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California, the seventh-largest U.S. oil producer, has put a near halt on issuing permits for new oil and gas drilling this year. The state’s Geologic Energy Management Division has approved seven new active drilling well permits in the first half of 2023 , which compares with over 200 it had issued by this time last year. The delay in approvals is due to California’s progressive environmental laws and standards against fossil fuels despite its role as a major oil producer and a major...

New car prices are up 25 percent under Biden’s Presidency and they will likely increase further as Biden’s proposed auto efficiency standards will increase automakers’ production costs. In 2018, there were a dozen new car models that sold for less than $20,000, but in 2023, there was only one: the Mitsubishi Mirage, which accounted for about 5,300 of the 7.7 million new vehicles sold  in the United States in the first half of the year and is scheduled to go out of production in two...

Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) has projected that President Biden’s infrastructure bill and his Inflation Reduction Act will save Americans up to $38 billion  on electricity costs over the remainder of the decade, using a version of the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). Despite EIA being part of the DOE, EIA was not asked to perform the analysis using NEMS. That was likely due to the spurious assumptions used by the DOE, as explained...

Hawaii, like California, has pushed electric utilities to invest in renewable energy, rather than maintaining their current transmission lines and ensuring that brush would not affect their operations. Now that Maui has had a fire that has killed over 100 people and cost tens of billions of dollars in property losses, blue state politicians and liberal newspapers like the New York Times have blamed the wildfires on climate change. Hawaii’s Democratic Governor Josh Green repeatedly...

Europe’s plan to slash carbon emissions and reach net zero carbon by 2050 is seeing a backlash as the spiraling cost — both political and economic — needed for the transition is becoming clearer to Europeans. Wind and solar projects are now getting more scrutiny with Siemens indicating huge costs to fix operational problems. A new offshore wind project in the North Sea was canceled due to high costs and the negative effects on the environment  it would create. French President Emmanuel...

The Biden administration is proposing to tighten energy efficiency standards for new residential water heaters--the second-largest energy-using appliances in most households. Heating and cooling are the largest residential use of energy with water heating accounting for about 13 percent of both annual residential energy use and consumer utility costs. If finalized, the proposal would take effect in 2029 . Under the Department of Energy’s proposal, the most commonly-used electric water...

First Solar, an Arizona-based solar-panel manufacturer, expects to receive as much as $710 million this year—nearly 90 percent of its expected operating profit—from federal subsidies meant to encourage domestic renewable energy production. Those incentives could be worth more than $10 billion  for the company over the next decade. The incentives were approved by a Democratic Congress and President Biden last year and taxpayers will be paying the bill. Ten billion dollars is 20 times more...

Last week, the Biden administration issued a proposal by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to increase the average fuel economy of vehicles sold in the United States. Under the proposal, automakers would be required to increase the average mileage of the passenger vehicles they sell by 2 percent  a year for passenger cars, and 4 percent a year for light trucks, between 2027 and 2032. If implemented, the plan means new autos sold in the United States would achieve an...

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has proposed increasing royalty rates for oil and natural gas drilling on federal lands from 12.5 percent to 16.67 percent—about a third higher–and raising the minimum bond paid upon purchasing an individual drilling lease from $10,000 to $150,000. To top it off, they propose raising the minimum bond required for a drilling lease on multiple public lands in a state from $25,000 to $500,000—a 20-fold increase . Developers must...

So far this year, there have been 108 lithium-ion battery fires in New York City, which have injured 66 people and killed 13, up from 98 fires that had injured 40 and killed two at this time last year. The most recent was a fire at an e-bike shop that killed four people near midnight on the morning of June 21 and left two individuals in critical condition and one firefighter with minor injuries. According to Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh , it was “very clear” that the fire was linked...