Trump’s Treasury nominee warns of US economic crisis

Energy News BeatTreasury

 

The middle class will face the largest tax hike in history unless cuts made during Trump’s first term are extended, Scott Bessent has said

Trump’s Treasury nominee warns of US economic crisis

The US is headed towards an economic crisis by year’s end, Scott Bessent, US President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, has warned. During his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, the former hedge fund manager predicted that the country would face a “gigantic” middle class tax increase in a few months unless it extends the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which is set to expire at the end of 2025.

The TCJA was a major tax reform law signed by Trump during his first term in office in December 2017. It reduced individual and corporate tax rates, nearly doubled the standard deduction, and introduced a 20% income deduction for small businesses. While corporate tax cuts were made permanent, individual provisions are set to expire at the end of 2025.

“Americans are barreling towards an economic crisis at year’s end,” Bessent told the Senate. He warned that if the tax cuts expire as scheduled at the end of the year, “Americans will face the largest tax increase in history, a crushing 4 trillion tax hike.”

Bessent praised Trump’s tax reform, noting that Americans “saw the power of these cuts” before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and interrupted their implementation, and that they were “a great success.”

Bessent added that unless the tax cuts are “renewed and extended,” the US “will be facing an economic calamity,” with the middle-class likely bearing the brunt of the fallout.

“We will see a gigantic middle class tax increase, we will see the child tax credit halved, we will see the deductions halved, so it will be – what we call in economics – it has the potential for what we call a sudden stop,” he warned, referring to a term characterized by an abrupt reduction of capital flows into a nation’s economy, which is often accompanied by economic recessions and market corrections.

Bessent’s remarks come amid a broader debate over US fiscal policy. While Republicans have been advocating for extending the tax cuts to sustain economic growth, critics argue that the TCJA disproportionately benefited higher-income individuals and contributed to the national deficit.

Bessent’s comments sharply contrast with remarks made earlier this week by outgoing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. At the New York Association for Business Economics on Wednesday, Yellen warned that policies including a full extension of the 2017 cuts could “exacerbate projected deficits” by around $4 trillion through 2034. She slammed calls for extending the cuts as “misguided economic policymaking,” and warned they “could undermine our country’s strength, from the resilience of the Treasury market to the value of the dollar, even provoking a debt crisis in the future.”

Source: Rt.com

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Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting backtracks on nuclear

Energy News Beatnuclear

 

Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz has concluded a nuclear energy revival in Germany is unrealistic, despite his party’s long-standing criticism of the timing of the country’s nuclear phase-out.

The front-runner to become Germany’s next leader after the February 23 elections, Merz has pulled back from a previous goal of restoring Germany’s nuclear reactors.

“They are being dismantled, they are being decontaminated. There is no way to fix this, most likely”, the centre-right CDU leader said this week at a meeting with a conservative workers’ union.

Chances of reactivation were “lower by the week”, Merz added.

Germany decommissioned its last three operating nuclear power plants in April 2023, following a 2011 decision by then-chancellor and fellow CDU member Angela Merkel.

Despite accepting that the country’s nuclear phaseout is now a done deal, Merz this week called the original decision to exit the technology a “grave strategic mistake”.

Merz’s concession that nuclear is likely dead in Germany comes despite a promise in his party’s election manifesto to examine “the possibility of restarting operations at the nuclear power plants that were recently shut down.”

The manifesto also alludes to “research into fourth and fifth generation nuclear energy, small modular reactors and fusion power plants.” While this would appear to leave a glimmer of hope for Germany’s nuclear advocates, the probability of such technologies ever becoming viable for energy generation is unclear.

The party has not commented on whether it has shifted its position following Merz’s remarks.

Germany’s exit from nuclear has been politically fraught, especially as a planned closure of the country’s last remaining plants coincided with the 2022 energy crisis. Chancellor Olaf Scholz ultimately ordered the remaining three nuclear power stations to keep running for four more months during the 2022/23 winter.

Since then, politicians have traded accusations on who should have done what.

In 2024 a conservative-established parliamentary committee investigated accusations that Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a member of the Green party, pressed ahead with the final shut down based on green “ideology”, and with disregard for the country’s energy security.

Scientists and plant operators  weighed in during those deliberations, stating that it would be “unrealistic” to put existing power stations back into operation, and arguing that the construction of new plants would take more than a decade and come at great expense.

While internal written exchanges from the ministry’s internal communication proved controversial, scientists and operators concluded the plants’ decommissioning had never put Germany’s energy security in danger.

Habeck told the committee that his ministry had worked “without a pre-determining outcome based on ideology”.

[Edited by DC/OM]

Source: Euractiv.com

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What Does Trump Want in Greenland?

Energy News BeatGreenland

The U.S. president-elect’s threats could lead the autonomous Arctic island to negotiate new terms in its relationship with Denmark.

By , a multimedia journalist from the Faroe Islands.

Few would have imagined that just over one month later, Trump Force One, the private family airplane of the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world, would take off from West Palm Beach, Florida, and head to Nuuk’s new 2,200-meter runway. On board was Donald Trump Jr., who was on what seemed to be a public relations trip following his father’s stated desire to gain “ownership and control of Greenland.”

This is not the first time U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has voiced his desire to own the biggest island in the world, but this time is different because he has refused to assure the world that military force won’t be used. “The fact that he can’t assure us that he won’t use military force creates uncertainty,” said Bibi Nathansen, a journalist at Greenlandic broadcaster KNR. “What is it that he wants? Does he want more military bases here? Is he going to take Greenland by force?”


Trump’s rekindled interest in Greenland is the latest instance of superpower interest in the island. As Foreign Policy has previously reported, Greenland’s mineral wealth, the opening of shorter polar shipping routes due to melting ice, and the area’s security importance as the last barrier before North America in the event of a Russian attack have all been mentioned as reasons for its geopolitical significance. Moreover, China has tried to use Greenland to gain a foothold in the Arctic on several occasions, both with investment in potential construction of airports and mining. U.S. interest in Greenland largely has been about keeping out China, which controls most of the world’s rare minerals.

Most political parties on the autonomous island want to work toward total independence from Denmark. The wish for independence has roots going back decades, but it has grown stronger in the last 15      years. In recent years, there has also been growing tension about Denmark still controlling Greenlandic foreign policy, with Greenlandic politicians wanting more power to influence how geopolitics play out on their island.

Now, Trump’s comments have thrown local politics into turmoil—a development that could strengthen the island’s independence movement in its upcoming election, which are set to be held before April 6. The recent turmoil has shed light on how important Greenland is in global geopolitics and could hand the independence movement a strong campaign issue—advocating for talks with Denmark about more autonomy.


Greenland’s prime minister, Múte B. Egede, has expressed a desire to gain more control over the island’s foreign policy, which would mean more independence without cutting ties to its former imperial ruler. “It could go both ways,” said Kuupik Kleist, who was prime minister of Greenland from 2009 to 2013. “Today, Greenlanders are aggrieved by Trump’s latest comments about military and economic power.”

“It is now time to take the next step for our country,” Egede announced in his New Year’s address. His speech could have been an opening move in the election campaign, although one analysis predicted that there could be a referendum on total independence within the next election period. However, that was before Trump mentioned military and economic might as potential leverage to gain “ownership” of Greenland.

