Black Monolith or Energy Black Hole?

Remember the famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the monolith first appears? The proto-humans all gather round and practically worship the thing as a god. The same sort of thing is going on in Hawaii as we speak, except the monolith is one giant freaking battery and the worshippers are not ignorant apes, but enviro-nuts, which are pretty much the same thing now that I think about it.

The Kapolei Energy Storage (KES) project is being built on eight acres of land in Kapolei on the island of Oahu. When complete, the giant battery will be capable of storing up to 565 megawatt hours of electricity and dispatching up to 185 megawatts. In other words, it can put 185 megawatts onto the Hawaii grid for up to three hours.

By law, all electricity generated in the state of Hawaii is supposed to be produced using 100 percent renewable fuels by the year 2045. The island’s lone coal-fired power plant, with a rated capacity of 203 MW, is due to be forcibly retired next year. Plus Power, the company developing KES, says the battery will enable the grid to operate reliably once the coal plant goes down for good: “The 2022 completion of the KES project will ensure that the AES coal-fired plant will end operations, supporting the state’s goal of shifting from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable energy generation.”

Average hourly demand in Hawaii is about 1,000 megawatts. That’s average demand, peak demand – which is what really matters when talking about grid stability – is considerably higher. But, for purposes of this analysis, we’ll use the average, which leads us to an important question: can a battery that can satisfy a little less than 20 percent of demand for a period of three hours replace a coal-fired power plant that has the capacity to satisfy 2- percent of demand more or less continuously?

The answer, which should be obvious to any high-school physics student, is no. A battery does not produce electricity, it’s just a place for electricity produced elsewhere to hang out for a while. In the case of the state of Hawaii, most of that electricity is, has been and will continue to be produced by burning oil. Roughly 65 to 70 percent of Hawaii’s electricity is generated by combustion of petroleum liquids according to data provided by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Funny, it doesn't look like a monolith.

About 17 percent of electricity was generated from renewable sources, primarily wind and solar. That’s not bad, but it’s not anything close to the 100 percent goal. Worse, it’s likely that the battery will be primarily charged using electricity produced by burning oil, not by using electricity generated from renewable sources. The problem is the bugaboo that always affects wind and solar: capacity factor.

Capacity factor is a measure of how much electricity a power generation asset produces compared to what it theoretically can produce. If a plant is rated at 100 megawatts, but generates on average 40 megawatts, we say its capacity factor is forty per cent. Most nukes operate at capacity factors in the high nineties. Coal fired base-load plants are generally in the eighties, sometimes the low nineties.

Wind and solar have crappy factors because, even in Hawaii, the sun don’t always shine and the winds don’t always blow. Solar panels don’t have much to do at night and their efficiency drops significantly on cloudy days. Wind turbines can’t operate in calms or near-calms and, perversely, also have to shut down if the wind is too strong.

The Descent of Man: Feeling good about feeling good.

Again using EIA data, we find that last year the combined capacity factor for wind and solar was about 27%. So, while the total capacity of all renewable generation assets on Hawaii, 746 megawatts, sounds impressive compared to average daily demand, those assets will only generate about 200 megawatts on average. And when they are generating electricity it makes a whole lot more sense to pack it on the grid than sending it on a short vacation to the battery. The only time the battery will be charged using renewables is during those rare instances where there is a significant excess of renewable power. Most of the time, it’ll be charged up courtesy of fossil-fuel combustion.

Of course the battery will make a fine story for those who don’t understand how electricity works and allow eco-nuts to feel good about themselves. Will it do much of anything to help Hawaii meet its 100 per cent renewables mandate? Nope.

John Kerry in La-La-Land

"Climate czar" John Kerry made a particularly tin-eared comment recently which demonstrated how ignorant liberals are about the world outside of their utopian fantasies. Kerry was asked what he would say to oil and gas workers who would "see an end to their livelihoods" should the Biden administration's climate agenda be fully implemented. He responded, "What President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks have better choices... That they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels."

This was justly mocked as a modern-day rendering of the apocryphal Marie Antoinette quote, "Let them eat cake." But it's worth noting that there's something more shocking about Kerry's blockheadedness. Does he really not know how ridiculous it is that Green Energy jobs could replace the natural resource ones he wants to disappear?

The U.S. government subsidizes wind and solar power to the tune of $7 billion per year to make it even somewhat competitive with traditional energy sources. Even if the Biden administration doubled that, so-called renewables wouldn't come close to filling the gaping hole left by lost oil and gas jobs. In an editorial about green jobs, the New York Post offers a relevant anecdote:

[Andrew] Cuomo spent $950 million in public money to put up a solar plant in Buffalo. The first tenant, SolarCity, went bust; Elon Musk had to have Tesla take SolarCity over. Panasonic was lured in to help Tesla make a go of the plant, only to flee a year ago. With nearly a billion bucks down the drain, the project has never come close to offering the jobs once promised for it.

