Category Archives: EPA

Will The OPEC Cartel Break Up?


Because the OPEC cartel provides about 40% of the world’s crude oil, it has been able to control the crude oil price.  Its members meet and set the amount of crude they will produce for sale opposite the forecast world demand.  They can reduce or increase production to raise or lower prices. Other major crude producers outside of OPEC have been able to sell all their crude oil but acting independently are unable to displace OPEC’s role as the selling price arbiter.   As you would expect, OPEC wants the price to be high but recognizes that if they set it too high, demand will drop and competitors will be encouraged to prospect for more crude.   Within OPEC, the members have their own issues that make setting the production levels and thus the price, not easy.  However, Saudi Arabia, currently the world’s largest producer of  crude oil,  is said to be the primary voice in this process.  When the OPEC members meet, as they did on May 31st, to set the production level/price, one big factor was how much of their government’s budget is derived from the oil revenues.  And what is the price of crude oil that makes that budget whole? The graph below, from the American Interest’s posting “OPEC Sweats: How Low Can Oil Prices Go?illustrates the price needed to balance their government’s budget:

2013_fiscal_breakeven_point-e1370293236725

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Oil and Gas Reserves Are Increasing And Fugitive Methane Emissions Are Decreasing.


The National Journal posting “The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought” relates that the Interior Department says that the Bakken and Three Forks formations in North and South Dakota and Montana have twice as much oil and three times as much gas as previously estimated in 2008.  The USGS  now believes that these two formations hold 7.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  This is good news and surely there will be more upward valuations of  US oil and natural gas reserves in other  formations.

The Alarmists Are The Real Deniers


The new normal according to the Alarmist warmers is that “cooling is warming.”  Every possible weather event, if it is unpleasant, is due to global warming. As the readers  of this post are very intelligent,  they remember that until the last 15 + years, the Alarmists have told us that global warming would mean hotter summers and winters.  That is what the alarmist’s climate models predicted but those predictions are being shown to be terribly wrong.  So what’s an alarmist to do?  They are hoping that you don’t notice that they are changing their mantra without ever acknowledging that they were wrong.
But what are the facts?   The “Updated on 23 April 2013” chart, below, shows that in the past two weeks, the US has experienced 4163 record low temperatures for this time of year.  We believe that this is weather and it is always changing.  But to the desperate Alarmists, it is the result of global warming.
Recordlows2wksUS
Chart by Ham Weather.com (click on chart to enlarge.)
A posting by David Deming  in the Washington Times, titled “The real deniers of climate change”  characterizes the data verses the alarmists contention.  He says:
“The Northern Hemisphere is experiencing unusually cold weather. Snow cover last December was the greatest since satellite monitoring began in 1966. The United Kingdom had the coldest March weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in 134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles to clear snow from the streets.
Cold-weather extremes are a natural climatic variation, and this is exactly the point. If the world were experiencing a climate crisis owing to global warming, there shouldn’t be a single record low temperature anywhere in the world. The Associated Press has assured us, though, that this cold spell is not only consistent with a warming globe, it is actually caused by global warming. The proffered explanation is that cold weather in Europe is a result of melting sea ice in the Arctic. If this special pleading strikes you as unusually tendentious, it is all in the best tradition of explaining away ex post facto any weather event that appears to contradict the ruling paradigm.”
Deming cites numerous examples of the how wrong the Alarmists have been over the years.  The full posting is worth the reading to see what he has to say.
He concludes with this:
“With each passing year, it is becoming increasingly clear that global warming is not a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification, but a political ideology that has to be fiercely defended against any challenge. It is ironic that skeptics are called “deniers” when every fact that would tend to falsify global warming is immediately explained away by an industry of denial.”
cbdakota

“Greedy Lying Bastards” Fails To Draw An Audience


“Greedy Lying Bastards” the film, was on the list of top box office attractions  for one weekend.  It grossed $45,000 the weekend of March 8-10 and its place was #45 out of 50. With that  kind of gross, it is no surprise that it did not make it back since then. The film is said to have cost $1,500,000 to produce.  For comparison, that weekend’s top grossing movie was “OZ the Great and Powerful”, which pulled in $79,100,000.

The critics at the movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes,  gave it 73 out of 100 which is a very favorable rating.   A typical review was that by John Hartl for the Seattle Times in which he said:

“ The title says it all in “Greedy Lying Bastards,” a blistering attack on politicians, propagandists, dissemblers and other climate-change deniers.No longer taking the relatively polite approach of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the filmmakers set out to focus on the celebrities who have been most successful in using the media to encourage a sense of doubt in a skeptical public.”

The reviewers held nothing back as most of them always love the liberal theme.

I suppose their next production will be the “Those Dirty Rotten Bastards That Used The New Black Panthers To Prevent Entry To The Theater To See Our Epic Production Greedy Lying Bastards”.  They have to blame someone for their failure.

cbdakota

The UK Gets It, The US Doesn’t–Teaching AGW In Schools


In Great Britain, it is being recommended that the advocacy of man-made global warming be cut from the national curriculum for children 13 and under (see here).  In the US,  teaching of AGW has been recommended for all grades and in every science class. The following  is an overview of this plan and those that have developed it according to a Bloomberg.com posting on 4 March 2013:
 “The Next Generation Science Standards were developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nonprofit Achieve and more than two dozen states. They recommend that educators teach the evidence for man-made climate change starting as early as elementary school and incorporate it into all science classes, ranging from earth science to chemistry. By eighth grade, students should understand that “human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming),” the standards say.”

