Getting past “doomism,” new Power Brief on rare earths, and new binoculars

Dec 10, 2021

Getting past "doomism," China flexes rare-earths muscle, new Forbes, and new binoculars for Christmas

If you want to know what’s happening in the commodities market, ask a farmer. That’s what I did on Monday, while in Indianapolis for a presentation to the Indiana Electric Cooperatives. At breakfast, I sat next to Doug Burnworth, who grows corn and soybeans on about 1,500 acres in the state. (Burnworth is the vice-chairman of the Noble Rural Electric Member Cooperative, based in Albion, Indiana.) He said that while grain prices are good, the price of fertilizer and chemicals is causing major heartburn. He told me that in October of last year, a ton of liquid fertilizer with 28% nitrogen delivered to the farm gate cost him $165 per ton. Lately, that same fertilizer was costing $550 per ton. Meanwhile, the price of potash has gone from $305 per ton to $800 per ton. What about the price of diesel fuel? Burnworth said that with no-till farming, his fuel use has dropped. So oil prices aren’t his biggest worry. But he’s not just concerned about the price of fertilizer, he’s also having trouble getting good prices on other agricultural chemicals. In my view, Burnworth’s comments are an indicator that more inflation, particularly in food prices is almost certain.

On Wednesday, I was in Houston for a panel discussion at the World Petroleum Congress on the issue of perceptions of the oil and gas industry. It was my third chance to attend a WPC and while the attendance was still large (some 5,000 people attended) the conference was significantly smaller than the other WPCs that I attended in Johannesburg and Madrid. Nevertheless, it was a real pleasure to be at the conference, to see the exhibits, and to meet so many people from all over the world. It was yet another confirmation that the world economy continues to run on oil and it will for a long time to come. In my remarks, I encouraged the people in the audience to remember that amid all the discussions about climate change and catastrophism, four out of 10 people on the planet today are living in electricity poverty. I also underscored some of the points I made in a piece I wrote last month for Forbes, about how extreme energy poverty remains a fact of life and that last month, during the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow, some 144 people were burned alive in Sierra Leone while trying to cadge a few liters of “free gasoline” from a damaged tanker truck. I also encouraged them to read my November 16 testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Four things today:

Leigh Phillips on the podcast talking “doomism,” Marx, and nuclear
New Power Brief on China and rare earths
My Senate ENR testimony on Forbes
Nikon 8x30 binoculars for Christmas

The image of the binocular collection above is from Wikipedia.

Leigh Phillips: Karl Marx would have been "an energy maximalist"

On this week’s Power Hungry Podcast, I talk with Leigh Phillips, a Canadian science writer and the author of a terrific book, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defense of Growth, Progress, Industry, and Stuff.
I talked to Leigh about the never-ending attraction of “doomism,” how elite academics and environmental groups became estranged from the working class, and why the Tennessee Valley Authority, in his words, is a “cathedral of American socialism.”

I have been intrigued by Leigh’s work for a while. Austerity Ecology was published in 2015, the same year that the Ecomodernist Manifesto was published. His self-description puts him in the ecomodernist camp. He says that he writes about “the interface between science and society, especially philosophy of science, economics, and politics. If there is a theme that unites most of my work, it is exploring the emergence in the 21st Century of a framework of geo-anthropic systems governance—or the struggle over how we as the globally dominant species are beginning to steward human and earth systems in a more rational, democratic, and egalitarian fashion.”

Leigh, along with Emmet Penney, and some others have made me think about electricity and societal well-being in a different way. A self-described “democratic socialist,” Leigh argues in Austerity Ecology that “progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway.”

