Month: June 2025

Above, Bloomberg report on oil prices is a good bookend for my column of this week, here.

It’s a peculiar situation in that so many segments of Trump’s base supported him with the idea that he was definitely NOT going to do the things that he was promising to do – and now they’re saying “We didn’t vote for this!”.
Go figure.

As I’ve discussed – there is a fundamental mismatch between MAGA’s goal of Drill Baby Drill, lower gasoline prices, and the interests of the Oil oligarchs who elected Trump, hoping to make more money. These things do not go together.

Market Watch:

Major global oil producers in the group known as OPEC+ did exactly what U.S. President Donald Trump has been asking for — and American oil producers may be the ones to soon pay the price.

The group, led by Saudi Arabia, announced on May 3 that it would accelerate its plans to boost output in June for a second month in a row, prompting a drop in oil prices to their lowest level in more than four years.

The group’s decision has triggered a supply surge, despite crude oil sliding to the low-$60s per barrel — and U.S. shale producers are “feeling the squeeze,” economists at Allianz Research, led by Ludovic Subran, wrote in a note Friday.

OPEC+ said it would increase production in June by 411,000 barrels per day. That would follow an increase of the same amount for the month of May. The monthly increases are three times larger than the group had originally planned under its phaseout of 2024 voluntary production cuts by eight of its members that had totaled 2.2 million barrels a day.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Trump Promised Low Oil Prices. That Will Gut the Industry that Elected Him”

CNN:

An aging coal power plant that was supposed to shutter last week will run throughout the summer at the order of President Donald Trump’s Energy Sec. Chris Wright, a decision that could cost Midwest energy customers tens of millions of dollars.

The last-minute federal order to keep the J.H. Campbell plant operating came as a surprise to Michigan officials, including the head of the state’s Public Service Commission, given it was at the tail end of a multi-year retirement process that was approved in 2022.

“The grid operator hadn’t asked for this, the utility hadn’t asked for this, we as the state hadn’t asked for this,” said Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission. “We certainly didn’t have any conversations with the (Energy Department) in advance of the order, or since.”

Wright’s May 23 emergency order cited concerns the Midwest could face a summer electricity shortage due to a lack of available coal, gas and nuclear plants that can provide stable baseload power. But Consumers Energy, the utility that owns the coal plant, told CNN in an email it already purchased another natural gas-fired power plant to carry the load when the coal plant went offline.

Scripps said the cost to keep the over-60-year-old plant operating, even for 90 days, will be high, and customers in 15 states will foot the bill.

“I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that we’re looking at multiple tens of millions of dollars at the low end,” Scripps said. “I think there’s a range between there and the high end of getting close to $100 million.”

Continue reading “Trump Order Pumps Pollution and Dumps Ratepayers”

I had to wait for a while to interview John Johannsen. Although over 90, he had work to do clearing some trees along a ditch line, which took a few weeks.

A former county commissioner in Montcalm County, Michigan, Johannsen’s responsibility was to review clean energy ordinances that the several townships were writing with “poison pills” to keep out clean energy. John knew then that those ordinances were illegal – and that quandary lead the State of Michigan to pass new legislation, which gave landowners and clean energy companies another pathway, through the Public Service Commission in Lansing, to get permitted.

Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, along with Michigan, all now have some form of State siting process for clean energy.

One more from John, below.

Continue reading “County Commissioner: Clean Energy Gives Farmers and Communities More Options”

Midland Daily News (gift link):

President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill has passed the U.S. House, but it will be weeks before the Senate acts on any changes.

One thing is clear, the administration and the Republican Congress are aggressively working to sabotage clean energy, ignoring science and the urgency of climate change, and plunging ahead to accelerate fossil fuel extraction and attendant pollution.

You might think this would mean champagne and celebration among oil and gas tycoons — but you would be wrong.

In an anonymous survey conducted by the Dallas Federal Reserve in March, executives expressed disappointment and pessimism about the industry and the administration.

Among the comments from the oil barons:

• “Trade and tariff uncertainty are making planning difficult.”
• “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets.”
• “I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career.”
• One major shale oil player told Bloomberg News that the industry could be facing “a bloodbath.”

