More than 150 Republicans take aim at Biden's moratorium on natural gas exports
More than 150 House Republicans are calling for President Biden to reverse his moratorium on liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, an action they argued negatively impacts the energy security of the U.S. and its allies.
The Republican lawmakers — led by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y. — penned a letter to Biden on Sunday evening, demanding his administration "expeditiously approve all pending applications to increase the global supply of natural gas."
"This is economically and strategically dangerous and unnecessary," they wrote in the letter to Biden. "Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, DOE has consistently found that U.S. LNG exports serve the ‘public interest’ because they contribute positive economic benefits and strengthen energy security for the American people, and also have the potential to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions."
"Your administration should do everything it can to encourage greater production of clean-burning and reliable natural gas, and to grant the export permits that allow access to global markets," the letter added.
Late last month, Biden ordered the Department of Energy (DOE) to pause pending permits for LNG export facilities while federal officials conduct a rigorous environmental review assessing the projects' carbon emissions, which could take more than a year to complete. The action represents a major victory for activists who have loudly called for such a move, even threatening to hold large protests over the issue.
The president said the pause on LNG permitting was a part of his sweeping climate agenda, adding the action "sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time." He also took aim at "MAGA Republicans" for willfully denying the "urgency of the climate crisis."
But, in their letter Sunday, McMorris Rodgers, Johnson, Scalise, Stefanik and the other Republicans said pausing additional LNG export capacity could ultimately bolster Russia, noting that, in December 2023, more than 87% of U.S. LNG exports went to Europe, U.K., or Asian markets. In the aftermath of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, energy experts argued LNG exports would be critical for helping American allies to wean off Russian gas.
"Actions that slow or halt the ability to export U.S. LNG would weaken global energy security and put these strategic markets at risk," the lawmakers wrote. "Such actions would undercut efforts we have made to help Europe reduce its reliance on Russian energy."
And they further argued that pausing LNG export growth threatens to cause increased U.S. energy prices, lead to higher global greenhouse gas emissions and harm the U.S. economy. The letter pointed to research indicating that LNG exports could add as much as $73 billion to the U.S. economy by 2040, create upwards of 453,000 American jobs and increase U.S. purchasing power by $30 billion.
The letter, meanwhile, comes days before Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans are planning to hold a hearing to examine the potential ramifications of the LNG export pause.
In addition, Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Tim Scott, R-S.C., led a group of 16 senators last week in introducing the Unlocking Domestic LNG Potential Act which would strip DOE of its authority having final say on LNG export projects, instead leaving approval decisions with the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Companion legislation was introduced by Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, one day later and is expected to receive a floor vote this month.
While it is unclear which proposed projects the action will affect, a senior administration official said at least two have a larger capacity and two have a smaller capacity. Another official added that the pause implemented Friday will only impact projects that have gone through FERC's lengthy approval process and are ripe for DOE approval.
According to federal data updated last week, there are 11 projects that have been green-lit by FERC but are not yet under construction. An additional four projects are pending before FERC and two are in the pre-filing stage. Those six projects wouldn't be impacted by the pause since they are not before the DOE yet, but would be impacted if approved by FERC.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/more-150-republicans-take-aim-bidens-moratorium-natural-gas-exports
************************************************Germany’s budget chaos leaves green-energy projects in limbo
Germany’s climate and transformation fund faces a shortfall of as much as €10 billion ($10.8 billion) next year, according to people familiar with the matter, casting doubt on the nation’s goal for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
The gap in the off-budget fund threatens key solar and hydrogen projects, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information is private.
“It is currently not possible to provide conclusive information on this, as it depends on various parameters and estimates that need to be updated,” according to Germany’s finance ministry, commenting on the size of the funding gap.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition was forced to overhaul its finances after a top court last year ruled that it was unconstitutional to transfer more than €60 billion earmarked to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic into the climate fund. While the 2024 budget has finally passed, that only came after the government readopted a debt brake, raising concerns about the funding available to achieve Germany’s target of slashing carbon emissions by 65% by 2030.
“The core problem remains that Germany should actually be investing massively this decade to accelerate the climate transformation, secure cheaper energy and transform our industry from a world based on cheap Russian gas,” said Jens Burchardt, a Berlin-based partner with Boston Consulting Group and the founder of the firm’s Center for Climate and Sustainability. “However, there currently seems to be a lack of political consensus in favor of this.”
***************************************************
In the Land of Net Zero, The Man in the Diesel Tank is King
Gwythian Prins is quite right to express his concerns about the impact of Net Zero on the U.K.’s national security in a piece published the other day on this site, ‘Net Zero Threatens National Security‘.
I’ve been racking my brains to think of a time in human history when a kingdom or state consciously chose to retro-equip its army with inferior technology or compromise its capability by seeking to introduce unreliable equipment. And I can’t think of one – what can I think of is all those who lost because they didn’t keep up.
