American utilities have used the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war to price gouge the consumer.
Natural gas prices have nosedived 73% since 3Q2022 but utility prices stopped declining a year ago and are down just 14% from peak.
Utility gas actually increased in 4Q2023 and again in 1Q2024.
Look at all that air under the red line. First time that's happened in decades.
People should be MAKING A STINK!
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps the most overwhelming economic messaging advice I picked up from Democrats was for him to heave “Bidenomics” into the dumpster. Attempting to make voters believe something they don’t is folly. Attaching your name to that strategy borders on masochistic.
Here’s How Biden Can Turn It Around
Joe would be well on his way to re-election right now if he weren't shooting himself in the foot with his stupid green energy policies, which are keeping inflation from coming down harder than it already is.
That's what needs to go in the dumpster.
Compared to November 2020, my new budget plan payment for combined natural gas and electric for the coming winter will be 42% higher than it was three years ago, despite the fact that natural gas prices have normalized almost to the penny.
Electricity is up 25% since Green Energy Joe got elected and isn't coming down, but that can't account for it since I consume far less electricity than natural gas on an average basis. More than 65% of my energy consumption in kWh is from natural gas in the last year, as it is every year, less than 35% is from electricity.
A 25% increase to 35% of my old bill would result in a total payment today less than 9% higher. Instead it's 42% higher.
Remember that the utility uses natural gas to generate the electricity, too, and it's paying normal prices today for the gas, not the inflated prices of the recent past.
There's no excuse for the extra cost I'm paying.
The utility is price gouging.
Chris Christie is a smart guy with many of the right ideas about government spending, taxes, inflation, energy, and the environment.
But it's a real stretch to think that the timid interest rate increases of the Fed are responsible for this year's so-far moderating inflation indicators when it's falling energy prices since the winter which deserve the real credit. Christie himself admits that outrageous government spending hasn't been curbed at all.
His is a simple binary view which, while conventional and correct as far as it goes, doesn't get to the heart of the current matter.
Low energy prices have always been and remain key to a successful economy, and it was the spike in natural gas cost inputs because of the Russia-Ukraine war which accelerated inflation globally, not just in the US.
Fed chair Jerome Powell was correct in June of 2021 to believe that inflation would be transitory for "weak supply" reasons, but the Fed rate increases didn't actually commence until the start of the war in Ukraine, which compounded those reasons with the cutoff of European natural gas supplies.
But since the winter the natural gas price is down 73% from peak, coal is down 70%, and gasoline is down too, but a comparatively modest 24%.
Americans consumed in 2022 the energy equivalent of 26.9 billion kWh/day of natural gas, 13 billion kWh/day of gasoline, and 7.9 billion kWh/day of coal.
Natural gas is twice as important as gasoline in the overall American energy picture, primarily for heating, and as a substitute for coal in electricity generation.
Natural gas produced 4.6 billion kWh/day of electricity in 2022, the top source of electricity, vs. coal at 2.3 billion kWh/day and nuclear at 2.1 billion kWh/day.
Chris Christie is right though. We must "uncap" US oil and gas production and be energy independent.
Europe's natural gas storage, by the way, is presently 93% full as the war in Ukraine drags on. They are ready.
The US used 88.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day in 2022. We presently have about 35 days in storage.
Crude oil consumption in 2022 was about 20.3 million barrels per day. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is down to about 17 days of supply, from about 35 in 2011.
Watch CNBC’s full interview with GOP Presidential Candidate Chris Christie
Christie lets Fed off the hook for inflation, blames Trump and Biden for overspending
Natural gas is twice as important as gasoline for America's energy needs.
eia.gov says the United States used 369 million gallons of gasoline per day in 2022. That's the equivalent of 13 billion kWhr/day last year.
America also consumed 88.52 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day in 2022. That's the equivalent of 26.88 billion kWhr/day last year, 2.06 times as much.
Gasoline is down 14.6% in 1H2023, natural gas 60.5%.
Reported here.
2022 global production averaged 80.6 million barrels per day on one accounting.
OPEC must think the 2022 figure closer to 90 million bpd since it projects growth in demand of 23%.
