To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Sunny. Highs in the mid 60s. West winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Friday Night: Clear. Lows in the lower 40s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Cold-Weather Shelter known as the Sheltering Tree, opens:The shelter opens at Church on the Rock at 2200 North State Street in Bunnell as the overnight temperature is expected to fall to 40 or below. It will open from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. The shelter is open to the homeless and to the nearly-homeless: anyone who is struggling to pay a utility bill or lacks heat or shelter and needs a safe, secure place for the night. The shelter will serve dinner and breakfast. Call 386-437-3258, extension 105 for more information. Flagler County Transportation offers free bus rides from pick up points in the county, starting at 3 p.m., at the following locations and times:
- Dollar General at Publix Town Center, 3:30 p.m.
- Near the McDonald’s at Old Kings Road South and State Road 100, 4 p.m.
- Dollar Tree by Carrabba’s and Walmart, 4:30 p.m.
- Palm Coast Main Branch Library, 4:45 p.m.
Also: - Dollar General at County Road 305 and Canal Avenue in Daytona North, 4 p.m.
- Bunnell Free Clinic, 4:30 p.m.
- First United Methodist Church in Bunnell, 4:30 p.m.
The shelter is run by volunteers of the Sheltering Tree, a non-profit under the umbrella of the Flagler County Family Assistance Center, is a non-denominational civic organization. The Sheltering Tree is in need of donations. See the most needed items here, and to contribute cash, donate here or go to the Donate button at this page.
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today’s guests: former School Board member Cheryl Massaro and former County Commissioner Dave Sullivan. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
The Blue 24 Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month.
Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Notably: Today, as I’m sure is being remarked in a million places and has been noted here on previous occasion, is the anniversary of the JFK assassination in Dallas in 1963, supposedly by Oswald’s 6.5mm Carcano rifle with telescope sight, in those “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century,” in DeLillo’s phrase, moments after JFK had told Jackie, in DeLillo’s imagining “We’re heading into nut country now.” (What is it about Dallas? It was in a pawnshop there that John Hinkley bought the .22 he used to try to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, for $29.) Today as I’m sure is not being remarked in most places, least of all on these indifferent shores (indifferent about the bombs, the massacres, the war crimes, that is; I would not blame Americans to be indifferent about every tom-dick-and-harried country’s independence day), is also the supposed Independence Day of my old Lebanon, an independence from France, in 1943, once celebrated, and now ridiculed. The Lebanese can;t even be independent from themselves, as Hezbollah reminds the survivors every day. But it’s worth a memory or two, and a few cedars have managed to survive the bombings, though I’m not sure they’ll survive global warming even on their slopes 8,000 feet up in Lebanon’s mountains.
—P.T.
View this profile on Instagram
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.
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
A Christmas Carol at Athens Theatre
Al-Anon Family Groups
‘The Country Girl’ at City Repertory Theatre
Handel’s Messiah at Palm Coast United Methodist Church
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Flagler County Library Board of Trustees
Nar-Anon Family Group
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
… the body of the people has more to fear from oppression than from resistance. The consciousness of that melancholy truth, inspires a degree of persevering fury, seldom to be found in those civil wars which are artificially supported for the benefit of a few factious and designing leaders.
–From Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (1776).
Ray W, says
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting perspective on President-elect Trump’s promise to drill for more oil. In a story, not an editorial column, titled, “Trump’s Oil and Gas Donors Don’t Really Want to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill'”, the reporter writes that Trump’s “fossil-fuel benefactors have a different agenda.”
Here are a few bullet points about their differing agenda:
– “Many of the tycoons who backed the Republican’s victorious campaign (I note that the author did not use either the term “mandate” or “landslide”) say what they need with is shoring up demand for their products — not pumping more fossils fuels, which they have little incentive to do.
“They are pushing for policies that would lock in fossil fuel use, such as easier permitting for pipelines and terminals to shuttle fossil fuels to new markets (I note that yesterday Trump said that on his first day in office he would reinstate the XL Pipeline project). They also favor eliminating Biden administration policies meant to put more electric vehicles on the road.”
– The author acknowledged that under Biden administration guidance “shale companies produced record amounts of oil and natural gas as crude prices rebounded from the pandemic’s depths and then soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the industry is also confronting the early stages of a long-term shift away from fossil fuels, as well as concerns that gasoline consumption has peaked in the U.S.”
