By Vijay Jayaraj – December 29, 2021
The coming cold of winter is being paired with “green-inspired” energy policies that have created higher energy prices and fuel shortages.
Historically, winters have been big killers. But centuries of innovation made us more resilient to the cold as we fully utilized the naturally available fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity. However, today these modern advantages are being sacrificed at the altar of climate change in exchange for the purported magic of wind, solar and batteries.
Though the pandemic-led economic recovery has contributed to a surge in energy demand, the real reason for shortages and price hikes is the anti-fossil fuel policies of political leaders.
In the U.S., motorists have faced rising gas prices as President Joe Biden has suffered dropping approval ratings in polls. The president first blamed OPEC for the price hike and then pleaded to the same OPEC to increase production. International oil prices are inelastic, meaning they closely follow the rise and fall of demand. It should be no surprise that fuel costs rose as a result of Biden’s restraint on all things fossil.
As soon as Biden became president, he cancelled the Keystone pipeline, which would have delivered high quality oil from friendly Canadian neighbors. The president also brought in regulations that made drilling for oil more difficult, rendering the U.S. more dependent on Middle East producers.
As a stop-gap measure Biden has asked U.S. companies to produce more oil and for strategic reserves to be used. Nonetheless, the effects of his policies will be felt in the coming months and years. Americans may have to deal with energy insecurity for the next three years as Biden is determined to reduce consumption of fossil fuels.
In addition, there is a looming crisis in the power sector across the globe, courtesy the obsession with so-called renewables — also known as unreliables. Many places — like Colorado, Texas, Germany, and the U.K — are staring at the possibility of power blackouts. The situation is predominantly driven by an overreliance on renewable energy sources, which are intermittent year-round and cannot supply on-demand base load during peak hours.
In the modern world, blackouts result in extensive disruption to life as almost all sectors are power-dependent. An increased in interest in electric vehicles could aggravate the problem with a higher demand for electricity.
In developing nations, energy disruption has the potential for more dire, life-and-death circumstances for millions of poor people in Africa, Asia, and South America. Both India and China faced in 2021 a severe coal shortage, which was partly the result of diverting a lot of public funds, time, and energy to creating wind and solar resources. The countries’ large-scale renewable installations could not provide on-demand electricity. Seventeen provinces in China experienced severe blackouts, forcing the closure of factories and offices, which resulted in unemployment among the poorest.
These episodes of energy shortages in Asia could serve as a sobering warning to other countries. The future of energy security will be dependent on the policies adopted, and it doesn’t look very good at this point.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and holds a Master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.
This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy December 29, 2021
Biden has been sucking up to the green blob, and does not want to admit what that leads to. For the green blob, raising energy costs is a goal, so expecting otherwise is naive at best.
The Democrats have a serious problem. Biden is suffering in the polls, which might be OK if there were a viable replacement available to take over for the next election. Unfortunately for them, Harris is also unpopular. Remember the theory that Biden was going to quit after a year or so and she was going to take over? That’s not going to work. Oopsie.
I haven’t looked at my favorite Democrat blog, Talking Points Memo, for a long time. I wonder how the Democrats dealing with the problem of having a viable presidential candidate for the next election. … crickets … They’re still obsessed with Trump.
When Enron was about to go down the tubes, the board would hold prayer meetings because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. I wonder if that’s how the Democrats feel.
The Green Blob is a small minority. Pandering for their votes is a really bad idea if the resulting policies alienate a large majority of the population. Hoping that Americans are too dumb to understand what’s happening to them is also a bad strategy.
Considering how fast Brandon is turning into a vegetable, if we avoid a Harris Administration in 2023 it will be a miracle.
Tactically the Demonrats’ best move is probably to have Brandon hang on until the mid-terms are over, pretending that he’s the 2024 candidate and hoping to avoid the complete wipeout that would likely occur if Harris were to take over or be widely anticipated to take over.
Then as soon as they take their losses, Harris is installed. Presumably she will face a Republican Congress.
Ironically that will greatly improve her chances in 2024 by lowering expectations.
She won’t need to be associated with unpopular crazy far-left initiatives pushed by the Bernie/Squad. She can exercise the tired obstructionist Republicans trope instead.
If she picks a few common-sense centrist initiatives that have any beneficial effect on the economy, she might even get some bipartisan successes and rebrand as a centrist.
If she remains highly unpopular at least they will be rid of her and ready for a different candidate in ‘28. So I think it’s a much better than 50% probability that we have to get used to hearing President Harris cackling on the news.