Continue reading “Column: “Drill Baby Drill” Backfires – Fossil Industry in Chaos”

A friend vacationing in Northern Michigan, “God’s Country” near Pellston, is suffering with choking wild fire smoke from Canada.

Air quality alert up there today with an index of 125 – “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups”.

Thank Exxon, and the willing collaborators who are willing to leave this, and much, much worse – to their children, and the next thousand generations of human beings.

New York Times:

Wildfire smoke from Canada and plumes of desert dust from the Sahara are smothering large portions of the United States, creating hazy skies and hazardous air quality from the Northeast to the Southeast.

The National Weather Service issued air quality alerts on Wednesday for New York City and many surrounding areas, including New Jersey and most of Connecticut. Officials said that those more sensitive to air pollution should limit going outdoors and watch for respiratory symptoms from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Continue reading “Choking in God’s Country”

While the cyber truck is aggressively ugly to send some kind of dysfunctional Tech Bro message, this new postal vehicle’s lovably awkward design serves the needs of its operators, and surrounding human beings.

North Carolina Governor Josh Stein is the guest.

Josh Stein in USAToday:

First of all, we need to get FEMA started right away on the most important work after a storm: permanently rebuilding homes and businesses. Right now, FEMA focuses on temporary housing solutions after a storm hits, while states wait on HUD, usually for well over a year, to fund permanent housing repairs. This costs the federal government thousands of dollars in temporary housing payments and makes homeowners wait even longer to move back home.

Let’s shrink that time and cost by charging FEMA with getting people’s homes permanently repaired so they can move back in faster. That’d be better for both homeowners and taxpayers.

Second, applying for federal help is way too complicated. People have to fill out complex applications for support from FEMA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Small Business Administration – all after experiencing a life-changing disaster. We could make FEMA a single front door to people who need a federal disaster response, using a single application form. FEMA experts can then work with disaster survivors to get them the support they need.

Continue reading “Colbert: North Carolina Still Reeling as Trump Targets FEMA”

As Measles spreads, Polio warming up on deck, a new Dark Ages in the offing.

New York Times:

Who could argue with setting a “gold standard” for science?

Actually, thousands of scientists from around the country.

President Trump has ordered what he called a restoration of a “gold standard science” across federal agencies and national laboratories.

But the May 23 executive order puts his political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to “correct scientific information,” control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.

It has prompted an open letter, signed by more than 6,000 scientists, academics, physicians, researchers and others, saying the order would destroy scientific independence. Agency heads have 30 days to comply with the order.

Continue reading “Trump’s “Correct Science Information” Echoes Inquisition, Soviets, and Nazis”

John Morales is one of the most honored and respected of US TV meteorologists, having been a hurricane expert in South Florida for more than 40 years.
Here, he acquaints his audience with the impacts of Project 2025’s systematic destruction of US science and technological leadership.

Below, from my own interview with John a few years ago on Miami’s own “carbon tax” — expensive, tax funded sea walls to keep out fossil fuel caused sea level rise.

The clean energy transition is about a lot of things, but not incidentally, national security.

Noahpinion:

It’s not clear how many Russian bombers the Ukrainians managed to take out, but everyone agrees it was a significant chunk of Russia’s bomber force. And these magnificent, enormously expensive, rare, highly prized machines of destruction were taken out battery-powered toys.

Again, the world has changed, almost overnight. 

The American military is much better than the Russian military, but it’s ultimately not that different — it’s built around a bunch of big, expensive, heavy “platforms” like aircraft carriers, jet planes, and tanks. Each F-22 stealth fighter, still widely considered the best plane in the sky, cost about $350 million to build. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion each. An M1A1 Abrams tank costs more than $4 million, and so on. 

That’s the amount of value that will be destroyed every time a cheap plastic battery-powered Chinese drone takes out an expensive piece of American hardware in a war over Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or Xi Jinping waking up in a bad mood — not including, of course, the lives of whatever Americans happen to be inside the hardware when it gets destroyed. Except the true value lost will be much higher, since — like Japan in World War 2, or Russia now — the U.S. now has extremely limited defense manufacturing capacity, and thus won’t be able to easily replace what it loses. 

As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes.

Continue reading “What Ukraine’s Drone Attack Should Tell us About Clean Energy”