Something is not right with Texas and it’s not just the weather
From GodlikeProductions
Something is not sitting right with me with Texas and it’s not just the weather.
I mean it really bothers me these millions of Texas families are suffering.
I couldn’t sleep actually...
So I woke up this morning, made coffee and got to researching.
I started pulling Biden’s EO’s this morning and I found something buried in the Keystone Piepline EO..... way towards the end of the doc.
It turns out that the same day Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline, he also lifted the security on our power grid for 90 days (Trump’s EO the year prior secured our power grid by giving China no access.)
Here below is the snippet buried in Biden’s Keystone pipeline EO.
“c) Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days. The Secretary of Energy and the Director of OMB shall jointly consider whether to recommend that a replacement order be issued.”
Just a small little paragraph tucked away in one of Biden’s EO’s the first day he was in office under the umbrella of “restoring science to tackle the climate crisis”.
So I researched our energy transformers that supply our power grid.
Turns out, we have had zero transformers in this country that were manufactured in China prior to 2009. From 2009 -2019, China has manufactured 200 of our transformers, supplying 60% of our power grid.
Trump’s EO states this snippet, interestingly enough.
May 1, 2020 order, President Trump stated that
“the United States should no longer purchase transformers and other electric grid equipment manufactured in China. He signaled that it is important to end relationships that U.S. utilities have directly with Chinese businesses and multi-national companies manufacturing transformers in China, which are later plugged into the electric grid in the United States.
Chinese power equipment can be embedded with software and hardware that can be remotely accessed, enhancing China’s ability to commit cyberattacks. Because power transformers are huge and weigh between 100 and 400 tons, it is not easy to identify embedded software or hardware. There is also a potential hardware risk since counterfeit items can be easily put into large power transformers.”
If you lookup “ Electric Panda”.... you will wonder why in the heck this isn’t front page news now with Texas.
Conclusively, Biden, on his first day in office, opened up the American electrical grid to China.
His very first day in office. 3 weeks later, 5 million are without power and struggling to keep their families warm, and many livestock are unable to survive the emergent conditions caused by my power and limited water.”
Valentines Day Texas Massacre
Biden’s order could let China control US electric grid
Less than one week into his presidency, Joe Biden has already put U.S. security at greater risk to Chinese and other threats.
Biden, who long has been accused by critics of being soft on China, issued a lengthy executive order in which, buried amid matters purportedly designed to combat climate change, was an anomalous and potentially dangerous provision. The provision in question addresses nothing reasonably connected to climate change. Instead, it suspends for 90 days a key security measure put in place last May 1 by former President Donald Trump. Biden’s suspension of Trump’s measure makes not the slightest sense.
Trump’s Executive Order 13920 declared a national emergency with respect to the nation’s electric grid and prohibited the acquisition or installation of “any bulk-power electric equipment … designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied, by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary.” In sum, Trump forbade the use of grid equipment that is made in China, Russia, or other hostile nations.
Trump’s order was a common-sense response to real, proven threats. Just last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States seized a Chinese-built transformer because officials believe “its electronics had been secretly given malicious capabilities, possibly allowing a distant adversary to monitor or even disable it on command.” Cybersecurity expert Joseph Weiss reported that officials found “electronics that should not have been part of the transformer — hardware backdoors” that could allow the Chinese to “effectively gain control of the transformers without any network forensics being the wiser.”
Weiss also reminds us that China was first caught trying to hack into a U.S. grid in California as far back as 2001, and that “the Russians have been in our U.S. grids since 2014.”
Remote computer access may not be the only problem. In an interview with me Tuesday afternoon, Tommy Waller, director of infrastructure security at the Center for Security Policy and the director of an expert coalition called “Secure the Grid,” said that the concerns extend beyond remote-computer control.
“We’re also worried about sensors and actuators and drives that are installed even if they are not connected to the Internet,” he said. “If that hardware installed inside of them is designed at some point to send the wrong readings, it could sabotage the safety and security of that system.”
It has long been thought (quoting just one illustrative, major paper on the subject) that a major power grid collapse might be the single most deadly event in U.S. history, with “catastrophic” results due to “the lack of the basic elements necessary to sustain life in dense urban and suburban communities.” It thus makes perfect sense for Trump to have issued the directive against involving hostile foreign entities in the grid supply chain.
Contrarily, it boggles the mind to see Biden suspend Trump’s directive. Granted, Biden’s order suspends it for only 90 days while asking the secretary of energy to use the time to consider if a replacement order should be issued. Still, even if the policy is to be reviewed for improvements, why suspend it in the meantime? Why leave the grid vulnerable? Why not keep Trump’s wise Executive Order 13920 in place until and unless the Biden team comes up with something better?
