“Pound Sand”: Fossil Fuel Agenda in Disarray

Trump cabinet members begging oil execs to boost drilling in the face of war imposed Oil demand destruction.
I’ve been telling you – these guys boast constantly about being free marketers, but they’re just grifters.

Bloomberg:

The Strait of Hormuz oil shock has yet to crash demand as the rich world borrows from its stocks and pays up to secure supply. Traders are now sounding the alarm that a harsh adjustment is coming.

The longer the vital oil channel doesn’t reopen, traders say, the more consumption is going to have to recalibrate lower to align with supply that’s dropped at least 10%. And for that to happen, people will have buy less, either through prices they ca

A billion barrels of supply loss is already all-but guaranteed — more than double the emergency inventories that governments released not long after the conflict began at the end of February. Buffers are being used up fast, helping to keep a lid on oil prices for now. But with the closure now in its ninth week, demand destruction that started in less obvious sectors like petrochemicals in Asia, is quietly spreading to everyday markets the world over.

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Below, Goldman Sachs expert: Hormuz will never be the same.

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Electric Rate’s are About Much More than Data Centers

The CBS spot above isn’t really as nuanced as it needs to be, a kind of frames a “Data Centers cause price increases” story that isn’t exactly accurate.
But what it gets right is, setting the story in Georgia, pointing out that one of the big drivers in that state has been the startup of the Vogtle Nuclear plants, which have given that industry a massive black eye in terms of affordability.
They interviewed Patty Durand, who I just met thru her Op-Ed below.

Patty Durand in Utility Dive:

In April 2024, Georgia Power completed the first new nuclear units in the United States in 30 years. But for Georgia Power customers, the project did not come with a celebration: It came with an almost 25% rate increase.

And Plant Vogtle came with its own “Let them eat cake” moment for Georgians: On May 31, 2024, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined federal and state officials at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on site in Waynesboro, Georgia. There, she called for building 200 more gigawatts of reactors without mentioning the Vogtle’s $36 billion price tag, while attendees enjoyed cake shaped like nuclear reactors.

Throughout construction, as cost overruns ran into the billions of dollars, these same regulators declined to put consumer protections in place, claiming that a thorough review to determine what costs were prudent and reasonable would take place at the end. Yet that review never happened. Georgia is one of only a handful of states with no consumer utility counsel or advocate to represent consumers in complex, billion-dollar rate cases. For Vogtle, that absence had profound consequences: as the project neared completion, PSC staff and Georgia Power reached an agreement under which cost overruns would be passed directly to customers, without a full record of hearings or prudency review. The result is little national understanding of the drivers of the cost overruns, allowing all kinds of beliefs about nuclear energy to take root without a factual record.

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Interview: Jeffrey Sachs on Coming Shocks

The interviewer is the execrable hypocrite and liar Tucker Carlson, I know.
But he doesn’t say much.
It’s mostly Sachs talking, and worth a sober listen.
We’ve crossed some kind of Rubicon here, and this is an outline of an array of unprecedented economic and physical shocks that we, as a planet, are about to experience.

Warmer, Wetter, Dryer, More Extreme. This Spring has it All.

Extreme rains over the Upper Midwest severely impacted Wisconsin and Michigan last week – straining dams, flooding homes, washing out roads that have been stable for a century.
Above, Steve Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin discusses the climate fingerprints on recent extremes.

In Central and Northern parts of Michigan’s lower peninsula, it was the wettest spring on record.

Map below from Farm Journal shows broad swaths of the Eastern US with areas ranked for precipitation – showing the contrast between regions experiencing either the wettest, or driest years in their records.

Continue reading “Warmer, Wetter, Dryer, More Extreme. This Spring has it All.”

Footage Said to be Israelis Destroying Solar Panels

Not much more available on this from major news outlets.
Let me know if you have insights.