Tuesday, October 19, 2021

It Turns Out The World Still Needs Coal

 

A Liebherr mining truck at dusk at Peabody's North Antelope Rochelle Mine in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming (photo via Peabody Energy). 



When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn

And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County?
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

(see full lyric + audio


from Zero Hedge

Readers may remember President Biden ran on shutting down coal mining as part of his overall campaign against fossil fuels

And as President, Biden has called for a transition away from coal towards "renewable" energy (solar and wind). 

Today's energy crunch is partly due to a decline in production during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, but it's also due to a misguided focus on green, or renewable energy, as Noah Rothman noted earlier this month:

The sloppy, blinkered effort to transition away from fossil fuels to hypothetical sources of power that cannot meet the energy consumption needs of the planet due to the constraints imposed on them by the laws of physics is an obstacle to meeting “newly minted environmental, social and governance standards for clean energy.”

And a prime beneficiary of that has been Peabody Energy (BTU), whose shares spiked 23% on Monday after the company announced that its coal revenue in Q3 would be the highest in seven quarters and it offered bullish forward guidance. 

A Top Name Last Summer 

Peabody was one of our system's top names last summer, and appeared in a portfolio we shared here at the time (Building A Bear Proof Portfolio). It has also appeared in aggressive portfolios of ours as recently as last week. 

This is the hedged portfolio we presented in that article in July. In addition to Peabody Energy, it included the ProShares Ultra Bloomberg Natural Gas ETF (BOIL), Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF), Generac Holdings (GNRC), Green Plains (GPRE), and Overstock (OSTK), and Cassava Sciences (SAVA). 

These and subsequent screen captures are via Portfolio Armor

Why Those Names

Each trading day, our system analyzes total returns and options market sentiment to estimate potential returns for thousands of stocks and ETFs. The underlying securities above were selected because they were among our top names: the ones that had the highest potential returns, net of hedging costs. Our system started with roughly equal dollar amounts of each, and then rounded them down to round lots, to reduce hedging costs. It swept up most of the leftover cash from the rounding-down process into a tightly hedged Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF) position, to further reduce hedging cost. 


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Europe's Energy Crisis Exposes Green Fraud

: Picture: netzerowatch.com

Vladimir Putin has been celebrating the recent and much reported European energy crisis, knowing that withouout his doing anything, thanks to the obsessive pandrering to Greta Thunberg and the green lobby political leaders ion the UK and EU member states Russia has been handed control of European markets, with the option of manipulating supply chains and prices at the same time. In the meantime the European nations have failed to sufficiently diversify supply. While the UK government creastes an artificial petrol shortage and blames it on a lack of tanker drivers, the whole of Europe faces a long hard winter of electricity blackouts because green policies dictested investments in unsustainable sources of 'sustainable' power , closed down coal generating plants and abandoned nuclear, leabing most EU member states dependent on Russian natural gas for electricity generation and domestic fuel.

At the same time, since oil price-indexed long-term contracts with Russia for oil and natral gas supplieds were thrown out, full control of European energy market powers have been handed to National Oil Companies, such as Gazprom.

European leaders desperately need to reconsider their somewhat hostile position on Russian gas supplies and the future role of the NordStream 2 sub - Baltic pipeline, which is still being threatened by US sanctions and Eastern European opposition.

It seems that Vladimir Putin is holding all the aces when it comes negotiating terms for natural gas supplies to Europe. Without substantially more natural gas supply to Europe, consumers and industry may well be facing a winter of discontent. Europe’s gas supply diversification strategy has been a failure, not only due to EU tactics and regulations but also because of the ongoing one-sided emphasis on a rapid energy transition to intermittent 'sustainable' sources like wind and solar while regulating hydrocarbons out of the equation. This divestment of the most reliable energy source for supplying base load round the clock, seven days a week, and the full-scale investments and heavy subsidisation of unreliable 'renewables', while ignoring the fact that the backbone of the European economic system is still hydrocarbon fueled demonstrates how all over the developed world the cult of scientism has replaced rational thinking with green dogma.

