April 2025 – Page 2 – This is Not Cool

Honey, I Shrunk the Profits. Energy Sec Tap Dancing as Tycoons Lose Patience

More Keystone Kops flip flops from the gang that can’t drill straight.

Energy Sec and Climate bullshitter Chris Wright, along with Interior Sec Doug Burgum called on the luxuriously plush carpet by Billionaire donor and Fracking Tycoon Harold Hamm, to explain themselves, and how the allegedly “pro business” administration is kneecapping the industry.
This follows closely after a Federal Reserve of Dallas survey of Oil Executives revealed some brutal takes on the current Administration by their own Robber Baron donors.

Oilprice.com:

In the space of ten days, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has gone from full-throttle shale hype-man to waving the red flag on oil prices. Today’s bombshell? “$50 oil is not sustainable for producers,” Wright said, according to Bloomberg’s Stephen Stapczynski.

But now, with WTI hovering around $62.86 and the sector still licking wounds from a brutal $10-per-barrel drop this month, the messaging has shifted. Hard.

The contradiction is emblematic of where U.S. shale finds itself in 2025: stuck between political slogans and fiscal reality. On one hand, Trump wants “drill, baby, drill” to be more than just campaign nostalgia. Trump also wants consumers to see lower prices at the pump. Meanwhile, Wall Street wants dividends, not drilling binges.

As for US shale players, they just want clear and predictable policies with oil prices that don’t swing $10 per barrel in a 30-day period.

Lease Cancelled for Storied NASA Lab

Space.com:

BOSTON — NASA is canceling the lease for the offices of a branch of the Goddard Space Flight Center in New York that does Earth science research.

In an April 24 email to Goddard employees, Makenzie Lystrup, director of Goddard Space Flight Center, said that the lease the agency has for office space in a Columbia University building will end May 31. Those offices host the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), part of Goddard’s Earth science division.

Lystrup said the decision to terminate the lease was linked to ongoing reviews by the current administration of all government leases, but did not give further details on the decision, including whether it was made by NASA or outside the agency, such as the Department of Government Efficiency.

Planting Trees? It’s not That Simple

Josh Johnson: Lady’s Night on the Blue Origin

Comedian Josh Johnson on the recent high profile women’s flight on Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin spacecraft.
The “Overview Effect” is the psychological change that comes about from seeing the Earth from orbit.
I recently got as close as I’ll ever get in an immersive virtual reality exhibit, “The Infinite”, which was running at the nearby Midland Center for the Arts.

Above, one hour routine, below, short clip.

How “Beautiful Clean Coal” is Raising Costs, and Killing Us

RMI:

The latest research indicates that emissions from uneconomically dispatched coal plants — coal plants that run when cheaper resources are available — cost communities $13–$26 billion in health costs each year. These costs are 13 times greater than what consumers are paying for that electricity, which is close to $1–$2 billion per year. Between 2015 and 2023, communities have had to pay $236 billion in overall added health costs.

Power plants near population centers cause the most damage

The health costs are staggering but they are also location specific. The following map shows the distribution of these health costs at the county level and the corresponding bar graph aggregates these impacts at the regional level. The regions with the highest health impacts are in the areas covered by MISO (serving the Midwest) and PJM (serving the Mid-Atlantic), and the Southeast.

Two factors play a role in high health impacts, (1) emissions when it is uneconomic to run the coal plant and (2) the proximity to dense populations. In regions like MISO and PJM, coal plants are located near densely populated cities. Even though the West has high uneconomic dispatch emissions, the population is more spread out, so health costs are lower, though nearby residents still experience significant effects. On the other hand, PJM has historically had less uneconomic dispatch losses than other areas but has the second highest health cost because those coal plants are located near population centers.

Flood Funding Fiasco is FEMA FAFO

“This is politicization of grant funds and disaster assistance like we’ve never seen before,” a second FEMA official told CNN.

ABC News:

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the state’s entire GOP congressional delegation are urging President Donald Trump to reconsider after the Federal Emergency Management denied the state’s request for federal disaster relief following a series of deadly storms last month.

