Roger: My first response would be to demand that all spending on infrastructure to reduce CO2 emissions be cancelled if it doesn't result in projected CO2 emissions reductions at a cost below $X per tonC. The absolutely worst part of German energy policy is that the German people have ruined their economic competitiveness by investing in renewable generation technologies that cost too much and far more than the "social cost of carbon". This might even get bipartisan support.
Given our massive deficit, it should be clear that the best way to reduce emissions is through a carbon tax that generates desperately needed revenue rather than through subsidies that increase our deficit. No one wants to face this reality, even those who favor raising taxes on foreign goods (aka tariffs)
Roger: This is off-topic, but do you intend to write about the claim by Young and Hsiang that the average TC results in 7,000-11,000 excess deaths over the next 15 years.
"Ensuring long-term support for and independence of the U.S. Energy Information Agency to continue providing the world’s best energy data, so that U.S. energy policy can be evaluated and, as needed, course corrected in real time."
Does EIA use data collected by the states? Some of that data is less than perfect for reasons mostly tied to "that's the way we've always done it" and little incentive to simply provide monthly Oil, Gas & Water rates by wellbore.
Some, like Alaska, do a great job by providing an MSaccess download with all wells over all time. Every other state is worse. Some are a lot worse by not even collecting (= asking for) certain phases or by individual wellbore.
Roger, your table showing US oil exports of 9108 thousand barrels/day (kb/d) in section 2 "(The US in the world’s energy superpower") is somewhat misleading. Certainly the US exports more oil than anyone else, but it also imports nearly the same amount, so that its net exports (exports minus imports) would place it way down on your table. For example in 2022, the latest year for which EIA data seems to be easily available, the US exported 9580 kb/d while it imported 8320 kb/d, for a net export of 1260 kb/d. For comparison Mexico, near the bottom of your table, is shown as exporting 1271 kb/d in 2023.
The US shouldn't commit to expanding natural gas exports because resources are limited and natural gas is a critical complement to wind and solar power. As you know, solar and wind suffer from intermittency and can't follow the grid load. Inability to follow the load can bring the grid down, therefore natural gas turbines, hydropower and batteries are used to stabilize it. However, hydropower is limited in many regions, and batteries are very expensive. This means that, as technology stands right now, we should be very careful and avoid exporting additional natural gas.
An additional problem I see is that a foreign policy designed to have hostile relations with Russia is a losing policy. The best option for the US is to turn around the neocon foreign policy designed to dismember Russia or make it submit to US imperial power, and eventually break apart the China-Russia-Iran axis, making Russia an ally. Taking markets from Russia just doesn't make sense when eventually we will be running out of natural gas export capacity, and when Russia is the only nation able to help us contain China.
I realize this long term complex Great Game isn't something most Americans think about, but it's time you be introduced to alternatives to the eternal wars strategy. Remember we have a huge national debt, the US military has been weakened by the Biden regime, and we haven't got anything positive to show from the dumb military adventurism we have suffered from since Clinton led our forces to defeat in Somalia in 1993.
Fernando: Our foreign policy isn't "designed to have hostile relations with Russia". Our foreign policy since WWII has been governed by a rules-based international order where stronger nations don't invade and annex their neighbors. Since WWI, we have supported self-determination of peoples. None of this is a "neo-con" policy. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, Mr. Putin has publicly written that his destiny is to restore Russian greatness after losing the Cold War and to bring all Russian speaking peoples under the protection are restored Russian Empire. His policy is essentially the same as that of Hitler, whose objective was to restore German greatness after losing WWI and to bring all German-speaking peoples under the protection of a Third Reich (the successor of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire united under Bismarck). Putin's ambitions, not those of US Neo-cons, have brought Russian into conflict with the US and the EU in NATO. In February 2022, Biden did NOTHING to stop Russia from invading and overrunning Ukraine (which EVERYONE expected within weeks). Putin's military incompetence provided the opportunity to properly arm the Ukrainians and support their self-determination and a rules-based international order. And no, SoS Baker didn't officially promise Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't expand eastward if Gorbachev recognized the wisdom of allowing Germany to re-unite under the restraints imposed by NATO. All Eastern European countries were still part of the Warsaw Pact at that time.
Fernando also spouts more propaganda: "The best option for the US is to turn around the neocon foreign policy designed to dismember Russia or make it submit to US imperial power, and eventually break apart the China-Russia-Iran axis, making Russia an ally. The best option for the US is to turn around the neocon foreign policy designed to dismember Russia or make it submit to US imperial power, and eventually break apart the China-Russia-Iran axis, making Russia an ally."
The Russian Empire was dismembered by the Civil War that followed WWI and was partly patched back together in 1922 as a voluntary "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", from which any Republic could leave at any time (Article 26 of founding treaty). The USSR voluntarily dismembered itself in December 1991, though the Baltic Republics and Georgia had left in 1990.
The Western response to the increasing aggressiveness of China and Russia has brought these two countries closer together. The US and EU imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the seizure of Crimea and on China after violations of the "one country-two systems" agreement under which the UK handed over Hong Kong to China. An "unlimited friendship" was proclaimed by Putin and Xi on February 4, 2022, 18 days before Russia invaded Ukraine. Since Biden had already publicly declared no US troops would be sent to help Ukraine and since everyone expected Ukrainian resistance to collapse within weeks, this friendship was intended to counter the sanctions on Russian fossil fuels that would inevitably follow.
The "rules based order" went down the toilet when Clinton sent the US rangers to be defeated in Somalia in 1993. Things got even worse when he lied to justify bombing and invading Yugoslavia in 1999. They appeared to have struck bottom when Bush lied to justify invading and attempting to occupy Iraq in 2003. But Obama piled it on in Libya and Syria, and it got even worse now that Israel is ethnically cleansing the Palestinians with full US support.
