Fox News hit, offshore boondoggle, Forbes, Jack Lifton, and Right Whales
Fox News hit, new RCE piece on the offshore wind boondoggle, new Forbes piece on extreme energy poverty, Jack Lifton talks rare earths, and...Right Whales
The last 364 days have been memorable. Lorin and I started the year on a camping trip in Big Bend Ranch State Park where we, along with our friends, were snowed in for two days. Few experiences rival being in a remote area of the Chihuahuan Desert during a snowstorm and few places are as wondrous as the desert covered in snow when the sun comes back out. Lucky for us, our camping companions were better prepared than we were, so we survived the incident with no injuries or frostbite. Little did we know that roughly six weeks later we would get hit by a blizzard in Austin that would include losing power in our home for 45 hours. The ERCOT blackout caused by Winter Storm Uri, continues to reverberate in Texas politics. (Here’s a link to my August 1 piece in the Dallas Morning News explaining why the blackout was a government failure.) Add in the frustrations of the pandemic, the new Biden administration, the energy crisis that is ravaging Europe, and well, yes, it’s been a memorable year.
A few numbers for the year: I did 45 speaking engagements, most of which were in person. I published several dozen articles (I haven’t counted them) and published 52 newsletters. The Power Hungry Podcast has grown significantly. Thanks to my colleague, Tyson Culver, who produces the podcast, we published 56 episodes this year. We are now averaging more than 2,000 downloads per episode. We are also getting good traction on YouTube. My channel, Robertbrycetv, has about 1,200 subscribers. (If you haven’t subscribed, please do so.)
Finally, I was honored to testify before Congress three times this year. Last month, I testified, in person, in front of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee at a hearing captioned: “To examine the causes, outlook, and implications of domestic and international energy price trends.” In October, I testified, virtually, in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management about “strategies for improving critical energy infrastructure.” In June, I testified virtually before the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, about transportation issues.
Okay, enough looking back. Lorin and I are planning to spend time with the kids today and maybe swim at Barton Springs or maybe do some birding. So let’s cut to the chase. Five items today:
Fox News appearance on China and rare earths
RCE: Offshore wind harpooned by new lawsuit
Forbes: 263 humans burned alive in 2021
Jack Lifton on the podcast talking EVs, China, and rare earths
Right whales
The photo of Right Whales above was taken by NOAA in 2006.
On Monday morning, I was contacted by producers at Fox News to come on the Ingraham Angle to discuss my Christmas Eve article in the Wall Street Journal piece on China and rare earth elements. It was my first national TV hit in a while. I was glad to have the opportunity. Here’s a link to the segment.
On Monday, I published a piece in Real Clear Energy about the offshore wind craze. I wrote:
Despite more than a decade of hype and the promise of billions of dollars in federal and state subsidies, the offshore wind boondoggle – and yes, boondoggle is the right word for it – keeps getting torpedoed by delays and litigation. The latest harpoon to slam the nascent industry hit last week when the Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation sued three federal agencies in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. on behalf of several commercial fishing groups. The suit alleges that the permit awarded to the proposed 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project violates numerous federal laws including the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and National Environmental Policy Act.
I concluded:
Among the few entities that will benefit if projects like Vineyard Wind get built are foreign companies. Vineyard Wind is owned by Avangrid Renewables (a subsidiary of Spanish utility Iberdrola,) and the Danish firm, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. Britain’s BP, Norway’s Equinor, and Denmark’s Ørsted are also pushing to develop several thousand megawatts of offshore wind capacity in US waters. It’s time to end the hype about offshore wind and the giveaways to foreign corporations. Let’s hope these lawsuits succeed and they scuttle the offshore wind business once and for all. I’ll end by saying once again that if policymakers are serious about decarbonizing the electric grid, they need to get serious about nuclear energy.
Again, here’s a link.
Yesterday, I published a piece in Forbes about a subject I have been reporting on for several years: deaths of extreme energy poverty. The latest immolation occurred on December 14 in Haiti. I explained:
Two days before Christmas, the deputy mayor of Cap-Haitien increased to 95 the number of Haitians who were burned alive on December 14 after an overturned tanker truck caught fire and exploded. According to press reports, about 100 residents gathered around the overturned truck trying to help themselves to the fuel when the fuel ignited. The gruesome accident in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, was at least the fourth such accident to occur in 2021, and the second in two months.
