Category Archives: Energy

Rule Five Inflation Reduction Friday

Here, from Alex Epstein, is a great refutation of leftist claims about the misleadingly-named Inflation Reduction Act.  Read the whole thing, but here’s the first of twelve myths about that Act:

The Inflation Reduction Act is one of the worst energy policies in American history.

Its supporters are trying to hide this by spreading myth after myth about it being beneficial.

Here’s how to answer them.

  • Myth 1: The Inflation Reduction Act will lower the cost of energy.Truth: The Inflation Reduction Act will rapidly raise the cost of energy via
    • Policies that coerce us into using costly, unreliable “green” options
    • Policies that increase fossil fuel costs
    • More power for energy-obstructing bureaucrats and activists

The Inflation Reduction Act coerces grids and consumers into using costly, unreliable solar/wind electricity that they wouldn’t otherwise choose because it’s too expensive.

E.g., it indefinitely extends costly subsidies for unreliable solar/wind that defund and shut down reliable gas/coal plants.

  • At the same time the Inflation Reduction Act is promoting the shutdown of reliable electricity generation, it is—insanely—promoting far more use of electric cars via subsidies. California recently previewed the Inflation Reduction Act by telling citizens there wasn’t enough power for EVs even at 3% market penetration.1
  • The Inflation Reduction Act adds numerous taxes and restrictions on fossil fuels that will increase the cost of producing them.These include new or higher taxes on crude oil, on natural gas, on drilling on federal lands—all during an energy crisis where fossil fuels are desperately needed.2
  • Not only does the Inflation Reduction Act make energy more expensive by restricting fossil fuels directly, it does much more damage indirectly by giving much more money/power to anti-fossil-fuel bureaucrats and activists—who will eagerly restrict fossil fuel investment, production, and transport.
  • The Inflation Reduction Act gives anti-fossil-fuel bureaucrats/activists a new level of destructive power via language authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict any activity that emits CO2–which means anything the administration wants—under Section 115 of the Clean Air Act.3
  • The Inflation Reduction Act also gives anti-fossil-fuel bureaucrats/activists a new level of destructive power via $10s of billions for anti-fossil-fuel “environmental justice” causes.According to a WH-commissioned environmental justice report we must “sunset investment by 2030 in fossil fuels, plastics…and nuclear energy”!4
  • All claims that the Inflation Reduction Act will lower energy costs simply deny the obvious cost increases from:

    • Policies that coerce us into using costly, unreliable “green” options
    • Policies that increase fossil fuel costs
    • More power for energy-obstructing bureaucrats and activists.

Read it all.  Share widely.

This Act, it is apparent, is the back-door implementation of much of Alexandria Occasional Cortex’s “Green New Deal.”  It’s blatantly anti-nuke, anti-oil, anti-gas, anti-automobile, anti-American – you name it.  And the Democrats did this on purpose.

As I’ve always said, I’ll give the Dems credit for one thing:  When they get a chance to act, even with the narrowest of majorities, they take full advantage of it.  They squeezed this abomination through with the help of a few GOP turncoats, and they’ll do more if possible.  We already have one “diversity” Supreme Court pick, who seems to have been nominated and confirmed mostly for her plumbing, skin color and leftist politics – and hopefully that will be all the Supreme Court picks President Biden(‘s handlers) get.

But energy is a hot topic right now.  Gas prices are trending upward again.  The folks that provide us with heating oil have warned us of a significant increase this year.  Fortunately we have plenty of firewood.  Remember, also, that the price of fuel affects the price of everything else, and oh, by the way, the Imperial government wants you to give up your current vehicle for an expensive electric one.

Some days “fuck off, slaver” just doesn’t seem strong enough.  Hopefully in November we’ll turn enough of these bastards out to at least give us a reprieve – for a while.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Watch this:

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is an American treasure, and he has more intellectual power on his worst day than either Joe Biden or Heels-Up Harris ever did on the best day they ever lived.  In this clip, he lays out something I’ve been saying for years, only Dr. Hanson does it far more eloquently – and he brings receipts.  Give it a listen.  It’s worth fourteen minutes of your day.

Now then…

On To the Links!

Yeah, he’s running.

Get woke, go broke – the streaming services adjust.

Here we go again.

Arizona, doing the jobs the Imperial City is supposed to do but won’t.

Beef – it’s what’s for dinner.

Abolish the FBI.  Yeah, I think we’ve likely come to that point.