Your lengthy post is pure neocon ideology distilled into one long paragraph. Unfortunately for you, what you neocons have never figured out is how to win a war.
Finally, Fernando you insultingly claimed that my post was "pure neocon ideology", when everything I write is substantiated by FACTS that you and your ideology choose to ignore. I won't deny that some of the neocons became excessively ambitious, unrealistic, and unprincipled in the decade after we won the Cold War, but that is no reason to abandon the rules-based international order that has made the last 70 years more peaceful than the centuries that preceded it.
According to the US State Department, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was legally launched in response to Saddam's violations of the inspections and disarmament provisions of the cease fire that temporarily ended the fighting after the 1991 Gulf War that approved by the UN. Those violations were the subject of about a dozen UN resolutions over the next decade including crippling sanctions. However, people only remember that Bush, with post 9/11 hubris, idiotically declared Iraq had WMD and that he could go to war for that reason. AEI recently held three part review of our decision to invade Iraq on its twentieth anniversary with both supporters and critics. The truth was that Bush was told that US intelligence didn't know whether Saddam had destroyed (without needed and required international supervision) all of his WMDs after the first Gulf War and whether he had restarted those programs after the UN weapons inspectors had been expelled. The AEI program reminded me what everyone has forgotten (given the mess the incompetent Bush administration made after the invasion) is just how dangerous and evil Saddam was (including to his own people). He made large quantities of chemical and biological weapons and ROUTINELY used them on his own people and on the Iranians in a horrendous 8-year war that killed 0.5 million. With the fourth largest military in the world, he took on an alliance that included almost the entire world, including troops from Egypt and Syria, lost and still didn't lose his grip on power. His scientists were scheduled to produce a dirty atomic bomb in 1992 and likely would have much earlier if the Israelis hadn't taken out the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. The real truth about WMD wasn't that Saddam had them in 2003: He had AND USED them in the past and everyone agreed he would do so once sanctions and inspectors were gone in the future. International support for sanctions began evaporating after 2000, so Bush was faced with need to act now or face a fully re-armed Iraq with WMDs in another decade. After he was captured, Saddam explained that the Middle East was a dangerous place and that he WANTED his neighbors to believe he still had WMD. IMO, Bush's crime wasn't going to war; it was the incompetent way he justified it and carried it out.
Frank, either you believe in that "rules based order" baloney or you don't.
International law requires a UN Security Council resolution to carry out an invasion, regime change and occupation of a UN member nation. The US lacked this sanction (the WMD claim was evident baloney, given that UN inspection teams had failed to find any signs of either chemical or nuclear weapon manufacturing or stocks in Iraq. This is why Bush The Idiot made up the CoW (Coalition of the willing) to invade Iraq. Given the lack of sanction and the failure to find the WMD we can say Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Powell are war criminals.
Most of what you write above is false. And it helps prove that the "rules based order" is a BS term coined by the American imperialist propaganda shop. It looks like baby puree cooked up in a neocon shop for youngsters who were in kindergarten in 2003.
Given that we have deviated so much from my original comment, I want to repeat my original thesis: design of hostile moves against Russia is a serious blunder, because it forces Russia to align with China. And right now China is a much bigger threat. This is evident to anyone with a normal forehead who hasn't been brainwashed by the imperial media. Unfortunately most Americans treat foreign policy as a partime topic they think about after they watch the Game of the Week, so unfortunately Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, and I remain in a minority as the rest of you foam at the mouth and growl at the enemy du jour.
When NATO first expanded, I was concerned that Russia would see the eastern expansion of NATO as a threat, creating problems in the future. However, I have since learned that Russians are inherently expansionist, somewhat like we saw American expansion to the Pacific as our national destiny in the less-enlightened nineteenth century. Even as the USSR was falling apart, Russia was gaining control over 20% of Georgian territories in South Abkhazia and South Ossetia and more in the 2008 war that Russian lured Georgia into. Russia fought two brutal wars to regain control of Chechnya. All of these were autonomous area when part of the USSR with a negligible number of ethnic Russian. There are serious questions about how these Causasian peoples should be organized and governed, but they are not Russian.
We didn't adopt a foreign policy designed to be hostile to Russia; Russia's Eastern European neighbors knew the expansionist Russian bear would return someday, which it is in the form of a Putin intent on restoring Russian greatness and recreating the empire of Peter and Katherine the Greats. Most of the Eastern European nations were desperate for the protection of NATO and the anti-corruption campaign needed to join EU. Hatred of corruption drove the Ukrainians into the Euromaidan the same day Yanukovych reneged at the last minute signing a trade deal with the EU promising help in dealing with corruption. Only idiots think the CIA can prompt a half million demonstrators to come to the EuroMaidan and occupy it for three months in winter - twice.
NATO and the EU didn't expand eastward to create trouble with Russia, it did so because the people in those counties wanted to pay the price demanded from them for membership. Bush II not overly and insanely aggressive about creating a pathway to membership in 2008 without the backing of other important members. No plan was ever offered and the effort was abandoned after the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.
The air campaigns against the Serbs attacking UN-declared safe zones in Bosnia and Kosovo were not approved by the UN Security Council, but an infantry brigade of non-US NATO forces was approved by UN Security Council Resolution 998. The fighting began after Yugoslavia (a creation of the Versailles Treaty) voted to dissolve itself into it original constituent parts and the Serbs began taking territory from its neighbors. The Bosnia capitol Sarajevo was under bombardment and siege for almost 4 years, despite having been declared a safe zone by the UN. Genocide and ethnic cleansing were widespread. 8,000 Bosnians supposedly under the protections of UN troops were massacred in the Srebrenica genocide. Genocide was also taking place in Kosovo. Numerous UN resolutions and safe areas failed to stop the fighting, but 20 days of NATO air attacks ended the fighting in Bosnia and three months of bombing caused the retreat of the Serbs from Kosovo. UN resolution 1244 agreed to by Serbia made Kosovo and autonomous area protected by UN forces, but Serbia did not recognize Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008, meaning it should not be recognized under international law (but the US and half the countries in the world now recognize Kosovo). Both want to join NATO, but (IIRC) will need to resolve their differences before they can do so. Genocidal wars led by Serbs persisted in the former Yugoslavia for most of a decade, but the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY was unable to deal with them fully within the "rules-based order" because the Russians supported aggression by their fellow Slavs.
