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The country music sounds blasts from the past good to be here again I'm looking at a radio programming book from 1968 and here in York, PA WNOW at 1250 AM and 105.7 FM was the place for country music back then. I would start listening in during the fall of 1970 to begin my country music journey..... Today out of Dallas we get Glenn Beck with predictable negative comments about Russia. Russia and Texas have something in common. They produce oil and natural gas. Energy. Last December President Trump signed legislation to sanction companies helping to build the Nord...

June 9, 2020: Despite the financial crises, continuing anti-government protests and growing criticism from government and military leaders, the senior clerics who run Iran believe that there is a good chance the American presidential elections in November will put a more pro-Iran and anti-Israel government in power. While this is a possibility, many Iranians don’t believe the clerics can hang onto power until the end of the year. Poverty is growing in Iran and the government continues to spend lots of money on military operations in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Syria is the costliest foreign adventure. So far this...

LONDON (Reuters) - BP will cut about 15% of its workforce in response to the coronavirus crisis and as part of Chief Executive Bernard Looney’s plan to shift the oil and gas major to renewable energy, it said on Monday. Looney told employees in a global online call that the London-based company will cut 10,000 jobs from the current 70,100. “We will now begin a process that will see close to 10,000 people leaving BP – most by the end of this year,” Looney said in a statement. [snip] ENERGY TRANSITION The job reductions are also part of Looney’s drive...

From my quarantine hidey-hole in Girdwood, Alaska, it was the oddest of Zoom calls. The oil industry and the fishing industry are not always chummy, but here we were on the same video link. Crews in close quarters – be they fishing boats or oil tankers or drilling platforms offshore – needed appropriate safety measures in this pandemic. Onshore, in remote coastal communities, fish processing plants and oil production facilities both bring in itinerant workers, so both industries sought to avoid enabling contagious “vectors” of coronavirus for others. The call looked like Hollywood Squares, but no one was cracking jokes....

Egypt has announced an anti-Turkey alliance that includes Greece, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France to confront Turkish moves in Libya and the Mediterranean. The announcement was made during a virtual meeting with the foreign ministers of these countries on May 11. In a joint statement issued shortly after the meeting, the five-party alliance said it will focus on confronting the Turkish moves in the territorial waters in Cyprus, where Turkey has been carrying out “illegal” excavations in the Mediterranean under Cyprus sovereignty. The alliance also condemned Turkey’s escalated violations of Greek airspace.  The European Union condemned May 16...

The coronavirus won't destroy America's energy industry. But Democrats might. Progressive lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders have long called for a nationwide ban on fracking. But even Joe Biden, the "moderate" Democratic apparent nominee, recently seemed to embrace this radical idea. The oil and gas industry has already taken a big blow to the gut. Because of reduced demand caused by lockdown orders nationwide and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, the unthinkable happened in April when an oil futures contract sank into negative territory. In my home state of Colorado, hundreds of wells have been abandoned and...

The sustained plunge in global oil prices has brought deep, unexpected shifts on the geopolitical landscape, with impacts felt in the Arctic and the Middle East, and in the fortunes of the American heartland and the future of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance. A U.S.-engineered market truce has helped energy prices rebound slightly this month after flatlining in April, but analysts say reverberations will likely be felt for years to come as they chip away at the foundational international partnerships in the post-World War II era and create new alliances and rivalries. Analysts say there is no way the U.S. and...

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the 2018 election by a landslide. His approach to government spending — even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout — might best be compared to that of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Recognizing that industrial wind and solar electricity bring little to no value to electrical grids, Mexico is moving to avoid the higher electrical prices experienced by Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, South Australia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other governments that have heavily subsidized their supply of intermittent electricity. The only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’...

If completed, the pipeline, which has spent the past decade in political and legal limbo, would help carry some 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada to refineries in Texas. Although Biden’s climate plan was more ambitious than anything proposed by Obama, it attracted criticism from liberals who faulted Biden for not pledging to ban fracking and for attending a fundraiser co-hosted by a co-founder of a natural gas company. Beyond that, Biden’s environmental critics worry he will not try to rein in greenhouse gas emissions as aggressively as climate scientists say is necessary. In 2018, a panel...