Robot dogs.

Do the elites want to stave us to death?

That’s actually racist.

Good guy with gun.

No shit, Sherlock.

Probably not.

This Week’s Idiots:

The Nation’s John Nichols (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) is still a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.

Robert Reich (Repeat Offender Alert) is still a sawed-off runt, and an idiot.

The New Republic’s Jason Linkins is an idiot.

Dan Goldman is an idiot.

Vox’s Rachel Cohen is an idiot.

This idiot fails to understand:  We want the (un)civil service gutted.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

One of the most talented songwriters and performers of the Seventies was Carly Simon, best known for tunes like Anticipation and You’re so Vain.  But one of my favorites of her work is the 1971 tune That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be, from her debut album Carly Simon.  I enjoy the song in spite of its rather pessimistic outlook on marriage, which I don’t share; my parents enjoyed a happy marriage for 71 years, and while my first marriage ended after only six years, I have been married to my own dear Mrs. Animal for over thirty years and we couldn’t be happier.

Anyway – I still really enjoy this song, and Carly Simon’s vocals.  Here is a live performance, again from 1971, in which Carly Simon shows eloquently how beauty and talent can go together.  And you know what’s great?  Look at that audience.  No cell phones held up, no heads turned down towards their little screens, just a lot of people watching the show.  Enjoy.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!
Ruffed Grouse

Note:  We’ll talk more about the Mar-A-Lago raid in tomorrow’s post.  I’ve been reading about the incident and its implications, and I have some thoughts.

Now then:   Alaska grouse season, at least here in our game management unit, opens today.  I probably won’t get out until the weekend, but boy howdy am I ever ready to get after them.

Willow Ptarmigan.

We have several kinds of grouse.  Hereabouts we have Spruce Grouse and Ruffed Grouse.  The limit is fifteen birds per day (!) of which no more than two may be ruffies.  Up north there are Sharptail Grouse, and down on the panhandle we have Dusky Grouse, the same toothsome birds I hunted back in Colorado.  At higher elevations and farther north we have three kinds of ptarmigan:  Willow, Rock and White-Tailed.

If I never hunted anything but birds up here, I’d never get bored.  And I have no notion of limiting myself to birds.

And so…

On To the Links!

Oh please please please pretty please.

Show me in the Constitution where the Imperial government is allowed to do this.

The best whiskeys to drink this August.  Kind of partial to Pendleton, myself.

Fuck Around and Find Out II, Electric Boogaloo.

It’s open season on gun laws.  Good.

Shots fired in Mall of the Americas – outside the Nike store?  Hmm.

We can hope. 

I’m a big fan of the DeSantis 2024 idea.  Every day, more and more.

But, yeah, Trump’s running again.

This kid has a bright future.

As jokes go, this was the wurst.

This is some banana republic shit right here.

What could possibly go wrong?

This Week’s Idiots:

The Hill’s Michael Starr Hopkins is an idiot.

She seems nice.

Hypocrites and idiots.

MSNBC’s Jessica Levinson is an idiot.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.  Related:  The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols is an idiot.  To clarify:  Brittney Griner is not a “political prisoner.”  She is an idiot, who brought an illegal substance into a sovereign nation.  We lock up people who do that here, too.

Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) is still a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.

Robert Reich (Repeat Offender Alert) is still a sawed-off little runt, and an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

I’ve always kind of liked Miranda Lambert.  While later in her career she cultivated kind of a “outlaw country” vibe, earlier on her songs were a little more peppy and upbeat, but still with an authentic country feel.

One of my favorites is New Strings, from her 2005 album Kerosene.  It’s a lively tune, enjoyable and optimistic, and one senses, maybe a little autobiographical.  Here, then, is the official video for that song.  Enjoy.

Animal’s Daily Nuclear News

Before we start, check out the latest installment of Legionnaire over at Glibertarians!

Now then:  The snail’s pace US approval of the first small reactor design is nearing completion.  But there’s a catch.  Excerpt:

On Friday (July 29), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new nuclear reactor design, making it just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US. But in some ways, it’s a first: the design, from a company called NuScale, is a small modular reactor that can be constructed at a central facility and then moved to the site where it will be operated.

The move was expected after the design received an okay during its final safety evaluation in 2020.

