The Afghanistanization of American Energy
As with Afghanistan…
We are pulling the military out. We are doing it by a date certain. And we are doing it from Kabul. A city with millions of people and lots of buildings. An urban military nightmare. Not from Bagram, a mere 40 miles from Kabul, where we control the base and can control the perimeter. But how can we assure that Americans and Afghans who supported the Americans can get out safely? We will rely on the Taliban to provide safe passage to the urban airport. That Taliban? The people who have been at war with the people seeking to leave? That is my judgment. Ah yes Biden's predictably awful horrible stulted and wrong judgment. That explains it.
This was Biden's approach to ending the US occupation of Afghanistan. He elected to enact the pullout from the highly populous city of Kabul, with its relatively small airport in a chaotic urban environment. Very difficult for our military to control. We relied on the Taliban (the Taliban!!!) to provide safe routes of egress. We had a military airbase at Baghram only 40 miles from Kabul which we could control but chose instead to go from the City. On a preannounced timetable. A date certain so all our enemies had the timetable.
So it is with Energy.
I will detail here the REAL war Biden and his handlers have declared on American energy production in their blind and foolish and ill-considered Utopian dream for Net Zero. The oft cited elements like shutting down the Keystone pipeline and preventing leases on Federal lands are not even near the top of the list of attack vectors they have eventuated.
Biden's judgment has been turned to the very lynchpin of civilization here and throughout the world. Energy. We are pulling out. We will simply stop the production of hydrocarbon energy. This will force a transition to renewable forms of energy, primarily solar and wind. Never mind that those forms are intermittent and unreliable, feeding an electricity grid that requires constancy and reliability. Never mind that the bulk of the equipment necessary to build them comes primarily from our greatest geopolitical foe in China. Never mind that doing it this way will result in the unnecessary deaths of millions through freezing and starvation. That is the judgment.
The press, when they cover the energy crisis at all, point only to the most obvious problems. The EPA and its imposition of Carbon limits on end user power plants, which has mercifully been ended by the SCOTUS. Killing pipelines. Removing federal land and offshore areas from permissible drilling area.
The most important fulcrum for destroying our energy industry and production is more hidden, rarely mentioned, harder to understand. That is the focus of this article.
First the Crisis
Crude Oil Prices - split into gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel, plastics etc.
Gasoline Prices - powering the auto fleet
Natural Gas Prices - home heating, industrial uses, fertilizer
While the Administration gaslights people claiming these are due to Putin, they are not. This is a deliberate result of willful and insidious Executive Branch policy.
Even before the COVID pandemic temporarily killed demand and drove prices to low levels, investment in energy production was lower than it needed to be. Both private and public sources of power were brought to bear. Now they are commingled in a single effort.
ESG, Environmental, Social and Governance investing is the private fulcrum. Led by Larry Fink and Blackrock, corporate boards were threatened that they had better eschew energy and reduce their carbon footprint. Energy companies themselves were told by both ESG investment barons and politicians that their business would be forced to end. Given such a backdrop, would you commit investment capital to oil and gas discovery and production?
Not content with the $15 Trillion under their control, a decent proportion of the total US market capitalization, we now have Blackrock’s former head of ESG as the President's senior-most economic advisor. The fox is in the henhouse. The recent notorious exchange in response to Biden saying we would suffer high energy prices for as long as it takes:
"CNN: "What do you say to those families that say, 'listen, we can't afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years?’"
BIDEN ADVISOR BRIAN DEESE: "This is about the future of the Liberal World Order and we have to stand firm."
The Russia-Ukraine military conflict is part of the energy crisis, but it isn't the most important part.
No, the most dangerous and pernicious of the causes of the energy crisis is the enlisting of the full regulatory might of the government to choke off energy financing.
Three important documents comprise this whole-of-government War on Energy.
