Weather: Partly cloudy. Humid with highs in the lower 90s. Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph. Thursday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the lower 70s. East winds 10 to 15 mph, diminishing to around 5 mph after midnight.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
In Court: Drug Court convenes before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public.
Keep in Mind the Summer BreakSpot: Free Meals for Kids and Teens, Monday through Friday: Flagler Schools and Café EDU is providing free meals to all kids 18 and under this summer. It started on May 31, it’s running through July 29. Meals Must be Consumed Onsite. No Identification Needed. No Application Necessary. The Summer BreakSpot Program, also known as the Summer Food Service Program, is federally funded under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and, in Florida, administered by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Sites are locally operated by nonprofit organizations (sponsors) that provide the meals and receive a reimbursement from USDA. For additional information, please reach out to Café EDU at 386-437-7526 x1159, or email [email protected]. The free meal locations are:
Flagler-Palm Coast High School
5500 E. Highway 100, Palm Coast, FL 32164
Breakfast: 7:45am–8:30am
Lunch: 12:15–1:00pm
Dates: May 31–July 29, Monday through Friday, except July 4.
Housing Authority
502 S. Bacher St., Bunnell, FL 32110
Breakfast: 9:00am–9:30am
Lunch: 11:30–12:00pm
Dates: June 6–July 29, Monday through Friday, except July 4.
Navy Bombing in the Ocala National Forest: Navy training schedules indicate that inert and live bombing will take place at the Pinecastle Range Complex located in the Ocala National Forest this week. Bombings at times can be heard in Flagler-Palm Coast. The bombings are scheduled as follows:
Wednesday – 10 a.m.- 6:30 p.m. Live/Inert
Thursday – 1 p.m.-Midnight. Live/Inert
Friday – 1 p.m.-Midnight Live/Inert
Saturday – 5:30-8:30 p.m. Live/Inert
During bombing periods wildlife may be temporarily displaced. Use extra caution when driving through the Ocala National forest and surrounding areas. Secure any items around your residence that could attract wildlife. Always be mindful of larger animals including black bears and practice bearwise measures. The telephone number for noise complaints is 1-800-874-5059, Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility, Jacksonville, Fla. For additional information, call (904) 542-5588.
Notably: Happy Birthday, Katharine Graham (1917): you transformed the Washington Post into a newspaper just about as worthy as its namesake, for the nation’s sake–on the very anniversary day of Lincoln’s house divided speech no less (1858), a speech about a sesquicentennial and then some ahead of its time. Psycho premiered on this day in 1960. Boy George has nothing to do with this day other than I happen to be hearing him sing at World of Beer in Orlando–where we are exiled for two days–as I type this (his birthday was actually on June 14), and my beloved is smiling it up.
Now this:
Flagler Beach Webcam:
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“Why did I write it down! In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidental, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
–From Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook,” Holiday, December 1966, and in Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968).
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Beth says
The oil industry had their highest profits under Obama…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/294614/revenue-of-the-gas-and-oil-industry-in-the-us/
The dude says
Yet they somehow managed to keep gas under $4.00/gal anyway.
Thanks Obama.
Timothy Patrick Welch says
Concerning the cartoon…
It’s just bad contract negotiations with extraction of oil (and other minerals) from public lands.
It would seem as though a good contract that increases the cost to extracting companies as the value of the product increases, beyond a certain agreed upon price would be a solution. This would also have a stabilizing effect on prices.
Ed Danko says
Biden’s antifossil fuel policies are responsible for the increase in the price of fuel. Complete the XL Pupeline and re-elect President Trump and watch the price of gas drop. It’s so simple even a liberal left-wing Democrat should be able to figure this one out.
The dude says
Hey Eddie,
How’s that boycott going?
Not very well apparently.
Anyway, how about some specific examples of these “policies”?
References and cites would be good, since it’s you and we all know what your relationship with the truth is. ( I kid… we know you have no relationship with the truth at all.)
