Reason.com article - We're Not Short on Power

the latest on the Russia Ukraine. Trump apparently not real happy with Vladimir and Putin right now an Zelensky, I guess pulling out of that mineral deal that I thought was kind of negotiated, sort of kind of Plus, you see surgeons are using three D printed organs in the operating room. Just that brief statement about the subject matter, right, we're talking about you see researcher doctor Prasha Robbie, he'll be a guest on at eight forty five to explain

that to us. And I've never done this before, but I got a great reaction to an op ed piece out of Reason the other day. Mark Osterich, who was described as a founding partner of a nonprofit firm Crane and Gray, and the editor of a daily energy newsletter

called Gridbrief. But he did such a beautiful job explaining the bat crap insanity of United States energy policy that I just wanted to bring it back to everybody's attention because I didn't get to it till the very end of the program, and I only read a part of it, but I got so many requests for the link to the article. I've just asked Jostreker to put a link to it on my blog page or podcast blog page

at fifty five caresee dot com. Because when you contemplate his words and they make perfect sense, you realize what a lie and a bill of goods we've been sold on this whole green crap. Anyway, bear with me and enjoy if you haven't heard it before. We're not short on power, we're just too sanctimonious to generate. At the caption of the article, I recall Ontario Premier Doug Ford he threatened at twenty five percent retally on American energy exports, and I know he pulled that off the table, but

that's the predicate for this wonderfully written analysis. And he writes the headline framed as another Trump tariff story Ontario premiere Doug Ford threatening a twenty five percent retaliation in American energy exports. But the real story of the Northeastern energy crisis is more than a cross border drama and goes back well before the tariffs and trumpeting. Ford's threat is the latest lash and a decade's long ritual of

energy self flagellation. US regulators and lawmakers have been kneecapping American energy electricity production with regulation after regulations, smothering new projects in the name of preservation wetlands of the Northeastern bullrush sedge, often before they even break ground. Instead of building up capacity, we import Canadian power to keep the missions off our ledgers like mafia countants, cleverly skirting the law while they convinced the world that they're making us cleaner, greener,

and smarter. Even as the lights flicker and the bills climb. The people paying the price are not in press conferences or policy meetings. They're at home, choosing between groceries and the gas bill. I met them last winter in North Philly. I was there to run focus groups on the impact of rising energy costs. A father talked about replacing olive garden dinners with Spaghettio. It's a shame that little League

wins no longer earned a night out. A grad student turned her one bedroom apartment into a boarding house, three people sharing the space just to keep the lights on. A restaurant owner described her kitchen working in winter coats because they couldn't afford to run the heat. These weren't sob stories, they were quiet portraits of sacrifice and grit. Since then, prices have jumped another seven percent percent despite

our reliance on Canadian imports. In twenty twenty four, this is where we get to the meat of it, folks, the US imported twenty seven thousand, two hundred gigawatt hours of electricity from Canada. That is enough to cover twenty percent of New York supply and fifteen percent of New England's total winter load. Because we've made building new power here nearly impossible and incentivized imported power through regulatory loopholes that allow us to ignore any emissions that happen outside

the United States. It's a simple formula, export emissions, import virtue. Meanwhile, domestic energy products in the Northeast stall, sputter or collapse. We're sitting on four hundred and sixty nine billion tons of coal, two point nine trillion cubic feet of gas, and centuries of nuclear fuel. But in the United States, building power plants now requires a legal team and decades of hearings. We've turned power generation into a theater of guilt.