“Why open the floodgates to grid infrastructure produced by countries hostile to America?” asked Waller.
Why, indeed? Biden’s order offers no explanation for suspending Trump’s proscription. This part of Biden’s new executive order is not just foolhardy but reckless. Congress should raise a stink about it, and Biden should revoke it, forthwith.
As a result of the record-breaking freeze in Texas, massive demands have sent retail energy and electricity prices skyrocketing.
One power supplier, Griddy, went so far as to tell 29,000 of their customers – now fully exposed to the real-time swings in wholesale power markets – to switch to another provider because spot electricity prices pushed as high as $9,000 a megawatt-hour.
In recent years, Texas officials were lured into adopting supposed ‘green’ energy policies and production, and promoted the sale of electric cars, including Telsa motors, whose billionaire owner Elon Musk has recently begun relocating a large part of the company’s operation to the Lone Star state. But at the current price per megawatt-hour, charging your Tesla is liable to set you back about $900.
IMAGE: A frozen Texas wind turbine is being doused with petrochemicals in order to remove the ice of the blades. Billionaire owner of ‘green’ manufacturer Telsa motors, Elon Musk, never anticipated his electric car revolution could be hampered by failing ‘sustainable’ green energy grids in Texas.
The electricity shortage in Texas amid the cold snap has sent spot electricity prices soaring so much that the surge in power prices equals a cost of $900 for charging a Tesla.
The typical full charge of a Tesla costs around $18 using a Level 1 or Level 2 charger at home, according to estimates from The Drive. This estimate is based on an average price of $0.14 per kWh of power.
However, the extreme winter weather this week has sent Texas spot electricity prices soaring, as the wind turbines froze in the ice storms and reduced the wind power generating capacity in the Lone Star State by half.
Spot electricity prices at the West hub have soared above the grid’s $9,000 per megawatt-hour cap, compared to a ‘normal’ price of $25 per megawatt-hour, FOX Business notes.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) called early on Monday for rotating outages across the state as extreme winter weather forced wind power generating units offline, while electricity demand set a new winter peak record.
At the same time, freezing cold and ice storms cut offline almost half of the wind power capacity in Texas.
“We are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units,” ERCOT said.
In Texas, wind power generation overtook coal-fired generation in 2020 for the first time ever, with wind power now accounting for 25 percent of the Texas electricity generation. Natural gas-fired power generation is the leading source of electricity in Texas, with more than 45 percent share.
While oil-and-gas rich Texas is the leading U.S. state for wind power installations, the frozen turbines in the Arctic weather have strained the grid so much that rolling outages in Texas continue for a second consecutive day.
“The wind-dependent Texas grid is experiencing rolling blackouts, prices the equivalent of $900 per Tesla charge, and an expected supply shortage of 10 GW–the amount of electricity needed to power 5 million homes,” Alex Epstein, Founder of Center for Industrial Progress, tweeted today.
Here is my video from yesterday
A winter storm in Texas, global warming and the Great Reset
These two article confirm what I have been saying for a while.
“I leave it to readers to decide which is the more deplorable, the politician who refuses to accept the science or the politician who accepts the science but then behavesas if the science is a hoax. There is, however, clearly a different kind of climate change denialgoing on here; one that plays dangerously to the narrative of right wing false populists.”
Climate change denial (the other sort) is alive and well
There is broad agreement that 2018 was the worst year yet for the environment. According to the New York Times “The Story of 2018 Was Climate Change;” while the Washington Post informed us that: “Extreme weather in 2018 was a raging, howling signal of climate change.” Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic EuroNews warned us that “Europe’s chaotic weather in 2018 is a wake-up call for climate change.”
Not that any of this made much impression on the world’s climate change denier-in-chief, Mr Trump; who has recently been berated (again) for failing to understand the difference between climate and weather. In response to the wave of winter weather that has descended on the USA this week, Trump decided to troll environmentalists on his Twitter feed:
“Be careful and try staying in your house. Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”
The tweet was no doubt designed to antagonise Trump’s democrat opponents who are currently engaged in their own version of denial. New Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez swept into the House of Representatives demanding that her Democrat colleagues put tackling climate change front and centre now that they have taken control of the House from the deniers in the Republican Party. This went down like a lead balloon in the office of the new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi; who quickly co-opted Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s support for a microwaved version of the all-talk-but-no-action climate policies adopted in the Obama era. As Anthony Adragna and Zack Colman at Politico note:
“Moderate and establishment Democrats largely prevailed in their first showdown with liberals over the select committee. Whereas protesters, joined by Ocasio-Cortez, stormed Pelosi’s office last November demanding the panel be empowered to issue subpoenas and write legislation, the committee that Democrats will establish Thursday can do neither of those things. It is only authorized to conduct investigations and develop policy recommendations to reduce the effects of climate change. Any legislation would be drafted by standing committees such as Energy and Commerce.”
