Curling up by the fire with a good book

Via Mish, comes this story from the U.K.:

Some cash-strapped British pensioners are buying books from charity shops and burn them to keep warm as freezing temperatures gripped the UK, a London newspaper reported Tuesday.

Workers at a charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, told London newspaper Metro that pensioners were looking for thick books such as encyclopedias — which are sold for a few pennies second hand — as a cheaper alternative to coal.

"Book-burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves," the paper quoted one shop assistant as saying.

"A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night."

Energy prices have soared in Britain in the past years, with some estimates showing gas prices up by around 40 percent since January 2008, and electricity tariffs rising by about 20 percent. ...

Article here. This might be coming soon to a fireplace near you, especially if the FedGov passes Cap and Trade (which will seriously raise energy prices) to please the Global Warming gods, and their fervent true believers. Of course, if inflation takes off, it'll probably happen anyway, particularly for those on fixed incomes.

Pump prices on pace to top 2009 highs

From Yahoo Finance news, we learn that more pain at the gas pumps is on the way:

The cost of filling up the car is rising in the wake of soaring crude and by this weekend, pump prices will race past the highs for all of 2009.

Tracing the ascension of crude, up 14 percent since mid-December, energy prices across the board are catching up. On Tuesday, benchmark crude prices closed higher than they had on any day last year.

And from MaxedOutMama we learn that naturally, the Obamites want to make domestic drilling for oil and natural gas harder:

Drilling for oil and natural gas on government land will face increased environmental scrutiny and slower approvals under requirements announced today by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

The moves will stop industry from treating public lands as a “candy store,” Salazar said. Representatives of oil and gas companies said the changes will slow domestic-energy development and make the U.S. more dependent on foreign supplies.

I guess we still aren't tired of shooting ourselves in the foot yet. MaxedOutMama sums up the Administration's energy policy thusly:

Not only don't we have any way to replace our transportation infrastructure with electric vehicles, we don't currently have any plan to sustain our current electricity production. We have thrown immense amounts of money into "green" sources and we are getting very little out for our efforts.

If we are concerned about carbon, nuclear power plants should address that issue.

If we are concerned about safety, coal plants are the way to go.

If we are concerned about air quality, both nuclear and NG plants are the way to go.

If we are concerned about the environment, then more hydropower is the way to go; any new projects are currently blocked by environmentalists.

If we are concerned about national security and the economy (and they are now one and the same issue), then it would be something like all of the above. Oil is not used to produce much in the way of electricity, and to the extent that electric vehicles are viable, we will need the electricity production to operate them.

If we want to be poor, hungry, sick and generally vulnerable, then our current policy is the best possible option and just keeps getting more optimal all the time. The more US energy policy looks like California policy, the more US finances look like CA finances. Is that any way to run a country?

Global Warming claims another victim

From Watts Up With That comes another "benefit" of envirowackory [via Maxed Out Mama]:

On October 31, 2009, the once largest aluminum plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another American industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company in Montana will shut down its aluminum production because it cannot purchase the necessary electrical power to continue its operations.

How did this happen in America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability. America’s industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.

America grew because of innovation and hard work by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been extinguished. Why?

Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls Aluminum.

But the real reasons are much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources of electricity other than Bonneville? ...

Read the rest here. The pain inflicted by these environmental laws will grow more acute as the economy worsens (partly as a result of those same laws), and jobs will continue to vanish overseas to more business and jobs friendly locations. Evidently, it's not enough that we tie one metaphorical business hand behind our backs, we must shoot ourselves in both feet as well.

Obama to finance offshore drilling ... in Brazil

From the Wall Street Journal:

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas. ...

Article here. I guess when you're spending trillions of the people's money, a few billion may not seem like much anymore to the Washington elites. We have long since become our own worst enemy, and now the game seems to be to figure out the most imaginative way to simultaneously screw the American taxpayer and screw our domestic energy industry, all while helping our economic competitors boost theirs.

What happens when the wind stops blowing?

