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Energy

Opinion: A Kamala Harris Presidency Is The Stuff Of Nightmares

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By PETER MURPHY

 

Vice President Kamala Harris is one election away from winning the White House and accelerating America’s climate hysteria that is already well underway thanks to the outgoing President Joe Biden.

“There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” then-Sen. Harris said during a CNN-sponsored town hall back in 2019, during her ill-fated run for president.

That same year, she threw her support behind the Green New Dealproposed by  New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey. That is a plan that would spend trillions of taxpayer dollars to “transition” America from oil, gas and coal sources to so-called wind, solar and batteries–or, rather, to subjugate the nation to an all-powerful green state under the command of the federal government.

Harris later teamed with AOC to introduce the Climate Equity Act, which was a confusing, word-salad of a bill to address climate “injustice” in “front-line communities” using the familiar means of creating a massive new federal bureaucracy.

During Harris’ short-lived campaign for president, which crashed and burned months before the 2020 caucus and primary votes, she called for a climate pollution fee that would “make polluters pay for emitting greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.”  Typical of so many climate falsehoods, Harris conflates carbon emissions with “pollution.”

In his letter to the nation last Sunday announcing he was dropping out of the presidential race, President Joe Biden boasted that he had overseen passage of the “most significant climate legislation in the history of the world” — an apparent reference to his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. This “significant” legislation included hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate welfare for companies to build wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles and other climate-related projects.

Because, after all, the U.S. is “the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change – still the second largest today after China’ said a story posted by the climate-rabid media outlet, Yahoo News.  Expect a President Harris to double down on such unscientific drivel.

In a modern historical anomaly, Harris is poised to become a major party’s presidential nominee without a single caucus or primary vote, which is a throwback to the old days of party bosses and smoke-filled rooms at convention time.

Still, Harris is among the most privileged Americans to ever become a presidential nominee of a major political party, though not without difficulties. Her parents were both college professors, but they divorced when she was young. Following law school, Harris became a prosecutor in the Alameda County attorney’s office. With the assistance of her politically powerful mentor and very close friend, the charismatic California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, she was appointed to several public jobs, elected as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, and then U.S. senator.

After becoming a senator, Harris began running for president. Her 2020 presidential campaign helped reveal her radical positions on climate and a host of other issues and enabled her to get on the short list of vice presidential choices.

With Biden’s mental and physical decline now so obvious, Harris has become the beneficiary of a ninth-inning political coup d’état against the president, engineered by Democratic Party leaders, who pressured him to drop his re-election campaign on the eve of the party’s nominating convention.

Harris is no Scranton-born, working-class pretender, who rode Amtrak. She does not have any record of political centrism, moderation or bipartisanship, which Biden practiced off and on throughout his career and helped him win the presidency in 2020.

By contrast, Harris is a product of the one-party state of California, who supported destructive policies on climate change, energy, crime and welfare that helped spark in California high fuel costs, declining living standards and a population exodus.

The election of 2024 will have climate change on the ballot, as did the 2020 election. The big difference this time is that Americans have experienced more than ever the inflationary and detrimental effects of climate policies with no impact on climate change.

And, it is not a supposed moderate candidate making the climate sale to the public, but a true believer, Kamala Harris.

Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington D.C.-based organization in support of free market, technological solutions to energy and environmental challenges.

Energy

Activists using the courts in attempt to hijack energy policy

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2016 image provided by Misti Leon, left, sits with her mom, Juliana Leon. Misti Leon is suing several oil and gas companies in one of the first wrongful-death claims in the U.S. seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the changing climate.

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Isaac

They twist yesterday’s weather into tomorrow’s crisis, peddle apocalyptic forecasts that fizzle, and swap “global warming” for “climate change” whenever the narrative demands. They sound the alarm on a so-called climate emergency — again and again.

Now, the Left has plunged to a new low: weaponizing the courts with a lawsuit in Washington State that marks a brazen, desperate escalation. This isn’t just legal maneuvering—it’s the exploitation of personal tragedy in service of an unpopular anti-energy climate crusade.

Consider the case at the center of a new legal circus: Juliana Leon, 65, tragically died of hyperthermia during a 100-mile drive in a car with broken air conditioning, as a brutal heat wave pushed temperatures to 108 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The lawsuit leaps from this heartbreaking event to a sweeping claim: that a single hot day is the direct result of global warming.

The lawsuit preposterously links a very specific hot weather event to theorized global warming. Buckle up—their logic is about to take a wild ride.

Some activist scientists have further speculated that what may be a gradual long-term trend of slight warming thought to be both cyclical and natural, might be possibly exacerbated by the release of greenhouse gases. Some of these releases are the result of volcanic activity while some comes from human activities, including the burning of oil, natural gas and coal.

