Sidebar: Sunday School 4/10/22

One of the things that drives me nuts is how no one challenges the talking heads when they toss stuff unsupported nonsense out into the universe. A perfect case in point? The discussion on Fox News Sunday on "how national security and energy policy go hand-in-hand."

Dana Perino asked Britt Hume if he thought "President Biden will get to a place where he will figure out a way to buck the progressives and move forward to allow us to drill more here at home?"  Here's how his response started (I added the emphasis).

Well, I think he and his party are pretty much enthralled to the Green Movement and his energy policies to date have reflected that, and they have obviously -- are restraining the potential of American energy production, which would be at this point I think it's fair to say -- ... that we need more of everything. 

"More of everything" is the 'all of the above' policy. It acknowledges the need to increase our use of renewables, as well as our continued reliance on fossil fuels including coal, natural gas, and oil - "certainly for now and for the near future," Hume said on Sunday. Here's more of his response.

And I don't think the president is ready to go there, they will blame the oil companies for not producing enough and so on. We've heard that many times before, and they blame the oil companies for higher gas prices and all the rest of it. But the best way to get gas prices down is to throw open the regulatory barriers and let the United States energy industry go, which it certainly can...

If we did that, he said, we could supply countries in Western Europe with energy to make up for what they're not going to be getting anymore from Russia. And that would "cut off the flow of Western funds into Vladimir Putin's war chest." Perino said Hume's answer "makes sense to me. We'll see if it makes sense to them going forward." 

Of course, it makes sense to Perino and Hume: if we're cutting regulations, everything will be fine, right? Well, no; what Hume's selling, the oil industry isn't buying.

Last month there was a gathering in Houston called CERAWeek. I stumbled on it, looking for info on this issue. According to its website,  

For forty years, CERAWeek has been providing an integrated framework for understanding what’s ahead for global energy markets, geopolitics, and technology. Participants include senior executives, government officials, thought leaders, academics, technology innovators and financial leaders.​ 

Among the speakers last month? Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who did as Hume suggested: she asked for increased production: 

We are on war footing and we have to respond. We have to increase short-term supply...The message right now, and I hope investors are listening, is that we can’t have one element holding back when you see what is happening every night. At this moment, we all have to give.

Here's where it gets interesting; there's this great reporting from Freightwaves.com, which covered CERAWeek (emphasis added).

Even as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was using the platform of a major energy industry conference to call on the nation’s oil producers to ramp up production, what was being said during other sessions made clear that was not likely to happen. 

The increasing U.S. industries’ strategy of restrained output and investment was on display last week at two separate panels at CERAWeek. It’s a game plan that has implications not only for the price of oil in the short and medium terms, but also for the transportation industries that serve it.

And it wasn't just one person saying production wouldn't be ramped up - it was several people.

• Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, one of the largest producers in the shale fields of the U.S., said "We’re not going to chase growth like we all did.” His comments came during a panel discussion on 'balancing growth and investor returns in the North American shale market.' The plan? Keep growth rates at 5%.

Unfortunately, government estimates are for slightly over 7% growth, to help replace the four million barrels of Russian oil a day that's no longer available.

• On the same panel? Tim Leach, an EVP at ConocoPhillips, who said that “accelerating investment in an inflationary environment is never a good idea,” and he added, a “long-term view is 'what creates value for our shareholders'.” 

• On a different panel, Chad Michael, president of an energy-sector investment bank, said that among investors, there's "an expectation of returning significant amounts of cash flow." And he said "the business model is mid-single-digit growth, because that is what investors want."

He said, they can't do much more because of labor and supply chain issues, something Granholm acknowledged in her remarks, too. The article did note that Biden's goal of moving away from fossil fuels has an impact on investing, but everyone knows the industry is not going anywhere anytime soon.

• Raoul LeBlanc, a VP at S&P global, suggested that in the face of calls for more production, the industry needs to ask "just how reasonable is it to step on the accelerator?' The current impact won't last forever." 

Why didn't anyone mention a prohibitive regulatory environment? Here's more on that, again from the Freightwaves.com reporters.

HOUSTON — A key State Department official used an appearance at energy industry event CERAWeek to take on what he said were “myths” about the Biden administration’s energy policy... 

The official was Amos Hochstein, Senior Advisor for Global Energy Security at the State Department. 

Hochstein disputed the view that the administration “is somehow holding back or is responsible for the industry not being able to produce a rising amount of oil.”

Production is up since Biden took office, but in recent weeks it's been holding steady; during that time, pressure on everyone to stop using Russian oil, and on the industry to replace it, increased.

When Hochstein has spoken with oil industry officials, he said he has asked them if the Biden administration had taken steps that are restricting production. “The bizarre thing is they told me it is not true,” Hochstein said. “The industry said there is no bottleneck for added production.” 

Rather, he said, issues outside the federal government's control, including labor shortages and problems with the supply of fracking sand, are hurting production. 

What's that all about? According to a report from Reuters (emphasis added)  

Sand supplies are so tight that it is slowing the pace of work for some oil drillers, and higher costs for sand are eating into the bottom line for others....