We're producing energy in the United States is too sinful to permit, but importing it from somewhere else lets us feel pure. It's not policy, it's penance. In twenty twenty one, New York shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, one of its last sources of zero emissions based load power. That same year, New York began ramping up electricity imports from Canada to fill the gap, bringing in seven thousand,

six hundred gigawatt hours. Hydro electric power alone couldn't handle the demand, so Ontario's gas plants fired up to meet the demand, releasing an estimated one million tons of carbon dioxide plant food. But because those emissions occurred north of the border, New York claimed to drop in its own energy sector emissions. And that's the game. When Canadian hydro falters, Canadian gas steps in, but the emissions vanish on US. Climate ledgers turned to Vermont, importing over eighty percent of

its electricity. Massachusetts and much of the rest of New England operate from the same playbook. The grid operators they belong to import around fifteen percent of its winter peak from Canada. When hydro output dropped eighteen percent due to drought,

gas peaker plants and fossil fuels save the day. In twenty twenty three alone, utilities in Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick generated an estimated thirteen point four million metric tons of carbon dioxide plant food, none of which appear on the emission ledgers of states like Massachusetts and Vermont, despite

their heavily reliance unimported power from those provinces. Meanwhile, the twelve hundred megawat Commonwealth wind project was canceled outright after a developer paid fifty million dollars to walk away, citing financial infeasibility and permitting delays. This is not a glitch in the system. Is the system and I love this line. A nineteen to ninety nine rule by the Environmental Protection Agency allows states to treat imported electricity as emissions free,

regardless of how it's generated. I don't make the rules, man, I just think them up and write them down. It's a convenient accounting trick that lets politicians hit climate targets without actually reducing actual emissions. At the same time, domestic energy projects face a labyrinth of legal, regulatory, and activist roadblocks thanks to laws like Title VIV of the Clean Air Act and a permitting system that treats any new

infrastructure as a threat until proven otherwise. We've built the political culture that worships the optics of clean energy while punishing the act of actually producing it. Across the Northeast, domestic energy projects don't just struggle. They're buried. Offshore wind collapses under lawsuits over fishing rights in ocean views, small modular reactors gathered dust in regulatory limbo. Pipelines are killed

over silt and wetlands. Nuclear plants drowned in litigation. In twenty sixteen, New York veto to the Constitution pipeline, leaving the Marcella Shale untapped. Two years later, during a brutal cults in a Massachusetts imported liquefied natural gas from Russia rather than lay pipe from Pennsylvania. A proposed forty two megawat biomass plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, was blocked on a technicality in twenty twenty one after years of permit delays

and concerns over quote unquote environmental justice. Clean local energy was too controversial, imported emissions no comment. Altogether, the region has canceled enough projects to generate forty two thousand gigawatt hours annually, more than fifty percent above the power we imported from Canada in twenty twenty four. We're not out of energy, we just outlawed reality. We pretend its progress, We pretend the air is cleaner. We pretend that exporting

emissions is environmentalism. It's not. It's theater for climate lobbies, campaign sound bites, and activists to measure success and press releases, not power output. The emissions remain, only the guilt is outsourced. So No Ford's tariff thread isn't the story. It's just the headline. The real story is what made that threat possible. Our addiction to imported virtue, our refusal to build in a regulatory culture that punishes the very act of producing energy.

We're not short on power, we're just too sanctimonious to generate it. Thank you for indulging me on that I thought he made awesome points. And isn't it crazy the nineteen ninety nine rule imported electricity is emissions free. They could be using the dirtiest coal plants on the planet in Canada, but because that smoke isn't coming out of the state of New York or ver modern New Jersey,

its counts as emissions free. You see the nonsense. And all this we import products from China, the component products for all these environmentally correct green electric vehicles, with the exception of teslas, which apparently you're not allowed to drive anymore because well, yeah, evil space man, they come from coal plants, energy generated by coal plants in China. Aren't we all breathing the same air on this globe of ours?

Don't the winds flow? And it is an amazing reality that one volcanic eruption can negate all of the efforts to get rid of carbon from the atmosphere. And again, carbon dioxide's plant food. It's plant food. It's a lie, man, We are living a lie. This climate religion has got people so damned delusional that they just you buy into this six seventeen fifty five Kerosite talk station. I just I just woke up in some sort of parallel universe. I just don't know when it happened.