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MORNING ENERGY NEWS  |  07/20/2020
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People notice when you threaten to outlaw their livelihood.


Washington Examiner (7/17/20) reports: "Jim Cassidy, business manager of the Insulators Local No. 2 union just outside Pittsburgh, knows Joe Biden as a friend of labor. He keeps a photo of himself with Biden in his office from when the former vice president visited Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, in 2018 to campaign for then-U.S. House candidate Conor Lamb, a centrist Democrat. It’s a visual reminder of Biden’s longtime support for unionized workers who build things. But Cassidy, 55, is torn over whether Biden the Democratic presidential nominee would be an enemy of the fossil fuel industry whose workers he represents, workers who install insulation material on piping and boilers in natural gas plants. 'Joe Biden is really one of us. I always loved the man,' said Cassidy, a registered Democrat. 'He scares me now. Is he embracing the new Green Deal or whatever they are calling it? He needs to get some stuff straight.'"

"Restrictions and bans on natural gas are being labeled as essential elements of that climate policy. But those bans are, in fact, regressive taxes that will have an almost undetectable impact on global climate."

 

– Robert Bryce, 
The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity

Contingency lawyers strike in MN and DC.


Wall Street Journal (7/19/20) column: "Here we go again. The Attorneys General of Minnesota and Washington, D.C., recently filed lawsuits accusing oil companies of covering up climate change for decades. Last winter New York state finally lost its anti-Exxon legal crusade, after nearly four years of investigating. A Democratic-appointed state judge tossed that lawsuit, calling its claims 'hyperbolic.'...The new cases, against Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Koch Industries, dredge up old internal documents, but they look political from top to bottom. Minnesota’s suit, focused on Exxon, helpfully includes links to source files. Clicking through reveals so many tendentious quotations that Attorney General Keith Ellison refutes his own claims. The lawsuit reads like an ambitious politician’s attempt to cherry-pick from decades of debate on a shifting issue. The case brought by Karl Racine, the D.C. Attorney General, is similar. It cites some of the same files and attacks oil companies’ advertising as 'greenwashing.' If the public weren’t misled, it says, 'people might purchase less fossil fuel products, or decide to buy none at all.' Where’s the evidence for that? Alarming climate headlines aren’t scarce, yet voters keep rejecting a carbon tax. Climate change is such a thorny issue precisely because fossil fuels have powered the economy since the Industrial Revolution, and few Americans will sign up to cut their standard of living."

Blocking affordable, reliable energy sources doesn't make expensive, intermittent sources any more appealing. 


American Spectator (7/18/20) column: "A recent spate of court rulings and corporate decisions has commentators asking if the age of the pipeline has come to an end...The environmentalist fantasy is that pipeline shutdowns will usher in an economy powered by wind and solar. What they fail to appreciate is that a wind-and-solar economy would be an environmental catastrophe in its own right. The power density of oil and gas enables a relatively small footprint for energy systems. Wind and solar do not share that characteristic. According to research from Strata, natural gas requires 12.4 acres to produce one megawatt of electricity, solar requires 43.5 acres, and wind requires 70.6 acres. Work headed by David Keith, Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard’s Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, indicates that meeting U.S. total energy demand with wind power would require covering 72% of the country’s continental land area with wind turbines. A 2019 Wood Mackenzie analysis estimates that a decarbonized power grid would require an addition of 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmissions lines — enough to wrap around the planet 8 times. The so-called energy transition would also require unprecedented extraction of critical minerals like lithium and cobalt, the production of which China-based firms dominate, raising the prospect of future environmental, human rights, and geopolitical crises. Against this backdrop, pipelines don’t look so bad."

Trump's successes can be measured by how high the greens turn up the end of the world rhetoric.


Reason (7/17/20) reports: "The release earlier this week by the Trump administration's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) of updated rules implementing the National Environmental Policy Act was met with furious denunciations from leading environmental activist organizations. The Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Director Sharon Buccino asserted that the new rules 'would gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).' National Wildlife Federation President Collin O'Mara also declared that the CEQ's 'final rule effectively guts' NEPA, presenting 'a clear and present danger to all Americans.' Friends of the Earth Legal Director Marcie Keever stated, 'The Trump Administration's attacks on NEPA are dangerous and unforgivable.'...The activist groups chiefly object to how the new rules clarify that non-federal projects with minimal federal funding or minimal federal involvement, such that the agency cannot control the outcome of the project, are not major federal actions and thus do not require an EIS before proceeding. In addition, the activists decry the fact that the new rules require that EIS reviews consider only the reasonably foreseeable direct environmental impacts of proposed projects and not, as in the past, speculative indirect and cumulative effects." 

Energy Markets

 
WTI Crude Oil: ↓ $40.22
Natural Gas: ↓ $1.69
Gasoline: ~ $2.19
Diesel: ~ $2.43
Heating Oil: ↓ $121.97
Brent Crude Oil: ↓ $42.77
US Rig Count: ↓ 275

 
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