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blaming Putin, climate change, climate cracktivists, CPI, D/S/Cs, Diesel fuel, DOT, EPA, gas prices, green new deal, inflation, joe biden, living paycheck to paycheck, mean tweets, Meat Puppet Administration, national security, Pete Buttigieg, rolling blackouts
Biden, and others of the self-imagined elite in the Meat Puppet Administration are saying the quiet part out loud. There is a crisis threatening to tear apart the social fabric, and sooner, rather than later, sunder America. It’s not just inflation, though that’s a significant driver of the crisis. It’s reality illiteracy, specifically, the inability of D/S/Cs to understand from where electricity comes, or worse, knowing and ignoring reality.
I am among most Americans who have had to deal with a new reality: gas at more than twice the price in only a year, yet still rapidly increasing in price. It’s only a matter of time until we replay the supply scarcity and gas lines of the Carter years. I recently had to take a round trip of 800 miles. It cost about $200.00 in gas. I’m retired; I can barely afford that, but because it was necessary to visit family, we made the sacrifice. Millions can’t, and D/S/Cs don’t care. This is precisely what they want, as Joe Biden recently said:
President Joe Biden blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday [05-09-22] for the latest spike in gas prices, suggesting the foreign leader had enacted a ‘gas tax’ on America by invading Ukraine. [skip]
‘This year we have a similar problem, but it’s because of energy because of Putin’s gas tax,’ he said, describing the tax as ‘the gas tax of him causing such a disruption in oil markets around the world.’
The AAA national average for a gallon of gas is now $4.574, breaking the previous record set in early March.
By now, few Americans believe Putin and the war in Ukraine have much, if anything, to do with rising gas prices. This Consumer Price Index graph provides a bit of clarity:
As does this one tracking the skyrocketing price of used cars and trucks:
And this one tracking the price of food and beverages.
None of these are obtuse measures dimly understood only by economists. They’re crushing Americans every day. Americans living paycheck to paycheck—aren’t, not since Biden took office. Here’s another Administration lie no one is buying anymore:
The late, unlamented Jen Psaki constantly moaned evil oil companies weren’t using the oil leases they had. It’s their fault we don’t have enough oil and it’s so expensive! Why, they aren’t using some 9000 leases, so of course we had to illegally cancel lease sales!
Reality: oil companies buy leases in the hope of finding oil they can extract at a profit. Many leases produce no oil, or no profitable oil. Simply drilling an exploratory well is expensive, and there is little incentive to do it when the Administration is pressuring banks to deny loans to the energy industry, and when it costs more to transport oil to a refinery than truckers can make on the load. Merely holding a lease is no indicator of profitable oil.
But climate change! We have to incredibly transition to a non-fossil fuel economy!
The new Pause has lengthened by another month. On the UAH satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset, seven and a half years have passed since there was any trend in global warming at all.
So what? CLIMATE CHANGE!!!
Just about everything we consume, all the necessities of life, are transported via truck. Diesel fuel, which along with gasoline, hits new record highs every day or so, is essential, yet, Biden is making war on truckers:
President Joe Biden rightly announced a ban on Russian energy imports Tuesday — though only after a bipartisan group in Congress twisted his arm. Biden had resisted the move, despite the purchases funding Vladimir Putin’s deadly Ukraine invasion, worried it would further boost gas prices (and further tank his polling).
But he’s doing plenty to jack up prices through his policies here at home. On Monday, his own Environmental Protection Agency announced it wants to slap new rules on tractor-trailers, buses, delivery vans and moving trucks. The regs, aimed at cutting nitrogen oxide and carbon pollution, will make life harder not only for working-class truck and bus drivers, our essential backbone already exhausted by COVID fatigue — they’ll hit all American shoppers hard.
As Climate Depot’s Marc Morano put it, ‘US climate sanctions on Americans have more impact than US sanctions against Russia.’
The EPA move toward ‘zero-emission vehicles in the heavy-duty fleet’ will spike driving costs right as transportation professionals are facing a fuel crisis. It will make everything in the supply chain more expensive when we’re already seeing record inflation. The Independent Women’s Forum tracks a market basket of typical family goods each month, and we’ve seen food costs explode in the last year: Bacon is up 18%, beef 16%, eggs 13% and bread 6%.
