90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, March 10, 2022

American Oil Drillers: Democrat Policies Blocking Energy Production

Oil drillers say they are working to fill the recent void in the oil market but are hampered by Democrat policies.

While gas prices rose about one dollar before the run-up to the Ukrainian war and 70 cents since the invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has blamed the oil industry for not producing enough oil to shore up the oil crisis from the war. He claims American drillers are not utilizing 9,000 leases on private land.

But American shale drillers have pushed back by suggesting Biden’s supply chain woes and woke private, and public investment strategies have dramatically slowed swift production.

“Getting lenders to choke off money to fossil fuel companies is the next needed move for the industry to address the material risks that the coal, oil and gas industry faces,” Leslie Samuelrich, president at investment advisory firm Green Century Capital Management, said back April about industry’s future lending decisions.

Samuelrich’s analysis has come true, which is greatly reducing the feasibility of new oil projects on the reported 9,000 private land leases.

“Ten years ago, the ‘cost of capital’ for developing oil and gas as compared to renewable projects was pretty much the same, falling consistently between 8% and 10%. But not anymore,” Bloomberg reported in November. Now the cost of capital is reportedly 20 percent for long-cycle developments.

Biden’s attack on private financing is only one angle of assault. In August, a Biden changed global bank financing rules that make it more difficult for drillers to find investors. The policy is intended to accelerate renewable energy investment rather than fossil fuel investment, thereby greatly defunding oil production.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that oil drillers believe the “flight of capital from the fossil-fuel industry in recent years has left U.S. oil patches without enough fracking equipment to bring a ton of new wells online, and that a resurgence of go-go drilling would deplete companies’ most valuable drilling locations”:

Lenders—who have become more wary of funding oil-related ventures as environmental, social and governance ideas catch on in financial circles—are still unwilling to give money to most of the nation’s crop of oil-field service companies, or to smaller oil producers that want to expand their operations, executives and analysts said. That has left small but instrumental players short of the financing they need to repair fracking equipment sidelined during the start of the pandemic, or invest in building drill bits, drilling rigs and blowout preventers.

Data suggests the drillers are correct. American oil production is down drastically from 2019 before the pandemic. In 2022, oil production is 12 million barrels or 8 percent less than in 2019.

“They’ve already got all of their available equipment out there already,” Richard Spears, vice president at energy consulting firm Spears & Associates Inc., told the Journal. “The constraint on growth is going to be, where do you get another [fracking] truck?”

Biden also has a third approach to damaging the American oil industry. Biden has nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to the Fed. It is well known Raskin expressed interest in driving up financing costs for fossil fuels. In a New York Times op-ed from 2020, Raskin dubbed the oil industry as “dying” and suggested the Fed should not support the oil drilling.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) told Breitbart News that Raskin is “trying to kill an essential industry to the world economy by nominating people for the Federal Reserve that will use fiduciary rules to unemploy 12.5 percent of the state, and give Russia more leverage over the...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #283

The Likely Return of the Disastrous Nuclear Deal with Iran

Will a desperate Biden make even more concessions?

President Joe Biden is on the verge of making another colossal foreign policy blunder. He wants to restore the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the Obama-Biden administration had concluded in 2015, along with Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China. Some of the same Obama-Biden administration players involved in the original negotiations, who strongly denounced former President Donald Trump’s wise decision to withdraw from their fatally flawed handiwork, are determined to bring it back to life.

President Biden appears ready to make major concessions to Iran. For example, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, “Iran’s 'breakout time'—the duration needed to amass enough nuclear fuel [f]or a bomb—could be as little as six months,” under a restored deal as opposed to the JCPOA’s original twelve-month breakout time. As of mid-February, Iran had already amassed 33.2 kilograms of uranium material enriched to the 60 percent level, nearly double the amount it had in early November of last year.

“Iran would need around 40 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium to produce enough weapons-grade nuclear fuel for a weapon,” the Wall Street Journal reported. This means that Iran already has about three-quarters of what it would require to advance quickly to weapon-grade 90% fuel for a nuclear bomb.

Iran has put itself in the driver’s seat by plowing ahead to reach an incredibly short breakout time, enabling the regime to extort more concessions from the Biden administration. The war in Ukraine, which is destabilizing the global energy market, also provides the Iranian regime with a stronger bargaining position to achieve the maximum lifting of sanctions and unfreezing of Iran’s assets. The regime is counting on the West’s need for Iranian oil to make up for shortfalls from other oil producing countries.

