Kevin Dowd: close the border, eliminate regulations, end the war on fossil fuels, cancel electric vehicle mandates, do a little dance

 

 

 Kevin Dowd takes over for Maureen Dowd on Thanksgiving, here:

 

Trump promises a return to common sense and has been given the tools to accomplish it with an electoral mandate and all three branches of government on his side. He cannot squander it. He must not get bogged down in petty disputes and perceived slights. ...

There are things he can do right away to make a difference: close the border, eliminate regulations, end the war on fossil fuels and cancel EV mandates. ...

He should move forward without rancour or grievance, fuelled by the joy of the Trump Shuffle, his robot-like dance that has broken out at UFC fights and across the NFL. I’m going to have the younger members of the family teach it to Maureen on Thanksgiving.

Senator John Barrasso: Trump's new energy secretary fracking pioneer Chris Wright will make America an all-of-the-above energy country that puts American families first

 

 Republican Sen. John Barrasso, who is expected to become chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Trump promised bold choices for his Cabinet, and Wright's nomination delivers.

"He's s an energy innovator who laid the foundation for America's fracking boom. After four years of America last energy policy, our country is desperate for a secretary (of energy) who understands how important American energy is to our economy and our national security,″ Barrasso said of Wright, adding: "Wright will help ensure America remains committed to an all-of-the-above energy policy that puts American families first."

More.

Global population exploded from 1950 because the world turned to cheap, abundant fossil fuels, but Kamala Harris' energy adviser thinks fossil fuels are a death cult

 

Cheap gasoline prices were key to the Trump-era "boom" for the bottom half of income earners destroyed by the Great Recession

Reported here in "Inflation-shocked low- and middle-income Americans may not spend normally for years":

“For a very large share of Americans, the bottom 60% are spending more on essentials than before the pandemic,” said Michael Pearce, Oxford Economics deputy chief U.S. economist. “The burden is hardest among the lowest income but also touches middle income. Spending patterns of low-income Americans will take years to recover.” ...

The last time low-income Americans’ discretionary spending fell this much, which was during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, it took five to 10 years for spending patterns to return to previous levels, he said.

“And the reason was gas prices fell,” Pearce said. Global oil prices fell by about 70% between 2014-16, which pushed pump prices sharply lower and helped low-income Americans catch up.

“It’s harder to see some revolutionary cost saving (like that) on the horizon,” he said. 

          

Harder to see only if we continue with the green energy nonsense.

The opportunities are YUGE for Trump/Vance because ALL energy costs much more now.

It's not just gasoline. Get the government boot off the neck of fossil fuel producers and gasoline will come down, natural gas will come down, and electricity will come down. 

Base energy from coal should be transitioned to nuclear, which works in cold weather and hot weather without fail just like coal, unlike natural gas, wind, and solar, which are fine where appropriate but not as base energy, the energy you must have when you need it when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and the gas won't flow.

J. D. Vance knows:

 

 

The world has grown to 8 billion because it gets 76+% of its primary energy from cheap fossil fuels, but Kamala Harris' energy adviser won't have kids and calls them the death cult

Fossil fuels have terrorized her into childlessness and hatred for individualists, whites, and men.

 

Kamala Harris' confused messaging on fossil fuels, reported by Politico and given publicity by CNN's KFILE, continues to melt down lol

Camila Thorndike, a top Harris-Walz campaign climate adviser, abruptly walked back her recent comments stating that Vice President Kamala Harris would be hostile to future oil and gas drilling as president—effectively reversing her reversal of the candidate's position.

In a statement Monday, Thorndike lamented that she wasn't clear enough when she told Politico last week that Harris is not "promoting expansion" of oil drilling and suggested Harris was not fond of a provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act mandating fossil fuel leases. Thorndike serves as Harris's "climate engagement director."

"I didn't explain myself clearly here," Thorndike said Monday. "Contrary to Trump's claims, the VP has not banned fracking, doesn't support banning fracking, and in fact cast the tie-breaking vote on the biggest pro-climate law ever, which, yes, opened new fracking leases. People know that's her position." ...

It remains unclear how Thorndike's new statement clarifies her comments from last week. 

More. 

It's hard to run away from a former position which had no nuance.

Harris was, and remains, an extreme opponent of fossil fuels, a Kool-Aid drinker like Hillary Clinton who thought you could mandate solar panels on every home in the United States.

More importantly, her political support comes from the extreme opponents of fossil fuels, and they have to be assuaged as Harris runs away from them in order to win in pro-fracking Pennsylvania, at whom the Monday statement was aimed.

Harris' climate adviser is being forced by the campaign to say words she doesn't want to say.

 

 

LOL, CNN's KFILE has really flipped the script, keeps going after Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on their hypocrisy

 KFile: Kamala Harris pledged to prosecute oil companies over emissions. Now, she’s praising their record US production

 “You should be really prepared to look at a serious fine or be charged with a crime,” Harris said in November 2019 when a South Carolina town hall attendee asked whether she would investigate companies such as Chevron and Shell for their role in contributing to climate change. ...