Leigh and I talked at length about the neo-Malthusian thinking that dominates much of modern environmentalism as well as his second book, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Leigh believes that government needs to take a stronger role in the management of society. And while I disagree with him on several things – I think Jordan Peterson is great, Leigh can’t stand him – I agree with Leigh about the need for stronger government intervention in the management of the electric grid and the development and deployment of nuclear power. A final thought about the podcast: it’s worth listening to Leigh explain why he believes Karl Marx would have been “an energy maximalist.” Here’s how Leigh explained it:

freedom was the beating heart of Marx’s argument. And if energy is freedom, then the argument that we should pull back from energy, that we should reduce our energy consumption -- now I’m absolutely interested in energy efficiency, there’s no point in wasting anything -- but at the same time, we should always be wanting more energy to ever expand our freedom, that the expansion of energy consumption is in many respects what Marx is calling for. I know that sounds weird in the contemporary left, but I would say that Marx was an energy maximalist.

It was a fun episode and a longish one, about 1 hour and 25 minutes. Please give it a listen and share it.

New Power Brief on China and rare earths

On Tuesday, before I drove to Houston, I spent a few minutes recording a new Power Brief, which you can find here. As I’ve explained before, I can talk faster than I can write, so I did a 3-minute video discussing China’s recent move to consolidate its control over rare-earth elements -- like neodymium and dysprosium -- which are the critical ingredients in numerous alternative energy technologies. Have a look/listen.

It took me a while, but on Wednesday, I finally posted my written testimony from the November 16 Senate hearing on Forbes. I am pretty good at producing content, but I need to get better at getting it distributed. Thus, I’m working to get as much mileage out of each article that I write. I also re-posted the testimony on LinkedIn, which gets good traffic. In any case, here again, is a link to the testimony. Please share it.

The thingness of binoculars

In the 70-some “news” letters I’ve sent out over the past 18 months or so, I have spent lots of time talking about birds and the places we have visited to see various species. I’ve also written a bit about binoculars and bird books because I want to help other people get interested in birding. I’ve learned that having the right binoculars and a good bird guide (or app) makes the entire experience better.

Having good binoculars – which Wikipedia explains are “two refracting telescopes mounted side-by-side and aligned to point in the same direction” – is an essential part of making birding fun. If you can’t see the bird, and see it well, you can’t know it or fully enjoy it.

Over my three-plus decades of birdwatching, I have cycled through three of four pairs of binoculars and each new pair has been an upgrade over the previous one. Years ago, when Lorin and I were just getting into birding, I bought a pair of Pentax 7x50s that were plenty bright and had decent optics, but they were bulky and almost as heavy as the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. I would wear them around my neck while birding and after 30 or 45 minutes, I was ready to be put on a gurney. I replaced those with a pair of Nikon 8x42 Monarch 3 binoculars. About a decade ago, Lorin and I upgraded to the Monarch 7 model.

About two weeks ago, I bought myself an early Christmas present: a pair of Nikon 8x30 Monarch HG binoculars. Although I have only used them in the field a couple of times, I like them a lot. To be clear, I still love the Monarch 7 binoculars. I’ve taken them all over the world, including to Panama, High Island, and the Galapagos Islands. They are heavily scuffed and well used. I really like them. But the action on one of the eyepieces is a little balky. (I dropped them a while back.) And I wanted a lighter pair that I can carry more easily. So I got the 8x30s. They are substantially lighter than the 8x42s, and they have a wonderful feel. By that I mean they are solid in my hand and have a pleasing thingness to them. The older I get, the more persnickety I get, particularly about the things that I wear or use a lot. Binoculars fit both of those categories. Of course, you don’t have to spend a ton of money to get decent optics. That said, as with everything, you get what you pay for. My new 8x30 binoculars were not cheap. But I plan on using them for the next 10 or (I hope) 20 years.

I love binoculars. I have loved them since I was a kid. The image above is of a pair of 8x30 binoculars my dad bought while on a trip to Germany with my mother in the early 1970s. Even though the optics (and thingness) of those vintage 8x30 Weitwinkels are no match for my new Nikons, they are among my most-prized possessions.

My advice on binoculars is similar to the advice I got from author Larry Wright several years ago about buying a musical instrument: get the best one you can afford. I also recommend that you try them before you buy them. Make sure that you like the design, how they feel, and that you dig the thingness of the thing. You’ll be using them for a long time.

Have a good weekend.

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