Natural Gas Now Best Picks – October 22, 2022

It seems that the Netherlands is sitting on massive gas fields that could be brought on-stream in a matter of months, but the fear-mongers have imposed a moratorium on gas production because they blame fracking for earthquakes. If anything, shallow fracking serves as a stress relief mechanism to head off stress build-up resulting in stronger earthquakes down the road…

Netherland’s Groningen gas field lies approx. 3.3 km down. With an estimated 2,740 billion cubic meters of recoverable natural gas, it is the largest natural gas field in Europe and one of the largest in the world.

Will being forced to limit showers and other such extreme measures brought on by pursuing green grifting schemes also force the Dutch to rethink and frack? Could be!

Hat Tip: R.N.

Energy Transition? What Energy Transition?

Robert Bryce effectively demolishes the idea that we are in the midst of an energy transition:

We are in the midst of what some analysts are calling the “biggest global energy crisis in history.” But amid the crisis, which threatens to leave the European economy in ruins, plunge tens of millions of people into energy poverty, and result in widespread food shortages, one phrase continues to be used with astonishing regularity: “energy transition.”

…But there’s a problem: despite more than $2 trillion in spending on renewables over the past three decades, there is scant evidence that an energy transition is underway…

Renewable energy’s inability to displace hydrocarbons isn’t due to a lack of money. According to Statista, between 2004 and 2019, spending on renewables in the US was some $577 billion. Meanwhile, over that same time frame, the rest of the world spent another $1.5 trillion on renewables. But the BP numbers show that despite all that spending, wind and solar are not making a significant dent in our insatiable thirst for oil, gas, and coal…

Last year, the use of oil, gas, and coal grew by 10.5, 7.7, and 8.7 EJ respectively, resulting in a total one-year increase in hydrocarbon consumption of 26.9 EJ. Meanwhile, in 2021, wind and solar grew by 3.4 and 2.1 EJ, respectively, for a total of 5.5 EJ. Thus, in 2021, global hydrocarbon use grew nearly five times faster than the growth in wind and solar combined…

Last year, just the increase in global hydrocarbon use … was roughly equal to the output of all of the wind and solar projects on Earth.

No, the energy transition is just hype intended to reward green grifters with still more subsidies and politicians of the totalitarian sort with still more power.

Hat Tip: S.H.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
and Climate Corporatists Thirst for Both

Two stories brought forward by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge tell us exactly what climate hype is all about and it’s not climate or even fighting natural gas and other fossil fuels. First, there’s this:

In another foretaste of potential future ‘carbon allowance’ limits, a major bank in Australia has introduced a new feature that links purchases to a customer’s carbon footprint and warns them when they are going over the average.

Australia’s Commonwealth Bank (CBA) has partnered with Cogo, a “carbon management solutions” company, to launch the new feature, which is part of CBA’s online banking platform.

The bank gives the customer the option to “pay a fee” to offset their carbon footprint, with the average listed as 1,280 kilograms, a long way from the ‘sustainable’ figure of 200 kilograms…

While initially presented as a handy way for someone to track their consumption habits and the supposed impact they have on the environment, some fear that such schemes could one day become mandatory and place limits on purchases of customers who exceed their ‘carbon allowance.’

As we previously highlighted, allied with climate lockdowns, technocrats want to exploit hysteria over climate change to increase financial control over individuals.

Such a proposal was presented in the science journal Nature by four environmental “experts” as a means of reducing global carbon emissions.

Everyone would be issued with a ‘carbon allowance card’ “that would entail all adults receiving an equal tradable carbon allowance that reduces over time in line with national [carbon] targets.”

The authors make it clear that the program would be a “national mandatory policy.”

Carbon units would be “deducted from the personal budget with every payment of transport fuel, home-heating fuels and electricity bills,” and anyone going over the limit would be forced to purchase additional units in the personal carbon market from those with excess to sell.”

Of course, the wealthy would be easily able to afford the offsets, and many of them are directly invested in the trading mechanisms that the scheme would be based on.

The proposal makes clear that the means of measuring a person’s uptake of carbon units for travel would function “on the basis of the tracking the user’s movement history.”

The authors note that mass compliance with COVID-19 lockdown regulations has greased the skids for further intrusive tyranny and that, “people may be more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations related to PCAs to achieve a safer climate” as a result.

And, then to illustrate what’s behind this freedom killer and failing attempt to squelch use of natural gas and fossil fuels, Durden brings us this:

Is ESG not a concerted effort to warp trading markets with acutely political aims that seek to reward companies and capital investments for their pledged commitment to ideological beliefs rather than their likelihood for generating future profits?

When boardrooms and investors distort free markets by treating stocks and other assets as more valuable than they really are, simply because they are painted a shiny “green,” then ESG overvaluation turns misguided yet “politically correct” fantasies into gold. Ideology hijacks the market’s natural direction toward an objective and transparent “meeting of the minds.” There is an unspoken but unmistakable fraud…

Government-enforced environmentalism has created its own class of “green” billionaires. Whenever and wherever governments have mandated that citizens purchase certain goods or suffer legal consequences, the producers of those goods have made financial killings.

Anyone once blissfully unaware of that kind of crummy crony capitalism surely learned a thing or two watching global vaccine mandates drive up pharmaceutical industry profits, while government-granted indemnification clauses rendered vaccine makers free from financial liability for any resulting injuries.

When governments subsidize entire industries, force citizens to purchase those industries’ products, and protect those industries from the legal consequences of their products’ harm, then money flows into the pockets of those with ownership stakes.

Put these articles together and anyone can can begin to understand what’s behind opposition to natural gas and other fossil fuels and the promotion of green energy that has no particular future; it’s all about money and power and nothing else. Only the foolish imagine it has anything to do with the environment.

Hat Tip: D.S.