Tag Archives: President Trump

IEA: Higher Energy Prices are Russia’s Fault, Not Renewable Energy

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

According to the IEA, consumers are unfairly blaming green policies for driving up prices, when the truth is it’s all Russia’s fault.

Strategies for Affordable and Fair Clean Energy Transitions

INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY

The last few years have been tough for many energy consumers around the world, with high energy prices putting a lot of pressure on the cost of living. The effects have been most severe for low-income countries and households. This has rightly put issues of affordability and fairness at the centre of the energy debate.

For an honest assessment of the situation, we need to be clear about where these pressures on the cost of living have come from. The global energy crisis that escalated in early 2022 was not caused by clean energy. Since the early days of the crisis, I have been speaking regularly with energy policy makers from around the world. None of them have complained of relying too much on clean energy. On the contrary, they wish they had more, because the result of investing in these technologies today is a more affordable energy system for consumers tomorrow – as well as less severe impacts from climate change, major improvements in air quality and greater energy security.

When people misleadingly blame clean energy and climate policies for the recent spikes in energy prices, they are, intentionally or not, moving the spotlight away from the main cause – the major cuts that Russia made to natural gas supply.

That said, there is still an important debate to be had about affordability and fairness in clean energy transitions – notably in terms of how the costs and benefits will be shared. And that is why we have produced this important new analysis. We wanted to provide an evidence base and actionable advice for policy makers as they consider their strategies for the future. A key risk is that poorer households, communities and countries are excluded from the new clean energy economy that is emerging around the world because they cannot pay the upfront costs of the switch to a safer and more sustainable energy system. As a result, they remain vulnerable to swings in fuel prices, which already disproportionately affect their budgets and well-being compared with their wealthier counterparts.

Well-designed policies are essential to addressing this. This special report provides examples – from across advanced, emerging and developing economies – on ways to make clean energy technologies more accessible to all. This is an important and growing area of work for the International Energy Agency (IEA), as demonstrated by our longstanding work on energy access globally and, more recently, by our Global Summit on People-Centred Clean Energy Transitions in April 2024 and our Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa in May 2024, which mobilised USD 2.2 billion in new announcements from governments and private sources to increase clean cooking access in Africa. Both summits were firsts of their kind – but they won’t be the last as we continue to address these critical issues with stakeholders from around the world and work with them to drive progress.

As we consider the energy technology pathways available for communities and countries worldwide, it is essential to keep in mind that many of the clean and efficient choices are also the most cost-effective ones – typically because they require much lower day-to-day spending on fuels to operate. Putting the world on track to reach net zero emissions by 2050 requires additional investment but also reduces the operating costs of the global energy system by more than half over the next decade compared with a trajectory based on today’s policy settings, this special report shows.

Pursuing such a path has considerable implications for economies across the globe, notably for fuel importers and exporters. This is why we have produced this special report to help all countries understand the costs, benefits, opportunities and challenges of moving rapidly towards a cleaner and more affordable energy system – and to offer strategies for doing so. I would like to thank the team of IEA colleagues who worked on this first-of-its-kind analysis, including lead authors Peter Zeniewski and Siddharth Singh, under the expert guidance of Chief Energy Economist Tim Gould. I’m also grateful to Brian Motherway and Jane Cohen, who lead the IEA’s work on inclusive energy transitions, for their valuable contributions. I’m confident that this report will provide an important foundation for productive and evidence- based discussions on ensuring that clean energy transitions benefit as many people as possible, and especially the poorest and most vulnerable.Source: https://www.iea.org/reports/strategies-for-affordable-and-fair-clean-energy-transitions

Claiming clean energy policy is not responsible for the current European energy price crisis is absurd.

Putin might have made the decision to cut energy supplies to Europe. But the risk of Putin acting in a hostile manner was only a surprise to European greens.

The following is President Trump in 2018 warning Germany it was delivering its energy security into the hands of a hostile foreign power. The German diplomats watching Trump’s speech laughed in Trump’s face, showed utter contempt for the President of the United States.

If Trump’s warning wasn’t enough, the following (with subtitles) is part of a widely circulated video which was broadcast on Russian TV in 2010, of President Putin laughing at how Europe’s energy policy stupidity and rejection of nuclear was delivering total European reliance on Russian energy supplies.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Putin_Jokes_Energy.mp4

Putin starting a war should also not have been a surprise. Back in 2005 and probably earlier, President Putin was describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical tragedy”, something he would like to rectify.

The inescapable truth is the 2022 European energy price crisis was entirely the fault of European politicians and their ruinous obsession with renewable energy, which left Europe vulnerable to a foreign power which made no secret of its hostility and geopolitical ambitions.

Europe could easily have buffered itself against external supply shocks by encouraging domestic fossil fuel resource development, or going nuclear. They did neither, instead frittering capital on useless renewables, which when tested by the Russian gas embargo proved hopelessly inadequate for the task of maintaining European energy security.

All attempts to deny this unequivocal European failure to apply basic common sense to a crisis which was no surprise to anyone with a brain deserve our derision and contempt.

Joe Biden’s Dangerous Natural Gas Game

From RealClearEnergy

By Tristan Abbey

If the devil is in the details, bureaucracy is hell on earth. Though terrain familiar to the Biden administration, Republicans must prepare to navigate it.

Witness the debacle over liquefied natural gas exports, wherein the White House, by “pausing” most new approvals, has catapulted the energy security of key U.S. allies straight into the buzzsaw of its climate ambitions. (The category of exports that will continue to be authorized is tiny.) The Department of Energy claims that a multifactor impact study due in early 2025 is required to determine whether and how the moratorium will be lifted.