Pouring money into renewables isn't going to create the jobs they claim it will, and certainly not in Appalachia or the Rust Belt, which would be hit hard by a fracking ban.

It's worth noting that 70 percent of the world's solar panels are manufactured in China, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. Meanwhile, China's preferred power source is carbon-intensive coal. In fact, China's new coal-fired energy capacity in 2020 outstripped the rest of the world by 300 percent.

Which is to say, whatever his intentions, Kerry's energy preferences don't amount to blue collar job creation, but to increased American investment in Chinese renewables in order to subsidize China's addiction to coal. Maybe if he came down off his private jet for awhile he'd realize how crazy that is.

Pacific Gas? and Electric

Earlier this month, just as the hand of winter tightened her grip across some of the most prolific oil and gas regions in America, city officials in San Francisco demonstrated the disregard they have for the free market and unmasked the contempt they have for hard-working Californians. Fortunately, the oil and gas industry has the opportunity to stand in the gap and protect the future of free markets through continued delivery of low cost, abundant energy.

In what is yet another chapter in the effort by local and state leaders to create government dependence through the methodical dismantling of the free market, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban the use of natural gas in new commercial and residential construction in San Francisco. That means natural gas stoves, furnaces, water heaters and appliances will no longer be permitted. Rather, builders will be required to install electric (or solar) powered appliances and heating equipment, fueled by more costly electricity or insufficient solar power.

This is curious since California is a net importer of power, meaning the state does not have enough local power generation capabilities to meet the power demand. Hence the decades of rolling brownouts across the state that plague California’s summers. According to government data, natural gas and solar are the two most prevalent sources of electricity generation in California; however, solar generation is non-dispatchable.

Grid operators have been using natural gas and, to a lesser extent, electricity imports from neighboring areas to contend with changes in demand. San Francisco city government, therefore, just made using natural gas illegal, while mandating the use of already scarce electricity which is generated from natural gas and hydro-electric (dams) sources located outside of California. It feels like some kind of drunken game of Twister doesn’t it?

It's all fun and games until the power goes out.

City officials cited cost savings, public health benefits and a fervor to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the move. None of the officials were able to explain how electricity, more expensive and more scarce than natural gas, would produce cost savings.

In fact, depending upon the market, it costs about 30 percent more to operate electric appliances compared to natural gas appliances. Nor could the officials articulate the "standard" by which public health benefits were being measured by this mandate. San Francisco is after all, the city where human feces and hepatitis C-infected drug addicts are strewn about the streets in equal measure, with nary a city health official in sight. If ‘public health benefit’ in San Francisco were a ship, it would be called the Titanic.

In its vote, San Francisco joined nearly forty other California cities which have also banned natural gas in new commercial and residential construction. These actions stand alongside similar efforts around the country. In Washington state, for example, the state, in defiance of the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, sought to ban oil trains transporting oil and gas from North Dakota’s Bakken fields to ports and refineries located along the western shores of the state.

Or the efforts by the Center for Biological Diversity to dismantle four hydro-electric dams on the Snake River in Washington state. Or the effort of Michigan governor Whitmer’s to permanently close Line 5 of the Enbridge pipeline that moves oil to refineries in the region.

Even the most casual observer would deduce that it must be green zealotry that in fact underpins these dreadfully anti-market efforts. During all of this, however, it is notable, that the rates of greenhouse gas emissions are below what would have been required by the infamous Paris Climate Accord. And the U.S. hasn’t even been aligned with the carbon gas-emitting signatory countries for at least four years. These lower emissions rates have been the direct result of the move from coal to natural gas.

The objective becomes increasingly clear then. While asserting concern for climate change, green zealots actually are more interested in control…. control of just about everything. They seek to increase the cost of producing and using these otherwise inexpensive fuels through rules and mandates. Government is artificially manipulating the market in an effort to force consumers and industry into accepting a more expensive, but less desirable quality of life.

Control freaks unite!

And if the market won’t accept this objective? That depends entirely upon the importance the oil and gas industry places on its own future. The industry must be willing to chart its own course and communicate its own narrative if it wants to stop this sinister effort.

Laws and rules like these represent actual threats to the very foundations of the industry and to a free society. Local and state governments across the country seek to wrestle our free-market decisions from us and mandate the quality of life we will be permitted to enjoy. If the industry fails to respond, the next reasonable steps will include outright bans according in accordance with this Orwellian worldview.