I continued:
It’s hard to imagine a worse way to die than being burned alive. And yet, over the past 12 months, at least 263 human beings were immolated — and every one of those deaths was caused by extreme energy poverty. The conflagrations in Haiti, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Lebanon show how desperate people can be to get the energy they need to improve their lives. All four of these accidents show, yet again, that the defining inequality in the world today is the staggering disparity between the energy rich and the energy poor. More than 3 billion people around the world are living in places where per-capita electricity consumption is less than what’s used by an average American refrigerator.
I ended the piece with these lines:
But when people like McKibben and de Blasio use the words “we” and “our” they have the luxury of living in places where hydrocarbons are so cheap and abundant that they can imagine a world where they aren’t needed. McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, where annual tuition, fees, and room and board cost students $76,820 per year. When McKibben and de Blasio use words like “we” and “our” they aren’t speaking for the people who live in places like Cap-Haitien and Freetown. The next time you hear a climate activist tell you how terrible it is that we are using hydrocarbons and that we should be using renewables, and only renewables, you might tell them about what happened this year in Cap-Haitien and Freetown. You might remind them that instead of complaining about climate change, they should be thankful for the plentiful energy that allows them to lead comfortable lives. You might also remind them that in 2021 alone, 263 human beings were immolated — burned alive — trying to get their hands on a few liters of motor fuel.
Jack Lifton on rare earths and why humans are "mineral parasites"
I have known Jack Lifton for more than a decade. I first interviewed him about rare earth elements back in 2009, when I was writing my fourth book, Power Hungry, which has an entire chapter on the issue of import dependence, China, and rare earths. I also quoted Lifton in this article that I wrote for Real Clear Energy back in 2010.
Lifton, who is based in Detroit, has been writing about rare earth elements, critical minerals, and the companies that produce them, for more than two decades. On the podcast, Lifton, who is the editor-in-chief of InvestorIntel.com, explained why China’s dominance of the global rare earths market will continue, why projections about huge increases in electric vehicle production in the U.S. are “nonsense,” and why as he put it, humans are “mineral parasites.” Jack knows his neodymium from his dysprosium. He speaks plainly about how the US auto sector is forfeiting its energy advantage to China. It’s a message he’s been delivering for more than a decade.
Here’s a link to the episode. Please share it.
The Sierra Club on the North Atlantic Right Whale: "A single whale death can have a significant negative impact on the species' ability to recover"
While writing about the Vineyard Wind project for Real Clear Energy, I delved into the North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis). I have been close to whales only once in my life. That was back in 2016 when Lorin and I took the kids to the Galapagos Islands. I’ve forgotten what type of whales we saw, but I vividly remember being gobsmacked at how big the animals were and how small our little inflatable boat felt when they were underneath us. (The photo above was taken in 2015. It is attributed to Moira Brown and the New England Aquarium.)
Given that the big environmental groups have been almost completely silent about the impact that proposed offshore wind development on the Eastern Seaboard will have on marine mammals, it’s interesting to read this analysis from the Sierra Club about Right Whales:
The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered whale species in the world. Formerly numbering in the thousands, there are currently fewer than 500 individuals living in their remaining habitat on the U.S. east coast and Canada. Right whales were one of the most popular targets for whalers as early as the eleventh century; in fact, the moniker “right whale” comes from the fact that they were the right whales to hunt. Their slow speed, docile nature, coastal habitat, and tendency to feed at the surface made them both easy to find and easy to kill. Additionally, forty percent of a right whale’s body mass is low-density blubber, much higher than most other whale species. This means that dead right whales float on the surface, allowing whalers to collect the blubber without needing to haul the entire carcass onboard their ships.
As a result, North Atlantic right whales were heavily overhunted for many centuries. By the mid-1700s, the population in the North Atlantic was reduced to the point that whalers began focusing on other species. By 1935, the entire world population was estimated to be below 100 individuals. Finally, governments decided it was time to take action, and a global ban on hunting North Atlantic right whales went into effect in 1935.
Although the ban has allowed the population to recover slightly, the whale is still in grave danger of extinction from humans. A significant portion of North Atlantic right whale deaths are due to human activities... Because the North Atlantic right whale has such a small population and a low annual reproductive rate, a single whale death can have a significant negative impact on the species’ ability to recover. However, this also works in the other direction: preventing a single whale death can increase the chance of recovery. The Sierra Club’s work has been focused towards eliminating as many whale fatalities as possible... Now is not the time to get complacent, as it is critical that right whales continue to be protected.
Happy New Year, y'all.
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