No sooner had the corporate wing of the Democrat Party succeeded in turning the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis into talking shop (albeit one with a more urgent-sounding name) than Speaker Pelosi and her corporate Democrat followers revealed their true feelings about climate change by dashing off to the airport to fly off on a jolly with the corporate lobbyists down in Puerto Rico. The climate crisis, it would appear, is not quite urgent enough to cause anyone to cancel a flight to a corporate beano… at least, not someone who was booked on a flight.
The ongoing manifestation of “Al Gore Syndrome” – in which the rich fly around the planet lecturing the rest of us on how we (i.e. not them) have to do something about climate change – is also on display in Davos this week. As Rebecca Ratcliffe at the Guardian reports:
“David Attenborough might have urged world leaders at Davos to take urgent action on climate change, but it appears no one was listening. As he spoke, experts predicted up to 1,500 individual private jets will fly to and from airfields serving the Swiss ski resort this week.
“Political and business leaders and lobbyists are opting for bigger, more expensive aircrafts, according to analysis by the Air Charter Service, which found the number of private jet flights grew by 11% last year.”
Worse still, an outbreak of penis envy among wealthy delegates has led to a ramping up of the size (and thus the weight and carbon emissions) of private jets similar to the “my yacht is bigger than your yacht” competition that the (largely male) global elite has engaged in for decades.
The sheer hypocrisy of a wealthy elite whose lifestyles do more to undermine the environment flying off to a luxury sky resort to discuss environmental policy has not been lost on the increasingly strident right wing populist movement that is snowballing across the western states. Michael Bastasch at the right-wing Daily Callerlists the series of climate policy defeats that were inflicted on the neoliberal elites during 2018:
“Despite increasingly apocalyptic warnings from U.N. officials, 2018 has seen a number of high-profile defeats for policies aimed at fighting global warming. Politicians and voters pushed back at attempts to raise energy prices as part of the climate crusade.”
The list of defeats includes:
Ontario Premier Doug Ford revoking a carbon tax in June
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull failed to pass a carbon reduction bill and was forced to resign in August
Washington state governor Jay Inslee failed to get a carbon tax adopted during the November elections
A group of Republicans who do not deny climate change, the House Climate Solutions Caucus, were also voted out in November
Toward the end of November, French President Emmanuel Macron made his ill-fated attempt to impose a climate levy on diesel fuels; sparking the massive yellow vests protests.
According to Bastasch, the political fallout in France has persuaded the Pelosi wing of the Democrat Party to tone down their stance on climate change:
“France’s carbon tax revolts sent a clear message to Democratic lawmakers across the Atlantic Ocean. Democrats will take control of the House in 2019 and want to make global warming a central part of their agenda.
“Democrats and even environmentalists distanced themselves from carbon taxes in the wake of French riots…”
I leave it to readers to decide which is the more deplorable, the politician who refuses to accept the science or the politician who accepts the science but then behaves as if the science is a hoax. There is, however, clearly a different kind of climate change denial going on here; one that plays dangerously to the narrative of right wing false populists.
There was a time when I wondered whether it would be different, if only there was someone idolised by the political right who accepted the science and stood up to call for action. Indeed, if only there was such a figure who also had a solid background in the physical sciences. Surely that would have done away with denial; allowing us to have a sensible debate about how to reverse or at least mitigate the growing climate emergency. And then I remembered that there once was such a person…
On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the nearest you can get to a secular saint among the political right – gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, calling on world leaders to take action on climate change while there was still time:
“For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.
“Now we know that this is no longer true.
“We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part.
“In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man’s activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.
“We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.”
Thatcher even broached issues surrounding the climate crisis that today’s activists shy away from even thinking, still less mentioning in polite conversation:
“The real dangers arise because climate change is combined with other problems of our age: for instance the population explosion; — the deterioration of soil fertility; — increasing pollution of the sea; — intensive use of fossil fuel; — and destruction of the world’s forests, particularly those in the tropics.”
This outline of the crisis – obvious enough to people three decades ago – could have come out of the mouth of any of today’s climate activists. But coming from one of the most revered neoliberals – and a doctor of chemistry to boot – it should have been followed by a serious, worldwide programme of action. It wasn’t; and for good reason. At the end of the speech, Thatcher threw in the one condition that condemned us:
“We have to recognise the importance of economic growth of a kind that benefits future as well as present generations everywhere. We need it not only to raise living standards but to generate the wealth required to pay for protection of the environment.