These 1984-esque realities will not impede leaders and their cohorts. They will continue to live as they desire. The rules and bans aren’t for them after all. Think Michigan's Whitmer whose husband went boating during its state lockdown, or California governor Newsom’s French Laundry group birthday party during his state’s lockdown. They and their cohorts will assuredly keep using their gas appliances they’ve prohibited others to use in the coming years, while also feeling superior. After all, they recycle, drive Teslas, provide their own canvas bags when shopping at Whole Foods and wear Lululemon leggings while they work out their status anxiety on their Peloton bikes.

As an industry, oil and gas needs to commit to pushing back on these attacks. Inexpensive energy is imperative for a thriving economy, manufacturing excellence, economic mobility, job creation and a future of prosperity. The industry needs to take back control from the preaching class and remind them that their lifestyles have been brought to them by the men and woman of the oil and gas industry. 

Why Do the Greens Hate the Environment?

Let’s start with the axiomatic: the green lobby hates the environment. How do we know this?

Who are these “greenies?” They same people rallying for various and sundry lefty causes – abortion, womyn’s rights, the environment, whatever. And what do they leave behind these rallies? Tons of trash. Do rallies for GOP causes leave this much trash behind? No. Is this trash all over sidewalks, curbs, street, parks, a sign of loving the environment? Nope.

Maybe they were too busy putting on weird hats.

Were the BLM/Antifa riots, burning down cities, torching hundreds of cars, good for the environment? Well – no. If cows farting is bad for the environment, what do you suppose thousands of tons of ash, CO2, CO, methane, oil-smoke, burning tires and burning car batteries are going to do to the air and climate?

How about “environmental” “warriors” burning cars at car dealerships? Good for the environment? Umm. No.

But think of the planet!

In San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other large – Democrat – metros, people … uh… relieve … themselves on the street, on the sidewalk. Results? Feces washing into storm drains that run directly to the ocean. Filth and disease are not good for the environment. In fact, one could say that those supporting this filth are enemies of the environment – and one would be correct. Even the indigenous peoples in North America didn’t just drop and leave it – they cared more about the environment, disease, smell, sanitation – than today’s “modern” lefties.

These are the same people calling for socialism. What are the environmental results of socialism? After the USSR opened up (when socialism failed utterly), we saw what it had wrought: Environmental catastrophe. The book about it was called “Ecocide.” That’s not a journal of environmental care.

Where do people care about the environment? Where they can afford to. Where their normal needs for food, shelter, safety are met. If you’ve traveled to the third world (Or California’s Central Valley, or Skid Row in Los Angeles, or just about any street in San Francisco) you know that the environment is the last thing on their minds. Why? Lack of capitalism – rejection of capitalism at the behest of the same academic and NGO lefties that fill-up our streets and parks with trash after a rally celebrating their care for the environment.

Look at the results of Democrat polices in California. If you think miles of homeless living in tents at the side of the road, lacking access to sanitation are good for the environment, then you probably also think that socialism results in wealth used by first world countries to care about their environment. Problem? It doesn’t; it’s the opposite.

He left his shirt in San Francisco.

But the Green Lobby wants to get rid of all those polluting systems that create electricity, replacing them with wind farms, right? Better?

No – the metal needs to be mined, transported, smelted, formed, transported, erected. And, 10-15 years later, it needs to be removed, transported – and dumped into a landfill because it doesn’t degrade. Not good for the environment. In fact, absent the demand by the left for windmills, these millions of tons of ore wouldn’t be mined, smelted, transported and then thrown away. This is good for the environment… how?

But – solar! Ok. What does solar require? Rare earths. Where are those mined? China, Afghanistan, Africa. Raise your hand if you think these countries have solid environmental records. No hands? Shocker.

But – batteries! Cool – mine the world’s lithium to make batteries to store electricity.

How about we just make electricity as we use it? You know, in a “power plant?” No lithium, no millions of tons of iron ore, no 200-foot blades buried for thousands of years.

These – all – are pathologies of a left that pretends to care about the environment: Waste on the streets, burning down cities, strip-mining the planet, ensuring society goes broke.

The Green Agenda has just about zero positive, and innumerable negative consequences for the environment and society. Add the socialism demanded by this same cohort? Ecocide on steroids.

And all to reduce the global temperate in 100 years by less than one degree C. Maybe. For $100 TRILLION dollars. Actually. Either these people are dumb as bricks – or they hate the environment. There is no middle ground here.

