Guest “too fracking funny” by David Middleton
Brookline passes bylaw banning future use of oil, gas in new buildings
Nov 21, 2019
BROOKLINE, Mass. — A Massachusetts town overwhelmingly voted Wednesday night to ban the future installation of oil and gas pipes in future construction projects as well as in renovations of existing buildings.
The bylaw, which passed the Brookline town meeting with 210 votes in favor and just three opposing, would be the first such prohibition in the state of Massachusetts.
[…]
“This warrant article is not the whole answer, but it represents a start” in reaching Brookline’s stated 2050 carbon neutral goal, said Town Meeting member Cornelia van der Ziel.
“When you’re in a hole, the first thing is to stop digging,” State Rep. Tommy Vitolo said; this warrant article takes away the shovel, he added.
[…]
WCVB5
This bit of enviro-nitwittery “would require homeowners and developers to use electricity to power all future heat, hot water and other appliances.” Exceptions would be made for “backup generators, restaurant kitchens and medical offices, among other uses”… Expect a run on backup generators at the local Home Depot.
80% of Massachusetts homes rely on fossil fuels for heating… only 15% rely on electricity.
84% of Massachusetts electricity is generated by natural gas-fired power plants.
Amazingly, a state so dependent on natural gas is one of the most hostile to natural gas and natural gas pipelines. Massachusetts imports 12% of its natural gas from Vladimir Putin et al…
Massachusetts has three liquefied natural gas import terminals. In 2017, foreign imports into Massachusetts equaled about 12% of the natural gas that entered the state and 7% of New England’s total demand for natural gas.
US EIA
Despite the fact that these tenuously United States are awash in cheap, domestic natural gas, with a growing number of LNG export terminals and their proximity to booming natural gas production from the Marcellus play … Massachusetts still operates three LNG import terminals. Massachusetts is the only State in the nation with three LNG import terminals and no export terminals (FERC).
Massachusetts Limits Gas Pipelines, Imports LNG from Russia Instead
BY IERAPRIL 16, 2018
Environmentalists are winning in Massachusetts by getting natural gas infrastructure projects shelved. Natural gas consumers in the state, however, are losing out because those pipelines would supply natural gas to consumers at a lower cost than imported liquefied natural gas (LNG)—receiving some of that LNG from Russia through the Everett LNG terminal—the only LNG import terminal still operating in the lower 48.
Environmentalists seem to be obsessed with stopping the construction of domestic pipelines in this country, regardless of what they carry, what fuels they displace, and how global greenhouse gas emissions may be affected. Liquefied natural gas results in greater emissions than pipeline gas because cooling the gas to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit and then shipping and regasifying it requires more energy than pumping natural gas through domestic pipelines. Generally, LNG produces 5 to 10 percent more emissions over its entire life cycle than piped gas.
Russian LNG Shipments to Massachusetts
Three years ago Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker proposed an energy policy consisting of 1,200 megawatts of renewable energy, 1,600 megawattsof offshore wind, and an expansion of natural gas pipeline capacity. Environmentalists fought the natural gas pipeline expansion and won, shelving several pipeline proposals. (For instance, officials in Massachusetts and New Hampshire blocked the $3 billion Access Northeast Pipeline.) Environmentalists want to rely solely on solar and wind power—intermittent sources of electricity that need back-up power. As Massachusetts has been shuttering its coal-fired power plants, that back-up power has mostly been supplied by natural gas, raising the price of electricity as cold weather forces different sectors to compete for natural gas.
The shortage of natural gas was clear earlier this year when a cold snap caused prices for natural gas to spike and the purchase of Russian LNG to supply the Everest LNG import terminal a few miles north of Boston. The Russian LNG comes from a new $27 billion terminal on the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Circleoperated by Yamal LNG—a joint venture among Russia’s gas company Novatek, France’s Total, and China’s CNPC. Novate is on the Treasury Department’s financial sanctions list. However, the LNG shipment does not violate the prohibitions that the Obama Administration imposed four years ago because it is owned by a French energy trader arriving on a French-owned vessel (Gaselys) and consisting of Russian gas as well as gas from other European sources.
