Posts Tagged ‘Regulation’

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Government in Action: Idiot Street Signs

Thursday, March 11th, 2021

I’ve been watching entirely too many Top Gear/Grand Tour videos on YouTube. This one struck me as just barely justifiable for posting here as an example of idiot government regulation at work: a look at idiot street signs.

These are all from the UK. Feel free to share examples closer to home in the comments.

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Posted in Regulation, video | 2 Comments »

Texas Energy Outage Postmortem

Wednesday, March 10th, 2021

I finally had time to finish this postmortem post on the Texas winter storm energy grid crisis. I’ve got a ton of pieces to get through, so let’s dig in.

  • How the energy grid fell apart:

    Here were two problems, one short term and one long term—which exacerbated the short-term one.

    The short-term failure came at about 1 a.m. Monday when ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures, and arranged for more generation.

    Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (in the ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.

    This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.

    In the last four to five years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today.

    We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar, which is cheap for two reasons—it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.

    Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to a total of 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity statewide, though they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity.

    Wind and solar, with state and federal subsidies, have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market.

  • More:

    Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.

    “Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.

    What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.

    Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.

    Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

    “There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money,” he added. “About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.”

  • “Yes, Green Energy Failures Helped Cause Texas Blackout Disaster.”

    As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?

    But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.

    The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.

    Snip.

    On the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts. The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heat waves.

    Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter. Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.

    We knew solar would not produce anything during the night, when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar. This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.

  • Could lawmakers have prevent the blackouts?

    “By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid, and wind generation bottomed out at 2 [percent] of installed capacity by Monday night,” said Jason Isaac, director of Life:Powered, a project of Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former state lawmaker.

    “Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts—inconvenient but manageable—instead turned into 4 million Texans left in the cold and without answers,” he continued. “To make matters worse, ERCOT shut down power at natural gas substations in the Permian, leading to further shortages.”

    Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has since said Texas should stop building wind turbines; focus on gas, coal, and oil; and called for the firing of Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees to the Public Utility Commission—the government body that oversees ERCOT.

    But was this crisis foreseeable? Isaac says yes.

    “We’ve known for years that a weather event combining low wind and solar production and record demand could lead to blackouts,” he told Texas Scorecard. “This week, that event became a reality as new wind and solar generation failed to produce when it was needed the most, and it appears ERCOT fell asleep at the wheel.”

  • How the Texas outage started with bad policy:

    For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.

    When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.

    Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.

    So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.

    Here’s the long story.

    Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.

    However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.

    Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)

  • Here’s an informative thread on how the Texas energy market is set up and how some of the system was offline when the worst hit:

    I think here he’s conflating a few different things; it’s unclear how much capacity was taken off line due to insufficient weatherization and how much was caused by ERCOT foolishly inducing blackouts in the gas-producing Permian Basin.

  • Chuck Devore:

  • More on how renewables helped create the crisis:

    Mitchell Rolling explains: “As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.”

  • More on the same theme:

    The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.

    That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.

    But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.

    This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.

  • The truth about those frozen wind turbines:

    One of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.

    Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.

    Snip.

    As the graph plainly shows, wind generation choked down but natural gas compensated. Coal and even nuclear power generation dipped. Solar generation has been negligible due to cloud cover and several inches of snow and ice.

    The cold has created extreme demand across the state. During most winter storms, the Panhandle, West Texas, and even North Texas around Dallas and above toward Paris may get cold but Central and South Texas could remain well above freezing. This has not happened during the current series of storms. The entire state is in a deep freeze, with snow appearing even on Galveston Island’s beach. Galveston averages lows of about 50 degrees and highs in the mid-60s during a typical February. It’s 37 degrees in Galveston as I write this, well below average. Austin has seen single-digit temperatures at night.

