Fantastic Article. If you dig you will find that Rewiring America founders are active investors in electrification startups (but don't talk about it) that stand to benefit greatly from outlawing combustion or subsidizing electrification
Generally I think both sides could come together with some small tweaks to messaging and strategies. Promote nuclear, renewables and new fossil fuels. Don't ban gas, but make it easy/cheap to upgrade to heat pumps (and if you already have gas, then it can serve as a great reliable back up) etc etc.
This post definitely respresents the polarization of these issues. Yes there is big money lining up behind left energy policies that really need to be sense checked becase they are hamful in the long term. But historically there has been way more influence behind anti energy transition intiatives whether from corporates or the Koch's as you mention, so the influence is just catching up.
Would love a follow-up to this article identifying $ going to moderate causes with sensible solutions.
What is commonly overlooked in this race to electrify everything is the need for fossil fuels for all of the transportation required. There is no replacement. Renewables don't transport anything.
The fact that we do not live in a society where information is as open & available as we would like to think should come as no surprise to any of us. What the author fails to mention is that there is an equivalent "dark money" machine pushing the fight against renewable energy & for hydrocarbons. It is touched on in this article:
I agree with your first sentence, but what government functions without some form of corruption of ideas or data? Europe until recently was far further down the road of corrupted platforms than we were. The creation of what was envisioned as a common market by its proponents in the 1950's, the EU has become a vast political machine which removes the dictates of individual governments which are subordinated to the whims of a group of elite paternalists. In any event, we've in a two year period caught up to Europe through the administration's unilateral decision making on things it has no business shredding. Yes, we once played the game with the oil lobby, but even if you go back to the 1970's, adjusted for inflation the subsidies given to Exxon, Shell, Texaco, etc were dwarfed by the direct and indirect money from the federal government now and during the Obama catastrophe to "green energy". Worse, Joe Biden who is essentially a hand puppet with not a gram of rectitude, has through possibly illegal executive fiat, quashed the marketplace through direct manipulation of the EPA, Interior, and even DOHS.
Add to this backdrop the self righteous hand wringing by useful idiots of George Clooney's or Bill Gates' ilk, and you now have an echo chamber of government, institutions and corporations all bending the masses to their will in an unending effort to turn our energy generation upside down. None of the proponents of this game have the least worry about the cost...why should they when they can afford their ill fated plans. Green legislation and corporate backing is a slow rolling catastrophe that almost none of the citizenry either understands the ramifications of or has asked for. We are serfs and our overlords want no outside input. Look no further than House members talking about silencing climate change and energy "disinformation".
I hope you truly do care about how this is all playing out, David. I'm in my 50's and have never been this frightened by governmental and corporate intervention in a functioning market system. The liberals have gone completely insane in their hatred of reasoned discourse AND constitutional government. They're nuts.
The fact that we no longer have representative government (please support ranked-choice voting & an end to partisan gerrymandering - both of which are feasible in the current social climate) should be a cause for distress all around. I don't understand why more people don't get upset at the concept of a "safe congressional seat." In modern politics, the people who define the districts are just engaging in a game of having the politicians select their voters when it should be the other way around.
The government has become an advocacy game for the ultra rich with only minimal input from the populace. While "both sides" have arguments that possess some merit, the discussion quit being merit based several decades ago. Now the general feeling seems to be, as you suggest, that "the other side" has gone completely insane (can you really support the kind of advocacy being put forth by the MAGA crowd?). part of this is the fault of the social media platforms which amplify the loudest & most insane (i.e. click producing) voices.
Regarding the merits, or lack thereof of renewable energy, it would be nice to have a merit based discussion. Currently, hydrocarbons have an oligopoly on transportation & huge influence over electrical generation as well. In my mind, oligopolies & monopolies are fairly similar & equally toxic. I would like to see a true marketplace based on real merits & not fear mongering. All energy generation is a matter of trade offs, particularly when we are limited to one viable biosphere. There is a lot of money invested in breaking that oligopoly but still plenty of money supporting it.
I did a little research a decade ago that suggests the level of influence:
Click the tab on organizational size. You don't have to look very hard to appreciate the fact that much of the world's economic power lies with the hydrocarbon industry. Now don't get me wrong, hydrocarbons have made modern civilization (with all of it's merits & faults) possible & for the most part, these companies earned their dominance. However, the world is not nor should it be static. the question becomes, in what direction will the dynamics take it?
