know) better than to listen to his party’s extreme ideological base. Biden has often given in to this base, though, and the result now is him sucking up to Saudi Arabia and Nicolas Maduro, begging them to do what he’s afraid to: Drill, baby, drill.

[rookiepilot]

Oil is really on the move.......

[goingmissed]

Pelmet, your posts are starting to look more and more like John Swallow's hysteria.

Is this hysteria or just examples of the complete stupidity of the greens.....They are desperate for more oil to be pumped but only from our enemies. How do people become so incredibly foolish? Oh, by the way, is copy and paste articles from mainstream media hysteria on my part. No, just shallow responses from those exposed as unable to think critically. They enrich our enemies which are an alliance of countries like Iram, Venezuala, and Russia and then say that I am hysterical.

Did you just assume my political leaning? Pfft.

[pelmet]

If I were PM, I would implement an emergency reliable energy program to be implemented the way programs were implemented for WWII.

Legislation would use the Notwithstanding Clause to emergency build pipelines and whatever other infrastructure is required to get the energy to Europe over the next 5 years.

We have already been warned with the explosions on the Nordstream pipeline of what we can anticipate in the future. The forces of darkness are aligning against us. Forces that have implemented torture states in Europe, possible local nuclear weapon use, destruction of modern cities, etc.

Now, some people call the reality of the destruction of Mariupol with weapons financed with money that could have gone to Canada as hysteria. They certainly would have said that a year ago if I predicted it, and they still do.

But their personal pride(inability to admit they were wrong) overrides their ability to acknowledge their faulty thinking.

We need to do what our previous government was doing, encouraging more oil and gas production.

[pelmet]

India must change.

In Delhi, the air is so bad it kills a lot of people. Its so bad — pollution closed the airport on multiple occasions, they went below minimums. From pollution.

I’ve been to China, same story, not quite as bad. Yellow looking air. Ugh.

China is investing a ton in solar. But all takes time.

Simple actions like pollution control devices on cars can make a big difference.

China plays ys for fools using the greens and the left. They do the minimum required to be able to say they are doing something and people believe and say how we have to do what the rest of the world is doing. They still build plenty of coal-fired plants.

But people are gullible and think that they are doing changing over when China’s goals are nefarious……..help to weaken the west by letting the westerners do it themselves. You can see it working right now. They buy cheap Russian oil while we pay huge premiums on energy.

These things are obvious if you do a proper analysis.

[pelmet]

What is frightening is the huge nimber of grown adults that latch onto the green ideas......

Derek H. Burney: The frightening reality about energy security
Opinion by Derek H. Burney - 6h ago

Shortly after sabotage operations blew ruptures in the Nord Stream pipelines from Russia to Germany, OPEC announced plans to reduce oil production by two million barrels per day. Both actions increased pressure around energy shortages, notably in Europe, where prices are already substantially higher than last year and are likely to get worse as winter nears. However, the threat is global and immediate.

Fossil fuels will be a vital source of energy for decades to come, yet the Canadian and U.S. governments remain mesmerized by climate-change evangelism and continue to stifle production of oil and gas for domestic markets, never mind for increasingly desperate allies.

The fixation on the threat from climate change lacks both balance and perspective. The technology simply does not yet exist for a rapid transition to a world without fossil fuel. In the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Germany and France are desperately reopening coal-fired power plants and reactivating dormant nuclear reactors in order to meet energy shortfalls. At the same time, China and India are importing more coal from Russia .

As Amin Nasser, the CEO of Saudi Aramco recently observed , plans for a transformation to renewables have been “sandcastles that waves of reality have washed away.”

Without the responsible development of fossil fuels, our societies face economic and social crises more imminent than those stemming from climate change. Yet, dubious prophecies from climate activists go largely unchallenged while evidence of global resilience to climate change over centuries is widely ignored, as are notable efforts by industry to reduce carbon emissions. U.S. and Canadian emission reductions in recent decades are largely due to the expansion of natural gas production that climate lobbyists want to shut down.

Many of the dire predictions spouted 20 years ago have been thoroughly debunked. The polar bears are not a vanishing breed. Their population has increased from between 5,000 and 10,000 in the 1960s to roughly 26,000 today . Ten years ago, environmentalists warned sternly that the Great Barrier Reef was nearly dead as a result of bleaching caused by climate change. This year, according to Bjorn Lomborg, “two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest coral cover since records began in 1985.”

The dark night of global warming has not emerged, but terrifying doom and gloom predictions cause many people, especially the young, to believe that the end is near.

As a Wall Street Journal editorial opined , climate religion is “easier to preach with a seaside view from a bluff in Martha’s Vineyard than it is from a village with unreliable electricity in the Congo.” Little attention is paid to the threat of “net zero” on the welfare of the poor. Without fossil fuels or their equivalent, food production would collapse in the developing world.

India and other developing countries are jointly demanding $1.3 trillion in “climate financing” every year by 2030, over and above what developed countries have already promised, if they are to introduce climate-change measures. Emerging economies will not sacrifice poverty eradication and economic development to follow a “net zero” approach that brings so much pain for such little climate reward.

The world still gets 80 per cent of its energy from fossil fuels. As part of its recently approved Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration unveiled a plan to spend US$369 billion on climate measures, including the production of wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles. Yet Bjorn Lomborg indicates this expenditure “will have a negligible impact on climate change, reducing the global temperature rise unmeasurably, possibly by 0.0009 degrees Farenheit.”

Increased reliance on weather-dependent renewables and electric vehicles — the singular salvation for climate activists — ironically helps China, which dominates the global market on many renewable components . Of the 136 electric vehicle battery factories expected to be operational by 2029, a total of 101 will be in China. China has one quarter of the global supply of lithium, an essential EV material.