The Plan of Destruction
Climate-Related Financial Risk
Executive Order 14030 of May 20, 2021
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/05/25/2021-11168/climate-related-financial-risk
A ROADMAP TO BUILD A CLIMATE-RESILIENT ECONOMY (White House)
October 14, 2021
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Climate-Finance-Report.pdf
FSOC Report on Climate-Related Financial Risk (Treasury, with many other agencies)
October 21, 2021
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0426
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/261/FSOC-Climate-Report.pdf
Treasury under Yellen is leading the War on Energy by seeking to choke off financing through banks, non-bank lenders, investment firms and insurance for the industry. You must read these things to get a sense of the audacity. Here is a sample from page 6 of the Executive Summary in the FSOC document:
“Sectors of the economy that are GHG-intensive, which include the energy, transportation, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors, likely need to undergo significant structural changes. These changes will likely require technological innovations and complementary policy actions that incentivize transitions to low-GHG methods of production. These could include regulation of GHG emissions, tax policies, or other measures that would incentivize or require reductions in GHG emissions. The necessary structural changes are likely to broadly affect households, communities, and businesses.”
Gee, do you think so?
“The Council recognizes the critical importance of taking prompt action to improve the availability of data and measurement tools, enhance assessments of climate-related financial risks and vulnerabilities, and incorporate climate-related risks into risk management practices and supervisory expectations for regulated entities, where appropriate.
In addition, FSOC members should also promote consistent, comparable, and decision-useful disclosures that allow investors and financial institutions to take climate-related financial risks into account in their investment and lending decisions.
Through these actions, financial regulators can both promote the resilience of the financial system and help it support an orderly, economy-wide transition toward the goal of net-zero emissions.”
And there it is. The plan is a transition to Net Zero emissions for the United States.
Here are the agencies sitting as part of FSOC:
“FSOC Members
The Council is composed of ten voting members who head the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve Board or FRB), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Bureau or CFPB), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), along with the independent member with insurance expertise, plus five nonvoting members. Two of the nonvoting members head the Office of Financial Research (OFR) and the Federal Insurance Office (FIO). The other three nonvoting members are a state insurance…”
The War
The FSOC document is the strategic blueprint for the war, which marshalls the full power of government to stamp out energy finance for good. Or for ill. It does not take much imagination to foresee the horrors this will ful strategic blunder and manifestation of Biden's ill judgment will have on the populace he was elected to serve and protect. The effect will be more horrifying than one's worst nightmares. It will result in financial destruction and the actual deaths of many Americans.
FSOC was a creation under the auspices of the Treasury Department during the Great recession of 2008 which broke the world. It was created to identify, track and suggest solutions for things that threaten the economy of the United States, like the mortgage problem that caused that crisis.
Under Janet Yellen, it has been repurposed.
No one voted for this. The people's elected representatives in Congress did not vote for this. This is being implemented by Executive fiat, under the radar
We need a vigorous national debate on 2 issues. First whether Climate Change is a threat at all. Second even if it is what we should do about it.
In that debate we will need Social Media NOT to censor any views. Right now, the crazy views of one side, the Climateers, are well-represented, but the crazy views and even most of the reasonable views of the other side are censored, or authorities are pushing for such censorship.
This means Facebook, Twitter and Google must be prohibited by law from weighing on the balance of views. Because balance is what is needed to vet all ideas fully.
If you are going to do industrial planning, and this is, then you need a plan. Not just a plan to destroy, but a plan to build the replacement.
In absence of other forces, in commodities, the cure for low prices is low prices and the cure for high prices is high prices. Low prices curtail return on deployed capital Lower capital investment leads to lower production and relative to demand means higher prices in time. High prices spurs additional capital investment, leading to higher production and relative to demand, lower prices. In time.
Time is a critical element. But all of that is true only in the absence of other forces. The many tentacled leviathan that is the Federal Government is bringing forces to bear on investment that are impeding market price signals which would otherwise lead to increased production and in time lower prices.
The actions of the FSOC in abusing their regulatory power to choke off finance for energy production are a greater threat to the financial stability of the United States than Climate Change will ever be.
