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We are having inflation, in part, because Biden chose to stop energy production that his green friends abhor before there was enough from other renewable sources to replenish the shortfall he created.
Now Dufus can shift the blame to Putin and whomever he choses but facts are facts. Biden simply chose to lift both legs at the same time and fell on his ass.
The price of energy can go down if energy companies are allowed to restart production but there are two basic reasons why they might be reluctant to do so, or why this might not happen as follows:
a) if prices are dropping while the cost of money and capital are going up the return to replenish the shortfall he created the incentive to drill is impacted.
b) If the political climate toward corporate America remains negative and the government is spending billions to replace oil that is another reason for energy companies to think twice about drilling.
c) A third reason could be a continuing strong dollar makes oil more expensive and it might be cheaper for European nations to purchase coal
Having said that, let's look at why energy prices cold remain high and go higher:
a) Supply does not meet current demand which should expand as people return to work, spend their savings on car trips.
b) Oil goes into just about everything, plastics, air transport, heating homes, shipping etc,
c) Finally, COVID awakened our eyes to the fact that America is vulnerable and dependent upon foreign nations, many of which are unfriendly, for vital products we no longer produce domestically. I would expect to see a recovery in domestic production increasing the demand for domestic energy. At present America imports about 60% of our oil needs from foreign sources.
d) Perverse as this sounds ESG is also having a positive effect on why energy prices have escalated. Oil companies like Chevron, Exxon etc. have been spending large sums of their capital on alternative sources and have less capital available for drilling. Furthermore, new wells can take several years before they are in a stabilized production position.
Obviously, I am not certain which way energy prices will, in fact, go but my instincts make me believe we are in the beginning stages of an energy bull market and the price of oil has further upside as do selected oil stocks leveraged to oil prices.
Right now oil prices are in a pull back position but should consolidate and form a base not far from current levels and make a sustained move over the coming months.
But what do I know.
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The Rich World’s Climate Hypocrisy
They beg for more oil and coal for themselves while telling developing lands to rely on solar and wind.
By Bjorn Lomborg
The developed world’s response to the global energy crisis has put its hypocritical attitude toward fossil fuels on display. Wealthy countries admonish developing ones to use renewable energy. Last month the Group of Seven went so far as to announce they would no longer fund fossil-fuel development abroad. Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. are begging Arab nations to expand oil production. Germany is reopening coal power plants, and Spain and Italy are spending big on African gas production. So many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal that the nation will more than double its exports.
The developed world became wealthy through the pervasive use of fossil fuels, which still overwhelmingly power most of its economies. Solar and wind power aren’t reliable, simply because there are nights, clouds and still days. Improving battery storage won’t help much: There are enough batteries in the world today only to power global average electricity consumption for 75 seconds. Even though the supply is being scaled up rapidly, by 2030 the world’s batteries would still cover less than 11 minutes. Every German winter, when solar output is at its minimum, there is near-zero wind energy available for at least five days—or more than 7,000 minutes.
This is why solar panels and wind turbines can’t deliver most of the energy for industrializing poor countries. Factories can’t stop and start with the wind; steel and fertilizer production are dependent on coal and gas; and most solar and wind power simply can’t deliver the power necessary to run the water pumps, tractors, and machines that lift people out of poverty.
That’s why fossil fuels still provide more than three-fourths of wealthy countries’ energy, while solar and wind deliver less than 3%. An average person in the developed world uses more fossil-fuel-generated energy every day than all the energy used by 23 poor Africans.
Yet the world’s rich are trying to choke off funding for new fossil fuels in developing countries. An estimated 3.5 billion of the world’s poorest people have no reliable access to electricity. Rather than give them access to the tools that have helped rich nations develop, wealthy countries blithely instruct developing nations to skip coal, gas and oil, and go straight to a green nirvana of solar panels and wind turbines.
This promised paradise is a sham built on wishful thinking and green marketing. Consider the experience of Dharnai, an Indian village that Greenpeace in 2014 tried to turn into the country’s first solar-powered community.
Greenpeace received glowing global media attention when it declared that Dharnai would refuse “to give into the trap of the fossil fuel industry.” But the day the village’s solar electricity was turned on, the batteries were drained within hours. One boy remembers being unable to do his homework early in the morning because there wasn’t enough power for his family’s one lamp.
Villagers were told not to use refrigerators or televisions because they would exhaust the system. They couldn’t use cookstoves and had to continue burning wood and dung, which creates air pollution as dangerous for a person’s health as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, according to the World Health Organization. Across the developing world, millions die prematurely every year because of this indoor pollution.
In August 2014, Greenpeace invited one of the Indian’s state’s top politicians, who soon after become its chief minister, to admire the organization’s handiwork. He was met by a crowd waving signs and chanting that they wanted “real electricity” to replace this “fake electricity.”
