A last chance for Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Kylian Mbappé back on the biggest stage of all. Brazil bidding for a record-extending sixth title.

One of the most eagerly anticipated World Cups in memory — as much for off-the-field reasons as those on it — is just around the corner in Qatar and excitement is building after the qualification period was wrapped.

Thirty-two teams, 64 matches, 29 days. The first World Cup in the Middle East.

The tournament starts on Nov. 20 and the final is set for Dec. 18.

Here’s a few things to watch when the tournament gets going in the smallest country ever to host a World Cup, where some fans will be staying in floating hotels when they head over to take in the games:

Brazil (No. 1 in FIFA ranking). Neymar, Vinícius Júnior and the rest of the flair-filled Selecao are peaking at the right time. Is a first World Cup title since 2002 on the horizon?

Belgium (No. 2). The “Golden Generation” is gradually breaking up but there’s still Kevin De Bruyne leading the Belgian charge.

Argentina (No. 3). No World Cup title since the days of the great Diego Maradona. This will be the first World Cup since his death in November 2020 and Argentina is improving, with Messi still at its core.

France (No. 4). The defending champions. Still the country with the most depth to its squad, despite a growing injury list. Now with Mbappé AND Karim Benzema leading the attack. No team has retained its World Cup title since Brazil in 1962.

England (No. 5). The team has hit a bad patch of form — winless in six games — but has a strong track record in recent major tournaments. England was a semifinalist at the World Cup in 2018 and a finalist at the European Championship in 2021.

Lionel Messi, Argentina. The seven-time world player of the year might have been saving his 35-year-old legs for one last push at a World Cup winner’s medal that, to many, would solidify him as soccer’s greatest player.

Cristiano Ronaldo, Portugal. He has won the European Championship but the leading scorer in men’s international soccer hasn’t played in a World Cup final, let alone won one. He’s 37 years old now — make the most of him while you can.

Kylian Mbappé, France. The star of the last World Cup at the age of 19 and he is only getting better. The speedy striker could match Brazil great Pelé in being a champion at his first two World Cups.

Kevin De Bruyne, Belgium. Widely regarded as the world’s best midfielder, his driving runs are among the best sights in soccer. Belgium just has to hope he arrives healthy.

Neymar, Brazil. Often overshadowed by Mbappé and Messi at Paris Saint-Germain, still the main man for Brazil. Watch out for tricks and flicks, and some histrionics, too.

Get ready for a feast of soccer. There are eight groups of four teams, with the top two advancing to the 16-team knockout stage.

There will be four games back-to-back per day — yes, four! — for most of the first two sets of group games, then simultaneous kickoffs for the last two games in each group.

There’ll be no break for the knockout stage, which begins the day after the group stage ends. The first day without soccer comes on Dec. 7 — the 17th day of competition.

Qatar vs. Ecuador, Nov. 20. The first match of the tournament and always a date to save on the calendar.

Argentina vs. Mexico, Nov. 26. The first of the big continental rivalries in the group stage, with Messi potentially sealing his and Argentina’s spot in the last 16.

Spain vs. Germany, Nov. 27. Surely there can’t have been many bigger group-stage matches than this at a World Cup? Two recent champions, two giants of European and world soccer.

Iran vs. United States, Nov. 29. It has been labeled as “The Mother of All Games Part II.” Just like at the World Cup in 1998, the two countries will meet in the group stage in a politically charged matchup. Diplomatic relations have yet to be restored between the nations since being severed in 1980.

Ghana vs. Uruguay, Dec. 2. Anyone remember the night of July 2, 2010? In the last minute of extra time in a World Cup quarterfinal match between Uruguay and Ghana, Luis Suarez deliberately stopped the ball with his hand on the goalline, got sent off, only for Ghana to miss the penalty and lose in a shootout as Suarez celebrated on the sideline. Revenge would be sweet for Ghana.

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You can see that in Poland people are actually burning trash to stay warm. Burning trash in your fireplace creates toxic smoke. It’s hazardous. The government’s considering handing out masks so people can breathe more safely when they’re outdoors.