If these people did not hate the environment and did believe in reducing the impact (if any) of greenhouse gases on the climate, what would they support, unflinchingly? Nuclear. You know, as does one of the founders of Greenpeace. Do you want baseload energy? A modern world? A clean environment? No more GHG released (well, at least other than the billions of tons from volcanoes – the left hasn’t yet figured out how to plug those menaces…)?

Saying no nukes at San Onofre.

There is one and only one answer, and the lefties hate it: Nuclear. Progress the left wants to give away. So they can leave tons of trash on the ground. So they can make the economy such that no excess wealth exists for cleaning-up the environment. So they can despoil thousands of acres of earth with strip-mining for rare earths – well, at least it won’t be in their backyards…

If they did not hate the environment and wanted it cleaner than today, the left would support nuclear power and capitalism. That they don’t leaves only one response: They hate the environment – and all this “climate change” nonsense is just about control. But you knew that.

What’s Behind The Green Door?

Looking up environmental sources under the variable heading “Green,” I came across a reference to a 1956 pop tune, “Green Door,” which had soared to the top of the hit parade charts. The question it posed was, “what’s behind the green door” and the answer it gave was a boisterous group of party animals who “laugh a lot” and whom the singer wished desperately to join: “All I want to do is join the happy crowd behind the green door.” The song’s open sesame “Joe sent me” didn’t cut any ice since “hospitality’s thin there.” The correct password, proleptically speaking, would have been “Al sent me.” After all, Al Gore has sent so many people through the green door that a vast new edifice has become necessary to house the “happy crowd” that grows by the day.

True, the Greenies by and large cannot be portrayed as a merry band of revelers. They are generally earnest and forbidding to a fault, self-righteous and censorious. They don’t laugh a lot and are certainly not a perky, convivial crowd. They are proud of their ostensible bona fides and redemptive proclivities as Mother Nature’s savior and mankind’s conscience. Many of the Greenies are academics draped in diplomas which they take as an infallible sign of prescient wisdom, but are really of no more value than ink stamps that allow them into the club.

Still, this is not the issue. The issue is that, competent or incompetent, charlatans or believers, they find the party too good to pass up. They want in and they want to stay in, even at the risk of eventually bringing their credentials into disrepute. The perks, awards, government subsidies, academic fellowships, scientific laurels, corporate subventions, endowments and research grants just keep rolling in to keep the party going. And the green door has swung wide open to welcome the climate beneficiaries while it remains shut tight to the uninvited. Hospitality’s thin there.

As the song puts it, “they play it hot behind the green door.” According to Green lore, the earth is warming catastrophically. Oceans will rise. Polar bears will soon become extinct. Snow will cease to fall. Greenland will melt. The Himalayas are puddle-bound. Land and sea will be despoiled by pipeline spills. Whole populations will starve. The world will come to an end if we don’t change our habits of consumption and our expectations for a viable and prosperous future. Only wind and solar can save us from the looming eco-apocalypse.

Get mean, think Green.

That’s the party mantra. If we ignore the portents, then one thing is certain. The end is nigh!

Predictive failure does not deter ideological zealots. A disaster must arrive someday to confirm their forecast and justify their program for salvation. It matters little if their timetable is off by ten, twenty, or a thousand years since, under the aspect of eternity, a cataclysm is bound to happen in seculae seculorum. The mathematics can always be redone in the light of a grisly but accommodating future to which only they have privileged access. It is they who stand before the burning bush of the world and hear the voice of the Lord. For this pixilated mentality, being wrong over and over is a sure sign that they will be right once. The end-of-the-world fanatics merely keep revising their calculations, relying on a new revelation to perfect their reckoning and reinforce their delusion. They have managed to turn science into divination.

The problem is that wind and solar don’t work as they should or are projected to. The reason for many of the failures in green energy-production companies—Spectrawatt, Ener 1, Abound Solar, Solyndra,  etc.—is simple. As noted environmental consultant, author, and Pipeline contributor Rich Trzupek, author of How the EPAs Green Tyranny is Stifling America, explains, the energy density of convertible wind and solar is risibly low and dispersed, which renders green, electricity-generating power plants, whether large or small, “the most inefficient, least reliable, and expensive form of power we have.” As Trzupek jestingly remarks, “‘climate change’ is a figment of a computer’s imagination.” 

But this has not prevented the climate models from becoming the Authorized Version. The Global Warming meme continues to circulate in defiance of accumulating evidence to the contrary, which leads one to wonder who the real “deniers” are. “Warmist” foundations and nonprofits are determined to continue issuing environmental fatwas, in particular to tie up state-of-the-art, economically productive oil pipelines in endless litigation, impacting national revenues and costing hundreds of thousands of jobs, as well as innumerable spin-off markets and enterprises. 

