During the global outbreak of COVID-19 America's energy producers are pitching in to help our communities. We'll be doing our best to amplify these great stories made possible by America's producers.
Gassing up the heroes on the front lines.
Chevron pitches in: "Chevron, which has a long history of supporting communities, particularly in times of need, has donated $110,000 in fuel gift cards to first responders, food banks and kitchens and nonprofits in the Permian Basin. Fuel gift card recipients include nonprofits such as Meals on Wheels, which are relying on their staff and volunteers to deliver essential meals to seniors in need. Other organizations include area food pantries such as the Ward County Greater Works Food Pantry, fire departments like the Greenwood Volunteer Fire Department in Midland County, and police and sheriff departments across the Permian. The donation is part of a $1 million commitment of Chevron and Texaco to distribute fuel gift cards in communities where Chevron operates across the nation. Each card is valued at $100. Since March, Chevron has committed more than $12 million around the world to COVID-19 response efforts."
"You can't ask for capitalism on the way up and then socialism on the way down."
Bloomberg (5/4/20) reports: "A lame-duck Texas regulator who proposed mandatory oil-output cuts said the effort is 'dead' a day before the biggest U.S. crude-producing state was set to vote on the measure. Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton said in an interview on Bloomberg TV that the three-member agency wasn’t prepared to vote on curtailing supplies in a process known as 'pro-rationing.' His comments likely mark the end of a month-and-a-half-long saga that divided the shale industry over whether regulators should adopt OPEC-style production caps amid a historic collapse in crude prices...'At this point we still are not ready to act, and so it’s too late, so there is no proposal to make,' Sitton, one of three Republicans on the commission, said Monday. 'I think that pro-ration is now dead.'...'The market forces are stronger than the threat of proration ever was,' said Cye Wagner, chairman of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, which was opposed to state quotas. 'It would be more harmful to the industry than the market-driven response that’s coming.'"
Do you hear the people?
Forbes (5/1/20) column: "Bye-bye shelter-in-place. Hello re-opening. Apple’s Mobility Trends report shows that traffic in the US and other countries like Germany has pretty much doubled in the past three weeks. It had been down up to 72%. And location data provider Foursquare says that gas and fast food visits are back to pre-COVID-19 levels in the American Midwest. Rural areas are following the same pattern. 'Gas station traffic has returned to pre-COVID-19 levels in the Midwest, and in rural areas throughout the country,' Foursquare said yesterday in a blog post. 'Foot traffic to quick service restaurants (QSRs) has risen over the past several weeks.' Whether governments, medical professionals, and scientists want it to or not, people seem tired of the shutdown and eager to get back to some semblance of normal life. Another sign of the impending return to normal?"
Your hand sanitizer is in your gas tank by government edict.
Wall Street Journal (5/4/20) column: "One of the few everyday consumer items still not available at most stores is good old rubbing alcohol. Unlike the toilet paper shortage caused by irrational hoarding, the coronavirus pandemic has greatly increased the actual need for germ-sanitizing alcohol. What makes the shortage particularly frustrating is that the U.S. is, by far, the world’s largest producer of alcohol. That distinction is a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which required fuel producers to blend four billion gallons of corn ethanol into their gasoline by 2006 and 7.5 billion by 2012. The immediate result was a spike in the price of corn and an increase in food prices world-wide. U.S. farmers soon solved this problem by diverting millions of acres of land to growing corn. Ironically, this increased overall CO2 emissions, much to the chagrin of the environmentalists who had championed the mandate as a way of fighting global warming. Long before policy makers had seen their error, however, farm states had so fallen in love with ethanol that they successfully lobbied the federal government to raise the mandate to 32 billion gallons a year by 2022. Keep in mind that the oil industry would gladly pay billions of dollars in extra taxes each year not to use it."
Just what the doctor ordered... a tax on all aspects of modern life to jumpstart the economy.
E&E News (5/5/20) reports: "Supporters of taxing carbon believe they're on the cusp of a comeback. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to usher in an era of debt and belt-tightening, multiplying the difficulties in passing expensive climate legislation, like the Green New Deal. That could favor climate policies that are designed to raise tax revenue at a time when trillions of dollars are being spent by Congress to stymie the economic fallout from the pandemic, according to several policy analysts who support pricing carbon dioxide emissions. 'The scale of spending that we're seeing is going to provoke political backlash at some time,' said Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank that advocates for taxing carbon. The repercussions for the federal deficit are already coming into focus. The Congressional Budget Office last month revised its pre-virus projection for the 2020 deficit from $1.1 trillion to a record $3.7 trillion — with federal debt exceeding GDP for the first time since World War II. The national debt, meanwhile, stands at a record $24.6 trillion and climbing."