Poor and middle-class families are hurt the most by Biden’s failed energy policies and obsession with the Green New Deal. They spend a higher percentage of their family budget on consumer goods carried by these trucks. Families just below the poverty line fork out 10.2% of their budget for food at home, while households with annual incomes over $150,000 spend just 5.4% on it.
But, if it saves even one life—while costing tens of thousands—it’s worth it!
The EPA claims this new rule will annually prevent ‘up to’ 2,100 early deaths, 18,000 cases of childhood asthma and 78,000 lost days of work. But its assumptions are based on highly disputed cost-benefit analyses that overstate the assumed cataclysmic risks and underestimate consumer harm.
And of course environmentalists, some of the most violent activists alive, say the EPA doesn’t go far enough, demanding it push for even more regulations to not just punish gas-powered trucks but promote electric-powered ones.
And speaking of diminishing gas supplies:
One of my go-to persons on energy is John Kemp, a London-based analyst. (Follow him on Twitter, or you can get on his email list if you like.) His note today examines U.S. oil stocks, and guess what? Our oil sticks are rapidly depleting, in what Kemp calls ‘the biggest oil shock since the 1970s.’
U.S. petroleum inventories are depleting to critically low levels as output fails to keep pace with the rapid rebound in consumption after the pandemic, putting intense upward pressure on oil prices.
Petroleum inventories were depleting at an unsustainable rate even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the disruption of Russia’s petroleum exports in response.
U.S. inventories of crude oil and refined products outside the strategic petroleum reserve have fallen in 63 out of the last 88 weeks according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Commercial stocks have depleted by a total of 315 million barrels since the middle of 2020, more than offsetting the 204 million barrels accumulated during the first wave of the pandemic and lockdowns.
Ironically, actually, by design, gas prices are more expensive in blue states, much more expensive:
The highest gas prices are found disproportionately in high-tax, heavily regulated Democratic states, while the lowest gas prices show up in so-called red or purple states. California leads the way at a whopping $5.78 per gallon, followed by Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Connecticut, and New York among the lower 48 states (Hawaiian and Alaskan geography make any comparisons with the rest of the country difficult). At the bottom sits Kansas, at $3.81 per gallon, followed by Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Iowa.
If those numbers seem low, that’s because the article from which the excerpt was taken was published in March. Gas prices in California are bouncing up against $7.00 per gallon. But don’t worry, our Department of Transportation led by Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, is helping:
New vehicles sold in the U.S. will have to average at least 40 miles per gallon of gasoline in 2026, up from about 28 mpg, under new federal rules unveiled Friday that undo a rollback of standards enacted under President Donald Trump.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its new fuel economy requirements are the strongest to date and the maximum the industry can achieve over the time period. They will reduce gasoline consumption by more than 220 billion gallons over the life of vehicles, compared with the Trump standards.
They are expected to decrease carbon dioxide emissions — but not as much as some environmentalists want — and raise new vehicle prices in an industry already pressed by inflation and supply chain issues.
Is that even possible? No, but Pete doesn’t care:
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose department includes NHTSA, said the rules also will help strengthen national security by making the country less dependent on foreign oil and less vulnerable to volatile gasoline prices. Gasoline nationwide has spiked to an average of more than $4.22 per gallon, with much of the increase coming since Russia, a major oil producer, invaded Ukraine in late February. It cost $2.88 per gallon just a year ago, according to AAA.
Oooooh. So this is about national security:
‘Transportation is the second-largest cost for American families, only behind housing,’ Buttigieg said. The new standards, he said, will help keep the U.S. more secure and preserve ‘the freedom of our country to chart its future without being subject to other countries and to the decisions that are being made in the boardrooms of energy companies.’
See America? Pete is protecting us from evil oil companies, and making us free to chart our future without the ability to drive anywhere when we choose.
But auto dealers say more stringent requirements drive up prices and push people out of an already expensive new-car market. NHTSA projects that the new rules will raise the price of a new vehicle in the 2029 model year by $1,087.
As with everything else, the government grossly underestimates costs and the rate of inflation. Consider these facts from a man who works in the oil industry:
Anyway, so what’s the point of this? Why have I told you this? It’s to expose you to the truth about crude oil and the oil industry, because you’ve been lied to. Not by me though. You’ve been lied to by the phony President and his phony cronies, but I want to set the record straight. I’m going to tell you the truth, so pay attention.