First, I appreciate the thorough response. It displays none of the mental capture sought by either side of the political divide. And clearly enhancing the efficiency of existing energy sources and exploring novel energy development with as painless a set of trade-offs as possible is necessary In a world that values flourishing human life. Good on you
As long as there have been human beings there has been influence. I have great influence over my family in almost every area of life. Companies desire to wield it over government and their customers and most politicians want to wield that influence over everyone possible. As Chomsky wrote, anybody who announces that they're running for higher office should be immediately suspected. Perhaps that's cynical, but his point is made. I no more believe that Obama went from law school to being a city government flunky in Chicago because he gave a shit about the city than I do the notion that I can make the vast quantities of energy necessary to support an ever increasing global demand by making lots of pretty solar panels. Obama is an egotist and solar arrays are chock full of problems starting with their production and ending in the toxic runoff they create when fractured. We live in a world of conflation and outright lying perpetrated by "experts" who either care about their careers or money more than reality. I expect vested interests to act....aelf-, interested. But what the green energy juggernaut and government + institutional Covid reaction has showed in excruciating detail is the amount of prevarication and disdain for humanity supposedly independent actors show every damned day. I can't disagree about the MAGA conservative leadership displaying the same capture as the insane Left. But, and this is extraordinarily important, two things are true about our MAGA countrymen and women. One, the leaders are not 1960's Bull Connors crushing dissent and demanding some people be treated like farm animals. They are demagogues and know which side of their bread is buttered. These folks know how to sell political access to the "drill baby, drill" masses and it's revolting. But were it not for their sheer volume, conservatives would be even more terrorized than they are. The second thing that I see displayed in full measure is the left's sheer and unadulterated hatred of rural people, particularly whites. Show me a Midwest farmer who needs 500 gallons of diesel per month to keep his local Superfresh in corn and butter and I'll show you a guy whose lifestyle, religion and skin color is detested by folks who want fertilizer outlawed, cows euthanized, religion made illegal and tractors to be forcibly taken and maybe replaced by some idiotic electric contraption. That is the definition of a MAGA Republican. Which one do you think is more rational, somebody of his ilk who might possess a passing flirtation with racism due to his monocolor surroundings or a poor black city resident who doesn't particularly like white people. My answer is neither. They're both of equal value. But ideological capture has become an expert level profession of large swaths of self righteous douche bags in our coastal populations who value their artisanal coffees and ersatz farmer's markets to coal miners, rural farmers or factory workers. Those are so many cardboard cutouts to be burned, while urban blacks are hailed as noble chiefs.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is that the language and methods of persuasion surrounding energy from the left is utterly divorced from rationality. Jacobson is a complete liar or a bad expert. And oil companies are RUNNING at solar since they want....money and influence. That is indisputable. And labelling the rural middle of the country as the problem and talking about ensuring they can't read anything that they agree with because "disinformation" is a malthusian proposition that will end in bloodshed or individual rights being forcibly removed from Americans.
And, Africa and India. They want cheap energy. They don't want what rich multiculturalism wants them to want, which is to continue being totems of noble savagery for the enjoyment of elite assholes. I appreciate you engaging and your patience. I'll read the linked articles you laid down when I can do more than look at my phone which is what I'm doing.
Thank-you Chris, I appreciate rational engagement & none of us likes to think of ourselves as "captured" or in any way not in possession of free will. of course the truth can be much more subtle than any of us realizes & constant vigilance is important, along with the humility to recognize that each of us can be subject to non rational influence. I would enjoy further discussion on the biases & limitations of humans but, alas, I need to go & deliver a talk to my local "philosophical" society (yeah, in quotations because realistically, they lean more towards natural philosophy than the metaphysics which is my inclination (& not my topic tonight;-).
That sounds like a great evening to me. I'm headed to trivia in Baltimore City which is a huge highlight of my week. Two of my sons and a friend of mine will try to dominate the competition! Have a fine evening.
As the recent example in Ukraine of the harms of Germany's economy being beholden to Russian energy, the subtext of Robert's article is that those that control of energy wield significant political power. The curious result of gas bans is that typically MORE gas is consumed. The reason is thermodynamics. A non-combined-cycle natural gas fired power plant maxes out at about 33% efficiency in converting the energy in natural gas into electricity. That means that any end use of electricity for heating that is not at least three times as efficient relative to resistance heating ends up using more natural gas (or other dispatchable energy source.) The best-case thermodynamic efficiency of heat pumps is 300%. However, when it is below about 40 degrees F outdoors, the thermodynamic efficiency of heat pumps plummets. When it gets very cold outside, the heat pump's auxiliary resistance heater is activated. Watch the power meter start spinning rapidly then. Thus, a "bait and switch."
I wanted to point out the distorted thermo efficency claims of heat pump advocates and the federal government's own figures myself in responding to another commenter. Administration flunkies are touting the greatness of electric vs gas home heating to a public that has no idea of the constant cost of heat pumps to anyone dealing with freezing temps during the winter months, as in 3/4 of the country. And that's being optimistic. Woudn't it be great if the average citizen asked his/her HVAC contractor for advice rather than being force fed false data by our government using our tax dollars.
The U.S. EIA data below supports my contention. The state of California is one of the leaders in establishing municipal natural gas bans. See this September 22, 2022 Bloomberg article, "California Moves to Ban Natural Gas Furnaces and Heaters by 2030." If those bans were really environmentally and economically beneficial, the year-to-year use of natural gas would be declining. Instead, since 2019, the annual use of natural gas for California electricity generation is INCREASING. See the details at https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3045ca2A.htm BTW, California's residential electricity rates are among the highest in the nation. What this portends for the U.S. is ominous both for ratepayer's energy bills and for the environment.
In this piece, we compared GA to CA. We showed the EIA data (rates) and outlined the differences between the two state's approaches to "renewables".