The U.S. has one large-scale lithium mine, in Nevada. Two more were proposed nearby but ironically, environmentalists (those advocating a full conversion to EVs) are blocking both mines in the courts. Plans by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to extract lithium from California’s Salton Sea, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, have stalled over a contract dispute that led the government to rescind its grant.

Keep in mind that two-thirds of solar panels are also made in China. The more dependent the West becomes, the more China will, like Russia, weaponize energy policy to its advantage.

Climate change is an elitist obsession, one that ignores the pace, cost and unreliability of a full transition to renewables. Government regulations and corporate and financial market ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) demands are contributing to a shortage of supply from U.S. refineries , which in turn is exacerbating the shortage stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. U.S. Gulf Coast refineries are operating at 97 per cent of capacity but, as Joseph Toomey quipped in RealClear Energy, “There isn’t any more blood to be squeezed from this turnip.” Mexico has quickly grasped the opportunity and is building a $12-billion refinery that will start producing next year.

Yet, U.S. and Canadian leaders persist in suppressing responsible energy production and prattle on about the “existential threat” of climate change. Having failed to sway OPEC, the U.S. is turning to regimes like Venezuela’s rather than liberating energy resources at home.

Few western leaders and opinion-shapers actually understand how the energy world works, nor do they acknowledge the catastrophic consequences of their vainglorious climate change posturing. A strong dose of reality on energy security is sorely needed.

The United States, Canada and Mexico have abundant energy resources that others envy. With a collaborative commitment to approve LNG pipeline projects and export terminals, North America could be a superpower economically and geopolitically; more effective on the global stage than all the misguided affectations about climate change could ever achieve.

It is time to confront the miasma of climate zealots and recognize that energy security is the handmaiden of economic and national security. Common sense and self-interest should dictate greater emphasis on innovation, rational regulations and investments that support fossil fuel development, and a measured approach to green energy.

[rookiepilot]

Didn’t you vote for these guys in power with these policies?

[pelmet]

The price of listening to the green fools(and that is aside from loss of security in a dangerous world). And remember this when you hear the greenies whine about provoding a bailout for the oil companies. They cost you a lot more money. Friends of The Earth are really just inadvertent freinds of Russia/Iran/Venezuela/etc.


THE DEMOCRATS' OIL FOLLY. President Joe Biden has just announced his plan to release even more oil, 15 million barrels, from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That is the last portion of the 180 million barrels he authorized for release in March, which was the biggest withdrawal ever from the reserve that is supposed to ensure a supply of oil in case of a national emergency.

In this case, the national emergency is most likely the midterm elections, in which the president's party is likely to lose seats in Congress, in large part because of runaway inflation that is powered, in significant part, by an increase in gas prices. Biden's release reduces the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, to its lowest level in nearly 40 years.

Given that, Biden has also authorized the government to begin purchasing oil to replenish the reserve. But he wants to wait until the price of oil goes down. It is about $90 a barrel now, and Biden has ordered the replenishment of new oil when the price falls below $72 a barrel, which may or may not happen in the near or mid-future.

Therein lies a story. Way, way back, in March 2020, then-President Donald Trump proposed to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its maximum capacity with U.S.-produced crude oil. That would have involved the purchase of 77 million barrels of oil. Trump wanted to act because oil was cheap, about $24 a barrel, and the United States could effectively top off the tank for a very good price.

At Trump's behest, Republicans put money for the oil purchase in a big spending bill that was then under consideration on Capitol Hill. That's when their efforts were stopped cold by Democrats, who labeled Trump's plan a "$3 billion bailout for big oil." This is from Roll Call on March 25, 2020: "The Trump administration's plan to top off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve ran into a blockade ... after lawmakers excluded $3 billion in funding for oil purchases from the massive stimulus package before Congress. Senate Democrats took credit for stripping out that money from the Senate bill ... calling it a 'bailout' for the oil industry." In particular, then-Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) took personal credit for killing the measure.

It was, to say the least, a shortsighted, politically motivated move. "If you believe in the purpose of the SPR, now is the perfect time to make sure it's full," the energy secretary at the time, Dan Brouillette, said. "We're expecting that Congress is going to be supportive of this."

They weren't. At least Democrats weren't. And the effects of Schumer's move are still being felt today. The Democratic blockade "effectively cost the U.S. billions in potential profits and meant Biden had tens of millions fewer barrels at his disposal with which to counter price surges," wrote Bloomberg's Steven T. Dennis last month. On Twitter, Dennis noted that environmental groups cheered Schumer's blockade. "VICTORY!" tweeted Friends of the Earth on April 3, 2020. "The Energy Department dropped its plan for a $3 billion Big Oil bailout! Thank you @SenSchumer and Senate Democrats for stopping this administration from exploiting a global pandemic to help polluters profit."

So there it is. If at some point the price of oil does fall below $72 a barrel and Biden moves to replenish the reserve, he will probably tell the country, with Schumer cheering him on, that he's getting a great deal for the U.S. Then, just remember what happened, and didn't happen, in 2020.

[EPR]

I'm with Pelmet, he's onto something that we should be rallying around! https://www.icsc-canada.com/our-plan

[rookiepilot]

I'm with Pelmet, he's onto something that we should be rallying around! https://www.icsc-canada.com/our-plan

Stop voting for the hairdo who hates the West and lies to his own people.

Ain’t complicated.

[EPR]

I'm with Pelmet, he's onto something that we should be rallying around! https://www.icsc-canada.com/our-plan

Stop voting for the hairdo who hates the West and lies to his own people.

Ain’t complicated.

I think you're confused, I vote for Pierre, all the way!