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Biden Is Failing The World

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The world desperately needs energy and yet President Joe Biden is preventing sufficient quantities of oil and gas from being produced.

Many people in the U.S. are still unaware of just how dire the situation is in Europe. They have started logging their old-growth forests for wood fuel to stay warm during the winter. You can see in a tweet that just came out today from somebody in Denmark that “people are stealing each other’s wood pellets and their wood briquettes as soon as they’re delivered.” To make matters worse, “There’s constant reports of cars having their tanks drilled and their gas stolen.” Remember, it’s not even winter yet. Winter’s actually over 72 days away. So this is a very serious situation.

You can see that in Poland people are actually burning trash to stay warm. Burning trash in your fireplace creates toxic smoke. It’s hazardous. The government’s considering handing out masks so people can breathe more safely when they’re outdoors.

Recall that natural gas is the reason the United States reduced its carbon emissions more than any other country in the world. Carbon emissions have been on the decline globally, in large measure, because of the transition from coal to gas. Natural gas is something that most reasonable people agree is a superior fuel to coal. Natural gas is the reason the United States reduced its emissions by 22% between 2005 and 2020, which is five percentage points more than the United States had agreed to reduce our emissions under cap and trade legislation, which nearly passed Congress in 2010 and under the UN Paris Climate Agreement.

The above is a graph that was produced by Matthew Yglesias, a well-known progressive blogger. He tweets it out whenever somebody points out that President Biden isn’t doing all he can to expand oil and gas production. It’s accurate. It does show that oil production increased on a daily average under Biden from under Trump. But it’s deeply misleading. You have to remember that under Trump, the Coronavirus pandemic, for several months, massively slashed oil production.

You can see from the below chart of the EIA data on crude oil production that we still haven’t gotten back to where we were before the pandemic. Now consider how the need is much greater for US oil now that Europe and the United States are rejecting Russian oil.Upgrade

The United States is the biggest liquified natural gas exporter, it’s true. But it takes five years to bring online new LNG capacity in the United States. So all of the new LNG that’s come online during Biden’s presidency was due to past presidents.

And Biden has leased less land than any President since World War II. It’s a shockingly small amount of land: 130,000 acres as opposed to seven million acres under Obama, four million acres under Trump, during the first 19 months of their administrations. It’s a huge reduction in the amount of land being leased.

You can see that in some particular cases, like a very large oil and gas sale in Alaska, the Department of Interior claimed there wasn’t any industry interest in the lease. This turned out not to be the case. The Senator from Alaska, Lisa Markowski said, “I can say with full certainty based on conversations as recently as last night, that Alaska’s industry does have an interest in lease sales and the Cook Inlet to claim otherwise is simply false, not to mention stunningly shortsighted.”

People point out the oil and gas industry does have many thousands of leases, and that’s true, but there’s a high degree of uncertainty about whether the leases they have will produce oil and gas at levels that make sense economically to produce from.

So increasing oil and gas leasing at a time of an energy crisis in Europe seems like a no-brainer, but the Biden administration is not doing that. In fact, it’s been preventing the expansion of gas in many other ways.

You can see the Biden administration denied a request to have a formaldehyde regulation exempted. All else being equal, you’d wanna reduce that pollution. But I think a little bit of formaldehyde is gonna be a less toxic airborne event than having people breathing toxic wood and plastic smoke in Europe. The right thing to do, in terms of aiding our allies, would be to wave that regulation. But the Biden administration refused.

You can see that the Biden administration is actively considering forgoing all new offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific. It may do no offshore leases at all for oil and gas.

Instead, the Biden administration has sought to give sanctions relief to Venezuela in the hopes that Venezuela would produce more oil. And of course, most famously Biden went to Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis to produce more oil in July. Now, everybody agrees that was a huge foreign policy failure. The Saudis announced they would be cutting production with the rest of OPEC+. The Biden administration’s pressure on the Saudis apparently annoyed them. Now, they’ve been pushed closer into the arms of Russia. This is a pretty significant setback for the Biden administration.

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At the same time Biden was going to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to produce more oil. Biden administration was refusing to even meet with oil and gas executives. That’s a pretty serious snub when you consider that it’s an industry you want to expand production.

An oil and gas analyst on Twitter criticized a Senator from Wisconsin for suggesting the Democrats are responsible for the lack of refining capacity. He said, “What — do you also blame a political party for a flat tire?”

