This week’s best energy picks: The Green Worm Turns, Green Dream Goes Out with Trash, Mineral Leasing Brings in the Cash and much more.
By THOMAS J SHEPSTONE
Best Energy Picks - November 11, 2023
Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.
NOV 11, 2023
This week’s best energy picks: The Green Worm Turns, Green Dream Goes Out with Trash, Mineral Leasing Brings in the Cash and much more.
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This is a fascinating article as the following excerpts reveal. The green transition is failing everywhere: EVs won’t sell, wind is dying and solar is creating gleaming silver elephants across the landscape consuming volumes of green cash faster even than a horde of locusts. That’s because the point of the climate scam is raiding the pocketbooks and wallets of ordinary ratepayers and taxpayers to fatten the bank accounts of corporatists who skilled at milking the government. They have done so by creating a phony crisis of global warming through funding of rebels needing a cause to first believe and, then, demand government action, that action being to throw somebody’s else’s money at the green grifters as long as they can get away with it, but it is all suddenly falling apart:
[Y]ou have likely seen over the course of just the past few months that the supposed green energy transition — widely hyped and massively subsidized for two decades — has suddenly started to crumble on multiple fronts. We are rapidly approaching the green energy wall. And yet at the same time, the promoters of the climate scare are not backing down. Not in the least. To the contrary, the New York Times reports just today that the major environmental NGOs are in a process of cutting their funding for their most basic programs, like dealing with toxic chemicals, in order to double down and focus even more on the one big issue — climate change…
[A] New York Times article from today, headline: “Environmental Groups Cut Programs as Funding Shifts to Climate Change.” Even as everyone can see that this whole green energy thing is just not going to work, the Times reports that the entire environmental movement is doubling down, cutting other programs and focusing their funding on climate change to the exclusion of everything else:
A significant shift in donor contributions to nonprofits fighting climate change in recent years has left some of the nation’s biggest environmental organizations facing critical shortfalls in programs on toxic chemicals, radioactive contamination and wildlife protection. The Natural Resources Defense Council is shutting down its nuclear mission and has laid off its top lawyer in the field. . . . The NRDC is not alone. The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Environmental Working Group, which have been at the forefront of efforts to clean up waste water, regulate pesticides and adopt tougher standards for atomic power plants, are facing similar financial problems.
All the funders and the activists care about any more is climate change:
Meanwhile, global spending to fight climate change by environmental groups and other nonprofits reached $8 billion in 2021, most of it in the United States and Canada, according to a survey released in September by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. . . . “Funders that had a nuclear program or a toxics program have left those fields entirely and have gone to climate change,” said Marylia Kelley, senior adviser and former executive director of a citizens oversight group…
Big Green, like all entities that start small with an honorable mission or at least the face of one (the NRDC was never anything but a cover for Rockefeller family land grabs and other gentry class special interests) got corrupted along the way. They pursued funding from corporatist enterprises to support the cause and eventually that became the cause itself and now they are at the point they are wholly indebted to the moneychangers whose sole cause was pulling down subsidies from all of us. They have been bought and paid for and, as the whole edifice crumbles, they have no choice but to double, triple and quadruple down on the lies that got them where they are.
Hat Tip: T.C.
Another Green Dream Goes Out with the Trash
Here’s an update on New York City’s virtue signaling attempt to use electric vehicles to plow snow:
New York will rely on diesel-powered snow plows as opposed to electric ones this Winter, halting its goal to put electric ones on the street after a failed testing period.
Three years ago, the New York Department of Sanitation ordered seven electric rear loader garbage trucks made by Mack LR Electric. The department has not been able to find electric trucks that are powerful enough to plow snow like the original diesel ones.
Each truck made by Mack cost more than $523,000 and was part of a long-term goal under the NYC Clean Fleet Transition Plan to move toward a majority of “clean” energy versions by 2035, with emergency and specialized trucks totally converted to electric vehicles by 2040…
The electric vehicle trial period failed to produce the desired results needed to move away from diesel snow plows.
“In our test of the non-diesel rear-loaders, we found that they could not plow the snow effectively,” Commissioner of the New York Department of Sanitation Jessica Tish said during a City Council hearing in November 2022, per the New York Sun. “We need them to go 12 hours and so I do not see today, given the current state of the technology, a path forward to fully electrifying the rear loader portion of the fleet by 2040.”
The tests indicate sanitation trucks will likely not fully electrify by 2040, like the department hoped, as the electric trucks do not perform well in cold temperatures.
Nobody but a politically correct Manhattanite living in their bubble of self-righteousness would have ever thought this was a good idea, but now they know and will have to pretend they don’t if they want to get invited to the best penthouse parties.
Meanwhile, the City quietly notes this on their website:
The City of New York operates over 100 CNG vehicles, including select sanitation trucks and sweepers, passenger vans, and Honda Civic sedans. We operate three CNG fuel sites to support this fleet.
So, CNG works for heavy duty service and electric…not so much.
Hat Tip: V.F.
Mineral Leasing Brings in Cash for the Feds
The Biden Administration brags about how much money has come to the Feds for distribution, as if it wasn’t doing all it could to kill the industry:
Today, the Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR) announced the disbursement of $18.24 billion in revenues generated in fiscal year 2023 from energy production on federal and Tribal lands and federal offshore areas. U.S. energy production under President Biden’s leadership has reached an all-time high on both public and private lands throughout the nation.
The disbursements provide funds for states and Tribes to pursue a variety of conservation and natural resource goals, including irrigation and hydropower projects, historic preservation initiatives, conservation of public lands and waters, and investments in maintenance for critical facilities and infrastructure on our public lands…
This year, $1.43 billion was distributed to Tribes and individual Indian mineral owners; $3.46 billion to the Reclamation Fund; $1 billion to the Land and Water Conservation Fund; $150 million to the Historic Preservation Fund; $379 million to federal agencies; and $7.09 billion to the U.S. Treasury…
The revenues disbursed to 33 federally recognized Tribes and approximately 31,000 individual Indian mineral owners represent 100 percent of the revenues received for energy and mineral production activities on Indian lands. Tribes use these revenues to develop infrastructure, provide health care and education, and support other critical community development programs, such as senior centers, public safety projects, and youth initiatives.
Since 1982, the Department has disbursed more than $371.3 billion in mineral leasing revenues. ONRR makes most of these disbursements monthly from the royalties, rents, and bonuses it collects from energy and mineral companies operating on federal lands and waters.
What’s especially galling about the story is the attempt the contributions of renewables projects on Federal lands, which amounted to a relatively small $600 million that the Feds gave the projects at the outset as part of massive green subsidy programs. The grifters get credit for returning a fraction of what they got while drillers earned real money, but, hey, that’s the way game is played isn’t it?
Hat Tip: D.S.
And, Briefly:
Climate Change Hysteria Refuted, Days of “Unknowns” Are Over, from J.S.
Why Those Bank Emissions Numbers Are So Rosy, from R.N.
Time For A Generator? New Warning Says Half Of US At Risk, from D.S.
Is Biden’s Hydrogen Initiative Next Green Energy Boondoggle, from R.N.
Halt Regulation by Subsidy, from S.H.
Idiocy for the Birds Takes Flight, from R.N.
The last link is a bonus from a very good friend who keeps me informed on the latest absurdities being wrought by the fatally conceited experts among us who are afflicted by CSDS (Common Sense Deficit Syndrome).
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