We noted CA is barely hanging on to its last nuclear power plant (Diablo Canyon) while in GA two AP-1000s are about to crank up to 2.2 GW of CO2 emissions-free electricity.
The EIA report doesn't appear to separate the difference in costs between modern electric heat pumps from much more expensive resistance heating when it makes heating costs comparisons between natural gas and "electric". According to the article in the link below, when the source of electric heat is an efficient heat pump, electric heating is significantly cheaper than gas. The article also claims that the EIA reports uses total household electricity costs, not just the electricity used for heating. In the interest of having a candid discussion of the topic, I would be interested in hearing Robert discuss the point made in the linked article.
I note your point on the funding source. My question when comparing the cost of various heating sources with "electric" heating is what type of electric heating is being discussed. Another government source claims, "Today's heat pump can reduce your electricity use for heating by approximately 50% compared to electric resistance heating...", so just comparing gas heating with electric needs to be more specific about the type of electric heating. (https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-pump-systems)
Heat pumps really are a Goldilocks use case. You need a pretty small range of outside temperatures to gain substantially on gas in terms of electricity used; this is especially so in newer homes that meet insulation inspection as there isn't a frequent call to heat in a 50° ambient temperature and a linear increase in need below that. Below 40° as Gene points out, heat pumps rapidly decline in efficiency. Talk to anyone in the Northeast or Midwest about costs and you'll find that come December or even November, heat pumps start looking mighty expensive. An anecdote, my brother lives close enough to me that he has the same utility; in early fall his heat pump is modestly cheaper than my forced hot air (high efficiency unit). By November his cost is double mine in a house that is roughly 30% larger.
Quoting from your comment, "Today's heat pump can reduce your electricity use for heating by approximately 50% compared to electric resistance heating...", That implies only 200% thermodynamic efficiency. Note my comment made recently. reducing total natural gas use typically requires around 300% thermodynamic efficiency, which is the best-case value for heat pumps. Heat pump efficiency depends on outside temperature. Below around 40 degrees F, the heat pump efficiency plummets.
From the Saul Griffith report for Rewiring America you noted:
"Solar, wind, and nuclear are the resources we have that far exceed our demands. Solar and wind are the cheapest, and have fewer complications than nuclear energy. Some scientists, such as Mark Jacobson at Stanford, argue that an all–renewables strategy can supply our energy needs globally.5 This bold claim has sparked some controversy (and a lawsuit), but if we allow some nuclear energy and use tricks to smooth out daily and seasonal variations (described in Chapter 7), the claims of Jacobson’s critics evaporate. We’re blessed with enough zero–carbon energy to meet our needs and even expand our wants — we just have to harness that energy sensibly."
"Some nuclear".
"Mark Jacobson at Stanford"
"We're blessed with enough zero-carbon energy....we just have to harness that energy sensibly"
Translation - OK, our celebrity scientist was wrong. And suing people doesn't change that. BUT with "some" nuclear (which we will fight to the death to prevent; judge us on past actions, not present happy talk!), it'll all be just fine. p.s. no, we haven't figured out that what we are proposing won't work.
I see that tactic a lot from the Green Agenda, Build Back Better, Climate Change Alarmist, wind/solar gang. They know nuclear is a gaping hole in their narrative, and they get beat up bad in debate over their anti-nuclear stance. So now many of them pretend to embrace nuclear in a lukewarm way, knowing full well that government policy & corrupt regulators will ensure that nuclear at best struggles to maintain its current level. It will get a tiny fraction of the subsidies that wind & solar get, which in turn are very effective (designed for?) at damaging the grid economics of nuclear energy.
A good example is the UCS, Union of Concerned Scientists, more accurately called the Union of Concerned Lawyers. They claim: "we support nuclear energy as long as it is implemented safely". While they do everything they can to delay, disrupt and push up costs for nuclear power plants.
You know how to determine if an energy source is viable and absolutely necessary in 2023...? If Alex Ocasio Cortez, the least useful person in almost any room, suddenly begins pushing it. Since she doesn't know how to read, it took a trip to Japan last month for AOC to suddenly decide that nuclear isn't going to destroy the planet. Instead it's the only way we can begin to afford all of those incredibly costly and destructive turbines and solar farms.
It's not hard to figure out what this is all about, you just have to read what the Shadow Government minions have stated. The Corporate Overlords of the Western World are Malthusians. Malthus has always been a religion of the ultra-rich. They are Rent Seekers and for them Scarcity = A Monopoly of Wealth & Power. Their penultimate goal is the techno-feudal World Government. Read & learn:
From THE GLOBAL REVOLUTION by The Club of Rome 1991 "Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, "new enemies must be identified."[2] "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."[3]
"We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest"
Paul Warburg, the International Banker testifying to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1950
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis."
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
Depopulation: "I Hope It Can Occur In a Civil Manner"
"The World can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion"
" I know in one way or another it's going to come back down so I don't hope to avoid that, I hope that it can occur in a civil way "
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller in an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991
“This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long – We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome, Sept. 23, 1994
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.
If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
from David Rockefeller’s autobiography ‘Memoirs’
“Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order (referring to the 1991 L.A. riot). Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government.”