According to this, crude oil remained the top primary energy source in the world at 31.2% in 2020, followed by coal at 27.2%, and natural gas at 24.7%.
71% of China's primary energy is derived from coal. China is the world's number one emitter of so-called greenhouse gases.
The monthly payment will now resemble the high end of normal I experienced in the years prior to the Russia-Ukraine War.
Like a boot off my neck.
Emma is CNBC's go-to green ideologue on staff.
“By completely prohibiting the installation of natural gas piping
within newly constructed buildings, the City of Berkeley has waded into a
domain preempted by Congress,” Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump
appointee, wrote for the panel. ...
All three judges on the panel were Republican appointees. The ruling reversed a 2021 decision by a U.S. district judge who had blocked the challenge to the city’s ban.
More.
The thing will probably go to the full 9th Circuit next, and then possibly to the Supreme Court of the United States.
First they came for your toilets, dishwashers, and clothes washers, and you said nothing.
Then they came for your coal, and you said nothing.
Then they came for your lightbulbs, and you said nothing.
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| top lines show full 2022 and start of 2023 |
Grand Rapids, MI, had its 5th warmest January by average temperature in Jan 2023 since 1892. Case is similar in many US cities which broke into the top 10 warmest Januaries on record, including Indy, Syracuse NY, Columbus OH, and Madison WI.
Bloomberg, here:
Germany now generates more than a third of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, according to Destatis, the federal statistical office. In the third quarter, its electricity from the fuel was 13.3% higher than the same period a year earlier, the agency said.
Germany as recently as 2019 still had 40 gigawatts of electricity capacity from coal, and planned to reduce that to 27 by 2022, so obviously Germany has much more capacity available than 10 gigawatts during its present natural gas supply crisis caused by the Ukraine war.
But Germany's more serious mistake than reducing its coal capacity was its voluntary and hysterical reduction of nuclear generation capacity by 40% in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Now it's got just 3 reactors left out of the 17 it had back in the day.
Meanwhile US electric capacity from coal in 2021 dwarfed the German, at about 210 gigawatts, but that is way down from almost 318 in 2011, a similarly ideologically driven, self-imposed, and illogical reduction of 108 gigawatts, or 33% in ten years.
The foolish growing reliance on unreliable "green energy" in the US and the turn away from coal which began in earnest under Obama has meant increasing unreliability of electric resources during extreme events, and a huge increase in the duration of power outages experienced by customers.
The average customer outage was just north of 8 hours in 2020 vs. about 3.5 hours in 2013, an increase of over 130%.
This will only get worse if America tries to rely on wind and solar at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear.
Cold weather pushed up electricity use in TVA's seven-state region where more than 60% of homes are heated by electricity. ...
TVA Chief Operating Officer Don Moul is heading an investigation of the problems that led to the power outages last week. Moul said in a telephone interview that high winds damaged several of TVA's protective structures at the Cumberland plant and several gas-fired combustion turbines used for such peak power periods. TVA's directive to local power companies to cut some of their energy use was the most efficient means to respond to the inadequate energy supply, Moul said.
More.
The left, of course, is blaming the fossil fuels themselves instead of wind damage to existing energy infrastructure, whose maintenance has been neglected in the rage for so-called green energy and against coal:
"[T]he mandatory blackouts were due to coal and gas failures," [Amy] Kelly [the Tennessee representative for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign] said.
The hysteria of this prejudiced response is matched, however, by the feckless customers of the federally-run utility, whose only care is that their power was cut when it was 5 degrees F outside, and on Christmas Eve:
"Why would anyone in their right mind decide it is a GOOD idea to have rolling blackouts today? First of all, it is a whopping 5 degrees outside and second, it is Christmas Eve ... This is ridiculous."
There's never any discussion about how core inflation vaulted to the current levels well before the war in Ukraine even began.
The reason for the inflation surge is Biden's war for green energy, the one input which makes everything cost more because green energy costs much more than conventional energy from coal, oil, and natural gas.
Add trillion$ in COVID stimulus chasing too few goods and it's a recipe for the disaster which is ongoing, not moderating.
Some people get it. Most don't.
