Fossil fuels are providing the only currently available source of power for the extraction, refining, manufacturing, growing, and transportation of everything we use.

Can other technologies eventually replace fossil fuels? Absolutely … but it is literally madness to think that we should starve and price ourselves out of fossil fuels before the replacement is tested, available, better, and cheaper.

And yet we’re seeing the results of exactly that madness in Europe today. Here’s a joke adapted specially for this post.

Q: What did the Germans used to use for home heating in the days before firewood?

A: Electricity and gas.

Not bad for made to order … but it’s absolutely no laughing matter.

Just superb!

Hat Tip: R.N.

Get Real! The Grid Can’t Handle the EVs You Want!

Golden State leaderships anything but golden. It’s more like kryptonite, in fact:

What would happen if, say, the power grid was to fail in EV-crazed California? To answer that question, we need only rewind a few months. This past summer, plagued by scorching hot temperatures, the Golden State’s power grid came incredibly close to collapsing.

It survived, but only just.

The grid will be tested again. With California’s desire to push the sales of EVs, the next test could prove to be an unmitigated disaster. Energy is a finite resource, a fact that seems to be lost on so many EV enthusiasts.

In truth, the nation’s power grid is already on its last legs. It has been for years. In a sobering piece for Smithsonian Magazine, Dr. Massoud Amin, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Minnesota, explained the many ways in which the country’s power grid, “the most complex” one ever assembled, could fail. The grid, he wrote, “underpins our economy, our quality of life, our society.” Without it, society will be brought to a screeching halt. Crime will rise. Lives will be lost. Chaos will reign supreme.

By 2025, according to the American Society for Civil Engineers, the inability of the United States to maintain its many power lines will cost the country dearly—$130 billion, to be exact. EVs, so often hailed as the best thing since sliced bread, come with a whole host of sizable problems.

Across the United States, as the author Ben Guess recently noted, there are currently 21 EVs per public charging port. By 2030, to keep up with EV purchasing trends, the United States must install almost 500 charging ports every day for the next 8 years.

Does this sound realistic to you?

Even if the United States does somehow manage to install enough ports, the grid simply isn’t strong enough to support the battery-related demands… In the blind embrace of all things green, we must not lose sight of the bigger picture, the objective realities that stare us straight in the face.

Yes, there are objective realties, but not in the world of the elitists, corporatists, ideologues and power-thirsting mad men who seem to rule for now.

Hat Tip: D.S.

An Angry Old Man Blames Others for Doing What He Demanded!

The very worst President ever:

Consider President Biden’s outrage Friday over last week’s robust earnings reports for oil and gas companies. Six of the largest “made $70 billion in profit in one quarter,” he said at a fundraiser. These “excess profits are going back to their shareholders and their executives instead of going to lower prices at the pump.” The President who has done everything in his power to limit U.S. oil investment is now furious that he succeeded.

Mr. Biden doesn’t seem to believe oil companies should be allowed to make a profit or even cover marginal costs. “We need to keep making progress by having energy companies bring down the cost of a gallon of gas to reflect what they pay for a barrel of oil,” he said. Anything more is “excess” profit.

Keep in mind that oil majors’ current profits follow steep losses in the pandemic. As oil prices plunged amid lockdowns, companies and OPEC nations pared investment and shut in wells. Demand for oil then bounced back much quicker than supply, which has driven up prices—and profits. That’s Econ 101.

Mr. Biden is miffed in particular that companies are returning cash to shareholders rather than increasing supply. “You should be using these record-breaking profits to increase production and refining,” he said this month. But the progressive climate lobby and his own Administration’s climate policies have been urging the opposite.

Exxon Mobil lost a board proxy fight in 2021 after large public pension funds and asset managers criticized it for investing too much in oil and generating too little profit. Exxon and its board need to assess “the possibility that demand for fossil fuels may decline rapidly in the coming decades,” BlackRock said.

The International Energy Agency warned only last week that “no one should imagine that Russia’s invasion can justify a wave of new oil and gas infrastructure in a world that wants to reach net zero [greenhouse-gas] emissions by 2050.” It added that “any new projects would face major commercial risks” that may result in failing “to recover their upfront cost.”

No wonder oil companies are returning cash to shareholders rather than make investments in production that take decades to pay off. U.S. shale drilling can produce returns more quickly. But rather than drill more wells, many producers are shrinking their inventory of “drilled but uncompleted” wells.

Let’s do something on Tuesday to relieve some of the agony brought by this White House occupant.