Frank, don't mix up Bosnia and Kosovo. Go back and study history before you write here, because what comes out once you mix the two isn't legible. I warn you that I volunteered to help a team accusing Clinton and Blair as war criminals for the Kosovo mess. The document was turned in but the court said IT lacked jurisdiction to put a US president on trial. So all we proved was that those international courts aren't that much into justice (this may explain why Israel gets away with industrial scale crimes against humanity and nothing gets done to stop it).
Fernando: The fact that you were part of a team that accused Clinton and Blair of war crimes is PROOF that you too believe in a rules-based international order that they violated (as I admitted). It is far better to have world committed to a rule-based order and leaders who will be briefed on how poorly things have worked out when desperate times have led other presidents to bend the rules and minimize, if not totally avoid violations of those rules. A 20-day bombing campaign in 1995 wasn't an outrageous price to pay for ending the four-year siege of Sarajevo, but that led to 3 months of bombing over Kosovo and a quarter-century of disagreement with peace-keepers over the status of Kosovo.
To the best of my knowledge, Arab terrorism has always provided a legal justification for Israel's military actions. By stationing troops and equipment and building their tunnels in civilian areas, Hamas is legally responsible for the deaths of many Gaza's. Sinwar publicly admitted that more civilian deaths were in Hama's best interest. IMO, the occupation of more and more of the West Bank by the Israeli settler movement violates the rules-based international order, as technically the Arab surrender of Palestinian land to Israel after the 1947-8 war.
As for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that was legally justified as a response to a decade of violations of the ceasefire (supported and documented by a dozen UN Security Council resolutions) that temporarily end the First Gulf War
More [pro-Putin?} propaganda from Fernando. EVERYTHING that happened in Somalia was under the "rules bases international order". Along with other nations, the US sent troops to Somalia in 1992 (under Bush, not Clinton} in response to a unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 794, passed after 300,000 Somalis had died of starvation and another 1.5 million were at risk of starving. The operation was intended to provide security for those bringing food and medicine to the Somalis. In 1993, the UN Secretary General had gotten these forces in the political struggle to pacify the country and the Security Council passed Resolution 837 calling for the arrest of leaders responsible for attacking peacekeepers. This resulted in the Battle of Mogadishu. President Clinton then ordered US forces not to get involved in offensive UN operations to arrest leaders of factions. In Feb 1994, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 897 to withdraw forces from Somalia and the civil war there continues to this day and providing a haven for Al Qaeda.
The Rangers were sent to Somalia by Clinton in 1993, after the initial US deployment under Bush had failed. The Ranger's mission, to force the Habr Gidr to surrender and agree to a coalition government, wasn't approved by the UN Security Council. The Rangers proceeded to massacre the majority of Habr Gidr elders as they were discussing the terms they would demand. This hardened the Habr Gidr position, and led to the subsequent US raid and defeat.
The events are described in detail in the book "Black Hawk Down".
As you can see, you have been fed a re-worked and false version of history. By the way, one reason I followed this mess in detail is my earlier assignment to the Chalbi desert near the Somali border in the late 80's.
This is a very well done article on my views on climate
“Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. says humanity needs to consider the risks of climate change, but this cannot be done through scaring people into believing an imminent apocalypse.”
Truly excellent, Roger. Thoughtful, level-headed, data-driven, well-reasoned, calm and well-supported by both facts and logic. Should be required reading for everyone who will have any influence on energy policy.
Agreed, but as to the comment of “rule by executive order” it wouldn’t hurt to undo the worst of Biden’s on day 1 with a bunch of NOTs? Then move to legislation?
“ The world would benefit from a massive increase in energy research and innovation as opposed to simply massive subsidies for existing technologies that are not up to the task.”
This is why I advocate soon incoming canadian PM Poilievre doesn’t scrap the carbon tax but instead reduce it to $10/ton with no carve outs except for the poor and direct all that to energy research with initial focus on nuclear.
I'll throw out a moon-shot idea from George Friedman of Stratfor. He has been predicting that space based solar power will come online sometime in the middle of this century. It might be worth trying to make that happen sooner with targeted research funding.
I recall a back of the envelope calculation that showed that enough solar energy hits the upper atmosphere in just a few hours to power the whole globe. It's stunning how much energy the sun provides. It will be challenging to figure out how to harness it and get it to the right points on the surface.
I have a few thoughts on a better energy path forward.
Don’t try to go to zero emissions in general. Low emissions from natural gas is good enough. In the electric sector, build out nuclear energy and accept natural gas for peaking. Natural gas is too valuable to use for base load electricity and should be reserved for transportation and buildings.
Trying to build an electric system that uses wind, solar, and energy storage will do more harm than good. The costs to provide reliable energy will be extremely high, relying on weather-dependent resources introduces an intractable reliability risk that will eventually cause a crisis, and the cumulative environmental impacts of all the wind turbines, solar panels, and energy storage options will be unacceptable.
No jurisdiction has ever successfully converted to relying on wind and solar with no fossil backup. Before committing to that approach a demonstration project is necessary.
I follow New York’s attempt to go net-zero using renewable energy at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. The organizations responsible for the electric system all agree that a new category of generating resources called Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFR) is necessary to keep the lights on during periods of extended low wind and solar resource availability. Given that DEFR is needed for a wind and solar reliant electric system and that nuclear is likely the only feasible option it makes sense to skip the wind and solar buildout completely and go nuclear for base load and load following generation. The French experience and results indicate that this is a viable option.
