Natural Gas Now Best Picks – May 20, 2023

According to a new study, all of New York City is under pressure due to the weight of its many massive buildings. It’s enough pressure, in fact, that the city is sinking.

In the study, published in Earth’s Future by New England-based scientists investigating sea level rise on coastal cities, the authors found that the “downward pressure exerted by the built environment” of New York City is causing the city to sink up to 2 millimeters per year (and faster in some parts)—a relatively quick sink rate compared to other cities.

With 1.68 trillion pounds of buildings in New York City, that’s a lot of downward pressure.

“New York is emblematic of growing coastal cities all over the world that are observed to be subsiding,” the study authors write, “meaning there is a shared global challenge of mitigation against a growing inundation hazard.”

The increasing risk to sea level rise in New York City, specifically, comes from the sheer weight of the high-rise buildings. The combination of a dropping city and a rising sea increases future flood risks, according to the study.

New York City confirm’s Jefferson’s contention “The mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body,” Its masses of voters, blithely ignorant on the subjects of food production, energy supply and all matters of sell-reliance, have made a political bonfire of the Empire State. So, let the Big Apple sink as it will force them to move and confront reality in the lands across the Hudson that make their lives even possible. Meanwhile, the falsehood that global warming is causing rising oceans that not even Barack Obama could stop and the theology of 15 minute cities will both be exposed for so much silliness.

Hat Tip: R.N.

FERC Hits the Siren on the Coming Catastrophe from Green Energy Grifting

The message could not be louder or any more clear:

On May 4, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission delivered stark warnings to the members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The agency’s acting chairman, Willie Phillips, told the senators, “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.” [emphasis, links added]

FERC Commissioner Mark Christie echoed Phillips’ warning, saying the U.S. electric grid is “heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.”

His colleague, Commissioner James Danly, averred that there is a “looming reliability crisis in our electricity markets.”

The commissioners pointed to several factors for the reliability crisis, including numerous coal plants that are being retired prematurely, insufficient pipeline capacity to assure natural gas can be delivered to power plants, insufficient high-voltage transmission capacity, and distortions in the electricity market caused by massive federal subsidies for weather-dependent renewables.

On the last point, Danly told the senators, “FERC has allowed the markets to fall prey to the price distorting and warping effects of subsidies and public policies that have driven the advancement of large quantities of intermittent renewable resources onto the electric system.”

In his written testimony, Danly went further, saying “Most of these market-distorting forces originate with subsidies — both state and federal — and from public policies that are otherwise designed to promote the deployment of non-dispatchable wind and solar assets or to drive fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.”

Danly continued: “The subsidies available to renewable generators are so lucrative that, when participating in procurement auctions, they are able to offer at a price of zero instead of their actual cost. The market signal thereby created is that these new resources can be built for free, and thus the cost of power is also free. This, of course, is untrue, and the inevitable consequence is market-wide price suppression. The price suppression deprives other market participants of much-needed revenue, leading to the premature retirement of the dispatchable generators which have to offer into the market at their true costs in order to remain viable.”

Yes, even Joe Biden’s FERC leadership is saying the green grifting enabling measures he and John Kerry are pushing on behalf of Larry Fink and other World Economic Forum types are setting us all up for catastrophe. Global warming is nothing but a scam and FERC members are effectively calling it out.

Hat Tip: S.H.

Kids Show Us Western Civilization Has Become One Big Lie

Western Civilization is truly imploding with lie after lie and corruption wherever we look, as this story illustrates:

A Montana judge on Friday said a climate change lawsuit from young people challenging the state’s pro-fossil fuel policies will proceed to trial despite efforts by the state to derail the case.

The upcoming trial in Helena would be the first of its kind in the United States, according to experts in climate law who said the nation is lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of climate litigation.

However, because of prior rulings that limited the scope of the Montana case, a victory for the plaintiffs would not automatically alter the state’s regulation of fossil fuels.

Attorneys for the 16 young plaintiffs, ranging in age from 5 to 22, alleged state officials were trying to avoid the upcoming trial when Republican lawmakers in March repealed the state’s energy policy — one of two laws that the case challenges. The plaintiffs and their backers are hoping to use the two-week trial that’s set to start on June 12 to highlight the dangers of fossil fuel emissions that scientists say are making climate change worse.

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, a Republican, had asked state Judge Kathy Seeley to dismiss any part of the case touching on the cancelled energy policy…

The case was brought in 2020 by attorneys for the environmental group Our Children’s Trust, which since 2010 has filed climate lawsuits in every state on behalf of youth plaintiffs. Many cases — including a previous one in Montana — have been dismissed.The latest Montana lawsuit originally sought in part to repeal a state policy promoting coal, gas and oil development. Scientists say burning those fuels is largely driving climate change by releasing planet-warming carbon dioxide.

An attorney for the plaintiffs, Philip Gregory, told The Associated Press the policy was repealed by the Legislature “not because the state has committed to changing its fossil fuel policy and actions, but because the state seeks to avoid standing trial.”

He said the state’s continued support for fossil fuels violates environmental protections in the Montana Constitution, which says the state “shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and all future generations.”

The lawsuit documents how the consequences of climate change already are being felt by the young plaintiffs, with smoke from worsening wildfires choking the air they breathe and drought drying rivers that sustain agriculture, fish, wildlife and recreation…

But Seeley said the court could declare that the state was in violation of the Constitution, without ordering that anything be done in response.

Sandra Nichols Thiam, an attorney with the Environmental Law Institute, said that could further the case of the failure of governments to address climate change.

“It’s highly significant that this case is going to trial at all,” Thiam said. “Getting all of this information on the record will be a major advancement in climate litigation.”

Consider the following:

1. We have a court seriously entertaining the opinions and contentions of a five-year old plaintiff. While the plaintiffs’ attorney will argue he defends the interests of a child, he is, in reality using the child as a chip and pretending the child has a valid opinion on global warming. This is completely unserious nonsense; a corrupt manipulation of the system.
2. The judge perpetuates the fraud as well by signaling that, even she finds a vocation of the Montana Constitution, she may wells do nothing about it, meaning the whole thing is but an exercise in virtue signaling at public expense.
3. This virtue signaling starts with Our Children’s Trust, which is yet another tax-exempt outfit abusing the system to do politics. It has been funded by the elitist self-serving Rockefeller Brothers Fund and is apparently allied with Strike With Us, which has “put forward a list of political demands that include the Green New Deal, halting all fossil fuel extraction and planned infrastructure projects, and for lawmakers to introduce legislation protecting the so-called ‘Rights of Nature.’”
4. Flush with ruling class money, Our Children’s Trust is a serial litigator that has been pursing dozens of similar cases on the theory that sooner or later some judge somewhere will be stupid enough to entertain it.
5. Republicans, rather than stand their ground, naively and predictably tried to make the issue go away by playing stupid games.
6. The entire premise of the lawsuit is founded on junk science from modeling that has never successfully predicted anything.

Such is Western Civilization today; a totally corrupt civil society managed by special interests, grifters and the world’s biggest liars. The truth has long left it.

Hat Tip: D.S.