Tag: green energy

Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity prices

The Interior Department has made another illegal agreement with a gas company to drop development of cheap and clean offshore wind and instead focus on dirty, expensive gas, giving that company the better part of a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money while starving Americans of much-needed electricity.

Wind is one of the cheaper forms of energy we have available to us, and also has the benefit of not causing pollution. Pollution from fossil fuels harms human health, causing millions of deaths and childhood asthma cases and costing trillions of dollars per year globally.

It’s also an important resource at a time when American electricity demand is increasing, leading to higher energy bills as the proliferation of data centers squeezes energy availability.

However, the Department of the Interior, the government agency responsible for usage of public lands including oceans, is currently occupied by Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel advocate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the fossil fuel industry.

As such, Burgum has done all he can to stop cheap and clean energy projects and to try to benefit dirty and expensive fossil fuels, to the detriment of Americans’ lungs and electricity bills.

Interior has cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new power generation projects and halt existing constructions, and tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking expensive, dirty projects with “concierge” service). His party suggested drastic new fees on wind farms, far in excess of the inspection fees on dirty oil projects.

But many of those efforts have been swiftly reversed by courts due to their illegality.

This hasn’t stopped Burgum from coming up with other illegal ideas to starve Americans of the energy they need.

The latest trend has involved a pattern of bribes given to oil companies from public coffers to convince them to stop development of offshore wind and instead refocus on gas projects.

It started with a nearly-$1B bribe from taxpayer coffers to French oil giant TotalEnergies in March, basically buying out its offshore wind lease in exchange for a commitment to put that money into fossil fuel projects.

Interior made up a fake national security reason for this agreement, even though it is clear that domestic sources of power are far more secure than the kind that start intractable global conflicts. Courts have previously ruled that there are no national security concerns around wind power and Dept. of Defense had signed off on these projects.

But it didn’t stop there. Interior has continued with similar near-billion-dollar bribes, with an $885 million deal in April, and another near-billion-dollar deal today.

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EU Climate Scam Exposed: IPCC Admits Doomsday Scenario Was “Implausible” Garbage – But Brussels Refuses to Scrap a SINGLE Regulation Built on the Lie

The House of the Great Climate Scam is collapsing. The United Nations’ own climate priesthood has finally admitted what skeptics have screamed for years: their favorite apocalyptic scenario, RCP8.5 – the one predicting civilization-ending warming, floods, fires, and famines unless we destroy our economies with Green New Deals – is “implausible.” Fake. Junk science sold as gospel.

But here’s the real bombshell the fake news won’t touch: The European Union, that bloated bureaucratic beast strangling its citizens with Net Zero madness, hasn’t pulled even one document, “scientific” report, regulation, or taxpayer-funded scare tactic based on this now-discredited fairy tale. Not a single one. Trillions in subsidies, destroyed industries, skyrocketing energy bills, and farmers rioting in the streets – all propped up on a foundation of lies.

The Big Lie That Powered the Green Grift

For over a decade, EU apparatchiks at the European Environment Agency (EEA), Joint Research Centre (JRC), Climate-ADAPT, and even the European Central Bank leaned hard on RCP8.5 as their “high-emissions” nightmare fuel. Sea-level rise maps? RCP8.5. Extreme fire weather? RCP8.5. Heatwaves, droughts, flooding Armageddon? All RCP8.5. The PESETA projects hammering agriculture, coasts, energy, and tourism? Straight out of the RCP8.5 playbook. Bank stress tests? You guessed it.

These “experts” hyped impossible futures – all to justify the European Green Deal, Fit for 55 insanity, carbon taxes, EV mandates, heating bans, and deindustrialization that’s gutting Europe. Roger Pielke Jr. nailed it: These scenarios produced “impossible futures” that dominated policy anyway.

Now the IPCC’s scenario team is quietly retiring RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 for the next assessment round because it’s detached from reality. Even they can’t pretend anymore.

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Polish Minister Slams ‘Insane’ EU Climate Policies

EU’s ‘green’ agenda is a recipe for disaster.

You know the suicidal environmental policies emanating from Brussels are about to be ditched when even members of the Polish liberal government led by PM Donald Tusk are openly criticizing it.

Tusk was elected with a clear mandate to bring Poland closer to the EU after the conservatives from PiS had bucked the Globalist agenda on so many fronts.