Henry Kissinger @ Bilderberg Conference, Evaians, France 1991
Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State quoted in Time magazine on July 20, 1992: “In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea.”
" Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it. "
Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
" The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet. "
Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
" Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. "
Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
" A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation "
John Holdren Obama Science Czar
"In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a master plan is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late."
Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation."
UN Commission on Global Governance report
"Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."
Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
"In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways."
Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General
"Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises."
Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute
"A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income."
Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable."
Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
"All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."
Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
"The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man."
Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
"A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible."
United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
"A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."
Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
"The resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion."
We almost used the same Abrams pic in the piece we released yesterday. We had it underneath the line:
"It also vividly demonstrates a recurring theme in government and modern environmentalism: no amount of failure is too much to succeed."
(But alas, with the other population, food production and other visuals, it put us over the email length limit for the post! :)
Two serious comments:
1) The aggregate assault on this whole ideological charade cannot withstand the fact, data, reason and logic-based stones being thrown at it on Substack forever. What you, Doomberg, BF Randall, Roger Pielke, Jr., and many others are doing to expose it will bring it down. Just like Solzhenitsyn helped bring down the USSR. We believe that and, in fits and starts, are attempting to help.
2) It occurs to us there is danger ahead for all of us related to #1. Look at your decades of work, and everything you've posted since joining Substack, Robert. Look at Doomberg's energy/environmental-related work. Same with BF Randall. Same with Roger Pielke, Jr.
From this very post today:
"Last June, McCarthy (who has since left the Biden administration) declared that she was in favor of having big tech companies censor speech involving climate change. In an interview with Axios, she said “tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.”
We are threatening a lot of people in the Climate-Industrial Complex (our preferred term for 20 years). This includes a lot of people in California behind what we exposing, including many with money from, and in, Big Tech. Including specific people and NGO's.
It occurs to us that eventually these same people are going to lean on our publisher to do what McCarthy is suggesting.
When, not if, that happens, things are going to get interesting. Suffice to say it will be a big test of free speech for this platform we've fallen in love with. And for free speech in western civilization.
All of us are using publicly available information to do the heavy lifting of investigative journalism that the mainstream media won't do. (We all know why.) I
Imagine how different the world would be had it never been allowed to have the Gutenberg press.
Imagine how different it could be if the best thing since - Substack - were pressured by the same forces we're writing about to shut down this Brandeis sunlight machine as "disinformation".
We live in interesting times. We love writers who have courage in interesting times. Keep up the super work, Robert!
It is truly unfortunate that Elon Musk's intellect stops before striking wisdom. He is captive to an absurdist belief in renewables and battery tech as forces of incredible, wonderful change for the planet. Given his otherwise rational views on speech and liberty, I can only hope that he puts the environmental Kool Aid down and thinks deeply on these matters. We would all be better for having a rich cast off from the Mind Head of lefty dogma.
Well he is pro-nuclear. But he is making serious cash on the wind/solar/battery scam. With his utility storage megapacks he was able to boost price 50% from 2021 to 2022 and still has a 2 yr backlog of orders.
If he tried to make nuclear reactors the NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission) would stonewall him so bad he would lose his shirt. Take the NRC out of the picture (and the EPA which is also allowed to blockade nuclear to add misery to madness) and Musk would have factories cranking out thousands of SMR's every year on a big assembly line, every production run an improvement over the previous one. Guaranteed, the cheapest energy on the planet, in fact there would be no competition, the oil price would plummet to $5/bbl and Gas to $0.50/mmbtu and mentioning the words wind & solar would bring on a chorus of deep belly laughter.
Agreed. But Elon is also all in on the wind and solar madness. He isn't that far removed from Jacobson in his utopian version of reality in which a little slice of west Texas could be dotted with solar arrays and wind farms and voila! Energy solved. No mention of the necessary concrete, steel, precious metals and minerals, etc necessary to complete the transformation. And after all, as a guy who owns a largish battery company, Musk isn't going to note it will take several hundred years of mineral extraction compressed into a few to create the batteries necessary to back up the continental grid for even 30 minutes.
Though he is a visionary, Musk's outlook is captive to a static outlook just like the myriad of PhD's at universities who swallow their skepticism amidst a sea of federal grant money.
Seriously, if you had a business that was on a public financed gravy train like he has, are you going to screw that up? Look at all the weapons manufacturers who are on the Ukraine Proxy War gravy train, no matter how insane it is. As CEO you have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. He did enough damage by not going along with the Davos censorship bandwagon. They dumped Tesla shares by the $billions.
By all measure, what he is doing with SpaceX by far and away compensates and overwhelms the $scam$ he gets from the wind/solar/battery racket. And history will prove that true. SpaceX will change the World.
"...The World Economic Forum's much publicised Great Reset heralds the end of human freedom for all but those at the pinnacle of the new social hierarchy that is emerging with billionaires and technocrats at the top, as the new techno-feudal lords, and everyone else as a surveilled and controlled neo-serf class. This is not the type of world you want live in...."
