Handsy Joe cancels Keystone

[rogue06]

Fauci the Fraud is out there saying that we have finally reached the plateau. And just after China Joe was inaugurated, too (but surely that's a coincidence).

He has now changed his mind Fauci warns COVID-19 situation 'potentially could get worse' given new variants

[Cow Poke]

He has now changed his mind Fauci warns COVID-19 situation 'potentially could get worse' given new variants

Another "win/win" prophecy by the great Faucini --- if it gets worse - "see, I told you so", if it doesn't "yeah, we worked hard and prevented a horrible tragedy".

[Ronson]

Another "win/win" prophecy by the great Faucini --- if it gets worse - "see, I told you so", if it doesn't "yeah, we worked hard and prevented a horrible tragedy".

Sounds like the Climate Change fanatics:

"Hotter than average? That's Climate Change."
"Colder than average? That's Climate Change."
"Normal weather? That's Climate Change taking a short break."

[Cow Poke]

Sounds like the Climate Change fanatics:

"Hotter than average? That's Climate Change."
"Colder than average? That's Climate Change."
"Normal weather? That's Climate Change taking a short break."

And....

A) Identify a potential problem
2) Exaggerate it beyond all capability for individuals to solve
C) Propose a federal response requiring whole new branches of government, unelected officials, salaries, mega money....
D) Never actually solve the problem, citing the need for more money and more money...
5) Announce the problem is getting worse, needs MORE money, more agencies....

And, somehow, friends, supporters, companies owned by friends and supporters get filthy rich 'fighting the problem'.

[rogue06]

And....

A) Identify a potential problem
2) Exaggerate it beyond all capability for individuals to solve
C) Propose a federal response requiring whole new branches of government, unelected officials, salaries, mega money....
D) Never actually solve the problem, citing the need for more money and more money...
5) Announce the problem is getting worse, needs MORE money, more agencies....

And, somehow, friends, supporters, companies owned by friends and supporters get filthy rich 'fighting the problem'.

You mean like Pelosi, who's husband bought 25 call options on shares in Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company, investing a million dollars not long before Biden announced that all federal vehicles would be transitioned to electric automobiles? When questioned about possible improprieties (i.e., insider trading), a Pelosi spokesman brushed it off saying that her husband, not the speaker, made the Tesla investments and the speaker’s political relationships were irrelevant.

This is big news in financial news circles but is receiving the expected yawn in the MSM.

[Cow Poke]

You mean like Pelosi, who's husband bought 25 call options on shares in Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company, investing a million dollars not long before Biden announced that all federal vehicles would be transitioned to electric automobiles? When questioned about possible improprieties (i.e., insider trading), a Pelosi spokesman brushed it off saying that her husband, not the speaker, made the Tesla investments and the speaker’s political relationships were irrelevant.

This is big news in financial news circles but is receiving the expected yawn in the MSM.

Eggzackly like that - or even Clinton's buddies who made millions off the disastrous Obamacare website.

[Ronson]

And....

A) Identify a potential problem
2) Exaggerate it beyond all capability for individuals to solve
C) Propose a federal response requiring whole new branches of government, unelected officials, salaries, mega money....
D) Never actually solve the problem, citing the need for more money and more money...
5) Announce the problem is getting worse, needs MORE money, more agencies....

And, somehow, friends, supporters, companies owned by friends and supporters get filthy rich 'fighting the problem'.

Sounds about right to me. Even the A) 2) C) D) 5) makes sense.

[Starlight]

Another "win/win" prophecy by the great Faucini --- if it gets worse - "see, I told you so", if it doesn't "yeah, we worked hard and prevented a horrible tragedy".

So better than the prophecy conservatives were touting that Covid would magically disappear when Biden was elected because the MSM would lose interest in touting the hoax?

[rogue06]

So better than the prophecy conservatives were touting that Covid would magically disappear when Biden was elected because the MSM would lose interest in touting the hoax?

Not that Covid itself would literally disappear. But the coverage has indeed sharply declined and CNN has decided to drop their Covid fatality counter they had going soon after old Joe was elected president. There was even some pundit on cable news declaring that coverage has decreased because the number of confirmed cases started dropping in early January.

[Cow Poke]

So better than the prophecy conservatives were touting that Covid would magically disappear when Biden was elected because the MSM would lose interest in touting the hoax?

You'd have to address that with whatever conservatives were touting that - but such sarcasm is fueled by the fact that Fauci and others have been all over the map on this. This is undoubtedly a political football.

Even Cuomo showed that, while declaring it's not a political football.