Recall that natural gas is the reason the United States reduced its carbon emissions more than any other country in the world. Carbon emissions have been on the decline globally, in large measure, because of the transition from coal to gas. Natural gas is something that most reasonable people agree is a superior fuel to coal. Natural gas is the reason the United States reduced its emissions by 22% between 2005 and 2020, which is five percentage points more than the United States had agreed to reduce our emissions under cap and trade legislation, which nearly passed Congress in 2010 and under the UN Paris Climate Agreement.

The above is a graph that was produced by Matthew Yglesias, a well-known progressive blogger. He tweets it out whenever somebody points out that President Biden isn’t doing all he can to expand oil and gas production. It’s accurate. It does show that oil production increased on a daily average under Biden from under Trump. But it’s deeply misleading. You have to remember that under Trump, the Coronavirus pandemic, for several months, massively slashed oil production.

You can see from the below chart of the EIA data on crude oil production that we still haven’t gotten back to where we were before the pandemic. Now consider how the need is much greater for US oil now that Europe and the United States are rejecting Russian oil.Upgrade

Click to join Michael Shellenberger on Substack

The United States is the biggest liquified natural gas exporter, it’s true. But it takes five years to bring online new LNG capacity in the United States. So all of the new LNG that’s come online during Biden’s presidency was due to past presidents.

And Biden has leased less land than any President since World War II. It’s a shockingly small amount of land: 130,000 acres as opposed to seven million acres under Obama, four million acres under Trump, during the first 19 months of their administrations. It’s a huge reduction in the amount of land being leased.

You can see that in some particular cases, like a very large oil and gas sale in Alaska, the Department of Interior claimed there wasn’t any industry interest in the lease. This turned out not to be the case. The Senator from Alaska, Lisa Markowski said, “I can say with full certainty based on conversations as recently as last night, that Alaska’s industry does have an interest in lease sales and the Cook Inlet to claim otherwise is simply false, not to mention stunningly shortsighted.”

People point out the oil and gas industry does have many thousands of leases, and that’s true, but there’s a high degree of uncertainty about whether the leases they have will produce oil and gas at levels that make sense economically to produce from.

So increasing oil and gas leasing at a time of an energy crisis in Europe seems like a no-brainer, but the Biden administration is not doing that. In fact, it’s been preventing the expansion of gas in many other ways.

You can see the Biden administration denied a request to have a formaldehyde regulation exempted. All else being equal, you’d wanna reduce that pollution. But I think a little bit of formaldehyde is gonna be a less toxic airborne event than having people breathing toxic wood and plastic smoke in Europe. The right thing to do, in terms of aiding our allies, would be to wave that regulation. But the Biden administration refused.

You can see that the Biden administration is actively considering forgoing all new offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific. It may do no offshore leases at all for oil and gas.

Instead, the Biden administration has sought to give sanctions relief to Venezuela in the hopes that Venezuela would produce more oil. And of course, most famously Biden went to Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis to produce more oil in July. Now, everybody agrees that was a huge foreign policy failure. The Saudis announced they would be cutting production with the rest of OPEC+. The Biden administration’s pressure on the Saudis apparently annoyed them. Now, they’ve been pushed closer into the arms of Russia. This is a pretty significant setback for the Biden administration.

At the same time Biden was going to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to produce more oil. Biden administration was refusing to even meet with oil and gas executives. That’s a pretty serious snub when you consider that it’s an industry you want to expand production.

An oil and gas analyst on Twitter criticized a Senator from Wisconsin for suggesting the Democrats are responsible for the lack of refining capacity. He said, “What — do you also blame a political party for a flat tire?”

I pointed out that a single oil refinery outage would have little impact if we had sufficient refinery capacity, and the reason we don’t is that politicians, mostly Democrats have used regulations to prevent their construction. When I interviewed executives one said to me, “If you were an oil company, why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars into expanding refining capacity if you thought the federal government would shut you down in the next few years? The narrative coming out of this administration is absolutely insane.”

So you can see here that refinery capacity was increasing all the way through 2020. It then declined due to the pandemic. And it has not risen since then. When the analyst was asked, why don’t we get more refineries? He clearly didn’t know. Or at least he said he didn’t know. But it’s clear the Biden administration has not wanted more refineries.

There was a chance to retrofit a major refinery in the US Virgin Islands. It was a refinery that was older. It needed pretty significant upgrades. It was polluting. But these are machines that can be fixed. Several billion dollars of investment would’ve fixed it and it goes back many years. This is an article from 2008. It describes how, at that time, the Democrats in the Senate killed a proposal for refinery expansion.