This Pivotal Moment - Episode 2 - Part 6 - The Time to Choose
"...For hundreds of thousands of years humanity has strived against adversity, overcome incredible odds, grown and flourished on this planet. We have not come this far to become mere cybernetic nodes in some soulless AI-driven digital prison. It's time to wake up, to stand together and reject the dystopian Great Reset agenda and then start building a more beautiful world in which human freedom is not sacrificed on the altar of the technocratic state...."
I feel like one of those "ping pong balls" in the nuclear fusion videos from years ago.
So much crap being thrown at us these days from every direction. It is having the effect they intend; wearing us out and depressing us. Wearing us down until we have little energy to keep fighting. Just once it would be nice to feel like we had some big guys on our side. We are Davids fighting numerous Goliaths but the outcome appears to be different. 🥺
It seems like only yesterday when robber barons did things like build a national library system and unnecessarily employing thousands of workers building Rockefeller Center as the Depression raged. Now they just want to take your home, force you to eat grasshoppers, sell you scratchy sweaters to keep you warm in your hovel between shifts at the Central Committee Wind Turbine Plant Number 1, and pledge obeisance to our overlords for their kindness and elite knowlege and power lest you be thrown in prison. Gee that sounds an awful lot like Communism under Stalin
The GOAL of the Secular Ruling Families & Billionaires is to reach 2030 with a smaller Herd of modern moron slaves. They will use all the tools available to Them in order to reach the GOAL.
Unless modern moron slaves are willing to cull instead of being culled there is no point in wasting Time with this sort of information mainly because modern moron slaves really don't care about reading about this sort of stuff. And the few that read are aware that they can't do anything about this.
Our current Civilization was built by Them... They own the MAIN SYSTEM and this simple fact allows Them to control all the myriad of sub-systems.
If anyone reading seems this is exaggerated look for evidence no further than to the absolute SUCCESS of OPERATION COVIDIUS.
If They want to stop giving modern moron slaves GAS, They will.
Fantastic Article. If you dig you will find that Rewiring America founders are active investors in electrification startups (but don't talk about it) that stand to benefit greatly from outlawing combustion or subsidizing electrification
Generally I think both sides could come together with some small tweaks to messaging and strategies. Promote nuclear, renewables and new fossil fuels. Don't ban gas, but make it easy/cheap to upgrade to heat pumps (and if you already have gas, then it can serve as a great reliable back up) etc etc.
This post definitely respresents the polarization of these issues. Yes there is big money lining up behind left energy policies that really need to be sense checked becase they are hamful in the long term. But historically there has been way more influence behind anti energy transition intiatives whether from corporates or the Koch's as you mention, so the influence is just catching up.
Would love a follow-up to this article identifying $ going to moderate causes with sensible solutions.
What is commonly overlooked in this race to electrify everything is the need for fossil fuels for all of the transportation required. There is no replacement. Renewables don't transport anything.
The fact that we do not live in a society where information is as open & available as we would like to think should come as no surprise to any of us. What the author fails to mention is that there is an equivalent "dark money" machine pushing the fight against renewable energy & for hydrocarbons. It is touched on in this article:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/
Of course, "Real Clear Energy," where I found this article, is quite transparent in it's bias towards hydrocarbons.
I agree with your first sentence, but what government functions without some form of corruption of ideas or data? Europe until recently was far further down the road of corrupted platforms than we were. The creation of what was envisioned as a common market by its proponents in the 1950's, the EU has become a vast political machine which removes the dictates of individual governments which are subordinated to the whims of a group of elite paternalists. In any event, we've in a two year period caught up to Europe through the administration's unilateral decision making on things it has no business shredding. Yes, we once played the game with the oil lobby, but even if you go back to the 1970's, adjusted for inflation the subsidies given to Exxon, Shell, Texaco, etc were dwarfed by the direct and indirect money from the federal government now and during the Obama catastrophe to "green energy". Worse, Joe Biden who is essentially a hand puppet with not a gram of rectitude, has through possibly illegal executive fiat, quashed the marketplace through direct manipulation of the EPA, Interior, and even DOHS.
Add to this backdrop the self righteous hand wringing by useful idiots of George Clooney's or Bill Gates' ilk, and you now have an echo chamber of government, institutions and corporations all bending the masses to their will in an unending effort to turn our energy generation upside down. None of the proponents of this game have the least worry about the cost...why should they when they can afford their ill fated plans. Green legislation and corporate backing is a slow rolling catastrophe that almost none of the citizenry either understands the ramifications of or has asked for. We are serfs and our overlords want no outside input. Look no further than House members talking about silencing climate change and energy "disinformation".
I hope you truly do care about how this is all playing out, David. I'm in my 50's and have never been this frightened by governmental and corporate intervention in a functioning market system. The liberals have gone completely insane in their hatred of reasoned discourse AND constitutional government. They're nuts.
The fact that we no longer have representative government (please support ranked-choice voting & an end to partisan gerrymandering - both of which are feasible in the current social climate) should be a cause for distress all around. I don't understand why more people don't get upset at the concept of a "safe congressional seat." In modern politics, the people who define the districts are just engaging in a game of having the politicians select their voters when it should be the other way around.