The current crisis and the greater one looming as winter deepens, shows one main fact of life, the claimed success of the energy transition is not based on a a well managed approach to energy policy but on virtue signalling alone. By relying too much on renewables, the market has become destabilized, but politicians and others refuse to admit they were wrong and change course. Destabilization could and should have been prevented, by acknowledging the fact that for the foreseeable future hydrocarbons, including coal, will play a significant role in the European energy market.

At the same time, European politicians also should acknowledge that without hydrocarbons, not only does energy supply become threatened, but the hydrocarbon based economy suffers. It is not yet fully understood by most, but without hydrocarbons, especially natural gas and oil, food and other primary sectors will be hit hard. The first shutdowns of fertilizer and steel companies have already been reported.  

Brussels, London, Berlin, Paris and even The Hague, should start to change their approach to energy and the 'greening' of the economy. Politicians should start to listen to market analysts that have been warning of a disruption in energy markets.

Instead of pushing 'green' energy from 'sustainable' sources as long-term en,ergy strategy of EU and non - EU European nations should acknowledge the position of hydrocarbons as a foundation of our economies and way of life while investing in other options such as nuclear at the same time. Investments in 'sustainable' (if the wind blows and the sun shines,) sources and in ways of smoothing the supply such as highly effective but hugely expensive and environmentally damaging ways of converting energy into storable forms. The huge battery installations proposed by Elon Musk are a non starter as far as achieving anything other than the enrichment of Elon Musk. For a stable energy supply, diversified sources and domestic production are crucial. Without these, supply giants such as Putin’s Russia are holding all the aces.

The EU’s “green deal” for elimiating net CO2 emissions and Bris Johnson's 'net zero' promises, presented in a way that suggests thy are about saving the planet or at least winning plaudits at the cooming COP conference in Glasgow, but are ambitions that though they tie in neatly with the climate change fearmongering narrative of the United Nations and play on the emotions of rank and file voters but 'net zero' and all that it entails is really a vital component in the push for global hegemony. European leaders may sense that the decarbonisation agenda will force fundamental reform on the world’s economies, and want Europe to be at the front of that technological and policy revolution, but their ambition is built on a false premise. Europe has not lowered the amount of CO2 emitted in producing what it consumes, it has merely offshored its carbon emissions, along with jobs and prosperity to counties like China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Brazil where political leaders do not give a flying fuch about greening the planet so long as their pals and Swiss bank accounts are being regularly serviced.

The EU’s wish to lead the world to green economic meltdown and the UK's decision to beat Europe to it reflects that in matters of environment, political leaders are becoming more and more detached from reality. Green parties are more influential in Europe than rest of the world and leftists masquerading as greens have infiltrated education the law and other institutions of state from where they can influence policy without actually being elected to govern anywhere. They have hijacked the media and are winning the battle for hearts and minds to the extent that other conservative and socialist parties have replicated their agenda. But how much truth is there in this collective guilt tripping and self flagellation. European (including UK) industry operates very efficiently with relatively low emissions. Its cities are pushing ahead with electrified public transport systems and the use of electric vehicles as taxis and delivery vans so that urban economies rely less and less on the car.

