Free Republic

SANTA FE — New Mexico congresswoman Deb Haaland has been tapped as President-elect Joe Biden’s interior secretary, according to The Washington Post and other national news outlets. If confirmed, Haaland, 60, would make history as the nation’s first-ever Native American cabinet secretary and would lead an influential federal agency that oversees more than 500 million acres of public lands and tribal issues. Haaland, who is a Laguna Pueblo member and former San Felipe Pueblo tribal administrator, had been touted as a potential Cabinet pick by many fellow House members and Native American groups. As head of the Interior Department, Haaland...

San Francisco’s 11-member Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Monday to ban the use of natural gas in new buildings as a measure to fight climate change. Ironically, the state relies on natural gas for electricity generation, and the city does to some extent as well.

In one of the rare instances where the media has bothered to ask Joe Biden about anything of substance, he was forced to give an answer during the last presidential debate about whether or not he was planning on banning fracking. He flip-flopped on that issue yet again, saying that he would not be banning fracking, likely because he’s aware that the polls in Pennsylvania are hanging by a thread at the moment. But as C. Boyden Gray points out this week at Real Clear Politics, Joe Biden’s answer wasn’t just at odds with previous statements by both he...

Energy issues, and the Green New Deal specifically, may end up being the political death of a potential Joe Biden presidency. During his debate with President Donald J. Trump on October 22nd, former Vice President Biden embraced the idea of banning fracking and eliminating the American oil and gas industry.  That was a big mistake.It seems like Biden has fallen for the fallacy that supporting the radical environmental agenda is good politics. He may have spent too much time in coffee shops in Delaware and on Amtrak trains to understand the financial struggle many Americans are facing. His leftist advisors...

Heather Price knows her way around gases. An atmospheric chemist at North Seattle College, she studies outdoor air pollution, the flow and change of chemicals in Earth’s atmosphere. But she wasn’t worried about the gas stove in her own home before her son developed asthma and, at two and a half years old, had to use his inhaler multiple times a day. She started to wonder: Was gas making her family sick? Sign up for The Atlantic’s daily newsletter. Price’s house ran on natural gas—“gas stove, gas furnace, gas hot-water heater,” she says. In American homes, this setup is quite...

Winding through green forested hills, the road to Meadowbrook Mobile Home Park in York County is nestled with brown-paneled trailers and potholes half-filled with jagged concrete. Sue Ritter has lived here for more than 40 years, before the pipes began to break, leaving faucets dry for days and causing sewage backups to soak the floors. Several trailers, constructed with cheap material and wood additions, have caught fire in recent years. When workers in large trucks began barreling down these roads in 2017, hollowing out part of the forest for Sunoco’s Mariner East pipeline project, it seemed like another nuisance the...

Turns out wind and solar have a secret friend: Natural gas We’re at a time of deeply ambitious plans for clean energy growth. Two of the U.S.’s largest states by population, California and New York, have both mandated that power companies get fully 50 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by the year 2030. Only, there’s a problem: Because of the particular nature of clean energy sources like solar and wind, you can’t simply add them to the grid in large volumes and think that’s the end of the story. Rather, because these sources of electricity generation are “intermittent”...

Joe Biden has made it clear that he was for fracking before he was against it. Forget the cognitive testing — the cognitive dissonance of the incoherent policies his puppet masters are feeding him though his earpiece is enough to disqualify him for the presidency and may doom him politically in key states like Pennsylvania just as Hillary Clinton's pledge to bankrupt a lot of coal companies doomed her. Banning fossil fuels and killing the energy independence Trump achieved before the Wuhan virus pandemic would kill the American economy and future hopes for recovery. It is said a little child...

  LEADING AN ENERGY REVOLUTION: American energy production is soaring to new heights under President Donald J. Trump’s pro-jobs, pro-national security, and energy independence agenda. Under President Trump’s leadership, the United States has become the world’s number one producer of oil and maintained our position as the number one producer of natural gas.American energy exports reached an all-time high last year, marking the first time in 67 years that our annual gross energy exports exceeded our gross energy imports. Crude oil production hit new record highs both last year and the year before, leaping past the previous record set in...