Sherry says
@ed.. . . And, to HELL with our environment . . . right???? Who needs clean drinking water??? Who needs to protect wildlife????https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/no_keystone_xl/in_harms_way.html
After more than 10 years of tenacious protests, drawn-out legal battles, and flip-flopping executive orders spanning three presidential administrations, the Keystone XL pipeline is now gone for good. The project’s corporate backer—the Canadian energy infrastructure company TC Energy—officially abandoned the project in June 2021 following President Joe Biden’s denial of a key permit on his first day in office. But the path to victory wasn’t always clear. Many had hoped that the disastrous project was finally done for in November 2015, when the Obama administration vetoed the pipeline—acknowledging its pervasive threats to climate, ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health. But immediately after taking office, President Donald Trump brought the zombie project back to life, along with the legal battles against it. By the time President Biden took office in 2021, ready to fulfill his campaign promise to revoke the cross-border permit, the dirty energy pipeline had become one of the foremost climate controversies of our time.
Laurel says
Sherry: What Ed doesn’t realize, and what the Trump cult doesn’t talk about, is that the Canadian dirty oil was to be sent to us for refinement and then sent on to China. It was to be no benefit to the US, except big oil, and actually a detriment with us being stuck with the waste product and damage to our ecology.
Now, Biden is off to Saudi Arabia (Trump’s buds) to *negotiate* with murderers in order to calm us down, and try to get his ratings up. Putin (Trump’s bud) has the biggest share of blame, along with big oil, but it’s so easy to blame democrats because they, the Republicans, listen to Tucker Carlson while tanning their balls.
Sherry says
Right On Laurel! I’m sure that even if Ed knew the actual facts he would choose to ignore them in favor of mindlessly following the propaganda of the far right and the complete BS and lies of FOX and their despicable asinine talking heads.
C.J. says
Ed, read the replies below, each knows and summarizes the truth about that pipeline and it is obvious you never read or heard or listened to the truth about it. Not a single person in Palm Coast will or would have ever benefitted from a drop of oil or gasoline from it. But the truth was never important to you was it?
Ray W. says
Ed Danko joins the ranks of the gullible among us.
Once again, in February 2021, the 13 OPEC nations voted to jointly cut crude oil production by six million barrels per day. Saudi Arabia announced it would voluntarily cut another million barrels from its own wells, taking a total of seven million barrels of crude oil off the international market, from a worldwide total of just about 100 million barrels of crude oil produced per day. Another 10 nations that do not have voting rights, but attend OPEC meetings, agreed to keep their own production levels steady in order to maximize the financial benefit they would attain when the OPEC reduction took place. At the time, crude oil was selling for about $35 per barrel. As supply dipped, crude oil stockpiles began to slowly lower, particularly at a time when demand was rising as countries emerged from the COVID turndown. Prices slowly and inexorably rose to about $85 per barrel in the year following the vote to cut production.
Yes, some five months later, OPEC voted to slowly return to normal levels of production, at a rate of 400,000 barrels each month. At the voted rate of increases, it would take some 17 months for OPEC to return to normal production levels. It has only been 11 months since that second vote.
Then, Russia invaded the Ukraine. Russia exports roughly four million barrels of crude oil per day. Prices immediately and rapidly rose.
Unless you, Ed Danko, are prepared to show that President Biden either sought out or in some way influenced OPEC to cut production or persuaded Russia to invade the Ukraine, you are simply talking to hear your gullible head roar.
Industry journals document that OPEC nations need oil revenue to balance their national budgets. One of those journal articles that I read way back in April of last year detailed Saudi Arabia needing crude oil prices to be above $76 per barrel for that country to balance its national budget.
