Current and former candidates for the Republican nomination for the Office of President of the United States fall into two distinct groups. See if you can guess what distinguishes Column A candidates from those in Column B.
Column A
Column B
I haven’t seen this much crying since the last episode of The Biggest Loser.
On Wednesday of the week just past, the Department of the Interior conducted the first sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico since BP’s Macondo oil spill. Measured by the statistics touted in Interior’s press release, the sale would appear to be a rousing success:
NEW ORLEANS – The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced that its Western Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale 218, held [December 14] in New Orleans, attracted $337,688,341 in high bids and included 20 companies submitting 241 bids on 191 tracts comprising over a million acres offshore Texas. The sum of all bids received totaled $712,725,998. This announcement is consistent with steps President Obama announced in May 2011 to expand domestic oil and gas production safely and responsibly.
By comparison, the previous Western Gulf sale, Sale 210 in August 2009, saw high bids totaling $115 million for 164 tracts. More money for more tracts: what’s not to like?
A detailed look at the leasing history, however, reveals a different story. While deepwater remains active, the shallow water Gulf saw little leasing action. Many of the shallow water bidders from recent sales stayed home for Sale 218. Continue reading
From the venerable New York Times:
Think of the public as a consumer in a grocery aisle passing a box of brownie mix, the consultant said. The brownie on the front is so delectable that she can imagine the taste and the smell. So delicious, in fact, that she pays no attention to the back of the box listing the ruinous fat and calorie content.
Environmentalists, the consultant said, were always yammering to consumers about the back of the box. And, guess what? Nobody wants to listen.
Yes. Environmentalists are the same people who campaign to replace Happy Meal fries with celery sticks.
Another day, another distorted and fear-mongering attack from the Old Grey Lady on America’s natural gas industry.
Headline: Add Quakes to Rumblings Over Gas Rush
(originally published under the headline “Some Blame Hydraulic Fracturing For Earthquake Epidemic”; link may require subscription/signup)
Nine quakes in eight months in a seismically inactive area is unusual. But Ohio seismologists found another surprise when they plotted the quakes’ epicenters: most coincided with the location of a 9,000-foot well in an industrial lot along the Mahoning River, just down the hill from Mr. Moritz’s neighborhood and two miles from downtown Youngstown.
At the well, a local company has been disposing of brine and other liquids from natural gas wells across the border in Pennsylvania — millions of gallons of waste from the process called hydraulic fracturing that is used to unlock the gas from shale rock.
Here, the Times conflates two dissimilar processes in an attempt to create fear and worry about natural gas. Follow below the jump, and allow me to explain. Continue reading
On Monday, Canada’s Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that his country would exercise its legal option to end its participation in the Kyoto Protocols. The Protocols were a United Nations initiative, adopted in 1997 with a goal of rolling carbon dioxide emissions back to 1990 levels in an effort to stop Global Warming. Failure to meet those goals would incur stiff monetary penalties.
Canada will not meet its 2012 goal, so as a treaty member it would incur penalties of $14 billion in 2012, or $1,600 for every Canadian family. Kent characterized Kyoto as an “impediment”, citing the absence of the world’s two largest carbon-emitting countries, China and the U.S., from its membership.
(The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocols. China was exempt from the penalties. China’s carbon emissions are now highest in the world, eclipsing U.S. emissions by nearly 50% in 2008.)
Canada Withdraws From Kyoto Protocol
(NYT link may require subscription/registration.)
“To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of either removing every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads or closing down the entire farming and agriculture sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada,” Kent said. [Emphasis added.]
To quote Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber, “So you’re saying there’s a chance!”
Continue reading
Quote #1: “The UN plan will shift wealth from the first world’s poor to the third world’s rich without making any difference in climate control.”
Quote #2: “Anything coming out of the mouths of Maldives officials related to climate, CO2, or sea level is pure bulls**t.”
Iron Eyes Cody cried at the sight of polluted waters and skies in a famous public service announcement, first aired in 1971. Old Iron Eyes may have been a faux-Indian, but his message resonated with people. The Crying Indian PSA was one of the most successful ever.
It resonated because it was true. In the early ’70s, the environment was a mess. Urban skies were noticeably tinged in sepia/grey. Rivers and streams were often clogged with discarded debris and fouled with chemical sludge.
April 1970 saw the first Earth Day. In December of the same year, the Environmental Protection Agency was born.
The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, with the Clean Water Act to follow in 1972. 1973 brought the Endangered Species Act.
Gradually, the environment improved. The bald eagle and the American alligator came back from the brink of extinction. Air quality improved, there was less litter, and the phosphate foam disappeared from streams.
And, rightly or wrongly, EPA got the credit. As the hippies of my generation greyed, they remembered their Earth Day Groove-In fondly.
Fast forward to 2011: the EPA has become a stifling, job-killing bureaucracy. What happened? When did the EPA jump the shark? Continue reading
Blown away: gales wreck wind turbines as Scottish storm wreck havoc
Gusts of up to 165mph were recorded in the Cairngorms in Aberdeenshire as gales brought travel chaos to Scotland and the North.
A 100-metre tall wind turbine burst into flames in North Ayrshire, and in Coldingham in the Scottish Borders, a turbine crashed to the ground yards from a road.
The £2 million turbine in North Ayrshire was not believed to have been spinning at the time. Fires can occur if extreme wind loosens or breaks electrical connections, whether turbines are rotating or not.
On Tuesday, the Institute for Energy Research issued its North American Energy Inventory (.pdf link), a report which documents the government’s own estimates of oil, natural gas and coal resources for the U.S., Canada and Mexico. (The IER is a non-profit, non-partisan 501(c)3 organization that is dedicated to advancing America’s supply using free market principles.)
In a nutshell, North America contains a vast bounty of energy sources in the form of oil, natural gas and coal. Reports that we are “running out” of energy sources use semantics and terminology to play with the facts. Simply put, we have chosen not to exploit potential sources close to home, finding it more expedient or convenient to depend on faraway sources for our energy.
Based on the ongoing tangible successes in North Dakota and Pennsylvania, one would think that the jobs/growth potential presented by aggressive energy development would tantalize any politician who is truly interested in helping the economy. One would think.
The following video will give you a quick run-down of the key points of the report, but I would encourage anyone interested to download and read the full report. It is extremely well-documented and although it is chock-full of facts and figures, I found it to be an easy read.
Maley's Energy Blog 