It never made any sense to me why the focus was and is on solar and wind if the goal is to reduce emissions. Their non-dispatchable nature is a crippling limitation for running a modern power grid. Fortunately, more and more people seem to be waking up to this fact, given the mini-renaissance that's starting to happen around nuclear power.
It would be good to get an update from the guest author you had a few months ago who explained the lead times necessary for new permitting, exploration, and extraction. I believe he said that the Biden admin had effectively stopped all new permitting which would mean that it will take several years before any new energy sources come online.
It would also take several years to build the natural gas liquefaction plants. I don't keep with the industry details, but based on my experience it would take at least five years to get a significant amount of additional export capacity built. We have to factor in geopolitical issues, the fact that resources are limited, and the Europeans rather funny plan to actually stop emissions by year X (I think they say 2050?).
A. In the interest of “We the People …” and preservation of the Republic, representative government, checks and balances and all that good stuff, can we stop the use of ‘Czar’, appointing little Caesars and special purpose ‘Kaisers’? Appears to be decidedly unconstitutional. Can’t find a job description at USAJobs.gov that has czar, caesar, kaiser, or king in its title.
B. Don’t we already have an entire federal agency focused on energy and a cabinet-level position called Secretary? Perhaps the policy discussion should flow through here to Congress. Perhaps the key job skill for the position needs to be delegation and collaboration, not political posturing and ideological subservience.
C. I like these ideas, Roger, especially when coupled with responsible cost-benefit analysis of climate adaptation and mitigation policies that incorporate or rely upon rigorous material flow and waste/pollutant life-cycle analysis. “Green Power” isn’t as clean as it pretends to be and a nationwide charging network energized by fossil fuels for vehicles that most Americans can’t afford, even with tax incentives and rebates, is imbecilic.
Wind and solar are losers. Too much raw material stock invested for too little reliable, consistent delivery of energy to the consumers to be worth the price. Natural gas is a plentiful resource but, along with crude oil, has uses beyond production of electricity for businesses and consumers. What's left is nuclear, the Bad Boy of the last half century, that could have brought Western Civilization to a new, greater level of freedom and economic progress but for the NIMBYS who balked at the waste storage issue. There are other nuclear technologies now that are safer than uranium/water reactors as well as capable of economic energy production without the byproducts that have weapons production potential. SMR's are now being deployed on a limited basis to power AI centers which could then lead to more widespread deployment in logistics management in a host of less controversial endeavors. I won't hold my breath waiting for news about fusion... I'll be long dead & my atoms recycled by Nature before humans see any meaningful contribution from fusion power... other than what we get now from Sol.
Another thought, Roger! We desperately need a list of research topics that the US should be funding! You could put that together. Tap your sources, including subscribers to this. Some of the research might just be about alternate ways to fill the data holes that exist we know! Other research could tackle what, if anything, we can learn from the 30 years for which we do have decent data (?). Also investigating the natural ccycles of things other that hurricanes. I loved your series on this and that would be a valuable task! None of this, and your little wouldn't speaks or speak to whether climate change is real. Let policymakers draw their own conclusions. But you could also put on the list the level of CO2 needed to sustain food production in various places. And research on the efficacy /cost of suggested policy approaches (actually that might be a metastudy as i think there is a lot out there. Just a thought. Your fan, Pamela.
You could try to identify natural gas resources, the economic reserves thereof, using price tiers all the way to $30 per million BTU, and what the overall market would be like in say 25, 50, and 75 years. When you all see the answer you will go in shock.
"Refining the Inflation Reduction Act" -- I have to disagree on that one. Abolish the IRA. Its destructive, market-damaging pork to buy votes and favor supportive corporations.
The IRA is probably one of the more robust policies from the Biden Administration. That is because it hands out a lot of money to red and blue districts. So the only realistic option is to improve it -- while recognizing that some want to do IRA2, IRA3 and some want to cancel it.
Yes, simply redirect it to useful energy like nuclear in the same states, accompanied by education of what baseload nuclear does for your economy vs intermittent renewables.
It also imo plays a crucial role in “friendshoring” manufacturing and critical mineral sourcing in a robust response to the strategic threat from China.
I hate to hear that you think solar has a good future - I hope not - we have enough! We need studies that are not biased to evaluate the degradation to the soil and our water before they install much more utility scale solar.
If there is not enough good ROI - return on investment, all these investors, then will sell,sell again until the little guy holding the broken bag will leave it behind for the local counties to clean up - that will happen sooner than later! Think of orphaned wells only with millions of acres! Tax payers will have to clean it up again! I have seen this as clear as day since I first became involved with it! Someone once described it as single use plastics!
I don't see the IRA going away, just paired back as much as they can, and carbon capture will get a better hold, because gas loves it!!! Money for nothing... as the old song goes!
Hope hydrogen just evaporates, or sinks, or whatever it does!!!
Batteries too - gone.... poof....
Nuclear lets get on with that - everyone seems to be embracing it!
It took enough of this wind and solar crap to be installed to see it was a necessity - and of course the AI impact coming at us full throttle, cinched that!
Now let's sit back and see what happens! Popcorn anyone!
Another thing I would do in a comprehensive energy policy is create statutory responsibility somewhere in the Federal government for monitoring and maintaining overall energy grid reliability nationally, including the ability to weigh in on regulations that would harm such reliability. As o understand it the combination of market-ized state energy policies that look only at price and the transfer of energy across states and regionally means there’s no effective oversight on that crucial question
Roger: My first response would be to demand that all spending on infrastructure to reduce CO2 emissions be cancelled if it doesn't result in projected CO2 emissions reductions at a cost below $X per tonC. The absolutely worst part of German energy policy is that the German people have ruined their economic competitiveness by investing in renewable generation technologies that cost too much and far more than the "social cost of carbon". This might even get bipartisan support.
