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The first-ever offshore wind lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico attracted only one bid, yet the Biden administration called it a victory. The auction of offshore wind development rights in the Gulf of Mexico ended with a single $5.6 million winning bid, reflecting meager demand despite the productivity of oil and gas production in the region. Germany’s RWE won rights to 102,480 acres  off Louisiana, while the other two lease areas on offer off Texas received no bids, according to U.S....

The Biden White House is worried about gas prices now that a number of states have prices over $4 a gallon. Because high gas prices agitate voters, the White House is in discussion with Venezuela again to get Maduro to agree to run “free elections” in return for removing oil sanctions that would put more oil on the global market, thereby reducing oil and gasoline prices. His administration is also in talks with Iran, and that country has been ramping up exports . Biden could easily get...

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...