[rogue06]

keystone-pipeline-compared-to-manual-tranmittal-fuel.jpg

[whag]

keystone-pipeline-compared-to-manual-tranmittal-fuel.jpg

Then there's the operation itself:

This is the world's most destructive oil operation—and it's growing

A quick look north using Google map’s satellite view clearly shows some of the impacts on the landscape. Scattered along the banks of the Athabasca River is one of the world’s largest collections of tailings waste ponds—able to fill more than 500,000 Olympic swimming pools. These are so toxic, ducks and other birds have to be prevented from going near them.

Although some companies have invested significantly in technology to address the tailings problem, that has not put a dent in the scale of the problem, according to the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based energy think tank. The overall volume of tailings has kept growing for more than 50 years. Some ponds are leaking into the Athabasca River, says Paul Belanger, a former oil sands worker and current co-chair of Keepers of the Athabasca, an organization of indigenous peoples and environmentalists.

Older article but still relevant:

Oil Sands Mining Uses Up Almost as Much Energy as It Produces

Tar sands retrieved by surface mining has an EROI of only about 5:1, according to research released Tuesday. Tar sands retrieved from deeper beneath the earth, through steam injection, fares even worse, with a maximum average ratio of just 2.9 to 1. That means one unit of natural gas is needed to create less than three units of oil-based energy.

Profitability aside, the development of Canada’s oil sands reserves will never offset declines in crude oil. At the world’s current rate of oil consumption—32.2 billion barrels per year—Canada’s tar sands oil reserves remain at a finite 168.6 billion barrels, enough to keep the world fueled for less than six years.

[rogue06]

Then there's the operation itself:

This is the world's most destructive oil operation—and it's growing



Older article but still relevant:

Oil Sands Mining Uses Up Almost as Much Energy as It Produces

IIRC, mossy already posted something about these being called tar sands. While the title of the article calls them oil sands the article itself immediately bait and switches to a discussion of tar sands.

[whag]

IIRC, mossy already posted something about these being called tar sands. While the title of the article calls them oil sands the article itself immediately bait and switches to a discussion of tar sands.

That's a dodge. You know that mossy isn't even authoritative enough to know what the substance consists of.

https://www.americangeosciences.org/...-are-tar-sands

Tar sands (also called oil sands) are a mixture of sand, clay, water, and bitumen.^[1] Bitumen is a thick, sticky, black oil that can form naturally in a variety of ways, usually when lighter oil is degraded by bacteria.^[2] Bitumen has long been used in waterproofing materials for buildings, and is most familiar today as the binding agent in road asphalt. However, most of the bitumen produced from tar sands is refined and mixed with lighter oils to produce synthetic crude oil that can be further refined and used in much the same way as typical crude oil.^[3]

https://geology.utah.gov/resources/energy/tar-sands/

Utah’s oil sand resource is the largest in the United States. The deposits are located mainly in two areas of Utah: the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah, and central southeastern Utah.

Oil sands or tar sands (also called oil-impregnated sandstones and bituminous sandstones) are, as the names imply, sandstones that are saturated or filled with black, heavy hydrocarbons or bitumen. The sandstone can be unconsolidated, that is, the sand grains are held together mainly by the bitumen, or it can be consolidated, whereby the sand grains are held together by silica or carbonate cement with the bitumen filling the remaining voids. The bitumen is viscous, relatively immobile in the rock, and cannot be extracted by conventional oil-production techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands

Oil sands, tar sands, crude bitumen, or bituminous sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. Oil sands are either loose sands or partially consolidated sandstone containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay, and water, soaked with bitumen, a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum.

Also, apologies for linking to same article in both links (not that you noticed because you planned to hand wave). Here's the first article that discusses the complexities and downsides of that mining operation:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...le-fight-back/

[seanD]

More (seemingly intentional) damage to the oil and gas industry and the economy...

Biden Oil and Gas Lease Sale Cancellations Draw Strong Reaction

As gas prices continue to break records, the Biden administration’s cancellation of two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one lease sale in Alaska’s Cook Inlet has drawn clashing responses, including an accusation that the administration is “blatantly lying.”

Fishing boats entering Cook Inlet via the Kenai River, Kenai, Alaska, on July 1, 2020. (Beeblebrox via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
One political figure who weighed in was Donald Trump Jr., who recently campaigned with successful Republican Senate primary candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio.

“Looks like Joe is doing a great job of making inflation his top priority,” he wrote in a tweet.

The Cook Inlet oil and gas lease would have covered 1.09 million acres in the Cook Inlet, a body of water connecting Anchorage with the Gulf of Alaska.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told The Epoch Times the Cook Inlet sale was canceled due to a “lack of industry interest in the area.”

