Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #790
06/09/2023, 06/10/2023, 06/11/2023
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1) Under Biden Oil and Gas Investment Down 80%
Joe Biden’s war on American energy is unfortunately working all too well.
Some of our readers have asked us why CTUP has taken such a lead role in fighting back against the ESG propaganda campaign.
The chart below from Texas Public Policy Foundation helps explain how the ESG movement is accomplishing one of its goals: to create a political climate so hostile to oil and gas production that investors are afraid to put capital into new oil and gas wells, refineries, pipelines, etc. In other words, ESG is evil because it has created a political risk premium in fossil fuel development.
As TPPF explains: “Private capital investments in North American oil and gas operations has diminished over the past several years despite the fact that global demand for oil and gas is rising. This anti-American and anti-capitalist ESG agenda is definitely playing a role in restricting our ability to produce more energy here...”
The U.S. and the rest of the world are still consuming record amounts of fossil fuels - it’s just that the energy isn’t coming from America. Dismantling American energy is a good way to dismantle our prosperity.
2) Even the UN IPCC Admits Climate Change Doesn't Increase Forest Fires
We showed the historical time series for Canada – with declining wildfires – yesterday.
Roger Pielke JR, a former chairman of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Weather Forecasting, points out that even the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) “has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change.”
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development has an excellent report on all the things we can do to stop forest fires without retreating into climate hysteria. But, of course, creating hysteria is the one thing that the left excels at.
This not-too-surprising headline from Bloomberg caught our attention:
According to the story, because the sun isn’t shining, solar power generation has fallen in half in the New England states due to the thick smoke from the fires.
But don’t expect the lights to go out anytime soon in Massachusetts or Maine, because it turns out all those progressives in Boston and Vermont don’t depend much on solar energy. The Bloomberg story reports that “solar accounts for about 3% of power generation in New England.”
We guess that means total power generation in these “green” and “blue” states is down just 1.5% – because solar is so inconsequential. Apparently, all those sanctimonious Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren voters have concluded that green energy is for thee, not me.
Biden's FTC chair Lina Kahn never met a merger she didn't hate or a business she didn't want to regulate, but perhaps her single most destructive move was overruling her agency's own administrative law judge to block the merger of Grail and Illumina.
Congressman Darrell Issa of California explains the fallout from this moronic intervention:
What if we could detect almost all cancers in the earliest stages when less-invasive treatments mean lifesaving cures? Mortality rates — and health care costs — would plummet because most cancers could be cured or controlled using existing therapies.
The good news is this innovation exists today in the form of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) from one blood test. The bad news is we don’t have an Eisenhower administration determined to deliver a medical game-changer to as many Americans as possible.
Instead, we have a Biden administration — in the form of the Federal Trade Commission and Chair Lina Khan that Biden named to head it — creating an impenetrable barrier to access to millions of cancer patients.
California-based Grail is a pioneer in the MCED space and wants to merge with another California company, Illumina, which makes the machines used by Grail to scan our blood for signs of cancer. Illumina says it wants to bring Grail’s potential breakthrough test beyond the concierge doctors and self-insured health plans and to the entire country.
But this isn’t good enough for Khan, an avowed critic of corporate mergers. She deems this anti-competitive and offers the excuse that Grail has no present competitors... It may be the single worst regulatory mistake this country has ever made because early detection could do for cancer what Salk did for polio.
5) GM CEO Admits EVs Are Unprofitable – So She Wants More Taxpayer Money
We warned that GM was making a BIG mistake in going all in on EVs. Now Mary Barra concedes there’s no profitability because they are so expensive to build – and people don’t want them. This is quite an admission from a CEO who had repeatedly promised to be making money on mass-market EVs by now:
After admitting that Tesla is currently leading, Barra went on to say that she just doesn't see high margins on EVs right away. She emphasized that this is why incentives are important, to get vehicles into that $30,000 to $40,000 price range that will work for more buyers. Barra also noted that she does finally see EVs taking over ICEs when it comes to profitability, but not until the end of the decade or longer.
It will take until 2030 "or longer" and taxpayers should just keep ponying up endless subsidies? That’s exactly what the left said about wind and solar power – that they just needed five years of subsidies to be profitable. Now some 25 years later wind and solar are still unprofitable and more addicted than ever to lavish taxpayer handouts.