Back in the middle of the 16th century BC, northern ancient Egypt was controlled by a group called the ‘shepherd kings’ or Hyksos. They’d invaded from what is now Syria and pushed back native rulers, establishing their own regime. They’d achieved this with one very simple tactic: they had chariots.
Now, the Hyksos chariots were a bit cumbersome and seem to have had four warriors in them. But when the Egyptians didn’t have chariots, the Hyksos behemoths were cutting edge.
When an Egyptian leader called Ahmose materialised on a cometh-the-moment, cometh-the-man basis, he didn’t try to push the Hyksos out with slower and more cumbersome chariots. Indeed, the Egyptians didn’t have any chariots.
So they started making chariots. And what’s more, they made their chariots smaller, lighter and faster so that they could fight a Bronze Age Blitzkrieg war. Ahmose led these vehicles into battle and, just like Heinz Guderian’s Blitzkrieg war of 1940, he pulverised the Hyksos whose chariots had become obsolete in an instant.
The blistering Ahmose established the 18th Dynasty, reunified Egypt and ushered in its greatest line of kings who presided over an unprecedented era of wealth, power, and – most important of all – national security.
One of the last of the kings of that dynasty was Tutankhamun in the late 14th century BC, whose tomb was famously found almost intact in 1922. On his body was an iron dagger, made of iron from a meteorite. At this time this spectacularly hard metal, which cut through bronze like a wire through cheese, was beyond the wit of man to smelt. Only a king could own one.
Within a few centuries the secret of the high temperatures needed had been discovered and humanity, for good or ill, entered the Iron Age. No-one went to war with a Bronze Age sword after that unless he wanted to lose or be conquered. The Roman Empire was an Iron Age state.
When the Romans went to war against the Carthaginians in the First Punic War (264-241 BC) they were not a naval power, even though the Carthaginians were. The Romans used a wrecked Carthaginian ship as a template and built their own, adding improvements in the form of the corvus boarding ramp. Yes, it was trial and error, but they won their first engagement with the Carthaginians in the Battle of Mylae in 260 BC because their ships were better.
It was a long and hard struggle with catastrophes along the way, but Rome won that war, and the next two wars against Carthage and ended up as the most powerful naval force in the Mediterranean.
There are so many other stories like this that I could go on for hours. The principle is always the same and the dynamic is the process of technological development, which at its fastest is and always has been driven by warfare. The unavoidable fact that it is impossible to stand still or diminish the effectiveness of a nation’s armed forces without making that nation a sitting duck for a more ambitious nation’s greed.
Yes, of course arms reduction treaties can and do exist, and they’ve been a mechanism for trying to inhibit the recklessness of unrestrained militarisation by encouraging mutual compliance in stepping back. They can and do work – up to a point. But there has never been a situation where everyone is prepared to play ball at the same time.
In the world of realpolitik there is simply no conceivable possibility of any serious nation unilaterally trying to cripple its capacity either to manufacture the raw materials or the hardware with which to defend itself, and expecting to survive. Extraordinarily though, that is quite literally what seems to be happening in Britain today.
There is no future for Net Zero in warfare, the armed forces or manufacturing. We cannot defend ourselves with electric tanks made of papier-maché steel, to use them as a metaphor for any other aspect of military technology.
We can’t have a situation in which during a war our factories are at the mercy of windpower generated by turbines in the middle of a sea beyond us to defend in a meaningful way or can’t function at full bore simply because it’s a cloudy day. Nor can we depend on an energy source that isn’t up to the job, however much of it we have, just as in the same way the Bronze Age fizzled out in the face of iron.
It might be better for all of us if we were all susceptible to such limiting factors, but the world doesn’t work like that. The ‘enemy’, whomever that turns out to be and whenever that is, will kit itself out with whatever will make it most likely that it wins and seizes what it wants, whether that is territory or resources or just power. And if that means the enemy goes to war with faster, more reliable and more powerful equipment then that’s exactly what its troops will have to hand.
Look at how the Germans spent years preparing themselves for 1939. That they ended up losing isn’t the point. In 1939-40 they were streets ahead of other European countries, which is why their advance was terrifyingly fast. They lost in 1945 because by then the Allies (which means the U.S.) had poured unlimited resources into record-breaking technological development and manufacturing capability on an unprecedented scale. The Germans probably had some of the best equipment, but they couldn’t produce it in sufficient quantities, despite resorting to synthetic oil. And that’s just as important as the equipment itself. The Tiger tank might have been as good as ten Shermans, but the Allies had eleven Shermans.
It may be an unpalatable aspect of human society, but if there’s anything that history tells you, it is what people are like. And in a world of nation states, you must be in a position to defend yourself. I hope beyond anything else there isn’t going to be a war, but one of the best ways of making sure there is one is to make yourself look like a pushover.
Cyber assaults are all too likely in the future. That’s a whole other story too, but it won’t change the fact that if we ever need to pull ourselves together and fight back then we’ll have to kiss Net Zero goodbye on the spot. The only question now is whether it’s already too late.
Here’s hoping we don’t have to find out the hard way.
