In the field of energy and climate, the U.S. "mainstream" media are so devoted to the official narrative that it is very difficult to find out what is actually going on.  To take just a few relatively recent examples of what you might have learned from reading the New York Times: you might have learned that producing energy from the wind or sun is now cheaper than producing it from coal (with no mention of the problems or costs of intermittency); or that New York (along with many other jurisdictions including most of the EU) has banned "fracking"; or that "climate change is real" and the Paris climate accord is essential to solving the impending crisis.  But try to find out from the New York Times (or any other U.S. "mainstream" source) if the world is actually reducing production and use of fossil fuels or the resulting emissions.  Good luck.

For information on those things, you might try the invaluable Global Warming Policy Foundation.  Their daily email from yesterday (April 5) contains plenty of information to leave you shaking your head at the idiocy of those who claim to be our moral betters.

First up: the U.S. Energy Information Agency is just out with an update of world "tight" oil and gas reserves.  The update comes with this map the currently-known locations of oil and gas shale formations:

I know it's Easter Sunday, and I don't mean to be sacrilegious, but I can't help noticing that it's also April Fool's Day.  Unfortunately, human foolishness is much more of a topic for the Manhattan Contrarian than religion.  Can we come up with a nomination for the biggest April Fool of 2018?  I nominate the country of Germany!

Regular readers will notice that I have returned repeatedly to the subject of Germany's futile and delusional efforts to "save the planet" by replacing energy that works with energy that does not work ("renewables"), while in the process roughly tripling the cost of electricity for German consumers.  A recent post on February 10 was titled "How Self-Delusional Can We Be About The Cost Of Electricity From 'Renewables'?"   Attempting to understand how electricity coming from the seemingly free wind and sun could lead to a tripling of electricity prices, that post noted that Germany -- with peak electricity demand of about 83 GW -- had rushed in recent years to build "renewable" capacity that had reached about 84 GW, theoretically enough to supply all the electricity they would ever need.  But somehow, Germany still had retained fossil fuel generating capacity of about 108 GW, which is about the same fossil fuel capacity you would want to have to supply 83 GW of peak demand if you had no renewable capacity at all.  Despite spending hundreds of billions of euros on the renewable capacity, they had not been able to get rid of any fossil fuel capacity at all!  They still need all the fossil fuel capacity for backup when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.  (The data came from this report from German think tank Agora Energiewende.)

That post inspired a comment from reader BrianE, who asked:

I would be interested in knowing how much less CO2 Germany . . . [is] producing for their 30 cent/kW electricity.