The government has become an advocacy game for the ultra rich with only minimal input from the populace. While "both sides" have arguments that possess some merit, the discussion quit being merit based several decades ago. Now the general feeling seems to be, as you suggest, that "the other side" has gone completely insane (can you really support the kind of advocacy being put forth by the MAGA crowd?). part of this is the fault of the social media platforms which amplify the loudest & most insane (i.e. click producing) voices.
Regarding the merits, or lack thereof of renewable energy, it would be nice to have a merit based discussion. Currently, hydrocarbons have an oligopoly on transportation & huge influence over electrical generation as well. In my mind, oligopolies & monopolies are fairly similar & equally toxic. I would like to see a true marketplace based on real merits & not fear mongering. All energy generation is a matter of trade offs, particularly when we are limited to one viable biosphere. There is a lot of money invested in breaking that oligopoly but still plenty of money supporting it.
I did a little research a decade ago that suggests the level of influence:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/0B64VZROKfWDTb1BObVBCSTFtc1U/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=111903736968841482304&resourcekey=0-ECgViKONxr6_zgoeMMwu9Q&rtpof=true&sd=true
Click the tab on organizational size. You don't have to look very hard to appreciate the fact that much of the world's economic power lies with the hydrocarbon industry. Now don't get me wrong, hydrocarbons have made modern civilization (with all of it's merits & faults) possible & for the most part, these companies earned their dominance. However, the world is not nor should it be static. the question becomes, in what direction will the dynamics take it?
First, I appreciate the thorough response. It displays none of the mental capture sought by either side of the political divide. And clearly enhancing the efficiency of existing energy sources and exploring novel energy development with as painless a set of trade-offs as possible is necessary In a world that values flourishing human life. Good on you
As long as there have been human beings there has been influence. I have great influence over my family in almost every area of life. Companies desire to wield it over government and their customers and most politicians want to wield that influence over everyone possible. As Chomsky wrote, anybody who announces that they're running for higher office should be immediately suspected. Perhaps that's cynical, but his point is made. I no more believe that Obama went from law school to being a city government flunky in Chicago because he gave a shit about the city than I do the notion that I can make the vast quantities of energy necessary to support an ever increasing global demand by making lots of pretty solar panels. Obama is an egotist and solar arrays are chock full of problems starting with their production and ending in the toxic runoff they create when fractured. We live in a world of conflation and outright lying perpetrated by "experts" who either care about their careers or money more than reality. I expect vested interests to act....aelf-, interested. But what the green energy juggernaut and government + institutional Covid reaction has showed in excruciating detail is the amount of prevarication and disdain for humanity supposedly independent actors show every damned day. I can't disagree about the MAGA conservative leadership displaying the same capture as the insane Left. But, and this is extraordinarily important, two things are true about our MAGA countrymen and women. One, the leaders are not 1960's Bull Connors crushing dissent and demanding some people be treated like farm animals. They are demagogues and know which side of their bread is buttered. These folks know how to sell political access to the "drill baby, drill" masses and it's revolting. But were it not for their sheer volume, conservatives would be even more terrorized than they are. The second thing that I see displayed in full measure is the left's sheer and unadulterated hatred of rural people, particularly whites. Show me a Midwest farmer who needs 500 gallons of diesel per month to keep his local Superfresh in corn and butter and I'll show you a guy whose lifestyle, religion and skin color is detested by folks who want fertilizer outlawed, cows euthanized, religion made illegal and tractors to be forcibly taken and maybe replaced by some idiotic electric contraption. That is the definition of a MAGA Republican. Which one do you think is more rational, somebody of his ilk who might possess a passing flirtation with racism due to his monocolor surroundings or a poor black city resident who doesn't particularly like white people. My answer is neither. They're both of equal value. But ideological capture has become an expert level profession of large swaths of self righteous douche bags in our coastal populations who value their artisanal coffees and ersatz farmer's markets to coal miners, rural farmers or factory workers. Those are so many cardboard cutouts to be burned, while urban blacks are hailed as noble chiefs.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is that the language and methods of persuasion surrounding energy from the left is utterly divorced from rationality. Jacobson is a complete liar or a bad expert. And oil companies are RUNNING at solar since they want....money and influence. That is indisputable. And labelling the rural middle of the country as the problem and talking about ensuring they can't read anything that they agree with because "disinformation" is a malthusian proposition that will end in bloodshed or individual rights being forcibly removed from Americans.
And, Africa and India. They want cheap energy. They don't want what rich multiculturalism wants them to want, which is to continue being totems of noble savagery for the enjoyment of elite assholes. I appreciate you engaging and your patience. I'll read the linked articles you laid down when I can do more than look at my phone which is what I'm doing.
Cheers.
Thank-you Chris, I appreciate rational engagement & none of us likes to think of ourselves as "captured" or in any way not in possession of free will. of course the truth can be much more subtle than any of us realizes & constant vigilance is important, along with the humility to recognize that each of us can be subject to non rational influence. I would enjoy further discussion on the biases & limitations of humans but, alas, I need to go & deliver a talk to my local "philosophical" society (yeah, in quotations because realistically, they lean more towards natural philosophy than the metaphysics which is my inclination (& not my topic tonight;-).