    To put all of this into some perspective, the storm that dumped more than six inches of ice and snow on Austin Sunday night would, by itself, have been a historic storm. It dropped more snow on the capital than any other storm since 1949. It was preceded by a major cold snap and has been followed by more extreme cold and then another ice and snow storm Tuesday night. Texas has not suffered a single historic winter storm over the past several days, but a series of them without any warming in between…

    Add to all of this, when Texas gets winter storms it usually doesn’t just get snow. Snow is fairly easy to deal with. Texas also gets ice, which can snap electric lines and break trees and tree branches, which also can fall on and break power lines. A tree in my yard is bent over by ice to the point that it looks like an invisible hand is holding it down. We can expect the ice to kill off millions of trees around the state. The ice layers also render most roads impassable. All of this is very unusual for Texas, but not unprecedented. The winter of 1836 was notably harsh; Santa Anna reportedly encountered deep snow as he marched his army toward San Antonio.

    Most winters, Austin will have a few cold days but no snow. Central Texas is known to go entire winters without anyone having to so much as scrape any frost off their car windshield. Austin has had two significant snowstorms in 2021, with the current one being historic by any measure.

    Piecing known information together, the wind turbines in Western Texas froze up starting Friday before the icy snowstorm hit, on Sunday night to Monday morning. This destabilized the Texas grid ahead of the worst of the storm. The storm produced the temperatures and precipitation the forecasts expected, but with weakened power generation and demand skyrocketing to heat millions of homes, homes which for the most part are not insulated against the current level of cold temperatures, the grid was set up to suffer mightily as it’s not hardened against extreme cold such as this once-in-a-century storm series is delivering.

  • In chart form:

  • What can clean energy advocates say when wind turbines freeze?

    Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But the pumps use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.

    California progressives long ago banished coal. But a heat wave last summer strained the state’s power grid as wind flagged and solar ebbed in the evenings. After imposing rolling blackouts, grid regulators resorted to importing coal power from Utah and running diesel emergency generators.

    Liberals claim that prices of renewables and fossil fuels are now comparable, which may be true due to subsidies, but they are no free lunch, as this week’s energy emergency shows. The Biden Administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.

  • More on eliminating wind subsidies and the road forward:

    Decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies that favor unreliable wind power are crowding reliable energy sources out of the market, weakening the grid, and leading directly to the blackouts we experienced last week.

    It’s no surprise — in fact, Texas came close to seeing widespread blackouts in August 2019. Our reserve margin, the buffer of extra electricity between what Texans are using and what we can produce, has become steadily smaller in recent years. And without quick action by state leaders, it will only get worse.

    We should eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies — especially unreliable wind— to allow the free market to function smoothly. We must prioritize reliability and affordability in our electricity choices. Unfortunately, that’s not politically popular. But these are steps we can and must take for our state’s future.

  • Austin’s useless City Council being their usual useless selves: “Austin Energy’s biomass power plant in East Texas, which the city purchased in 2019 for $460 million, sat idle and produced no power during one of the worst winter energy crises in state history.” Well, at least it was providing Austinites jobs? Nope. It’s near Nacogdoches.
  • It did indeed suck to live without power for days on end.
  • A Texas Public Policy Foundation symposiums on the outage.
  • Heh:

    • Also, I got my electric bill for February and…it’s a totally normal February electric bill. It helps to have natural gas heat…

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    Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas | 13 Comments »

    Abbott FINALLY Lifts Wuhan Coronavirus Restrictions

    Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021

    A mere five months after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lifted coronavirus restrictions on his state, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is finally doing the same:

    At a press conference in Lubbock, Governor Greg Abbott announced that he was issuing a new executive order that would rescind most of the regulations in his previous orders, including allowing all businesses to open to “100 percent” capacity and ending the statewide mask mandate beginning next Wednesday.

    “It is now time to open up Texas 100 percent. Every employee who wants to work should have that opportunity. Every business that wants to be open, should be open,” said Abbott.

    Abbott said that his executive order will allow county judges to impose other restrictions if COVID-19 hospitalizations rise above 15 percent in the state trauma service area that covers their county — though not with a penalty of jail time or fines with any mask mandates.

