This is Not Cool

One negative blowback: In Indonesia, expanded use of biofuels, specifically palm oil, could put additional pressure on forests.
Otherwise, big push into renewables, a feared revival of coal seems less and less likely.

Oil Price:

The Hormuz crisis has already triggered an electrification drive in south and Southeast Asia as consumers struggle with fuel price spikes and even shortages in some countries. Europe and Asia are accelerating plans to install wind, solar, and battery storage capacity to protect against the highly volatile oil and gas markets in increasingly uncertain geopolitical developments.

Investors overwhelmingly expect financing for renewable energy projects to surge in the wake of the Iran conflict, a new poll by the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association (UKSIF) showed last week.

Investment firms managing a total of around $7.4 trillion (£5.5 trillion) in assets under management completed the UKSIF survey last month, which showed 87% of respondents expect both global and UK-specific investment in renewable energy projects to increase following the war.

The survey also showed 78% of respondents felt global renewable energy investments were now “less risky relative to oil and gas” after the outbreak of the war.

Greencentralbanking:

“Despite the narrative that LNG can provide energy security through diversifying supply routes beyond fixed natural gas pipelines, in reality, we’ve seen that this has not been the case with all the cards held by a few LNG suppliers,” says Amy Kong, energy transition researcher from Zero Carbon Analytics (ZCA) in a media briefing. “In essence, we’re seeing the same problems with new dealers.”

Continue reading “In Asia: Hormuz Impact Accelerates Transition”

Recommended by May Erlewine, no slouch musician herself.

About Troy W. Eckard

Since 1985, Troy W. Eckard has dedicated his entire career to the U.S. energy industry, giving him a wealth of knowledge and expertise for qualified individuals who seek direct ownership of oil & gas assets.

Troy has been blessed, challenged, and seen major cycles both up and down! The company’s direction today is to aggregate, maturate, and prudently liquidate as we build wealth for our partners and our firm!

Below: Oil/gas veteran Matt Randolph aka “Mr Global” on the current Iran impasse.

Continue reading “Why “Drill Baby Drill” is Not Happening”

Truth generally ages well, and only gets truer with time.

Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” debuted 20 years ago today.
It was apparently even more inconvenient than we thought at the time.
The fossil fuel barons have since made it clear that they’re willing to lock down the world in a global authoritarian state – if that’s what it takes to maintain revenues and, more importantly, control.

I took my family to see it at a theater about 20 miles away. After it ended, my son, then about 20, mused as to whether we should walk home.
I’d been following the science of the greenhouse effect since, well, since I read about the problem in Isaac Asimov’s “Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science”, when I was 10 years old.
It came up again in the 70s, when Jimmy Carter’s Global 2000 report mentioned it as an emerging issue in 1977.

Continue reading “20 Years Out from An Inconvenient Truth”

They’ve had extreme rains under Hurricane Ida.
Extreme storm surge under Sandy.

Could the city handle a climate enhanced storm that delivered both?

Adaptation will be slow, and horrendously expensive.

Above, on point topical song for this moment.

Below, CBS reporting on folk singer Jesse Welles.

Continue reading “Music Break: Jesse Welles – Call me When you Win the War”

Robert Fella on X:

This Australian’s reply to #Trump‘s rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.

“Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.

You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail.

Your life expectancy is going backwards. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker’s stock to your mates.

Your minimum wage hasn’t moved in 15 years. You’ve got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack you.

Continue reading “One Aussie Response to Trump’s Greenland Greed”

PBS report from Denmark comes at a time when a Middle Eastern War for Oil has closed off 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas supplies, indefinitely. Denmark is uniquely positioned to ride out the storm, and stands as a strong counterfactual to the Trump administration’s rants against clean energy, particularly wind.

The report also touches on another bogus tactic Secretary Chris Wright has used against wind energy – the myth of “national security” concerns related to wind’s radar signature.

Heatmap:

The Trump administration justified its nearly $1 billion settlement agreement with TotalEnergies to effectively buy back the French company’s U.S. offshore wind leases by citing national security concerns raised by the Department of Defense. Emails obtained by House Democrats and viewed by Heatmap, however, seem to conflict with that story.

California Representative Jared Huffman introduced the documents into the congressional record on Wednesday during a hearing held by the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. 

“The national security justification appears to be totally fabricated, and fabricated after the fact,” Huffman said during the hearing. “DOI committed to paying Total nearly a billion dollars before it had concocted its justification of a national security issue.”

The email exchange Huffman cited took place in mid-November among officials at the Department of the Interior. On November 13, 2025, Christopher Danley, the deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources, emailed colleagues in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the secretary’s office an attachment with the name “DRAFT_Memorandum_of_Understanding.docx.” 

Continue reading “Denmark a Quiet Rebuttal to Trump’s Green Hate”

As part of its deal with fossil fuel billionaire donors, the Trump administration has ordered several expensive and obsolete coal plants, slated to be closed, to remain open, using specious “emergency” powers to keep ordering 90 day extensions.
In other words, the same half assed corrupt way they’ve been running everything else, from the War for Oil to the Protections for Pedophiles.
One of those plants is the J.H. Campbell plant near Lake Michigan.

Michigan Public Radio:

The Trump administration has once again ordered the J.H. Campbell power plant in West Michigan to remain open, despite Consumers Energy’s plan to shut the plant down last year.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office last year. After that, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a 90-day order for the coal-fired power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan to remain in operation. That order has been renewed every 90 days since then. The latest order was set to expire Monday, when Wright issued his 5th renewal.

The current order expires August 16.

Detroit News:

The May 23, 2025, order was the first of more than a dozen 90-day emergency orders U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has issued to utilities and power grid operators in four other states, forcing them to extend the life of fossil fuel plants otherwise destined for closure. Wright said their power was needed to protect against shortages.

Advocacy groups and Democratic states tied to the Midwestern electricity grid, including Michigan, are challenging Wright’s use of federal emergency powers, claiming he falsified an energy emergency to prop up the coal industry and overrule local decision-makers. They made their case Friday before a panel of judges on a federal appeals court.

Even officials in Republican states are pushing back after seeing their share of the Campbell Plant’s bill.

“We didn’t even know the plant existed,” said Chris Nelson, South Dakota Public Utilities Commission chair, who estimated his state’s customers already are on the hook for well over $1 million in Campbell costs. “Certainly, the plant is of no benefit to our customers in South Dakota. Now, all of a sudden, we are faced with paying our proportional share of those ongoing costs. Our contention is that that, just frankly, is absolutely unfair.”

Continue reading “This Plant is Coal’s Golden Ballroom”

Greenlanders don’t want MAGA hats, apparently.
Governor Jeff Landry found no takers when he reportedly offered children “all the chocolate chip cookies they could eat” to come to his mansion.
Nothing creepy about that, Jeff.

New York Times:

President Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, came to the island this week on a self-proclaimed good-will mission to “make a bunch of friends.”

So far, he has not found many.

Within hours of landing on Sunday in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, Mr. Landry was touring the town in a cold drizzle when one Greenlander gave his entourage the finger.

After he offered some MAGA hats to Greenlandic children, several shook their heads.

He even told some kids that if they came to his mansion in Louisiana, they could have “all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

The next day, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, expressed his discomfort with the whole thing.

Continue reading “Greenland Cold to Trump’s Envoy”