1) There is enough recoverable crude oil within the continental US to supply current and projected future demand for 400+ years, and that’s just the oil we know about. It doesn’t account for future discoveries. That’s a fact, jack.
2) We do not need to import a SINGLE DROP of foreign crude oil. The domestic oil industry can easily meet, and even surpass domestic demand. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. That’s a fact, jack.
3) The domestic oil industry currently cannot satisfy domestic demand due to oil drilling restrictions imposed by the federal government. That’s a fact, jack.
4) The price of EVERYTHING revolves around oil, and the law of supply vs demand dictates the price of oil. When oil is plentiful, commodities are cheap. When oil is scarce, commodities are more expensive. Right now, domestic oil is scarce, and the price of everything is high because of these restrictions imposed by the federal government. That’s a fact, jack.
5) We import foreign oil from countries that drill and produce it much cheaper than we’re able to because they do not implement all of the environmental safeguards that we do. Their methods are FAR more destructive to the environment than ours are. That’s a fact, jack.
6) Every year, the federal government leases tracts of land to oil companies so they can explore on it for oil. If enough oil is found during exploration, the company can then apply for a drilling permit which allows them to drill a well. If no oil is found during exploration, or if the amount found is not enough to be profitable the lease expires without ever being drilled on. Leases that are active, but not being drilled on does NOT mean that oil companies are being lazy, or are trying to keep the oil for themselves, etc. etc. It means they’ve either explored the lease for oil and found nothing, or found oil but it’s not enough to justify drilling for. That’s a fact, jack.
7) It’s not Russia’s fault, or China’s fault, or Ukraine, or India, or Venezuela, or Iran, or Bangledesh, or any other countries’ fault as to why everything is so expensive right now. It’s Joe Biden’s fault, because he is suppressing the domestic oil industry for political gain. That’s a fact, jack.
Analysis: Probably, gentle readers, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Just as Biden admitted he had built the greatest vote fraud machine in history—suuuure he got 81 million votes—he admitted he’s destroying the economy on purpose in the name of climate change. He wants $10.00 a gallon plus gas, because we’re making an “incredible transition” away from fossil fuels to an all renewable energy future. But is that even possible?
Of course it’s not.
Virtually everything we need for modern life, including medical devices, such innocuous things as plastic tubing, catheters, syringes and more, requires petroleum. Yet not only haven’t we built a major new refinery since 1977—nearly half a century—climate cracktivists, which comprise the entirety of the Biden Meat Puppet Administration, will not allow new construction, just as they won’t allow new pipelines, new drilling, mining the rare earth minerals necessary for computer chips and electric cars and their batteries, or anything that would hamper their fevered green dreams.
Electric cars remain only about 1% of all vehicles on American roads, purchased by the top 7% in household income. They’re toys for the wealthy who can afford a third, fourth or fifth car to display their greenie virtue signaling. They have more than enough conventionally powered vehicles for when reliability and range matter. But that’s not going to matter, because we don’t have nearly the electric generation capacity, or chargers, to power any increase in electric vehicle numbers. We don’t have enough for our needs right now, as even the D/S/C propaganda arm media is predicting rolling blackouts for much of the country, particularly the blue states, this summer.
Remember I said D/S/Cs have no idea from where electricity comes? So-called “sustainable” energy sources—windmills, solar, even hydroelectric, don’t produce nearly enough to maintain our present, failing, power use needs. They’re intermittent, and there is no such thing as batteries of sufficient size and capacity to store the necessary energy and provide it when those sources aren’t producing power, which is most of the time. Even Elon Musk, who makes electric vehicles, has admitted we don’t have nearly enough generation capacity for even a tiny increase in the numbers of EVs.
We also know EVs aren’t pollution free. They don’t produce emissions as they operate, but the electric generation sources that charge them do, and in much greater quantities than tailpipe emissions. The mining necessary to produce rare earths and other substances they need is exceptionally dirty, particularly outside the US, where they don’t give a damn about environmental issues. They can’t afford to. Yet, greenies are shutting down coal plants and even nuclear plants, which are by far the cleanest electric generation technology, further reducing our generation capacity.
