This is Not Cool

US Gas Exports an Increasing Burden on Energy Prices

The plan is to lock in US natural gas, and the infrastructure to support it, across this country and the rest of the world, to guarantee a captive, dependent group of consumers, who can be squeezed, abused and blackmailed, for decades to come.
This means jacking up exports, pitting US consumers against those in Europe and Asia, who are willing to pay 2x, 5x, or 10x more for the product.

Share.America.gov:

This winter, America’s natural gas keeps millions of Americans warm in their homes, powering everything from heating systems to holiday decorations. Beyond U.S. borders, the United States serves as a reliable, year-round supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG), strengthening global energy security when demand rises, including during the winter months.

Already the world’s largest exporter of LNG, the United States is on track to double its LNG production capacity by 2029. America exports LNG — used for electricity generation, industrial production and to home heating — to 43 countries.

“We stand ready to provide any country with abundant, affordable energy supplies if you need them,” President Trump said of U.S. energy production at the U.N. General Assembly in September. “We’re proudly exporting energy all over the world.”

For each of the first nine months of 2025, U.S. LNG export volumes outpaced the same month in the prior year. In fact, in September, U.S. LNG exports topped 15 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), a 25% increase over September 2024.

Inside Climate News:

During the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump promised voters that his policies would lower their energy prices by 50 percent, repeating this pledge in speeches in New York, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. “We will cut energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months—not just for businesses but for all Americans and their families,” he wrote in a Newsweek op-ed.

That hasn’t happened. Nationwide, electricity bills are up 13 percentcompared to last year, with some states facing steeper jumps than others. One of the reasons for those increases is the growing export of liquefied natural gas and a corresponding spike in gas prices, argues a new report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.

Does War for Oil Make Sense?Venezuela’s Oil will Not be Quick to Market

Good interview here with Ed Hirs of the University of Houston, conducted after the invasion of Venezuela.

Key points:

Venezuelan oil reserves are massive, but new players attempting to leverage them will need a lot of time, and capital. According to Hirs, ramping that production will not happen to an appreciable degree in the current Trump administration.

Hirs offered a calculation that if US drivers had paid the cost of the invasion of Iraq in their gasoline prices, that would have added $1.19 to the price of a gallon of gas. That did not happen of course, those costs were just charged to future US generations.

Oil companies that go in there might want some kind of guarantee that the MAGA administration will not pull the rug on any initial agreements – bearing in mind that this administration just abrogated legal contracts related to wind farms that have been blocked off the US coast.

Given the relative cost of oil from say, Canada, the economics “don’t make any sense” if the idea was to get cheaper prices, any time soon.
The price of a barrel of oil was $80/barrel a year ago, and has now dropped to less than $60, which is already hurting producers and workers in the US oil patch. Any additional price drops would be a hit to production in the US Permian basin, which needs a decent floor on price to be profitable.

We Broke it. We Bought it.

Remember the last war for oil, when the statue of Saddam came down in Baghdad?

The American media was euphoric.

Shortly after, the wheels started coming off.

I’m getting vibes like that right now.

We broke it. We bought it.

Another Coal Plant Kept Open on Backs of Rate Payers

It’s happened in Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania, now Colorado.
Aging, obsolete, polluting and expensive – coal plants that markets have abandoned are being mandated to run by the “free market” whiz kids in Trump’s energy department.
Captive ratepayers money being siphoned to the pockets of coal baron donors and cronies.

Colorado Public Radio:

The U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order late Tuesday to keep an aging Colorado coal plant open, just one day before it was slated to close.

The plant — Unit 1, part of Craig Station, in Moffat County — is now required to keep running until March 30, 2026. The order can also be extended.

The move drew a furious response from the governor’s office and environmental groups, who contest whether an emergency even exists that would require the plant to stay open.

Governor Polis said the order would lead to a huge spike in costs to repair the plant, which may be borne by customers of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a cooperative operating the plant to deliver electricity to rural communities in Nebraska, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado.

“This order will pass tens of millions in costs to Colorado ratepayers, in order to keep a coal plant open that is broken and not needed,” Polis said in a statement.

“Ludicrously, the coal plant isn’t even operational right now, meaning repairs — to the tune of millions of dollars — just to get it running, all on the backs of rural Colorado ratepayers!”

CPR could not immediately confirm whether the plant is broken. Tri-State, which operates the plant but co-owns it with other utility companies, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to keep the plant open. The law allows the federal government to order power plants to stay open during emergencies — like during times of war, in the aftermath of disasters or when there’s a shortage of electricity.

But this year, the Trump administration has repeatedly used the law to keep the lights on at plants in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana and other states.

CBS News: Climate Change not the Biggest Factor in Young People’s Family Planning

Elon Musk and others are clamoring for young people to start having more babies – but they are working against programs that support the child care, housing, and health care that families need to consider a child.

