Oil, Gas Surge. Sun, Wind, Prices Stable

Meme worth spreading at this teachable moment

New York Times:
“In a prolonged conflict, the combination of higher energy costs, disrupted logistics and a generalized confidence shock would constitute a meaningful drag on global trade volumes at precisely the moment the world economy was still digesting the inflationary and growth consequences of the tariff shock,” noted analysts at ING, a bank. “The mother of all bad timings

Fears of disruption to shipping on the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway on Iran’s southern border through which a large share of the world’s oil and gas passes, upended energy markets. Oil prices continued to surge, with Brent crude oil, the global benchmark, rising more than 6 percent, to $83 a barrel, the highest level since mid-2024.

Natural gas prices soared. European natural gas futures jumped for a second day; prices have roughly doubled over the past two days. A measure of gas cargoes in Asia rose 45 percent on Tuesday.
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Jeffrey Sachs:

Ask yourself the simple question: why does China have 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail — roughly 30,000 miles — and the United States has not one mile? Why is Chinese infrastructure advancing at a pace that would have seemed impossible a generation ago while American

infrastructure is literally falling apart? The answer is not complicated. China does not go to war. The United States is in nonstop, undeclared war. War that is never voted on, never debated, never honestly accounted for.

The cost is not just money. It is freedom. It is the steady transformation of this republic into a military state — one that funds foreign carnage while its own people live on crumbling foundations, both literal and figurative.

Continue reading “Oil, Gas Surge. Sun, Wind, Prices Stable”

Is MAGA Waking Up to Clean Energy?

No, hell, they didn’t suddenly start believing in science. They don’t care about the planet, or their children.
They just want to make sure the price of electricity doesn’t spike to the moon before the ’28 election.

I’ll take it.

Newt Gingrich in the Daily Caller:

Solar and wind power are popular, with 80 percent and 74 percent respectively backing local construction. In the right areas, they make a ton of sense. Further, these technologies grow cheaper and more reliable every year. They have their place in a comprehensive energy-abundance strategy—but they can’t work alone.

America’s energy future demands a bold, diversified plan emphasizing natural gas, clean fuel technologies, nuclear, and renewables. Diversification reduces supply disruptions and ensures economic stability. Modern grid technology improves reliability and affordability. Securing abundant energy is vital for economic growth, innovation, and global competitiveness.

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Washington Post took note of White House resident racist maniac Steven Miller’s wife Katy posting a note favorable to solar energy.

Washington Post:

“Solar energy is the energy of the future,” Katie Miller posted recently. “Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky — we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” Another of her posts suggested solar is more vital to the U.S. than coal power, contradicting White House messaging and policy.

Trump has been blunt about his distaste for solar panels, calling them a “blight” on the landscape, “very inefficient, and very ugly too” and — along with wind turbines — “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY.” His administration has blocked hundreds of projects from final approval as it prioritizes fossil fuels.

Yet Katie Miller is no outlier in her willingness to buck MAGA orthodoxy on energy from the sun.

Continue reading “Is MAGA Waking Up to Clean Energy?”

Antarctica “in Crisis” with Vanishing Sea Ice

New Scientist:

If all our fear and uncertainty over climate change could be distilled into a single statistic, then arguably it was delivered to an emergency summit on the future of the Antarctic last month.

Nerilie Abram at the Australian National University, Canberra, opened her presentation with a slide headlined “Antarctic sea ice has declined precipitously since 2014, and in July 2023 exceeded a minus 7 sigma event”.

At times, the noise of the 500 researchers who gathered for the Australian Antarctic Research Conference in Tasmania was overwhelming, as they tried to make sense of the unprecedented shifts underway at the bottom of the globe. But as Abram’s slide sunk in, it was as if the whole room was holding its breath.

Put simply, a minus 7 sigma event, meaning seven standard deviations below the average, should be all but impossible, says Ed Doddridge at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, who works with Abram.

