“Opponents of oil and gas have increasingly targeted energy projects through misinformation, protests, lawfare and misinformation, hurting a strategic U.S. industry that employs more than 11 million Americans, and negatively impacting our country’s economic stability.” (Energy Transfer, below)

Pragmatic rent-seeking by crony capitalists is a major problem in the United States. Political capitalism allows “the worst of get on top,” while misallocating resources from consumer to governmental ends. Think of Ken Lay of Enron. James E. Rogers of Public Service of Indiana/Duke Energy. John “beyond petroleum” Browne … Ben van Beurden of Royal Dutch Shell… GE’s Jeff Immelt… T. Boone Pickens … John Hofmeister. The wind and solar crowd. Even Kelcy Warren, co-founder and chairman of Energy Transfer, the subject of this post.

As a Houston Chronicle editorial stated on Monday:

A few of Trump’s Texas-based allies and donors stand to make a killing off Biden’s climate law.

“Under the proposed deregulation plan, data centers would not need to worry about grid reliability to keep their business running. The two parties can make their own reliability arrangements, involving engineering (underground connections, backup generation, storage or through contract provisions).”

Data center madness due to artificial intelligence (AI) struck the U.S. Last week. President Donald Trump kicked it off with a strange White House session January 21, as AI gurus announced a $500 billion plan (scaled up from an initial $100 billion bet) to use private money for a veritable plethora of data centers across the entire U.S. The moniker was “Stargate,” not to be confused with “Watergate.”

Joining Trump at the White House meet-and-greet were Open AI founder Sam Altman, Oracle founder Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayosh Son. They would find the money, not ask the government for it.…

This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a free fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete Newsletter for this post can be found here.

Unreliables (General):
*** The True Cost of Industrial Wind Energy
*** Dem Lawmakers Hinder Federal Investigation Into Biden Admin’s $400 Billion Green Energy Loans
Norway Wants to Scrap EU Power Links amid Surging Prices
Former NY Utility Regulator Warns State Lawmakers They’re on the Naughty List

Wind Energy — Offshore:
Floating Offshore Wind Systems in the Impoverished State of Maine

Wind Energy — Other:
*** Osage Tribe Wins Again, Federal Judge Orders Removal of 84 Wind Turbines by Next December
Wind Power Has Hit Its Limits In Europe

Fossil Fuel Energy:
Exxon To Build Large Off-Grid Natural Gas Plants To Exclusively Sell Electricity… AI Data Centers?…

“The contrived sense of accomplishment in history matching is spurious correlation for an infinitesimally small period of time. Using Exxon’s internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is little more than a propaganda tool.”

“Exxon Knew” is a political-lawyer campaign focusing on certain internal company documents to make a case that the oil major knew that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a future threat to human betterment.

Smoking gun? Hardly.

A half century later, the IPCC is still trying to update and figure out physical climate science. Exxon did not do a study on the benefits of CO2 or the offset of sulfur dioxide emissions. The concern way back then was Global Cooling, Peak Oil, and Peak Gas. And as the company knew, fossil fuels had no viable substitute, as in wind and solar.…