Rep. Peter Stauber joins the show on the latest episode of The Unregulated Podcast for a discussion on his efforts to reverse the Biden admin's war on Minnesota's minerals and miners. Now streaming on our website and all your favorite pod-catchers.
Thanks to American ingenuity, our energy is now being exported to the Middle East.
Oil Price (1/15/26) reports: "Saudi Aramco signed a long-term supply deal with Commonwealth LNG, Reuters has reported, citing unnamed sources in the know. The size of the annual shipments will be 1 million tons. The Cameron, Louisiana, facility will have a nameplate annual capacity of 9.5 million tons of liquefied gas. Originally, the plant was supposed to be up and running by 2027, but the developer said last year it would have to delay the start date to 2031. The company blamed the temporary ban on new liquefied natural gas capacity that the Biden administration imposed on the industry in its final year, following a report by an environmentalist that claimed LNG is more harmful than coal for the atmosphere. The Trump administration lifted the ban, but not soon enough...For Commonwealth LNG, the Aramco deal is a step closer to hitting its contracted volume target of 8 million tons annually, which it has set as a condition to make the final investment decision on the project. This decision is now expected by the end of the first quarter of this year."
They're catching on....
Wall Street Journal (1/14/26) opinion: "Data center moratoriums are the new fracking bans. Environmental nonprofits are deploying the same playbook against data centers that they have used against oil, gas, nuclear and chemical companies over the past decade, and many business leaders are again tempted to stay silent. But America is at a crucial moment that demands bipartisan realism on energy and electricity, the lifeblood of economic prosperity and global power. As artificial intelligence accelerates, abundance, cost and reliability must take precedence. Anything less will weaken national security, stifle growth and fuel inflation. After the 2015 Paris Accords, the environmental movement initiated its attack on the carbon molecules underpinning electricity, fuel and pharmaceuticals...The arsonists are donning the firefighter helmets again. Trying to stop data center construction while expecting continued economic growth is no different from trying to stop oil, gas and nuclear production while expecting reliable, affordable electricity. Data centers aren’t a luxury. They are the factories of the 21st-century economy, converting energy into processing capacity the way refineries convert oil into gasoline and chemical plants convert minerals into batteries. Treating them as something society can simply “pause” doesn’t reduce demand for digital services; it constrains the supply of compute, raising costs and outsourcing technological progress elsewhere."
The mail never stops, but it's time to pull the plug on this misadventure.
Reason Magazine (1/14/26) reports: "In 2014, the United States Postal Service (USPS) began replacing its fleet of delivery vehicles. In the almost 12 years since, only about 6 percent of its 51,500 custom-built delivery vehicles have been delivered. The Postal Service says the rollout will last at least two more years. The signature USPS delivery truck is the Grumman Life Long Vehicle (LLV), which first entered service in 1986. Designed to last over 20 years, some have now been in service for twice as long, and don't include many modern amenities, like air conditioning and airbags. Maintaining the LLVs beyond their best-by date involved reverse-engineering the 130,000-strong fleet for discontinued parts, according to The Washington Post. In 2014, the USPS began its $9.6 billion fleet upgrade by announcing the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) program...The Postal Service agreed to pay Oshkosh $77,692 per e-NGDV and $54,584 per NGDV in March 2023. To put these numbers in context, FedEx's fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans is considerably cheaper, costing $50,830 for the baseline 2026 Sprinter and $61,180 for the 2026 eSprinter. (The Sprinter debuted in 1995 and the eSprinter rolled out in 2019, two years before the USPS awarded its Next Generation Delivery Vehicle contract to Oshkosh.) Paying almost $80,000 per vehicle should have rung alarm bells, but what makes this situation worse is that the USPS knows cheaper alternatives exist. 21,000 of the Postal Service's new fleet are commercial off-the-shelf vans like the Ford E-Transit (whose 2026 model starts at $54,855). In 2023, there were nearly 40,000 Mercedes-Benz Metris vans (which start at $41,495) in its fleet. It's unclear why the agency decided to get bogged down with Oshkosh at all. Whatever the reasons may be, price is not one of them."