Unsightly government approved wind farms are killing birds in hecatombs, disfiguring the landscape, leading to wildlife habitat loss, polluting the soil and ground water, adding steeply to electricity bills and literally driving people crazy (Wind turbine Syndrome). Government and industry supporters of solar panels base their projections on the presumed success of the German solar model. But the German wind and solar experiment is tanking fast. It may soon become obsolete and is gradually being wound down.

With respect to solar, researchers at Utah State University have found that solar power “cannot sustain itself in the energy market… it is intermittent, inefficient and cannot meet demand,” as is also the case with wind. Mandates and subsidies cannot save these faltering industries. Pipedreams are no substitute for pipelines. Solar alchemy is as embarrassing as breaking wind.

None of the renewable proposals are feasible. The physics limit for wind turbines (the Betz limit) is too puny for anything but computer games. The same is true of the physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit). Moreover, wind and solar function only when nature permits, which renders them unreliable. Even lobbying sites like iea wind (the Internet is awash with viridian proclamations) cannot hide the variability factor in wind and solar production. As Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute concludes, “[T]he physics and economics of energy combined with scale realities make it clear that there is no possibility of anything resembling a radically ‘new energy economy’ in the foreseeable future.”

It’s time to face the truth. The global warning refrain is now a tiresome tune being played on an “old piano,” though they’re still “playing it hot.” The song concludes with the question: “Green door, what’s that secret you’re keeping?”

The secret is that demonizing traditional forms of energy extraction and application has become a recipe for economic debacle. The secret is that carbon is not a malefic agent but a chemical miracle that actually greens the world. Finally, the secret behind the green door is that some of the party-goers are surely aware that their testimony is spurious, but the party is just too good to leave. That’s a secret that must remain secret. 

'Resilient Recovery' Really Isn't

Back in June I wrote about a new Ottawa-based task force called Resilient Recovery, whose objective is to recommend "sustainable" government action to counteract the economic consequences of the pandemic and lockdowns. What made this group newsworthy was that it counted among its members  former Justin Trudeau advisor Gerald Butts, who'd recently returned to the world of highly remunerative enviro-activism after falling on his sword to mitigate the electoral consequences of Trudeau's inappropriate actions during the SNC-Lavalin scandal. Butts, of course, still has the PM's ear, which makes him an attractive target for any green group with big dreams and a few bucks to spend.

After what were no doubt two grueling months of slaving over hot policy proposals in the balmy Ontario summer, Resilient Recovery have released their preliminary report and, well, its so predictable that it could have been published alongside the press release announcing their formation.

The No. 1 proposal... suggests the federal government spend over $27 billion on retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient.... Other recommendations include moving more quickly to build widescale use and accessibility of zero-emission vehicles and to support the retention and attraction of clean vehicle manufacturers in Canada. The group also wants to see the federal government accelerate investments in the renewable energy sectors; spend more on restoring and conserving natural infrastructure and invest in ways to make working for and creating green businesses easier and more sustainable.

In other words: same old same old.

Task force member Andy Chisholm explains in the piece linked above that their "ultimate goal is to ensure Canada is focusing on the future and the needs of the country in the years and decades to come if and when it starts to roll out billions of dollars in economic stimulus once the health emergency spending phase is over." They recommend $50 billion expenditures, on top of the quarter of a trillion in new debt Canada has already taken on over the course of the pandemic, in response to which Canada's credit rating was downgraded, and probably not for the last time.

The liberal reply is that the added debt will go towards creating jobs at a time when Canada is seeing higher unemployment rates than any other G7 country, and fair enough -- that's a noble goal in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, however manufactured. Still, to invest (borrowed money!) so heavily in an unproductive industry in an already precarious economy is, in a word, nuts.

A sane response would be to capitalize on Canada's abundant natural resources by lowering the regulatory burden on the oil and gas industry at a time when it has been dealt a difficult blow. Prices are down, but the sector is still standing, and it would have more money to pump into Canada's economy if it weren't spending so much dealing with federal red tape. Moreover, it wouldn't cost tax-payers a penny.

I bet that never even occurred to them.

Who's Afraid of 'Climate Change'?

If you don't already keep tabs on Michael Shellenberger, you should. While you may not always agree with him -- Shellenberger is a self-described environmentalist and man of the left -- you will find him to be an honest, insightful, and even brave writer. Brave because he consistently uses facts to counter the hysterical narrative of the Green New Deal wing of the green movement, which as you might imagine doesn't win him a lot of friends.

One example of this: Forbes, where he is a regular contributor, pulled down his most recent piece, 'On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare,' within a few hours of publication.