Of course this is all idle speculation this far out. Covid could fade away, and inflation could cool off by next Fall. It’s a big risk that the Republicans have peaked too early. Things are never as good or as bad as they appear.
New Green Deal, Build Back Better, Great Reset: non-government leftist globalist organisation World Economic Forum, another arm of the climate hoax octopus.
It is all a plot!?
but luckily they couldn’t keep it secret from you?!
Hey griff, I wonder if shivering is a good exercise? Let us know.
Griff has been reading this.
Amount of fossil fuels burned to power the UK’s electricity grid falls to record low
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/markets/article-10356951/Amount-fossil-fuels-burned-UK-electricity-falls-record-low.html
Unaware that the night in question is in the middle of the only 10 day holiday in the UK when virtually every factory and office is closed with lighting and heating switched to minimum and it’s the warmest evah Christmas to New Year week and it’s quite windy.
But never the less it shows the versatility* of renewables.
*typo “lack of” missing
Drax burning biomass is considered “renewable energy”?
Conspiracies don’t have to be secret. OPEC is a conspiracy, it’s just out in the open. No doubt your tiny little brain can’t process this subtlety.
Good comments Dennis – you nailed it. It’s all radical green BS – a pack of lies.
The ability to predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence. I have one of the best (earliest and most accurate) predictive track records on climate and energy.
In contrast, climate doomsters have a perfect NEGATIVE predictive track record – every very-scary climate prediction, of the ~80 they have made since 1970, has FAILED TO HAPPEN.
“Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.”
By the end of 2020, the climate doomsters were proved wrong in their scary climate predictions 48 times. At 50:50 odds for each prediction, that is like flipping a coin 48 times and losing every time! The probability of that being mere random stupidity is 1 in 281 trillion!
It’s not just global warming scientists being stupid – they have been 100% wrong about every scary climate prediction – so nobody should continue to believe them.
There is a powerful logic that says no rational person or group could be this wrong for this long – they have followed a corrupt agenda – in fact, they knew from the beginning of their catastrophic global warming narrative that they were lying.
The radical greens have NO credibility, make that NEGATIVE credibility – their core competence is propaganda, the fabrication of false alarm.
Excerpt from my latest paper:
“SCIENTIFIC COMPETENCE – THE ABILITY TO CORRECTLY PREDICT”
by Allan MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., October 20, 2021, Update Nov. 8, 2021
http://correctpredictions.ca/
They just want us to get used to having regular power outages, like in Pakistan and Nigeria. If you have regular outages, you get used to it, so it is not a shock when it happens, We have gotten too dependent on reliable electricity! We should be happy about getting dragged back to the power systems of 80 years ago.
Charging a huge amount for CO2 emitting fuels is Plan A. And those that collect any part of the huge amount are totally in favour….and they all totally agree that CO2 must be reduced at any cost….
C02 is not a problem and mankind doesn’t produce enough to matter even if it were to be. Follow the science. Methane isn’t a problem either, what produces the most methane, humans, cows, bugs or the Earth?
Ohhh yes it is!
(Panto season in the UK again, folks!)
You’ve serially failed to prove your assertions!
Nothing new there – he never does.
Where you’re concerned it’s been panto season all year long Griff
Oh yes it is! Nah nah nah I can’t hear you!
Methane comes mainly from plant degradation (rice fields, rotting leaves in forests). Degrading grass (in the earth or in the cow doesn’t make any difference). Also leaks
in fracking and other petroleum installations.
Termites emit about 150 megatons/yr of methane
They are few and we are many.
The Hill
Germany powering down three nuclear plants in shift to renewables
______________________________________________________
The insanity isn’t stopping.
And they are destroying the Black Forest for more worthless windmills.
Really, they aren’t.
griff, google “German Black Forest Wind Turbines Yielded only 11.8%…”. Why don’t you fact check instead of exposing your bias?
Concerning 30 years in the future. The surviving proletariat will be burning fossil fuels again by using the blades of broken down wind generators.