When Dharnai was finally connected to the main power grid, which is overwhelmingly coal-powered, villagers quickly dropped their solar connections. An academic study found a big reason was that the grid’s electricity cost one-third of what the solar energy did. What’s more, it was plentiful enough to actually power such appliances as TV sets and stoves. Today, Dharnai’s disused solar-energy system is covered in thick dust, and the project site is a cattle shelter.
To be sure, solar energy has some uses, such as charging a cellphone or powering a light, but it is often expensive and has distinct limits. A new study in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, found that even hefty subsidies couldn’t make solar lamps worth their cost to most people. Even in wealthy nations such as Germany and Spain, most new wind and solar power wouldn’t have been installed if not for subsidies.
This is why, for all the rich world’s talk of climate activism, developed nations are still on track to continue to rely mostly on fossil fuels for decades. The International Energy Agency estimates that even if all current climate policies are delivered in full, renewables will only deliver one-third of U.S. and EU energy in 2050. The developing world isn’t blind to this hypocrisy. Nigeria’s vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, articulated the situation elegantly: “No country in the world has been able to industrialize using renewable energy,” yet Africa is expected to do so “when everybody else in the world knows that we need gas-powered industries for business.”
Rather than selfishly block other countries’ path to development, wealthy nations should do the sensible thing and invest meaningfully in the innovation needed to make green energy more efficient and cheaper than fossil fuels. That’s how you can actually get everyone to switch to renewable alternatives. Insisting that the world’s poor live without plentiful, reliable and affordable energy prioritizes virtue signaling over people’s lives.
Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
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Why the Baby Formula Shortage Is Biden’s New Afghanistan
The media cannot hide from mothers the empty shelves and disappeared supplies.
By DOV FISCHER
Long, long before the greater American community discovered that Kamala Harris is an idiot and a zero, I published on these very pages that, other than her being Willie Brown’s arm candy with benefits, she was a Nothing. The late Rush Limbaugh, G-d rest his soul, read significant parts of my article on his radio show, assuring its viral spread. But the Left media blacked out any mention of the vapidness of Kamala and her record. Despite media backing, with “reporters” even helping her pick out clothes, her presidential campaign proceeded to implode. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. But she did end up on Joe Biden’s circus merry-go-round comprised of Black women appointed to important positions, regardless of: (i) mindless incompetence (Kamala as vice president), (ii) anti-Semitism (Karine Jean-Pierre as White House press spokesperson), and (iii) pathetic mediocrity (Ketanji as Supreme Court justice despite a particularly mediocre prior record, marked by repeatedly being reversed — even by Democrat-appointed judges — on appeal).
Conservatives’ challenge — continually — is to break through to the wider audience of politically unaffiliated Americans, the “Independents,” the “soccer moms.” ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post black out conservative voices. So do social media. Therefore, although conservatives sound the alarms, those messages often are consigned to reverberate like trees falling in the middle of a forest. The sound is forceful, but fewer hear it than should.
Thus, most Americans initially believed the lies that Donald Trump was in cahoots with Russia and in conspiracy with Vladimir Putin. They believed the most vicious lies propagated by Obama’s CIA head, James Brennan, himself formerly a Communist Party voter — and who really can know where he stands today? The lies of Obama’s “intelligence” chief, James Clapper. The lies of Christine Perjury Ford. For the longest time, Americans were fed the belief that Michael Avenatti could be a serious contender for the presidency of the United States. They never heard about the Hunter Biden laptop. They simply believed the garbage peddled for them by CNN at airport lounges and on Facebook and Google doctored searches.
Yet, as I wrote in these pages long before others realized it, Biden’s Afghanistan evacuation catastrophe marked a breakthrough. Throughout Biden’s first half-year, the media had been running interference for him. They hid how his multi-trillion-dollar package to print paper money would spiral inflation into the stratosphere. They hid the Democrats’ roles in fostering surging violent crime, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and sexual perversions in the early grades of public school, and the chaos at the Mexican border. But when 13 American military heroes were murdered savagely at Kabul airport, in a shamefully catastrophic scene straight out of Miss Saigon, with impossible-to-hide images of desperate Afghans plunging to their deaths from the skies as they haplessly lost grip on the outer handles of airplanes they clutched, his Afghanistan secret no longer could be concealed, and thus the greater secret emerged:
“Ladies (she/her/hers) and Gentlemen (he/him/his) of America: Your country now is in the stewardship of a boob, a rube, and a stooge.”
The shield was lifted, and even his Left media defensive line no longer would be able to hide his incompetence. As I (me/myself/I) wrote then, Biden’s numbers never again would be positive. So it was written, and so it has been done.
Yet, even as his numbers tanked, the Left media have continued to do their best to hide what they can, to spin what breaks out in public, and to provide whatever cover possible:
1. Inflation? It’s Putin’s fault.
2. The crime surge? Blame it on Ultra-MAGA (it/it/its).
3. Teaching critical race theory? Ain’t happening, despite what parents hear on their kids’ Zoom classes and see in the blue states’ newly commissioned woke textbooks.