Under a certain conception of executive power, it should be simple enough for a second-term Trump administration to end this national embarrassment by pressing “resume” on the authorization process. But as analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have suggested, merely setting aside the study could provide a basis, however tenuous, for future litigation. In the modern administrative state, it is easier to open than shut the procedural door to delays.

Previous administrations have already published macroeconomic impact studies on the question of LNG exports from the U.S. The Obama administration paused its authorizations until its first study was released in December 2012, for example—curious timing, considering the election the previous month and the study’s actual completion in July of that year. Virtually every scenario in every study, including additional analysis in 2015 and 2018, has found net benefits to accrue.

It’s possible reopening the Obama playbook was the Biden team’s plan all along. After all, Secretary Granholm didn’t commission a new study in 2021, or in 2022, or in 2023. By waiting so long, the DOE can now claim that the cumulative volume of its authorizations is approaching the upper limit of the range that the 2018 study examined. Under the duplicity theory, approvals resume under a second Biden term as soon as the study is released and the election fades away.

But maybe the administration doesn’t even have a plan. It could be sheer incompetence. Gas exports offend the sensibilities of the Democratic base, but Appalachian swing states reap the economic rewards and European allies are desperate to detach themselves from Russian energy. Political operators will try in vain to triangulate even if it is impossible. We can imagine them now, hunched over the asphalt between the West Wing and the Eisenhower building, desperately chalking angles with a compass and ruler.

More ominously, Energy Secretary Granholm may be laying the groundwork for a Kafkaesque application process designed to punish an industry this administration has only ever pretended to tolerate. The fact that DOE’s approving authority is now housed in the Office of Resource Sustainability is suggestive, as is the Fiscal Year 2025 budget request to triple programmatic funding for export authorizations, primarily in the form of “anticipated studies and environmental reviews.”

In any event, undoing what the Biden team has done will take careful work by a putative second-term Trump administration. Putting the matter to rest on a more permanent basis will require legislative action, chiefly amending the Natural Gas Act signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. In the meantime, “death by study” works both ways.

Tristan Abbey is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics. He previously served as a staffer at the White House and the U.S. Senate.

Claim: Trump’s Anti-Science Climate Denial Threatens the Foundations of Prosperity

From Watts Up With That?

By Eric Worrall

According to a review of a book by Kings College Professor Daniel Susskind, President Trump is the harbinger of a new age of superstition and prejudice, which threatens to derail science driven economic growth.

Long-term growth is more vulnerable than it looks

A new book argues the belief that economies should always expand is relatively new, and threats to the future of growth are as large now as any time in the post-Industrial Revolution era.

Guy Debelle Former Central Banker
May 23, 2024 – 5.00am

…

We have taken economic growth for granted for much of the past century. When the economy isn’t growing it dominates the news cycle, because those periods of decline have very much been the exception, not the rule. Even the slightest prospect of a recession can generate reams of tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers.

…

Daniel Susskind provides a timely and thought-provoking book on the history of economic growth in Growth: A Reckoning. Timely, because a number of the critical factors that Susskind argues underpin growth are currently under threat. This is most apparent in the US in the form of Donald Trump, where science is being supplanted by superstition, reason by assertion, experience by prejudice.

…

This bears on the Future Made in Australia debate. The government can provide the policy framework to support the market in taking advantage of Australia’s comparative advantage. The market will not always provide the right price signals. The market will not embody all the things that society cares about, though it can be shaped that way.

…Read more: https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/long-term-growth-is-more-vulnerable-than-it-looks-20240506-p5fp5a

The “Future Made in Australia debate” is a reference to the pushback against an absurd far left attempt to kickstart Aussie manufacturing, without addressing any of the fundamental factors which led to the original decline, such as Australia’s expensive and increasingly unreliable energy.

My question – what if the climate crisis is pseudoscience, like the many great pseudoscience movements which came before it, and the rise of Donald Trump is a desperate attempt to restore an age of evidence based decision making, before the rise of climate superstition plunges us into a new dark age?

Obviously this is pretty much the opposite position to that expressed by Guy Debelle, who wrote the article above, and I assume Daniel Susskind have taken. SO how do we tell who is right?

Weight of numbers is no defence against the suggestion the climate crisis is superstition – pseudoscience movements don’t rise to prominence because they lack support. When Einstein was told about the book “100 authors against Einstein”, Einstein is reported to have replied “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”.

The real tell of a pseudoscience is the inability of the pseudoscience to make worthwhile predictions, and the desperation of advocates to excuse away its failures.

Any examination of climate predictions reveals a dismal track record of failure. WUWT has accumulated 12 pages of failed or failing climate predictions, such as a prediction made before the US senate in 1986 by the Grandaddy of the global warming scare, James Hansen, that by now we would have experienced 3-4C of global warming.

As for the desperation to excuse away failures, we see that every day, as politicians pour billions into failed green energy policies which are designed to address a non problem, or the way climate modellers urge we accept their predictions as a source of truth, despite the decades long failure of climate models to accurately predict future climate trends.

This failure is easy to demonstrate – the diagram at the top of this page, which shows the divergence between reported confidence levels and climate model predictive failure, was created by former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer.

But I doubt professor Daniel Susskind or former merchant banker Guy Debelle will be moved by any of the arguments I just presented. If I am right, they are deep in the grip of pseudoscientific superstition, a superstition which ironically convinces them that they are actually the champions of reason, and are therefore all but impervious to arguments based on logic and reason which contradict their prejudices.

Of course, in our world it doesn’t matter what the Daniel Susskind and Guy Debelles of the world believe.

What matters is what voters believe. One of the great strengths of the US Republic and other nations where people get to vote for their leaders is protection from elitist groupthink. We don’t have to accept the prejudices of people who call themselves experts, we can make up our own minds who we believe.