“It would be absurd to adopt polices which would bankrupt the industrial nations, or doom the poorer countries to increasing poverty…”
This was to effectively argue that “we have to destroy the environment in order to save the environment.” World leaders could take whatever action they decided upon… provided that it didn’t interfere with the free market. And so it was that we entered into a thirty year stupor based around two proposals that Thatcher mentioned in the speech:
“We [the UK government] now require, by law, that a substantial proportion of our electricity comes from sources which emit little or no carbon dioxide, and that includes a continuing important contribution from nuclear energy… [and] It is sensible to improve energy efficiency and use energy prudently; it’s sensible to improve energy efficiency and to develop alternative and sustainable sources of supply; it’s sensible to replant the forests which we consume; it’s sensible to re-examine industrial processes; it’s sensible to tackle the problem of waste.”
A combination of mendaciously named “renewables,” energy efficiency, recycling and planting trees to act as a carbon sink was all we needed to win the day. Except, of course, that this was denial too. Thatcher could not bring herself to the glaringly obvious conclusion that if the debt-based and fossil fuel enabled global economy that produced the carbon (and other greenhouse gases) was the problem, then the global economy would have to go. Thatcher was not about to sacrifice the neoliberal consensus that she had given birth to in the previous decade.
In this way we can draw a straight line from Thatcher, through Al Gore all the way to the Pelosis of today. Each, whatever their pronouncements on the climate emergency, determined to maintain the global corporate order whatever the cost. Meanwhile, those within the 99 percent who are not still somnambulant as a result of the opioid promises of windmills and solar panels, have cottoned on to the con-trick. As distrust in politicians and mainstream media gathers pace, a growing mass of ordinary people are standing up against policies that place the cost burden of patently inadequate (renewable energy harvesting technologies account for less than three percent of the world’s energy) responses to climate change on the shoulders of those who can least afford it; while the elites continue to fly around the planet spewing greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere.
The danger of the false populism of the political right is that it will win the public over to the belief that climate change is a hoax. If they do so, equal fault must be laid at the door of those on the political left and centre who profess to want action on climate change but act as if it wasn’t a problem. Which is, of course, another way of saying what Thatcher should have said at the end of her otherwise ground-breaking speech – if we want to do anything about the climate emergency (and at this stage, mitigation is the best we can hope for) then we need to radically shift away from further economic growth into a managed spiral of de-growth… something that Mother Nature will likely impose upon us anyway if we choose not to act.
Electric cars will not stop rising oil demand, says energy agency chief
Trucks, petrochemicals and air travel driving global oil use, Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency says
Electric car use may be growing exponentially, but they are doing little to curb rising carbon emissions and oil demand, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.
“To say that electric cars are the end of oil is definitely misleading,” economist Fatih Birol told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“This year we expect global oil demand to increase by 1.3 million barrels per day. The effect of 5 million cars is [to diminish that demand by] 50,000 barrels per day. 50,000 versus 1.3m barrels.”
Last year, the IEA predicted that the number of electric cars globally would grow from 3 million today, to 125 million by 2030. But Birol said the number paled in comparison to the 1 billion cars powered by internal combustion engines.
Davos elite looks to ‘Globalisation 4.0’ to stem climate change
Besides, he said, it was not cars that were driving oil demand – “full stop”.
“Drivers are trucks, the petrochemical industry, planes. Asia is just starting to fly,” he said, referring to the agency’s 2018 energy outlook report that also cites shipping as a major source of oil demand.
Birol also highlighted the problem of powering electric cars when two thirds of global generation comes from fossil fuels.
“Where does the electricity come from, to say that electric cars are a solution to our climate change problem? It is not,” Birol said.
“Even if there were 300 million [electric cars] with the current power generation system, the impact in terms of CO2 emissions is less than 1% – nothing. If you can’t decarbonise [the power sector], C02 emissions will not be going down. It may be helpful for the local pollution, but for global emissions it is not.”
Environmentalists have repeatedly accused the Paris-based IEA of skewing its research in favour of the oil and gas industry, including by underestimating the growth of the renewables sector. Research and advocacy group Oil Change International believes that this is encouraging governments to overshoot their Paris climate pledges.
Greg Archer, UK director of Transport&Environment, a European umbrella group focusing on transport sustainability, said Birol’s comment revealed the IEA’s bias.
“It took over 20 years to sell the first million electric cars globally, and just a year to sell the second million,” Archer wrote to Climate Home News. “Now well over a million are sold every six months and the growth is continuing to accelerate. Just as the IEA continually has to upgrade its annual forecasts for solar and wind power, so it is for electric cars too.”
Arched said that electric vehicles would increasingly drive down demand for fossil fuels, while we could expect trucks, ships and planes to prioritise hydrogen, advanced biofuels and e-fuels.
“Eventually oil will remain in the ground because it is too expensive to pump it out,” he concluded.
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