Climate change, according to the report above, is very much a factor, but economic fears are the leading barriers for young people starting a family.

Tesla Sales Crash on Musk’s Nazi Image, Fire Fears

MAGA on fire.
Musk locked in – can’t get out.
Happy New Year.

Axios:

Tesla vehicle sales declined for a second consecutive year in 2025, hitting their lowest point since 2022.

The results mean that Chinese automaker BYD sold more EVs in 2025 than Tesla for the first time in a full year: 2.26 million for BYD and 1.64 million for Tesla.

Why it matters: Tesla vehicle sales are critical to funding CEO Elon Musk’s AI ambitions, including humanoid robots and self-driving cars.

Driving the news: The company on Friday reported a 8.6% drop in deliveries — a close approximation to sales — to 1.64 million for the year.

The full-year drop came despite an unexpected boost to sales in the third quarter as consumers rushed to buy EVs to qualify for the federal tax cut before it expired at the end of September.
Deliveries are now down 9.5% since their all-time high in 2023.
Deliveries totaled 418,227 for the fourth quarter, down 15.6% from the same period a year earlier and missing Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 422,900.
It was also the automaker’s worst fourth-quarter showing since 2022.

The big picture: The company suffered a backlash to Elon Musk’s political activity in early 2025 and the end of the federal EV tax credit later in the year.

Some prospective customers spurned Tesla after Musk became a close adviser to President Trump and leader of the budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk acknowledged “some blowback” from his political involvement was hurting the company and eventually left the administration.

UPDATE: Fossil Fuel Threats to Farmers Mirror those to Climate Scientists

When I started interviewing farmers in the midwest about their difficulties in getting clean energy sited on their land, what hit me like a two by four was the similarities to the stories I heard 10 years before from climate scientists.
Both groups were being subjected to death threats, harassment, vilification in the press (local papers for the farmers), rumor campaigns on line, accusations of wrongdoing.

For instance, scientists like Michael Mann was threatened with prosecution by Republican Senator James Inhofe for nonsense accusations of wrongdoing.
One farmer I spoke to told me about someone calling the Michigan DNR and falsely reporting him for improper burning.
Both scientists and farmers spoke of death threats against themselves and their families.

Markets? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Markets

Aren’t you glad we have all these hard nosed capitalist business men in charge in DC?
We’ve heard ad nauseam about the terrible subsidies for clean energy, and how evil globalists are “picking winners” by incentivizing clean energy.
So, what does the market think of, say, coal?

Associated Press:

Federal officials rejected a company’s bid to acquire 167 million tons of coal on public lands in Montana for less than a penny per ton, in what would have been the biggest U.S. government coal sale in more than a decade.

The failed sale underscores a continued low appetite for coal among utilities that are turning to cheaper natural gas and renewables such as wind and solar to generate electricity. Emissions from burning coal are a leading driver of climate change, which scientists say is raising sea levels and making weather more extreme.
—
So markets seem to be telling us something important about the demand for coal. The reasons for that are obvious if you look at the costs of coal generation compared to cleaner, cheaper, quicker to market competitors.

But, Republican “Business men” in charge are where they are because of donors. And a lot of those donors are fossil fuel barons. And those donors expect some payback.

Indiana Capital Chronicle:

Federal officials have ordered a temporary halt to the planned shutdowns of two coal-burning Indiana power plants amid President Donald Trump’s attempts to boost the coal mining industry.

The U.S. Department of Energy orders issued Tuesday require Northern Indiana Public Service Co. and CenterPoint Energy to keep those generating plants operating despite their intentions of closing them this month.

Jeff Masters: How to Use the IPCC to Deny Climate Change

Grifters gonna grift.
Meteorologist Jeff Masters breaks down how climate disinformers like Secretary of Energy (and fracking grifter) Chris Wright can pretend to use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to distort and deny climate reality.

Yale Climate Connections:

The new Department of Energy secretary, Chris Wright, until recently was the CEO of Liberty Energy, the nation’s second-largest fracking firm. In 2024, the firm published a manifesto called “Bettering Human Lives,” in which Wright makes a provocative statement that would be reassuring – if only it were true:

“Another thing that we often hear about climate change is that it leads to a significant increase in extreme weather events with deadly consequences. This claim is false. Extensive reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) actually show no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or weather-related droughts,” Wright wrote in a CEO letter introducing the report.

The IPCC is a U.N. body with the job of providing information about climate science to governments. Thousands of scientists volunteer to contribute to its reports, which are published every five to seven years.

Wright’s claim about what the IPCC says is effectively rebutted by atmospheric scientist Jim Kossin, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, in the video below by Peter Sinclair, a former Yale Climate Connections contributor.

“We have high confidence that extreme precipitation events are increasing in intensity and frequency and that human actions are playing a substantial role,” Kossin says in the video. Even for drought, where the science is somewhat less certain, “We still have good confidence that drought extremes are increasing and that human actions are playing a role,” Kossin adds.