After severe storms hit the state in mid-March, Sanders applied for disaster relief through FEMA, under what’s known as a major disaster declaration. The request was denied.

Splinter:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new thing is to deny obviously needed support to disaster-struck areas, even where a Republican is in charge. It is producing some… interesting responses.

“Despite today’s notification, I am grateful to the Trump Administration for their strong support for southern West Virginia’s recovery following the February floods,” said West Virginia governor Patrick Morrisey, in a statement on Tuesday. The flooding in question killed multiple people, and the recovery from them has been slow, with officials on the ground still asking for help months later. To be fair to Morrisey, FEMA did previously approve assistance requests for some West Virginia counties — but not a bunch of others.

The “thank you sir may I have another” sort of answer from the governor isn’t playing that well at home. “Instead of fighting to defend you, Governor Morrisey released a statement doing what he knows best—puckering up to the current administration,” said the state House minority Whip Shawn Fluharty.

We told y’all. It’s right there in Project 2025

CBS News: Climate Adaptation Could Mean Eating these Crabs

Warming waters bringing an invasive crab to New England waters.
One solution – eat the bastards.

As Tesla Stumbles, Rivals Rise

Tesla owners getting post-it notes on their car is an example of the unsettling reaction to “lunatic” Musk.

ABC News:

Tesla’s profits fell 71% over the first three months of this year, a company earnings release on Tuesday showed. The company’s performance fell short of analysts’ expectations.

Total revenue decreased by 9% from one year earlier, to $19.3 billion, while revenue derived from car sales plunged 20% over the first three months of 2025 compared to a year ago, the earnings showed.

Bloomberg:

Sales of electric vehicles climbed to 294,000 in the first quarter of the year, a 10.6% increase compared with the year-earlier period. January through March is a relatively slow time for car sales, nevertheless EVs moved off the lot much more frequently than cars and trucks in general. (Total US auto sales were nearly flat in the first quarter).

EV adoption is cruising along in the US, despite a backlash against the industry’s largest player and the Trump administration’s push to wind back clean energy incentives and emissions regulations. Interest is spreading from early-adopters to mainstream consumers, from EV evangelists to the EV-curious. Williams, for example, isn’t concerned about his personal emissions or climate change. He’s just tired of paying for gasoline and oil changes and considers the preponderance of new EVs a better, more reliable form of technology.

Graph of the Week: 2024 CO2 Rise Downplayed by Neutered NOAA

CNN:

The Trump administration quietly released key climate change data last week that has historically been accompanied by expert analysis from government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, CNN has learned.

The lack of context minimized the government’s own findings that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide — the most abundant planet-warming gas in the air — jumped up by a record amount in 2024.

Instead of issuing a public-facing web story with an explanation of the annual measurement, as the agency has at this time of year for about a decade, NOAA public affairs officials scuttled those plans and instead released the new data on X and Facebook on April 14, sources at the agency told CNN. The social media posts link to NOAA’s CO2 data-tracking web page.

The episode, along with recent budget and staffing cuts, illustrates the Trump administration’s resistance to publicly distributing climate change-related data. The posts on X and Facebook, for example, did not call attention to the record-high rate of year-over-year increase in CO2 concentrations.

Energy Secretary’s Gas Company Sputtering in Trump’s “Golden Era”

Liberty Energy 6 month performance as of April 22

Bastard got out and took a cushy Deep State job just in time to escape Trump’s “Golden Era”.

E&E News:

The oil company founded by Energy Secretary Chris Wright reported falling profits Thursday, warning investors that the oil industry faces “storm clouds on the horizon” amid President Donald Trump’s tariff blitz.

Liberty Energy is a barometer of the health of America’s oil patch. The Denver-based company provides fracking services to oil and gas companies, and it is of growing importance today — as the company was founded by Wright and is one of the first oil firms to report its first quarter earnings amid the president’s push to impose tariffs on a broad-range of imported goods.

“As we look forward, of course, there are some storm clouds on the horizon,” Liberty CEO Ron Gusek told financial analysts. “We don’t know if that storm is going to roll in here or not.”