Small modular reactors have been promoted as avoiding many of the problems that have made large nuclear plants exceedingly expensive to build. They’re small enough that they can be assembled on a factory floor and then shipped to the site where they will operate, eliminating many of the challenges of custom, on-site construction. In addition, they’re structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.

Many of the small modular designs involve different technology from traditional reactors, such as the use of molten uranium salts as the reactor fuel. NuScale has a much more traditional design, with fuel and control rods and energy transported through boiling water. Its operator-free safety features include setting the entire reactor in a large pool of water, control rods that are inserted into the reactor by gravity in the case of a power cut, and convection-driven cooling from an external water source.

Wondering about that catch?  Here’s the catch:

The NRC will still have to weigh in on the sites where any of these reactors are deployed. Currently, one such site is in the works: a project called the Carbon Free Power Project, which will be situated at Idaho National Lab. That’s expected to be operational in 2030 but has been facing some financial uncertainty. Utilities that might use the power produced there have grown hesitant to commit money to the project.

So, each site will have to be individually evaluated and will have to go through a lengthy approval process – and will, no doubt, be heavily lobbied against by greenie-weenies and NIMBY types all the way through.

Consider the irony here.  Small reactors of this type have the enormous potential to provide clean, high-density energy.  They’re uniquely useful in small, isolated communities.  (Like, say, much of Alaska.)  And now, after a long, torturous approval process, the NRC has approved one design, but each individual application will have to be rigorously scrutinized, and will have to overcome determined opposition at every step of the way, making it almost impossible to use them to provide the abundant, clean energy that these opponents of nuclear power claim to want.

Forget what these people claim to want.  Look at what they actually are in favor of:  You (not they) reducing your standard of living to meet their claimed goals.  Look at the actions of the high-profile members of the opposition:  Jetting around the globe in private jets, living in huge mansions a few feet above tide line in the oceans they claim are rising out of control.  They expect you to pay the price they aren’t willing to.

This is tech with great possibilities.  Maybe I’m wrong, and reactors like this will be approved for wide use.  But I wouldn’t bet a plugged nickel on it.

Rule Five Oil Bonanza Friday

This is interesting:  There have been some big oil discoveries in the Caribbean; MasterResource’s Vijay Jayaraj has the news.  This will affect global energy prices, but here in the U.S., we may still have some other problems.  Excerpt:

The poverty-stricken Caribbean countries of Guyana and Suriname have hit the jackpot with the discovery of huge offshore oil reserves that are on track to produce revenue for decades.

Opposition from the United Nations and other anti-hydrocarbon entities might hamper the pace of production but won’t stop it. The global need for more crude is too great, and the economic situation of the two South American nations is too dire.

Suriname has been experiencing double-digit inflation for a while now (35 percent in 2020). The inflation rate is now above 50 percent due to the ongoing global energy crunch. Suriname’s economy shrank by 3.5% in 2021. Guyana’s economy is in a similar situation, with 40 percent of Guyana’s 800,000 living in poverty.

All this could change now, thanks to the oil discovery.

Equatorial Guyana and Suriname—situated side-by-side and bounded by the equator and Atlantic Ocean — have combined oil reserves estimated to be 17 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Together this represents the world’s largest oil discovery in the last two decades. Some call it the “the most promising oil discovery hotspot on earth.” Others say it is “the most exciting oil frontier on earth.” In addition, there are gas reserves of more than 30 trillion cubic feet.

That’s great news, but there’s a stumbling block:

The biggest hurdle to the extraction of these reserves could come from lack of capital. Both Suriname and Guyana have an “underdeveloped capital market with limited financing options” for new projects.  These nations will be under severe financial stress if the international climate-industrial complex takes a strong stand against their extraction plans and their own governments acquiesce.

In summary:  The wealthy developed nations of the world wil go RHEEEEE at the very idea of impoverished Third World nations lifting themselves out of poverty by developing their own natural resources, and the USA will likely lead the pack, at least as long as loony “green” activists and the Democrat Party hold any influence at all.  And even if Guyana and Suriname tell the wealthy developed nations to get stuffed and proceed with development, those same self-absorbed First World nations may well clamp down on possible sources of capital.  In the article, Guyana’s President is making noises about inviting the Saudis to invest.

There’s a lot of money to be made here, and it’s a fair bet that most of the developed world’s capital investors won’t be making any of that money, and that will make if harder for Guyana and Suriname to develop these resources and, by the way, lift many if not all of their citizens out of poverty.  Because it’s an inevitable law of nature and economics that growth is dependent on cheap and abundant energy, and these two nations are set to start supplying a lot of that.