But it turns out that the European Union has become so radicalized that even Tusk’s liberals can’t stomach it anymore.

EU cheerleaders from POLITICO hosted an Energy & Climate Forum in Brussels today, where Secretary of State Krzysztof Bolesta said the EU was ‘moving too fast’ in its emissions cut plans targeting heavy industry.

Politico reported:

“The speed at which the EU is pushing its industry to cut carbon emissions under the Emissions Trading System is ‘insane’, according to Poland’s deputy climate and environment minister [Krzysztof Bolesta].

[…] ‘This is insane. And it’s not one industry branch, it’s quite a few. So, for me, this topic is actually something that we need to change’, he said, adding the current trajectory would hand the EU ‘the moral high ground, but we’ll have no industry’.”

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California Program Gives Free Solar Panels to Illegal Aliens

A California climate change program has spent $49 million to hand out free solar panels to illegal migrant homeowners, a shocking report revealed.

The Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program is one of the state’s many climate change initiatives, and this one is aimed at farm workers — including those who are in the U.S. illegally, according to City Journal researcher and writer Christopher Rufo and his co-author Austen Hufford.

The program is part of California’s multibillion-dollar cap-and-trade system which “taxes carbon producers and redistributes approximately $3 billion per year to energy programs and left-wing social causes — all under the banner of fighting ‘climate change,’” the two wrote.

Rufo and Hufford found that California has spent about $49 million on the program to hand out free solar panels to recipients, some of whom are illegal aliens.

The company that runs the program is called Nonprofit La Cooperativa Campesina de California. La Cooperativa then partnered with MAROMA Energy Services, which describes itself as “minority owned.” These two have contracted out the installations of said solar panels.

As Rufo and Hufford note:

These organizations have heavily advertised the program to California’s nearly 900,000 agricultural workers, half to three-quarters of whom are illegal immigrants. In its official documentation, California’s Department of Community Services and Development acknowledges that non-citizens are eligible for the program and that they even accept identification from foreign governments.

In a Spanish-language radio broadcast, Natalie Velores, a program manager for MAROMA, confirmed that participants do not need “legal status” in the United States and can use a matrìcula consular, a common form of identification that the Mexican consulate provides to migrants who have crossed the border, to apply.

These companies confirmed that legal citizenship is not required to be afforded the free solar panels.

The providers also mounted an extensive information drive by sending representatives out into the farm worker communities across the state to let them know how to get their free solar power systems.

But, while a ton of cash has been spent on this program, only 2,000 families have been the recipients of the free solar systems to date.

“That means the State of California has allocated roughly $23,000 per household for its program to provide free solar panels, refrigerators, and other services — a number that raises serious concerns about financial accountability,” Ruffo and Hufford wrote.

Finally, it appears that at least one politically connected activist is at the center of these groups that are reaping millions from the state. The man, Mauricio Blanco, “worked as a project manager for La Cooperativa Campesina de California, which has been awarded at least $10.7 million by the state; is currently listed as an executive of MAROMA Energy Services, which has been granted nearly $34 million from La Cooperativa for ‘weatherization’ services since 2017; and is CEO of John Harrison Contracting, a firm that appears to have done much of the solar installation work.”

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Green Retreat: California Eases Carbon-Market Costs For Oil Refiners

California’s green-energy regime has hollowed out the state’s refining and oil industry, leaving motorists paying the highest gasoline prices in the country. AAA data show the state gasoline average now north of $6 per gallon, compared with a national average of roughly $4.36 as of Saturday morning.

The result of political blowback in California over unaffordable gasoline and diesel prices at the pump is a retreat from left-wing climate policies that could offer relief to motorists, Bloomberg News reports.

On Friday, the California Air Resources Board voted to create up to $4 billion in free carbon allowances for oil refiners and other industrial polluters. This will help them more easily comply with the state’s greenhouse gas limits under the Cap-and-Invest program.

Earlier this year, CARB proposed further tightening emission limits by removing 118 million allowances from the market to keep the state on track to meet its 2030 climate targets. For refiners, that would mean further reducing emissions or paying more for allowances, with mounting costs already pushing them out of the state. 

The move will help contain gasoline prices at the pump and prevent refiners from leaving the state, especially after energy disruptions in the Gulf region pushed California gasoline prices above $6.

Take US oil giant Chevron, which recently warned that California is careening toward an energy crisis because of the Iran war, and that the company may quit refining oil in the state unless officials roll back taxes and regulations.