See posting without facts is quite entertaining huh?
nah, they need the forest to produce woody biomass, the only true renewable, dependable, base load power
Before coal replaced wood, the forests in Europe were being denuded. There isn’t enough forest growth to run the energy needs of modern society. Drax, for example, produces just a few percent of the UK’s electricity and less than 1% of its total energy needs but it has to import its wood from North America. Biomass will never grow beyond a few percent of energy needs. After fossil fuels, nuclear is the only option.
of course there isn’t enough wood to power society- has anyone ever said there is? no, nobody is that stupid- it’s just another form of energy- that is actually just a byproduct of excellent forest mgt. – the low quality wood exists and must be gotten rid of to grow superior trees
what’s the big deal about importing the wood? totally irrelevant- it moves on really big ships so its efficient – other energy moves on trucks or moves in pipes
so the fact that biomass can never be a big contribution means we should use it? then please tell me what to do with all that low value wood in the forest which we need to get rid of to grow high value timber? in the past, it was cut, piled up and burned in place, all across the American southeast, the “wood basket” for the planet
Keep in mind, people who promote woody biomass are NOT in any way oppossed to fossil fuels and nuclear- we are not buddies with the wind and solar fools- other than the fact that to build a big solar farm, they need loggers to come in and clear cut the forests- then that wood goes to some biomass plant. Loggers use a great deal of diesel to run their machines and trucks- and most wood processing mills use fossil fuels along with wood chips
and, as a free benefit, burning wood chips produces plant food!
Of course they are. One thing we can be sure of: there will never be any shortage of stupid politicians … it’s where Dunning Kruger sufferers go to thrive. Like our resident trolls, everything they know about science they got from the media.
There are around 32,000 onshore and offshore wind turbines operating in Germany that have made very little difference to Germany’s CO2 emissions (Covid excepted) since the Energiewende policy was adopted in 2011.
Any reduction would be due to reduced energy consumption mainly due to increased cost; there is obviously a limit to how far the energy consumption down-trend can go.
Besides an an additional 1,500 wind turbines per year by 2045 would barely replace the current number that will be reaching their useful life in the next few years.
It was the Coalition that made that law 5 months before Fukushima, not the Greens.
Now they inherit the whirlwind.
It would be ironic if it was entertainment. It is not!
Here are the facts. You have to burn something to stay warm, cool or to make the wheels spin. The total amount of energy demanded to do that is what needs to be delivered. If you are incapable of doing that at a price that everyone can afford, then you can be replaced with someone that will.
It’s not rocket science.
Good comment Doonman. You have added to the famous assertion: demand/price/consequences. Great. Not currently in political favor.
There is a simple solution for many countries … burn more fossil fuels 🙂
The trick for the politicians will be to avoid the green blob after.
It was good to learn that Australia joined several other nations that refused to ban fossil fuels including coal despite the demands made at COP26.
Still, there is some zeroing out –
Blank Looks Matter….
That’s what is called a “thousand-yard stare”.
More like “WTF am I doing here” stare
That’s the look of the man whose finger went thru the toilet paper.
A now former Australian politician, lawyer and business person, proudly describing himself as a globalist, and after becoming a Cabinet Minister after 1996 warned that electricity and water was too cheap in Australia.
Obviously The Australian Greens agreed with him and today Australians are paying a far higher price for both.
Malcolm got rich enough to become a leftie.
(Something I always aspired to but never quite pulled it off. )
But then again I never got to buddy up with the corporate big swinging d1cks like Mal did.
Hypocrisy is an asset when used to further your own ends.
No wonder Mal and Kevin have found so much in common.
Malcolm, and other significantly wealthy people, salve their consciences with ‘luxury beliefs’ – virtue-signalling ideas that actually achieve nothing except pushing prices up for everyone. They can easily afford the outcome. Others can’t.
The Biden Administration strategy is an old and tired one.By raising regulatory barriers to production, they can inflate the price of oil and then blame it on “greedy oil companies”. Expect many show trial investigations into “price gouging” that will be announced with great fanfare and find nothing, as usual.Their efforts are intended to put “green” energy on a par with real energy.
As I recall. Pres Obama, in a well-reported speech setting out his desire for an all-renewables power system, stated categorically that, “Electricity prices will necessarily skyrocket”. At least he was truthful in at least one aspect.
in Italy they anounced 45% increase in electricity, and 50% for gas.
When is the revolution coming?
And Salvini said go ahead with NordStream 2 – long term contracts instead of spot-pricing.
A voice of sanity in Italy, so voters can see the problem.
This website rages against the cancellation of Keystone, while putting up articles about how new transmission lines for renewables scar the landscape…
Shut up, liar. No one wants to hear your lies.
Psst, Griff mate, the Keystone XL pipeline is mostly buried and would have delivered reliable energy
The wind turbines aren’t buried and aren’t reliable
Still wonder why it’s possible to rage against reliable energy and unreliable windmills?
Don’ even bother. Griff is simply ignorant about so many things.
Interesting point given reports that the Colorado fires were started by power lines sparking in the high winds. More scattered turbines would have more scattered power lines in heavily wooded, and dry, forests.
