Energy

The Environmental Protection Agency has just released its most aggressive emissions rules to date. The rules demand that coal and gas plants capture almost all of their emissions. In essence, fossil fuel plants will have to cut their emissions by 90 percent between 2035 and 2040 or shut down. Unless, of course, they can afford to run carbon capture systems or swap out natural gas for hydrogen. But is that even realistic? “By requiring carbon capture or hydrogen burning, two technologies that haven’t even had multiple successful demonstration projects, let alone mature supply chains, the Biden administration is essentially signing a death warrant for fossil fuel plants,” Isaac Orr, an energy analyst at the Center for the American Experiment, said in an email.

A politically-connected electric battery company with deep ties to the Biden administration is in trouble. Proterra could be staring down financial ruin, even though everyone from the president to his cabinet have worked overtime to boost the bus company. The Biden administration was supposed to be a ticket to ride for California-based Proterra. In 2021, it told shareholders that it was ready to “ride the wave” of taxpayer-funded incentives for vehicle electrification. It had all the right friends in all the right places. It hired a lobbying firm with extensive ties to Democratic politics weeks before Biden toured its facility.

The Biden administration has found itself between a rock and a hard seam of coal. A cohort of Native American tribes have realized just how sacred — and lucrative — their lands really are, and they’re not trusting the promises of an old white man this time. “When the administration says, ‘We're going to create all these millions of jobs if we just switched over [to renewable energy] today,’ they haven't shown us the fine print that says where those jobs are coming, which region, doing what,” Daniel Cardenas, chairman of the National Tribal Energy Association and member of the Pit River Tribe, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "When you start questioning them there, then they start getting defensive.

California has gone full pagan — it lives and dies by the weather. Over the last few days, the state’s power grid has groaned under the strain of a massive heatwave. Combine that with a hydropower-sapping drought and you’ve got a recipe for blackouts. While major weather events pose challenges for any electricity system, California’s has become uniquely vulnerable to blackouts thanks to an over-investment in weather-dependent wind and solar. Every night during the heatwave, solar experiences its scheduled defeat at the hands of sunset and Californians are left praying for the wind to blow and and the imports to flow.

During the course of my daily media interviews, one of the most frequent questions I hear is, “when will things get better?” Being the bearer of bad news is frustrating, but unfortunately that’s all I see for the next few years. Following the basic laws of economics, energy prices can only come down based on two factors: increase the supply or decrease the demand. They may not like to admit it, but President Joe Biden and his team understand the need for a supply increase. It explains the president's trip to Saudi Arabia to ask their king to increase oil production. He has dispatched envoys to Venezuela and Iran for the same purpose. Unfathomably, his administration continues its relentless attacks on domestic oil production.

Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail in 2020 that he would "transition away from the oil industry,” convert to 100 percent "clean" energy by 2035, and "end fossil fuels.” Shortly after taking office, he started to make good on this pledge by suspending all new gas and oil leases on federal property and ending the Keystone XL pipeline. Now, faced with gas prices at a record high $5 per gallon and runaway inflation — aka the consequences of his own actions — Biden is looking for an off-ramp. Somehow, the Biden administration has decided it can still convince oil companies to ramp up domestic production in the short term while simultaneously promising to adhere to the president’s ambitious climate change goals in the long term.

With the travel-heavy Memorial Day weekend upon us, the fast-rising cost of gasoline is getting a lot of attention. Last week, gasoline rose above $4 a gallon in all fifty states. That’s the first time that has happened. Some are predicting gas could reach $6 a gallon this summer. If that comes to pass, the average American family could see a major impact on their budgets. (It might be noted as well, that the price of home heating oil has nearly doubled this year. If that continues, the economic impact next winter, especially in the northeast, where a high percentage of homes are heated by oil, will be considerable.) The threat of a recession is rising thanks to fuel shortages. Why has the price of gasoline risen so far so fast?

Boris Johnson is considering doing something that should be a duty for every leader. In the wake of sanctions poised to disrupt the 8 percent of domestic oil and 18 percent of diesel the UK imports from Russia, Johnson is reportedly toying with the idea of putting his country first and on the road to self-sufficiency by lifting the UK’s moratorium on fracking. The British government banned hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in 2019. Fracking is a method of extracting oil and natural gas by drilling deep underground and fracturing shale rock with a fluid mixture (99 percent water and sand) that allows fossil fuels to flow out, be captured, processed and used to myriad ends (including gasoline).

The price of petroleum products is inherently cyclical, rising and falling over time due to natural and ineluctable economic forces. This has been going on since the dawn of the petroleum industry 163 years ago. The reason is that exploration for and development of petroleum resources are extremely capital intensive activities. Thus when prices are low, there is little incentive to increase production by taking the risks inherent in looking for and developing new supplies. But then, as the world economy expands over time, the demand for petroleum products increases, and prices rise. This increases the incentive to go look for more oil and gas, and the rig count goes up. New fields are located and new technologies (such as fracking) come on line.