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DAILY ENERGY NEWS  | 12/05/2025
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If the EPA is admitting the new ethanol rules raise fuel prices, what exactly are we doing here?


Wall Street Journal (12/4/25) editorial: "Gasoline prices are down, but the Environmental Protection Agency is about to push them up. President Trump is committed to affordable energy, but he is also under intense pressure from the corn-state ethanol lobby...The RFS is a relic of the 1970s oil shocks. President Jimmy Carter warned of 'catastrophe' and lavished subsidies on 'gasohol.' Oil scarcity proved fleeting, but corn-state interests had discovered an entitlement, and in 2005 Congress discovered a new rationale: climate change...The EPA’s chief role under the RFS isn’t environmental protection but management of special-interest grievances. The agency’s latest proposal, to reassign retroactively years of exempted obligations, is legally dubious. The EPA openly admits its action will raise fuel costs—the only one of several statutory factors that it analyzed—implicitly conceding that the statutory criteria no longer guide anything."

“The interaction of America’s 130 million buildings with our energy system should not be further complicated by arbitrary and imprecise federal guidance.” 

 

– Lou Hrkman,
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

It's been an expensive lesson, but the Euros are starting to catch on to the importance of domestic energy production. 


Oil Price (12/2/25) reports: "Energy costs prompt Europe to reconsider oil, gas opposition. When Germany earlier this year approved an offshore gas drilling project, it raised a lot of eyebrows. An energy transition champion, a record breaker in wind and solar installations, now Germany was turning back to hydrocarbons—and it is not alone in this. European countries have seen their electricity costs rise to some of the highest in the world over the last decade, despite promises that the transition from coal, oil, and gas to wind, solar, and batteries would be both clean and cheap. It has been neither, with most of the equipment for wind and solar installations produced cheaply in China using its abundance of coal power generation capacity. Yet while the “cleanliness” credentials of the transition tend to get habitually swept under the rug, doing the same with soaring costs for electricity has proven a lot harder...Reuters’ Ron Bousso reported this week how countries including Greece, Italy, and even the UK are reconsidering their transition focus to allow for continued production of energy commodities that have proven to be difficult to give up—and expensive. Bousso mentions several recent oil and gas projects in Europe, such as the expansion of Energean’s Block 2 project in the Ionian Sea with Exxon, and Shell’s statement from last month that it was willing to invest more in Italian oil and gas exploration as soon as the government lifted restrictions on such activities."

A swing and a miss from the "reporters" at Politico.


CEI (12/2/25) article: "In September, Politico published an article titled 'How a major DOE report hides the whole truth about climate change.' In October, I rebutted that article in a two–part essay. Today’s post provides further vindication of the Department of Energy (DOE) report, A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. Four reporters — Benjamin Storrow, Chelsea Harvey, Scott Waldman, and Paula Friedrich — co-authored the Politico article. Climate scientists John Christy, Judith Curry, Steve Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer co-authored the DOE report. The Politico article accuses the DOE authors of quoting selectively from the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Specifically, the reporters fault the scientists for quoting one sentence about hurricane intensity in AR6 but not the next sentence. That omission is 'clearly designed to mislead the audience,' the reporters contend. Not so...It is the Politico reporters who mislead the public by omitting the DOE authors’ 'very next sentence.' The reporters commit the journalistic malpractice they falsely ascribe to the DOE authors. Fifth, empirical analysis posted this week by American Enterprise Institute scholar Roger Pielke, Jr. confirms the assessment of AR6 and the DOE authors that robust detection of a trend towards stronger hurricanes continues to elude scientists."

If renewables are so great for consumers, why do proponents need to lie in the sales pitch?

“Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.” - Tupac (also the editors at Nature)


New York Times (12/3/25) reports: "In April 2024, the prestigious journal Nature released a study finding that climate change would cause far more economic damage by the end of the century than previous estimates had suggested. The conclusion grabbed headlines and citations around the world, and was incorporated in risk management scenarios used by central banks.
On Wednesday, Nature retracted it, adding to the debate on the extent of climate change’s toll on society. The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research. Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent...The paper was also cited by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and was in the top 5 percent of journal articles tracked by Altmetric, a measurement tool for research impact. Carbon Brief, a climate-focused news outlet, found it was the second most referenced climate paper in 2024...The authors’ failure to account for those correlations, Mr. Schötz argued, made the results so uncertain that they were essentially worthless."

Energy Markets

 
WTI Crude Oil: ↑ $60.04
Natural Gas: ↑ $5.36
Gasoline: ↓ $2.97
Diesel: ↓ $3.71
Heating Oil: ↑ $236.90
Brent Crude Oil: ↑ $63.38
US Rig Count: ↑ 570

 
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