– This past summer, the CEO of Canary, an oil-field services company, Dan Eberhart, told Trump at a fundraiser to push back against the EIA’s prediction that oil demand would likely peak by the end of this decade. Eberhart later told a reporter that the EIA needs “to stop acting like fossil fuels are the devil.”
– “Many of Trump’s oil and natural-gas supporters favor easing regulations that govern drilling. The changes would include scrapping rules targeting methane emissions, getting new permits to frack on federal land and eliminating climate disclosure rules.
“But some donors grimace when they hear Trump promise that under his watch, crude-oil producers would open the floodgates. He has also promised to cut American’s energy costs by 50% or more.
“Oil backer’s skepticism stems from the fact that Wall Street has successfully pressured chronically indebted frackers to stop burning through cash, and return it to shareholders via buybacks and dividends instead of reinvesting it to frack more wells.
“‘Our stocks will be absolutely crushed if we start growing our production the way is talking about it,’ said Bryan Sheffield, a Texas oilman who contributed more than $1 million to Trump’s latest campaign.”
– The author argues that geology, meaning the ability to continue to find new sources of cheap oil (the proverbial low-hanging fruit), may limit future expansion in crude oil production.
– On the subject of natural gas, the author notes that the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on issuing new permits to build LNG exporting facilities. Trump has promised that on his first day he will retract the moratorium.
– The author notes that while domestic demand for natural gas has had an “uptick” in recent years, shale companies produce far more natural gas than American consumers need. The shale companies have been “shipping gargantuan amounts of liquefied natural gas to Europe and Asia, making the U.S. the largest natural-gas exporter in the world.”
– Matthew Ramsey, with pipeline company Energy Transfer reinterpreted Drill, Baby, Drill for the reporter: “I think ‘drill, baby, drill’ means we open up a lot more markets that have otherwise been closed to us.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Crude oil producers like the prices their product now commands on the world marketplace. If they have to choose between producing more oil and losing profit because today’s glut of oil becomes an even greater glut or producing the same amount and keeping their profit level, I argue that they will not produce more oil. Instead, they will quietly lobby for deregulation that will best lower their extraction costs.
The professional lying class of one of our two political parties will continue it efforts to deceive the gullible among us that Trump is the only energy king, when Obama was the first energy king during the Shale Revolution and Biden followed Obama’s and Trump’s path and became the new energy king.
But the question remains: Will the world transition to clean energy or not? Current predictions do have the world’s demand for fossil fuels peaking around 2030.
If this is true, drill, baby, drill will go down in history on one of many great political deceptions.
If oil companies have their way, perhaps we will forego cheaper and more efficient forms of renewable energy in favor of oil and natural gas profits. After all, current solar technology already offers new sources of electrical energy production at half the amortized cost of any form of carbon-based electricity production.
In an economy based on capitalism, the answer would be clear. Transition to far cheaper new sources of clean energy. Battery technology is rapidly becoming cleaner and cheaper. Solar technology offers far more future gains than does oil or gas.
As an aside, I commented on this some time ago, after I read an EIA article that had concluded that with so many worldwide LNG facilities under construction right now, if they are all completed, an “overhang” in capacity would soon form, meaning that so much more worldwide LNG export capacity is about to be added to already-existing capacity that LNG facilities all over the world will no longer be able to operate at full efficiency due to too much gas and too few buyers.
If this is true, Trump issuing a permit to build yet another LNG export facility will mean that the company, when it opens in seven years, will be operating in a world of partial efficiency due to a glut of capacity.
As I recall without looking it up again, we already have eight operational LNG export facilities. In January 2016, we had zero such plants. Two of the eight are still expanding in total capacity toward full permitted buildout. A ninth is in the initial phases of opening. Two more are in construction and expected to become operational at some point in 2025. We already have enough capacity in the works to double today’s exports of LNG. Adding yet another facility in seven years may not prove to be economically feasible, just as today’s nearly completed plants may never reach full efficiency.
Then again, the political issue is not whether the new plants will or should ever be built. The political issue is the opportunity to claim to the gullible among us that more permits are being issued.