Denmark colonized Greenland in 1721, when Hans Egede, a Danish Norwegian missionary, first stepped on the ice in Nuuk. The island remained under Danish control until World War II, when the United States occupied and defended it. When the Danes moved back in after the war, they incorporated the island further by making it a Danish county. What followed was a catastrophic period of so-called modernization. People were forced to abandon their lifestyles in small villages to take up jobs in the bigger cities. The scars of imperial times have not healed, and in recent years, a new focus has been put on Danish sins in Greenland.

In 2022, Denmark apologized and provided compensation to six Greenlanders, who were the last surviving among 22 kids taken away from their families and sent to Denmark for boarding school as part of a 1950s modernization experiment. Last December, Egede commented on yet another scandal from the 1960s and ’70s, in which Greenlandic girls as young as 13 years old had IUDs inserted without their consent, ostensibly to control population growth. He called it a “genocide.”

However, while the shadows of imperialism still dominate Greenlandic policy, the island is not a colony or county of Denmark anymore. In 1979, Greenland gained home rule, and in 2009 it signed the Self-Government Act. Today, Denmark still controls security and foreign policy, while most internal affairs, including policy about the mining rights for rare minerals, in which Trump (and perhaps Elon Musk) has an interest, is under full Greenlandic control.

Greenland’s economy still depends on an annual financial support grant from Denmark, which amounts to around $500 million annually (around 20 percent of the island’s GDP).  Some see mining as a way to become more economically independent, with one of the companies that wants to mine optimistically claiming that Greenland would get 1.5 billion Danish kroner (around $206 million) a year. However, there is a catch: If Greenland earns more than 75 million Danish kroner (around $10 million), the grant will be reduced. “If there is anything I could change with the self-government agreement, it would be that,” said Kleist, who became a consultant for one of the big mining projects in the country after leaving politics. “All the income should go to Greenland without offset in the Danish financial support.”

The upcoming election “should be a wake-up call for the Danish government that if they want to preserve the union with the Faroe Islands and Greenland, they have to make a greater effort,” Kleist said. Maria Ackrén, professor      at the University of Greenland, said that Trump’s comments could have sparked long-needed negotiations on Greenland’s relationship with the Danish Kingdom     . “What has been discussed is … free association or some sort of commonwealth or looser union with Denmark,” she said, adding that any new relationship would have to be approved by Greenlanders in a referendum.

Trump’s comments could also create a new kind of unity between Denmark and Greenland, if the government manages to negotiate more independence, which seems likely. “Danish and Greenlandic politicians all agree that Greenland is not for sale. That they agree that Greenlanders are not a commodity that can be sold, but a people,” said Nathansen.      .


One recurring theme in the reaction to Trump’s statements has been shock—particularly at the comments that he wanted control over the island’s security. Denmark is one of Washington’s closest allies, and while Denmark resumed governing the island after World War II, the United States kept a military base there that is still active today. “The United States can already do whatever they want in Greenland militarily,” Kleist said.

Rasmus G. Bertelsen, a professor of international relations in Tromso, Norway, agreed. “In the last 10-15 years, the United States has pressured Denmark to pressure Greenland to exclude Chinese investment,” he explained. “But then you can ask yourself: In order to make sure that there’s no Chinese investment, science, or technology in Greenland, does the United States need to take over Greenland?”

The answer is obvious. On several occasions, Chinese investors were ready to open up for business in Greenland, but Denmark prevented it. When Greenland decided to start construction on two airports, including the one in Nuuk, Americans and Danes voiced concern that a Chinese construction firm was preapproved for the work on the critical infrastructure. The result was that the Danish prime minister at the time, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, and Kim Kielsen, then prime minister of Greenland, decided to explore Danish funding. In the end, the Danish government provided part of the funding for the airport to prevent Chinese investment.

“We in Europe have created, in my view, a very misleading narrative that the United States has been altruistic and benevolent to Europe,” Bertelsen explained. Trump might be more honest about Washington’s motives. “Now it’s just going to go for a transactional version, where there is no pretense of benevolence, there’s no pretense of being altruistic, there’s no pretense of providing global public goods.”


When Trump Force One returned to Florida, Trump Jr. was equipped with PR videos of Greenlanders in MAGA caps, telling Americans they were ready to be bought. One of the other passengers, conservative policy influencer Charlie Kirk, produced a nine-minute video about why Greenland should become “state 51.”

He talked about how rich Greenland could be with all the “rubies the size of baseballs” in the northern part of the island and all the other minerals in the ground just waiting to be taken up. “America should want those resources for our country,” Kirk said in the video and explained how the “socialist Greta Thunberg environmentalists from Copenhagen” couldn’t make the mining happen. In addition to the ridiculous statement that Denmark, which was ranked as the second-simplest place in the world to do business in the Global Business Complexity Index in 2023, is socialist, Kirk missed one key point: Greenlanders alone decided not to mine for      rare minerals because of the fear of radioactive waste. Greenland’s last national election effectively became a referendum on the mines in the southern part of the island, and Greenlanders voted for the party that promised to halt the mining projects for environmental reasons—and has done so.

Trump may be on people’s minds when they go to the polls in the coming months. Recently, one of Greenland’s two representatives in the Danish Parliament, Aki-Mathilda Hoegh-Dam, called for Greenland to become an independent state. And when the Danish and Greenlandic leaders met with the press on Jan. 10, the message from Egede was clear. “Greenlanders don’t want to be Danish, and they don’t want to be American. They want to be Greenlandic,” he said.

In the foreground are about half a dozen small buildings close to the shore of an ocean bay. Several of the buildings are painted blue or green, but most of the paint is weather-faded from the elements. Out beyond the bay, a pale white iceberg larger than all the buildings combined floats on the water.

In the foreground are about half a dozen small buildings close to the shore of an ocean bay. Several of the buildings are painted blue or green, but most of the paint is weather-faded from the elements. Out beyond the bay, a pale white iceberg larger than all the buildings combined floats on the water.

Source: Foreignpolicy.com

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The Renewable Energy Reckoning: Challenges, Failures, and 2025 Policy Shifts

Energy News Beat

In the Energy News Beat – Conversation in Energy with Stuart Turley talks with Steve Goreham about the key energy challenges for 2025, including rising electricity demand driven by AI, EV slowdowns, and grid capacity struggles, alongside potential policy shifts under the Trump administration. It critiques the environmental and economic viability of renewables like wind, solar, and EVs, highlighting issues such as land use, fragility, rising insurance costs, and reliance on subsidies. Germany’s energy policy failures and California’s regulatory influence are discussed, with emphasis on the need for practical solutions over ideological approaches. Steve Goreham concludes by sharing insights from his books and promoting balanced energy perspectives.

Thank you, Steve, for stopping by the podcast for our second interview. I appreciate your leadership and books in the energy space and recommend everyone check them out. – Stu

Amazon Green Energy Breakdown https://a.co/d/aE7jZU9

‘Highlights of the Podcast

00:00 – Intro

01:08 – Key energy issues: electricity demand, EV slowdown, and Trump’s policies.

02:17 – Rollbacks of emissions regulations.

04:26 – Inflation Reduction Act impacts.

05:46 – Germany’s renewable energy failures.

07:47 – AI-driven electricity demand.

09:07 – Texas grid challenges.

10:26 – Land requirements for renewables.

11:48 – Solar panel fragility and insurance issues.

13:20 – Rising EV insurance and battery costs.

15:10 – EPA waivers and California’s influence.

24:32 – Offshore wind turbine risks.

26:30 – Wind farm disposal and subsidies.

27:32 – Criticism of green technology’s impact.

29:05 – Steve shares contact info and promotes books.

 

Click the graphic to buy the book on Amazon.

Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure

Energy News Beat

We cover the global energy landscape and bring unmatched insights into the energy business. Follow us @ www.energynewsbeat.com
By Stu Turley

Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podca st. My name’s Stu Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group. Today is a special day. I’ve got a fantastic friend of the show and he is back. His name is Steve Gorham. He wrote the book Green Energy to break down the Coming of the Renewable Energy Failure. And I mean, it is a van tastic book that has aged well. Welcome, Steve. And we’re so glad you’re here today.

Steve Goreham [00:00:36] Hey, still great to join you again. Thanks so much and happy New Year.

Stuart Turley [00:00:40] Happy New Year. And I’ll tell you, with the new administration coming in, Steve, can you give us some of your thoughts on, you know, when we sit back and take a look? President Trump has said he’s going to end the E.V. mandates. And then you sit back and take a look at He’s also committed to reducing our cost of energy to consumers by 50% in the first year. Holy smokes, Batman. That is a huge commitment.

 

Steve Goreham [00:01:08] Well, that would be that would be special. He tends to exaggerate a little bit the new president. But yeah, 2025 could be the year that doom is green energy, not only in the United States but around the world. We have four big or big things going on. One is, is the rise of electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence. The second is the electric vehicle slowdown around the world, everywhere but China. Wind, solar and battery problems in many, many places on the grid and elsewhere. And then the new Trump administration policies. So it could be a big, big year of change.

Stuart Turley [00:01:40] I like the way you say big, big year of change. We’re as we are recording this, Kamala Harris got to be the first woman to ever certify her own loss as a presidential candidate. That was pretty cool.

Steve Goreham [00:01:56] Yeah, that is a special one. I like the way Mr. Trump has moved forward. You can see he’s learned so much from the first administration, as I recall, in 2016. It took him about six months to even get his cabinet people nominated. Now he’s got everybody all the way down 2 or 3 levels that have been proposed. Yeah, So it’s moving. They’re moving much, much faster than they did two terms ago.

Stuart Turley [00:02:17] You know, and when you take a look at the trifecta, Doug Burgum for Interior, Lee Zeldin for EPA and Chris Wray for Energy secretary, that three Musketeer group is phenomenal. And I think that you take it rid of the regulatory issues and you got Chris right, who knows energy inside and out and everything from nuclear to oil and gas. And I mean, he is a top notch guy. I think you’re going to have a heck of a team on the energy front.

Steve Goreham [00:02:53] Well, I think so. We’ll have to see how much they can do. Lee Zeldin, for example, there are three big things that the EPA put forward this year. Collections on power plant emissions. And those are being challenged in court by about 20 states. Regulations on vehicle emissions, automobiles to get like 60% by the year 2032. That’s being challenged by a number of companies. And then the California waiver that’s been granted on heavy trucks and on EVs and other things. Right. Those are all things that I think could be reversed or the they by the Trump Justice Department may not choose to defend these court suits. I mean, they may just let them fall away. We’ll just have to see. So there are some really, really big changes that could happen as far as the EPA. Right. And then, as you know, we have this inflation reduction act passed in 2023 that is just doubling vast amounts of money into renewables. It was the Cato Institute that’s estimating well, during the the first the Biden administration, it was about $15 Billion a year in subsidies, tax credits, other things going to renewables went down. Some under President Trump’s come up again under Biden. But with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Cato Institute says it’s going to be $80 billion in fiscal year 2025. Just huge amounts of taxpayer money going to all these crazy projects like carbon dioxide capture and storage, carbon pipelines, charging stations, offshore wind. And I think Mr. Trump has said he’s going to reverse a lot of that now since that’s a congressional act. They’ll have to pass some acts limited, I think. Right. And we’ll see if they can get that through Congress.

Stuart Turley [00:04:27] That’s going to be a tough one. And I love Dan Bongino when he calls it the poor keyless bill. I absolutely love that. You know, Dan Bongino is just a cool, cool cat. But when we sit back and take a look like the today when we’re recording this podcast, President Biden put the moratorium on oil and gas drilling. And even though everybody’s saying, Trump can go ahead and turn it back around, you know, it’s going to take years to unwind the way that they have done this, from what I understand. And. It is a absolute despicable act. It’s not going to stop drilling for tomorrow. It’s not going to stop drilling in the next month. But it is a slowdown of years in, quite honestly, natural gas length. Steve, let’s take Germany for half of the sake. Germany, with their evil policies and their green energy policies have failed. They got rid of their nukes. They tried to do wind and solar. They had to fire their, their coal plants back up. And and they have gone into full de-industrialization mode. And they’re a poster child for your book. They used to be the poster child for war. Clean, clean energy.

 

Steve Goreham [00:05:46] Yeah, they’ve they’ve really ruined their energy and they’ve relied, as you said, on two things. One is wind and solar and the other is imported natural gas, which they were getting for many years from Russia. What happened was the wind and solar has been having problems blowing in 2021. People don’t realize before the Russians invaded Ukraine, there was a summer when wind output was down more than 20%. And so in 2021, they burn natural gas all year. And by the end of the year, the price of natural gas in Europe had gone up by a factor of five, five times as expensive as it was. And then Russia invaded Ukraine and it just skyrocketed. And so if it wasn’t for the US and Qatar shipping liquefied natural gas, people would have been without heat all during the winters. And and but yeah, as you say, right now, natural gas is about three times the price in the US, electricity in Denmark and Germany where they have all those wind turbines three times the US price amongst the highest in the world and their industries can’t make it, many of them moving out chemicals and fertilizer and a lot of other things.

Stuart Turley [00:06:48] It’s just they lost the oldest steel mill. And I mean, that is that’s how you make cars. The engineering they’ve d industrialized.

Steve Goreham [00:06:58] And their auto industry is in terrible shape as well. They have a lot of problems with electric vehicles. Now EVs are down in Europe. They lost share in this last year and they have all these mandates and the consumers just don’t really want them except for maybe the wealthy or somebody with a second car. And so they just they’ve created all sorts of problems and they keep you know, they keep doubling down on all this stuff.

Stuart Turley [00:07:22] Do you in this past week, it was pretty amazing. I would have never I did not have on my bingo card that I think Saturday when I saw that Germany has bought more uranium. They haven’t even fired their coal, their their nuclear plants back online or failed to turn them back on. But they’re already buying the uranium because they know they’re going to need it from Russia.

Steve Goreham [00:07:47] Interesting. Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s a lot of talk about about a nuclear resurgence. We should talk a little bit about the demand in the United States. Yes, the demand is for electricity is something that’s new and it’s really going to stop the green energy movement in its tracks. So over the last two decades, we’ve had basically flat electricity demand in the United States, about 4.2 million gigawatt hours, almost no change. Right. But all of a sudden, we have well, there’s a number of green things going on and they want to shift to electric vehicles. They want to shift to heat pumps and away from gas appliances. And the US government, in all its wisdom, wants to produce billions of kilograms of green hydrogen. And every every kilogram of green Green hydrogen requires 50 to 55 kilowatt hours of electricity about running a house on two days. But then biggest of all is this new drive for artificial intelligence, said GPT came out about two years ago and all of the utilities in United States are blindsided. Texas, for example, recorded a record load in 2023 of 85GW. But because of the high, they’re now projecting they’re going to need 150GW. They’re going to need to almost double it by 2030. And, you know, they don’t know how to do this. Virginia, how do you.

 

Stuart Turley [00:09:00] How do you double that Texas Ercot grid in five years? Steve Well, I don’t know how we do that.