Climategate III–220,247 New E-Mails Have Been Released.


Who ever it is that broke into the files at East Anglia University back in 2009, has just released, to selected bloggers, a password to access some 220,247 new e-mails. The person that got these files says it is time to release the remainder of the ClimateGate documents.  He says the task is too big  for him to handle.  He is not saying that these emails will have as big an impact as the first release back in 2009 did but he said there may be some big stories in this lot.

Not much is out in the public yet but you can bet that many folks will be working their way through these e-mails.  So, to keep up to speed on them you might want to go to WattsUpWithThat:   or

Tom Nelson  http://tomnelson.blogspot.com

Climate Depot  http://www.climatedepot.com

Junk Science  http://junkscience.com/2013/03/13/climategate-3-0-220247-e-mails/

The Reference Frame  http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/03/climategate-2013-is-here-foia.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LuboMotlsReferenceFrame+%28Lubos+Motl%27s+reference+frame%29

cbdakota

Consumers Paying for New Ethanol Surcharge


A recent Climate Change Sanity post discussed the gasoline cost  “spread”.  The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)  adds another item to the spread.  The WSJ points out that this year the EPA’s requires more ethanol to be mixed with gasoline than the refiners can use and still not have greater than 10% ethanol in the final fuel. The refiners fear that more than 10% has the potential to damage engines.
From the WSJ posting:
 “This year refiners and importers are required to blend 13.8 billion gallons of ethanol into the nation’s gasoline, rising to 14.4 billion next year. The EPA allocates a share of this mandate to oil and gas companies, and to monitor compliance each gallon of ethanol is assigned a 38 digit Renewable Identification Number, or RIN.”
Now isn’t this a great example of over regulation.  Each gallon is identified by a 38 digit  number!!!  13.8 billion gallons, all with their own name (or number).

Where Are The “Consensus” Scientists Hiding?


Dr Rajendra Pachauri admits that there has been no global warming for 17 years.  Dr Pachauri is, if you don’t know, the leader of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a branch of the UN.  The IPCC has issued reports on climate change which conclude—- burning of fossil fuels releases CO2 causing a “dramatic” increase in global temperatures.  The IPCC documents have had widespread influence. For example, the US EPA successfully used these reports as the technical justification to declare CO2 a hazardous pollutant that needed to be regulated. The IPCC’s belief is that natural forces are inconsequential.
For the last 17 years, CO2 emissions resulting from fossil fuel burning have increased.  The measurement of atmospheric CO2 has climbed steadily over these 17 years and yet the global temperature has not risen.  Proving that the natural forces indeed are consequential.

More Range Anxiety From Tesla. Trip On Newly “Electrified” I 95 Falls Short Of Plan


Tesla planned, for  NY Times writer John Broder,  a trip using their model S top of the line all-electric car.  The plan was to test out Tesla’s newly “electrified I 95 corridor” that has two charging stations along the way.  The idea here is that these two station should allow for a trip from Washington DC to the Boston area. Things did not work out.

The model S is a $101,000 vehicle with a 85 Kilowatt-hour battery that Tesla reports has a range of 300 miles between charges. The EPA rates the range at 265 miles.  The distance from Broder’s home to the first charging station in Newark, DE was about 114 miles and the distance to the second charging station in Milford, CN is about 200 miles.  So the trip should be easy. Below is a NYTimes graphic of the trip.  The numbers represent the each new phase of the journey.

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US PRODUCED 83% OF THE ENERGY IT CONSUMED IN 2012


The US is making progress in becoming self-sufficient energy-wise.  The posting “Energy Charts of the Day” on the American Enterprise Institute blog site shows a projection  that 83% of the energy used in the US was produced in the US.  Behind this improvement has been State and private ownership of oil and gas plays.  To achieve a permit to drill in North Dakota takes 10 days.  The federal government take 307 days to process a permit to drill.

aeichartenergyprodcons

From the AEI blog we have:

1. Thanks largely to the recent significant increases in the domestic production of fossil fuel energy (oil and natural gas), the U.S. was more energy self-sufficient in 2012 than at any time in the last two decades.  Based on data for the first nine months of 2012, the U.S. last year produced more than 83% of the energy it consumed for the first time since 1991 (see chart above).

GovoilPermits

2. From the article “Economics of the Bakken Oil Boom: What the Rest of the Nation is Missing,” in today’s Canada Free Press:

The Bakken development in North Dakota should be an example for the nation, indicating what could be accomplished with the right energy policies to decrease unemployment, raise government revenues, increase per capita income, decrease poverty, and help produce the nation’s major energy source.

So far, the hydraulic fracturing revolution that has created these positive economic developments is largely confined to production on private and state lands, due to governmental policies reducing opportunities on federal lands and a punitive federal regulatory environment. Even though there are massive shale oil and oil shale resources on federal lands, federal policies are choking off any production increases. Here’s one illustrious example: it takes the federal government 307 days to process a permit to drill, but it only takes North Dakota 10 days (see chart below)

See also “President’s Pants On Fire……”

cbdakota