Natural Gas Now Best Picks – April 1, 2023
Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.
This week; the horror of Congo mining to produce EVs, the Inflation Explosion Act, Black Rock withdrawals and German resistance.
Look for these stories below, including links to the original articles!
Electric vehicles depend upon minerals we are increasingly prevented from mining here in the U.S.. The minerals instead get produced in places of horror for children such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] is the world’s biggest producer of cobalt, essential to the lithium-ion batteries that power cellphones, computers, EVs, and a host of devices. The silvery metal is stained with the blood of Congolese slaves, many of them children. Siddharth Kara, an expert on human trafficking and slavery, hopes to wake up the world to this 21st century horror with Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, his latest book, published in January….
The exploitation of the Congolese is an enormous travesty. Multinational corporations earn untold billions from selling cobalt, while the Congolese live in extreme poverty, suffering abuse, slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, and the poisoning of their soil and water. Children as young as six years work in mines to augment family income. Miners earn $1-2 daily. More than 75% of Congolese live in poverty, 33% suffer from food insecurity; only 26% have access to clean water, 9% to electricity. Life expectancy is 60.7 years; in child mortality, the DCR ranks 11th from the bottom of the list.
Demand for cobalt is expected to grow 500% by 2050, and with the world fixated on electronic devices, the horrific injustice in Congo will continue. Miners, including children, work without protective equipment, crouched underground for hours breathing toxin-suffused air. Medical care is inadequate. Tunnel collapses and floodings are common; there is no counting the dead…
They in turn sell to industrial processors, joint ventures between Congo’s state-owned mining corporation and CCP-linked and -funded Chinese companies. The latter have gained advantage with low-ball bids, bringing in their own cheap labor, securing plants with military force, and operating without human rights considerations. The semi-refined cobalt they churn out is taken to commercial-grade refineries in China, since Congo cannot supply the electricity needed for the process. It was thus that in 2021, China produced 75% of the world’s refined cobalt.
Virtually selling the country to the Chinese, Congo’s leaders have allowed them to run riot like the earlier colonizers who conquered with arms. This time, the ravaging of the land and its people is worse. With hardly any environmental rules enforced, mining has killed agriculture, caused severe air and water pollution, and increased exposure to radioactivity. Armed guards patrol the cratered landscape, inflicting gratuitous violence and sexual assault to subdue the populace. They are joined in this by Congolese soldiers, who are known to run child labor groups, pocketing the wages and the proceeds of ore sales.
And, who are the primary beneficiaries of all this? Green energy grifters, virtue signaling EV owners and the Chinese Communist Party.
Hat Tip: R.N.
The Inflation Reduction Act Guarantees Inflation for Decades!
Alex Epstein demonstrates the humongous lie that is Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act IRA), which will assure unending inflation, massive subsidization of green energy grifters and destroy our electrical grid.
If the “green” sources the IRA was subsidizing were actually on the verge of being cheap, they wouldn’t need to be subsidized.
If the IRA was trying to make low-carbon energy cheap—which is the only way to lower global CO2 emissions long-term—it would have focused on liberating low-carbon energy production from the anti-development “green” regulations that hold back nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas.
The real goal of the IRA was to pretend to do something about global CO2 so as to wildly enrich “green” companies that are unable/unwilling to compete on a real market—above all solar/wind companies, who successfully lobby to be paid a (subsidized) premium for unreliable power!
Given that the IRA’s promise of $400 billion in subsidies leading to lower costs was a lie, it should be no surprise that the $400 billion number is a total lie.
The IRA’s cost is limitless:
1. It lasts a limitless number of years
2. It costs limitless dollars per year
3. It does limitless harm to our grid.
Do not, under any circumstances, forget that Joe Manchin voted for this garbage piece of legislation and sold out labor and West Virginia in the process. Natural gas is the solution, not green energy and Manchin knows it.
Hat Tip: D.B.
From the “It Couldn’t Happen to A Nicer Fellow” Files
Well, this is what happens when, for the sake of power, you attempt to tell everyone to dump natural gas and other fossil fuels, Larry Fink:
“If BlackRock Inc.’s largest ESG-labeled exchange-traded fund is a bellwether for the sustainable investing industry, it’s fair to say the US sector may be in for a bumpy ride.”
The assets of the iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA ETF (ticker ESGU) have dropped to $13.8 billion from a high of $25 billion as recently as a year ago. The slump occurred as shareholders pulled money from the ETF, but also as its investment performance trailed benchmark indexes, including the S&P 500, over the past two years.
A recent $4 billion withdrawal from ESGU shows “the concentration risk” that exists in this sector, said Shaheen Contractor, senior ESG strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence.
All so completely predictable but the lure of being the big guy at the World Economic Forum and ruling the globe from a BlackRock perch was too strong it appears.
Hat Tip: S.H.
The European Commission has drafted a plan to allow sales of new cars with internal combustion engines after 2035 if they run only on climate neutral e-fuels, as it tries to resolve a spat with Germany over moves to phase out combustion engine cars.
The draft proposal, seen by Reuters on Tuesday, suggests creating a new type of vehicle category in the European Union for cars that can only run on carbon neutral fuels.
Such vehicles would have to use technology that would prevent them from driving if other fuels are used, the draft said.
The proposal could offer a route for carmakers to keep selling combustion engine vehicles after 2035, the date when a planned EU law is set to ban the sale of new CO2-emitting cars…
ARD German TV reports on a study by the Potsdam institute for climate impact research, which reveals the utter lack of reality in the German debate about e-fuels. Even in the best-case scenario, Germany will struggle to get enough e-fuels to meet its indispensable demand, from shipping, air transport and the chemical industry. These will all still require liquid hydrocarbons as their energy source. In other words, there won’t be anything left for cars. The whole FDP debate about the exemption for e-fueled power cars after 2035 is a smoke screen.
Smoke screens, of course, are the only thing one gets with the global warming scam. Natural gas, by contrast, is the epitome of real.
Hat Tip: D.S.
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