Even better, if you wanted an EV, you’d have to stand in line for a year or more. All of the materials necessary to build EVs are in short supply, particularly computer chips, many more of which are necessary for EVs compared with conventional vehicles. That is, of course, if you could afford to shell out tens of thousands of dollars more for an EV than a conventional vehicle.
Final Thoughts: Our government is purposely impoverishing Americans in an attempt to force them to live as government thinks best. That means greatly increased power for them, and tyranny, poverty and misery for us. That their lunatic green schemes aren’t physically possible doesn’t matter to them, because this isn’t about serving the American public; it’s about enriching and empowering them.
Even if Republicans take control of the House and Senate in November, absent veto overriding majorities in both chambers, it’s going to take at least until 2024 to even begin to undo the damage Biden’s handlers have done in only a year and a half, and that’s only if an actual American Republican can overcome vote fraud to win the White House. Whether America can survive that kind of damage remains an open question, but we’re going to find out. Biden’s handlers are going to make sure of that.
If you’re not used to praying for the survival of your families and America, now just might be a good time to get some of that old time religion.
UPDATE, 06-01-22, 1720 MT: This is a daily disaster:
Gas prices increased five cents into Wednesday morning and topped a record high of $4.67 gallon, AAA data revealed.
As drivers are confronted with a 50 percent gas price increase from last year, 18 states are hovering around $5 per gallon.
JPMorgan Chase on May 18 raised concerns the national average price of gas could increase to $6 per gallon. California has already exceeded $6/gallon.
The soaring gas price has fueled President Joe Biden’s inflation.
On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted during a press interview she and the president had failed to accurately assess that inflation would climb to a 40-year-high.
When you’re not terribly bright, yet focused on fundamental transforming America, sexually and racially indoctrinating American children, loosing the FBI on parents who don’t want their children sexually and racially indoctrinated, crushing America’s energy independence, ensuring men can crush female athletes, pee in women’s bathrooms, sashay about women’s shower rooms displaying their junk, you’re calling everybody racist and saying things so stupid they could provoke WWII, it’s rather difficult to “accurately assess” reality.
Actually, the only reason Yellen is admitting this is because they’re all scared to death about the mid terms, not because they give a damn about Americans.
Elections have consequences. Let’s hope that voters come to their senses in November and elect the Republican members of the Uniparty. /sarc.
Dear Alan Booth:
Tragic, isn’t it, we end up voting not for the best candidate, but the least worst of what’s left?
Mike,
You could not have framed the thing more accurately ; absolutely on the money. It is Biden and the woke Democrats aim to destroy oil and gas, but unfortunately, to have nothing to realistically replace it with. No matter how “existential ” these mental “stud bulls” think they are, they miss the mark that is so obvious to nearly everyone else who breathes. That is, oil and gas is – and will continue to be for many decades – the literal lifeblood of the world’s economy. These shitheads simply deny the obvious and if they are challenged, they tend tp throw tantrums until they are given some kind of lip service by the titans in the “legacy” media.
Can’t change physics, nor chemistry, or the the very atmosphere that protects the earth. They don’t get it, and as John Kerry (the existential replacement for Al Gore) is so fond of saying, there is nothing in society that is as important as man-made climate change. This will be painfully true when society is forced to someday un-fuck the disaster that he and his woke Demo buddies are trying so hard to unleash on the nation and world.
Keep up the good writing Mike! Enjoy it immensely.
Tony
Dear Tony:
Thanks!
Forget Putin. Forget Ukraine. Prior to Mr. Biden “acquiring” the presidency, the United States was EXPORTING oil. Now, all of a sudden, we have oil shortages. What changed? How did Mr. Putin somehow reduce our domestic oil supply?
I suspect “One Term Joe” is the one responsible. The question now: can we survive this individual until 2024? We’re in for a very rough ride.
Dear navyvet:
It’s time, once again, to put our faith in our families and ourselves. As I’ve so often said, government has no conscience. It cares nothing for any individual.
We’re indeed in for a very rough ride, and we’d better be ready.
91 octane gas at Costco in Sunnyvale CA was 6.08 on Sunday. Let’s go Branden!
Dear Phil:
As they say: as goes California, so goes the nation.