I pointed out that a single oil refinery outage would have little impact if we had sufficient refinery capacity, and the reason we don’t is that politicians, mostly Democrats have used regulations to prevent their construction. When I interviewed executives one said to me, “If you were an oil company, why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars into expanding refining capacity if you thought the federal government would shut you down in the next few years? The narrative coming out of this administration is absolutely insane.”

So you can see here that refinery capacity was increasing all the way through 2020. It then declined due to the pandemic. And it has not risen since then. When the analyst was asked, why don’t we get more refineries? He clearly didn’t know. Or at least he said he didn’t know. But it’s clear the Biden administration has not wanted more refineries.

There was a chance to retrofit a major refinery in the US Virgin Islands. It was a refinery that was older. It needed pretty significant upgrades. It was polluting. But these are machines that can be fixed. Several billion dollars of investment would’ve fixed it and it goes back many years. This is an article from 2008. It describes how, at that time, the Democrats in the Senate killed a proposal for refinery expansion.

Go back to 2006. The same thing happened. The House was in the hands of the Republicans who passed a piece of legislation to expand refineries. And it was the Democrats who killed it. And, incidentally, they’re using the exact same arguments today that they used back then.

More recently, we’ve seen an attack on expanded natural gas pipeline capacity, including from Pennsylvania to the Northeast, particularly to Boston. The result of not having pipeline capacity is that they’ve been burning more oil for electricity in New England. In fact, oil-fired power jumped to a four-year high earlier this year. And they’ve been having to import liquified natural gas to New England rather than just pipe it in, which is significantly cheaper. Probably half as expensive.

Grassroots advocacy and lawsuits have prevented pipelines from being built. You can see there’s a strong correlation between the price of natural gas and the ability to get pipelines built. We stop building pipelines and gas gets more expensive. Globally, the impact is that we’re gonna return to coal. This is the consequence of stifling oil and gas production.

One could argue that we just need more scarcity in order to accelerate the transition to electric cars. But it’s notable that the major figures in this, including President Biden, supporters of President Biden, and representatives of his administration aren’t defending a pro-scarcity position. They’re instead claiming that they’re doing all they can to bring down oil and gas prices and expand production.

I think this data, and the historical chronology, paint a picture that shows that there has, in fact, been a war on natural gas and oil United States and that it is impacting global supplies, and leaving Europe vulnerable.

Click to see the video presentation of this article. Additional slides and graphs are in the video.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

New documentary exposes climate agenda as ‘scam’ to increase globalist power and profit

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Martin Durkin’s new film ‘Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth)’ shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping their alarmist narrative alive – despite the facts.

Martin Durkin’s new film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) opens a hot topic with some very spicy takes.

“This is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry” – so says Durkin’s voice-over, following a reprise of Greta Thunberg’s infamous “How dare you!” speech. The imagery of those deathly pale women in their blood-red costumes cat-walking doom for the cameras fades into whirling wind farms, followed by some striking claims.

One, from the co-founder of Greenpeace, sets the tone: “There’s no such thing as a climate emergency on this planet.”

Climate scam: Global control?

The film directly challenges the claim that CO2 levels from human activity are causing runaway climate change and shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping this narrative alive – despite the facts. Professor Steven Koonin of NYU asks on behalf of the climate science industry: “If CO2 is not having this impact – how are we going to stay in business?”

Precisely what that business is, and how it is maintained, is also the subject of a film whose central premise is that the world is in fact entering a period of cooling. Patrick Moore, the co-founder of environmental campaign group Greenpeace, says the presence of the polar ice caps shows that “this is an ice age. We’re at the tail end of a 50-million-year cooling period, and they’re saying it’s too hot.”

READ: Texas pulls $8.5 billion from BlackRock over DEI rules, left-wing climate agenda

It is an opinion shared by noted scientists featured in the film, such as Professor Koonin.

This is an inconvenient truth, Durkin argues, which explains the rising alarmism from the green lobby.

“The climate alarm is nonsense. It’s a hoax” – so says William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton. “I think ‘scam’ is a better word – but I am willing to live with ‘hoax.’”

Alongside other claims in the film that “activists are calling for the criminalization of climate skepticism,” Happer observes that “we see all these kinds of authoritarian measures being adopted, in the name of saving the planet. You’ve suddenly got the population under control all over the world.”