In the piece, essentially a pitch for his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Shellenberger reviews his environmentalist bona fides, working to save the California redwoods and lobbying the Obama administration to spend billions on so-called renewable energy, etc. Increasingly, however, he became disturbed by other environmentalists distorting the science to make a case for hysteria, and shutting down anyone who questioned their conclusions.

Shellenberger

They've been so successful that children routinely report having nightmares about climate change and people around the world are convinced the end is near. Eventually Shellenberger came to feel he had a responsibility to speak out and counter their propaganda.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Air pollution and carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations for 50 years
• Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
• We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

(more…)

Gov. Blackface and the Greening of Virginia

You're forgiven for still thinking of Virginia as a conservative state. If you went to school before the Leftists leveled our educational system, you'll know that securing the buy-in of steady, aristocratic Virginians like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson helped convince the colonists that the dispute those rowdy New Englanders were having with Britain wasn't just a regional affair. But as a matter of more recent history, between the elections of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and Barrack Obama in 2008, Virginia was only won by one Democrat in a presidential contest. This isn't to say that the Old Dominion has been governed exclusively by the GOP -- when Linwood Holton was elected governor in 1970 he was the first Republican to hold that position in a century -- but no matter the party power in Richmond, they had to conform to the small 'c' conservative culture of the state.

In a relatively short time, however, that Virginia has been fundamentally transformed. After the most recent gubernatorial contest, which saw the election of the fourth Democrat in the last five cycles, journalist Matthew Continetti wrote a piece about his home state entitled 'How States Like Virginia Go Blue.' In it he paints a picture of modern day Virginia as "a hub of highly educated professionals, immigrants, and liberals," with an exploding population comprised of both the wealthy and educated and the comparatively poor, both key Democratic constituents:

Over the last 29 years, Virginia has become wealthier, more diverse, and more crowded. The population has grown by 42 percent, from 6 million in 1990 to 8.5 million. Population density has increased by 38 percent, from 156 people per square mile to 215. Mean travel time to work has increased from 24 minutes to 28 minutes. The median home price (in 2018 dollars) has gone from $169,000 to $256,000. Density equals Democrats.

The number of Virginians born overseas has skyrocketed from 5 percent to 12 percent. The Hispanic population has gone from 3 percent to 10 percent. The Asian community has grown from 2 percent to 7 percent. In 1990, 7 percent of people 5 years and older spoke a language other than English at home. In 2018 the number was 16 percent.

If educational attainment is a proxy for class, Virginia has undergone bourgeoisification. The number of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher has shot up from 25 percent of the state to 38 percent. As baccalaureates multiplied, they swapped partisan affiliation. Many of the Yuppies of the ’80s, Bobos of the ’90s, and Security Moms of the ’00s now march in the Resistance.

Which is to say that, in that time, Virginia has been culturally and demographically tugged away from the rural, southern states and towards the urban, mid-Atlantic states. As one might expect, these trends are significantly more pronounced in the DC suburbs of Northern Va., especially Fairfax and Loudoun Counties. The populations of these counties have exploded in that time. Fairfax gets more press, but Continetti points out that the population of Loudoun has more than quadrupled since the early '90s. Immigration is an important factor, but the expansion of the federal government during the Bush and Obama administrations might be more significant. Bureaucrats and defense contractors have to live somewhere, and they vote according to their interests.

Transformations like the one Continetti describes have consequences. In 2017, Virginians elected Democrat Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, as its governor. A lot of ink has been spilt on Northam's expanding abortion access in Virginia (including his controversial comments related to post-birth abortion) and his war on guns (as well as the extremely civil protests against his anti-2nd Amendment initiatives, which were nevertheless vilified by the mainstream media), as these have particularly enraged the Old Virginians. And who could forget his racist yearbook photo, which he originally claimed did not depict him until he eventually apologized, though without clarifying whether he's the Klansman or the guy in black face. Somehow Democrats are always able to survive these things, while Republicans have their careers ended over more ambiguous incidents.

As Politico noted at the time:

In a bid to salvage his job, the Democratic governor of Virginia denied he was one of the men dressed up as a Klansman or in blackface in a picture on his medical school yearbook page — after admitting the night before he was, in fact, in the photo.

In a different yearbook at Virginia Military Institute, Northam was nicknamed “Coonman.” Why? He wasn’t quite sure, he said. “My main nickname in high school and in college was ‘Goose’ because when my voice was changing, I would change an octave. There were two individuals, as best as I can recollect, at VMI — they were a year ahead of me. They called me ‘Coonman’. I don’t know their motives or intent. I know who they are. That was the extent of that. And it ended up in the yearbook. And I regret that.”