Given our massive deficit, it should be clear that the best way to reduce emissions is through a carbon tax that generates desperately needed revenue rather than through subsidies that increase our deficit. No one wants to face this reality, even those who favor raising taxes on foreign goods (aka tariffs)
Roger: This is off-topic, but do you intend to write about the claim by Young and Hsiang that the average TC results in 7,000-11,000 excess deaths over the next 15 years.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07945-5
My first thought was that the changeover to daylight savings time results in excess deaths every year too.
I Tweeted on it
Instead, I might just do a post on the abuse of econometrics ;-)
"Ensuring long-term support for and independence of the U.S. Energy Information Agency to continue providing the world’s best energy data, so that U.S. energy policy can be evaluated and, as needed, course corrected in real time."
Does EIA use data collected by the states? Some of that data is less than perfect for reasons mostly tied to "that's the way we've always done it" and little incentive to simply provide monthly Oil, Gas & Water rates by wellbore.
Some, like Alaska, do a great job by providing an MSaccess download with all wells over all time. Every other state is worse. Some are a lot worse by not even collecting (= asking for) certain phases or by individual wellbore.
Any advice how to make this better?
Roger, your table showing US oil exports of 9108 thousand barrels/day (kb/d) in section 2 "(The US in the world’s energy superpower") is somewhat misleading. Certainly the US exports more oil than anyone else, but it also imports nearly the same amount, so that its net exports (exports minus imports) would place it way down on your table. For example in 2022, the latest year for which EIA data seems to be easily available, the US exported 9580 kb/d while it imported 8320 kb/d, for a net export of 1260 kb/d. For comparison Mexico, near the bottom of your table, is shown as exporting 1271 kb/d in 2023.
Yes, agreed that there are some complexities.
Most imports come from Canada and the trade balance have to do with domestic refining capabilities
EIA has a nice article on all this:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php
The US shouldn't commit to expanding natural gas exports because resources are limited and natural gas is a critical complement to wind and solar power. As you know, solar and wind suffer from intermittency and can't follow the grid load. Inability to follow the load can bring the grid down, therefore natural gas turbines, hydropower and batteries are used to stabilize it. However, hydropower is limited in many regions, and batteries are very expensive. This means that, as technology stands right now, we should be very careful and avoid exporting additional natural gas.
An additional problem I see is that a foreign policy designed to have hostile relations with Russia is a losing policy. The best option for the US is to turn around the neocon foreign policy designed to dismember Russia or make it submit to US imperial power, and eventually break apart the China-Russia-Iran axis, making Russia an ally. Taking markets from Russia just doesn't make sense when eventually we will be running out of natural gas export capacity, and when Russia is the only nation able to help us contain China.
I realize this long term complex Great Game isn't something most Americans think about, but it's time you be introduced to alternatives to the eternal wars strategy. Remember we have a huge national debt, the US military has been weakened by the Biden regime, and we haven't got anything positive to show from the dumb military adventurism we have suffered from since Clinton led our forces to defeat in Somalia in 1993.
Fernando: Our foreign policy isn't "designed to have hostile relations with Russia". Our foreign policy since WWII has been governed by a rules-based international order where stronger nations don't invade and annex their neighbors. Since WWI, we have supported self-determination of peoples. None of this is a "neo-con" policy. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, Mr. Putin has publicly written that his destiny is to restore Russian greatness after losing the Cold War and to bring all Russian speaking peoples under the protection are restored Russian Empire. His policy is essentially the same as that of Hitler, whose objective was to restore German greatness after losing WWI and to bring all German-speaking peoples under the protection of a Third Reich (the successor of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire united under Bismarck). Putin's ambitions, not those of US Neo-cons, have brought Russian into conflict with the US and the EU in NATO. In February 2022, Biden did NOTHING to stop Russia from invading and overrunning Ukraine (which EVERYONE expected within weeks). Putin's military incompetence provided the opportunity to properly arm the Ukrainians and support their self-determination and a rules-based international order. And no, SoS Baker didn't officially promise Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't expand eastward if Gorbachev recognized the wisdom of allowing Germany to re-unite under the restraints imposed by NATO. All Eastern European countries were still part of the Warsaw Pact at that time.
Fernando also spouts more propaganda: "The best option for the US is to turn around the neocon foreign policy designed to dismember Russia or make it submit to US imperial power, and eventually break apart the China-Russia-Iran axis, making Russia an ally. The best option for the US is to turn around the neocon foreign policy designed to dismember Russia or make it submit to US imperial power, and eventually break apart the China-Russia-Iran axis, making Russia an ally."
The Russian Empire was dismembered by the Civil War that followed WWI and was partly patched back together in 1922 as a voluntary "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", from which any Republic could leave at any time (Article 26 of founding treaty). The USSR voluntarily dismembered itself in December 1991, though the Baltic Republics and Georgia had left in 1990.
The Western response to the increasing aggressiveness of China and Russia has brought these two countries closer together. The US and EU imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the seizure of Crimea and on China after violations of the "one country-two systems" agreement under which the UK handed over Hong Kong to China. An "unlimited friendship" was proclaimed by Putin and Xi on February 4, 2022, 18 days before Russia invaded Ukraine. Since Biden had already publicly declared no US troops would be sent to help Ukraine and since everyone expected Ukrainian resistance to collapse within weeks, this friendship was intended to counter the sanctions on Russian fossil fuels that would inevitably follow.
The "rules based order" went down the toilet when Clinton sent the US rangers to be defeated in Somalia in 1993. Things got even worse when he lied to justify bombing and invading Yugoslavia in 1999. They appeared to have struck bottom when Bush lied to justify invading and attempting to occupy Iraq in 2003. But Obama piled it on in Libya and Syria, and it got even worse now that Israel is ethnically cleansing the Palestinians with full US support.
Your lengthy post is pure neocon ideology distilled into one long paragraph. Unfortunately for you, what you neocons have never figured out is how to win a war.
Finally, Fernando you insultingly claimed that my post was "pure neocon ideology", when everything I write is substantiated by FACTS that you and your ideology choose to ignore. I won't deny that some of the neocons became excessively ambitious, unrealistic, and unprincipled in the decade after we won the Cold War, but that is no reason to abandon the rules-based international order that has made the last 70 years more peaceful than the centuries that preceded it.
According to the US State Department, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was legally launched in response to Saddam's violations of the inspections and disarmament provisions of the cease fire that temporarily ended the fighting after the 1991 Gulf War that approved by the UN. Those violations were the subject of about a dozen UN resolutions over the next decade including crippling sanctions. However, people only remember that Bush, with post 9/11 hubris, idiotically declared Iraq had WMD and that he could go to war for that reason. AEI recently held three part review of our decision to invade Iraq on its twentieth anniversary with both supporters and critics. The truth was that Bush was told that US intelligence didn't know whether Saddam had destroyed (without needed and required international supervision) all of his WMDs after the first Gulf War and whether he had restarted those programs after the UN weapons inspectors had been expelled. The AEI program reminded me what everyone has forgotten (given the mess the incompetent Bush administration made after the invasion) is just how dangerous and evil Saddam was (including to his own people). He made large quantities of chemical and biological weapons and ROUTINELY used them on his own people and on the Iranians in a horrendous 8-year war that killed 0.5 million. With the fourth largest military in the world, he took on an alliance that included almost the entire world, including troops from Egypt and Syria, lost and still didn't lose his grip on power. His scientists were scheduled to produce a dirty atomic bomb in 1992 and likely would have much earlier if the Israelis hadn't taken out the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. The real truth about WMD wasn't that Saddam had them in 2003: He had AND USED them in the past and everyone agreed he would do so once sanctions and inspectors were gone in the future. International support for sanctions began evaporating after 2000, so Bush was faced with need to act now or face a fully re-armed Iraq with WMDs in another decade. After he was captured, Saddam explained that the Middle East was a dangerous place and that he WANTED his neighbors to believe he still had WMD. IMO, Bush's crime wasn't going to war; it was the incompetent way he justified it and carried it out.
Frank, either you believe in that "rules based order" baloney or you don't.
International law requires a UN Security Council resolution to carry out an invasion, regime change and occupation of a UN member nation. The US lacked this sanction (the WMD claim was evident baloney, given that UN inspection teams had failed to find any signs of either chemical or nuclear weapon manufacturing or stocks in Iraq. This is why Bush The Idiot made up the CoW (Coalition of the willing) to invade Iraq. Given the lack of sanction and the failure to find the WMD we can say Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Powell are war criminals.
Most of what you write above is false. And it helps prove that the "rules based order" is a BS term coined by the American imperialist propaganda shop. It looks like baby puree cooked up in a neocon shop for youngsters who were in kindergarten in 2003.
Given that we have deviated so much from my original comment, I want to repeat my original thesis: design of hostile moves against Russia is a serious blunder, because it forces Russia to align with China. And right now China is a much bigger threat. This is evident to anyone with a normal forehead who hasn't been brainwashed by the imperial media. Unfortunately most Americans treat foreign policy as a partime topic they think about after they watch the Game of the Week, so unfortunately Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, and I remain in a minority as the rest of you foam at the mouth and growl at the enemy du jour.
When NATO first expanded, I was concerned that Russia would see the eastern expansion of NATO as a threat, creating problems in the future. However, I have since learned that Russians are inherently expansionist, somewhat like we saw American expansion to the Pacific as our national destiny in the less-enlightened nineteenth century. Even as the USSR was falling apart, Russia was gaining control over 20% of Georgian territories in South Abkhazia and South Ossetia and more in the 2008 war that Russian lured Georgia into. Russia fought two brutal wars to regain control of Chechnya. All of these were autonomous area when part of the USSR with a negligible number of ethnic Russian. There are serious questions about how these Causasian peoples should be organized and governed, but they are not Russian.
We didn't adopt a foreign policy designed to be hostile to Russia; Russia's Eastern European neighbors knew the expansionist Russian bear would return someday, which it is in the form of a Putin intent on restoring Russian greatness and recreating the empire of Peter and Katherine the Greats. Most of the Eastern European nations were desperate for the protection of NATO and the anti-corruption campaign needed to join EU. Hatred of corruption drove the Ukrainians into the Euromaidan the same day Yanukovych reneged at the last minute signing a trade deal with the EU promising help in dealing with corruption. Only idiots think the CIA can prompt a half million demonstrators to come to the EuroMaidan and occupy it for three months in winter - twice.
NATO and the EU didn't expand eastward to create trouble with Russia, it did so because the people in those counties wanted to pay the price demanded from them for membership. Bush II not overly and insanely aggressive about creating a pathway to membership in 2008 without the backing of other important members. No plan was ever offered and the effort was abandoned after the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.
The air campaigns against the Serbs attacking UN-declared safe zones in Bosnia and Kosovo were not approved by the UN Security Council, but an infantry brigade of non-US NATO forces was approved by UN Security Council Resolution 998. The fighting began after Yugoslavia (a creation of the Versailles Treaty) voted to dissolve itself into it original constituent parts and the Serbs began taking territory from its neighbors. The Bosnia capitol Sarajevo was under bombardment and siege for almost 4 years, despite having been declared a safe zone by the UN. Genocide and ethnic cleansing were widespread. 8,000 Bosnians supposedly under the protections of UN troops were massacred in the Srebrenica genocide. Genocide was also taking place in Kosovo. Numerous UN resolutions and safe areas failed to stop the fighting, but 20 days of NATO air attacks ended the fighting in Bosnia and three months of bombing caused the retreat of the Serbs from Kosovo. UN resolution 1244 agreed to by Serbia made Kosovo and autonomous area protected by UN forces, but Serbia did not recognize Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008, meaning it should not be recognized under international law (but the US and half the countries in the world now recognize Kosovo). Both want to join NATO, but (IIRC) will need to resolve their differences before they can do so. Genocidal wars led by Serbs persisted in the former Yugoslavia for most of a decade, but the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY was unable to deal with them fully within the "rules-based order" because the Russians supported aggression by their fellow Slavs.
Frank, don't mix up Bosnia and Kosovo. Go back and study history before you write here, because what comes out once you mix the two isn't legible. I warn you that I volunteered to help a team accusing Clinton and Blair as war criminals for the Kosovo mess. The document was turned in but the court said IT lacked jurisdiction to put a US president on trial. So all we proved was that those international courts aren't that much into justice (this may explain why Israel gets away with industrial scale crimes against humanity and nothing gets done to stop it).
Fernando: The fact that you were part of a team that accused Clinton and Blair of war crimes is PROOF that you too believe in a rules-based international order that they violated (as I admitted). It is far better to have world committed to a rule-based order and leaders who will be briefed on how poorly things have worked out when desperate times have led other presidents to bend the rules and minimize, if not totally avoid violations of those rules. A 20-day bombing campaign in 1995 wasn't an outrageous price to pay for ending the four-year siege of Sarajevo, but that led to 3 months of bombing over Kosovo and a quarter-century of disagreement with peace-keepers over the status of Kosovo.
To the best of my knowledge, Arab terrorism has always provided a legal justification for Israel's military actions. By stationing troops and equipment and building their tunnels in civilian areas, Hamas is legally responsible for the deaths of many Gaza's. Sinwar publicly admitted that more civilian deaths were in Hama's best interest. IMO, the occupation of more and more of the West Bank by the Israeli settler movement violates the rules-based international order, as technically the Arab surrender of Palestinian land to Israel after the 1947-8 war.
As for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that was legally justified as a response to a decade of violations of the ceasefire (supported and documented by a dozen UN Security Council resolutions) that temporarily end the First Gulf War
More [pro-Putin?} propaganda from Fernando. EVERYTHING that happened in Somalia was under the "rules bases international order". Along with other nations, the US sent troops to Somalia in 1992 (under Bush, not Clinton} in response to a unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 794, passed after 300,000 Somalis had died of starvation and another 1.5 million were at risk of starving. The operation was intended to provide security for those bringing food and medicine to the Somalis. In 1993, the UN Secretary General had gotten these forces in the political struggle to pacify the country and the Security Council passed Resolution 837 calling for the arrest of leaders responsible for attacking peacekeepers. This resulted in the Battle of Mogadishu. President Clinton then ordered US forces not to get involved in offensive UN operations to arrest leaders of factions. In Feb 1994, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 897 to withdraw forces from Somalia and the civil war there continues to this day and providing a haven for Al Qaeda.
The Rangers were sent to Somalia by Clinton in 1993, after the initial US deployment under Bush had failed. The Ranger's mission, to force the Habr Gidr to surrender and agree to a coalition government, wasn't approved by the UN Security Council. The Rangers proceeded to massacre the majority of Habr Gidr elders as they were discussing the terms they would demand. This hardened the Habr Gidr position, and led to the subsequent US raid and defeat.
The events are described in detail in the book "Black Hawk Down".
As you can see, you have been fed a re-worked and false version of history. By the way, one reason I followed this mess in detail is my earlier assignment to the Chalbi desert near the Somali border in the late 80's.
This is a very well done article on my views on climate
“Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. says humanity needs to consider the risks of climate change, but this cannot be done through scaring people into believing an imminent apocalypse.”
https://www.freedom-research.org/p/dr-roger-pielke-jr-on-climate-alarmists
Truly excellent, Roger. Thoughtful, level-headed, data-driven, well-reasoned, calm and well-supported by both facts and logic. Should be required reading for everyone who will have any influence on energy policy.
“ “Not” is Not an Energy Policy”.
Agreed, but as to the comment of “rule by executive order” it wouldn’t hurt to undo the worst of Biden’s on day 1 with a bunch of NOTs? Then move to legislation?
“ The world would benefit from a massive increase in energy research and innovation as opposed to simply massive subsidies for existing technologies that are not up to the task.”
This is why I advocate soon incoming canadian PM Poilievre doesn’t scrap the carbon tax but instead reduce it to $10/ton with no carve outs except for the poor and direct all that to energy research with initial focus on nuclear.
Not that he listens to me.
I'll throw out a moon-shot idea from George Friedman of Stratfor. He has been predicting that space based solar power will come online sometime in the middle of this century. It might be worth trying to make that happen sooner with targeted research funding.
I recall a back of the envelope calculation that showed that enough solar energy hits the upper atmosphere in just a few hours to power the whole globe. It's stunning how much energy the sun provides. It will be challenging to figure out how to harness it and get it to the right points on the surface.
I don't want to make fun of you but it sure will take a lot of copper wire to transfer power from Earth orbit.
I have a few thoughts on a better energy path forward.
Don’t try to go to zero emissions in general. Low emissions from natural gas is good enough. In the electric sector, build out nuclear energy and accept natural gas for peaking. Natural gas is too valuable to use for base load electricity and should be reserved for transportation and buildings.
Trying to build an electric system that uses wind, solar, and energy storage will do more harm than good. The costs to provide reliable energy will be extremely high, relying on weather-dependent resources introduces an intractable reliability risk that will eventually cause a crisis, and the cumulative environmental impacts of all the wind turbines, solar panels, and energy storage options will be unacceptable.
No jurisdiction has ever successfully converted to relying on wind and solar with no fossil backup. Before committing to that approach a demonstration project is necessary.
I follow New York’s attempt to go net-zero using renewable energy at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. The organizations responsible for the electric system all agree that a new category of generating resources called Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFR) is necessary to keep the lights on during periods of extended low wind and solar resource availability. Given that DEFR is needed for a wind and solar reliant electric system and that nuclear is likely the only feasible option it makes sense to skip the wind and solar buildout completely and go nuclear for base load and load following generation. The French experience and results indicate that this is a viable option.
It never made any sense to me why the focus was and is on solar and wind if the goal is to reduce emissions. Their non-dispatchable nature is a crippling limitation for running a modern power grid. Fortunately, more and more people seem to be waking up to this fact, given the mini-renaissance that's starting to happen around nuclear power.
While we are at it, could someone define "net zero"?
It would be good to get an update from the guest author you had a few months ago who explained the lead times necessary for new permitting, exploration, and extraction. I believe he said that the Biden admin had effectively stopped all new permitting which would mean that it will take several years before any new energy sources come online.
It would also take several years to build the natural gas liquefaction plants. I don't keep with the industry details, but based on my experience it would take at least five years to get a significant amount of additional export capacity built. We have to factor in geopolitical issues, the fact that resources are limited, and the Europeans rather funny plan to actually stop emissions by year X (I think they say 2050?).
A. In the interest of “We the People …” and preservation of the Republic, representative government, checks and balances and all that good stuff, can we stop the use of ‘Czar’, appointing little Caesars and special purpose ‘Kaisers’? Appears to be decidedly unconstitutional. Can’t find a job description at USAJobs.gov that has czar, caesar, kaiser, or king in its title.
B. Don’t we already have an entire federal agency focused on energy and a cabinet-level position called Secretary? Perhaps the policy discussion should flow through here to Congress. Perhaps the key job skill for the position needs to be delegation and collaboration, not political posturing and ideological subservience.
C. I like these ideas, Roger, especially when coupled with responsible cost-benefit analysis of climate adaptation and mitigation policies that incorporate or rely upon rigorous material flow and waste/pollutant life-cycle analysis. “Green Power” isn’t as clean as it pretends to be and a nationwide charging network energized by fossil fuels for vehicles that most Americans can’t afford, even with tax incentives and rebates, is imbecilic.
Yes
Wind and solar are losers. Too much raw material stock invested for too little reliable, consistent delivery of energy to the consumers to be worth the price. Natural gas is a plentiful resource but, along with crude oil, has uses beyond production of electricity for businesses and consumers. What's left is nuclear, the Bad Boy of the last half century, that could have brought Western Civilization to a new, greater level of freedom and economic progress but for the NIMBYS who balked at the waste storage issue. There are other nuclear technologies now that are safer than uranium/water reactors as well as capable of economic energy production without the byproducts that have weapons production potential. SMR's are now being deployed on a limited basis to power AI centers which could then lead to more widespread deployment in logistics management in a host of less controversial endeavors. I won't hold my breath waiting for news about fusion... I'll be long dead & my atoms recycled by Nature before humans see any meaningful contribution from fusion power... other than what we get now from Sol.
Another thought, Roger! We desperately need a list of research topics that the US should be funding! You could put that together. Tap your sources, including subscribers to this. Some of the research might just be about alternate ways to fill the data holes that exist we know! Other research could tackle what, if anything, we can learn from the 30 years for which we do have decent data (?). Also investigating the natural ccycles of things other that hurricanes. I loved your series on this and that would be a valuable task! None of this, and your little wouldn't speaks or speak to whether climate change is real. Let policymakers draw their own conclusions. But you could also put on the list the level of CO2 needed to sustain food production in various places. And research on the efficacy /cost of suggested policy approaches (actually that might be a metastudy as i think there is a lot out there. Just a thought. Your fan, Pamela.
You could try to identify natural gas resources, the economic reserves thereof, using price tiers all the way to $30 per million BTU, and what the overall market would be like in say 25, 50, and 75 years. When you all see the answer you will go in shock.
"Refining the Inflation Reduction Act" -- I have to disagree on that one. Abolish the IRA. Its destructive, market-damaging pork to buy votes and favor supportive corporations.
The IRA is probably one of the more robust policies from the Biden Administration. That is because it hands out a lot of money to red and blue districts. So the only realistic option is to improve it -- while recognizing that some want to do IRA2, IRA3 and some want to cancel it.
Yes, simply redirect it to useful energy like nuclear in the same states, accompanied by education of what baseload nuclear does for your economy vs intermittent renewables.
And proceed
It also imo plays a crucial role in “friendshoring” manufacturing and critical mineral sourcing in a robust response to the strategic threat from China.
I hate to hear that you think solar has a good future - I hope not - we have enough! We need studies that are not biased to evaluate the degradation to the soil and our water before they install much more utility scale solar.
If there is not enough good ROI - return on investment, all these investors, then will sell,sell again until the little guy holding the broken bag will leave it behind for the local counties to clean up - that will happen sooner than later! Think of orphaned wells only with millions of acres! Tax payers will have to clean it up again! I have seen this as clear as day since I first became involved with it! Someone once described it as single use plastics!
I don't see the IRA going away, just paired back as much as they can, and carbon capture will get a better hold, because gas loves it!!! Money for nothing... as the old song goes!
Hope hydrogen just evaporates, or sinks, or whatever it does!!!
Batteries too - gone.... poof....
Nuclear lets get on with that - everyone seems to be embracing it!
It took enough of this wind and solar crap to be installed to see it was a necessity - and of course the AI impact coming at us full throttle, cinched that!
Now let's sit back and see what happens! Popcorn anyone!
Another thing I would do in a comprehensive energy policy is create statutory responsibility somewhere in the Federal government for monitoring and maintaining overall energy grid reliability nationally, including the ability to weigh in on regulations that would harm such reliability. As o understand it the combination of market-ized state energy policies that look only at price and the transfer of energy across states and regionally means there’s no effective oversight on that crucial question