Steve Goreham [00:09:07] I know I don’t know how they’re going to do it. So you’ve seen the headlines. So what’s going on? There’s there’s a bunch of things happening. The first off is the nation’s going to have to stop shutting down coal plants. And we’re already seeing that, you know, they’re extending the nuclear plants. Those are the ones getting all the headlines. There’s a new nuclear plant being or other a nuclear power plant being restarted in Michigan. The Palisades plant, a Microsoft is contracted for a restart of one of the Three Mile Island generators for the utility.

 

Stuart Turley [00:09:36] They’re not have that on my bingo card.

Steve Goreham [00:09:38] You know, they’re extending the the Diablo Canyon plant in California. So they’re extending all these nuclear plant and nuclear plants. And then we’re having this we’re seeing the same thing with coal plants. Other one, two, two plants in Utah, two plants in Wyoming, two plants in West Virginia that have been extended that were scheduled for shutdown. And now we’re looking at Tennessee and Maryland and other places to extend these coal plants. And we’re still not going to have enough. So the Green Movement already sees this coming and they’re starting to wheel in their teeth. So so the wind and solar just can’t handle this? No, it takes 100 times the land to get the same output from wind and solar as a coal, a nuclear or a natural gas plant. There’s just no way you can do it. And so this is going to stop the green movement, its tracks. And when Mr. Trump comes in and pulls all the subsidies out, too, it’s going to further, further shift the dynamic.

Stuart Turley [00:10:27] You sent over a graphic and the massive amounts of land required by 2050, wind and solar is 220,000mi². You’ve got the whole almost the the the states. We’re going to have this brought in in this podcast for our listeners. That’s almost all the swing states.

 

 

Steve Goreham [00:10:47] Yeah. This was about it’s worth about six states. So this was from a study called Net zero America by Princeton University in 2020. And Princeton is a renewables fan. But they said to go from 10% renewable electricity at that time to 50% renewable by 2050 would require 228,000mi² of incremental land. And that’s more than six states. I mean, this is something that is never going to happen.

Stuart Turley [00:11:12] No.

Steve Goreham [00:11:13] And we’re already see a lot that we’re seeing a lot of local local opposition. I’m trying to think of a gentleman who tracks this.

Stuart Turley [00:11:19] And Steve, I read something the other day that the solar panels you also sent over a storm damages to solar farms is incredible. I mean, a hail farm in Texas just wipes it out. Sorry, but edit hail farms, find a way to do that. And I read somewhere that they were saying that the solar panel farms can absolutely be more devastating to the environment than nuclear waste than our nuclear fleet.

 

Steve Goreham [00:11:48] Well, they do blanket the blanket, the area. And, you know, I mentioned this 100 to 1 land difference that comes from scientists by name of Clive Small in Canada. He actually wrote it wrote a book that looked at the the footprint of different electrical power sources. And he counted everything. He counted pipelines and waste pits and mines and everything. And he found that if you set a nuclear at about one unit of electricity for one unit of land, natural gas and coal are about the same. But solar and wind require more than 100 times the land to produce that same one unit of electricity. So so these are just these are just huge, huge costs in terms of land and build out. And then, you know, you can’t use enough land. There’s no way you can be able to serve the the air revolution on this. And you mentioned you mentioned the weather fragility. One of the things about about having you know, if you if you put coal or nuclear, you put it in a site, a building or gas. Yeah. And, you know, it’s pretty well protected from something like hail. But we’re now having more and more solar fields that are being destroyed by hail. So, you know, we’ve had three major ones in the last year that have been completely trashed. And the the insurance claims for hail damaged for solar or solar averaged about $58 million per claim. And they are going up and up. And the cost of of insuring these these solar facilities has gone up by as much as 400% in some cases. Or they put a limit on the policy coverage of like 10 or 15 million. So again, just another reason why why wind and solar have are having these problems.

Stuart Turley [00:13:20] Now, insurance also in the EV space has been a huge, huge issue because those things a way bunch their tires way more and the everybody’s complaining about the insurance on an even quadrupling I mean it’s been nuts.

Steve Goreham [00:13:38] Yeah the number I had is that on average good spots of yours are 70% more expensive in the US and in the UK, I think they’re much, much more expensive. And the other thing is, you know, if you get into a minor accident and you damage the battery in any way, there’s no way to to fix the battery, you have to replace the whole thing. And that’s like a 4000 to $20,000 charge. And so you have people like Hertz Rental that is getting rid of all or even, say, in a matter of fact, the CEO, I forget his name, but he was forced to step down because he he committed to buy all these electric vehicles from Tesla and others. And then when they.

Stuart Turley [00:14:09] Hit the market, did not like him for.

Steve Goreham [00:14:11] No. And they have to mark them down. You know, Hertz is in the not only the rental business, but they’re in the auto business as well. They buy cars and then they resell them. Right. And and in one year, the price of their their car, their EV car stock went down 30% and they had to write all that off. And so, yeah, they got rid of the CEO at Hertz, but there’s just a bunch of a bunch of issues with these things. But again, the problem is that we have we have many state governments and the Biden administration that wants to force everybody to get an electric vehicle thinking that they can stop the rise of the oceans if they do that. And that’s that’s 100 superstition. And now it’s it’s all sort of caving in.

Stuart Turley [00:14:47] In that in that well. And you have Governor Newsom in the I believe there’s what, 17 states with Governor Newsom that have state laws that have California and acts and EPA of a something. They can follow along on theirs. So he has reach through the follow along state legislatures. It’s just amazing to me about that reach.

Steve Goreham [00:15:11] Well, that’s a problem. The EPA has been granting waivers to California for many years on air pollution. It was it was set up in the 1970 Clean Air Act, I believe, because California already had some laws about air pollution, which was fine. But it’s become a situation where the EPA rubberstamp everything that California does. And then we have a bunch of other states that follow it as well. So we got all these crazy rules about things like heavy trucks, which are going to be impossible to electrify. But we’ll see. We’ll see what the Trump administration does. I think this maybe some of these may be a rollback or they may they may remove those waivers and that’s going to cause some big, big changes.

Stuart Turley [00:15:49] I’ll tell you, I’m I’m trying to get together some things for Doug Burgum, for the interior, as well as Lee Zeldin and Chris. Right. Chris Right. Has been on the podcast and he is a cool cat.

Steve Goreham [00:16:02] Yeah.

Stuart Turley [00:16:03] Absolutely. Love Chris. Right. And if we can get a panel together and some things I’d love to lean on you on some of these things and help see if we can help tee it up for them because I don’t know that they’re going to need every, every arrow in their quiver to help overcome the Biden administration landmines, if you would.

Steve Goreham [00:16:26] It’s going to be difficult. Bunch of those are guaranteed by X and in the case of the EPA, by the rulemaking, which takes a long time, but there’s many, many things could be done. Chris Right. First off, he needs to kind of purge all the the Department of Energy websites and say, you know, we’ve got all this global warming thing and if we do, all these things will stop the oceans from rising.

Stuart Turley [00:16:45] Is not a global warming friendly person at all.

Steve Goreham [00:16:49] I mean, that’s that’s one of the things that needs to be done. I mentioned three things about the EPA, the power plant emissions, car emissions, and then the waivers to California. Those need to be rolled back. Yep. The the ban on export terminal. So Mr. Trump put into place a natural gas export export terminals. As we were talking earlier, I presented to the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association this last year the price of natural gas in Pennsylvania is so low that they can’t make any money on it. They have so much gas and they can’t get it to market. States like New York have block pipelines. They’ve got to send it down to the Gulf. What we really need is a natural gas export terminal on the Delaware River. And we could ship a lot of the gas all over the world. We could reduce pollution from things like burning wood and charcoal and things that are causing problems for people. So that would be a big thing that could be done. What a.