California is highly exposed to the disruption rippling through commodity markets, as it imports about 20% of its refined fuels from Asia. But as extensively discussed here, oil product shipments from China, South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere have been disrupted, leaving Asian nations struggling to meet domestic demand, let alone export to California.

Chevron’s oil refining head Andy Walz recently warned that the potential for fuel shortages in California is his worst fear: “We have refineries in Asia that are having to cut crude, and so they’re going to make fewer products,” Walz said in an interview in late March. “What if San Francisco doesn’t have the jet fuel it needs? Or Los Angeles? Or maybe gasoline?”

Since California is disconnected from the U.S. fuel-making centers of Texas and Louisiana, it is essentially an energy island.

Walz noted in March, days after the U.S.-Iran conflict broke out, that tightening California’s cap-and-invest program “made no sense when you look at global tensions right now.”

California’s green regime has produced nothing but disastrous consequences for households, making fuel prices the highest in the nation:

There are national security implications stemming from the green regime, especially for the state with the nation’s largest concentration of military personnel and national security activity.

The retreat on climate targets by state regulators is a win for consumers and the nation, as green is nothing more than inflationary and degrowth, hitting working-poor households the hardest with unaffordable gasoline and diesel prices at the pump.

Elsewhere, the US-Iran conflict has forced left-wing states such as New York, Massachusetts, and others to dial back unrealistic climate ambitions.

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US Faces Electricity Shortages Heading Into Summer, as Grid Operators Warn of Limits of Green Energy

With more than 25 years of executive experience in the utility industry, people tend to listen when MISO CEO John Bear talks about energy.

And the message he’s sending about electricity shortages as Americans head into summer is clear.

“I am concerned about it,” Bear told The Wall Street Journal in an article exploring why power-grid operators are worried that electricity supplies may struggle to keep up with rising energy demands.

Bear is not some lone prophet foretelling doom.

From California to Texas to the Midwest, the Journal spoke to grid operators warning that conditions are ripe for outages, as plants pivot to new renewable energy sources.

These concerns are not unfounded. Evidence shows America’s power grid is increasingly unreliable and struggling to keep up with demand, and operators are bracing for rolling blackouts that could be arriving as soon as this year during heat waves and cold snaps.

‘Quitting’ Fossil Fuels?

Politicians and policy wonks often speak of “quitting” fossil fuels, as if they are a filthy habit or a narcotic like crack. But the reality is humans could not survive without coal, natural gas, and oil.

Despite their impressive growth, renewable energy sources—solar, wind, hydro and biomass combined—account for just 20 percent of US utility-scale electricity generation.

Fossil fuels, on the other hand, provide 61 percent of utility-scale electricity generation in the country. They heat and cool our homes, run our appliances, and feed the Teslas we drive.

While there is a great deal of excitement around the potential of renewable energy, one cannot simply replace a coal plant with a wind or solar farm and expect things will go just fine. These are intermittent energy sources, for one, but their construction and expansion has also been hit with delays for a variety of reasons, including inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.

“Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue,” Brad Jones, interim chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told the Journal. “We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability.”

The shift from filthy coal to clean energy has not always been smooth.

Last year, for example, Hawaiian officials were stunned to learn the coal plant they had killed had been replaced with a massive battery powered by oil, which one public official described as “going from cigarettes to crack.”

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Britain Desperate for Oil

Britain is now discovering you cannot dismantle your industrial and energy base, wage war on domestic production, impose endless climate regulations, and still expect to maintain a functioning economy. Reality eventually arrives no matter how many politicians attempt to legislate against it.

The UK is quietly loosening oil and gas restrictions because the country is becoming desperate. After years of aggressively pushing Net Zero policies, discouraging North Sea investment, raising windfall taxes on producers, and pretending renewable systems alone could carry an advanced industrial economy, Britain is being forced to confront the simple reality that energy shortages destroy economies from the inside out.

The North Sea once represented one of the great strategic advantages for Britain. During the peak years around the late 1990s and early 2000s, the UK was producing nearly 4.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. That production has collapsed by more than 70% over the past two decades. At the same time, Britain became increasingly dependent on imported energy while shutting down domestic capacity.

What politicians never understand is that energy is not just another sector of the economy. Energy is the economy. Every industry depends upon it. Food production depends on it. Transportation depends on it. Manufacturing depends on it. Once energy prices rise high enough, inflation spreads through the entire system because energy sits underneath every layer of economic activity.