What could they possibly have been planning? No doubt they just wanted to do the jobs that Americans refuse to take, right? While Leftists continue to deny that border control is a national security issue, recently a Muslim migrant from Jordan named Moayad Heider Mohammad Aldairi was sentenced to three years in prison for sneaking at least six Yemeni Muslims into the United States across the border from Mexico. Their intentions were unlikely to have been benign. Judicial Watch reported back in 2016 that police in a New Mexico border town arrested a woman they described as an “Islamic refugee”...

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...

To say times are tough for energy companies in the San Juan Basin would be an understatement. The market for natural gas is so bad right now that T. Greg Merrion has shut in nearly half of his family-owned company’s wells, most located in northwestern New Mexico. But that could soon change. If Merrion and key industry analysts are correct, there might be a silver lining in the oil crash caused by the coronavirus pandemic — it could end up helping northwestern New Mexico natural gas producers and even give a lift to state revenue in a time of crisis.

Economic conflict between the United States and China and Russia on full display today but first.... Protesters in Maryland's capital of Annapolis today urging a full reopening of the state..... Protesters are Pennsylvania's Capitol Building in Harrisburg today pushing for a reopening of the state.... German authorities afraid as mass protests are set in major cities like Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart Saturday in opposition to the government's coronavirus policy... The United States imposing tighter chip controls on the Chinese tech firm Huawei...... Its also been announced that Taiwan Semiconductor will be opening a factory in the United States.... A German...

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...

Coalville wants to ditch fossil fuels. The Utah city has pledged to draw its electricity from 100 percent renewable sources by 2030. From California to New Hampshire, dozens of cities have set similar goals. But these cities can't produce and store enough wind and solar power to run solely on renewables. As a result, their ambitious environmental policies could soon leave them powerless. Fortunately, these cities can rely on natural gas to supplement renewables while still reducing emissions. Renewable energy sources are frequently unreliable. Solar and wind-powered grids can't generate electricity on still, cloudy days. A city, state, or country...

Copyright © 2020 Albuquerque Journal With oil prices plunging to their lowest level in 22 years, state legislators are projecting an imminent budget crisis that’s likely to force the New Mexico Legislature into special session. Sen. John Arthur Smith, chairman of the Legislative Finance Committee, said the state could be facing a $1 billion loss in oil- and gas-related revenue if the crisis continues through this year and into 2021. ADVERTISEMENTSKIP In a Thursday letter to legislative leaders, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham indicated a special session is inevitable but said state officials need to have updated revenue estimates and a...

Exxon Mobil plans to reduce the number of oil rigs operating in an oil-rich region in the Southwest and may cut planned capital expenditures as the spreading coronavirus saps energy demand. The price of a barrel of oil has fallen more than 20% since the start of the year, and 8% in the last month, with energy demand expected to shrink as the outbreak drags on the global economy. Exxon will reduce the number of rigs in the Permian basin, a region that stretches across the border of New Mexico and Texas. Capital expenditures include expenses such as drilling and...

Last Friday, Prime Minister Trudeau abruptly reversed himself and demanded that the blockades of rail lines, which have sprung up in various places this month, be cleared. Monday, police in Ontario cleared out one of the larger protest camps, arresting 10 people and clearing the way for trains to resume service. But the protesters werenÂ’t done. Later that night they began throwing burning tires onto the tracks: This was the scene Monday night on the rail lines near Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. Police arrested 10 people earlier in the day and cleared out the camp that was set up Feb....

After a four-year battle with the state, the proposed Constitution natural-gas pipeline project has been abandoned, as National Grid warns of a coming natural gas supply emergency next Winter. The State of New York has a natural gas shortage, the result of years of the administration of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and environmentalists fighting the construction of new supply pipelines. A June 2019 report by The Manhattan Institute documented the shortage and its causes, Out of Gas: New York’s Blocked Pipelines Will Hurt Northeast Consumers:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration just announced some spectacular news that should be banner headlines across the country: The price of natural gas has fallen to its lowest February level in 20 years. The data shows that natural gas prices fell to $1.77 per million British thermal units. In inflation-adjusted terms, the price of gas has plunged by some 80% since its high of $13.60 12 years ago. The price is down 90% since 2005, when prices hit nearly $20. (Quick: Can you think of anything else that now costs one-tenth of what it did 15 years ago?) The Energy...