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Christmas Day Gas Prices Expected to Drop to Lowest Level in 5 Years

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President Donald Trump’s energy policies are delivering what is expected to be the lowest national average Christmas Day gas price for Americans since 2020, his last full year in office.

GasBuddy projects that on Christmas Day, the average gas price nationally will be $2.79 per gallon, down from $2.95 per gallon last year under former President Joe Biden, who deployed America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve during his administration when prices soared.

“Thanks to President Trump, gas prices have hit a five-year low and Christmas Day gas prices are projected to fall to the lowest level since 2020,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told Breitbart News. “Lowering energy prices for American families and businesses will continue to be a top priority for President Trump in the new year.”

Per GasBuddy, Americans are set to save “over half a billion dollars during the Christmas week compared to last year” on gas.

America saw gas prices rocket rapidly under Biden. On December 25, 2020, when Trump was president, prices nationwide averaged $2.26 on Christmas. On December 25, 2021–just 10 months into the Biden administration–the average cost of a gallon of gas rose by a whole dollar nationally, to $3.26 per gallon, according to GasBuddy. (Read more from “Christmas Day Gas Prices Expected to Drop to Lowest Level in 5 Years” HERE)

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Forget Stoves! There’s a Growing Movement to Ban New Homes From Having Any Gas at All

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A growing number of states and cities are considering or implementing bans for the future construction of not just gas stoves, but natural gas hookups themselves, a move that would raise costs for consumers and potentially have negative environmental consequences, natural gas advocates told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Lawmakers in the state of Minnesota introduced legislation Wednesday that would permit the state’s Commissioner of Labor and Industry to amend the state’s energy code to “mitigate the impact of climate change,” a directive that could be used to justify a ban on natural gas, according to the free-market Minnesota think-tank Center of the American Experiment. California and New York are weighing statewide bans which would not only increase costs, but may not have the climate benefits advocates hope for, Dan Kish, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research told the DCNF.

“Natural gas is our cleanest fossil [fuel] and it is responsible for the U.S. reducing carbon dioxide emissions more than other country, largely because we have centuries of the stuff.” Kish told the DCNF. “God blessed North America with enormous energy wealth, and our only impediment is power-hungry politicians who want to make energy more expensive and more foreign, while bossing Americans around by telling them how to heat their homes and what kind of car they can drive.”

Roughly half of all homes in the U.S. use natural gas for space and water heating, accounting for about 15% of all natural gas consumption in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Space heating with natural gas tends to be far cheaper than all-electric systems because they are more energy efficient, according to Seattle-based HVAC firm Evergreen Home Heating and Energy.

The issue of natural gas bans gained national prominence after news broke that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC) was considering banning gas stoves nationwide amid concerns that the pollutants produced by the stoves may have harmful effects. Yet, the study that these concerns are based on was partly funded by a pair of activist groups that advocate for the electrification of appliances. (Read more from “Forget Stoves! There’s a Growing Movement to Ban New Homes From Having Any Gas at All” HERE)

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Obama Enacting Even More New Regs to Destroy US Energy Production

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Photo Credit: Daily Signal By Stephen Moore. Recently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced major new regulations on the emissions of methane into the air from oil and gas production. It calls methane a “potent” pollutant and its new rules would require a 45 percent reduction by 2025 from 2012 levels. Most Americans support these new rules, according to polling from environmental groups. This isn’t surprising. Methane sounds like a dirty and dangerous pollutant and even deadly if leaked into water or the air.

However, methane is just another term for the main component of natural gas. Drillers have a powerful motive to stop leakage on their own, because they want to sell it, not spill it.

How much of a menace is methane from the oil and gas industry? The amount of leakage into the atmosphere is minuscule, says Dan Kish of the Energy Research Institute. “Cows emit more methane when they pass gas than the natural gas industry,” he notes. Look for the EPA to start regulating cattle.

Green groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund warn that emissions will increase through 2018 and have been claiming that drillers spew more methane into the atmosphere than ever before, that it is “84 times more potent” a pollutant than carbon dioxide, and new regulations are overdue. (Read more about EPA’s newest strategy to restrict drilling HERE)

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Experts: $5 Gas on the Way

By Kate Scanlon. You might want to consider filling up your tanks, America. One expert is warning $5 per gallon gas is on its way.

John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil, warns that we should “[e]njoy the price, because it’s going to go back up.”

“The next round of high prices is likely to start later this year, as crude rebounds to the $80s and $90s, perhaps pushing to the $100 level by late in the year or early next,” Hofmeister told USA Today.

Prices per barrel as high as Hofmeister projects would mean a significant hike in the price you pay at the pump. (Read more about how Obama is trying to destroy US energy production HERE)

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Massive Explosions Rock Propane Plant; Watch Raw Video Here

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Photo Credit: YouTubePropane explosions at the Blue Rhino LP gas plant rocked the Tavares area on Monday night, injuring eight people.

A massive emergency response was called to the plant, which is located at the 300 block of County Road 448, after multiple injuries were reported.

All employees on staff at the time of the explosion were accounted for by 2 a.m., Lake County spokesman John Herrell said.

“Plant management is comfortable saying they are accounted for,” Herrell said.

Eight people were hurt — some of them critically injured, according to Tavares Fire Chief Richard Keith.

Read more from this story HERE.

The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought

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Photo Credit: APThe United States has double the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas than previously thought, stored deep under the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, according to new data the Obama administration released Tuesday.

In announcing the new data in a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also said the administration will release within weeks draft rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing, technology that has come under scrutiny for its environmental impact but that is essential to developing all of this energy.