    COVID-19 hospitalizations have been on a sharp downward trend, with the most populous regions of the state falling below the 15 percent threshold during the recent statewide freeze.

    Currently only two trauma service areas are above that mark: the regions covering El Paso and Laredo.

    The governor’s last executive order related to the pandemic was issued in October and permitted some businesses to reopen at 75 and 50 percent capacity, as long as the same hospitalization metric was met.

    Here’s Abbott’s full order, which makes it clear that county judges may still impose certain lockdown conditions in certain circumstances, but: A.) No business limits below 50% capacity, B.) No limits on houses of worship, C.) No jail time for violating restrictions and D.) No mask penalties of any kind.

    Restrictions are lifted effective March 10.

    The big question is not why did Abbott lift what remained of the lockdown, but what took him so long. Here’s the coronavirus chart for Florida, which has been fully open since September 25, 2020:

    And here’s the same chart for Texas:

    Do anything about those charts suggest that Texas did any better than Florida? Texas had 2.67 million coronavirus cases and 44,353 deaths (for a population of 28,995,881), while Florida had 1.92 million cases and 31,134 deaths on population of 21,477,737. (Coronavirus numbers via Google, population numbers from here.) Take into account Florida’s higher elderly population and it seems that Texas has achieved no notable benefits for an additional five months of lockdown restrictions.

    It’s hardly any consolation that states run by Democratic governor’s are still stuck on stupid:

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    Posted in Regulation, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Interview with TPPF’s Katie Tahuahua On The Texas Winter Storm Energy Crisis

    Wednesday, February 17th, 2021

    I reached out to the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s energy expert Katie Tahuahua about the dire energy problems brought about by the huge winter storm, here are her answers:

    1. The Texas Interconnect Grid is a separate grid from the U.S. Eastern and Western Interconnect grids. What advantages and disadvantages does this provide for Texas energy consumers?

    KT: The advantage of Texas having its own electric grid is that our communities aren’t affected by poor policy choices in other states we have no control or accountability over. However, it also means we must bear the full costs of our choices and feel the full brunt of crises like the blackouts across the state this week.

    2. What role does ERCOT serve in managing the Texas Interconnect grid?

    KT: The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the Texas Interconnection Grid — although, unfortunately, the “Reliability” in its name has now been called into question.

    3. The current wave of extreme cold was forecast in advance. Why were so many electricity-producing entities caught off-guard?

    KT: There are two problems here. The first is that ERCOT waited too long to initiate conservation measures to meet increased demand as the weather turned colder. However, this delay wouldn’t have been a problem at all had Texas not put so many eggs in the renewable basket. Instead of adding more reliable fossil fuel generation to the grid over the last few years to keep up with our growing population and electricity demand, we’ve closed over 3,000MW in natural gas and clean coal and instead added 20,000MW of unreliable wind and solar to the grid. Unfortunately, all that wind and solar was barely generating when Texans needed it most. By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid and total wind generation bottomed out at 2% capacity by Monday night. Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts — inconvenient but manageable — instead turned into millions of Texans left in the cold and without answers.

    4. What, if any, role has ERCOT’s demand pricing policies played in helping create the current crisis?

    KT: ERCOT does not currently have demand pricing policies. While voluntary demand pricing programs could help prevent situations like this, any regulatory solution should place the cost of ensuring reliable electricity on the generators where it belongs, not on the customers.

    5. A great number of Austin households are without power right now. Has Austin energy performed notably worse than other government power entities, and what policies have contributed to making the situation worse?

    KT: Anecdotally, we know that there are communities in several areas of the state still without power. It does not appear that the blackouts are worse in Austin than anywhere else. However, Austin’s boisterous promotion of unreliable renewable energy — and their expensive failed efforts to use it — have reduced reliability for their customers and for the broader Texas grid. Unfortunately, San Antonio and CPS Energy are going down the same path that will put their ratepayers on the hook for $1 billion and further jeopardize the security of our grid.