Hmm...what on earth is going on here? Well, sand that cost in the low teens at the beginning of the pandemic, and rose to $20-$25 per ton, and now they're at $50-$70 a ton - something industry consultants called "unheard of in the industry's modern history." 

And what's hampering the sand market? Labor and delivery - as in, they're short-handed getting the sand out of the ground, and there are shortages in the trucking industry, too. Which, if you think about it, is pretty much the issue across the board, right? 

So, back to Hume and Perino, and the rest of the talking heads, no matter what side of the oil rig they sit on. I get that they're paid to offer opinions, and that most of them are anti-Biden (for a whole host of reasons). But at some point, someone with a microphone is going to have to stop talking about the politics of everything, and start talking about reality. 

Everyone knows gas prices are high, but most people don't know why; they'll listen to Hume and think that it's a regulatory issue. Or, they'll listen to someone else say it's price-gouging, or extreme profit-taking at the corporate level. And they'll all be at least partly wrong - some more wrong than others. Getting these folks to take time out of their endless discussions on the political implications of this stuff to talk about the real problems and real solutions we need seems a bridge too far.

If the politicians won't be honest with us, and the talking heads won't, and the 'news' people won't, we're going to keep taking one step forward and two steps back. 

Is that really what we want? And if the answer to that is yes, what the hell is wrong with us?

Sunday School 3/27/22

Every classroom I visited yesterday was all abuzz about the off-script statement from President Joe Biden about Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was a classic Biden gaffe, a classic Biden ad-lib, a classic Biden throw-away line. It was classic Biden. 

Like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Shrieking in the Hearing Room), saying someone needed to 'take Putin out', Biden said out loud what many people say quietly to themselves, or to a higher power in their prayers at night. 

In case you missed it, here's the video.

Since we know how that played out, with all the administration folks quickly moonwalking back the comment, I'm going to move on to other things, like these Fox News Sunday interviews, starting with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida Man). 

The chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Scott didn't even wait for a question to dive right in.

It's nice seeing you, John. I think we're going to have a great year. We've got great candidates running around the country. We've got some primaries. The Democrats have primaries. In their primaries, I think Bernie Sanders type candidates are going to come out. The Biden agenda is very, very unpopular. So, as long as we raise our money, as long as we, you know, focus on big, bold ideas, I think we're going to have a great November.

The 'John' mentioned was host John Roberts, who asked about Russia and Ukraine. Scott said we should be doing more.

 ... don't play to tie, you play to win. You give them every resource you can and you do it every second. You're thinking, every second, what else can we do to put Putin back on his heels and have him take his troops back into Russia? That's what we should be doing every second. We have got to win this.

Scott also said that Biden has "been pretty weak" and that he had done more, "Putin wouldn't have invaded."

Roberts had some questions on two items in Scott's "11-point plan to rescue America." First, that all Americans should pay income taxes so they "have skin in the game," and second, that  all federal legislation will sunset in five years - which could potentially lead to the end of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. 

He wondered why Scott would propose that kind of thing in an election year. Scott said those were "Democrat talking points," but Roberts insisted they were in the plan - and he's right. In his defense, Scott said

Also in the plan, it says we ought to, every year, talk about exactly how we're going to fix Medicare and Social Security... No one that I know of wants to sunset Medicare or Social Security, but what we're doing is we don't even talk about it. Medicare goes bankrupt in four years. Social Security goes bankrupt in 12 years. I think we ought to figure out how we preserve those programs. Every program that we care about, we ought to stop and take the time to preserve those programs.

That italicized part? I searched the plan for 'Social Security' and there's only one reference:

Force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt. 

That's not the quite the same thing as talking every year about fixing these programs. And, on the other point, the tax thing? 

...here's what's unfair. We have people that don't -- that could go to work and have figured out how to have government pay their way. That's not right. They ought to have some skin in the game. I don't care if it's a dollar. We ought to all be in this together. I'm going to focus, continue to focus on reducing taxes. 

Just once, I'd love a politician to name one of these freeloaders, or one of the lobster-and-steak-eating welfare queens 0r whatever they call them. If they can't name one, do they even exist? 

Scott said he's only been in DC for a short while - three years - but he went there "to change this country.

Look at where we are now. The woke left controls, you know, the executive branch. They control a lot of our government. They control academia. They control Hollywood.

My goodness - they control Hollywood!  

To his credit, Roberts suggested most of his Republican colleagues "want to focus on Joe Biden," not on coming up with some plan they have to try and sell to the American public. And I'm pretty sure he's right about that.

And, speaking of the woke left, the next guest was Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley is Nowhere Near Hollywood); he's one of the Deputy Whips of the Congressional Woke Left Caucus. 

They talked a bit about Ukraine, and the Iran nuclear deal, and where India gets military equipment. And then Roberts shifted to politics and stuff that's more wokey-lefty: how Biden "keeps talking about, 'we've got to move toward the green agenda,' That's fine,  

if you do it over the course of decades. Even if you gave everybody in the country an electric vehicle for free and you convert every home to electric heat, the grid wouldn't stand it. So, you've got to update the grid as well. I mean, is it a time to put a pause on the push toward the green agenda and say, look, for the meantime, we've got to pump more oil, we've got to help out our European allies, we've got to get prices down?