Yet power is not the only motive – there is also profit – for some. Professor John Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022, warns of how “there are not only billions but trillions of dollars at stake.”

Fear, power, and profit

Durkin is no stranger to climate controversy, with his 2007 film The Great Global Warming Swindle being praised in the British Parliament for showing how “anyone not agreeing with the orthodoxy of how climate change levy comes about sees their public funding drying up.”

The motion, supported by seven Conservative MPs, also noted “that one of the contributors [to the film] received a death threat.”

The climate of fear looks set to intensify, with Durkin’s new film showing how the science we are told to follow is made by an inhuman agenda of mandated poverty, food shortages, and depopulation – as this 2023 piece from Spiked makes clear.

READ: Trudeau gov’t paid WEF nearly $500k for report justifying its climate agenda, documents show

Man-made climate of opinion

Yet the tide outside the climate skeptical movement may also be turning.

Durkin gave a pre-release interview on March 14 to the UK’s Daily Telegraph. He told the hosts that the climate science we are told to follow is another example of a locked-down discourse presented as a debate.

“We have such an enormously powerful, publicly funded establishment that is able to control, directly or indirectly, what we hear, what we read, what we’re taught, what is okay to think, and what’s not okay to think,” he said.

The exclusion of dissent has manufactured the scientific “consensus” for the climate agenda.

“The frustrating thing for scientists in this area is you’re not really allowed to point to scientific data or observations published in mainstream journals carried out by scientists from very respected universities and so on, even cited by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body] … if it doesn’t fit the narrative,” Durkin said.

“And the pressure on them to shut up is extreme.”

This is the man-made climate of opinion in which fear has become the latest currency of choice.

Within days of the release of the film, German physicist and science vlogger Sabine Hossenfelder asked her YouTube audience whether “we should be terrified of climate change.” Her answer?

“I am indeed terrified, terrified that scientists support manipulating people.”

She cites several recent sources in mainstream and academic media which advocate “evoking fear” to “spur climate action.”

Instead of fearmongering, she suggests we might best look at what can reasonably done to help preserve natural habitats for wild animals. This seems a reasonable position, and she cites a lack of clarity arising from climate modeling which may conflate natural fluctuations in climate with man-made changes.

Fact-checked

The film is intended to reveal that man-made climate change is a fraudulent operation which can only succeed by censorship and propaganda. It claims this vastly profitable industry – which one Swiss bank estimates will require $270 trillion to realist its goals – reduces to a campaign to enforce global authoritarian control by manufacturing an emergency that is not supported by the evidence.

These are bold claims, and we have heard them before. In this case, however, we can check the record for ourselves with ease.

One climate skeptic has taken the trouble to produce a detailed fact-check of the claims made in the film.

Describing his efforts as an “annotated bibliography.” retired petrophysicist Andy May has supplied information supporting “70 key statements” made in the movie, ranging from natural climate variation through unreliable models to data manipulation – and the existence of a multi-trillion dollar climate lobby which ensures that “skepticism is career suicide.”

May has published four books – most recently The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, which “documents biases and errors in the International Panel for Climate Change assessment.”

May’s book challenges the fearmongering such as that of the UN head Antonio Guterres that “we are on the road to climate hell,” saying instead that the IPCC “seeks to rewrite climate history” to frame a narrative of doom unsupported by the facts.

“The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change,” says the summary for his book, available via May’s website. 

Fact-checker responds

May had this to say about the film whose facts he checked: “From the very beginning of this very well edited and produced movie we learn about the man-made climate change hoax or scam.”

He argues that this agenda is secured by the familiar tactic of demonizing and deplatforming skeptics.

“We learn that anyone skeptical that humans are causing dangerous climate change are to be shunned, or censored, or worse!” he says.

Finally, he shows the method in this madness. The alarmism is all about control.

“We also discover the ugly truth that all this government insistence that we are about to die due to global climate change is not true, and is all about money and power,” he explains. “The logic is that if it is truly a global problem, then it requires a global government, and all nations must submit to global domination by those who know what is good for us.”

Criminalizing dissent?

In one note, not included in the film, May cites evidence of “the U.S. Senate attempting to legislate scientific research outcomes,” saying “it doesn’t get worse than this.”