Europe’s big green ambitions also mean it has become the first geopolitical area to face the inevitable problems of going green. The political fallout from the current spike in energy prices on top of the civil urest generated by threats to introduce human - rights-violating vaccine poassports and force vaccination on people by denying the unvaccinated access to food supplies, healthcare and other basic ameneties which are nothing to do with eradicating a virus and everything to do with establishing totalitarian government, could possible bring down several very fragile governments. To a writer and commentator such mayhem is the gift that keeps giving but what the current spike in energy prices does is expose the grest fraud perpetrated by the green lobby. Not only is green energy not sustainable 24 hours a day to meet the basseload requirement of a modern, technological economy, it is not economicall viable either, as I will show in subsequent paragraphs. The whole green scare has been driven by leftist green activists who hate corporate business (which they ignorantly refer to as capitalism,) and want to destroy democracy, supported by self serving scie ntists whose only interest lies in securing generous research grants so they can spend their lives playing with mathematical models rather than working in the real world like the rest of us. To make matters worse for us poor punters, this green obsession of governments has led to our energy bills being loaded with green levies to subsidise investors in the underperforming sustaiable generators, wind turbines and solar panels which generate enegy more expensively than traditional methods and, ironically, are not cleaner than modern coal and oil plants but simply move the emissions from the point of generation to the place of manufacture. Politicians don't do long term but even so the imminent prospect of citizens unable to keep the heating and lights on, especially if predictions of a hard winter materialise, all this is the stuff of any government’s nightmare.

Boris Johnson's supposedly Conservative government, which is now operatingt from a position somewhat to the left of Castro's Cuba, has commited itself to a decarbonisation agenda that requires making fossil energy use more expensive , thus hitting the poorest demographic groups hardest. Vaccine passports were always going to be a hard sell, but bundled with fuel poverrty for the poor, energy blackouts, rampant inflation destroying the value of savings and the spending power of earnings, and possible food shortages into the bargain, it now look impossible for Johnson's government to avoid a revold from within their own party. With higher fuel prices are suddenly here and records being broken every week, the UK government and the EU Commission have painted themselves into a corner. Whether leaders can keep a cool head in the current crisis — this is, after all, the continent that spawned the yellow vests - will show whether their aspiration to global green hegemony has any staying power in the face of massive (but largely unreported,) pulic opposition in Frabce, Italy, UK, Netherlands, Spain and to a lesser extent but still sigificantly while the counry experiences political paralysis after another inconclusive election, in Germany.

The political embarrassment and downfall of a few long standing duopolies in the Europe's corridors of power may be satisfyinging to long term sceptivs like myself but will be little consolation for those now facing high bills, higher living costs and reduced spending power. In the longer-term however, the main and most damaging consequence of the failure to secure stable energy supplies for business and domestic users has been to exacerbate the risks of aging distribution grids and power stations by neglecting development of reliable sources in favour of subsidising uneconomic and unreliable wind and solar farms. If governments had not accepted the unscientific disaster movie predictions of tree hugging weirdie beardies by committed to net zero CO2 emissions without seriously considering how this could possibly be achieved, should any of the pedictions of catrastophe from the climate lobby turn out to be true, (and so far, in twenty years of climate scaremongering, none have,)we would be in a position to engineer a smooth trasition to systems less environmentally damaging, rather that forcing on ourselves the panicked solutions of politocians who only think in the short term and "scientists" who have shown time and again that they do not think at all.

A fuel price crisis is every leading politicians second worst nightmare, beaten only by a fuel crisis, there are few things voters will not forgive but driving peole into poverty for the sake of keeping warm, of hving people find no matter how much money they have there is no fuel with which to warm themselves are both unforgivable. In spie of this, leaders in the western world have brought us to the brink of both these unforgivable follies because their lust for power and associated love of a good scare story, especiall an artificial one that will scare voters shitless, and then when nothing really bad happens allow the political control freaks to claim, "We saved you," leaders and their propagandists have spread fear and panic about an impending (but whooly fictional,) climate crisis, and then implemnted climate policies climate policies that have made energy more expensive and are about to make it a lot more scarce. Instead of listening to the doom laden prophecies of Swedish troll - pouppet Greta Thunberg and the pseudo - science spounted by amateur computer programmers who pass their dodgy mathematical modelling off as research in order to phish for grants of taxpayers money, they should first accept that their 'net zero' pledges are unattaible and accept that hydrocarbons have an important role to play for the foreseeable future and beyond.

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