Damn - that's an unwoke righty comment right there. Khanna suggested it's possible to walk and chew green gum at the same time, or something. He called it 'common sense.'

Short term, increase production. Here's one way to do it: the federal government can buy back what we're using in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and provide a floor price. That's a bipartisan proposal. Let's pass it.

Long-term, let's have a moonshot on clean technology. If John F. Kennedy said that we need to go to the moon to defeat the Soviets, you want to defeat the petrol states of Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, let's have a moonshot on renewable energy.

Remarkably, Roberts' head did not explode after Khanna's answer. He moved to Queen Work Lefty AOC and her recent NY1 interview, and her thinking that "the Democratic Party is in trouble because of the president." He played this clip, and asked Khanna if she's right.

This is really about the collapse in support among young people, among the Democratic base, feeling like they are not -- that they worked overtime to get this president elected and they aren't necessarily being seen. 

Khanna outlined Biden's accomplishments (American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill, and more) and said "of course there are other things we ought to do. But this president has met the moment in very difficult circumstances." That led Roberts to suggest "Americans might disagree with you," pointing to the president's 40% approval rating.

Finally, Roberts had a question about Khanna's book, which talks about technology and how we can make it work better for us. 

... the political discourse in this country has sunk to new lows. Everybody's yelling at each other. And much of the reason why they're yelling at each other is because of social media. Is social media ruining this country?

He said no, but "social media needs to do better." 

They ought not to have incitement of violence. They ought not to discriminate against viewpoints, allow for free speech, and they ought to make sure that teenagers aren't getting manipulated in ways that are causing depression and suicide. So, absolutely, there need to be more smarter regulations on social media.

Speaking of social media, remember Truth Social, former president Trump's new platform? No surprise if you don't - it's been a dud, it seems. This article in The Guardian says  

...nearly a month after its launch, Truth Social has become a laughingstock, marked by a botched rollout, a share price collapse and, in Trump, a figurehead who doesn’t actually post much to his own social media platform...

And almost a month after the launch, Trump has so far shared only one thought to the platform; a boilerplate message in mid-February urging people to “Get ready!”

 See you around campus.

Meanwhile Back in Albany (v40)

Nathaniel Brooks/NY Times

How'd you do with Days One and Two of my Sonofa Gov's State of the State? And are you ready for more? 

Day Three focused on the greening of New York, what Gov. Andrew Cuomo called a "new economic engine that is future-oriented, that is essential to our survival, and that has the potential to benefit generations to come." But, he said,

As is true in so many major issues of our time, the challenge is to close the societal and governmental gap between aspirations and accomplishment, between rhetoric and reality, between saying and doing. Offering hope of a tomorrow that never comes is one of the main causes of our social unrest and distrust in government. We are just not making enough actual progress. Why? Because change is hard.

Have no fear, though: "As the world economy resets, and as change is a necessity, there is an opportunity to raise our efforts to the next level - and New York should seize this moment." And, we can seize the rhetorical moment, too: Cuomo noted that "candles cannot power the future." We're going to stick a fork in fossil fuels, or something, via a four-pronged approach: 

• identifying and building enough green projects to generate the clean energy needed to "reliably support" all our needs; 
• ending our reliance on other countries, by building our own green tech and equipment, and developing "a steady flow of projects to start up and sustain those new businesses;"  
• building up our transmission capacity to connect the dots between where energy is generated, and where it's consumed; and
• elevating our training and education programs, and building out our R&D capacity.

He announced a $26B public/private partnership to develop around 100 renewable projects across the state. 68 projects (52 solar, 13 on-shore wind, and three off-shore wind) are already underway, and he announced 24 more during his presentation. Cuomo expects 11,000 jobs in "upstate NY alone." (Upstate is defined here, in case you aren't sure exactly where to find it.) 

Among the new projects? Two new wind farms, invisible from the shore, off Long Island; turning a Capital-district brownfield into a state-of-the-art wind turbine tower facility, and adding a fifth offshore wind turbine hub to serve the entire east coast.

More big news? He announced a competitive bidding process for a new green transmission grid, starting with three projects all leading to NYC. Other projects across the state are designed to "break open congestion" and will start this year. And, we're going to have state-of-the-art battery storage capability, with construction already underway on a new facility in Franklin County

On the last tine of the fork, there's a new $20M Offshore Wind Training Institute, as well as training for heat pumps and geothermal heating technology, which will help us replace existing systems in some 130,000 buildings. All projects have must meet MWBE goals, and pay prevailing wage, so that workers and business owners of color are not left out.

He said the whole green program will create 12,400 megawatts of green power, enough for six million homes; directly create 50,000 jobs; and generate $29 billion in private investment. 

The message? "Go big, or go home," and he's got no intention of us sitting on the sidelines as others move forward.