Evil Energy Speculators

by Steve MacDonald 

Thanks to commenter JackL for the reminder; that Jeanne “no oversight” Shaheen, Barack ‘Boondoggle’ FauxBama and the Democrats have always relied on the lie that rising energy prices were the result of “Evil Oil Speculators.”

Evil Speculators…speculators…

Isn’t what Mr. Obama, Secretary Chu, and Senate Energy Committee maven Greene Jeanne Shaheen have done, energy speculation?  Aren’t they energy speculators?  What else do you call investing tens of billions in the future value of green energy?  It’s energy speculation.

Well how is that working out so far?

The Evil oil speculators risk their money on the price of something that goes up and down, but to its credit, actually produces energy we can use and even at its highest price, was still significantly cheaper than any of the green alternatives.

The Evil Green Energy Speculators (Obama, Greene Shaheen, etc.) risked tens of billions in taxpayers dollars (not their own money), during a recession, on extremely expensive, inefficient, limited use technology, made by poorly run companies with close ties to the political party and President who pushed the ‘investment,’ most or all of whom have now spent our money, collapsed, or filed for bankruptcy.

What the Democrats have done is, without a doubt, energy speculation.  But from where I sit, only one of them is actually evil.

You are reading "Evil Speculators"  by Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com.(Home)

Cornography

The US Senate has overwhelmingly voted to end billions in ethanol subsidies.  And even though the bill has no hope of becoming law--Obama will not sign it--corn prices collapsed on the news. This is instructive for two reasons. 

First a large chunk of the subsidy being cut is paid to oil companies (or blenders) to offset the mandate to add ethanol to motor fuel.  So this is not just some bipartisan effort to screw the corn belt--Big Oil gets tens of billions in support to offset the costs of adhering to environmental mandates.  This measure would remove some or all of that.  With this price support gone, fuels that include ethanol could get more expensive.  Returning real world costs to pricing is necessary to stimulate real world interest in getting corn out of the fuel supply but that will require more repeals of past mandates, none of which Obama will likely sign either.

But this vote does send a message that a different president (not Mitt Romney by the way) might end the rent seekers good fortune within two years and the price of corn has responded poorly to the news.

Second, and this what I really want to address, just the idea of a change in corn policy has had as much as a 12% immediate downward effect on the price of corn.  So how much impact might it have had were it likley to pass?  More.

So how can naysayers continue to insist that a similar act regarding domestic oil production and refinement capacity might not also have a similar impact on the price of oil and everything that uses it, motor fuels in particular?

There are plenty of people who insist that if the US announced tomorrow that it has lifted all its drilling moratoriums, opened up development, streamlined the lease and permitting process, committed to increasing domestic refining capacity, and is willing to let oil and gas companies invest their own money in new technologies to extract more resources, that it would have no short term affect on prices.

I contend that if the US did even one of those things it would have an immediate affect.  Not just say they were going to do it, but to actually do it.  But imagine if we planned to do all of them? 

Oil prices could collapse if the largest customer of global oil became more of a do-it-yourselfer.  But we need a president who understands that cheap energy promotes jobs and growth in every sector, that America is probably the cleanest extractor of it on the planet, and that it is a national security issue worthy of our immediate attention.

But Obama does not agree and as long as this President, the environmentalists, the Farm Lobby, their rent seeking factory farms, and Republican morons like McCain and Romney are addicted to Cornography, we will continue to pay tens of billions up front to hide this failed policy of the past while centuries worth or more of cheap domestic energy sits under our feet.

 cross posted

Electric Cars Are Worse For The Environment (Hah Ha!)

Back in 2008 when I was talking about how cars like the Prius were not nearly as environmentally friendly as the greens and Democrats let on because the manufacturing process for the battery system was so hostile to the environment. That process erased any benefits you might achieve during use.

That assessment was spot on.  And it is, in fact worse than I initially imagined.  Apparently the batteries do not last all that long.  They need to be replaced after a few years.  They are very expensive, almost prohibitively expensive.  Not including this new battery problem made hybrids look better than they actually were.  And it turns out there are a number of issues I had not  considered, issues that have come up as the battery only electric vehicle tries to find a place in the garages of drivers around the world.

The study was commissioned by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, which is jointly funded by the British government and the car industry. It found that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.1 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tonnes for a similar petrol car. Emissions from manufacturing electric cars are at least 50 per cent higher because batteries are made from materials such as lithium, copper and refined silicon, which require much energy to be processed.

Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car. Disposal also produces double the emissions because of the energy consumed in recovering and recycling metals in the battery. The study also took into account carbon emitted to generate the grid electricity consumed.

It gets worse.  While the US has abundant supplies of oil and gas, things the environmentalist left wont let us drill for or refine (but stuff we could get at or drill for domestically), the stuff you need to make reliable batteries for electric and hybrid cars is scarce on US soil.   Places like Bolivia, Chile and...China control the worlds supply of minerals needed to make them.

So while energy independence was never something we were going to really achieve, at least with oil and gas we could limit ourselves to sources primarily in our own hemisphere (which we do).  But batteries will require overwhelming reliance on other places that don't love us much either.

Lithium ion seems to be the direction most car manufacturers are heading, which poses fewer disposal risks to the environment — but still poses risks in mining and manufacturing, especially to groundwater.

Lithium also poses another blow to the argument for the electric car — its domestic availability. Eighty-five percent of the known reserves are in Bolivia, Chile, and China, and lithium is not the only element needed for large-scale production of car battery systems. Large flake graphite is also needed, and China controls 80 percent of the market, along with other “rare earth” elements. Far from ending our dependence on foreign resources, we will merely exchange our dependence from the Middle East to China, which is not exactly an encouraging thought for our future.

Even if we did have these elements in abundance, we would need to mine and drill for them. Those are precisely the activities that environmentalists and short-sighted government policies have been blocking for decades in coal, oil, shale, and natural gas. Besides, “peak lithium” may arrive long before “peak oil,” as the Argonne National Laboratory estimates that we only have enough lithium available to manufacture car batteries through 2050 — less than 40 years from now. A lithium “crunch” could occur by 2017 — which also hardly lends confidence to the reliability of the electric car as a long-term solution.

Not exactly the Green boom or boon we've been sold. And we'll get to enrich other enemies, instead of creating jobs and growth with the wealth of resources we have at home--just because a sliver of angry activists and the Democrat party they pander too don't happen to like those resources.

But batteries were always worse for the environment, for manufacturing and disposal.  The greens just refused to admit it in their quest to destroy oil and gas.  And they are bad in ways that are not just about their CO2 crack pipe and the fiscal fleecing that is the scam of global warming.  Battery disposal on that scale could pose a Yucca mountain like problem and NIMBY like reactions to any containment facilities for the millions of dead batteries, complicating environmental issues further.  Actual environmental issues, not the fake ones the left manufactures for politcal power.

It's all representative of the Alinsky model for change.  Whatever the institution is destroy it.  Don't worry about the side effects.  Don't concern yourself with all the possible outcomes.

That is what environmental socialists and democrats who write 3000 page bills do.  The goal is destroy what is there.  What replaces it, that's not any of their concern right now.  They can always tweak the edges, or if they have to, destroy that as well.  As long as they are the ones in power.  As long as they have control.

So what's next?  With democrats in charge, more of the same. 

H/T Hot Air

 cross posted

It Isn't Easy Being 'Green.'

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a reflection of failed 'Green' policy, the shadow of an idea that doesn't work on so many levels that even prominent members of the Green movement have begun soul searching over their own contradictions about the ideas which encouraged it's genesis (and its goals) in the first place.

Perhaps the best, and most recent example, comes to us from Walter Russell Mead in his review of George Monbiot's recent admission that "...because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed."  A  "thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one of the smartest people in it." 

Why is it always the really smart people who are so stupid?

Mead sums it up: "regardless of what is happening to Planet Earth, the green movement does not have coherent and workable solutions."

Greens like to have it both ways.  They warn darkly about “peak oil” and global resource shortages that will destroy our industrial economy in its tracks — but also warn that runaway economic growth will destroy the planet through the uncontrolled effects of mass industrial productions.  Both doomsday scenarios cannot be true; one cannot simultaneously die of both starvation and gluttony.

...

More, Monbiot also acknowledges the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the green solutions.  He acknowledges that there is no prospect for democratic politics to impose the draconian limits on consumption and economic activity that green dogma requires.  Every ‘solution’ the greens have come up with has a fatal flaw of some kind; none of it works, none of it makes any sense.