    6. How much, if any, has the push for “renewable” energy courses like wind and solar contributed to the current energy difficulties in Texas?

    KT: It’s clear that policy decisions favoring unreliable wind and solar energy made blackouts such as this inevitable at some point. The severity of this blackout could have been reduced had ERCOT acted more swiftly — but it never would have been an issue had our grid not been so deeply penetrated by unreliable energy sources that contribute the least when they are needed the most, yet are propped up by billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies every year.

    The Texas Legislature should end these subsidies and require all electric generators to guarantee a certain amount of “dispatchable,” or readily available, power to the grid at all times. The Texas Public Policy Foundation and our Life:Powered initiative will be working closely with the legislature to preserve Texans’ access to affordable, reliable electricity no matter the weather.

    Thanks to Katie Tahuahua for taking the time to answer these questions.

    Today is the first time in almost a week that the temperature is going to get above freezing…

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    Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas | 3 Comments »

    TPPF’s Chuck DeVore on Reasons Behind The Texas Blackouts

    Tuesday, February 16th, 2021

    Some brief background on why so many Texas households suddenly seem to be without power:

    Expect more on this subject in the near future.

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    Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas | 9 Comments »

    GameStop Short Sellers Refusing To Fold?

    Saturday, January 30th, 2021

    You might think that, having suffered billions in losses, hedge funds would want to get out of the GameStop short-selling game.

    You’d be wrong.

    The astronomical rally in GameStop has imposed huge losses of nearly $20 billion for short sellers this month, but they are not budging.

    Short-selling hedge funds have suffered a mark-to-market loss of $19.75 billion year to date in the brick-and-mortar video game retailer, including a nearly $8 billion loss on Friday as the stock kept ripping higher, according to data from S3 Partners.

    Still, short sellers mostly are holding onto their bearish positions or they are being replaced by new hedge funds willing to bet against the stock. GameStop shares that have been borrowed and sold short have declined by just about 5 million over the last week, marking an 8% dip in the short interest, according to S3. Most of the short covering occurred on Thursday, when the stock fell for the first time in six days.

    “I keep hearing that ‘most of the GME shorts have covered’ — totally untrue,” said Ihor Dusaniwsky, S3 managing director of predictive analytics. “In actuality the data shows that total net shares shorted hasn’t moved all that much.”

    “While the ‘value shorts’ that were in GME earlier have been squeezed, most of the borrowed shares that were returned on the back of the buy to covers were shorted by new momentum shorts in the name,” Dusaniwsky added in an email.

    Shares of GameStop were back up Friday after Robinhood and other retail brokers allowed trading to resume.

    The borrow fee on GameStop’s stock — or the cost-to-borrow shares for the purpose of selling them short — jumped to 29.32% on existing shorts and 50% on new short positions, S3 said.

    “If most of the shorts had covered, we would not be seeing stock borrow rates at these high levels — by now you would be able to borrow GME stock at single digit levels due to an increase in the lendable stock loan supply due to borrowed shares being returned after all the ‘supposed’ buy-to-covers,” Dusaniwsky said.

    GameStop remained the most-shorted name in the market as short interest as a percentage of shares available for trading stands at 113.31%, S3 said.

    (Supposedly Melvin Capital and Citron are out of their GameStop short positions. So who is still in?)

    Assuming all the above is true, the remaining hedge funds and their allies are still shorting more than 100% of the stock, despite the theoretically infinite risk involved. I can think of several theories to explain what appears to be apparently irrational behavior:

    1. Short sellers fully expect their friends in the Biden Administration and/or the financial regulatory apparatus to come to their aid and extricate them from the bind they’ve put themselves into by suspending or changing the rules. Huh. I wonder why they could possibly think that?

