Today, crude oil futures prices skyrocketed again. Do you remember a couple of years ago when they went NEGATIVE $30 bucks a barrel or more? The reason was there was so much energy that we ran out of storage.
Part of this was because of Covid and uncertainty around the shutdown. But it is important to remember that US government energy policy was focused on growing the total supply of energy not restricting it.
I turned on the business channels today. I rarely watch them. I noticed all the executives getting interviewed were fossil fuel executives and analysts. Where are the solar and wind people?
The answer is the solar and wind people weren’t on television because they don’t have answers and they don’t have a viable solution in the short, or long term. Are you awake yet?
On President Biden’s first day in office, he signed executive orders to kill the Keystone Pipeline and to ban exploration for energy on federal lands. The Biden administration thinks we can transition to “green” energy. The market is responding accordingly.
Unfortunately, Biden and his narrow thinking minions don’t support nuclear energy. It is the cleanest greenest form of energy production for an on demand information economy that we know of currently.
Markets respond. Markets price in all information that they know about. Sure, the Keystone Pipeline wouldn’t be finished for a while and won’t affect today’s energy price. Press Secretary Psaki has no idea what she is talking about. She’s just wrong. The market would price in the expected completion of Keystone and price into all stocks, futures, and OTC derivative contracts today. If you don’t believe the market doesn’t price in things in the future and discount them back to today, check out the prices of fertilizer stocks or airline stocks.
Here is the price of crude oil slightly before President Biden was elected and after his election.
That doesn’t look like a bearish chart pattern to me. Notice the big green candle in November of 2020. What might have happened then to change the perspective of the market so they’d price in new information?
Instead, Biden, his administration, the Democratic Party, and his followers want to break the backs of poor and middle class people by jacking up the price of fossil fuels and force them to green energy which is prohibitively expensive.
Not everyone can afford a Tesla. It’s also important to note that government heavily subsidizes the purchase of EVs and the development of wind/solar energy.
Once everyone has bought an EV, what’s going to stop the government from jacking up electricity prices? That will happen for sure if the focus is solar and wind power which absolutely does not work at scale.
Today I woke up losing more than 2% of my net worth. It seems every day I lose half a percent to 2%. To compound the loss, inflation is raging. If you are retired on a fixed income, this continued day after day pounding is costly.
This is not a bullish chart pattern.
The war Russia is engaging in that Biden instigated in November of 2021 with his statements around Ukraine joining NATO along with his January speech giving Putin the wink to invade a small part of Ukraine isn’t helping.
It is easy to point out the issues or problems, what is the fix?
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin offered an answer in her acceptance speech for Vice President at the Republican Convention in 2008. She’s more capable than Kamela by the way.
The answer to our problem is to increase the entire supply of energy. Microeconomics 101 will show you that if you increase the supply of something and hold demand constant, the price will go down. This isn’t rocket science.
It is a basic fact that our country currently runs on fossil fuels. So, short-term, drill baby drill! Massively increase the supply line when it comes to fossil fuels. This is a simple fix and will pay dividends this year.
A longer-term fix is to build thousands of nuclear plants across the United States. That will decrease the cost of electricity, and increase the supply as well. You will see the market dictate a transition to electric vehicles instead of a government forcing you into a corner.
Russia, the perpetrator of this unjust war, lives and dies off energy prices. High crude oil prices give their economy’s gears the grease to turn. Low oil prices crush them. Biden’s energy policy helps Putin fight his war combined with breaking the backs of Americans.
I am not willing to pay a higher cost for fuel to “benefit” the Ukranians when I know full well a solution to that higher price is readily in hand.
There is still space in the energy supply curve for solar and wind. Where?
These kinds of energy sources are great for decentralized uses. They need battery storage and other infrastructure to work well. Hence, put a solar-powered roof on your house and charge your UV. You can manage it and charge at night when you don’t need it. Solar-powered EV charging stations in places like a shopping mall parking lot are an idea that doesn’t recognize reality. It’s pure ignorance and dumb. However, an electrical grid backed by nuclear power for EV charging stations in places like that is a great idea. Why? Because if you are charging in a space like that, you need a quick on-demand charge.
Decentralized uses allow people to innovate around the power source. They can tailor it to their individual needs. That will increase adoption, and increase the total supply of energy for everyone.
The backbone of the American energy industry ought to be nuclear, sooner rather than later. If the current price of crude and the unpredictability of foreign events haven’t opened your eyes to that fact, then you are for ruining people’s finances to make them more government-dependent, or you are just dumb. There is no in-between.
From an email I received (and it's true). I blogged about it earlier here https://jeffreycarter.substack.com/p/the-ukraine-isnt-about-the-ukraine?s=w
"The war Russia is engaging in that Biden instigated in November of 2021 with his statements around Ukraine joining NATO along with his January speech giving Putin the wink to invade a small part of Ukraine isn’t helping."
The war was instigated to change the subject and give the Ds an issue, and a reason to crack down on their opponents as "traitors" going into the 2022 elections.
It is similar to the Covid lockdowns, and the failure to develop therapeutics from off-patent medicines or isolate at-risk populations, all intended to trash the economy before the 2020 elections.
They will do anything, destroy the economy, risk nuclear war, anything, to gain and hold power.
Quick question -- what happens in states that regulate electric prices? If you buy an ev so you don't have to worry about gas prices, as Buttigieg recommends, will electricity prices go up for everyone when demand increases because of people with evs? And if states with regulatory commissions don't build additional capacity maybe we get blackouts?