energy

ANWR Lease Sale…

by MyBaconPress

Cons have been threatening to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil and gas exploration because, of course they have. What, after all, is profitable about a refuge? To heck with that. Oil, baby. Because nothing says ‘moving forward’ like tying ourselves to yesterday’s energy source for years to come. Since it IS the among the stupidest choices humans might make, leave it to 47 to make it. And – spoiler alert – he did.

Last Friday, officials held an oil and gas lease sale. It was the third lease sale since 2021. Republicans included it in Lying Don’s “Big, Ugly Bill.” They’ve mandated at least four lease sales through 2035, each offering 400,000 acres. The first sale happened at the end of 47’s first term, in 2021. No major oil companies bid and only one smaller local operation, Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) participated.

The second offering was made during 2025, at the end of the Biden administration. No bids were made. Now this one. Again, no major oil companies participated and only two Alaska companies, HEX Energy, LLC and AIDEA participated. Only five of the 58 bids on offer received bids.

If you hate animals and people alike – like Team Evil – you think the sale was a great success. BLM Director Steve Pearce contrasted the Trump administration policies to those of the Biden administration in a statement he released: “This lease sale is another important step toward restoring American Energy Dominance and responsibly developing the vast resources Congress directed us to make available in the Coastal Plain,” Pearce said. “The previous administration did everything in its power to discourage industry from development in the Coastal Plain. The strong industry interest we saw today reflects confidence in Alaska’s resource potential and the Trump administration’s commitment to providing certainty for investment.”

All the standard tropes. Oh, “American Energy Dominance.” Sure, in yesterday’s energy source. The sun is the future whether cons like it or not. “The strong industry interest we saw” didn’t include any of the major players. How strong was it? And the regime’s “commitment to providing certainty for investment?” Could there BE a less certain investment?

See, on the other side, people don’t want the comparatively small amount of oil under ANWR to be developed over the sanctity of the refuge. There’s a LOT of pushback. Leases have changed hands, but, so far, nobody is drilling. That’s because the leases are NOT a “certain investment.”

The opposition includes the Gwich’in Steering Committee, which represents Gwich’in Athabascan tribal members in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. They released a statement that read, “the result of today’s lease sale speaks for itself. Yet again, no major oil and gas companies showed up to bid, because they know that drilling in the Arctic Refuge is a losing proposition.” Their focus is mostly on protecting the landscape for wildlife. But there’s economic failure, too.

Another opposing organization, Taxpayers for Common Sense, pointed out the fiscal folly in their own statement. The Vice-President of the organization, Autumn Hanna, wrote: “From two previous failed lease sales that delivered less than 1% of promised revenue, taxpayers already know that drilling in the Arctic Refuge is a bad deal. Today’s lease sale is yet another reminder that oil and gas development in the Refuge is high-risk, low reward with zero interest from real industry players. Americans will not see relief at the pump and, instead, face greater risks from the drilling in a sensitive region.”

There were a LOT of other voices in opposition, too, and that’s the main problem. Would YOU invest the millions of dollars necessary to develop your lease knowing every day the lease might be suspended or shut down entirely? You might. And you might lose all of that money.

This is an amazing, stunningly stupid fight, working to secure more of yesterday’s technology. But then, I’m learning, daily, that FAR too many Americans are amazingly, stunningly stupid. I mean, some people will believe anything. We need oil for all kinds of products so, sure, let’s burn it all up in our gas tanks. Why not? Oh, because it’s heating the Earth and threatening our biosphere?

What part of ‘maximizing shareholder profit’ do I not understand? The simple truth is, oil prices can be manipulated in ways solar can not and greed says, ‘keep using oil, good idea or bad.’ Greed kills, and I’d call that bad…

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Yeah, yeah, California takes a while to count their ballots. BFD. I’d rather they get it right, than get it quickly. Californians use a LOT of mail-in ballots and they get counted after the polling place ballots. It takes longer but it’s accurate. Our National Embarrassment, the Drumpfster, is just certain that means the election is “rigged.” When it comes to Donny, you can choose demented or stupid, but those are really the only choices.

He has never ONCE offered even the slightest evidence of his assertion – and he’s delusional. I wouldn’t take his word for what day of the week it is without a calendar nearby. I’m not even talking about verifiable proof, either. Just a little supporting evidence of his claim. Nope. Can’t do that. Why not? Well, because he doesn’t have any! He just wants you to believe him, like he just wants you to believe the economy is booming, despite all of the available evidence to the contrary.

He’s just angry that his preferred bootlicker, Spencer Pratt, has fallen a little behind Nithya Raman for second place in the race. That might leave Raman facing off against Karen Bass in November with Pratt outside looking in, and where Donny can’t get toadies, he sees cheating. I suspect Pratt only did as well as he did because he’s on television and people recognize him, and he might still move into second position. It takes a while to count votes in California – because we get it right…

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Think about this. Elon buys Twitter for $44 billion dollars and immediately transforms it into Brand X, a conservative hell-hole of misinformation, rendering the site nearly useless to decent people and hurting the value. But it got rid of Twitter.

Skydance paid $8 billion dollars for Paramount, the parent company of CBS, then removes their best late night host, Stephen Colbert, replacing him with hack comedians, and then goes on the attack against one of it’s flagship shows, ’60 Minutes.’ Lovely. CBS is being quickly transformed into a network nearly useless to decent people and hurting the value. But it’s getting rid of ’60 Minutes.’ Hell, it’s getting rid of CBS.