Stuart Turley [00:17:40] Great idea. And putting a floating station in could happen quick.

Steve Goreham [00:17:44] Yeah, maybe. I don’t know the details on that, but but possibly they’re doing some of that in Europe. I think the floating stations for offloading.

Stuart Turley [00:17:50] Like Vietnam just put in a LNG import direct to power. So that is a very, very smooth and fast way to a power station by bringing in a floating import facility. It it it’s faster. And I and I love what President Trump has said. If anybody is going to be investing in the United States and you want to bring in did you see when he was interviewing that or bringing forward that gentleman that was bringing in billions of dollars, 100 billion? And then he stood there and he says, are you going to invest 100 billion? What about making it 2 million?

Steve Goreham [00:18:26] 200?

Stuart Turley [00:18:28] They get 200 billion. I love President Trump for doing that. That was funny. But that’s the kind of thing your comment bringing in a gas facility for Pennsylvania to be able to to get up to New York. But Governor Hochul just signed the the bill that is climate reparations against the oil companies. Yeah, she is an absolute I got to make sure I don’t lose my podcasts and nut job, I think is what I was going to say.

Steve Goreham [00:19:03] Well, I think this is the second time a state has done it. I think Connecticut did it recently as well. We’ve had a lot of these suits in the past, but typically they’ve been cities or counties. Right. Of the city of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, a lot of these different cities, I think Denver, Colorado, or counties have have sued the oil companies, claiming that they’re getting rid of snow. They’re doing all sorts of things, causing dangerous climate change, causing the oceans to rise. Those have all been defeated. I don’t think there’s a single case in the United States when monetary damages have been awarded to a group away from the oil companies. The only place where where legal action has been successful, I think, is when groups sue the states and force the states to reconsider. The courts have said, well, state, you have to reconsider. But but in the case of Connecticut, in New York now, this is the first time that states have actually brought suits against and we.

Stuart Turley [00:19:54] Don’t know the judges that may be either Obama or Biden. Appointed judges. It may end up in law fair.

Steve Goreham [00:20:03] Well, this is not a you know, it’s it’s like this ocean race thing. If you go to a site on Nassau. Nassau estimates that oceans have risen 120m since in the last 20,000 years, 390ft. And we’ve only had human carbon dioxide emissions since about 1940. And the oceans have risen about four inches since that time. So four inches out of 390ft. Yeah, everybody everybody’s out there suing them for sea level rise. You know, this is just this is beyond anything sensible. This is modern superstition.

Stuart Turley [00:20:33] Have you ever seen the. I just saw this on tech talk over the weekend. A guy has got a glass of water. He puts a big ice chunk in it. Yeah. Puts and he starts melting that big ice jug and the water stays the same level.

Steve Goreham [00:20:50] It doesn’t change much. No. Well, that’s the case for the Arctic, which the ice is floating. What climate scientists will tell you, though, if the Greenland ice melts or the Antarctic ice and seals are on land masses, that would cause a big rise in ocean levels. Right. But again, there’s really not any evidence that the only rational solution to ocean rise and even to climate change is adaptation. You do it. Netherlands has done for centuries now. They build seawalls. They build islands. Right. Thinking we’re all going to drive an electric car and we’re going to stop the oceans from rising. That’s that’s just foolish stuff.

Stuart Turley [00:21:23] And Spain has had horrific flooding right now, but now nobody is asking the question, Steve, The U.N. mandated Spain take 200 dams out to make it more natural and that eliminate flood control. So it was no climate change. It was dam change.

Steve Goreham [00:21:48] Well, that’s what California is in the process of doing. And Washington’s considering, too. And they all say, well, you know, this is but they don’t think about the flood control issue. You know, I used to present what happened in 1861, the great California flood of 1861.

Stuart Turley [00:22:03] Yeah.

Steve Goreham [00:22:03] They literally got a year’s worth of rain over a few days. And in in January, the Mojave Desert looked like an ocean. They got something like like, well, I forget what the totals were, but there was a there was a guy who toured the the by the way, they had ten foot of water in Sacramento and the government was moved to San Francisco till the water went down. And then in this in the Sacramento Valley, the water got up to the the poles. These were telegraph poles at the time. It was 20ft high from the western mountains to the eastern mountains had flooded thousands of farms. A fifth of the cattle in California were killed from that one incident. And that’s the power of what weather can do, what nature can do. Since then, they built a lot of dams, and I think that makes a big difference. But if you start pulling those out, you may end up with problems again.

Stuart Turley [00:22:49] And it’s why so many people died in Spain and everything else. And you just have to sit back and go. What happened to logic, Steve? I mean, when you and I grew up, things were a little bit more logical than they are now.

Steve Goreham [00:23:01] Yeah, well, the ideology of climate system is powerful, and the fear that people get of of that comes from all the media and everything else. And education is powerful. But, you know, we’re going to see this turn around in the next few decades. We could have a couple of decades of cooling. You never know. It’s very hard to predict future global temperatures, I think.

Stuart Turley [00:23:18] And, you know, one of the things that I found very disturbing is if we if we would get rid of geoengineering and I and I know that geo everybody says, Kim trails are are that there’s too much evidence out there of all of them just absolutely let’s not spend any money or get all that money out if it isn’t happening. It just seems nuts to me that they’re spending all that money.

Steve Goreham [00:23:44] Well, we’ll get we’re going to get big changes here and we’ll just have to see what what goes on with the new administration. You know, these these offshore wind turbines are another thing. Yeah. We have Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Connecticut and New Jersey and New York and a bunch of states building these things offshore. But, you know, we had one wind turbine break up off the coast of Massachusetts, a single blade that was 300ft long fell off a wind turbine, and it produced five truckloads of plastic debris on the beaches. That was a single blade. Wait till we get a hurricane that goes through some of these these these fields of of Virginia Beach or or Long Island or wherever. They’re going to have a just a massive mess. These things are not in Europe. They have a lot of these, but they don’t get the storms that we got. So just another another problem waiting to happen.

 

Stuart Turley [00:24:33] With this in the in the microplastics that come off of those blades. What was horrific after talking to a marine biologist about this is the marine biology, the people that actually know science. We’re just absolutely stunned by how dangerous the wind farms are.

Steve Goreham [00:24:52] Well, the again, we’re not and they do take measures, you know, to protect these blades. They have the. The blades, turn in the wind and be feathered. The problem is that near the eye of a tropical storm of a hurricane, the winds change instantaneously from one direction to another and too fast for anything to react. So I shipped you a slide that shows all the from from Noah, that shows all these storm tracks around New Jersey. And in 170 years, there were 77 hurricanes or tropical storms. That’s about one every two and a half years. Boy, you have one of those come through a wind farm and they’re going to have a mess far beyond what they saw in Massachusetts this year.

Stuart Turley [00:25:29] My goodness. Yes. We will definitely have this in the show notes and they will be there. That is a heck of a storm pattern. Add to it 26 hurricanes, 51 top tropical storms and 170 years. Well, you know, and you sit back and your map, your data and your research is amazing when you consider they they are never a wind farm is never fiscally responsible from day one. The only reason it is able to be put up is because of subsidies and tax incentives. And then after five years, the maintenance numbers that I’ve been able to pull together, the average farm is applying for new money so they can upgrade the turbines and get more particulates. I mean, inflation reduction money. So instead of lasting 20 and 30 years, they have the best potential of 5 to 10.