That sounds like a great evening to me. I'm headed to trivia in Baltimore City which is a huge highlight of my week. Two of my sons and a friend of mine will try to dominate the competition! Have a fine evening.
As the recent example in Ukraine of the harms of Germany's economy being beholden to Russian energy, the subtext of Robert's article is that those that control of energy wield significant political power. The curious result of gas bans is that typically MORE gas is consumed. The reason is thermodynamics. A non-combined-cycle natural gas fired power plant maxes out at about 33% efficiency in converting the energy in natural gas into electricity. That means that any end use of electricity for heating that is not at least three times as efficient relative to resistance heating ends up using more natural gas (or other dispatchable energy source.) The best-case thermodynamic efficiency of heat pumps is 300%. However, when it is below about 40 degrees F outdoors, the thermodynamic efficiency of heat pumps plummets. When it gets very cold outside, the heat pump's auxiliary resistance heater is activated. Watch the power meter start spinning rapidly then. Thus, a "bait and switch."
I wanted to point out the distorted thermo efficency claims of heat pump advocates and the federal government's own figures myself in responding to another commenter. Administration flunkies are touting the greatness of electric vs gas home heating to a public that has no idea of the constant cost of heat pumps to anyone dealing with freezing temps during the winter months, as in 3/4 of the country. And that's being optimistic. Woudn't it be great if the average citizen asked his/her HVAC contractor for advice rather than being force fed false data by our government using our tax dollars.
The U.S. EIA data below supports my contention. The state of California is one of the leaders in establishing municipal natural gas bans. See this September 22, 2022 Bloomberg article, "California Moves to Ban Natural Gas Furnaces and Heaters by 2030." If those bans were really environmentally and economically beneficial, the year-to-year use of natural gas would be declining. Instead, since 2019, the annual use of natural gas for California electricity generation is INCREASING. See the details at https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3045ca2A.htm BTW, California's residential electricity rates are among the highest in the nation. What this portends for the U.S. is ominous both for ratepayer's energy bills and for the environment.
In this piece, we compared GA to CA. We showed the EIA data (rates) and outlined the differences between the two state's approaches to "renewables".
We noted CA is barely hanging on to its last nuclear power plant (Diablo Canyon) while in GA two AP-1000s are about to crank up to 2.2 GW of CO2 emissions-free electricity.
It is hard to see CA rates going anywhere but up. It's equally hard to see GA rates ever reaching CA's current rates. https://envmental.substack.com/p/sacrificing-humanity-on-the-green-766
How are these non-profit groups not just forms of legalized money laundering? Same crap happens in the urbanism/alt transportation world.
https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/the-streetsblog-files-part-i-of
Like in Bryce’s story here, NUCLEAR was not mentioned, WHY?
Believe me or NOT
THATS WHERE ALL OF THIS TYPE OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY IS HEADING........
Taking the long way to get there whether unintended may have serious even more than sticking with FF’s
How in the HELL is leading on alternative energy e.g. wind, solar the US not once again be eating out of CHINA’s hands not just for
Neodymium, Praseodymium, terbium etc..... but
Nuclear!!! for that is the ultimate control in power over all sectors!
NOT JUST THE ELECTRIC GRID
NUCLEAR being the only energy source to transform all three sectors!
The EIA report doesn't appear to separate the difference in costs between modern electric heat pumps from much more expensive resistance heating when it makes heating costs comparisons between natural gas and "electric". According to the article in the link below, when the source of electric heat is an efficient heat pump, electric heating is significantly cheaper than gas. The article also claims that the EIA reports uses total household electricity costs, not just the electricity used for heating. In the interest of having a candid discussion of the topic, I would be interested in hearing Robert discuss the point made in the linked article.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/heat-pumps/heating-will-be-costly-this-winter-but-much-less-so-with-a-heat-pump
Note carefully at the bottom right of Canary Media's home page the following: "© 2023 Canary Media — Powered by RMI." Yep RMI is Rocky Mountain Institute, highlighted in this article about dark money.
I note your point on the funding source. My question when comparing the cost of various heating sources with "electric" heating is what type of electric heating is being discussed. Another government source claims, "Today's heat pump can reduce your electricity use for heating by approximately 50% compared to electric resistance heating...", so just comparing gas heating with electric needs to be more specific about the type of electric heating. (https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-pump-systems)
Heat pumps really are a Goldilocks use case. You need a pretty small range of outside temperatures to gain substantially on gas in terms of electricity used; this is especially so in newer homes that meet insulation inspection as there isn't a frequent call to heat in a 50° ambient temperature and a linear increase in need below that. Below 40° as Gene points out, heat pumps rapidly decline in efficiency. Talk to anyone in the Northeast or Midwest about costs and you'll find that come December or even November, heat pumps start looking mighty expensive. An anecdote, my brother lives close enough to me that he has the same utility; in early fall his heat pump is modestly cheaper than my forced hot air (high efficiency unit). By November his cost is double mine in a house that is roughly 30% larger.