As an aside, the southern leg of the XL pipeline carries about 600,000 barrels of crude oil from North Dakota each day. Completing the northern leg of the XL pipeline will not increase the fixed capacity of the southern leg. And the Canadian tar sands oil would displace the North Dakota oil that is already being shipped through the southern leg, which would increase the shipping costs that American energy companies pay to ship their North Dakota crude oil. The Canadian tar sands crude oil would decrease the deficit caused by the OPEC and Russia decisions and add to the world’s supply of crude oil, but not by very much. In that way, one cannot say Ed Danko is completely wrong. It is better and far more accurate to say he is barely right and massively wrong. After all, a person can be right and wrong at the same time. Gullibility is the key in these situations. Given that Ed Danko has established his gullibility on this point, what else is there to say about him? Plenty!
First, I will expect better from Ed Danko in the future. All it will take on his part is for him to begin to exercise a little intellectual rigor before he begins typing a comment. The first step in his long quest to understand how to exercise intellectual rigor begins with him accepting the idea that crude oil is an international commodity. The only solution to an international shortage of crude oil is to increase the international supply of crude oil. Ed Danko’s comment suggests that he thinks that the shortage of crude oil is only a national shortage. If an Italian oil refinery owner contracts with an American energy company with oil wells in North Dakota by agreeing to pay more than its competitors are willing to pay for North Dakota crude oil, I guarantee Ed Danko that the North Dakota crude oil produced by that American energy company will be shipped to a port in Houston, loaded on a supertanker and taken to Italy. That oil will not stay in America to be refined by American refineries. Supply and demand in action.
Second, and as an aside, I read an EIA article last week that predicted that in July, the Permian Basin would be producing a record amount of crude oil, well in excess of 5 million barrels of crude oil per day. The Permian Basin began producing crude oil in 1918. Most of the drilling rigs in operation today are horizontal versions that are being used in the Permian Basin to drill horizontal bores through already existing wells. Once they are fracked, the old wells begin producing large quantities of crude oil again. One of many reasons American energy companies are focusing on the Permian Basin is that the pipeline infrastructure to transport crude oil to refineries or to ports for export was constructed long ago. We don’t need the northern leg of the XL pipeline when we can drill in the Permian Basin and produce crude oil more cheaply than the Canadian tar sands fields could ever produce.
Under Biden’s administration, the number of oil rigs in operation has steadily increased to levels just below the levels that were in use during the Trump administration at the time the pandemic hit (733 nationwide as of June 10th as opposed to 771 in February 2020. Over 2000 were in use for several weeks during the Obama years. Rigs in operation dropped from 771 to 250 in the two months after the pandemic hit and that 250 number would have been less if contracts to drill had not already been signed.). Again, most of the rigs are in West Texas. Most are of the horizontal type. A few are vertical drilling rigs. A significant number are natural gas drilling rigs. The overall number of drilling rigs in use is expected to continue rising.
In summary, once OPEC returns to normal production levels, once American crude oil production rises, and once Russia is booted from the Ukraine (one can always hope), perhaps the worldwide supply of crude oil will match demand and crude oil prices will begin to return to more normal levels. There will seldom be significant demand for Canadian tar sands crude oil because it is much more expensive to extract the oil from the tar sands fields in Canada (estimated to be in the $45 range per barrel) than it is to extract crude oil from the Permian Basin (under $30 per barrel due to fracking costs, with Saudi oil costing less than $10 per barrel to extract because it is not locked in shale rock and doesn’t have to be fracked to release it in significant quantities), before one adds on the shipping costs to transport the crude oil from Canada to Houston, as opposed to the shipping costs from West Texas to Houston. Given the competitive advantage American energy companies possess over Canadian tar sands energy companies, I would argue that it is better to have American energy companies make the money by drilling in the Permian than to give it to Canadian energy companies, particularly because the American crude oil is “light sweet” oil that causes less pollution during the refining process than does the “dirty” tar sands oil.
Of course, the best option is to wean the world off of its demand for crude oil, but that is longer term option than the short-term reality the world faces today. Yes, electric vehicles comprise just under five percent of today’s American vehicle purchases. Yes, the number of electric vehicles being sold in America is rising rapidly. Yet we are years, if not decades, away from converting to an electric fleet and we aren’t even close to converting the trucking and rail industries to electric power.