“Many [green] philanthropists who are willing to step up are looking around and saying, ‘DOE is stepping back and Catalyst doesn’t exist. I can’t solve this on my own.’” – Lara Pierpoint, Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition (below)
For decades, energy realists have explained why the stock energy created by the sun — fossil fuels — are inherently more economical than the dilute, intermittent flow from the sun. The concept of energy density has been explained ceaselessly in articles and books by Vaclav Smil. Political Economy 101 — markets pick winners, leaving losers for government — also comes into play as experimental technologies enabled by special government favor face the political winds of change.
Evidence? Start with the recent demise of the rooftop solar industry and the EV industry here in the U.S.…
Continue ReadingRicky Carroll, now a Senior Geophysicist at Hilcorp, provided a remembrance of a crazy workaround regarding oil production from an offshore California oil platform.
This is what I recall from when I worked the offshore fields Hueso and Huesocito as a geologist. My primary job was generating prospects in the Gulf of Mexico, but I was assigned short term projects to work non-ops offshore Santa Barbara. This was in the early to mid 80’s.
As I think back, regarding those CA fields, we were not allowed to run pipelines to shore from the platforms because local communities and the states forbid new pipeline construction after the Santa Barbara spill of 1969.
Yet, CA still had the best refineries for taking this sour crude and it already had an established onshore pipeline network.…
Continue Reading“The global climate elite are scrambling for relevancy and power. The poll-conscious wind and solar lobbies are disingenuously pitching affordability. And the climate zealots are getting nutty. Energy reality bats last.”
Let history note that the United States has issued a notice to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), effective February 27, 2026. This withdrawal is broader than the previously announced (and started) withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. The UNFCCC is the governing global network behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “consensus” science (based on subjective climate-model interpretation), as well as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Climate Accord of 2015.
The one-year window is running, with formal withdrawal set for February 27, 2027. As summarized by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):
… Continue ReadingIn January, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would be withdrawing from the UNFCCC.