It is funny that FSOC mentions Transition risks as one leading to financial instability. (p17-18). You meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it. This instability is directly CAUSED by their forced and ill-considered transition. The second of their 2 risks, physical risks, are dramatically overstated in order for them to justify their crusade. Still they seem unaware. They have a section on Financial Risks Associated with a Disorderly Transition (p19), but this seems almost secondary to them. It is the principle risk. The one they themselves are creating with their policies. Hilariously, the only risks they put down on paper are that the policies take too long (when the real risk is they are implemented too soon and without a viable plan) and that they are not done in concert globally. No wonder they are seeking global government.
A Brief Diversion into Climate Change - The Stated Reason For The War on Energy
From p14 of FSOC document:
“There is broad scientific consensus that climate change is driven by GHG emissions caused by human activity. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change is impacting every region of the Earth’s climate, these impacts are intensifying,13 and some of these impacts, such as sea-level rise, are likely to be irreversible.14”
It would be my guess that not 1 person engaged with FSOC in destroying our economy could tell you how much sea level has ALREADY risen in just the last 15,000 years since the end of the latest Ice Age. Estimates vary, but the number is likely somewhere between 300 and 400 feet. And these people are destroying our economy to prevent what? Another couple of feet? I have news for you but climate is not stable. There have been periods in Earth's geological history when there was no ice at the poles. Other periods when the entire Earth was frozen all the way to the equator. The elements that affect climate are numerous. Dozens at least. I could name at least 20 just off the top of my head, but that is not the argument here so I will not. The elements interact non-linearly with great feedback loops and recursive effects. The "models" they are using at the IPCC and its feeder Universities (everyone now depends on the flow of money thrown at Climate Change for their livelihoods so their motivations and incentives are highly suspect, or should be) are not even puerile. These models hardly count as infantile.
But even if you believe the Climateer hype and are a member in good standing of the Warmist religion, you must convince the people that this is a worthy cause, get their votes and then decide what to do about it. This has not been done. Today, one side of the argument is cancelled and silenced in our public square. So how can we come to a rational consensus?
The answer is it would be quite difficult. Yet the FSOC just assumes this is a given, a scientific consensus. That the problem is implied.
These people are well outside the powers granted them by legislation passed by an elected body. This is the biggest and most dangerous power grab in a long litany of overbearing Administrative State power grabs. The incoming Congress must be educated about this real threat and take steps to thwart it. Or it must be raised to the SCOTUS so it can be reigned in.
Frankly a far bigger threat to the financial stability to the US than Climate Change would be a 1859 Carrington type event. With Earth's magnetosphere currently waning in strength, a solar storm of that magnitude could conceivably bring down the entire US power grid. Perhaps half of the US population would die. This is PROBABLE in the next 30-50 years. It is a FAR greater threat to Financial stability, indeed to continued existence, than Climate Change. We just passed a $1.7 Trillion infrastructure bill. Did it address the hardening of the national electric grid? Are any agencies including FSOC doing so? No?
These people are not serious people.
Ocean chemistry is one of the risks associated with the burning of hydrocarbons at scale. But if you look at the last 500 million years of CO2 atmospheric levels and not just the last 500 or 200 or 100 as the Climate Fanatics do, you see we have been living in a LOW CO2 period, with past periods 10 or 100 times as high. There is a noticeable uptick in the last 100 years and it is cause for some concern. But not enough to justify the pogrom now taking place in the War on Energy, which has not been democratically authorized but is more of a putsch. Most people would agree that it is a cause for concern. Enough to warrant serious study. And most people would probably be happy if the bulk of energy came from renewable sources if just so we stopped sending $1 Trillion dollars a year or more to evil rulers around the world.
But to do a transition you need a serious and viable PLAN. We could plant billions and billions or trillions of trees, which act as a carbon sink to buy the time for study and for gathering an actual consensus in the popular will.
Shutting down fossil fuels without a plan, which will result in massive misery to human kind is irresponsible, reckless and evil. We can stop this evil by putting an end to FSOC and its nefarious and unauthorized activities.
The War on Energy must be stopped. Shutting down the FSOC would be a good start. A viable plan for any transition, should that reflect the popular will, must be made. Doing a Net Zero transition the way we left Afghanistan should not be acceptable to any rational person.