Natural Gas Now Best Picks – April 15, 2023

My previous post discussed a few aspects of the just-issued Tesla Report with the title “Sustainable Energy for All of Earth.” Today, I’ll poke around at a couple more.

You probably know that New York State seeks to establish its pre-eminence in the energy transition game with its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019. The CLCPA sets a series of targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The first big target is a 40% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030…

How to get there? Basically the entire idea that these geniuses have come up with is to build lots and lots of wind turbines and solar panels. At the end of last year they put out an endless and impenetrable document known as the Scoping Plan, supposedly laying out the specifics. Here is an easier-to-digest summary dated January 3, 2023 from a publication called The City. A few key lines:

There are grand plans in the works . . . for large investments in renewable energy with wind power at the forefront. Under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (CLCPA), New York State has committed to developing nine gigawatts of offshore wind-produced electricity by 2035 — enough to power over six million homes, the most ambitious target in the country. That puts New York at the forefront of an emerging trend along the east coast…

Enough to “power over six million homes”? If you know these numbers, you know that would only be true if the wind blew all the time at full strength, which it doesn’t, not even close…

The new 12 GW of wind and solar will work on average about 30% of the time, so will add on average 3.6 GW to the existing base of 39.89 GW. Our “grand plans” come to less than a 10% increase in effective capacity, and will only work intermittently. The 12 GW of wind and solar additions, even assuming they all get built (they won’t) won’t bring us anywhere near net zero electricity generation in the 2030s, let alone a net zero economy…

With that context, let’s now go back to the Tesla Report. Here is their chart for the U.S. of the new generation facilities that will need to be built to fully electrify the economy with carbon-free generation:

That’s right — it’s 5,338 GW of renewables, of which 1,971 is wind and 3,052 is solar. Almost all of that 5,338 will have to be newly built…

New York State is about 6% of the U.S. by population, so I guess that under Tesla’s scheme we will have to be building around 6% of 5,338 GW of renewable capacity, or about 320 GW. Our “grand plans” to build 12 GW in the next decade are insufficient by a factor of about 27. But I guess if we can get going and then maintain the pace of building about 12 GW per decade for 270 years, we can get there by, say, about the year 2300.

So the correct term for the Tesla document is “completely absurd.”

…But you knew the Tesla Report was absurd without reading it. If a company has a vision for a new product or system that is better and cheaper than what currently exists in the marketplace, the last thing it would ever do is put out a report like this supposedly telling everyone else how to do it. Instead, it would invest its own money to develop the product or system, and keep all the profits for itself. Here, the plan is transparently to get the government to put up all the money and for Tesla to harvest the subsidies.

Yes, this part of Elon Musk’s make up, too. And, he’s too smart not to realize natural gas is absolutely essential for energy security.

Hat Tip: S.H.

EVs and ESG A Case of “The Church of What’s Happening Now”

So, have EVs and ESG already peaked? Will the faddists and true believers come to realize natural gas is the only practical source of clean energy?

Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is the newest religion, and we all know who the practitioners are. Electric vehicle (EV) owners sing “Hallelujah” when they pull out of their garages. The investor-class ESG evangelists believe the new belief is in its beginnings. Whatever the Biden EPA does, investor Harris Kupperman thinks it’s likely just the Church of What’s Happening Now.

Kupperman, referred to as Kuppy by Real Vision’s Maggie Lake, told her, “Well, I think we’re nearing peak ESG, which is probably a good thing, honestly.” He explained,

And it’s like religions kind of come, they peak, they die out. No one practices Roman religions anymore. I can name three of the gods and I’m a Roman history major.

These things, they peak, they crest, and this little religion of ESG, it’s been around for a while. It peaked. And now there’ll be some die hard adherence, but I think the vast majority of investors want to make money. And it’s great if they’re doing something that has a social good, but most of them just want to save for their retirement.

As to all those fancy Teslas silently cutting you off in traffic, their drivers teeming with superiority, thinking they are saving the planet, Kuppy sees them going the way of T. rex.

“No. I think EV is going to be something you’re going to go to a museum with my kids and be like, wow, that was an evolutionary dead end and we always [waste] trillions of dollars on this. No, I think that there’s no future to EV.”

“Really, why?” an aghast Lake wondered.

Remember this trendy cause from 1989? Probably not.

Next, Kuppy comes with the hard facts amateur environmentalists and government enforcers don’t consider.

Because it [the EV] destroys energy. You have this concept called EROI, which is the return on energy you put in. An EV, you put more energy in than you get out. And so as a result, it’s just like a thermodynamic rule—it won’t work unless you subsidize it.

What’s the reason for EVs? It’s because it supposedly produces less carbon. But through the full life cycle of owning an EV, because so much carbon has to go into the stupid thing, it doesn’t use less carbon. You’re better off having a gas guzzler.

Yikes. Maybe EV owners are not as heroic as they believe.

One of the epiphanies in my life happened many years ago when I came across a stack of Time magazines from 2-3 years earlier in my basement and realized how dreadfully wrong those journals had proven to be in such a short period. Nearly every conventional wisdom excitedly proclaimed by the naive left-leaning “journalists” a couple dozen months earlier had since been turned inside out. Like Kuppy, I suspect EVs and ESG will experience a  similar fate. And, natural gas will still be here.

Hat Tip: D.S.

Wait…I Thought the Oceans Were Rising!

Well, we know the sands shift over time in the directions of the prevailing currents, but, still, this illustration speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

And, as one of our readers notes, this also explains why global warmists Barack and Michelle Obama nonetheless felt comfortable paying a rather large fortune for a beachfront home on Martha’s Vineyard, doesn’t it? They don’t believe their own scaremongering any more than the rest of corporatists and totalitarian power seekers perpetrating the climate scam.

Hat Tip: R.N. and E.S.