Shannon Love over at Chicago Boyz asks the question of all the wind power supporters:

At 6:41 PM, Feburary 26th, 2008, The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) activated a Stage Two emergency response to keep the power grid that supplies most of Texas from failing and triggering rolling blackouts.

The operators balanced the grid by cutting off power to “interruptible” customers. These are customers such as industrial sites that have their own power generators and that pay lower rates in return for being kicked off the grid during emergencies.

Several factors contributed to the emergency. Unusually warm weather caused increased consumption. Two coal plants were offline for scheduled maintenance. The major trigger, however, was an easily foreseeable problem:

Preliminary reports indicate the frequency decline was caused by a combination of events, including a drop in wind-energy production at the same time the evening electricity load was increasing, accompanied by multiple power providers falling below their scheduled energy production. In addition, the drop in wind energy led to some system constraints in moving power from the generation in the north zone to load in the west zone, resulting in limitations of balancing energy availability. The wind production dropped from more than 1700 MW three hours before the event down to 300 MW at the point the emergency procedures were activated.

Let me translate that for you: The wind suddenly stopped blowing. It does that sometimes. The grid couldn’t adapt to the sudden loss of wind-generated electricity and they had to kick people off the grid.

Currently, Texas receives 3% of its electricity from wind, the highest percentage in the nation. A lot of people seriously talk of requiring as a matter of law that we generate up to 30% of our electricity from windpower. If a sudden drop in windpower can destabilize the grid when windpower contributes only 3% of total power, what will our reliability look like when unreliable windpower contributes 10%, 20% or more? ...

Read the rest here. As I wrote almost a year ago (see my post here) about Al Gore's ten year plan to reduce carbon emissions from electricity production to zero, those who think we can just put up a bunch of windmills (sorry, wind turbines) and magically achieve "energy independence" are probably in a state of chemically induced delirium.

Apart from the fact that much of the most desirable parts of the country for wind generated electricity are often hundreds of miles (or more) from the large urban population centers where the electricity is needed, and would thus require massive transmission infrastructure investment, the intermittency problem inherent in wind or solar typically requires lots of natural gas powered electricity generation plants co-sited with these wind or solar farms. Although good luck getting those transmission tower rights-of-way and build permits with all the lawsuits from the environmental and conservation groups that would inevitably follow ("What??? You want to build stuff in the habitat of the endangered blue-speckled red-horned snail darter? Never!")

Of course, the liberal elites in Los Angeles or San Francisco who use all that electricity probably don't give much thought to the idea of besmirching millions of acres of pristine prairie or desert with wind turbines and solar panels as far as the eye can see. After all, that's flyover country, populated by overall-wearing unsophisticates. Paradoxically, however, the coastal elites object to any sort of development in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a truly remote place where virtually no humans ever visit (and don't even fly over on their way to visit the elites on the other coast), and thus a place where development would go sight unseen. Go figure. So goes the cognitive dissonance of the Leftist mind, I suppose.

World electricity consumption expected to decline for first time since World War 2

Via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog, comes this graph (click on image to enlarge):

Another artifact of the global economic contraction we're in, and an indication of its severity -- no other post-World War II recession saw an actual decline in electricity consumption. Obviously, the 2009 figure is an estimate, but unless the world economy stages an unlikely and unusually strong recovery this year, looks like we're on track for the first decrease in 64 years.

Gov. Palin talks about energy, ANWR

Governor Sarah Palin gave an interview with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo on the topic of energy a couple of days before Senator McCain's announcement of Gov. Palin as his VP nominee pick. She also discusses the issue of drilling in ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I can see why the Dems are worried: Gov. Palin comes across as highly knowledgeable, down-to-earth, and straight talking.

Excerpts (some repetition between the two videos):






View the whole interview here. Gov. Palin discusses ANWR and debunks some of the overhyped arguments against drilling there. She is also one of the few politicians to have actually visited the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Pelosi: Natural gas "clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels"

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, seems unclear on the concept of "fossil fuels", as evidenced by this doozy from a Meet the Press interview with Tom Brokaw:

... I'm, I'm, I'm investing in something I believe in. I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels. ...

Transcript here. Sigh.