Via Market Ticker
ht/ jd hasty
“No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal land. No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill. Period. End.”
That’s what candidate Biden said, and he made good on his promise as soon as he was inaugurated.
Such a position also means nobody will invest in refining capacity, particularly when you have states such as California which have banned the sale of vehicles using petroleum-based fuels starting in 2035 and all trucks, where possible, in ten more years. Why does that shut down refining now?
That’s simple: Capital cost for improvements and new construction have to be recovered over decades of time and the service life of equipment like that is typically 30, 40 or more years. If you tell me there will be no demand for the product in 10 years you have quadrupled the capital cost recovery required each and every year from now until then and that in turn means the price will wildly escalate and nobody may buy. There is no reason for a private concern to take that risk and you cannot compel them to do so.
If you think this is some “unexpected” result you’re nuts. Tell me how many nuclear fuel reprocessing plants are online today in the United States. In 1977 it was banned by Jimmy Carter and while Reagan reversed that E/O when he took office it did not matter as the former investments that had been made were destroyed by Carter’s action and nobody in their right mind would do it again, given that Carter ruined their investment by executive fiat.
There is basically zero fabrication and development on the nuclear fuel front today compared with requirements; we only produce about 5% of what we need. This isn’t because we don’t have it — we do have it. It’s because Carter screwed industry out of billions of dollars and nobody in their right mind is going to let that happen to them twice. The entire kerfluffle over waste disposal is of our making; the safest and best thing to do with high-level nuclear waste from reactors is to put it back into a new fuel pin (the fissile portion in commercial power reactors is only 5%, so you have 95% of the fuel pin contents available for such waste) and burn it up. Over time this process reduces the high-level waste that is dangerous for 100,000 years into lower-level waste that is dangerous for a hundred or two years which we can reasonably expect to be able to keep out of the environment using existing technology.
The same is true when it comes to petroleum, coal and natural gas. The latter, I remind you, is essential to make fertilizer, without which crop yields will be half or less of what we produce today. The far left, along with those who go along with it on the right, either do not understand any of this or don’t care and they both ignore the history including what happened in the 1970s and the impact that persists forty years later when it comes to civilian energy production.
If you want to see energy development resume here in the United States there is only one way to do it: Pass into law that (1) it will and may continue and expand, (2) Executive Action cannot curtail, impair or stop it again and (3) a serious supermajority of both houses of Congress will be required to change said law.
It’s pretty simple:
The energy required to produce a barrel of oil is considerably less than the amount of energy in a barrel of oil. The amount of energy that can be produced by a lone solar panel or wind mill is considerably less than the energy that solar panel or windmill will produce in its functional lifetime.
Therefore, anyone trying to replace fossil fuels with green energy is literally trying to put the US into a negative energy situation. At that point the only energy available will be animal or human energy, which is dependent on food, which can’t be produced in large enough quantities to feed that need to do the work that can no longer be done by fossil fuel powered equipment. That means millions will starve.
The Biden administration is literally trying to trigger a massive and deadly famine in the US. They’re trying to murder us.
It must be nice to be a politician and dictate pie-in-the-sky economic policy without any knowledge, personal responsibility or accountability. Particularly when one is ignorant of how the world works and devoid of common sense.
Economists like to devise complicated formulas and graphs in order to try to explain how the economy works. However, what makes an economy work is really human nature; capitalism works better than communism because humans have individual wants and needs and are usually greedy (“greed” is used here as Gordon Gecko used it). People act in their self interests or in the interests of their families, and no amount of central planning can fully anticipate these self interest choices.
Politicians are usually either morons, or liars, or lying morons. Take corporate taxes for example. Corporations don’t “pay” taxes; they pass those costs along to the consumers who actually pay the taxes. Only working people pay taxes – you can quadruple the taxes on Walmart, and at best all you will succeed in doing is raising the cost of groceries and other goods people buy at Walmart. At worst, you will run these companies out of business if the price of their goods and services exceed the ability or desire of folks to pay for them. This is basic economics.
I absolutely hate the trend of governing by Executive Order; so far as I am concerned, executive orders are greatly abused and should be outlawed. But I digress – I hate governmental central planning even worse. Please show me an economy where central planning has worked long term, or even intermediate term. Or let’s look at central planning another way – do you want Joe Biden deciding what you can or cannot have or what you can produce or not produce? Of course not – Joe Biden is a demented fool and he is just as likely to mandate that everyone produce and consume nothing but ice cream as anything else.
Finally, people are fools if they think governments can solve their problems. Governments are not magical things; they are institutions that have the authority to use force against people, and inhabited by human beings who frequently have no discernible skills or abilities. Look at Bernie Sanders, whose story is unfortunately not particularly unique. Bernie has essentially failed at everything he has tried to do except for getting elected as a Senator. His ideas have been tried and have historically failed, yet thousands of Bernie Bros look at Sanders as a savior. Bernie’s status as a Senator has endowed him with nothing more than an opportunity to turn a six figure salary into millions of dollars for reasons and activities that remain a mystery.
Stop The madness.
Sounds a lot like “sanctions” to me. And with about the same results: cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Remember when we had a guy who made the best deals, instead of this crap?
Jackass Joe is a Chinese torpedo, a wrecking ball, the demolition man, etc.
He presides over the destruction of the United States while bald-faced lying about it!
The enemy isn’t 5,000 miles away. It is right here in the White House!
“Behind every unit of economic output is a unit of energy.”
Countries go to war over energy, and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.
…and the motivation behind it is 100% consistent with their core mission. Increasing innocent human suffering, misery and death.
Requiring oil companies to produce more oil without allowing them to access the resources necessary to do so is like Pharoh telling the Hebrews to make mud bricks with straw gleaned from the fields while denying them the ability to cut the needed straw.
Are ballot boxes fire proof??? Asking for a guy at the bar.
I would bet they are still subsidizing ethanol, way to many campaign contributions at stake.
We will not vote our way out if this.
The tree is dying of thirst….
OF this.
(Fat finger typo…)