Steve Goreham [00:26:31] Yeah, I think the tax cut is going to run out in ten years as well. So they they need to renew to get those. Yeah.

Stuart Turley [00:26:37] And it’s just amazing.

Steve Goreham [00:26:39] What do you do with the blades when they run out to you? You know, right now we have the blades that come from Iowa. Wind farms are being shipped to Nebraska because none of the landfills will take them. And I think, well, there are two big.

Stuart Turley [00:26:49] Ones sort.

Steve Goreham [00:26:50] Of in Europe right now, which, you know, doesn’t help with their emissions numbers.

Stuart Turley [00:26:54] I did not see that. Now, I saw that Scotland had taken out 14 million trees, you know, in order to put their wind farms in. And then they got because their wind turbines are turbines, they have to have diesel generators in their design in order to keep them turning enough to get to a certain speed. And when the speed gets up, then they can shut their diesel generators down. And so, you know, here it is. They’ve ruined the wood, they’ve destroyed this, and then they’re burning all this diesel to get the wind generation going.

Steve Goreham [00:27:32] Now, it’s it’s it’s real fortunate, you know, And again, it’s this it’s the basis of all this is to try and reduce CO2 emissions thinking that we can control the climate if we do that. But the climate is much more complex and it it.

Stuart Turley [00:27:45] Is was the shame your forward was by Mark Mills and I absolutely love Mark Mills Mark Mills that book and I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing him twice. And again I’m highly recommending everybody go out and buy this book now tell him Stu sent you and then this is absolutely a net. Zero is nothing more than a wealth transfer, in my opinion. I think net zero is absolutely a financial fiscal policy club The the administration has been using around the world.

Steve Goreham [00:28:21] Thanks.

Stuart Turley [00:28:21] To it isn’t.

Steve Goreham [00:28:22] It is a fun paperback. It’s got a whole bunch of color sidebars in it. A great stories about the one professor that says we should all lead human flesh to control global warming. There’s a there’s another one about a Southern California cosmetic surgeon that was taking tissue from his patients and turning it into his vehicle fuel. He was he was actually prosecuted. That’s not legal to do. But we’re just we’re just filled with crazy energy and climate things in this world right now. And it makes it kind of fun.

Stuart Turley [00:28:47] It does. In fact, there’s a picture of a boneyard wind turbine blade waste near New York. And in Texas, they got a boneyard out there in Texas. And these things are just absolutely horrifically bad for the environment. How do people get a hold of you, Steve?

Steve Goreham [00:29:05] They can go to my.

Stuart Turley [00:29:05] World.com.

Steve Goreham [00:29:07] Ingram Goram AMD com. I’ll send him a signed copy of this book or any of my other three. There’s one called The Mad Mad Mad World of Climate tism. If you have kids in junior high or high school, they need this book to get a more balanced, balanced view.

Stuart Turley [00:29:20] And green outside the green box.

Steve Goreham [00:29:23] Yeah, that’s about sustainable development. And it talks about how the four and the four horsemen, the environmental apocalypse, overpopulation, resource depletion, climate destruction and global pollution. If you look at all of those, the trends are really good. And all of those despite what you read in the press. So it talks about a little broader discussion of all those areas.

Stuart Turley [00:29:42] Right? Well, thank you so much for stopping by the podcast. We’re going to have the staff roll this out as soon as we possibly can. So thank you very much.

Steve Goreham [00:29:50] Stu, always at your service.

Stuart Turley [00:29:51] Hey, we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks.

The post The Renewable Energy Reckoning: Challenges, Failures, and 2025 Policy Shifts appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Kremlin unveils topics for Putin’s talks with Iranian president

Energy News Beat

ENB Pub Note: I have discussed this in great detail in my podcast series with George McMillan, and we still have 10 hours in the production work on the Russia geopolitical issues around pipelines, and Land vs Sea power. The current President Trump administration appears to be missing information from the Biden Adminstration on the key issues around the Russian next steps. Check the interviews out on the Energy News Beat Substack: HERE https://theenergynewsbeat.substack.com/


The leaders are expected to discuss several key issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict and Tehran’s nuclear program

Russian President Vladimir Putin will discuss a wide range of regional and global issues with his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, during a meeting in Moscow on Friday, the Kremlin confirmed on Thursday.

The leaders are expected to sign the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement, which the Kremlin described as a framework for the long-term development of bilateral relations between Russia and Iran.

The agenda for the talks includes recent developments in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and the Israel-Palestine conflict, according to the Kremlin’s statement shared by Russian media on Thursday. Discussions will also cover the South Caucasus region and Tehran’s nuclear program. Following their meeting, Putin and Pezeshkian are scheduled to address the media.

Earlier this week, the Kremlin stated that the two leaders would explore avenues for cooperation in trade, investment, logistics, and transport infrastructure.

Russia and Iran are currently collaborating on the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a major infrastructure project aimed at creating a transport link between India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Central Asia, and Europe. The 7,200-kilometer multi-modal transit system combines ship, rail, and road routes to facilitate cargo movement. According to some expert assessments, it could serve as a secure alternative to the Suez Canal, protecting trade flows from geopolitical risks.

The Kremlin stressed that relations between Moscow and Tehran are “on the rise” and are being strengthened “on the basis of mutual respect,” with both nations considering each other’s interests.

Pezeshkian last visited Russia in October to attend the BRICS Summit in Kazan. At the time, Moscow indicated that relations between the two countries were poised to reach the level of a “comprehensive strategic partnership” in the near future.

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Trump’s Ambitious Week One Agenda

Energy News Beat

He has pledged to take immediate action on issues from border security to trade.

By , a reporter at Foreign Policy, and , a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep, where we are layering up ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, which is set to be the chilliest in 40 years. Brr.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: What to expect during Trump’s first week, Armenia tilts away from Russia, the latest on the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage release deal, and an awkward confirmation hearing typo.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep, where we are layering up ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, which is set to be the chilliest in 40 years. Brr.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: What to expect during Trump’s first week, Armenia tilts away from Russia, the latest on the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage release deal, and an awkward confirmation hearing typo.


Trump’s Big Day

Trump returns to the White House on Monday, and he’s poised to hit the ground running. Trump has promised to take immediate action on issues including border security, trade, and energy and is expected to sign a slew of executive orders to accomplish those goals. According to one tally from Axios, Trump has pledged to do 59 different things on Day 1.

Trump made bold, ambitious commitments while on the campaign trail, including mass deportations and ending the Russia-Ukraine war within “24 hours.” Though Trump is likely to take an aggressive approach in pursuit of his agenda, he’ll still face serious obstacles.

Here’s what you can likely expect from Trump on four key issues during the first week of his second term.

Immigration: Trump has vowed to advance his hard-line immigration agenda on Day 1, including by immediately sealing the U.S. southern border and launching “the largest deportation program in American history.” Stephen Miller, who served as immigration czar during Trump’s first term and is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, has said the incoming president plans to unleash a raft of executive orders on his first day to crack down on illegal immigration.

As part of this effort, Trump has vowed to sign an executive order on his first day in office that terminates birthright citizenship. Since birthright citizenship is a 14th Amendment right that grants U.S. citizenship to individuals born in the United States, and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—regardless of their parents’ immigration or citizenship status (with the exception of children born to foreign diplomats)—expect potential efforts to eliminate it to spark major legal battles.