[…]
IER
And the cherry on top of the sundae…
Average Residential Price of Electricity by State, August 2019 and 2018 (Cents per Kilowatthour)
| State | Aug-19 | % US Avg | Aug-18 | % US Avg | |
| 1 | Hawaii | 31.16 | 234% | 32.39 | 244% |
| 2 | Alaska | 23.56 | 177% | 22.51 | 170% |
| 3 | Rhode Island | 21.76 | 164% | 18.70 | 141% |
| 4 | Massachusetts | 21.54 | 162% | 20.80 | 157% |
| 5 | Connecticut | 21.29 | 160% | 21.27 | 160% |
| 6 | California | 19.86 | 149% | 19.85 | 150% |
| 7 | New Hampshire | 19.47 | 146% | 19.32 | 146% |
| 8 | New York | 18.39 | 138% | 19.02 | 143% |
| 9 | Maine | 17.90 | 135% | 16.91 | 128% |
| 10 | Vermont | 16.68 | 125% | 17.96 | 135% |
| 11 | Michigan | 16.53 | 124% | 15.40 | 116% |
| 12 | New Jersey | 15.79 | 119% | 15.25 | 115% |
| 13 | Wisconsin | 14.80 | 111% | 13.99 | 106% |
| 14 | Iowa | 14.73 | 111% | 14.18 | 107% |
| 15 | Minnesota | 13.91 | 105% | 13.78 | 104% |
| 16 | Pennsylvania | 13.83 | 104% | 13.95 | 105% |
| 17 | New Mexico | 13.00 | 98% | 13.48 | 102% |
| 18 | Kansas | 12.96 | 97% | 13.95 | 105% |
| 19 | Alabama | 12.83 | 96% | 12.32 | 93% |
| 20 | South Dakota | 12.72 | 96% | 12.62 | 95% |
| 21 | Missouri | 12.71 | 96% | 12.92 | 97% |
| 22 | Colorado | 12.70 | 95% | 12.43 | 94% |
| 23 | South Carolina | 12.56 | 94% | 10.36 | 78% |
| 24 | Arizona | 12.52 | 94% | 12.83 | 97% |
| 25 | Illinois | 12.51 | 94% | 12.52 | 94% |
| 26 | Maryland | 12.46 | 94% | 13.05 | 98% |
| 27 | Ohio | 12.45 | 94% | 12.90 | 97% |
| 28 | District of Columbia | 12.39 | 93% | 12.56 | 95% |
| 29 | Georgia | 12.38 | 93% | 12.60 | 95% |
| 30 | Virginia | 12.36 | 93% | 12.27 | 93% |
| 31 | Indiana | 12.25 | 92% | 12.53 | 94% |
| 32 | Delaware | 12.24 | 92% | 12.21 | 92% |
| 33 | North Dakota | 12.06 | 91% | 11.80 | 89% |
| 34 | Wyoming | 11.97 | 90% | 11.75 | 89% |
| 35 | Montana | 11.91 | 90% | 11.29 | 85% |
| 36 | Florida | 11.90 | 89% | 11.33 | 85% |
| 37 | Nebraska | 11.83 | 89% | 11.98 | 90% |
| 38 | Texas | 11.80 | 89% | 11.27 | 85% |
| 39 | Nevada | 11.79 | 89% | 11.40 | 86% |
| 40 | North Carolina | 11.71 | 88% | 11.29 | 85% |
| 41 | West Virginia | 11.56 | 87% | 11.40 | 86% |
| 42 | Mississippi | 11.22 | 84% | 10.84 | 82% |
| 43 | Oregon | 11.18 | 84% | 11.12 | 84% |
| 44 | Utah | 11.17 | 84% | 10.85 | 82% |
| 45 | Tennessee | 10.80 | 81% | 10.85 | 82% |
| 46 | Kentucky | 10.62 | 80% | 10.60 | 80% |
| 47 | Oklahoma | 10.61 | 80% | 10.87 | 82% |
| 48 | Idaho | 10.18 | 77% | 10.48 | 79% |
| 49 | Arkansas | 10.08 | 76% | 10.01 | 75% |
| 50 | Washington | 10.06 | 76% | 9.93 | 75% |
| 51 | Louisiana | 9.57 | 72% | 9.92 | 75% |
| U.S. Total | 13.30 | 13.26 |
Brookline, in a State which already has the second most expensive residential electricity prices in the Lower 48, wants to force its residents to switch from heating with natural gas to heating with electricity generated from Russian natural gas…
In Germany, the Greens tends to forbid one family homes, because of land consumption, and more places for windmills. People living in cities need less cars, less streets at the countryside.
They want16 year olds to have the right to vote.
Do they still want someone to be 18 to buy a beer.
Oh, and they require photo ID to buy alcohol but not to vote.
