The Hill on Manchin’s permitting bill, two new podcasts, $100 binoculars

Manchin's permitting bill contained a huge federal power grab, two new podcasts, and a comparison of Audubon prints

I’ve been home this week enjoying -- finally! -- some cooler weather. As you have heard, the summer here was ungodly hot and dry, and then it got hotter and drier. We’ve had a touch of rain over the past few weeks, but the heat persisted for most of September. On Tuesday, the weather changed and as I went out to get the newspaper, (yes, we still get the dead-tree version of the Wall Street Journal) I smelled,  and felt, the coming of autumn. I have done some media this week. I was on Bill Peacock’s Excellent Thought podcast talking about ERCOT and the ongoing challenges in the Texas electric grid. I have also been having fun with the “about a minute” videos. I had good traction this week on TikTok with one about the Nordstream pipeline bombing. As of this morning, it’s had about 127,000 views. This experiment has been informative. In about two months on TikTok, I’ve gained more than 4,700 followers. That’s twice as many followers as I garnered over 12 years on YouTube. I like the idea of reaching a new audience. 

Speaking of Nordstream, there’s plenty more to write about that. As I noted in my video, Russia is the prime suspect in the sabotage of the pipeline. Why? If the pipe is bombed, Gazprom can claim force majeure and not have to honor its commitments to supply gas to its customers in Europe. That said, it’s also possible that we will never know for sure who bombed the pipe. Furthermore, now that Russian gas is out of the picture for the foreseeable future, Europe’s energy security and energy affordability crisis may only get worse from here. Finally, it’s important to keep the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline in context. The history of modern warfare is full of examples of pipelines being bombed. I wrote about pipeline attacks back in 2004 for Salon, and in 2005, including this piece for The Atlantic. Four items today:

• The Hill: Manchin’s infrastructure bill contained a huge federal power grab

• Chris Lawson on Europe’s fertilizer crunch

• Jesse Jenkins on decarbonization and expanding U.S. renewable-energy capacity

• Two collections of Audubon’s prints 

The images above are of two collections of John James Audubon’s prints. I got them at Half Price Books here in Austin. The book on the left is a collection of prints made by J.T. Bowen of Philadelphia. The one on the right contains prints done by Robert Havell of London. See below for my discussion of them.

On Tuesday afternoon, The Hill published my piece about Joe Manchin’s proposed permitting-reform bill. Alas, the article didn’t stay relevant for very long. About two hours after it was published, Senate Democrats announced that the Manchin bill was dead. Their plan had been to attach the measure to a must-pass continuing resolution that will keep funding operations of the federal government. (That resolution was approved on Thursday.) And while the permitting-reform bill had some positive things in it, the measure also contained what would have been a huge federal power grab when it comes to the siting and financing of high-voltage transmission projects. I began: 

• Last month, the wind and solar sectors got a massive boost when President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 into law. That measure gives tens of billions of dollars in new tax credits to the companies that build wind and solar projects.

• Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin, the powerful Democrat from West Virginia, introduced an infrastructure-permitting bill that could give the wind and solar sectors another big gift: If passed into law, the measure will give Washington bureaucrats the authority to override state and local objections to expanding high-voltage transmission lines, a move that the wind and solar industries have wanted for years.

• The bill gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), in conjunction with the Secretary of Energy, the authority to big foot the states if they determine transmission lines are in the “national interest” and if they “enhance the ability of facilities that generate or transmit firm or intermittent energy to connect to the electric grid.” (For those of you scoring at home, see page 78 of the 91-page bill.) Indeed, the language of the bill makes it clear that America’s national interest should be handcuffed to weather-dependent renewables that require staggering amounts of land and whose supply chains depend heavily on metals, minerals, and magnets that are produced almost exclusively in China.

I concluded: 

• The bottom line here is obvious: Any federal overhaul of energy infrastructure permitting will be contentious. But Manchin’s Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022 includes what would be the biggest land grab by the federal government over the states in modern history. It would give unelected federal employees in Washington authority over the siting of power lines stretching hundreds of thousands of miles across rural America.

• We need infrastructure siting reform. But legislation that includes a federal takeover of the siting of our electricity grid is a power line too far.