“My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming, and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries,” Trump said in a video statement in May 2023 about the birthright plan.

There is also significant uncertainty around legal immigration, with memories of the sudden travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries days after his first inauguration in 2017 still echoing. More than a dozen U.S. universities have asked their international students and faculty to return to campus before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 in the event of another travel ban.

Russia-Ukraine war: Just days before Trump takes office, the reality of solving the almost three-year war in a single day appears to have dawned on the president-elect’s team. Trump advisors are now reversing course, admitting for the first time that the Russia-Ukraine war will likely take months to resolve—if not longer.

The strategy for achieving such a landmark agreement, though, remains largely the same. Trump has suggested that he would use the threat of sanctions and military assistance (or the lack thereof) to force Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to come to the negotiating table. He has also appeared willing to bend to some of Moscow’s demands, including the loss of some Ukrainian territory and barring Kyiv from NATO membership.

Sen. Marco Rubio, tapped to be Trump’s secretary of state, reiterated that stance during his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. “There will have to be concessions made by the Russian Federation but also by the Ukrainians and the United States,” Rubio said, adding that “sanctions and the release of sanctions” would have to be part of that conversation.

Rubio also insisted that Trump remains a staunch supporter of NATO. Yet Trump has repeatedly said he plans to place the onus of European security on Europe, suggesting that he wishes for other nations to help carry the burden of future mediation efforts.

Tariffs and trade: Trump has big plans for tariffs, and some of them may be rolled out on Day 1. In a November Truth Social post, he vowed to place 25 percent tariffs on all products from Mexico and Canada as one of his first executive orders. “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” Trump wrote.

In another post that day, he also said he would place an additional 10 percent tariff on goods from China for its role in the fentanyl trade. (He has also separately threatened to hit China with tariffs up to 60 percent.)

Most tariffs undergo months of review before implementation, but Trump could potentially use a 1977 law intended for economic emergencies to levy these tariffs on Day 1.

Energy and climate: Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden made climate policy a key feature of his administration’s agenda, including by funnelling hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, tax incentives, and other grants to clean energy projects over a 10-year period under his flagship climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Trump has said he will immediately roll back many of his predecessor’s policies, including by eliminating what he has called a “ridiculous electric car mandate.” He has also promised to swiftly ramp up fossil fuel production. “Day one and a half, we drill,” he declared in a town hall with Sean Hannity in December 2023. “We drill, baby, drill. Drill, drill, drill.”

“Starting on Day 1, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refiners, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape,” Trump said in September 2024. He also said he would issue an executive order to “make sure that [offshore wind] ends on Day 1” and promised to “terminate” the IRA.


Let’s Get Personnel

The latest Trump nominations:

  • Paul Lawrence, deputy secretary of veterans affairs
  • Casey Mulligan, chief counsel for advocacy for the Small Business Administration
  • Katharine MacGregor, deputy secretary of the interior
  • Steven Bradbury, deputy secretary of transportation
  • Bill Briggs, deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday selected Republican Rep. Rick Crawford to chair the House Intelligence Committee.

Trump on Thursday also announced that he’s tapped three actors—Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone—to be “special envoys” to Hollywood. “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.


On the Button 

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Moscow’s line.  “This is not even up for discussion,” Nikolaoi Patrushev, an aide to Putin, said in an interview with a pro-Kremlin tabloid this week in reference to Kyiv’s push for Moscow to cede control of Ukrainian territories illegally annexed by Russia.

Striking a similar tone, Dmitry Rogozin, a member of the upper chamber of the Russian parliament who represents the occupied Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia, told Gazeta.ru this week that Moscow remains committed to its goal of “de-nazifying” Ukraine, echoing the Kremlin’s widely debunked justification for the war. “We will never return to the state we were in before 2022. Never. Everyone needs to understand this,” he said.

Armenia looks West. Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan was in Washington this week, where he signed a strategic partnership agreement with outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The move will strengthen ties between the United States and the South Caucasus country, which has become disillusioned with Russia, its longtime security guarantor. This month, the Armenian government approved legislation endorsing the country’s pursuit of European Union membership.

“January 2025 may go down as Armenia’s geopolitical inflection point, a time when Yerevan decisively moved to shun its longtime protector Russia and pin its political and economic future on integration with Western institutions, thus scrambling the strategic balance in the Caucasus,” Ani Avetisyan wrote for Eurasianet.

Netanyahu pumps the brakes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said a “last-minute crisis” with Hamas had postponed a cabinet vote to approve the Gaza cease-fire agreement. Netanyahu did not expand on what the crisis entailed. The vote is now expected to occur on Friday.

The delay in finalizing the deal came as far-right ministers threatened to quit Netanyahu’s fragile coalition government if the agreement for a long-sought reprieve from 15 months of brutal fighting moved forward.

Hamas on Thursday said it remained “committed” to the deal, rejecting assertions from Netanyahu that the militant group was reneging on aspects of the agreement. Meanwhile, Blinken said he was “confident” the cease-fire would begin Sunday.


Snapshot 

The six-week Maha Kumbh festival began in India on Monday, a Hindu event that is celebrated roughly once every 144 years and is thought to be the world’s largest gathering of humanity. Some 400 million Hindu pilgrims from around the globe set to bathe in and around the Ganges River.The six-week Maha Kumbh festival began in India on Monday, a Hindu event that is celebrated roughly once every 144 years and is thought to be the world’s largest gathering of humanity. Some 400 million Hindu pilgrims from around the globe set to bathe in and around the Ganges River.

The six-week Maha Kumbh festival began in India on Monday, a Hindu event that is celebrated roughly once every 144 years and is thought to be the world’s largest gathering of humanity. Some 400 million Hindu pilgrims from around the globe set to bathe in and around the Ganges River.Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images


Wonk of the Week

Amy began the week at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where the famed biographer of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Stephen Kotkin, shared his insights on what he termed “borders of defeat”—boundaries established through war and rebellion that are under threat of revision. Such flash points are a throughline among some of the major crises roiling the world today.

“[The Soviet Union’s] borders were borders of victory—they were in Berlin. Now you’ve got borders of defeat. Good luck trying to stabilize relations, getting to detente, getting to an understanding, with borders of defeat,” he said. “Israel? Quintessential borders of defeat, whether from the Iranian point of view or from the Palestinian point of view or many other points of view in the Middle East.”

“South China Sea, Taiwan? Borders of defeat,” Kotkin said. “How do you stabilize relations with these countries when they don’t recognize those borders as advantageous to them the way the Soviet Union did? Good luck.”


Put On Your Radar

Sunday, Jan. 19: The Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage release deal is set to take effect, pending approval by Israel’s war cabinet and parliament.

Monday, Jan. 20: Trump’s inauguration takes place.

The Senate Armed Service Committee is expected to vote on Pete Hegseth’s nomination to serve as U.S. defense secretary.

Monday, Jan. 20, to Thursday, Jan. 24: The World Economic Forum meets in Davos, Switzerland.

Wednesday, Jan. 23: The fifth anniversary of the Chinese city of Wuhan being placed under lockdown in an attempt to control the spread of COVID-19.


Quote of the Week

“Mediocrity has its place in government. We know that all too well,” former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton said on CNN on Thursday, speaking about the president-elect’s cabinet nominees.


 

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Golar’s Macaw produces first LNG at small liquefaction unit in Texas

Energy News Beat

Macaw announced in a social media post on Wednesday it achieved its first LNG from stranded flare in Texas using the F2X mobile unit, turning wasted gas into “clean energy.”