Vijay Jayaraj concludes:

This will prove to be a win-win for global supply and the development of local economies. “Suriname’s nascent oil boom is gaining momentum” and will deliver a “significant fiscal and economic windfall,” says Matthew Smith at Oilprice.com,

“Guyana will materialize as a leading global oil exporter with its petroleum output far exceeding domestic demand, while government coffers will swell with annual income expected to be over $10 billion annually in less than a decade,” he says.

The ability of Guyana and Suriname—and their right—to develop economically by utilizing their oil reserves should not be impeded by the climate-frenzied.

We can hope.  And we can hope that this will drive down global oil prices, oil being a highly fungible commodity, and we can hope that this will have a positive effect on the USA’s energy picture – and maybe undo a little of the damage the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration has done.  I’d prefer to get back to our Trump-era energy independence, but that will take a little more effort, not to mention a few honest elections.

Animal’s Daily Own Nothing News

Issues & Insights is fast becoming one of my favorite daily reads.  Here’s a bit that illustrates why,  ‘You Will Own Nothing, And Like It’ — The Real ‘Clean Energy’ Future, from their actual by-gosh editorial board.  Excerpt:

“We’re going to build a different future with one — one with clean energy, good-paying jobs.”

That was President Joe Biden talking about the climate “crisis” and how it “is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.”

Right about the time Biden was giving this speech, the World Economic Forum painted a picture of what Biden’s future would look like.

Suffice it to say, if you like socialism, you’ll love it. Because it involves a radical transformation of our economy that brings the end of private ownership of things like cars, phones, laptops, and other electronic devices.

The WEF article begins by admitting something that the left usually refuses to acknowledge: There aren’t enough metals around to power everything with “clean energy.”

“This transition from fossil fuels to renewables will need large supplies of critical metals such as cobalt, lithium, nickel, to name a few. Shortages of these critical minerals could raise the costs of clean energy technologies,” writes Winnie Yeh, the World Economic Forum’s head of responsible sourcing.

Let me just go on record here by saying, “Fuck the World Economic Forum, and the horse they rode in on.”  But wait!  There’s more!

Just how large a supply is she talking about? Even assuming that all the metals in use today are recycled, the World Bank estimates that the production of these minerals would have to increase roughly 500% by 2050 to meet the demand for “clean energy” technologies.

That means massively mining the stuff, which as we’ve pointed out repeatedly in this space, is hugely damaging to the environment — and far, far more damaging than drilling for oil.

“Mining has been called the ‘blind spot’ of the green energy transition,” Yeh writes. “On land, it has been associated with biodiversity loss, overuse of water resources, tailings waste, labor, and geopolitical issues.”

The stuff also can be mined from the ocean, but more than 100 environmental groups are opposed to deep-sea mining and more than 653 marine science and policy experts from over 44 countries have called for a moratorium on it because of the harm it would cause.  

So, if raping the earth and ravaging the seas to get the minerals needed for “clean energy” are off the table, what’s left?

Well, I’m guessing, since you’re here reading these virtual pages, you’ll have a pretty good idea what’s left – your standard of living, and my standard of living, and everyone else’s standards of living.  Here’s the onion:

Just get everyone to give up ownership of their cars, cell phones, and other stuff that needs power to operate. If we all shared the stuff, we’d need less of it.

“More sharing can reduce ownership of idle equipment and thus material usage,” Yeh says.

Other leftists have been singing the same song. Late last year, a transport minister in the United Kingdom declared that we had to move away from “20th-century thinking centered around private vehicle ownership and towards greater flexibility, with personal choice and low carbon shared transport.”

Of course, getting people to give up their cars for the “good of the planet” won’t be easy.

OK, I’m just going to speak for myself and Mrs. Animal here, but were we posed with this question by this Winnie Yeh asshole, my reply would be this: “We live in rural Alaska.  How the hell are we supposed to ‘share’ our vehicles?  How about our ATV?  Boat?  Should I ‘share’ my tractor, that I use to mow, move stuff around, till the garden plot and clear snow in winter?  Should I ‘share’ all my equipment?  With whom?”