All of this is true, whether it comes from a prominent intellectual of the movement like Monboit, some dopey, indoctrinated public school kid, or say...a misguided New Hampshire State Senator who can't read the writing on the wall and is afraid to educate his own constituents on the costs of failed policy.  Policy whose expense and waste do not go down if we continue to pursue them.

We can waste hours discussing the minutia of our RGGI dreams and aspirations, and we have, but at the end of the day..."It doesn't work."  RGGI is bad policy.  It is a failed relationship, based on a failed idea, with arguably good intentions, that some insist we must maintain simply because we are in it.  Not exactly the kind of thinking you'd expect from the same camp of ideological purists who insist on no-fault divorce.  But divorce is what we need.  We have irreconcilable differences.  So we should send Reggie the "breakup" text and just end it.

"You're not who I thought you were.  I'm sorry, but I just can't see you anymore.  Keep the T-shirts and just toss my tooth brush in the trash."

Or we could continue to tell ourselves lies and double down on this ecological equivalent of fiscal-spousal abuse knowing the entire time that nowhere in the short history of cap and trade has it ever succeeded at any of its stated goals unless the goals are job loss, redistribution of wealth to the friends of 'insert name of party in power here,' or the progressive over-taxation of everyone and everything that has, needs, or uses electricity--forever.

Maybe you'd like to be known as he who supports the tax on everything.  But at least have enough of a spine to admit the facts.  It is a tax on everything, and we are paying it for no good reason.

Or you could decide that you are serious about the goals, step back, and take stock of the failure that Cap and Trade is, and consider directing your energy toward a different set of solutions.  Solutions we have not even thought of yet but that may require cheap abundant energy, a free market, and a country like America to husband it.

I know. It isn't easy being green.  But if you are serious about the goals have the sense to admit this policy will never achieve them.  Whether it is this New Hampshire legislative session or next, just admit that is does not work so we can move on.   And yes, some mistakes have costs, and they get bigger the longer government is involved, but since when did letting the mistake continue ever cost less?

H/T Steven Hayward at Power Line

posted elsewhere...

Where's The Beef!?

My second thought after hearing about Prince Charles remarks on US beef consumption--I won't share the first, it's not proper--was "where is the nearest cheeseburger?"  The cheeseburger is perhaps the most perfect culinary delight ever conceived.  It is also an excellent way to deliver bacon to the taste-buds, and positioned next to a Sam Adams Boston Lager, could well be the last decent meal I ever ask for once the regime starts rounding up people like me.  But now that another prominent elitist, enviro-hypocrite has condemned my fascination with it, and America's dedication to this food genre, I feel inclined to  regress to my teenage days and rebel.

So pass the salt, mustard, and ketchup.

Charles, pronounced "Chahlz," should be taken as seriously as anyone who spends most of their life being known by just one name.  That is to say, not at all.  And here we make no exception because his beef with beef is that it's cultivation and husbandry uses too damn much water.

This is an entertaining observation coming from the prince of enviro-hippies, someone who undoubtedly has other concerns that have resulted in our trying to cram ethanol into motor-fuel to save the world from the same gas that escaped him while telling us we eat too much meat.  Lets ignore the problems of ethanol exhaust being worse, and get right to the point.  Corn uses insane amounts of water, heavily laden with massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides, all of which end up "spoiling"--is that the proper term--streams and rivers, exacerbating the problem of algae plumes.

And beef isn't getting billions in taxpayer prop-ups at every stage of production and delivery. Which means that Chaz would rather your burger look like this.

Cause for alarm?  Perhaps.  Corn based fuels are prompting shortages and food riots, with food inflation driving tens of millions below the poverty line.  We've got plenty of corn.  We just need to stop listening to enviro-morons whose policy prescriptions make the stated problem worse, while creating massive amounts of collateral damage.

If the Prince is really concerned about water, perhaps he'd be better off talking about how many corn tortilla's we eat, or better yet ask why we have to use corn syrup as a sweetener even though its worse for us than sugar. (Hint: the government makes sugar more expensive.)

As for Charles?  He doesn't even begin to understand that the anti-meat left has already endorsed the solution and made us pay for it.  Rising grain prices, created by food for fuel energy policy, subsidized by billions in taxpayer dollars, are making beef too expensive for the average table.  So he may get his wish after all. 

posted from: http://granitegrok.com/blog/2011/05/wheres_the_beef.html