According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. oil production for the first nine months of 2019 averaged over 12 million barrels per day. That level of production is 1.4 million barrels per day higher than the same period last year, despite the oil rig count declining steadily in 2019. EIA sees increasing oil production as the trend for the near future. In EIA’s Short Term Energy Outlook, oil production is expected to end the 2019 year 1.3 million barrels per day higher than last year, and it is expected to be another 1 million barrels a day higher next year ending the 2020 year with oil production at 13.29 million barrels per day.
California has some of the most aggressive mandates for renewable energy production in the country. The state has a 100 percent “clean” energy mandate by 2045, with 60 percent of the state’s electricity mandated to come from renewable energy by 2030. All new houses built in the Golden State must have solar panels on the roof, and several cities (e.g., Berkeley) have banned the use of natural gas in new residential construction. Increasing amounts of wind and solar on the California grid have caused reliability problems, with millions of people forced to endure days without power to alleviate wildfire risk believed to be caused by wind damage to electrical wires and insufficient back-up power when wind and solar are not producing.
“More often than not, we tend to overlook our truly spectacular rise from grinding poverty to previously unimaginable abundance. And so, during this Thanksgiving holiday, let us give thanks for accountable government, market economy, and scientific progress that make a king out of each of us.” – Marian Tupy, “Some Perspective on What We Have to Be Thankful For,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2014.
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”—Dr. Michael Mann, Climategate email, May 30, 2008
“In the end, Climategate ended my academic career prematurely…” —Dr. Judith Curry, November 12, 2019
This month marks the ten-year anniversary of Climategate. The episode was more than just “embarrassing and a public relations disaster for science,” as one sympathizer stated at the time. The leaked emails revealed a mainstream intellectual cartel trying to hype climate alarm by methodological tricks and resorting to secrecy and outright bullying (see selected quotations below).
According to AAA, California’s gasoline prices are the highest in the United States and are $1.45 more than the average U.S. gasoline price. While California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, wants to blame the oil companies and has asked his attorney general to investigate them for conspiring to keep gasoline prices artificially high, he should be looking at his state’s laws and regulations as the main culprit. According to the state’s Energy Commission, about half of the price difference between California’s gasoline price and the national average gasoline price is due to California’s taxes, its cap-and-trade policy, and its low-carbon fuel standard; and another third is due to higher refiner and retailer margins because of higher regulatory costs and less competition.
One of the recurring themes in my commentary on the climate change debate is how those pushing government intervention keep moving the goalposts (see one, two, and three). In the present post, I'll document this shift in the commentary from the same person—namely, Harvard's History of Science professor Naomi Oreskes.
In Minnesota, Xcel Energy estimates conservatively that it will cost $532,000 (in 2019 dollars) to decommission each of its wind turbines—a total cost of $71 million to decommission the 134 turbines in operation at its Noble facility. Decommissioning the Palmer’s Creek Wind facility in Chippewa County, Minnesota, is estimated to cost $7,385,822 for decommissioning the 18 wind turbines operating at that site, for a cost of $410,000 per turbine.
Repeatedly this month in California, Pacific Gas & Electric has cut off electricity to more than a million subscribers due to high winds and dry conditions that could cause a fire on its lines. In New York, National Grid has placed a moratorium on new natural gas hook ups because there is insufficient pipeline infrastructure to bring natural gas to homes and businesses. In both these cases, state politicians are mostly to blame, but they refuse to accept responsibility for the failures.
Under the banner STOP FOSSIL FUELS. BUILD 100% RENEWABLES, the group 350.org last month announced “a new fossil free milestone: $11 trillion has been committed to divest from fossil fuels.”
“These numbers are strong indicators that people power is winning,” the Bill McKibben-cofounded group boasted. “We would not have smashed our divestment targets without the thousands of local groups who have pressured their representatives to pull out of fossil fuels.”
Although the roughly two million affected residents of Northern California are recovering from the rolling blackouts imposed by utility PG&E, the company has warned that these “fire safety outages” may be periodically required for another decade. Naturally, California Governor Gavin Newsom decried the debacle as yet another example of “greed and neglect.” Yet as IER analyst Jordan McGillis explained in a previous article, the episode actually showcases the dangers of a government-imposed monopoly in electricity provision. In this article, I’ll elaborate on McGillis’ insights and show why the conventional economic rationale for government regulation of electric utilities is fundamentally flawed.