While Manchin’s bill didn’t go anywhere, the fight over the siting and expansion of the high-voltage transmission grid will continue. The NGO-corporate-Congressional-media complex is pushing for hundreds of gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity to be built in the U.S. But that buildout is being constrained by the limits of the electric grid. In my view, the electric grid we have now is largely the grid we are going to have. That means we need to utilize the existing transmission capacity to its fullest extent. And that means we have to put new power plants where the old ones are. And that means, over the long term, replacing existing coal and nat-gas-fired power plants with nuclear plants. 

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

I used this new slide during my speech in Austin last week

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Chris Lawson: "you're looking at a 5 to 6x price increase in ammonia. It's been fairly extraordinary"     

Chris Lawson is head of fertilizers at CRU Group, a London-based consulting firm. In this episode, Chris discusses the collapse of Europe’s fertilizer sector due to high natural gas prices, why Russia continues to play a key role in the global fertilizer market, China’s restrictions on exports, and how today’s fertilizer challenges will impact future food prices and availability. (The episode -- #139! -- was recorded on September 22, 2022). I was interested to hear about Chris’s background (he grew up on a dairy farm in Australia) and how he became an expert on fertilizer. Among the more interesting things that Chris said was that he doesn’t believe the world will face severe food shortages in the coming months. That’s a different take than what is coming from many other analysts. It was a good conversation that helped me understand better the importance of fertilizer. If you are curious, here’s a piece I published earlier this month on fertilizer in Newsweek. The audio and transcript are here. Here's the link on YouTube.
 

Jesse Jenkins: "the real challenge" is the "pace and scale of infrastructure that we have to build out"     

Jesse Jenkins is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton who focuses on energy system modeling. In this episode, Jesse talks about his work on modeling the potential emissions impact of the Manchin-Schumer Inflation Reduction Act, why his model projects a huge increase in renewables (nearly 400 GW of new solar and about 200 GW of new wind capacity), land-use conflicts, California, Europe, and why he believes the $370 billion in spending in the bill will stimulate more investment in the U.S. economy. (The episode, #140, was recorded on September 15, 2020.)  For more on Jenkins’ work, you can find his Net-Zero America study here. His REPEAT Project analysis is here. I will be publishing an extended Q&A with Jenkins on Sunday in Real Clear Energy. I’ll include a link to that piece in next week’s “news” letter. 
 
I will have more to say about Jenkins’ modeling and what it suggests. In my view, his work makes far too many assumptions about land use and the willingness of rural Americans to accept large-scale renewables and the transmission projects needed to make them viable. But that’s for another day. In the meantime, the audio and transcript of the episode can be found here. And as always, it’s on YouTube. 
 

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Comparing Audubon prints: Bowen Versus Havell   

For more than two years now, I’ve been featuring birds in this “news” letter and nearly every week I think about which bird I want to feature and why. Furthermore, nearly every week I think about including a print by John James  Audubon. But the more I learn about Audubon (and I’m no expert) and the more I look at the images he created, the more captivated I’ve become. As noted at the top of this note, I have two used books that contain Audubon’s prints. One collection of prints was done by J.T. Bowen of Philadelphia. The other contains prints done by Robert Havell of London As you can see from the two images of the Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) above, the two printers ended up with images that are similar, but not the same.

Bowen’s print is on the left. Havell’s is on the right. Also note that these aren't the highest quality images. They are merely snapshots I took from the pages of my books. 
 
As to the two different printers, I kind of prefer Bowen’s style as the prints have a texture that seems more lifelike and the colors seem to be a bit more vibrant than those in the Havel prints. That said, the color saturation in the Havell prints is lovely. It’s a joy to have two different collections of Audubon’s prints and to see how printers from nearly two centuries ago did their work. It also reminds me of something my fellow birder (and friend of more than 40 years), Chris Cauthon, said a while back, which was something to the effect of “sometimes an illustration of a bird can give you a better sense of it than a photo can.” That rhymes with my experience. The joy in having the two books showing work by two different printers, is being able to compare and contrast the images. The books I reference above are readily available from used booksellers. I paid $10 for one of them and maybe $20 for the other. The one with the introduction by Sheila Buff is available on Amazon for $20 or less. 
 
Have a good weekend. Turn off the TV and go birding!  
  

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