Britain now faces exactly the trap I warned Europe was heading toward. Deindustrialization combined with rising debt and declining living standards. Manufacturing weakens, capital flees, energy costs rise, and governments respond with more taxation and regulation which only accelerates the collapse further. This becomes a vicious cycle.

The desperation is now becoming obvious. The UK government is reportedly reconsidering restrictions on North Sea drilling and attempting to stabilize investment conditions because energy firms were already beginning to abandon projects entirely. The punitive tax structure imposed on producers created massive uncertainty while investment dried up. Companies simply stopped committing capital because governments kept changing the rules in the middle of the game.

Europe is in a depressionary phase while capital continues moving toward countries with stronger energy and industrial positions. You cannot build an economy entirely on financial services, bureaucracy, migration, and government spending while destroying the productive base underneath society itself.

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How China Used the Green Scam to Win American Taxpayer Dollars

Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who also served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, joined The Patriot Perspective to discuss his new book, China’s War on Faith, and delivered a blunt warning about the threat Communist China poses to the United States, religious freedom, and Western civilization.

Brownback, who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom during President Donald Trump’s first term, called the Chinese Communist Party “the most significant adversary we’ve faced in the last century.”

That warning should shape how Americans view one of the greatest policy scams of the modern era: the so-called green transition.

For years, the American people were told that solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery mandates were necessary to save the planet. Politicians framed green energy as a moral cause, not just an economic program. Anyone who questioned the agenda was accused of denying science, opposing progress, or standing in the way of a cleaner future.

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UK State Green Energy Project Refuses to Rule Out Use of Slave Labour

The left-wing Labour Party government in Britain has refused to confirm that it is not using slave labour in its publicly owned green energy project, despite having passed a law last year committing to do so.

The push in the UK to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with supposedly cleaner forms of energy may be coming with a hefty human toll, with it being unclear if the state-funded Great British Energy (GBE) project is using forced labour in places like China to prop up its so-called renewable sector.

Following pressure from campaigners, after initially baulking at the idea of banning slavery from its key green initiative, the Labour government adopted legislation last year committing GB Energy to ensure its “supply chains are free of forced labour” as it seeks to build a “new energy infrastructure using ethical supply chains.”

However, this week, the government appeared to admit the reality that it is nearly impossible to guarantee that any large-scale purchases of solar panels and other green products are free from slave labour, given the dominance that Communist China has over the industry.

A government spokesman said, per the Daily Mail, that GB Energy has “strict procurement controls in place” for solar panels, but admitted that it could not make any guarantees, only saying that the measures will look to root out forced labour from supply chains “as far as possible”.

The tacit admission of continued reliance on slavery sparked backlash, with Britain’s independent anti-slavery commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, saying: “The race to net zero should never come at the expense of people forced to produce goods in horrendous conditions, working endless hours and under constant surveillance.

“The Government promised taxpayers their money would not fund products linked to forced labour. They should not abandon that commitment.”

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Countries Plan “Fossil Fuel” Phaseout at Colombia Conference

Nearly 60 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, on April 24-29 to participate in the first Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, where they agreed to take steps to phase out so-called fossil fuels.

The conference, organized by Colombia and the Netherlands, was intended to facilitate a hastened phaseout of fossil fuels by countries already committed to implementing a radical climate agenda. A second conference is planned for next year in Tuvalu.

The Guardian reports:

Governments have been asked to develop national “roadmaps” setting out how they will end the production and use of fossil fuels, after a landmark climate meeting involving nearly 60 countries.

The voluntary plans will form the bedrock of a new initiative to wean the world off coal, oil and gas, the focus of two days of intensive talks in Colombia this week….

Colombia published a draft roadmap during the conference and set up a scientific panel to advise countries. On Tuesday, France became the first developed country to release a national roadmap to phase out fossil fuels….

While countries already publish climate plans under the Paris agreement, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), [Colombian Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Irene Vélez Torres] said these were not sufficient to serve as roadmaps because they addressed only countries’ domestic greenhouse gas emissions, allowing fossil fuel producers to sidestep the climate impact of their exports.

The Gulf states and countries such as China, Russia, and India did not attend, while the United States was not invited. A list of participating countries, which includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, can be found here. The European Union also participated.

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