Back in the 60s two politicians were arguing about communism on a tv show. One guy asked the other if he had ever been to a communist country. The fellow replied “no but I have been to Massachusetts “. I didn’t understand that comment at the time but I do now.
I’ve been crafting this sentence over the last few months:
Nihilism will be imposed until it is seen not to work.
Green thinking degrades gray matter.
QUESTION: What color is stupid? ANSWER: I let you guess.
I assume coal bins are still legal.
Households will revert to 1880 technology.
I occasionally do residential electrical work in mansions in Brookline. It’s a very unhappy place. I swear! Here are FOIA 911 (recorded) calls a radio station broadcast daily.
https://omny.fm/shows/toucher-rich-1/toucher-rich-brookline-911-hour-3-4
You should have seen the electric scooter fiasco! I’d never live their and may they freeze!
I occasionally do residential electrical work in mansions in Brookline. It’s a very unhappy place. I swear! Here are FOIA 911 (recorded) calls a radio station broadcast daily.
https://omny.fm/shows/toucher-rich-1/toucher-rich-brookline-911-hour-3-4
You should have seen the electric scooter fiasco! I’d never live their and may they freeze!
Here’s the scooter 911 calls
https://omny.fm/shows/toucher-rich-1/toucher-rich-brookline-911-hour-3
That, in itself, is a fine tribute to the work of the chemical engineers and all others involved in the production, transport, and supply of such fuels that will keep modern civilization functioning for many many decades to come.
There is still yet time to get that legion of new nuclear engineers trained and up to speed.
I do sometimes wonder (and maybe hope?) that this is actually a long-term ploy by pro-nuclear folks. Think about it:
* Get rid of reliable coal & natural gas as sources of electricity, and get everyone hooked on electric-everything
Then, turn your back on the Greens:
* Prove that the Green solutions are inadequate to meet these immense reliable electricity needs
And say hello to greeeeeeen ($):
* Save the day with a new generation of safe, clean, not-your-grandfather’s nuclear power plants that don’t require the insurmountable cost of running gas lines everywhere to meet our needs, now that so many homes and buildings were constructed without them
Does it give a whole new meaning to the “Commonwealth of Massachusetts”?
I believe it’s now the “Commondebt of Taxachusetts”
Scooters…
https://omny.fm/shows/toucher-rich-1/toucher-rich-brookline-911-hour-3
If the environmentalists are happy to pay more for Russian gas than for US pipelined gas and are willing to accept higher emissions as well
I wonder what they would say to the Russians building a pipeline in Massachusetts, taking the profits AND reducing emissions as well
it would tick all their boxes. hurt America. reduce emissions. help the cause of communism.
Massachusetts is way more communistic then Russia these days.
The way this winter is shaping up they might want to rethink this..
I’ll wager that Nancy Pelosi would vote for a law banning the importation of natural gas.
Let them freeze in the dark.
Solar?
I spent 10 horrible years living in Boston. In the dead of winter they get 8-10 hours of weak sunlight a day – on the days it isn’t cloudy and snowing. By the time I moved back south I had a terrible vitamin D deficiency. Of course those are the months it is coldest and they will draw the most power to warm houses.
Brookline will reach it’s 0 carbon goal as an abandoned town doesn’t consume fossil fuels.
+50
Massachusetts ought to be off-loading natural gas from United States tankers instead of from Russian tankers.
If Massoftwoshits wasn’t run by total fracking greentards, they’d have beaucoup natural gas delivered by pipelines from Pennsylvania. If the People’s Republic of New York wasn’t run by total fracking greentards, they’d have beaucoup natural gas delivered by pipelines from New York.
We have met the enemy, and the enemy is mental greentardation.
Bingo!
It really is amazing how stupid and blind the progressive environmentalists are here in the Northeast. I live in southern NH, and used to live in north-eastern MA. I cry and shake my head every time I see my propane and electric bills knowing what is just a few hundred miles away.
I used to drive out to Watkins Glen, NY on occasion, and the folks out that way really are punished by the NY State Government by being denied the ability to frack as they do just south of them in PA. So much of that gas could be piped up here. The economic benefits for the entire North East would be HUGE, and would undoubtedly impact the national GDP positively.
When one looks at the states with the highest electric costs, one has only progressive Democrats to thank for stupidity. Sorry for being so political, but it is true. Energy policy alone is justification for voting Tump
No need to apologize.
These issues are all based on politics, and have little or nothing to do with science or economic viability.
