Fossil Shills CYA as War Shines Light on Gas Security

Fossil fuel apologists and shills have been pantsed by reality as the attack on Iran and subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz starkly revealed the national security vulnerability of a fossil fuel based economy.

OilPrice:

Europe has made significant progress weaning itself off of Russian oil and gas imports and building up its own energy supply chains. But the European Union still relies on imports for more than half of its energy needs, leaving it achingly vulnerable to the current energy crisis stemming from the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz and the war that the United States and Israel are waging in Iran. 

But while most of Europe’s major economies are scrambling to mitigate the damage of skyrocketing energy prices, one nation is feeling pretty good about its prospects. Spain could be sitting pretty thanks to its enormous investment in solar energy in recent years – but as much as Spain is turning into a role model for autonomy and resilience through clean energy, it may not be a formula for success in other European nations.

“Spain can demonstrate examples of how investing in renewable energy helps our households experience a lower impact from gas price increases,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain said in Brussels, the seat of the European Commission, on Thursday. At present, renewables represent almost 60 percent of Spain’s energy mix. 

“Last Saturday, the price per megawatt-hour of electricity in Spain was €14, while in Italy, Germany and France, consumers were paying over €100,” Sánchez went on to say. “That difference in price was not the result of random luck, but rather because this government has spent the last eight years working to be at the forefront of renewable energy deployment.”

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Below, fossil fuel shill Michael Shellenberger scrambling to cover his sorry ass.

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It’s Worse than You Think

Bloomberg:

The biggest oil supply shock in history has reached the one-month mark. Prices have surged, growth forecasts are being cut worldwide, and shortages are emerging across Asia, from Thailand to Pakistan.

But the energy industry is warning that the crisis is only beginning.

In conversations with more than three dozen oil and gas traders, executives, brokers, shippers and advisers over the last week, one message was repeated over and over: The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the situation. Many drew parallels with the 1970s oil shock, warning the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is threatening an even bigger crisis. Fuel crunches hitting Asia will soon start spreading west, they said. Europe is likely to face surging prices to secure cargoes and is at risk of diesel shortages in the coming weeks.

Bloomberg story above has a sobering barrel counter giving a glimpse of how much energy flow is being tied up by the Hormuz closure

Yahoo:

Oil prices could hit $200 per barrel if the war in Iran persists through the end of June, according to strategists from Macquarie Group.

If the war were to stretch well into summer, the strategists wrote in a client note on Wednesday, prices would need to move high enough to “destroy an historically large amount of global oil demand,” likely requiring Brent crude prices above $200 per barrel and pushing US gasoline prices up to roughly $7 per gallon.

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The Weekend Wonk: Jason Box PhD with Arctic Change Update

Jason Box has an update on arctic changes from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, which is a project of the Arctic Council.

Starts with a bunch of very small graphs, but don’t get discouraged, he focuses on each one full screen as the talk goes on. Less than 20 minutes and a thorough, if sobering, update.

Drones Warfare is a Paradigm Shift that the US has Been Sleeping On

We’re about to send young soldiers into a battlefield that they are as ill prepared for as the mounted cavalry regiments that charged machine gun nests in World War I.
The world leaders in drone warfare are the Ukrainians, but Iran has been supplying, modifying and improving their own drones, with Russian help, for at least half a decade. Maybe we should stop insulting Kyiv, and start learning from them.
Fox News report. This realization is slowly sinking into American media.

PBS Newshour below.

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Nebraska Fires an Ill Omen

Washington Post:

Wildfires are ripping across the Great Plains, and other flare-ups are popping up in Arizona and Colorado remarkably early in the season. Firefighters and experts are watching these giant red splotches of burning forest and grasslands with alarm, warning that the timing, ingredients fueling their startling growth, and what they signal about the fire season ahead is a recipe for concern — perhaps signaling an expanding frontier for fire risk in broader patches of the western half of the United States.

“To sum it up,” Pete Curran, a staff meteorologist for Watch Duty, a nonprofit that tracks wildfires live and sends updates to users in real time, and former captain at the Orange County Fire Authority, put it bluntly: “We are scared s—less.”

“To have any fire that goes hundreds of thousands of acres in a day anywhere is very unusual at any time of the year, let alone in mid-March,” he added about the blazes in Nebraska. “It got everyone’s attention.”

Many fire-prone parts of the country did not get a real, substantial winter, one that typically leaves mountains and soil with a solid snowpack to help cushion the transition into unrelenting summer heat. Combine that with the kind of dry cold fronts that brought powerful fire-igniting winds in late February in the Oklahoma Panhandle and southern Kansas; an unprecedented heat dome parked over a slew of states from California to the Great Plains that brought the country’s highest-ever March temperature; and wildfire crews already stretched thin. Meteorologists, climate scientists and firefighters who monitor such activity closely are already calculating how they can spread their resources across regions if these kinds of fires begin to pop off simultaneously.

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Study: Climate’s Economic Damages by 2100 “Eye Watering”

Not just tallying damages, naming, blaming and shaming corporations, and maybe uniquely, individuals.
Like the Epstein list – not one you would want to be on.

Nature – Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon:

Climate change is causing measurable harm globally. Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D); however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists, nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages. Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon7. Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions—one component of L&D—are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions. For instance, one tonne of CO2emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40–530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500–5,700). Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions. In other illustrative estimates, a single long-haul flight per year over the past decade leads to about $25k ($6,000–77,000) in future damages by 2100, and US emissions since 1990 caused $500 billion ($180–1,300 billion) of damage in India and $330 billion ($110–820 billion) in Brazil. Carbon removal offers an alternative to transfer payments for settling L&D, but is increasingly ineffective in limiting damages as the delay between emission and recapture increases.

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Climate Change will Move US Wildfire Threats Eastward

Continuing the fire discussion – it’s worth clarifying that climate is indeed, despite recently amplified disinformation, expanding the threat of wildfires.

Of particular concern is the expansion of wildfires from the more arid western areas we have grown accustomed to, eastward toward larger populations.

Washington Post:

Over the next few weeks, there’s little relief in the form of rain on the horizon for Nebraska. Another big surge of wind is expected Thursday and will be preceded by record heat on Wednesday. A recently updated seasonal outlook from the Climate Prediction Center expects more drought through June.

he same goes for places such as New Mexico, Wyoming, Florida, Texas, South Dakota and parts of Arizona, said Casperson. It reached 84 degrees in Flagstaff, Arizona, on Thursday — a temperature that had never previously been reached in the city before May 2, considering records dating to 1898.

But the state Casperson is watching the most closely?

“Colorado is where I’m looking,” he said.

The state has a history of powerful, explosive blazes that can rip through dry grasslands and forests and have only been getting worse — 17 of the 20 largest wildfires occurred in the last 10 years. In 2020, three wildfires shattered records with how much land they burned, damaging large parts of state parks. A year later, the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in the suburbs outside Boulder.

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Could a War with No Plan Mean a Crash with No Bottom?

At Fossil Fuel’s big CERA Week shindig this week, not much clarity about where energy markets are going in response to the unthinkable closure of Strait of Hormuz.

Above, some concerns expressed by Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank.
Some other voices breaking from the pack, as well.

New York Times Climate Forward via email:

If this is such a big energy shock, why aren’t oil prices higher?

The chief executives of Chevron and Shell expressed a great deal of concern that the futures market for oil, which we have all been watching very closely, doesn’t fully capture the scale of the disruption to the physical trade of oil and the physical trade of products like jet fuel and diesel in particular.

We’re getting really mixed messages about the trajectory of the war moving forward. My sense is that traders are having a hard time making sense of that.

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