President Biden finally announced the cut-off of U.S. oil and gas imports from Russia on March 8th. But instead of reversing his war on fossil fuels policies that have stymied more drilling and production of oil in the energy-rich United States, the Biden administration already has its hand out to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for their oil to make up for the resulting shortfall. And the Biden administration has its eyes on Iran.

Out of sheer desperation, the Biden administration appears ready to turn to Iran to add its own oil to the global oil supply. This means agreeing to a nuclear deal on Iran’s terms. It is a quick fix to show the American people that the Biden administration is taking action to reduce the price of gasoline that they are paying at the pump. Anything to avoid offending the climate change activists at home, which would happen if the administration were to do the sensible thing and remove barriers it has imposed against more domestic production of oil and gas.

While trying to isolate Russia economically and diplomatically for its invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration is negotiating alongside Russia (and China) to restore the JCPOA. Even worse, since Iran has refused to negotiate face-to-face with U.S. representatives, the Biden administration has outsourced the principal intermediary role to Russia.

“Russia has been instrumental in shaping a compromise,” Reuters has reported, based on information from diplomats.

If there is a deal, Iran will most likely ship its excess uranium over the agreed upon cap to none other than Russia as it did the last time around. Only this time, Iran would be doing so in concert with a country that has just brought the world perilously close to...

Have mRNA jabs ruined our chance at herd immunity?

New figures from Britain raise bright red flags about the direction of Covid in wealthy countries that used mRNA and DNA shots to attempt to defeat the coronavirus last year.

Hospitalizations and deaths remain stubbornly high and overwhelmingly occur in vaccinated people. In February, 90 percent of the 1,000 Britons who died each week of Covid were vaccinated.

New infections are not only far higher than they were before the Omicron variant emerged, they are rising again after a brief fall in February. And even boosters appear to offer no protection against hospitalizations in younger people.

British data are crucial both because Britain vaccinated and boosted early and because its datasets are far more complete and less politicized than those in the United States.

Day by day, week by week, the figures are becoming more worrisome. They hint that mRNA and DNA shots may have slowed if not completely halted the natural progression to herd immunity that occurred in earlier respiratory virus epidemics.

In fact, Britain now reports 99 percent of adults have antibodies to Covid, mostly as the result of vaccination. That level is far higher than epidemiologists believed would be necessary to support herd immunity. Yet Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths continue unabated. Almost 12,000 Britons are now hospitalized with Covid, more than at this time last year.

The most stunning chart is this one. Each week the British government releases a “surveillance report” which includes Covid deaths by vaccine status.

SOURCE

In the four weeks ending February 27, 397 unvaccinated Britons died of Covid, compared to 3,512 who were vaccinated. Using a broader definition, which may include more incidental deaths unrelated to Covid infections, the numbers are even worse, with 5,871 vaccinated people dying compared to 570 unvaccinated. (The United States does not publicly provide this data; it is not even clear American public health authorities collect it comprehensively.)

The report also shows for the first time that adults under 50 are now just as likely to be hospitalized for Covid whether they are boosted or unvaccinated. The report does not provide a similar hospitalization estimate for people who were vaccinated but unboosted, but based on the raw numbers it does provide, those rates are the highest of all.

Meanwhile, new Covid infections have nearly doubled in Britain in the last two weeks, and now top 60,000 a day. British media outlets have connected the rise to Britain’s “freedom day” on Feb. 24, which marked the legal end of Covid restrictions.

But Britain had already been moving toward normality throughout February, and cases were falling sharply. It is not clear that the legal end to restrictions made much difference behaviorally.

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Britain is not alone.

Though elite media outlets have sharply deemphasized reporting on Covid, the epidemic continues unabated in advanced countries. In Europe and the United States, overall death and hospitalization rates remain high as the epidemic enters its third spring. Meanwhile, in South Korea and Japan, which largely avoided serious problems before mRNA vaccinations and the Omicron variant, infections are soaring and deaths following.

In contrast, many poorer countries that used older “inactivated virus” vaccines, or have low overall vaccination rates, have seen their coronavirus epidemics progress in a more traditional pattern.

Infections have risen and then fallen rapidly in distinct seasonal waves. Omicron has not caused off-the-charts spikes in new infections - probably because previous immunity from natural infection is far broader and more valuable against Omicron than vaccine-generated protection.

Here’s India, for example:

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Rand Paul OBLITERATES The January 6 Commission: "It's An Abuse Of Power"

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