Next Tuesday at Senate ENR: IEA, EIA, and BOB

Senate ENR hearing with the IEA, EIA, and BOB, new Forbes piece on extreme energy poverty, Todd Royal on the podcast, and a gray fox on the porch

An interesting and busy week of getting caught up on assignments and preparing for lectures. On Thursday night, I presented to Mike McConnell’s class in Energy Management at the Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma. I’m always happy to do college lectures and presenting to the school from which my mother, Ann Mahoney Bryce, graduated back in 1946 with a degree in home economics, brings a smile to my face. I think she’d be happy to hear that I was speaking to students at her alma mater. The biggest news of my week is that I will be testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee next Tuesday in Washington. More on that below. Four things today:

• Senate testimony next Tuesday

• Forbes piece on COP 26 and deaths of extreme energy poverty

• Todd Royal on the podcast talking “clean” energy

• A gray fox on the porch

(I shot the photo above in Austin on November 6 at about 6:30 pm.)

I will be testifying at 10 am in the Senate Dirksen Office Building next Tuesday in front of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee. The caption for the hearing is: “To examine the causes, outlook, and implications of domestic and international energy price trends.”
 
This will be the third time this year I will appear before Congress. In June, I testified virtually before the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, about transportation issues. Last month, I testified, again, virtually, in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management about “strategies for improving critical energy infrastructure.” 
 
This hearing will be about soaring energy prices. My remarks will largely focus on why the U.S. should not follow Europe’s disastrous blueprint. The other witnesses are Tim Gould, the chief energy economist at the International Energy Agency, and Stephen Nalley, the acting administrator at the Energy Information Administration. Given that list of witnesses, I’ve joked  that the hearing will feature the IEA, the EIA, and BOB.

I believe the video of the hearing will be available on the committee’s website. If you are in Washington next Tuesday, come on down to 366 Senate Dirksen Office Building, at 10 am. 
 

This morning, I published a piece on Forbes about energy poverty. I began: 

• The defining inequality in the world today is the staggering disparity between the energy rich and the energy poor. That disparity came into gruesome focus yet again last week in Sierra Leone. On November 5, while several thousand policymakers, researchers, and climate activists at the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow were trying to forge agreements on how to slash consumption of hydrocarbons, about 115 people were burned alive while trying to collect gasoline from a damaged fuel tanker truck near Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown...Accidents like the one in Freetown are chillingly common. Since 2019, more than 400 people have died in accidents similar to the one in Freetown. The circumstances are almost always the same: a fuel tanker truck gets involved in an accident. Large crowds of desperate people assemble, excited about the prospect of free fuel. Then, due to an errant spark or a careless cigarette, the fuel is ignited and dozens of people are immolated. These deaths — all of them — are deaths of extreme energy poverty. While energy elites insist we need to drastically reduce our use of coal, oil and natural gas, hundreds of millions of people are living in grinding energy poverty and they will do whatever they have to do to get the energy they need.

I then detailed the other accidents that have occurred in Africa and Lebanon in almost identical circumstances. I concluded: 

• On Wednesday, at the COP 26 confab in Glasgow, a draft agreement was being circulated that called for “just transitions to net-zero emissions.” But the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality. Amid the never-ending talk about net-zero and bans on hydrocarbons, it’s essential to remember those 400 dead, those mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters in Sierra Leone, in Lebanon, Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere who were burned alive. Those people didn’t die because of climate change. They died trying to get the fuel they need to live.

Again, here’s a link. Please share it.
 

Todd Royal on the dirty truths about "clean" energy

This week’s guest on the Power Hungry Podcast is Todd Royal, the co-author (with Ron Stein) of the book, Clean Energy Exploitations: Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses that Support “Clean” Energy. In this episode, Todd explains how China has been  “weaponizing" the clean energy transition. He talked about the mining of cobalt, the slave labor used to produce polysilicon in China, rare earth elements, and why hydrocarbons are going to be needed for decades to come. He also talked about ESG rules on investments that are based on vague definitions of what is “good.”

Please give the episode a listen. 

Urocyon cinereoargenteus on the porch 

Last Saturday, a gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) was hanging out on our back porch like it was on salary. It was a healthy-looking specimen but for a patch on its left hindquarter that had been rubbed raw or infected by something. The animal probably weighed a dozen pounds. On Sunday, at about dusk, it cam back and crisscrossed the porch three or four times before leaving. It came back again on Monday shortly after nightfall. (The photo above was taken by the California Department of Water Resources in 2017.)

Lorin and I are no longer surprised by the wildlife that shows up in our yard. Our property backs up to the Barton Creek Greenbelt, which covers more than 800 acres and has nearly eight miles of trails. There are lots of places for wildlife to hide on the greenbelt and plenty of cat food bowls that get left outside by homeowners who live near the creek. Over the past few years, we’ve had visits from coyotes, a bobcat, and now, a fox. We get regular visits from armadillos, raccoons, and possums. We’ve seen foxes in the neighborhood, but never had visits like the ones that happened this week. After inspecting the dog bowls and sniffing under the bird feeder, the fox went out to the porch on my office and sat there for a while, like he owned everything between here and Nuevo Laredo. Here’s a bit about gray foxes from Wikipedia: 

•  The gray fox is mainly distinguished from most other canids by its grizzled upperparts, black stripe down its tail and strong neck, while the skull can be easily distinguished from all other North American canids by its widely separated temporal ridges that form a U-shape. There is little sexual dimorphism, save for the females being slightly smaller than males...Gray foxes often hunt for the same prey as bobcats and coyotes who occupy the same region. To avoid interspecific competition, the gray fox has developed certain behaviors and habits to increase their survival chances. In regions where gray foxes and coyotes hunt for the same food, the gray fox has been observed to give space to the coyote, staying within its own established range for hunting.  Gray foxes might also avoid their competitors by inhabiting different habitats than them. In California, gray foxes do this by living in chaparral where their competitors are fewer and the landscape provides them a greater chance to escape from a dangerous encounter It also has been suggested that gray foxes could be more active at night than during the day to temporally avoid their larger competitors. 

Happy Friday to you. 

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