************************************************
Why some Australians still need convincing the future lies in renewable energy
Last year, the Energy Minister asked the Energy Infrastructure Commissioner to investigate regional pockets of stubborn resistance and recommend ways of getting the doubters onside.
Andrew Dyer’s Community Engagement Review Report makes the bold assumption that Chris Bowen’s renewable energy plan can be put back on track, that his target of installing a 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours and 22,000 solar panels a day until 2030 is not as fanciful as it sounds. Opposition in the regions can be overcome by “ongoing excellence in community engagement and, more broadly, excellence in the execution of the energy transition”.
Engagement is a weasel word much loved by technocrats. It implies a two-way conversation, an exercise in exchanging information on the assumption that those in charge don’t possess the perfect knowledge needed to make perfect decisions.
In the minds of those who write these kinds of reports, however, engagement means no such thing. Engagement is the dissemination of a top-down plan, designed by people in the know.
Dyer says the government should develop a narrative “articulating why there is an urgent need for new renewable energy and transmission infrastructure”. He says opposition is often driven by “misinformation” and recommends the government establish one-stop information shops to help opponents get their facts straight.
He cites previous campaigns for efficient water use, cancer awareness and drink-driving as models of what could be achieved by appointing “an eminent, respected and independent spokesperson to engage the nation and be the ongoing champion of the energy transition”. Wisely, he steers clear of putting names to his proposal. The authority of most of those once considered national living treasures has been eroded by their endorsement of the voice referendum.
Dyer reflects on the role played by Sir John Monash in championing Victoria’s energy transition in the 1920s. This begs the question: Would Monash, the engineer who developed Victoria’s brown coal as a source of cheap and abundant energy, be prepared to champion wind and solar power today? Will wind and solar be powering the nation in a century’s time, the lifespan Monash anticipated for lignite?
The transition to renewable energy will reverse the progress made by Australia between the wars. Cheap energy attracted productive capital from Britain and the US. The increase in domestic manufacturing was driven by the perceived need for power and industrial self-sufficiency after the experience of WWI. Expensive and unreliable energy is driving companies offshore. It is barely 10 months since the Albanese government announced a $15bn scheme to attract manufacturing jobs and avoid a repeat of the shortages of essential goods experienced during the Covid-19 panic. The fund has yet to accept a single application, and Australia has fallen to 93rd in the Harvard Growth Lab’s rankings for economic complexity, sandwiched between Uganda and Pakistan.
Nowhere is the cost of the renewable energy transition more keenly felt than in the regions. They know first-hand the pressures on small and medium businesses from rising energy prices. They have discovered the dirty secrets the inner city prefers to ignore. They have experienced the rapacious demand for land required to generate a moderately respectable amount of power from wind and solar. They have seen and heard the scale of the civil engineering works required to build endless access roads and level platforms for turbines and cranes, often in remote and rugged terrain. They have been disturbed by the aviation warning lights on top of the turbines that compete with the natural beauty of a night sky away from the city lights.
Their roads have been churned by hundreds of truck movements transporting blades, steel and concrete. They know what it is like to be patronised by know-nothing community relations agents with newly minted degrees in strategic communication from UTS.
A community survey conducted for the commissioner’s review shows the extent of their unease. Nine out of 10 (92 per cent) were dissatisfied with the standard of community engagement by developers. Explanations in response to questions were considered unsatisfactory by 85 per cent. Only 11 per cent considered explanations relevant to their questions, and 85 per cent thought their explanations were not addressed promptly.
The conclusion the commissioner painfully avoids presenting to the Energy Minister is that any chance of gaining the social licence he desires has long since been lost. The haughtiness, equivocation and condescension of some developers have trashed the industry’s reputation. Governments that are supposed to control the excesses of the free market have instead acted as their facilitators. MPs, supposed to stand up for their constituents, have been nervous about taking up their concerns, fearing being labelled as climate deniers.
The idea an official information campaign will put these people straight is fanciful. The arrival of broadband means rural Australians have abundant information about the limits of renewable energy. They can follow the news from the US and Europe, where appetite and investment for wind and solar are diminishing and governments are reaching for other ways to reduce emissions, such as nuclear.
The internet has brought together communities blighted by renewable development from Tasmania to the edge of Cape York. In the past year, individuals overwhelmed by fighting their own lonely battle against cashed-up corporations have coalesced into a fledging national movement, Reckless Renewables; remarkably, without professional support or funding.
On Tuesday, the protest goes to Canberra with a rally at Parliament House. The renewable energy lobby has already fired warning shots. GetUp, which received $80,000 in donations last year from Mike Cannon-Brookes, is promising to pepper Canberra with posters. Renew Economy, the renewable sector’s version of Pravda, has tried to belittle the participants, mocking the support they have received from MPs Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson.
Bowen is unlikely to break his habit of entering parliament through the basement ministerial carpark and instead turn up at the front door. Put that down as a lost opportunity. His reception would have told him more about the country’s mood than any number of engagement reviews.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment