CCN Demand Higher Energy Prices (But Don’t Tell The Proles!)
By Paul Homewood
Let’s see what the fraudsters at CCN have been up to this week:
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, Bill McKibben and Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. urged President Joe Biden’s administration to block “a massive fossil fuel buildout” being proposed in Louisiana. The argument they make is worth journalists’ attention, for it highlights a central challenge often overlooked in climate coverage.
It’s indisputably good news that solar, wind, batteries, and other climate-friendly energy sources have been plummeting in cost and gaining market share, because this can reduce demand for fossil fuels. But reducing the supply of fossil fuels is the true measure of successful climate policy, because global temperatures will keep rising until the world stops burning those fossil fuels.
The fossil fuel industry has no intention of letting that happen. ExxonMobil just announced a $60 billion purchase of a rival oil and gas producer, signaling that Exxon plans to sell vast amounts of fossil fuel for decades. The United Arab Emirates is expanding its production capacity by 7.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent, even as Sultan Al Jaber, who heads UAE’s state-owned oil company while also presiding over next month’s COP28 summit, insists that he favors a net-zero future.
The contradiction at the heart of the climate fight, as Paris Agreement architect Christiana Figueres told the recent “Climate Changes Everything” conference, is that climate-friendly technologies are accelerating even as fossil fuel industry intransigence keeps greenhouse gas emissions climbing. This is the contradiction that our reporting needs to spotlight and explain to audiences.
In Louisiana, oil and gas companies want to construct an array of pipelines and terminals to export liquid natural gas. The climate implications are enormous, partly because LNG is as carbon intensive as coal. The proposed CP2 terminal alone would “be responsible for 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions annually than the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska” that Biden approved earlier this year, McKibben and Yearwood write, according to analysis by the US Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department cited by the Sierra Club.
Journalists do not have to be in Louisiana to report this story. As Damian Carrington and Matthew Taylor revealed last year in their “carbon bombs” expose for the Guardian, scores of similar climate-busting projects are being proposed or developed all over the world.
Incredibly, governments and public lending agencies are spending trillions of dollars to subsidize such climate-wrecking fossil fuel production. In 2022, they paid out $7 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies, the International Monetary Fund calculated. “That’s a definition of insanity,” John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate change, said two years ago in the lead-up to COP26.
As journalists prepare to cover the COP28 summit starting November 30 and elections in the US and elsewhere next year, it’s essential we understand — and help our audiences understand — that fossil fuels have to go, soon, if a livable planet is to be preserved. Questions to explore in your reporting include: How much is your country’s government spending to subsidize fossil fuels? And what is your country doing — or failing to do — to stop burning the fossil fuels that are dangerously overheating the planet?
https://mailchi.mp/coveringclimatenow/subsidizing-ourselves-to-death?e=26b08cfb8d
Instead of questioning why fossil fuels appear to be irreplaceable, the con-merchants at CCN naturally blame it all on fossil fuel subsidies:
$7 trillion ? WOW! – If governments are sending trillions of our money every year, no wonder we keep producing fossil fuels.
Except that John Kerry is not telling you the truth.
Their link to the supposed subsidies offers this insight:
In other words, us poor old taxpayers are not actually paying a penny to all of those wicked Big Oil companies.
On the contrary, they are actually selling us all oil, gas and coal extremely cheaply, much cheaper than the eco-nutters demand.
In fact what the far left extremists at CCN really want is for us all to pay much more for our energy in the name of global warming.
Apparently that’s progress!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“because global temperatures will keep rising until the world stops burning those fossil fuels”.
Should be saved until the climate starts cooling and rub their faces in it.
Assumption based on their fallacy.
We need, in not such a dictatorial way (she liked Mussolini) , the spirit of Lady Houston who, in the 1930s tried hard to get the government to see the dangers of Hitler et al and the lack of preparation for an inevitable war. She helped fund the development of the Spitfire and is most notorious for lighting up her private yacht with the sign: WAKE UP ENGLAND!
Never was such a spirit needed in this country.
It’s not progress, it’s control.
My thoughts exactly, DC. Together with ‘conditioning’. We are being set up to be a failed state: one which does not have the wherewithal (energy) to defend itself.
More like regression.
‘It’s indisputably good news that solar, wind, batteries, and other climate-friendly energy sources’
Dumbass. Batteries are not an energy source. Duh!
“be responsible for 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions annually than the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska”
A new unit of measure! The ‘Willow oil drilling project.’
Christiana Figueres: “climate-friendly technologies are accelerating even as fossil fuel industry intransigence keeps greenhouse gas emissions climbing.”
Misdirection. The oil companies are producing to meet demand. Supplying your customers is NOT ‘intransigence,’ refusal to change one’s views or to agree about something. The oil companies still believe they are oil companies. CCN is the world leader in intransigence. McKibben has been on the same schtick for DECADES.
So Kerry flat out lied. $7 trillion was not “paid out” at all. And now others propagate the lie.
“But reducing the supply of fossil fuels is the true measure of successful climate policy, because global temperatures will keep rising until the world stops burning those fossil fuels.”
The above is the political (read Marxist) anchor statement requiring Transformation from a Global Emergency to a successful Climate Policy.
It would be wise to first understand the enemy before we make any attempt to fix the problem: that’s not performing this transformation, but understanding why, over fifteen years after the 2008 Climate Change Act, Western Governments are still striving to attain an unreachable goal.
Transformation has a special meaning for Marxists. It’s the means by which Reality can be modified to agree with Man’s understanding of Reality. Yes, it’s not what Richard Feynman proposed: that if experimental results showed that the Theory disagreed with Reality, then the Theory is wrong, and you’ll have to change the Theory, not Reality. 🙂
Here’s James Lindsay PhD, explaining why Marxism has appeared to be unstoppable as well as destructive: (it’s because we don’t understand its underlying assumptions). In the video he shows that Marxism can be considered a Religion (so would be unable to be supported by the US Government). It is 103 minutes long, and intense (but enlightening, and worth it). However, the following excerpts, (50:10 – 59:00 and 1:02:10 – 1:09:02), give some context to Transformation according to Marxists and why they ‘put their theory first’:
The Dialectical Faith of Leftism
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/04/the-dialectical-faith-of-leftism
The UK Government is therefore taking the Climate Theory as True, and that reducing the fossil fuel supply will solve the Climate Emergency problem, and is forcing Reality to fix it!
Note that the Theory hasn’t changed for over 15 years, and that the objective is unfeasible. In fact, the stated objective is not the objective.
But, in the meantime, the West’s industrial base collapses.
Hopefully, you will know why. 🙂
But the world, more or less, significantly reduced anthropomorphic CO2 emissions with the Covid lockdown and it made not a blip on the Mauna loa CO2 measurement site. CO2 level continue to rise steadily.
Man’s annual CO2 contribution is generally accepted to be about 4% of total.
Anyone with a knowledge of levers knows that a person using a long bar can lift a heavy load quite easily. What we are trying to do is to reverse that lever and applying force at the short end and the load at the long end, i.e. a mechanical disadvantage. It can’t work.
reducing the supply of fossil fuels is the true measure of successful climate policy
To be replaced with what? Renewables can’t even keep pace with the increases in world energy demand. Choking off demand is all they’ve got.
I have often challenged the alarmists on blogs that talk about the “massive” subsidies that fossil fuel companies enjoy, asking to name these subsidies. The only things they come up with are the various tax reliefs to businesses, which apply to all businesses, which they call subsidies. Clearly a misnomer. This article states that subsidies have amounted to $7 trillion in 2022 yet 60% of this amount is calculated as due to undercharging of taxes and penalties that are placed on fossil fuel production. So someone has decided that the charges should be higher and the difference is classed as a subsidy. Thats some mental gymnastics there yet it will be taken as Gospel by the believers.
A further 18% of these “subsidies” is represented by an apparent undercharges for supplies. How this can be calculated in a free market situation is beyond me. This and the rest is just somebody’s opinion on pricing. The dynamics of a free market are clearly beyond the authors of this crap.
They never mention the royalties the oil companies pay.
Nor the taxes they collect for the government.
And that’s only the tax at point of sale which is significantly more than half of the actual price at the pump. Then there are all the income taxes paid by their employees plus social security contributions paid by the employers, and of course corporation tax if they still make a profit.
>>taxes they collect for the government