4. Chaos at the border? Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testifies under oath that the border has never been more secure.
5. Afghanistan evacuation? Blame it on the Taliban (they/them/theirs): They swore to us their solemn promises, and they lied.
6. Gasoline at $5 a gallon ($7 in California)? Blame it on Big Oil.
For everything, Biden has a hidden culprit to blame. After 50 years of being wrong, 50 years of bone-headed mistakes, shameless lies, and his own vile racism in public life, he continues blaming everything on others. No personal responsibility ever is taken. The Left media then race in to protect him. And anyone who still gets through has to contend with his Handshake Ghost and his Easter Bunny.
Yet he could not hide his Afghanistan failure.
And he cannot now hide his Baby Formula Botch.
When a mom goes to the supermarket or grocery or drug store and finds the shelves barren of baby formula, politics is cast aside. Abortion policy does not matter. “Roe” does not matter. “Wade” does not matter. Even “v.” does not matter. That baby (he/him/his, or she/her/hers, but no other pronouns) at home matters. Babies’ digestive systems are not yet sophisticated enough to break down and digest cows’ milk. Juices do not provide all the nutrients they need. They need either mothers’ milk or baby formulas like Reckitt Benckiser’s Enfamil and Abbott Laboratories’ Similac. When a mother has transitioned the baby from breastfeeding to formula in bottles, the mother’s breast milk production dries out. If formula suddenly then becomes unavailable, she does not want to hear about Putin, Big Oil, or Ultra MAGA. She wants baby formula — and she wants it now.
The Left media can hide many things, but they cannot hide from mothers the empty shelves and disappeared supplies. These are the kinds of shortages that Independent voters and soccer moms grasp beyond what they are told by TikTok and YouTube “influencers” and CNN “experts.” They want the formula, and they want it now.
Meanwhile, amid the catastrophe, Biden is sending palettes of emergency baby formula to feed the children of Illegals entering across our southern border. Finally, the apolitical soccer moms and Independents are getting an education into the ramifications of open borders: No baby formula for your children. Crowded hospital emergency rooms when you have a medical emergency. And reduced seats available for your kids at lower-cost state colleges and universities because seats are set aside for the children of Illegals.
The baby formula shortage is Biden’s domestic equivalent of his botched Afghanistan evacuation in that it screams out beyond Biden’s firewalls of ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. It pierces into American homes and bedrooms and baby cribs. Fathers and mothers have babies. Their parents have grandchildren. Babies have siblings. The baby formula catastrophe hits almost every American and almost every zip code. It is yet another symbol for history books to record how the Biden-Kamala White House was the most unfit, unsuited, incompetent governing administration in American history.
In a sense, many tens of millions of Americans deserve this. It was they who cast votes for these incompetents whose unsuitability and unfitness were demonstrably palpable from the outset. Those mired in the inner cities of Chicago, Milwaukee, Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, and the like — and who then repeatedly elect Democrat mayors and Soros-sponsored DAs — have reduced business crying on TV when their children are murdered by gang violence and stray bullets fired in an environment of no bail, no prosecutions, felonies reduced to misdemeanors, and emptied prisons. Likewise, those who voted for Biden have no business now crying that their babies are undernourished, their gasoline and heating prices are unaffordable, their schools are failing their children, and their entire country is out of whack. All these catastrophes have a common cause: not Putin nor Ultra MAGA nor Big Oil but Biden and Pelosi — and, honestly, the apparitions staring at them in their mirrors, the ones who voted for these villains.
Even so, we all are in this thing together. With the baby formula crisis, occasioned by the government shutting down Abbott Laboratories’ production but failing to act speedily to get the factories back on track, we have another Biden Afghanistan moment that points the way to November. No matter what the Left media say, the doctor’s prescription is clear:
Throw the bums out.
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Arabs to Biden: Shut Down Iran's 'Expansionist Project'
- Ahead of Biden's visit, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, in a clear message to the US administration and other Western powers, affirmed that any nuclear agreement or future negotiations with Iran must address the Iranians' "destabilizing behavior in the region, their support for terrorist militias, and their missile program."
- "Western countries prefer to talk about upcoming measures, preparing us for their failure to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions, but the truth is that we are in a race against time, and it is still possible to force Iran to abandon its secret plans to acquire nuclear weapons. The problem is that the entire international community does not seem serious and resolute in dealing with this issue and deterring Iran." — Dr. Abdulaziz Sager, founder and chairman of the Gulf Research Center, alanba.com.kw, June 14, 2022.
- Iran thinks with the "mentality of an empire" and that is why it is continuing its efforts to extend its control to several Arab countries. — Dr. Abdulaziz Sager, alanba.com.kw, June 14, 2022 CONTINUE
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