He directs readers to page 202 of a 2021 book by S.E. Koonin, which documents the attempt led by Senator Chuck Schumer in 2019 to pass bill S.729, which aimed “to prohibit the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, and for other purposes.”

As May notes, “Fortunately, the bill failed to pass, but the political pressure to find humans caused recent climate changes is overwhelming.”

This is an agenda which holds much of government, media, business, and even the scientific community captive. With trillions of dollars and the lives and liberty of humanity at stake, it is a welcome development that Durkin’s film, and the facts behind it, are now reaching a global audience.

You can see Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) here for free.

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Economy

The 15-Minute City: An extraordinarily bad idea

Published on

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Randal O’Toole

” the average resident of the New York urban area—the closest thing to a 15-minute city in the U.S. or Canada—can reach at least 21 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as in a 20-minute walk. The same will be true of other economic opportunities.  “

The latest urban planning fad to sweep across Canada is the 15-minute city, which proposes to redesign cities so that all urban residents live within an easy, 15-minute walk of schools, retailers, restaurants, entertainment, and other essentials of modern life. This is supposed to simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions while it increases our quality of life.

Some think it is a conspiracy. Others insist it is not. Conspiracy or not, the only way to have true 15-minute cities would be to drastically change Canadian lifestyles.

Fifteen-minute cities mean a lot more people living in multifamily housing and fewer in single-family housing. It means most food shopping would be done in high-priced, limited-selection grocery stores. There is no way that Costcos or even large supermarkets can fit into 15-minute cities; to survive, these stores need a lot more customers than could live within a 15-minute walk from their front doors.

Most of the benefits claimed for 15-minute cities are wrong. Proponents claim they would be more affordable, but high-density, multi-story housing costs two to five times as much, per square foot, as single-family homes. Packing people into four- and five-story apartment buildings would require cutting average dwelling sizes at least in half to make them anywhere close to affordable.

Proponents also claim 15-minute cities would save energy and reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants. But let’s be honest: people aren’t going to give up their cars or stop going to Costco.

Admittedly, the U.S. Department of Energy says that people living in high-density cities do drive a little less than people in low-density areas. But it also says that there is a lot more congestion in high-density cities. Since cars use more energy in slower traffic, high-density cities use more energy (and therefore emit more greenhouse gases) per capita than low-density areas.

Proponents also claim that 15-minute cities will be more equitable. Yet, before about 1890, most Canadian cities were 15-minute cities. Most people in these cities lived in crushing poverty and there were huge disparities between the rich and the poor, with only a small middle-class in between.

What changed these cities was the mass-produced automobile. The Model T Ford democratized mobility, allowing more people to escape the dense cities to find better housing, better jobs, access to lower-cost consumer goods, and a wider range of social and recreation opportunities.

The University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory calculates that the average resident of the New York urban area—the closest thing to a 15-minute city in the U.S. or Canada—can reach at least 21 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as in a 20-minute walk. The same will be true of other economic opportunities. Eliminating the automobile, which is the goal of the 15-minute city, would eliminate those economic benefits.

We had this same debate 50-some years ago when urban skies were polluted with carbon monoxide, smog, and other toxic automobile emissions. Some people advocated policies that would force people to drive less. Others advocated new technologies that would reduce the air pollution coming from autos and trucks.

Today, total automotive air pollution has been reduced by about 90 percent. All this improvement came from cleaner cars: new cars today pollute only about 1 percent as much as cars made in 1970. None of this improvement came from anti-automobile policies, as Canadians drive far more miles today than they did 50 years ago.

If anything, policies aimed at reducing driving made pollution worse as one of those policies was to increase traffic congestion to get people out of their cars. Yet, as noted above, cars actually pollute more in congested traffic.

Anti-automobile policies today, including 15-minute cities, spending billions on rail transit lines that carry only a small percentage of urban travel, and converting general street lanes into exclusive bike lanes, are going to have the same effect.

People who care about the planet should demand policies that actually work and not ones that are based on urban planning fantasies and fads. Instead of attempting to drastically change Canadian lifestyles, that means making cars that are cleaner and more fuel-efficient so that the driving we do has a lower environmental impact. The 15-minute city may not be a conspiracy, but it is still an extraordinarily bad idea.

Randal O’Toole is a transportation policy analyst and author of Building 21 st Century Transit Systems for Canadian Cities, an upcoming report published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Watch Randal on Leaders on the Frontier here.

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