    2. Short sellers expect to use their power to force trading companies to bend to their will by forcing retail investors to sell their shares (as Robinhood was reportedly doing on Thursday).
    3. Short sellers expect one or more “whales” (i.e., rich individual investors) to flip and either sell their shares or lend them out to cover shorts once the temptation to take profits is too great.
    4. Deeper-pocketed short sellers expect the squeeze to force weaker rivals out of the game, either taking huge losses to liquidate their positions or going bankrupt. In either case, they expect this winnowing to drop shorted shares below the 100% threshold, relieving the pressure on the shorts for the remaining short sellers.

    Obviously, it could also be a combination of all these. (Or something else; feel free to float other theories in the comments.)

    It’s the first two possibilities that should worry us from a policy position: If the big players can break the rules at will to reverse their fortunes when they’ve been beaten at their own game by the little players, then it’s not a free market. And if it’s not a free market, what’s to keep ordinary Americans from getting out of the game entirely?

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Economics, Regulation | 3 Comments »

    Joe Biden vs. American Oil Industry Jobs

    Monday, January 25th, 2021

    The Biden Administration is wasting no time in declaring war on America’s oil and gas industry:

  • Biden revoked permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, killing thousands of jobs.
  • He rejoined the job-killing Paris Climate Accord. The Paris Climate Accord has never been submitted to the senate for ratification, so how could it be constitutionally binding?
  • Despite protestations to the contrary, he wants to end fracking.
  • Biden has suspended oil and gas permitting on federal land for 60 days. Presumably some will be allowed to proceed once it’s made clear which Democrats will need to be bribed for the privilege…
  • New Mexico official says they’re shocked by Biden’s actions on federal land permits.

    Some New Mexico officials are now trying to defend themselves by saying they didn’t anticipate the new President would issue such a ban, but such protests ring rather hollow given that they most assuredly did understand that Biden plans to move ahead with his fracking ban, which would for all intents and purposes have the same effect. After all, virtually 100% of the drilling activity in southeast New Mexico targets the various shale formations in the Delaware Basin, and all shale wells require a frac job in order to be productive. Thus, a ban on fracking is the same thing as a ban on leasing and drilling.

  • Total job losses for all of Biden’s anti-energy policies could add up to 1 million jobs. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • And many of those job losses will be in Texas:

    in Texas, where small, independent operators play a significant role in oil production, Biden’s policies could pack more of a punch.

    Among Biden’s policy proposals:

    • Required disclosure of climate risks from public companies.
    • A commitment to end new drilling permits for federal lands.
    • A pledge to eliminate tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

    “To the extent that there will be effects, those effects would be felt primarily by smaller producers,” said Sheila Olmstead, professor of public affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. She served as the senior economist for energy and the environment at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.

    • Why settle for low-cost, reliable energy sources that provide high-paying, blue collar American jobs when there’s so much virtue signaling and graft to be had in Green New Deal pork?

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Austin Update For January 17, 2021

    Sunday, January 17th, 2021

    Austin news has been accumulating in heaps in drifts like trash strewn from a homeless encampment in a public park. So let’s grab a shovel:

  • First up: the case of the missing $6 million:

    More than $6 million in taxpayer money flowed to Austin nonprofits affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but taxpayers might never learn the identities of the organizations that got the money or get a chance to dig into their stated need for assistance.

    Citing a little-known state law that government transparency experts are only now learning exists, the city has refused to turn over a list of the 365 nonprofits that were granted the funds.

    The $6 million was funneled through the city from the federal government and distributed out of the Austin Nonprofit and Civic Health Organizations Relief fund, more commonly known as the ANCHOR fund.

    On Oct. 19, the American-Statesman requested a list from the city of the fund’s award recipients. On Nov. 16, the city denied the newspaper’s request, saying in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that it thought the information was exempt from public disclosure and requested that Paxton’s office affirm that determination.

    The law invoked by the city’s legal department, House Bill 3175, went on the books after the 2019 Texas legislative session.

    Filed by state Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, the bill made confidential the name and other identifying information of individuals and businesses that apply for state or federal disaster recovery funds. The definition of disaster, as spelled out in the law, includes such things as floods, earthquakes and hostile military action. It also includes epidemics, such as the COVID-19 crisis.

