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MORNING ENERGY NEWS  |  03/31/2020
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Some good news for a change.


New York Times (3/30/20) reports: "The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to announce its final rule to rollback Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards, relaxing efforts to limit climate-warming tailpipe pollution and virtually undoing the government’s biggest effort to combat climate change. The new rule, written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, would allow cars on American roads to emit nearly a billion tons more carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the vehicles than they would have under the Obama standards and hundreds of millions of tons more than will be emitted under standards being implemented in Europe and Asia...The lower fuel-efficiency standard 'is the single most important thing that the administration can do to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise of reforming the regulatory state, and to undo the impact that the previous administration has had on the economy,' said Thomas J. Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, an organization that supports the use of fossil fuels."

"In modern industrial societies, the fallout from Covid-19 feels like a dress rehearsal for the kind of collapse that climate change threatens."

 

– Jem Bendell,
 The University of Cumbria  

"Environmental Racism" is a great talking point for wealthy white liberals insulated from their own disastrous policies.


Axios (3/30/20) reports: "Top American civil rights activists are opposing an abrupt move away from natural gas, putting them at odds with environmentalists and progressive Democrats who want to ban fracking. Driving the news: In recent interviews, Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and National Urban League President Marc Morial said energy costs are hitting people of color unfairly hard. These concerns, expressed before the coronavirus pandemic, are poised to expand as paychecks shrink across America. 'I think people are concerned about the affordability and they are concerned about being left in the cold,' Sharpton told me in early March. 'I think natural gas is a temporary — I don’t think we ought to make it the end-all, be-all — solution, but in the interim, people in communities of color should not pay the brunt of suffering through cold winters.' In recent years, environmentalists and progressive Democrats, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have increasingly opposed natural gas and are calling to ban fracking because of its role in heating up the planet."

And the gold medal for shameless profiteering goes to our friends at AWEA!


New York Post (3/27/20) column: "Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Renewable energy is getting so cheap that it doesn’t need subsidies anymore. Yes, well. Renewables live or die by subsidies, in fact. That was proved yet again this week, when Democrats tried (unsuccessfully) to stuff a panoply of Green New Deal measures into the corona-crisis relief bill — including extensions of the tax credits that have been driving the growth of solar and wind energy. That Congressional Democrats would push so hard for solar and wind subsidies at such a critical time for the US economy is particularly galling for two reasons. First, the wind industry already stands to collect some $33.75 billion in subsidies between now and 2029. Second, wind-energy development in some of the most-heavily Democratic states in the country — Hawaii, California, New York and Vermont — has been effectively stopped due to local opposition. To be sure, the Washington favor factory never sleeps. But the American Wind Energy Association and its lobbyists deserve an Olympic gold medal for their utter lack of shame."

At least this branch of the climate cult is being honest about what the Green New Deal would actually look like...


E&E News (3/31/20) reports: "Some climate-focused economists see the COVID-19 pandemic as an unwitting experiment for a radical strategy to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The concept is called 'degrowth.' It involves a planned slowdown of economic sectors that emit large amounts of global carbon dioxide. Those sectors would scale down until the broader economy meets 'sustainable emissions levels,' advancing long-term health and environmental goals. 'Stopping the spread of coronavirus is paramount, but climate action must also continue. And we can draw many lessons and opportunities from the current health crisis when tackling planetary warming,' Natasha Chassagne of the University of Tasmania wrote in The Conversation, a publishing portal for academics...Proponents of the controversial idea, which has found traction mostly outside the United States, stress that 'degrowth' involves a purposeful contraction of high-emitting sectors while growing other sectors that produce low or zero emissions. The COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, is an unplanned crisis that has sent the entire global economy into a tailspin." 

Energy Markets

 
WTI Crude Oil: ↑ $21.48
Natural Gas: ↑ $1.72
Gasoline: ↓ $1.99
Diesel: ↓ $2.60
Heating Oil: ↑ $103.51
Brent Crude Oil: ↑ $23.49
US Rig Count: ↓ 719

 
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