I suspect that answer should be that I should give up my rural lifestyle and move into some rabbit warren of a city.  Well, if they want to drag Mrs. Animal and me out of our home back in the woods and into some city – even Anchorage – they are going to have to come a-shootin’, because we aren’t leaving.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Links may be a little sparse today, as we have a dear old friend visiting from the Forty-Eight.  Catching up with her and showing her the wonders of the Great Land is taking up a lot of really enjoyable time this week, so I’ve had rather less time at the desk.

Denali.

On Sunday last we went up to Healy, which is just north of the entrance to Denali National Park.  While the weather wasn’t the best, we enjoyed the drive, what scenery we did get to see was beautiful, but boy howdy is that whole area a tourist trap.  It’s funny because the town of Cantwell, just a few miles south of the park, is just a typical little Alaska town; it somehow seems to have eschewed most of the tourist stuff.

Still, if you’re in the area, I recommend visiting this part of the state, and touring the park if possible.  There really isn’t anywhere else in the country quite like it.

And so…

On To the Links!

Further proof that an Ed.D is the Dane Cook of graduate degrees.

Dazed and Confused.

We need rope and lampposts in Uvalde, stat!

Wholesale prices up 11.3% in June.  That’s not good.

Honestly I’d be more worried if there wasn’t a teen out there somewhere breeding frogs for the world’s largest frog army.

What the hell has this guy been eating?

Ship sinking:  Check.  Rats leaving:  Check.

Good guy with a gun.  You know, the kind of thing the gun-banners claim never happens.

Robert Reich finds an acorn.

I love a happy ending.

As aptly stated by one of my fellow Glibertarians:  Bugger off,  ya git!  Seriously, we fought a bloody revolution so that we wouldn’t have to listen to “royal” assholes like this.

Florida:  Winning!

Yes.  The US is in a recession.

The amazing – and confusing – hoatzin.

This Week’s Idiots:

Paul Begala is an idiot.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

The “Center for American Progress”‘s Ashfaq Khan is an idiot.

No, it won’t,  you idiots.

The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Hayes Brown (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

The daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont is as crazy as ever.

Here, both interviewer and interviewee are idiots.

Jonah Goldberg is an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

Speaking of Dazed and Confused:  I had the great good fortune to see Led Zeppelin in 1977 or 78 (the year, at this distance in time, is unclear.)  While the late Seventies show was great, in 1970, Led Zeppelin were at their peak. That year they performed at, among other places, London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Among the great songs performed at that show was the hit Dazed and Confused.  That song seems pretty apt today, as the term very accurately describes the current resident of the Imperial Mansion.  Here, then, is that tune from that show.  Enjoy.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Stacking firewood when it’s eighty degrees isn’t any fun.

Working on the firewood.

Not that the prospect of spending a morning stacking firewood exactly makes me want to dance a buck and wing in any case, but it’s been unusually warm and dry here in the Great Land over the last few weeks, and this warm/dry spell arrived right about the same time as two cords of firewood.  So, I’ve been putting it away in the early mornings, before it gets too warm, but bear in mind that the sun is coming up at a little after 4:30 in the morning right now, so…

Well, that’s part of the rural life, getting dirty, hot and sweaty from time to time.  I hear tell it builds character.

And so…

On To the Links!

You know what?  No thanks.

No shit, Sherlock.

Micheal Shellenberger nails another one.  I’m starting to like this guy; he’s no libertarian nor conservative, and I disagree with a lot of his economic and social stands, but on energy he’s right on.  And he says what he thinks, with no bullshit.

This is known as belaboring the obvious.

Well, duh.

World War 2 veteran weeps for his country. 

NPR gets a clue.

Jordan Peterson is now one of my heroes.

Quo Vadis, America?

They should, but they won’t.

Good.

Some promises aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

This Week’s Idiots:

CNN’s John Sutter is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Jessica Levinson is an idiot.

“Oregon health officials,” whoever they are, are idiots.

Alexandria Occasional Cortex (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Liz Cheney (Delusional – WY) is an idiot.

Juan Williams is an idiot.

Robert Reich remains a sawed-off little runt, and an idiot.

Vox’s Nicole Narea, Li Zhou & Ian Millhiser are all idiots.

MSNBC’s Michael Cohen is an idiot.  He’s not wrong about the ever-increasing red-blue divide, though.

USAToday’s António Guterres is an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

In 1982, The Who released their album It’s Hard, and the sixth song on that album is my favorite song by that band.   Eminence Front was a neat tune, featuring Pete Townsend on lead vocals rather than the more usual frontman Roger Daltry.  It’s an interesting piece, kind of a statement of the fronts put on by the rich and famous, to hide not only their personal weaknesses but in a lot of cases, their self-destructive tendencies; speaking of the song later, Pete Townsend did not exclude himself from that criticism.

