The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Invasion Of The Water Snatchers Texas ranchers are fighting “green” hydrogen projects. “It’s a ridiculous amount of water.” Sister Mary Grace and Sister Mary Michael, outside the  Carmelite Monastery of Our Lady of Grace , on August 15, 2024. Photo by author. Drought has hit Schleicher County hard. Lots of the stock tanks are dry. The only plants that appear to be thriving on this part of the Edwards Plateau are scrawny mesquite trees and the ever-present prickly pear cactus. As we turned onto County Road 339, the clouds of dust from the unpaved road were so thick that I slowed down to assure there was at least 100 yards between my vehicle and the tailgate of Ray and Sandra Pfeuffer’s pickup. It was the afternoon of August 15. The dashboard in our 4Runner showed the outside temperature was 103 F. The sun was relentless. There was almost no wind. A bare handful of clouds dotted the sky. The Pfeuffers, who raise goats and cattle on a 3,300-acre ranch about a dozen miles southe...

  O Death IRINA SLAV In February this year, Barclays  announced  it would stop direct financing for “energy clients, for upstream oil and gas expansion projects or related infrastructure.” The bank followed a massively popular trend in the industry of boosting support for transition-related businesses at the expense of traditional energy because traditional energy was the new plague, at least reputationally speaking. There must have also been plans to profit from the transition, no doubt, because forecasts and projections said it would be profitable. Fast forward five months and imagine my surprise when Barclays’ CEO, CS Venkatakrishnan  told  Bloomberg this week that banks couldn’t just quit oil and gas “cold turkey” and that the “reality is that for quite some time, fossil fuels will be with us.” In the same report, Bloomberg graciously informed us that Barclays is not the only one having sort of second thoughts about this whole move away from oil and gas busi...

  A Climate Of Fear So what ARE they on about? RADIO FAR SIDE It is fairly obvious to anyone who has done a bit of scratching around in the “climate change/global warming” quagmire that the entire narradigm is built on deliberately false assumptions, conclusions and methodologies. What is truly concerning in all this mess is the intentional obfuscation of what is really occurring, and what the ruling narradigm is being used to accomplish. We can dispense with the ruling narradigm rather easily. There is no global warming.  Global temperatures  have been steady or even declinng a bit over the past 25 years. If we compare globally averaged maps (the ones fed to the public as fear porn), as compared to the point readngs of actual temperatures, what we find is that overnight temperatures are running slightly above historic levels, while daytime temperatures show significant areas of cooling trends. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a “greenhouse gas,” and at current levels of 435pp...

  The face of hypocrisy in all its glory IRINA SLAV I was planning to shred some recent reports about fun stuff like green job subsidies and keeping oil in the ground but last night I finally got to watch a game from Euro 24 and my plan changed. The reason it changed was that in that game, or rather, the advertising around the pitch, the face of hypocrisy showed itself in all its glory. Now, you might argue that we see that face on a daily basis in every Euractiv report, in every “Europe” section news story on Reuters and other corporate media, but I guess that those ads around the pitch were the last straw. So, as I watched ten German citizens of foreign descent in rather odd purple shirts chase ten Hungarians back and forth, I couldn’t help but notice most of the ads were for companies such as Hisense, Aliexpress, Alicom, BYD, Vivo and some digital wallet or something that Google told me was an Alibaba business. Five of the thirteen Euro 24 official sponsors, in other words, are ...

  A "massive cushion" of madness IRINA SLAV The Cambridge Dictionary  defines  madness as “stupid or dangerous behaviour”. It also lists a few dozen synonyms, featuring words such as “chaos”, “bedlam”, and “confusion”. All of these can and should be used to describe several recent updates from Camp Transition. In one of these, I’d go as far as to use the lovely set phrase “stark, raving mad” and it’s not the one you’re thinking of, namely the latest gift from the IEA. But let’s start with that gift. Earlier this week, the IEA made all the headlines in the world by  warning  of a looming oil supply excess— a horrible overhang (which the IEA called “a massive cushion”) of 8 million barrels daily that is to materialise before 2030 while demand growth slows down because the IEA said it would slow down, so there can be no question about it. The IEA itself, true to character, called the expected supply surplus, or rather the spare production  capacity  surpl...