In Farmington, N.M., the economy was already struggling. Now everyone knows someone who is out of work because of the coronavirus. Very few say they know anyone who got sick.

According to a Space Force press release, which went out on May 6, another payload aboard the X-37B will be an experimental system designed by the Naval Research Laboratory that is capable of capturing solar power and beaming that energy back to Earth in the form of microwaves. Naval Research Laboratory’s head of beamed power has explicitly stated in the past that this system has enormous implications when it comes to long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In addition, it could allow satellites to provide reliable power anywhere on the planet or even to spacecraft or other satellites in orbit. In...

The U.S. military is removing Patriot antimissile systems from Saudi Arabia as part of a shift of forces and equipment in the region following a buildup last year in response to Iranian threats, a U.S. official confirmed on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal first reported that Washington is moving four Patriot missile batteries from the region. The U.S. official confirmed to The Hill that two Patriot systems will come from Saudi Arabia — along with the roughly 300 military personnel deployed to man them. The two systems had been sent to the country last year after a Sept. 14 strike...

Source article is from Carlsbad Current-Argus newspaper, a USA Today paper so title and link only authorized on Free Republic.Permian Basin natural gas pipeline could be blocked by lawsuit filed by Sierra Club

Hundreds of millions of dollars in cash has been shipped from Russia to Venezuela, providing a lifeline to the South American country as U.S. sanctions limit its access to the global financial system. A total of $315 million of U.S. dollar and euro notes were sent in six separate shipments from Moscow to Caracas from May 2018 to April 2019, according to data reviewed by Bloomberg from ImportGenius, which compiled Russian customs records it obtains through private sources. ...As a consequence of the scrutiny, the central bank is conducting more transactions in cash, sometimes offering local clients access to euro...

Global energy demand could slump by 6% in 2020 due to the restrictions placed on homes and industry in what would be the largest contraction in absolute terms on record, according to Paris-based IEA, which advises industrialised nations on energy. The slump would lead to a drop in carbon dioxide emissions of 8%, six times larger than the biggest fall of 400 million tonnes recorded in 2009 following the global financial crisis, according to the IEA, which described its estimate as conservative. ... Carbon intensive coal demand has so far been hit the hardest by the pandemic, with demand in...

WASHINGTON/LONDON/DUBAI - As the United States pressed Saudi Arabia to end its oil price war with Russia, President Donald Trump gave Saudi leaders an ultimatum. In an April 2 phone call, Trump told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that unless the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) started cutting oil production, he would be powerless to stop lawmakers from passing legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from the kingdom, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The threat to upend a 75-year strategic alliance, which has not been previously reported, was central to the U.S. pressure campaign that...

it’s appropriate to mourn the passing of one notable longtime New Yorker .. Unit 2 reactor at the Indian Point Energy Center. The workhorse, Westchester-based nuclear-power generator, which could have run for several more decades, is scheduled to be unplugged Thursday. Cause of death: political expediency .... the 1,028-megawatt Westinghouse machine delivered about 8,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year from a site on the Hudson River that covers less than a half square mile. Unit 2’s prodigious output left its more politically popular rivals — solar and wind energy — in the shade. Ivanpah, the biggest thermal-solar project in America,...

An artificial depression created around the coronavirus outbreak by American leadership will kill thousands of Americans, explained Jacki Pick, host of the Jacki Daily Show on BlazeMedia, warning of the consequences of varying economic shutdowns across the nation ostensibly aimed at addressing the viral spread. She offered her analysis on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. In her recently-published article, “What a Prolonged Shutdown Will Cost in Human Life,” Pick wrote: A prolonged shutdown could bring tens of thousands of deaths through spikes in rates of suicide, heart attack, missed cancer diagnoses, domestic violence deaths,...

Moore comes at the issue from a far-left perspective: Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for...

As oil prices have plummeted to levels never before seen, a rift has opened among the companies that extract crude. Some of them say state regulators should force producers to pump less in the hopes such regulation will raise prices. Others say no, just let the market do its job. While Texas, an oil-producing behemoth, is weighing the controversial idea of imposing limits, New Mexico, now an oil powerhouse in its own right, has largely stayed out of that debate. Depending where oil prices go and what other states decide to do, there may come a point when the state...