Not exactly the whole farm

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DAILY ENERGY NEWS | 04/19/2022

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The 0.00589% solution to high gas prices! President Biden allows leasing on 145,000 acres out of 2.46 billion acres of the federal mineral estate. Eureka!

Wall Street Journal (4/17/22) editorial: "In case you missed the Good Friday news dump, the Biden Administration plans to restart oil and gas leasing on federal lands this week. Or so its press release claims. The Administration as usual is restricting oil and gas development while pretending that’s not what it’s doing. During his first week in office, President Biden ordered the Interior Department to halt oil and gas lease sales on federal lands. Federal judge Terry Doughty last June ruled the ban violated the Mineral Leasing Act, which requires the government to hold quarterly lease sales 'for each State where eligible lands are available.' The judge ordered Interior to resume leasing. Interior appealed while dragging its feet. Finally in November it held an offshore sale in the Gulf of Mexico...Energy companies threatened to seek another judicial order to compel Interior to hold an onshore lease sale this spring. Interior’s Friday announcement is an attempt to head off that effort. It says it will hold a sale for 173 parcels on roughly 144,000 acres of land. This is doing the least possible to comply with Judge Doughty’s ruling last summer. This is two-thirds less land than the average during the Trump Presidency. Interior says it is 'prioritizing the American people’s broad interests in public lands,' but the sale amounts to a mere 0.00589% of federal land. Americans have a significant interest in more domestic energy production. They don’t want to keep paying more than $4 a gallon for gasoline."

"Unlike elected politicians, woke climate investors are not accountable for the effects of their climate policies: They exercise power without responsibility. This arrangement weakens America’s ability to respond to the geopolitical challenges of a revanchist Russia and an expansionist China."

– Rupert Darwall, RealClearFoundation

The "democracy" crowd is sure putting a lot of emphasis on being ruled by unelected beuracrats.

Daily Signal (4/14/22) op-ed: "The Biden Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed requiring publicly traded companies to not only calculate and report their own greenhouse gas emissions but those of their suppliers, customers, and logistics operators. The proposal could conceivably cover almost every company in America—even those that aren’t publicly traded and don’t fall under the SEC’s purview—adding enormous compliance costs and legal fees to their bottom lines...The result is confusion, and that confusion is meant to create the perceived need for so-called experts who can then be brought to the forefront to resolve the confusion the left has manufactured. This way, the debate “must” be left to unelected judges or experts who can decide things based on leftist ideology—and commonsense can be overridden. Here are a few examples of patently absurd arguments that the left says only experts can answer: Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., asked whether Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson could define the word 'woman.' Jackson responded to Blackburn: 'I can’t … I’m not a biologist.'...And now, Gensler’s SEC has put forth 506 pages of proposed regulations requiring all public companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and—except in the cases of smaller reporting companies—'the actions of the company’s suppliers and consumers,' and their greenhouse gas emissions. If the SEC doesn’t agree with their assessments, they will pay added compliance costs and legal fees. The rule also demands that they disclose all climate risks they might face. This will require the hiring of more accountants and climate change professionals to deal with the added stipulations, creating massive added expenses that only larger companies will be able to afford. See a pattern here? The point is to make it clear that nobody knows anything."

A problem with massive amounts of EVs—90% of the necessary supply chain doesn't exist.

Combine this with the rules from Biden's "infrastructure" package and it's like they don't want anything built at all!

The Hill (4/17/22) reports: "The Biden administration on Tuesday moved to restore some of the environmental regulations governing infrastructure project permitting that were rolled back by the Trump administration...In its 2020 NEPA regulatory rewrite, the Trump administration got rid of explicit requirements to consider an action’s 'indirect' impacts — those that happen later on or further removed, but are still reasonably foreseeable. It also got rid of the explicit requirement to consider its cumulative impacts, which refers to how a project’s pollution may interact with other pollution sources to make some areas particularly polluted. Critics raised concerns about the impacts of this change on communities that already face disproportionate pollution burdens and argued it could hinder the government’s ability to consider climate change impacts. The Biden administration reaffirmed the need to consider the 'direct'” 'indirect,' and 'cumulative' impacts, according to a statement from the CEQ. The Trump administration also sought to make the process more industry-friendly by adding language requiring agencies’ 'proposed alternatives to a company’s projects to be based on the company’s goals."

Energy Markets

WTI Crude Oil: ↓ $103.24
Natural Gas: ↓ $7.02
Gasoline: ↑ $4.10

Diesel: ↑ $5.04
Heating Oil: ↓ $380.72
Brent Crude Oil: ↓ $108.21
US Rig Count: ↑ 774

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