“I’m not sure that’s completely accurate,” Kara Moriarty, president and CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), told The Epoch Times.

“A lot of times, companies don’t want to tip their hand about participating in lease sales. The only time you really know if there’s interest or not is when you have the lease sale.”

“As the former Natural Resources Commissioner for Alaska, I know there is no way they could have confirmed ‘no interest’ until they held the lease sale,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who said the Biden administration was “blatantly lying to the American people.”

Both he and Moriarty referenced correspondence on the Cook Inlet sale from AOGA, which represents more than a dozen oil and gas producers in Alaska, as evidence of industry interest.

“The nature by which this announcement came to news—from the White House’s ultra-left climate czar Gina McCarthy, just down the hall from the president, [and] not the Department of Interior—raises further questions over who is crafting these disastrous energy policies,” Sullivan said, referencing the accidental email to a CBS reporter from a Biden administration official that first revealed the Cook Inlet lease’s cancellation.

Moriarty told The Epoch Times that “baffling is the nicest word I can come up with” for the cancellation.

Some local environmentalists, by contrast, expressed strong support for the decision.

“I’m very excited that we aren’t going to see an oil and gas lease sale that would really hurt our local economy,” Liz Mering told The Epoch Times.

Mering is advocacy director and inletkeeper of Cook InletKeeper, an Alaskan group opposed to oil and gas leasing in the region. Its website states that it seeks to “accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to an equitable, renewable energy future.”

The Interior spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the two Gulf of Mexico leases were canceled because of “delays due to factors including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales.”

In June 2021, Louisiana federal Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee, struck down the Biden administration’s pause on oil and gas leases. That pause had commenced with Executive Order 14008.

Yet in January, District of Columbia federal Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, ruled that the November 2021 federal offshore oil and gas sale, the largest in history, was invalid. He argued it violated the National Environmental Policy Act because it didn’t take greenhouse gas emissions into account. The Biden administration didn’t appeal the ruling.

The administration announced its plans to resume lease sales in March after an appeals court ruled it could incorporate a raised “social cost of carbon” factor when assessing permits.

When he was a presidential candidate, Biden’s promises included “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.”

The latest lease cancellations come as inflation and high gas prices wrack the nation.

AAA reported that regular gas on May 12 averaged $4.418 a gallon, the highest average price it has ever recorded.

Diesel is also at the highest price point ever recorded by AAA, averaging $5.557 a gallon.

“Prices for gasoline, diesel, and other products are high and climbing. Further, those high prices are raising the cost of other goods and services, and here we are with extraordinarily high rates of inflation at both the consumer and producer levels. The actions of this administration suggest little relief anytime soon,” energy economist Karr Ingham told The Epoch Times.

He said Biden hasn’t yet provided the next legally mandated five-year offshore leasing plan. The current plan ends in June.

“At this late hour, were they to set this new plan in motion today, it would be a year or so before it is in place. That means a significant gap in the time period during which companies may be able to reasonably make plans and allocate capital to drill new projects in these areas. So, in many respects, these canceled leases were the ‘last hurrah’ before that plan expires.”
Lawmakers in Impacted States React


Senators and representatives from Louisiana and Alaska, two states affected by the cancellations, have voiced anger and disgust.

“Pres. Biden has killed more energy lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s killing jobs, has killed America’s energy independence, and is fueling inflation that is killing Louisiana families. And he’s doing it on purpose,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) wrote in a May 12 tweet.

Kennedy’s senior colleague, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), voiced his concerns in similar language.

“President Biden’s administration is actively making high gas prices worse,” Cassidy said. “When we need to unleash American energy production, the Biden administration kills opportunities at every turn.”

“Rather than using American energy sources to help solve the problem and lower prices, the Biden administration continues to carry out policies that only benefit Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and other apparent allies of this White House. It is past time for the administration to put Americans first,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who serves on the House Natural Resources committee.

Sullivan said: “The timing and nature of this decision display a disturbing disregard for the pain American families continue to feel at the pump, for the hard-working Americans whose livelihoods and communities depend on the American energy industry, and for the grave consequences, these policies have on America’s energy and national security. As Gina McCarthy celebrates this decision from the White House, rest assured Vladimir Putin is popping corks in the Kremlin.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) hasn’t yet commented on the decision.

The Epoch Times has also reached out to the only Democrat representing Louisiana, Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.).

More like Biden admin throwing salt into an already festering wound. And this is why he's going to get solely blamed for our current economic situation, whether he's entirely at fault or not. He's been the most outspoken and visible opponent of the oil and gas industry.