Right.

A less publicized aspect of Northam's agenda has been his environmental extremism. Last September he signed an executive order setting a goal that the state produce 100 percent of its energy via "carbon-free" sources by 2050, and 30% within the next 10 years.

Chris Bast... of the [Department of Environmental Quality] told The Center Square that he did not have an estimate on how much the executive order will cost consumers or taxpayers, but said that investments to fight climate change are necessary. “The cost of inaction outweighs the cost of action,” Bast said.

Of course.

After the state elections in November flipped both legislative houses to the Democrats, they set about turning that goal into a mandate, and this spring -- in the midst of the pandemic and Virginia's lengthy and onerous lockdowns -- Northam signed the Green New Deal-inspired Virginia Clean Economy Act, which did exactly that. He also approved the Clean Energy and Community Flood Preparedness Act which puts Virginia on the path to joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. This multi-state compact imposes new regulatory burdens on Virginia's oil, natural gas, and coal power plants, and introduces a cap-and-trade scheme on the 30 largest of them.

As Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Daily Signal, “Virginia could hardly have picked a worse time to join RGGI,”

Everywhere RGGI has gone, higher electricity prices have followed. In Virginia’s case, however, membership will coincide with trying to recover from the self-imposed economic collapse of the statewide lockdown. At a time when millions have lost their jobs, many of them from small businesses that may never reopen, Gov. Northam and his supporters in the General Assembly are knowingly adding to the burdens of families trying to recover from the COVID-19 lockdown. It is a direct assault on the disposable incomes of the state’s most vulnerable residents by an out-of-touch political elite. Absurdly, with natural gas abundant, reliable, and cheap, the governor chooses this moment to hitch Virginia’s fortunes to taxpayer-subsidized wind and solar power, which are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive.

Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, adds that this push will ultimately be harmful to the environment and ignores the fact that the fracking revolution has led to a significant decrease in America's carbon emissions.

“If you’re going to require all of the state’s power to come from 100% carbon-free sources by 2050, this will require a lot of [the] state’s land, which probably means impacting the state’s agricultural lands or cutting down some forests and probably both... So much for the environment.”

“It’s also completely unnecessary,” he said. “If the goal is to stop climate change, the U.S. is already the global leader in carbon dioxide emission reductions. Between 2005 and 2018, CO2 declined 12%. The free market is already taking care of the environment.”

Unfortunately these trends seem unlikely to turn around any time soon. The Virginia Republican party is made up of factions which seem to despise each other more than they hate the Democrats, but it just might be the case that the numbers to change course just aren't there. Northam's opponent in 2017 was the GOP establishmentarian Ed Gillespie, a two-time loser in state elections, who attempted to appeal to nationalists by focusing on issues like crime and immigration. He received only 45% of the vote.

Perhaps the only solution might be a proposal which started gaining steam during the Second Amendment battles earlier this year -- secession. Specifically secession for those counties in western and southern Virginia disturbed by the direction of their state and interested in joining the more conservatively inclined West Virginia. And the free state of West Virginia, which itself seceded from the slave state of Virginia in 1863, seems ready to welcome their separated brethren with open arms. Should that transpire, and the size and relative importance of Virginia decrease on Northam's watch, his face will no longer be black or even green. It will be red.

'GOP Out of Touch on Climate Change'

Former Pennsylvania governor, Homeland Security secretary, and current enviro-lobbyist Tom Ridge has published an article at The Atlantic arguing that his fellow Republicans are behind the curve on environmentalism. After opening the piece with a maudlin reflection on the fact that we all should have been celebrating Earth Day on April 22nd, but that the COVID-19 pandemic kept us from doing so (for the first time I was able to connect with the Libs who've been rooting for the virus), Ridge states:

The Republican Party has largely abandoned environmental issues—to its great detriment politically. Majorities of Americans say the federal government is doing too little for key aspects of the environment, such as protecting water and air quality and reducing the effects of climate change. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center finds that Democrats mostly agree that the U.S. government should do more on climate. Republicans are divided by ideology, age, and gender; moderates, Millennials, and women within the party are far more likely than conservatives, older Republicans, and men to favor more federal action. More and more, the GOP as a whole seems out of touch on this crucial issue.

This assertion is questionable. Gallup has actually just released a new poll attempting to document how Americans priorities the challenges facing our country, and the data for April, respondents put Climate Change at the bottom of the list, tied for dead last in importance. Now, of course, April is a bit of a skewed month, with the pandemic understandably taking first place and sucking up all the oxygen. Even so, it is worth noting that in the previous months surveyed, "climate change" only barely misses last place.