Greens don’t have an issue chopping down trees when it comes to windmills, solar panels and palm oil but god forbid a single tree is taken down to grow food
Just label wood biomass and the Greens will approve, renewable energy, pity about the trees.
And the oil consumed to ship it around the world
That oil could be used for something more useful!
Details will only confuse Griffy.
notice that the word “lines” is a plural- meaning, many, very, very many- vs. a single Keystone
In Germany, this would be even more fitting: the German word “Gift” means “poison”.
Thanks, I have added to my Deutsch vocabulary.
Nice wry piece concerning New England on Doomberg.substack.com
Competing for the energy disaster trophy.
Until such times as the voters actually stop and think about who they vote for they can suffer the pain coming their way. We in the UK recently had an opportunity to send the Westminster bozos a clear message but the voters in North Shropshire voted for the biggest bunch of eco loons outside of the Green party, the Lib-Dems. Until that changes, the lunacy will continue. Unfortunately, I suspect it is going to take some time and considerable pain before the voters join the dots.
The problem is the people can’t see beyond voting for one of the 3 main parties even though the LimpDumbs are far from ever winning power. Or are not able to see that not voting – or spoiling your ballot – is a valid option if there is nobody suitable to vote for. this though usually brings a mewling response from the dim-witted of ‘people died for your right to vote’ – and of course to choose not to – or ‘you have to vote for somebody’ – er, no I don’t. Given that in the UK there is already a bit of concern about turnout which is why you hear calls to allow children to vote, or for it to be made online – yeah, as if that is secure eh USA? Imagine how the detached elite would respond if say only 25% of people voted. Even as it is today, nobody wins their seat with the majority of the electorate voting for them so they are already minority MPs.
What is missing in this analysis is that the coal-hating Gang Green (thanks, Obama!) have managed to shutter or sideline most coal plants, and NG has mostly stepped in to that resultant energy void, but the problem is that NG supplies are inelastic, and prices can and do skyrocket, especially in the winter. Our fave, and by that I mean only, electricity supplier, “EverSource” (really, could they have found a dumber name?), has already warned us of higher prices coming, with the blame placed squarely on NG. There is one (yes one) coal plant left for the entire region, in Bow, NH, but they will only use it in an emergency. How dumb is that? Starting up and shutting down a coal plant is extremely inefficient and expensive. They keep a pile of coal handy. I don’t know how much, but I believe it freezes in the winter, especially because it is just sitting there, and not being harvested. So that creates an extra problem. But yeah, blame it on NG. That’s the ticket.
It’s for the planet…shut up and pay up, losers.
Well it only gets “Better” with these virtual signalling Green politicians. The province of Quebec has just declared on December 31 2021 that there will be no more oil furnaces allowed in new construction in that province. Added to that they also declared that no oil furnaces can be replaced with new ones after December 31, 2023. In a province without a large infrastructure of natural gas to homes oil heating is the way it has been done since the 1950’s when coal was phased out.
That does not leave much to heat your house as they also banned wood stoves three years ago with cities like Montreal and Quebec City demanding existing wood stoves be removed by the end of this year. That leaves electrical power for heating whether it is direct electric or heat pumps with NO auxiliary firing for colder temperatures.
Propane was found to be expensive and hard to supply when these same politicians blocked a new multi-phase pipeline from western Canada in 2016 that would have supplied more propane and oil from western Canada on its way to St. John New Brunswick. Propane deliveries are done using the existing line 5 from Sarnia and the majority by rail tank car from western Canada. The rail car deliveries were disrupted in 2019 by Green protesters supporting the Antifa and BLM supporters till the Canadian federal government finally figured out that Quebec was running out of propane in the middle of winter and they put a stop to the protests after 6 months of no action.
Short memories these Green useless idiots have. Look back to the Great Ice Storm of 1998 and the reliability of the main power grid. During this ice storm the main power grid failed spectacularly when the weight of the ice broke major power lines everywhere and in some places the main steel transmission towers collapsed from the ice build up. Some areas of Quebec were without power for up to 6 weeks while Quebec Hydro struggled to replace the damaged infrastructure.
Wood stoves in homes were the only heat some people had till the power was restored and now those are banned. Putting all of your heating in the one basket of electricity where it has been shown to be unreliable can be called a criminal act.
I am sure the insurance companies are starting to look at upping their rates because they will be the ones who will be footing the bill when another ice storm happens or they will be installing NO Coverage for Ice storm riders in all policies going forth.