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MORNING ENERGY NEWS | 01/06/2021
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** Looks like we're gonna need more Solyndras than we previously thought.
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E&E News ([link removed]) (1/6/21) reports: "President-elect Joe Biden's transition team says the Trump administration has done more damage than anticipated to the government's ability to address climate change. Potentially lowering expectations for the incoming president's early climate efforts, Biden officials say their agency review teams have found deeper budget cuts, wider staff losses and more systematic elimination of climate programs and research than they realized. Some climate moves can't happen until Biden officials remedy those deficiencies, a senior transition official said, because 'those have been very carefully directed budget cuts to the very parts of the [EPA] that are going to be necessary to get rid of [Trump's] outrageous rollbacks.' For instance, the official said, EPA's research laboratories have been hollowed out, and its science advisory boards
have been depopulated. At the operational level, each of Trump's rollbacks has shuffled the staff and funding that had been in place to carry out regulations. The EPA workforce has shrunk by more than 600 people since the beginning of Trump's term, another source familiar with the agency review process said. That's on top of the agency's moves to restrict the kinds of public health research that EPA can use for regulations, and its watering down of the social cost of carbon, the government's metric for analyzing the benefits of emissions cuts."


** "U.S. Supreme Court justices have an important opportunity in January to pull the plug on unhelpful climate lawsuits and allow us all to focus instead on the monumental challenges that face our planet."
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– Guy F. Caruso, Center for Strategic and International Studies ([link removed])

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Swamp economics: Largest producer of weed killer wants climate policy to subsidize farmers who use weed killer.

** Bayer ([link removed])
(1/6/21) advertisement: "Believe it or not, the majority of products you buy at the grocery store could play a special role in the global effort to combat climate change. Why? Because behind everything we eat is a farmer who grew it. And behind an increasing number of farmers is Bayer’s new carbon rewards program, which provides the resources and incentives farms need to help repair our planet. Unfortunately, many human activities release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and agriculture is certainly responsible for a large percentage of those emissions. The good news? Agriculture can also have a positive effect of actually pulling carbon back into the ground, where it can benefit crops and the environment. That’s because plants have a superpower. They absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the soil through their roots. While humanity is working diligently to develop new carbon removal technologies, plants are doing it naturally all the time. This means that farmers around
the world, and the billions of acres of cropland they manage, are in a great position to reverse the present climate trend."

Say it with a British accent: The painful consequences of going 'carbon neutral' will be staggering, pointless, and entirely predictable.

** The Sun ([link removed])
(1/5/21) reports: "TEN million jobs are at risk due to a legal commitment to go carbon neutral by 2050, new research has found. Two in five workers in the UK’s poorest regions are reliant on high-emitting industries for jobs. And the report by the powerful Onward think-tank makes grim reading for the Prime Minister about the crucial Red Wall seats that decided last year’s election. It warns Boris Johnson that millions of jobs in the seats face being wiped out by his government’s target to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. The report says he must launch a major new job creation agenda in the Red Wall to find replacement positions and help retrain workers in new careers. Onward found 43 per cent of workers in battleground seats in the Midlands and the North currently work in high-emitting industries. The report was published to mark today’s launch of a cross-party programme of research, overseen by Onward, to identify the challenges of delivering net-zero by 2050."

Carry on, virtue signalers.

** Financial Times ([link removed])
(12/20/20) reports: "A third of climate funds sold in the UK are invested in oil and gas companies, according to research that highlights concerns that investors could be misled by sustainable investment products. The analysis by leftwing think-tank Common Wealth also found that low-carbon funds have far greater exposure to technology companies and financials, sectors that may play an indirect role in climate change, than to clean energy stocks. The findings will heap pressure on regulators to take bolder action to prevent greenwashing, where fund managers overstate their sustainability credentials to win a share of the ever-growing environmental, social and governance fund market...“The average individual investor making the effort to select a climate-focused fund option could reasonably expect their assets to be used to invest in decarbonisation, clean energy and other related areas,” said Adrienne Buller, the research’s author. “But investors may well be surprised and disappointed by
what their funds invest in.”

Energy Markets


WTI Crude Oil: ↓ $49.91
Natural Gas: ↓ $2.66
Gasoline: ↑ $2.27

Diesel: ↑ $2.57
Heating Oil: ↓ $151.69
Brent Crude Oil: ↑ $53.81
** US Rig Count ([link removed])
: ↑ 394



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