Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- October 11, 2019

Updates

October 12, 2019: this article over at zerohedge is so good, I'm tempted to post it in its entirety even at risk of copyright inquiry.

October 12, 2019:

October 11, 2019: from the WSJ, an op-ed -- "California's Dark Eyes" -- why the progressive paragon is living like it's 1899 (no typo).

Californians are learning to live like the Amish after investor-owned utility PG&E this week shut off power to two million or so residents to prevent wildfires amid heavy, dry winds. Blame the state’s largest blackout on a perfect storm of bad policies.

Two dozen or so wildfires in the past few years have been linked to PG&E equipment, including one last fall that killed 85 people. PG&E under state law is on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in damages and has filed for bankruptcy. For years the utility skimped on safety upgrades and repairs while pumping billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies to please its overlords in Sacramento. Credit Suisse has estimated that long-term contracts with renewable developers cost the utility $2.2 billion annually more than current market power rates.

A report this week by Next 10 and Beacon Economics warns that the state isn’t on target to meet its climate goals in 2030 because Californians refuse to abandon SUVs for electric cars. Wildfires last year produced more CO2 than the state’s businesses, homes and farms, offsetting state emission reductions in 2017 nine times over.

Environmental regulators responded to the report by claiming that carbon from burned trees is more “natural” than from combusted fossil fuels. Perhaps they’ve inhaled too much of their own smoke.

One comment that pretty much encapsulates readers' thoughts:

This is the same state that dropped $77 billion on a high speed rail project that no one wanted, designed to connect places no one went to, and failed to create a single piece of useful public infrastructure out of it.  But I'll bet a whole lot of homes, cars, planes, vacations, and private cash hordes were built from it.  There are countries in the world that would put people to death over such a travesty of public funds malfeasance.  No one even lost their job over that.  California is utterly and irredeemably corrupt. 

And this:

I was reading the interesting tale of the rechargeable Lithium-ion car battery. A Nobel was just given to three fellows responsible for the chemistry/engineering aspects-one 97. The down side from an environmental side was the relatively enormous 50-60 lbs of cobalt required. Supposedly 500,000 lbs of ore must be mined in one of several far away places in order to achieve that. Compared to clean natural gas and a CO2 extraction system attached to the engine  the environmental impact of the electric car is dubious at best. But that's why Musk needs to get off this rock pile. We need to be messing up other places not here. 

Original Post

California moratorium on oil and gas leases has ended. See below.

Finally; should have been done years ago. Why didn't the US Postal Service do this ten years ago? And it still hasn't. But UPS will. UPS will spend $450 million to add 6,000 vehicles to its natural gas fleet. Link here. Amazon did one better: adding a coal-powered fleet (AKA EVs). Posted earlier.

$5 gasoline in California? Nope, how about $6 gas? I remember all the pushback I got when I "predicted" $5 gasoline for California. The price of gasoline has risen 86.4 cents / gallon since the start of the year. And this is the end of the driving season. Links everyone. This is from Forbes.

While the CNN story focuses on this recent spike, the reality is that the lowest price Californians have experienced during 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), came during the week of January 28, when the price for a gallon of regular averaged $3.206. Texans paid $1.962 during that same week.

Let's see how this goes? US opens up California land for oil, gas leasing. LOL. Over at Rigzone.  Like that will go anywhere.

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has opened up 722,000 acres of federal land in California’s central coast for oil and gas leasing and development.

The land is located primarily in Fresno, Monterey and San Benito counties. The decision makes 680,000 acres of federal mineral estate available for lease with controlled surface use stipulations and an additional 42,000 acres available for lease with no surface occupancy requirements.

It also marks the end of a five-year moratorium on oil and gas leases in California. The state had not had an oil and gas lease sale since 2013.

The catch:  However, it doesn’t authorize any actual drilling for exploration or development of oil and gas resources, according to a BLM press release.

Geography lesson: quick! Where is the Gulf of Oman? We'll come back to this later.