It is “actually really hard to convey just how extreme this difference was, how extreme the low sea ice extent was”, he says. One way is to liken it to the concept of a one-in-100-year flood, for example. “If you run those sorts of statistics for Antarctic sea ice last year, you get a number somewhere between one in 7.5 million years and one in 700 billion years,” says Doddridge.

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More War for Oil Begins in Iran

Below, a farmer pleads to be allowed to host a wind farm, so that other young people, like his own son, will not be sent to the Middle East in wars for energy.

Continue reading “More War for Oil Begins in Iran”

Music Break: Oz Bandit – Cost Curves Don’t Lie

Cost curves don’t lie
They slide
Right past your ego and pride
You can cry online
But time
Moves with the cheaper side

Cost curves don’t lie
They decide
Who adapts and who gets denied
You can rage all night
But the line
Keeps falling by design

You scream “subsidy!” — that’s wild
Oil’s been spoon-fed since Standard Oil was a child
Tax breaks stacked in a trillion-file pile
Public land giveaways mile after mile

Free market? Stop it.
Your whole empire’s been budgeted profit
External costs you conveniently drop it
Now solar scales and suddenly you’ve got a problem?

Continue reading “Music Break: Oz Bandit – Cost Curves Don’t Lie”

Chart of the Week: Battery Prices Down (again)

Canary Media:

Yes, batteries got cheaper again last year. It’s so predictable at this point, it’s almost boring. Almost.

In 2025, the average price of a lithium-ion battery pack was $108 per kilowatt-hour, down 8% from the year prior, according to research firm BloombergNEF’s latest annual survey. It’s the continuation of a long-standing trend: With the exception of 2022, battery prices have declined every single year since 2010, when BNEF began looking at the data.

It’s a crucial metric — something of a skeleton key for the entire energy transition.

Cheaper batteries mean cheaper electric vehicles, and that in turn puts more EVs and fewer gas cars on the road. Cheaper batteries mean you can squeeze more juice out of your solar panels, displacing more planet-warming coal and gas. Cheaper batteries mean cheaper, clean energy — urgently needed in the U.S. as fast-rising utility bills collide with the push to decarbonize our energy system.

If You Liked RFK, You’ll Love this Surgeon General Nominee

Casey Means is a “wellness influencer” (read: grifter) nominated for the office of Surgeon General, the nation’s top medical official.
I say this as someone who is well acquainted with, uses and benefits from alternative medical approaches. There are some flat-out nutballs in that space.

Attn: Senator Bill Cassidy MD – The RFK example should be a giant red flag on this one.

Atlantic:

Casey Means has, to say the least, modified her tone. When she testified today in front of the Senate’s health committee, the nominee for surgeon general didn’t, as she is normally wont to do, delve into her experiences with psychedelics or endorse raw milk. She also did not rail at length against birth control. Instead, the longtime health entrepreneur and influencer emphasized her medical degree from Stanford—even though she does not have an active medical license—and sought out common ground with the senators cross-examining her.

Before her nomination last spring, Means—who dropped out of her surgical residency in 2018—embraced some unconventional theories about wellness. As Rina Raphael wrote for The Atlantic last month, Means has talked to trees, implied that natural disasters are a “communication from God,” and dubbed the nation’s health “a spiritual crisis.” When she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in 2024, she denounced seed oils and suggested that the widespread use of hormonal birth control was indicative of a cultural “disrespect of life.” She has also questioned the universal birth dose of the hepatitis-B vaccine.

Continue reading “If You Liked RFK, You’ll Love this Surgeon General Nominee”

Chinese EV-Porn Vid of the Week

There is a whole genre of YouTube video that can only be described as EV porn.
It is exclusively dominated by Chinese Built videos.
Watch this and you’ll understand by Ford CEO Jim Farley said his visits to China were the “most humbling” experiences of his life.

Seething with anger at the arrogance and laziness of US automakers, and the careless indifference even of UAW workers, their jobs on the line, who voted for the US to drop out of the EV race.