That $44 billion and the $8 billion are just pocket change to those guys. It’s like you buying a candy bar and deciding you don’t like it. You can throw it away without lamenting the loss of the couple of bucks you spent buying it. It’s just as easy for them to “throw away” billions of dollars to get rid of something THEY don’t like. But in both cases, the public has suffered.

The end result of letting people and companies pile up so much cash is their ability to corrupt society in whatever way they see fit. After the revolution, let’s go back to limiting how much people and companies can control through aggressive taxation in a specific effort to redistribute wealth. You want to make America Great Again? That includes a 92% top tax bracket. That’s what it was the LAST time America was great. The two went hand-in-hand…

An Empty US Cup…

by MyBaconPress

A while back, I wrote that the one thing a person might be able to argue as a “success” for 47 was his “border control.” The reason I suggest it’s only an arguable success is that he accomplished his greatest achievement by being overtly cruel and unreasonable, but, it seems to have worked. NOBODY wants to come to the US anymore. One can only guess at how many want to get the hell out.

So, in a completely unrelated topic, the World Cup is getting ready to play out. Oh, I guess it IS related, since whole blocks of hotel reservations are being canceled at an alarming rate. Well, alarming to the hotel industry. They’re being canceled because of that line up there, ‘NOBODY wants to come to the US anymore.’

The World Cup is being played out this year among three different countries, Canada, Mexico, and the US. I’m thinking two of those countries are going to feel a real economic boom from the impact of tourism. That third country there? The US? Yeah, there’s going to be an economic impact there, too. I just suspect it’s not going to be so much of a boom and more of a bomb. Nice work, Donny. It seems like everything you touch turns to…well, you know…

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Kevin Warsh is the guy 47 wants to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair. 47 wants Warsh because Warsh is a loyal toady who will manipulate interest rates as dictated by 47, who destroys everything he touches, or, perhaps, Warsh’s own investment needs. He’ll be the richest Fed Chair in history. He sat for the Senate Banking Committee confirmation hearing and said, get this, that the Fed would be “independent of the White House.”

He managed to say it with a straight face, too. Nobody in the room believed him, of course, but the Republicans all acted like it was straight from God’s lips, near reverential. Powell’s term ends in the middle of May. He says he’s staying so long as he’s being investigated. 47 says otherwise. Sooner or later, 47 is going to get his way. When he does, the dollar is going on a roller coaster that likely ends with deadly crashes…

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I saw a clip of Fox Not-News mouthpiece Jessie Waters, whose own mother doesn’t seem to like him much, saying that Virginia had “gerrymandered the state” in the recent election where Democrats just won a new mid-term district mapping battle. He was close to right. What he meant to say was “RE-gerrymandered the state.” It had already been gerrymandered to the Republicans benefit. That’s okay in the Republican mind. That didn’t become a bad thing until Democrats did it back to them. Now it’s a real outrage…

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Climate change is real. A broad swath of people in our failing nation insist otherwise. Climate change doesn’t care WHAT they say and just keeps getting worse. It’s caused by lots of things but one of the main things is burning fossil fuels. Obviously, making gas and selling it is legal. It just also happens to contribute to environmental devastation, wreaking havoc where ever it goes.

The link between burning fossil fuels and climate change is clear and proven so various environmental groups are suing oil producers, trying to get them to take some responsibility for their actions. Mostly, they want the oil producers to clean up their act – literally. Republicans in Congress are currently working to shield large oil companies from their responsibilities.

They are trying to pass a bill called the ‘Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026,’ because getting the oil companies to clean up their messes is a “shakedown.” If they succeed in this thing, the new federal legislation would dismiss pending climate accountability lawsuits, void all climate Superfund laws, and block similar future efforts. Good for oil. Bad for the planet, worse for humans.

It seems the industry is on the move. Right now, they know they have a small window to use a large-enough group of greedy but stupid people to protect them from their actions. To be clear, they want to keep doing what they’re doing, regardless of the cost. They just don’t want to be held responsible. And the Republicans are working overtime trying to help.

Remember when immoral Republicans in Congress passed the ‘Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act’ in 2005? That one protected gun makers from the consequences associated with the use of their product. Now innocent victims of gun violence can often NOT get redress through the courts because of that law and the oil industry is using it as a model to try and shield themselves from culpability.

Every day, it feels like the Republicans have gone all in. Every day it looks like the cons are close to losing power and they need to get all of their evil legislation passed and in place before that happens. Have you ever seen one of those boxes full of money blowing in the air? A person goes in and for a minute or so tries to grab and pocket as much of the money as they can. That’s how conservative lawmaking looks to me, today. They want it all and they’ve only got a short time left to try and get it.

I, for one, don’t think governments should be protecting industries from the effects of their businesses…

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Ah, Capitalism. “Build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” Right? Not so much. Still thinking about climate change, the world should be pushing to get off of burning fossil fuels as quickly as it can and electric cars are one good source to do that. If we continue the mousetrap-as-car metaphor, the best mousetrap in the world is made in China.

US car manufacturers DID beat a path to a door, too. The door to the White House, where a corrupt President slapped such high tariffs on the Chinese cars, they can’t be brought into the US. The US manufacturers know they can’t compete with the Chinese cars. Can’t? Won’t, more likely. And now, because of mealy-mouthed politicians, they won’t have to.

But nobody gets to tell me we live in a Capitalist society when competition is NOT king. If the Chinese build a better car, they build a better car. If competing car companies can’t match that car, the Chinese are going to clean up. Capitalism. The minute you ban that open competition, you’re banning Capitalism. Regardless of the stories you might hear, this is why American-made electric vehicles cost so much.

I suspect if this were a truly Capitalist nation, the Chinese car company BYD would have dealerships in every city and ‘Tesla’ would only describe Nikola again…