    The disclosure of federal relief dollars is not exempted from public records if the money is awarded by the federal government. For example, news organizations, including the Statesman, have obtained through public records the names of businesses that received financial assistance through the federal Paycheck Protection Program.

    But under the new state law, Austin was able to withhold the identities of businesses that received assistance from the ANCHOR fund because the money, although originally from the federal government, went to the city before it was distributed to the nonprofits.

    I just naturally assume the money was handed out as graft to members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, Greg Casar’s leftwing cronies, and various antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riot instigators (I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between those categories).

  • Speaking of the homeless, Austin’s homeless situation continues to get even more out-of-hand. “It’s not uncommon to walk out the door and find a pile of human feces on the patio behind us.”
  • A close, personal look at the problem:

  • If you live in Austin, you have until tomorrow (Monday, January 18) to sign the petition to reinstate the homeless camping ban. Go here to sign the petition.
  • There’s also a petition drive to recall various City Council members who reinstated the homeless ban. But you have to live in their respective districts to sign the petition.
  • I know you’re going to be shocked, shocked to find out that the City of Austin give preferential treatment to leftwing businessesin the form of property tax breaks…including one for Mayor Steve Adler’s own law firm.
  • Matt Mackowiak and Brad Johnson discuss the Austin homeless problem.

    • As the cherry on top, the City of Austin’s Stage 5 Wuhan coronavirus restrictions are still in effect through February 16…

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    Joe Rogan and Doctor Mark Gordon on California’s Lockdown Madness

    Monday, January 11th, 2021

    At some point I’m going to finish a full-blown Texas Vs. California update. But like every other blog post I’ve got in the works, it’s taking longer than usual to complete. So instead, here’s California-to-Texas refugee Joe Rogan interviewing fellow California-to-Texas refugee Dr. Mark Gordon, who specializes in recovering from traumatic brain injury and has a line of neutracuiticals about the many problems of California and how badly they’ve handled the lockdown.

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Texas, video | 1 Comment »

    Austin Mayor Adler To Bar Owners: I Decree No New Year’s Eve For You! Governor Abbott: In a Pig’s Eye You Do!

    Wednesday, December 30th, 2020

    Because he just hadn’t done enough to bankrupt Austin restaurants and bars, Mayor Steve Adler decreed that would not be allowed to stay open past 10:30 PM on New Year’s Eve:

    NOW THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE CITY OF AUSTIN, PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORITY VESTED BY TEXAS GOVERNMENT CODE CHAPTER 418, HEREBY ORDER,EFFECTIVE AS OF 10:30 P.M. ON DECEMBER 31, 2020, AND CONTINUING THROUGH 6:00 A.M. ON JANUARY 3,2021 THAT IN THE CITY OF AUSTIN:

    MODIFIED OPERATIONS FOR DINE-IN SERVICES

    SECTION 1. That the findings and recitations set out in the preamble to this ORDER are found to be true and correct and they are here by adopted and made a part hereof for all purposes.

    SECTION 2. Modified Operations for Dine-In Food and Beverage Services. Because the wearing of a face covering and physical distancing is not possible while individuals are seated together and dining, thereby increasing the risk of spreading the COVID-19 virus, a business must end indoor and outdoor dine-in food and beverage service at 10:30 P.M. but may continue to operate after 10:30 P.M. using drive-thru, curbside pick-up,take-out,or delivery service. Dine-in food and beverage service may resume beginning at 6:00 A.M.

    (All “WHEREAS”es and criminal penalties snipped, because it’s a PDF and all the letters run together into one giant German compound word, and it was a big enough pain reinserting the spaces into the excerpt above.)

    The reaction from Texas Governor Greg Abbott was swift:

    Hopefully this clarification about the limits of local government regulation will keep Adler from driving a few more establishments bankrupt…

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    Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas | 5 Comments »

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