“And, not unlike the tobacco companies, after years — ’cause they’d done the research — they knew the harm that their product was causing. They were making so much money that they kept that secret — same thing with these big oil companies. And they need to pay the price,” she said. “So yes is the answer.” Harris made a similar promise when speaking with the liberal Mother Jones magazine a month earlier, saying, “Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook, but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.” ...

Campaigning in Philadelphia last month, Harris pointed to the Biden administration’s record on increasing domestic oil production, telling voters, “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.” ...

Archived material from Harris’s 2020 campaign found more than a dozen mentions of prosecuting Big Oil either for pollution or climate change. Citing climate change as an urgent threat, Harris said aggressive action was imminently needed. ...

During a CNN town hall on climate change in 2019, asked whether she would sue ExxonMobil, Harris responded, “I have sued ExxonMobil.”

However, this claim was incorrect. While Harris did initiate an investigation into ExxonMobil for allegedly misleading the public and shareholders about the risks of climate change, she never filed a lawsuit against the company.

Kim Strassel: the GOP needs to be engaged in a whole-of-election message reminding Americans of the ugly Biden policies of past and present, and Kamala’s promise to carry them into the future

 The libertarian-inclined in the GOP want the message restricted more or less to the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime.

Biden: Forgotten But Not Gone

Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal

 

Strassel points out Biden is continuing or proposing the following to help cement support for Harris on the left:

Student loan giveaways

Nationwide rent controls

A plea deal for the 9/11 terrorists

$2.2 billion for farmers, ranchers, and owners of forest land who experienced discrimination

Million$ in new grants for women's health, state climate programs, tribal fisheries, youth skills programs

Signage everywhere thanking Biden's infrastructure law for road improvements

New rules protecting workers from heat

New prevailing wage rules for clean energy workers

New chemical and air toxin crackdowns

New regulations for wildlife refuges

New regulations on offshore drilling

Higher efficiency standards for commercial equipment and residential boilers

A crackdown on so-called junk fees for extras like family-seating on flights.

 

Polling has shown inflation and illegal immigration have been the top issues, which of course doesn't mean other things can't be issues.

 

Strassel doesn't seem to get that the green energy war on fossils fuels is the top problem for the economy, driving up the cost of everything, while the massive illegal immigration feeds competition for the housing no one can afford anyway, not to mention crime up and wages down for the bottom half of the country. 

 

And of course, the Trump tax reform disappears if Harris is elected, among other horribles. 

UK climate lunatics from Just Stop Oil jailed for years for blocking traffic in four-day incident in November 2022

 Five environmental activists who organised protests that brought part of the M25 to a standstill over four days have been jailed.

Forty-five Just Stop Oil protesters climbed gantries on the motorway in November 2022, forcing police to stop the traffic, in an attempt to cause gridlock across southern England.

Judge Christopher Hehir said Roger Hallam, 58, Daniel Shaw, 38, Louise Lancaster, 58, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, and Cressida Gethin, 22, had "crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic".

At Southwark Crown Court, Hallam was sentenced to five years' imprisonment while the other defendants each received four-year jail terms. ...

Hallam, a veteran environmental campaigner, was described as the "ideas man" of the movement, while the judge said Shaw was "up to his neck" in the planning of the protest.

More.

Biggest news of the day: Ford Motor bets Trump will win, scraps $1.3 billion investment in Canadian EV HUB, plans $3 billion Super Duty gasoline and diesel engine truck plant instead lol

 

 

 Ford to spend $3 billion to expand large truck production to a plant previously set for EVs

UBS’ Joseph Spak was among the analysts to applaud the additional investment in the highly profitable Super Duty models compared to money-losing EVs amid slower-than-expected adoption of electric cars and trucks.

“We believe this shows management’s confidence in more sustainable demand for Ford Pro vehicles,” he said Thursday in an investor note. “The [internal combustion engine] investment over EV investment should be viewed positively.”

Ford had previously announced plans to invest $1.3 billion into the Canadian plant for EV production. Those plans included a new three-row SUV, which the company recently delayed until 2027.

The announcement comes weeks after Farley said full electrification of “big, huge, enormous” vehicles such as Ford’s Super Duty trucks was “never going to make money.”

 

The rarely uttered but all-important truth: Energy prices lie at the root of all price pressures

Energy-heavy transportation and warehousing operations saw prices fall in the early and final purchasing stages of their business, PPI data showed. That indicates that supply-side pressures are easing, Kurt Rankin, senior economist with PNC Financial Services, wrote Thursday.

“The downward-trending energy PPI pace, which lies at the root of all price pressures in the US economy, implies that the second half of 2024 will see diminishing cost pressures from producers’ own energy bills, as well as the cost of shipping goods to retailers,” Rankin wrote. 

The final two paragraphs, here.