Grabbing onto that last, unproven thread, the plaintiffs have zeroed in on a handful of energy giants—BP, Chevron, Conoco, Exxon, Phillips 66, Shell, and the Olympic Pipe Company—accusing them of causing Leon’s death. Apparently, these few companies are to blame for the entire planet’s climate, while other oil giants, coal companies, and the billions of consumers who actually use these fuels get a free pass.

Meanwhile, “climate journalists” in the legacy media have ignored key details that will surely surface in court. Leon made her journey in a car with no air conditioning, despite forecasts warning of dangerous heat. She was returning from a doctor’s visit, having just been cleared to eat solid food after recent bariatric surgery.

But let’s be clear: this lawsuit isn’t about truth, justice, or even common sense. It’s lawfare, plain and simple.

Environmental extremists are using the courts to hijack national energy policy, aiming to force through a radical agenda they could never pass in Congress. A courtroom win would mean higher energy prices for everyone, the potential bankruptcy of energy companies, or their takeover by the so-called green industrial complex. For the trial lawyers, these cases are gold mines, with contingency fees that could reach hundreds of millions.

This particular lawsuit was reportedly pitched to Leon’s daughter by the left-leaning Center for Climate Integrity, a group bankrolled by billionaire British national Christopher Hohn through his Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and by the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s yet another meritless claim in the endless list of climate lawsuits that are increasingly being tossed out of courts across the country.

Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania judge threw out a climate nuisance suit against oil producers brought by Bucks County, citing lack of jurisdiction. In New York, Supreme Court Justice Anar Patel dismissed a massive climate lawsuit by New York City, pointing out the city couldn’t claim both public awareness and deception by oil companies in the same breath.

But the Washington State case goes even further, threatening to set a dangerous precedent: if it moves forward, energy companies could face limitless liability for any weather-related injury. Worse, it would give unwarranted credibility to the idea — floated by a leftwing activist before the U.S. Senate — that energy executives could be prosecuted for homicide, a notion that Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rightly called “moonbeam, wacky theory.”

The courts must keep rejecting these absurd lawfare stunts. More importantly, America’s energy policy should be set by Congress—elected and accountable—not by a single judge in a municipal courtroom.

Jason Isaac is the founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

 

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Alberta

Temporary Alberta grid limit unlikely to dampen data centre investment, analyst says

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From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Cody Ciona

‘Alberta has never seen this level and volume of load connection requests’

Billions of investment in new data centres is still expected in Alberta despite the province’s electric system operator placing a temporary limit on new large-load grid connections, said Carson Kearl, lead data centre analyst for Enverus Intelligence Research.

Kearl cited NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s estimate from earlier this year that building a one-gigawatt data centre costs between US$60 billion and US$80 billion.

That implies the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO)’s 1.2 gigawatt temporary limit would still allow for up to C$130 billion of investment.

“It’s got the potential to be extremely impactful to the Alberta power sector and economy,” Kearl said.

Importantly, data centre operators can potentially get around the temporary limit by ‘bringing their own power’ rather than drawing electricity from the existing grid.

In Alberta’s deregulated electricity market – the only one in Canada – large energy consumers like data centres can build the power supply they need by entering project agreements directly with electricity producers.

According to the AESO, there are 30 proposed data centre projects across the province.

The total requested power load for these projects is more than 16 gigawatts, roughly four gigawatts more than Alberta’s demand record in January 2024 during a severe cold snap.

For comparison, Edmonton’s load is around 1.4 gigawatts, the AESO said.

“Alberta has never seen this level and volume of load connection requests,” CEO Aaron Engen said in a statement.

“Because connecting all large loads seeking access would impair grid reliability, we established a limit that preserves system integrity while enabling timely data centre development in Alberta.”

As data centre projects come to the province, so do jobs and other economic benefits.

“You have all of the construction staff associated; electricians, engineers, plumbers, and HVAC people for all the cooling tech that are continuously working on a multi-year time horizon. In the construction phase there’s a lot of spend, and that is just generally good for the ecosystem,” said Kearl.

Investment in local power infrastructure also has long-term job implications for maintenance and upgrades, he said.

“Alberta is a really exciting place when it comes to building data centers,” said Beacon AI CEO Josh Schertzer on a recent ARC Energy Ideas podcast.

“It has really great access to natural gas, it does have some excess grid capacity that can be used in the short term, it’s got a great workforce, and it’s very business-friendly.”

The unaltered reproduction of this content is free of charge with attribution to the Canadian Energy Centre.

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