“These world-class formations contain even more energy-resource potential than previously understood, which is important information as we continue to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Jewell said in a statement.

The formations, called Bakken and Three Forks, span much of western North Dakota, the northern tip of South Dakota and the northeastern tip of Montana. The last time the United States Geological Survey assessed this area for its oil and gas reserves was in 2008. But that assessment did not include the Three Forks formation, which explains the substantial increase in the estimates. USGS estimates that these two formations together hold 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered—but technically recoverable—oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Read more from this story HERE.

Now That Syria Has Crossed Obama's 'Red Line' with Nerve Gas, What Next?

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Photo Credit: Reuters Israel’s top military intelligence analyst said in Tel Aviv on Tuesday that Syrian government forces had used chemical weapons – probably the nerve gas sarin – in their fight against rebels trying to force out President Bashar al-Assad.

He cited photographic evidence of victims foaming at the mouth, their pupils contracted.

The Israeli allegations, which came during a week-long visit by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to the Middle East, followed similar concerns of chemical weapons use voiced by Britain and France.

But so far, those assessments appear to lack the concrete proof Washington would need to accept the kind of deeper U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war that Obama has resisted. That, in turn, raises questions about just how well-defined the president’s “red line” is.

White House spokesman Jay Carney walked a cautious line speaking to reporters, making clear that Washington was taking the Israeli accusations seriously but would require “conclusive evidence” before deciding whether to move forward.

Read more from this story HERE.

Israel Strikes It Rich: Enormous Natural Gas Field Begins Production

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Photo Credit: AP

Natural gas began to flow into Israel over the weekend from a large offshore field, ending Israel’s status as a dry patch in an oil-rich region.

The flow came from the first of two enormous gas fields discovered off Israel’s coast in the past three years. The two fields, known as Tamar and Leviathan, are sufficient to supply Israel for 150 years, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

The Bank of Israel estimated that the flow this year from Tamar, the smaller of the two fields, would contribute one percent to Israel’s gross domestic product. Overall, the bank expects Israel’s economy to grow 3.8 percent this year.

The field is located 56 miles west of the Haifa port. The Leviathan field is slated to come online in 2016. The long-term value of the fields at today’s prices has been estimated at about $240 billion. More than half of profits are to be paid in taxes to the Israeli government.

“This is the beginning of a new era,” Isaac Tshuva, controlling shareholder of Delek Group Ltd., which holds a major stake in Tamar, told Business Week. “The Israeli economy will be able to exploit natural gas environmentally, geopolitically, socially and economically.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Energy Nominee: We Need Carbon Tax To Double Or Triple Energy Cost (+video)

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Photo Credit: jeanbaptisteparis

President Obama’s Energy secretary nominee regards a carbon tax as one of the simplest ways to move the energy industry towards clean technologies, though he notes that government would have to come up with a plan to mitigate the burden this tax places on poor people, who would pay the most…

“Ultimately, it has to be cheaper to capture and store it than to release it and pay a price,” MIT professor and Energy nominee Ernest Moniz told the Switch Energy Project in an interview last year. “If we start really squeezing down on carbon dioxide over the next few decades, well, that could double; it could eventually triple. I think inevitably if we squeeze down on carbon, we squeeze up on the cost, it brings along with it a push toward efficiency; it brings along with it a push towards clean technologies in a conventional pollution sense; it brings along with it a push towards security. Because after all, the security issues revolve around carbon bearing fuels.”

Moniz position is not far from that of Energy Secretary Steven Chu before he took a job in the Obama administration. “We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Chu said in 2008. Last year, gas hit $9 a gallon in Greece.

Watch video here:

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: Obama Intentionally Blocking Oil And Gas Production

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Photo Credit: AP

Delays in federal permitting for oil and gas exploration on public land is likely reducing national energy production and depriving the federal government of revenue, according to a federal report released Friday.

The report is the latest addition to a mounting body of evidence undercutting the administration’s claims that it has fostered increased oil and gas production, critics say. Production on lands the federal government controls has plummeted during Barack Obama’s presidency.

The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) inspector general examined 1,881 applications for drilling permits on public land. Fewer than 4 percent of those applications were “recent,” or filed in the last 180 days. The rest had experienced prolonged delays.

“By not processing these nominations as expeditiously as possible,” the Forest Service, a division of the USDA, “may be causing the federal government to forego revenue or prevent or delay the efforts of the private sector to provide energy to the public.”

The report is the second analysis by a federal body this month to support claims by administration critics that its energy policies have restricted domestic oil and gas production.

Read more from this story HERE.

Surprise: Obama’s Science Advisers Press For Carbon Standards

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Photo Credit: Allison Harger

President Obama’s outside team of scientific advisers is recommending the creation of carbon emissions standards for existing pollution sources and continued expansion of shale gas production in order to confront global warming.

Those are two of the wide-ranging climate policy suggestions that the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) unveiled Friday that address ways to curb emissions and adapt to inevitable climatic changes.

Others include creation of a “National Commission on Climate Preparedness,” infrastructure planning that integrates climate risks, and various steps to “decarbonize” the economy.

“Mitigation is needed to avoid a degree of climate change that would be unmanageable despite efforts to adapt. Adaptation is needed because the climate is already changing and some further change is inevitable regardless of what is done to reduce its pace and magnitude,” PCAST said in a letter to Obama released Friday.
The advisers note that broad policies to impose a cost on carbon emissions, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, don’t have political traction. But other options to address emissions are available.

Their letter to Obama urges “new performance standards for CO2 emissions from existing stationary sources.” The endorsement arrives as environmentalists are pressing the administration to begin setting standards for the current fleet of coal-fired power plants.

Read more from this story HERE.