The company did not provide further details.

Golar’s CEO Karl Staubo said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call in November 2024 that Macaw has “produced and sold its first ISO containers produced from flare gas in Texas to industrial clients.”

“We continue to fine-tune operations to adjust for the gas quality variability from associated US shale gas production,” he said.

Staubo revaled in May 2024 that Macaw has successfully developed the pilot LNG production unit named F2X.

One F2X unit can produce about 700 MMbtu of LNG and about 500 MMbtu of NGLs per day.

He said during Golar’s second-quarter results call in August 2024 that Macaw has deployed the first F2X at the live well in Texas.

Staubo also noted that Golar will consider strategic alternatives for the Macaw growth phase once the unit has proven stable operations on live well production.

Golar’s quarterly presentation showed that Macaw signed joint development agreements with “multiple clients” across the US, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia.

The company is also in talks with customers in Brazil and Peru, according to the presentation.

 

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India boosts LNG imports

Energy News Beat

The country imported 3.22 billion cubic meters, or about 2.5 million metric tonnes, of LNG in December via long-term contracts and spot purchases, preliminary data from the oil ministry’s Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell shows.

This marks a rise of 18.2 percent compared to the same month in 2023, PPAC said.

PPAC’s data previously showed that LNG imports rose in November, October, September, August, July, and June last year compared to the previous year.

During April-December India took 28.58 bcm of LNG, or about 21.8 million metric tonnes, up by 24.1 percent compared to the same period last year, according to PPAC.

India paid $1.2 billion for December LNG imports, up from $1.1 billion in December 2023, The country paid $11.7 billion in the April-December period, up from $9.8 billion in the same period in 2023, PPAC said.

Moreover, India’s natural gas production reached about 3.06 bcm in December, a drop of 2.1 percent from the corresponding month.

Natural gas production of 27.31 bcm in April-December was up by 0.4 percent compared to the same period in 2023.

Total natural gas consumption for December 2024 rose 7.1 percent year-on-year to 6.04 bcm, while March-December consumption increased 11,6 percent to 55.49 bcm, PPAC said.

India imports LNG via seven facilities with a combined capacity of about 47.7 million tonnes per year.

These include Petronet LNG’s Dahej and Kochi terminals, Shell’s Hazira terminal, and the Dabhol LNG, Ennore LNG, Mundra LNG, and Dhamra LNG terminal.

Also, Hindustan Petroleum expects its 5 mtpa Chhara LNG import terminal in India’s Gujarat to enter commercial operations soon after the facility receives its commissioning cargo.

PPAC said that during April-November last year, the 17.5 mtpa Dahej terminal operated at 101.6 percent capacity, while the 5.2 mtpa Hazira terminal operated at 40.9 percent capacity.

The 5 mtpa Dhamra LNG terminal operated at 24.4 percent capacity, the 5 mtpa Dabhol LNG terminal operated at 39.4 percent capacity, the 5 mtpa Kochi LNG terminal operated at 22.1 percent capacity, the 5 mtpa Ennore LNG terminal operated at 24.4 percent capacity, and the 5 mtpa Mundra LNG terminal operated at 24.5 percent capacity.

In October, Petronet launched two 180,000-cbm LNG storage tanks at its Dahej terminal in western Gujarat state.

The company is expanding the terminal with about 5 mtpa of new capacity, which should be available by March 2025.

 

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Bulgaria’s parliament approves new government after months of coalition talks

Energy News Beat

[[{“value”:”

Bulgaria’s parliament approved on Thursday a cabinet led by Rossen Zhelyazkov, a former parliament speaker, ending months of negotiations on forming a coalition government.

The centre-right GERB party came first following a snap election in October, the seventh held in Bulgaria in four years, but has had to hold tough talks with other political parties to form a government.

One hundred twenty-five lawmakers in the 240-seat legislature approved Zhelyazkov’s proposed cabinet on Thursday, opening the way for a new government to take office.

GERB’s coalition partners are the pro-Russian Bulgarian Socialist Party (S&D) and the populist There is Such a People, led by former TV presenter Slavi Trifonov. With the three forces falling short of the 121 MPs needed for a majority, Ahmed Dogan’s party, which represents the ethnic Turkish minority, said it would support the coalition without being part of it.

A coalition between a centre-right, centre-left, and populist force appears unlikely. However, commentators say that the parties behind Zhelyazkov’s cabinet share important similarities: conservative thinking and a national populist bias.

In this coalition bloc, the difference lies in the pro-Kremlin sympathies, which are strongly expressed in the socialist party and less so in the others.

“Bulgaria needs a regular government that will implement policies supporting the democratic rule of law, the competitiveness of the economy, security, and protecting citizens’ social rights,” Zhelyazkov told the parliament ahead of the vote.

Zhelyazkov pledged that his government would help the country enter the eurozone. The country is indeed very close to meeting the criteria for accession, but public opinion remains divided, fearing a price rise.

All the remaining parties will be in opposition.

The leader of the far-right and ultranationalist “Vazrazhdane” party, Kostadin Kostadinov, said that the new government begins with two “betrayals” and will end with two funerals—of the socialist party and “There is such a people.” According to him, the voters of these two formations have been deceived, and they will look for an alternative in the next elections.

Nikolay Denkov, former prime minister from the reformist ‘We Continue the Change’, said his force will be a “constructive and critical opposition”. “We will have experts for each minister to monitor their actions”, said Kiril Petkov, co-president of ‘We Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria’.

Radostin Vassilev from the small populist party ‘MECH’ (sword) declared the cabinet a “government of absolute unprincipledness.”

Delyan Peevski, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms – New Beginning party, which fights for the ethnic minorities’ electorate, said, “Something very unclean was finally born”. He ironically congratulated Boyko Borissov, the leader of GERB, for bringing together “those who have denied him for years”.

(Georgi Gotev | Euractiv.com)

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‘Chinese’ hacking of US Treasury went to the top – Bloomberg

Energy News Beat

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The computers of Secretary Janet Yellen and two of her aides we compromised in the December breach, sources have claimed

‘Chinese’ hacking of US Treasury went to the top – Bloomberg‘Chinese’ hacking of US Treasury went to the top – Bloomberg

Suspected Chinese hackers gained access to the computer used by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for work in a breach last December, Bloomberg News said on Friday, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The attackers infiltrated over 400 laptop and desktop computers, exploiting a vulnerability in third-party software to defeat the network’s defenses, the Treasury previously reported to Congress.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Yellen, Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo, and Acting Under Secretary Brad Smith are on the list of people whose stations were compromised. Less than 50 files were accessed on the machine of the head of the department, they said.

The US government identified a hacker group known as ‘Silk Typhoon’ and ‘UNC5221’, which Washington describes as sponsored by the Chinese government, as the party behind the hack. Beijing has denied any involvement in the incident.

The company BeyondTrust, whose software exposed government computers to infiltration, detected the breach and informed the US authorities about it. Hackers managed to obtain a security key, used by the vendor for remote technical support of customers in the Treasury, its report said.


READ MORE:
US Treasury accuses China of hacking its workstations

Around 3,000 files were reportedly compromised, as well as some sensitive data, such as usernames of Treasury employees, but classified materials and the department’s email systems remained secure, investigators said. The attackers were allegedly interested in the department’s work to enforce unilateral economic restrictions, which the US imposes on other nations.

The Chinese government has accused Washington of using hacking incidents on its soil to tarnish Beijing’s reputation and justify its sanctions policy.

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