Heartland Institute president James Taylor, commenting on this data, rightly points out that "People have a vague, general desire for policymakers to pay attention to climate change," but when there's any question of the bill coming due -- he also mentions polling which suggests that support for Green initiatives collapses when respondents are asked if they'd be willing to pay an extra $100 per month for them -- they completely change their tune.

To Ridge's credit, he makes a few points which might make his new friends at The Atlantic uncomfortable, saying "I continue to support policies that embrace all sources of energy, including natural gas, which has lowered our dependence on coal. I also support nuclear power, the largest around-the-clock provider of carbon-free energy." But he follows that up with a lament that his "conservative friends have been reluctant to join me in supporting renewable technologies such as wind and solar." Perhaps because his conservative friends are aware that wind and solar are boondoggles which might help gullible Liberals sleep better at night, but they certainly don't benefit the environment. Then again, maybe his friends would come around if they were paid lobbyists for the renewable energy industry, like Ridge.

All of which is to say, if anyone is out of touch with American voters, its Tom Ridge.

Thank You, Oil & Gas!

In the new documentary, Planet of the Humans, Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs explain that a major reason they've soured on green energy is that they came to see how reliant so-called renewables are on the very fossil fuels they aspire to replace. Wind turbines and solar panels are made of plastics which are produced using petroleum distillates, the crystalline silicon used to manufacture the photo-voltaic cells on solar panels make use of mined materials, etc.

And then, of course, there is the intermittency problem -- the sun isn't always shining, the wind isn't always blowing -- which makes it so that the Green Energy Industry requires traditional power plants to remain on stand-by to fill in the gaps, thus emitting more carbon than they would have otherwise. As Ozzie Zehner one of their experts puts it in the documentary:

You use more fossil fuels to do this than you're getting a benefit from it. You would've been better off [just] burning the fossil fuels in the first place instead of playing pretend.

This is meant to induce a sense of despair in the viewer, so as to lay a groundwork for their Malthusian suggestions and we-don't-ever-actually-use-the-phrase-population-control solutions. I was, however, reminded of this aspect of the documentary -- the exposé concerning the poison-pill fossil fuels mixed into your wholesome green energy -- while reading a Wall Street Journal editorial this week entitled Big Oil to the Coronavirus Rescue, which examined other products which rely on oil and gas.

The editorial begins by pointing out the irony of the New York City council's recently coming out of their pandemic hidey-holes to introduce a resolution divesting the city's assets from banks that invest in fossil fuels. Ironic because the industry that they are attacking is central to the production of supplies which we need to beat back the virus they've been hiding from. From the WSJ:

Exxon’s predecessor Standard Oil invented isopropyl alcohol (IPA), the key ingredient in disinfectants and hand sanitizer, in 1920. Its Baton Rouge chemical plant is now the world’s largest producer of IPA. While refineries have been throttled back, Exxon has ramped up IPA production by 3,000 tons per month, which is enough to produce 50 million four-ounce bottles of sanitizer.

The oil giant recently noted in a press release that the state of New York has turned to the Baton Rouge plant for critical supplies. Gov. Andrew Cuomo should be grateful Exxon isn’t holding a grudge after the state’s four-year inquisition for allegedly deceiving itself about its climate impact, which finally ended last December when a state judge tossed the state lawsuit as entirely without merit.

Exxon is also increasing production of a specialized polypropylene that is used in medical masks and gowns by about 1,000 tons per month, which is enough to manufacture up to 200 million medical masks or 20 million gowns. At the same time, it is applying its expertise in material science to develop new face shields that utilize a filtration fabric.

Working with Boeing, Exxon plans to manufacture as many as 40,000 masks an hour. According to an Exxon engineer, this new design and production method won’t be vulnerable to the supply-chain hiccups that have led to widespread mask shortages. No Defense Production Act coercion necessary.

The editors ask wryly whether "liberals want to divest from using those [products] to fight off the coronavirus?" Well, after watching Planet of the Humans which has one scientist saying that barring a "major die off in population, there's no turning back," you would be forgiven for concluding that at least for some liberals the answer is yes.

As for me, however, I'm extremely grateful that we have these products produced by the oil and gas industry. Every ounce of isopropyl alcohol, every bit of that specialized polypropylene they produce become weapons in our arsenal. I'm so enthusiastic about their work, in fact, that I'd like to see them focus their energies on it even more exclusively, to the exclusion of, for instance, cosying up to the Greens, who will never forgive them for existing anyway. Maybe they could even redirect the plastics earmarked for wind turbines and solar panels towards making face-shields, ventilators, and personal protective equipment for the next year or two.

Something to think about.