US Agrees to Deploy Military to Ecuador Following Presidential Candidate’s Assassination by Los Choneros Gang
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign/us-deal-military-ecuador-drug-cartel-explosion
Excerpt:
... The Biden administration has quietly entered into agreements with Ecuador that will allow the United States to send in military forces, both on land and off the coast of the South American country, which has been heavily affected by drug cartels operating in the region.
Select members of Congress were informed during a private briefing on Capitol Hill with Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso on Wednesday, September 26, 2023. Lasso was in Washington to meet with State Department officials and sign two deals, according to Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who was present at the meeting and spoke with the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
“They were announcing and signing an agreement with the United States,” said Crenshaw, who leads the Congressional Task Force to Combat Mexican Drug Cartels.
Ecuadorian President Lasso stated, “When we came to government in May 2021, the Ecuadorian criminal organizations with strong ties to the Mexican cartels were practically constituted as powerful structures that have used the prisons as centers of operation. They are economically strong, they are armed, with materials that surpass the police, and have the capacity to co-opt young people.”
The State Department has not publicized the agreements in any of the more than 30 press releases issued since Wednesday, but a State spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Friday that it had signed a status of forces agreements and maritime law enforcement agreements.
The maritime agreement allows US military vessels to be present in the waters off the northwestern coast of South America, which Colombian drug cartels use to move cocaine. The ability to move military vessels into the area will “strengthen cooperative law enforcement activities and build mutual capacity to prevent and combat illicit transnational maritime activity,” according to State.
Status of forces agreements outlines the terms by which members of a foreign military, in this case, the Defense Department, can operate or are expected to conduct themselves while in another country.
The second agreement was a less common one, according to Adam Isacson, who heads defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America and has worked on Latin American issues since 1994.
“That doesn’t mean we’re doing it, but it means we can and it means that they’re making a very clear signal to us that they want more us involved,” Crenshaw said.
The State and Defense Departments did not answer follow-up questions about the duties of troops on deployments to Ecuador and other agreements signed with Latin American countries. The US withdrew all military from the base in Manta, Ecuador, in 2009.
.....Ecuador’s Drug Violence
The country, which is not a major cocaine producer, has seen violence peak when a presidential candidate known for his tough stance on organized crime and corruption, Fernando Villavicencio, was fatally shot at the end of an August 9, 2023 campaign rally.
He had accused the Ecuadorian Los Choneros gang and its imprisoned leader, José “Fito” Adolfo Macías Villamar, whom he linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, of threatening him and his campaign team days before his assassination.
The United States recently offered a $5 million reward leading for information to the masterminds of those responsible for the assassination. Organized crime was behind the killing, Ecuador’s president said at the time.
The US also offered a $1,000,000 reward for information on any leaders in the gang responsible for his death. “The United States will continue to support the people of Ecuador and work to bring to justice individuals who seek to undermine democratic processes through violent crime,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who announced the reward, said on Thursday.
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I smell RINO WEF Crenshaw and his DoD bosses getting us involved in something they don’t want us to know about under the pretense of fighting the drug cartels.
Biden admin quietly released study showing green energy receives far more subsidies than fossil fuels
‘Solar should be competing for sales in the marketplace, not for subsidies in Washington,’
Excerpt:
The Biden administration quietly issued a 59-page report outlining the current scope of federal energy-related subsidies revealed that the renewable energy sector enjoys significantly larger taxpayer backing than the fossil fuel industry.
The report — authored by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) and published in August — represents the first of its kind since 2018. The EIA analyzed data from 2016 through 2022, and determined that, during that time period, the federal government doled out $183.3 billion in direct and mainly indirect taxpayer subsidies, more than half of which came over the last three years.
“For years Democrats have claimed technologies like solar energy are cheaper than coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. This report makes clear that solar is largely dependent on heavy subsidies with taxpayer dollars,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Fox News Digital.
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Reinforcing what we already know without government subsidies the ‘renewable energy market’ would not exist.
Largest EV Charging Station In World Powered By Diesel-Powered Generators
Excerpt:
The Harris Ranch Tesla Supercharger station is an impressive beast. With 98 charging bays, the facility in Coalinga, California, is the largest charging station in the world.
In 2017, Tesla CEO said that all Superchargers in the automaker’s network were being converted to solar.
“Over time, almost all will disconnect from the electricity grid,” Musk posted on X, formally known as Twitter.
Superchargers charge vehicles up to the 80% sweet spot in as little as 20 minutes, but to provide that kind of power for nearly 100 bays takes something solar can’t provide — diesel generators.
Investigative journalist Edward Niedermeyer discovered that the station was powered by diesel generators hidden behind a Shell station. Reporters at SF Gate tried to find out how much of the station’s electricity was from the generators, but couldn’t get a response from Tesla.
The station isn’t connected to any dedicated solar farms, which means that absent the diesel generators, the station is powered by California’s grid.
Another Case
Energy analyst and writer David Blackmon, author of the “Energy Transition Absurdities,” told Cowboy State Daily that the use of diesel-powered generators is not limited to the Harris Ranch station.
He used to shop at a Whole Foods in Houston. The company had installed a charging station in front of the store for its customers.
“It was the best parking spot in the lot, and it crowded out a bunch of handicap spaces,” Blackmon said.
He said there were diesel generators behind the store and whenever someone was using the chargers, the generators would kick on.
Destabilized Grid
Just as these charging stations find they can’t run without some fossil fuel backup, the retirement of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas is being delayed to accommodate the energy demands of an electric vehicle battery factory that’s under construction.
Blackmon said that these stories illustrate well the lack of thought going into the demands that will be placed on the grid with increasing amounts of electric vehicle adoption.
As those demands pile on, U.S. energy policy pushes to remove coal, nuclear and natural gas from the grid.
Blackmon said he watched all summer as the Texas grid, which operates separately from the rest of the county, nearly collapsed with the incessant heat.
“We almost had blackouts on Aug. 24,” he said.
State Sen. Cheri Steinmetz, R-Lingle, told Cowboy State Daily that despite claims that wind and solar alone can power the grid, they lack the reliability needed to satisfy energy demand. So, parts of the country, such as Texas, are facing shortages.
.....Blackmon said that the footprint required to generate enough power to satisfy all energy needs with wind and solar is enormous. It’s not just the wind farms, solar farms and battery factories, there are also thousands of miles of transmission lines to connect consumers with the power wherever it happens to be generated at any given moment.
This calls into doubt Musk’s plan to power charging stations off of solar.
“If that’s what he wants, then he only wants the chargers to work six to eight hours a day. If they’re purely powered by solar, there’s just no way out of that,” Blackmon said.
Musk has made many exciting promises that so far haven’t come to pass. Someone went to the trouble to make a website documenting his pledges and how many days have passed since they were made.
Musk has also been taken to task for his solar promises. Energy expert Alex Epstein ran a fact check on Musk’s claim that we could power the world with a small area of the Sahara Desert and “some batteries.”
Epstein calculated that enough battery storage to create a reliable grid would cost $590 trillion for the batteries alone. It doesn’t include the cost of all the transmission infrastructure. And the batteries would have to be replaced every decade.