Bee Gees 1967 prophecy is upon us!
“An the . . . all went out in . . .”
Identity Theft Alert!
Chaamjamal is a chemical engineer and rock star skeptic.
Everything I know about Massachusetts I learned from playing Fallout 4, and so far everything I have learned looks very accurate.
Me too. But when I was 15, a power transmission line was built near our house in central India. With the aid of a transformer, we got electricity. The local ‘electrician’ climbed up a ladder, grasped one of the foot long bamboo drop fuses above the transformer, and shoved it into place. He then slid down the ladder and collapsed in the plowed field: a few minutes later he said in heavily accented english ‘Velly lucky men’. The rest of the drop fuses were pushed into place with a long bamboo pole.
60 years later, I still love bright lights in my home. Reading at night with a hurricane lantern, a luxury I had enjoyed before and local kids did not have, is really for the birds, and I do not miss the odour of kerosene burning. I remember putting my feet to the ground in the dark before electricity – your feet actually hurt in anticipation of the scorpions or snakes that might be there.
Yamal…Yamal…now where have I heard that name before?
The Marcellus shale formation is the largest reserve of natural gas in the US. Natural gas should logically be the energy source for the eastern states (ignoring the 100% incorrect IPCC science).
The eastern US states should not be importing NGL as that increases CO2 emissions.
LNG requires 30% of the energy content of the transported NGL to liquify the NGL and gasify the NGL in addition to very expensive terminals.
The shale play encompasses 104,000 square miles and stretches across Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and into eastern Ohio and western New York.[2] It is the largest source of natural gas in the United States, and production was still growing rapidly in 2013. The natural gas is trapped in low-permeability shale, and requires the well completion method of hydraulic fracturing to allow the gas to flow to the well bore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_natural_gas_trend
Although before 2008 the Marcellus Shale was considered to have inconsequential natural gas potential, it is now believed to hold the largest volume of recoverable natural gas in the United States. In 2012, it was estimated to have 141 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable gas by the US Energy Information Administration, and 88 trillion cubic feet by the US Geological Survey.[3] In September 2012, the Marcellus Shale overtook the Haynesville Shale of northwest Louisiana as the leading producer of both shale gas and overall natural gas in the United States. In February 2014, Marcellus gas wells produced 14.0 billion cubic feet per day, a 42 percent increase over the year previous, and comprising 21 percent of all the dry gas produced that month in the United States.[4]
Comment: The world natural gas reservoirs that are listed in Wikipedia and every energy site oddly are not based on technically recoverable gas. Canada’s technically recoverable natural gas reservoirs is 1,220 trillion cubic feet based on current technology. World natural gas reservoirs may be unimaginably greater.
The test that is standardly done to determine a natural gas reservoir size is a flow test which is used to estimate traditional natural gas reservoirs.
A Canadian natural gas test for a natural gas ‘reservoir’ had paradoxical high volumes of gas from the test well.
The super high gas flow rates for the test site are not found for any other North American natural gas reservoirs.
These super high natural gas flow rates are only found in certain middle east natural gas field. Why there are super high flow rates from certain natural gas fields which is a paradox. No physical explanation why.
This technical paradox, was leaked to the those in the know in Canadian oil industry. Engineers and geologists are talkers and Canadians are rule breakers about interesting stuff.
There is now a $40 billion dollar gas terminal and a very expensive pipeline that is being built to export gas from that field.
” … Environmentalists seem to be obsessed with stopping the construction of domestic pipelines in this country, regardless of what they carry, what fuels they displace, and how global greenhouse gas emissions may be affected. …”
—————
Green nutters have effectively imposed undeclared sanctions on the Western World via cowards in Govt who keep giving in to them at the expense of the majority. China and Russia are fine, they’re socialist authoritarian utopias which never pollute, so get an automatic free pass, and the ‘greens’ wear a special blinker just for them.
I time you’ll be able to purchase a nice home in that town for next to nothing, if you can figure out how to handle the tax issues…
Forget about much new development in Brookline. Maybe that’s their goal?
This vote was no doubt activist-inspired, and therefore likely part of a wider push. There will thus be more municipalities passing similar regulations in blue states over the next year or two—and maybe in other countries too.
But by doing so, the activists are setting themselves up for awkward situations like that Cuoma is facing in New York. (See the WSJ editorial about it at the end of this week’s GWPF summary.) In the longer term, they are putting their whole progressive “do-something” faction at risk of embarrassment and worse.