Don't be fooled. High energy prices remain the main drag on the economy.

A presidential administration biased against fossil fuels, which still accounted for 81% of primary energy production in the US in 2022, is shooting itself in the foot when trying to fight inflation and explains the persistence of the problem which most elites predicted would only be transitory.

Gasoline prices remain Obama-like, not Trump-like in the first half of 2024

Natural gas prices remain highly elevated in the first half of 2024 and ticked up again

Electricity in the US has never cost more than under the recent, lunatic Biden administration

 

 

Joe Biden likes to promise (to end) things on Fridays when no one is paying attention, kiddo

 

Biden: "I Promise You I Am OK" (famous last words)

 

 

 

Biden restarts Obama's war on new coal leasing ended by Trump . . . just in time for the election

 

 In one of its biggest steps yet to keep fossil fuels in the ground, the Biden administration announced Thursday that it will end new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, which produces nearly half the coal in the United States.

Climate activists have long pushed the Interior Department to stop auctioning off leases for coal mining on public lands, and they celebrated the decision. It could prevent billions of tons of coal from being extracted from more than 13 million acres across Montana and Wyoming, with major implications for U.S. climate goals. ...

Last year, the Powder River Basin generated 251.9 million tons of coal, accounting for nearly 44 percent of all coal produced in the United States. Under the bureau’s [Bureau of Land Management] determination, the 14 active coal mines in the Powder River Basin can continue operating on lands they have leased, but they cannot expand onto other public lands in the region. ...

The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign estimates that 382 coal-fired power plants have closed down or proposed to retire, with 148 remaining. ...

Trump ... pledged to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports in a second term . . .. He also pledged to start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and to lift restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic. 

More.

Insurance companies got rich because of Obamacare rules, now electric utilities are poised to get rich because of Biden climate rules

 Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.

Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.

From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :

Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.

The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.

About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.

Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.

The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”

Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators. 

Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.

Norway, Europe's most anti-semitic country, is also its most fascist economy, centered in dem ebil fossil fuels lol

 Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, was established in the 1990s to invest the surplus revenues of the country’s oil and gas sector. To date, the fund has put money in more than 8,500 companies in 70 countries around the world.

More.

Trump promised to build the wall, Biden promised to end fossil fuel lolz

 

Sultan al Jaber keeps COP28 lunatics from taking the world back to the stone age lolz

 Anger and frustration as COP28 draft text omits fossil fuel phaseout

The burning of coal, oil and gas accounts for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is for this reason that so many had pushed for the COP28 outcome to show that “we are truly at the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”

However, COP28 President Sultan al Jaber faced a backlash last week when he claimed there was “no science” behind calls for a phase-out of fossil fuels, and that such a move would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

They always leave out that 82% of global energy comes from coal, oil, and gas.

You can't just wave a magic wand and make it all go away without committing global murder in the process.

 

Core pce inflation, which excludes food and energy measures, is still high at 3.5% year over year in October 2023, down 0.2 points from September or 5.4%

 Price increases at 3.5% instead of 3.7% year over year. This level remains outside of most people's experience since the late 1990s.

The broad measure fell to 3.0% from 3.4%. The energy goods and services component yoy has been negative, that is deflationary, for eight months in a row. The food component was up 2.0% year over year in October but is now in its tenth month of declines out of twelve on a year over year measure monthly.

Declining energy input costs have been the story behind declining inflation measures overall, primarily natural gas which is twice as important to the U.S. economy as gasoline on a BTU basis.

The Biden administration's green energy policy is at war with the reason for the happy circumstance of declining inflation measures it finds itself in, and Biden could be sailing to re-election if he were instead supporting fossil fuel production, which would slay the inflation dragon dead.

Congressional Black Caucasians most hurt

Newsom selects EMILY'S LIST leader to fill Feinstein Senate seat... 
 

 

The Congressional Black Caucus had urged Newsom to appoint Lee, saying she was the "only person with the courage, the vision, and the record to eradicate poverty, face down the fossil fuel industry, defend our democracy, and tirelessly advance the progressive agenda.

 

Overall inflation reversed course and ticked higher in August 2023 on a monthly jump in overall energy prices

 Overall inflation jumped up to 3.7% year-over-year and 0.6% month-over-month on a 5.6% jump in overall energy inflation month-over-month in August 2023.

Month-over-month, electricity was up 0.2%, gasoline was up 10.6%, piped utility gas was up 0.6%, fuel oil and other fuels were up 8.4%. Meanwhile food was up 0.2%.

Core inflation (overall inflation less food and energy) increased mom 0.3% and is still running 4.4% yoy.

Services inflation is still running high at 5.4% yoy, less rent of shelter at 3.1% yoy.

Shelter inflation rose mom 0.3% in both measures, and 7.2% yoy seasonally adjusted.

Going forward I expect inflation pressures to persist because of Biden administration green energy fantasies and hatred of fossil fuels combining with OPEC+ production cuts continuing indefinitely.