Friday factoids- Arctic, Border, Norks, China

Where to start… Biden? The Chinese? The Norks? Is there a real difference?

Remember how we talked about how the current administration doesn’t want to carry LNG by train and has closed pipelines, presumably all in the name of Clean Green Renewable Energy Regardless What It Costs? Well, dropping yet another shoe the Biden administration canceled the seven remaining oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday from Trump’s last days in office.

Alaska political leaders — including some Democrats — have long pushed to allow oil and gas drilling in the refuge in part because of its economic impact on Indigenous communities in an area with few other jobs. Many of those same voices pressed Biden to approve the Willow project for the same reason.

“I am deeply frustrated by the reversal of these leases in ANWR,” said U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, using a common shorthand for the refuge.  Press-Democrat

Guess they just want to tick everyone off. As well as force us all to go electric whether the grid will support it or not. Oh, be sure to see the end bit below.

A federal judge from Austin has ruled that Gov. Abbott must remove the floating orange ball barrier on the Rio Grande

On Wednesday, Judge David Ezra of the US District Court in Austin ordered the removal of the barrier and required Texas to foot the bill, pushing back on Abbott’s decision to install it back in July “without authorization of any kind,” ruling the buoy system is “an obstruction to the navigable capacity of that waterway” and a “threat to human life.”  Insider

Two thousand miles of out-of-control border, and 1,000 feet of buoys obsesses them. What’s that, roughly 1/10,000th of the border?

Governor Abbot, meanwhile,  says the judge can go piss up a rope  he doesn’t need Federal permission and he will wait for a Supreme Court decision. Guess he is noting that the Rio Grande throughout the vast majority of its length is only navigable by canoes and waders.

Remember when it was alleged that North Korean hackers were breaking into a Russian missile firm’s computers? No less than Microsoft says:

“North Korean threat actors may be capitalizing on the opportunity to conduct intelligence collection on Russian entities due to the country’s focus on its war in Ukraine,” the report said.

But allegations that Pyongyang is spying on its Russian allies are potentially more awkward as the countries draw closer amid the war in Ukraine.  Reuters

As North Korea, Russia, and China are reputedly chatting about closer relations, this could be a bit awkward. Too, these guys are masters of realpolitik and may just shrug it off as “boys will be boys, but now you stop, da?”.

And closing with the Chinese… to paraphrase the “Zorro” movie, “ah, the Chinese, the Chinese, the Chinese…”  an opinion piece in The Telegraph says:

Bloomberg reported on August 30 that a recent update by British/Dutch oil giant Shell seems to have quietly abandoned a previously-announced radical plan to cut the company’s carbon emissions. Meanwhile Shell will increase investment in finding and producing more oil and natural gas. (presumably except in Bidenland – ed.)

The same media platform reported August 29 that China’s government has now approved the building of more new coal-fired power plants than are currently operating in the United States. The researchers who worked this out stated that these new coal plants are mostly in places with lots of existing coal power, and will provide capacity beyond that needed to back up renewables. This would appear to be a tacit admission that more fossil fuel energy is required to meet rising demand for electricity, even as Chinese population growth has stagnated.  The Telegraph

Interesting that the headline is: “China is building new coal power so fast that ‘energy transition’ by the West is meaningless”.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Biden, China, North Korea