Radical Energy Policies & Players Reaping A Whirlwind?

Is Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer a radical environmentalist bent on defeating the good parts of her agenda by bending reality? Case in point might be her looking to shut down the Enbridge pipeline during a national gas shortage.

In a Washington Post op ed, she explained how the pipeline pumping crude oil through a 5-mile cross-section of Lake Michigan & Lake Huron is a “ticking time bomb” & she’s going to take “every action I can to shut them down.” She was referring to a rupture in another part of the pipeline network operated by Enbridge a decade ago & the obvious dangers another could trigger under a public water way. But, then, transporting crude oil by rail or truck overland also entails big environmental risks far more often, if less catastrophically, than pipelines. Meanwhile, she’s trying to shut down a future pipeline rupture in the middle of a cyber attack that paused 50% of the gas to the East Coast & set off crippling gas shortages, including regular gas prices of $3-$7 per gallon. Is her lawsuit trying to “cap” the amount of oil being pumped by Enbridge a brilliant preventative move or another example of liberal overkill, a pipeline death sentence, that will lead to even more price hikes?

Likewise, we learn in WSJ’s “Natural Gas, America’s No. 1 Power Source, Already Has a New Challenger: Batteries.” Again, the problem is not so much the good idea of combining renewable energy & battery-enable electricity storage to compete with very cheap natural gas energy as it is with moving way too fast to implement it. Think the recent Great Texas Freeze Fiasco due largely to moving the state’s power grid to renewables too fast too soon. Now, even tho “battery storage remains less than 1% of America’s electricity market”, investors in the new (if unperfected) technology are “threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments” because of fears natural gas 10 years from now might be a “stranded asset.” In this case, is it possible the market place AND government are teaming up to set up yet more energy chaos?

Davd Soul