Go back to 2006. The same thing happened. The House was in the hands of the Republicans who passed a piece of legislation to expand refineries. And it was the Democrats who killed it. And, incidentally, they’re using the exact same arguments today that they used back then.

More recently, we’ve seen an attack on expanded natural gas pipeline capacity, including from Pennsylvania to the Northeast, particularly to Boston. The result of not having pipeline capacity is that they’ve been burning more oil for electricity in New England. In fact, oil-fired power jumped to a four-year high earlier this year. And they’ve been having to import liquified natural gas to New England rather than just pipe it in, which is significantly cheaper. Probably half as expensive.

Click to join Michael Shellenberger on Substack

Grassroots advocacy and lawsuits have prevented pipelines from being built. You can see there’s a strong correlation between the price of natural gas and the ability to get pipelines built. We stop building pipelines and gas gets more expensive. Globally, the impact is that we’re gonna return to coal. This is the consequence of stifling oil and gas production.

One could argue that we just need more scarcity in order to accelerate the transition to electric cars. But it’s notable that the major figures in this, including President Biden, supporters of President Biden, and representatives of his administration aren’t defending a pro-scarcity position. They’re instead claiming that they’re doing all they can to bring down oil and gas prices and expand production.

I think this data, and the historical chronology, paint a picture that shows that there has, in fact, been a war on natural gas and oil United States and that it is impacting global supplies, and leaving Europe vulnerable.

Reporting on cities, energy, and the environment

By Bob Weber in Edmonton

It’s as if they were using a telescope not just to peer into space, but also into time.

Canadian scientists are already using spectacular data and images from the recently launched James Webb Space telescope to look backward into some of the oldest stars ever studied and forward into how new stars and planets are born.

“One of the holy grails of astronomy is to find stars that are the first stars to have formed after the Big Bang,” said Ghassan Sarrouh of York University, a co-author of a study on star clusters that’s already been published using James Webb data. “That’s what we think these are — the earliest stars.”

On the other end of time, Western University’s Els Peeters is looking into the future by studying hot young stars in the constellation Orion and their influence on the interstellar material around them.

“In that material is where the next generation of stars will be born,” she said.

Don’t forget the planets. A group at University of Montreal is looking at exoplanets — especially Earth-sized ones with water and other essential elements in their atmosphere that just might host life.

“We’ve already had a first result,” said Nathalie Oullette. “About a month ago was the first detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet.”

The James Webb is the result of $13 billion and more than two decades of work. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb orbits much deeper in space and is anywhere from a hundred to a million times more sensitive.

Two of its major components — one machine that aims the telescope with stunning precision and another that analyzes light far beyond the visible spectrum — were designed and built in Canada. That has given Canadian researchers the right to claim five per cent of the telescope’s observation time.

Scientists are almost giddy over the quality of what they’re getting back.

“Astounding,” said Erik Rosolowsky of the University of Alberta, who’s using Webb’s infrared capabilities to study how black holes create voids in interstellar dust, the spawning grounds for new stars. “It’s like someone’s given us a set of X-ray specs.”

Oullette said before Webb, astronomers could spend days going through murky data, separating signal from noise.

“It is quite remarkable how clean (Webb’s) data is.” she said. “With Webb, there’s no having to dig through the data to find the signal.”

Sarrouh puts Webb images side-by-side with those from Hubble.

“You can just see one set of images is really blurred and fuzzy. The other is full of all these really sharp points that just sparkle.”

The results are pouring in. Rosolowsky and his team already have 21 papers in the works.

And already, scientists are feeling their mental star maps shift.

It looks, for example, that things may have started up much sooner after the Big Bang than previously thought, said Oullette.

“Maybe structure started earlier than we had thought and galaxies started forming earlier than we thought.”

Rosolowsky has confirmed the existence of black holes so large they leave great holes in the centre of galaxies where stars would normally be created.

“We can see straight through and say this black hole is ripping apart all these proto-stars before they get going.”

Peeters calls it a new era in astronomy.

“It’s only operational for three months and already we’ve learned so much.”

Sarrouh said it’s a good time to be a Canadian astronomer.

“It will allow us to see into a time we’ve never seen into before. You can almost think of the James Webb as a time machine.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 10, 2022.

— Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960

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