Monthly Archives: June 2022

Cajoling Producers

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In a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed centered on the high and rising cost of fuel and the deleterious effect that’s having on our businesses and our economy, Collin Eaton, David Harrison, and Doug Cameron had this remark:

The administration has also tried cajoling US oil companies into increasing production, but few have chosen to do so, instead sticking to leaner budgets urged by investors.

That’s laid off to the maxed out refineries in the US, so there’d be no place to ship increased production, anyway. That’s a player, certainly, but it’s a relatively minor one.

The far more important factor, and it plays to refiners, also is this. Drilling new wells and reopening closed wells each costs lots of money, and it takes years to recoup those costs. It’s the same for the pipelines and other transports used to get the oil and natural gas to refiners, and it’s the same for the refiners.

The Biden administration, though, cannot be trusted not to pull the rug out from under anyone in the oil and gas industry before those costs have been recouped.

There’s no reason, then, for refiners to (re)expand their capacity, even were there product ready for refinement. Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate cronies are actively blocking the construction of additional pipelines with which to transport increased production. Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate cronies are constantly promising to put the remaining hydrocarbon energy producers—oil and natural gas producers—out of business. This is a plain extension of what Biden’s favorite bud and predecessor ex-President Barack Obama promised to do to the coal producers and largely succeeded in doing.

I Disagree with Freeman

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James Freeman, of The Wall Street Journal, has an op-ed out in which he says President Joe Biden should basically stay out of the public’s eye and not speak to us of important things.

For a while this column has been urging President Joe Biden to avoid public speaking, at least when the topic is important.

And

This column’s argument for the president to stick with prepared statements is not intended…as an ad hoc solution to the president’s reckless habit of making odd off-the-cuff statements about nuclear-armed powers.

I disagree. Biden should interact with the press—take questions without his handlers present, in addition to speak to the press—on a daily basis and always on the record. This would let us average Americans get a more accurate picture of Biden’s ability to function in the rough and tumble ad hoc-ery of the real world, and it would be more informative of his fitness for office and for reelection than watching him occasionally fumble with his teleprompter.

We also need to hear his off-the-cuff remarks to/about anybody and any nation, not just nuclear-armed powers. These remarks are much more informative to us average Americans regarding Biden’s thinking on the subject than any carefully scripted commentary or equally carefully scripted answers to just as carefully pre-selected questions from the press.

Wrong Answer

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President Joe Biden (D) and his equally progressive crony DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas now intend to move illegal aliens crossing our border into the interior of our nation, at taxpayer expense, where they will live in accommodations also provided at taxpayer expense.

The plan is designed to lessen the crowding now taking place along the border, where illegal immigrants have flooded the shelters in many cities, causing Customs and Border Protection agents to reportedly release the crossers onto the streets.

This, of course, is the wrong answer to the (over)crowding now occurring along our border.

The right answer is to not have the crowding at all, by not allowing the illegal aliens to come into our nation in the first place, and to promptly deport those who do cross our border illegally and are subsequently caught.

No one—not armies, not individuals, not collections of individuals—has any intrinsic right to enter another country without that country’s prior permission. No country has any intrinsic obligation to grant that permission. Borders and permission-granted entries are how a nation protects its own culture—and in the particular case of the United States, it’s how we protect the American culture and opportunities that make our nation a desirable place to live and to come to.

But the Biden administration knows this. The flooding of our nation with illegal aliens is one aspect of Joe Biden’s and his predecessor and BFF/mentor, ex-President Barack Obama’s (D), promises to fundamentally transform America.

A Critical Item

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President Joe Biden (D) wants half the new cars sold in the US to be electric, and he wants and 500,000 new charging stations for them, both by 2030. He considers reliable EV charging stations to be critical to getting us switched over to battery cars.

Charging stations are necessary (assuming the switchover itself is necessary; it’s not, but that’s a separate story), but they’re far from sufficient. The important thing here is reliable electricity running to each charging station—electricity from the grid. But that requires hydrocarbon-powered electricity generating plants, and it requires the electric grid, itself barely able to handle current loads—see the rolling blackouts that are routine in California and that have become a risk in Texas—to be upgraded to handle the vastly increased loads imposed by all those battery-powered vehicles, whether charged at the charging stations or in the home garage.

Also necessary, but not sufficient even in concert with the above, is an adequate definition of “fast charging.” If a battery-powered vehicle cannot be charged to the 400-mile range of a full gasoline tank in substantially the same 5 minutes it takes to “charge” that gasoline tank to an internal combustion engine-powered car to a 400-mile range, the battery-powered vehicle will remain impractical.

The true Critical Items, then, are at the origin and near-origin: deregulating domestic oil and natural gas production and deregulated electricity generation so there will be energy to put onto that upgraded grid.

“New Dems are ready to deliver”

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That’s what Congressman Scott Peters (D, CA) claims in his Thursday Fox News op-ed. But deliver on what? And deliver how?

Last year, our country was still recovering from the twin COVID-19 economic and public health crises.

Our economy had been recovering—burgeoning—from the Wuhan Virus’ (and Government’s reaction to it) impact on it since 2020 late summer, and we’d been recovering from the Wuhan Virus situation itself since roughly the same time frame as palliatives and treatment techniques were developed, and then as two vaccines aimed specifically at the virus were developed and approved for emergency use.

Last year—2021, the first year of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s control of both houses of Congress and of the White House—saw exploding regulation, overt shutdown of oil pipelines and of oil and natural gas drilling on Federal lands, and resulting historically high inflation, from which we’re still not even beginning to recover.

The Biden administration and Congress have taken steps to address inflation by improving our supply chains; releasing millions of barrels of oil from our strategic reserves; and rebuilding our roads, ports, and bridges.

In what way, exactly, have our supply chains been improved? We still have freight ships backed up at our ports, we’re still dependent on enemy nations like the People’s Republic of China for raw materials (rare earths and lithium, both raw and processed, to suggest just two), solar panels and panel components, a variety of types of computer chips, oil from OPEC (and potentially Iran and Venezuela), and on and on.

Releasing oil from our strategic reserves? That’s been tried three times now, by the Biden administration, and each has produced only a price drop of a couple of pennies that lasted only a couple of days—and what will Biden release when the reserves are expended? Furthermore, at what cost have these reserves been released? The Trump administration filled the reserves at the cost equivalent of $1.50-$2.00 per gallon of gasoline. Today’s cost is above $5.50/gallon (and rising). And Biden still refuses to allow oil (and natural gas) pipelines to be built and still is slow-walking leases (while canceling some) for oil and natural gas exploration and slow-walking permits actually to drill.

Rebuilding our roads…? How many projects have been started from that infrastructure bill enacted a year ago?

But we can’t stop here, and we won’t.

You need to, or you will be stopped. What you’re doing is destructive of our economy.