As we enter the season of Thanksgiving, we find ourselves most thankful for this information (as reported by The Washington Examiner from the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt):
“Virtually all oil and gas companies are planning further exploitation of fossil fuels, [a] report found, pouring $160 billion dollars into exploration since 2020. None of this investment is compatible with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) route to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and limiting the climate crisis, the report said.”
While we are devout conservationists, we are not environmental suicidists. And those investments by oil and natural gas companies certainly are a positive signal for energy-rich areas such as Western Pennsylvania.
For those companies are refusing to be beaten into submission by Gang Green, which would rather see the limbs of the state, national and world economies turn dark, rot and fall off, one by one by one by one.
We’re also thankful that the incoming Shapiro administration in Harrisburg is embracing, rather than eschewing, the Keystone State’s natural gas resources.
And we’re also thankful for the news that shale gas impact fees paid to local Pennsylvania communities is, as the Post-Gazette reports it, “on track to yield a record $275 million this year, largely on the back of high natural gas prices and a slight uptick in the number of new wells drilled.”
“A new analysis from the state’s Independent Fiscal Office anticipates there will be 570 new horizontal wells subject to the annual fee in 2022, an increase from 514 in 2021 and 465 in 2020, when both decreased drilling and a crash in the price of natural gas drove impact fee revenue down to $146 million. Last year, it recovered to $243 million,” the P-G report notes.
And all this the gangsters of the green movement consider to be “frightening.”
Of course, it is. For it means that the free market and those who understand it and make it work are pushing back against the command economists (who know not fundamental economics) seeking to destroy capitalism, prosperity and life as we know it.
Surely, we are engaged in hyperbole or worse, right. Hardly.
Here’s how Jim Hoft, founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, characterized the ramping up mission of the ecocratic left on Thursday:
“These globalists are on a mission to destroy not only the individual freedom that millions of Westerners have enjoyed in the Post-World War II era, but they also plan to destroy the market capitalism that led to a prosperous middle class.
“As long as the middle class is prosperous, it remains independent and capable of critical thinking,” Hoft wrote. “Wipe out their wealth and you wipe out their ability to think independently and make their own decisions.”
John Kerry, the Biden administration’s “climate envoy,” admitted as much in his Cop27 speech, Hoft notes, when he said:
“We need to create demand signals in the market where they didn’t exist.”
Hoft’s spot-on translation:
“They want to artificially create demand where none exists for electric cars, fake meat grown in labs, replacing animal protein with crickets and other insects, solar and wind power in place of reliable coal and oil.”
Of course, that’s not how capitalism works, Hoft reminds. “But that’s what they’re going to try to force upon the world through ESGs (environmental, social, and governance investing ) and a Chinese point system that punishes those businesses and individuals who refuse to go along with the new system of government and corporate coercion.”
Again, we all should be thankful that there’s growing resistance in the traditional energy sector against the New World Orderists who, left unchallenged and unchecked, will create a dysfunction and disorder the likes of which Planet Earth has never known.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