Anyway.  Here’s a great live version.  Enjoy.

Animal’s Daily Special Election News

And then there were three.  Excerpt:

The dust has settled in Alaska’s special U.S. House race, with the three final candidates meeting for two forums on Sunday and Monday before they scattered across the state to begin another chapter in a campaign that has continued to surprise and sometimes confound voters and election officials.

“Every day seems to be a new chapter of this race. We don’t seem to even get two consecutive days of the same chapter,” said Mary Peltola, the Democratic candidate who is facing Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich.

The three candidates used the forums — one hosted virtually by the Alaska Black Caucus and the other held in-person by the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce — to draw attention to their differences while still praising one another repeatedly.

Image from linked article.

“I’m very, very thankful that we have great candidates up here,” said Palin, a former governor and vice presidential candidate making her return to Alaska politics after a 13-year hiatus. “You guys have good choices, kind of can’t go wrong.”

Energy – especially gas prices – will be a big, big factor in the general elections this November, and on that ground, there seems to be little daylight between the three candidates:

Begich said, “We need to start unlocking energy production with the United States,” and “Alaska has a huge role to play as it related to our energy security.”

Palin said her goal is “to win the war against President Biden’s anti-energy independence agenda” and that “Alaska needs to be tapped into.”

Peltola said, “We’ve got to be developing positive relationships with other members of Congress in order to impress upon them the importance of Alaska’s oil and gas resources.”

Alaska fireweed

Mary Peltola, of course, should she win the seat – unlikely, I should think, but not impossible – she will be badly hampered in her pro-Alaskan energy hopes by her own party, while either of the other two candidates would be among the mainstream of the GOP on this issue.

And, of course, it’s maybe a special election, but it’s still an election, and the candidates are all politicians.  Promises and policy statements grow as fast as Alaska fireweed springs up along the roadsides this time of year.  I do think energy will be a, if not the issue.  Abortion isn’t that much of a much here; abortion access is already a matter of law in Alaska, and I don’t see too much talk about overturning that pre-Roe law.  Gun control is a non-starter in the Great Land, and I’m not seeing much talk about that.  West Virginia v. EPA could end up being a significant issue, but it will remain to see what happens in that quarter.

And, of course, all of this is just setup for November.  Alaska’s politics don’t figure all that much on the national scale, sadly; but whoever wins this special election and gets that brief stint in the Imperial City gains a big advantage for November.

Animal’s Daily Energy Bills News

Gasoline.

How much have your energy bills gone up?  A lot?  I’m just going to leave this here.  Excerpt:

Across the country, energy prices continue to skyrocket under President Biden’s agenda that strangled American energy independence. It’s being felt at the gas pump, where Americans are paying the most — ever — after the national average cost per gallon recently doubled under Biden’s policies. 

But in another less-obvious way, electricity rates have also been spiking under Biden. There’s no illuminated sign on the corner showing the price Americans pay per kilowatt hour, but the burden of increasing residential electricity rates is hitting wallets. 

Townhall reviewed the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) to find which states’ electricity costs made the biggest jumps by comparing average residential retail price of electricity (RRPE) in cents per kilowatthour between January 2021 and March 2022 when Biden took office — and the pain caused by the combination of Biden’s inflation and energy crises is abundantly clear. 

Lots of graphs follow.  Go read the whole thing.

Interestingly, we aren’t doing as bad in the Great Land as folks in lots of places; our overall energy bills have only gone up a tad over six percent, according to this piece.  I have a hard time drawing comfort from that when gasoline is at $5.51/gallon, as of yesterday.  Needless to say we’re not driving a lot when we can help it.

Add to this issue the fact that America’s electrical grid is aging, badly, and we’re anticipating rolling brownouts over much of the country this summer.  Our entire society relies on electricity; without it, we’re kicked back to 1850, and our country at the technological level of 1850 can’t support 335,000,000 people.  You’re looking at mass starvation, especially in the cities, and open civil conflict, if this happens.

I’d point out that “Hey!  No more mean tweets!”  But honestly, I didn’t see a plan from the GOP on addressing the problems with the grid.  Production, sure, some lip service.  But lip service ain’t getting us anywhere.