Quoting from your comment, "Today's heat pump can reduce your electricity use for heating by approximately 50% compared to electric resistance heating...", That implies only 200% thermodynamic efficiency. Note my comment made recently. reducing total natural gas use typically requires around 300% thermodynamic efficiency, which is the best-case value for heat pumps. Heat pump efficiency depends on outside temperature. Below around 40 degrees F, the heat pump efficiency plummets.
From the Saul Griffith report for Rewiring America you noted:
"Solar, wind, and nuclear are the resources we have that far exceed our demands. Solar and wind are the cheapest, and have fewer complications than nuclear energy. Some scientists, such as Mark Jacobson at Stanford, argue that an all–renewables strategy can supply our energy needs globally.5 This bold claim has sparked some controversy (and a lawsuit), but if we allow some nuclear energy and use tricks to smooth out daily and seasonal variations (described in Chapter 7), the claims of Jacobson’s critics evaporate. We’re blessed with enough zero–carbon energy to meet our needs and even expand our wants — we just have to harness that energy sensibly."
"Some nuclear".
"Mark Jacobson at Stanford"
"We're blessed with enough zero-carbon energy....we just have to harness that energy sensibly"
Translation - OK, our celebrity scientist was wrong. And suing people doesn't change that. BUT with "some" nuclear (which we will fight to the death to prevent; judge us on past actions, not present happy talk!), it'll all be just fine. p.s. no, we haven't figured out that what we are proposing won't work.
"Some nuclear"
I see that tactic a lot from the Green Agenda, Build Back Better, Climate Change Alarmist, wind/solar gang. They know nuclear is a gaping hole in their narrative, and they get beat up bad in debate over their anti-nuclear stance. So now many of them pretend to embrace nuclear in a lukewarm way, knowing full well that government policy & corrupt regulators will ensure that nuclear at best struggles to maintain its current level. It will get a tiny fraction of the subsidies that wind & solar get, which in turn are very effective (designed for?) at damaging the grid economics of nuclear energy.
A good example is the UCS, Union of Concerned Scientists, more accurately called the Union of Concerned Lawyers. They claim: "we support nuclear energy as long as it is implemented safely". While they do everything they can to delay, disrupt and push up costs for nuclear power plants.
Union of Corrupt Shills
Stole that from someone (forgot who) else.
You know how to determine if an energy source is viable and absolutely necessary in 2023...? If Alex Ocasio Cortez, the least useful person in almost any room, suddenly begins pushing it. Since she doesn't know how to read, it took a trip to Japan last month for AOC to suddenly decide that nuclear isn't going to destroy the planet. Instead it's the only way we can begin to afford all of those incredibly costly and destructive turbines and solar farms.
It's not hard to figure out what this is all about, you just have to read what the Shadow Government minions have stated. The Corporate Overlords of the Western World are Malthusians. Malthus has always been a religion of the ultra-rich. They are Rent Seekers and for them Scarcity = A Monopoly of Wealth & Power. Their penultimate goal is the techno-feudal World Government. Read & learn:
From THE GLOBAL REVOLUTION by The Club of Rome 1991 "Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, "new enemies must be identified."[2] "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."[3]
"We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest"
Paul Warburg, the International Banker testifying to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1950
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis."
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
Depopulation: "I Hope It Can Occur In a Civil Manner"
"The World can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion"
" I know in one way or another it's going to come back down so I don't hope to avoid that, I hope that it can occur in a civil way "
(i.e. Plandemic and deadly forced vaccines):
Club of Rome former director Dennis Meadows
https://rumble.com/v14uz0z-depopulation-i-hope-it-can-occur-in-a-civil-manner-club-of-romes-dennis-mea.html
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller in an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991
“This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long – We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome, Sept. 23, 1994
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.
If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
from David Rockefeller’s autobiography ‘Memoirs’
“Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order (referring to the 1991 L.A. riot). Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government.”
Henry Kissinger @ Bilderberg Conference, Evaians, France 1991
Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State quoted in Time magazine on July 20, 1992: “In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea.”
" Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it. "
Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
" The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet. "
Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
" Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. "
Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
" A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation "
John Holdren Obama Science Czar
"In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a master plan is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late."
Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation."
UN Commission on Global Governance report
"Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."
Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
"In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways."
Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General
"Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises."
Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute
"A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income."
Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable."
Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
"All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."
Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
"The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man."
Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
"A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible."
United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
"A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."
Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
"The resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion."
Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
Superb work, as usual, Robert!
We almost used the same Abrams pic in the piece we released yesterday. We had it underneath the line:
"It also vividly demonstrates a recurring theme in government and modern environmentalism: no amount of failure is too much to succeed."
(But alas, with the other population, food production and other visuals, it put us over the email length limit for the post! :)
Two serious comments:
1) The aggregate assault on this whole ideological charade cannot withstand the fact, data, reason and logic-based stones being thrown at it on Substack forever. What you, Doomberg, BF Randall, Roger Pielke, Jr., and many others are doing to expose it will bring it down. Just like Solzhenitsyn helped bring down the USSR. We believe that and, in fits and starts, are attempting to help.
2) It occurs to us there is danger ahead for all of us related to #1. Look at your decades of work, and everything you've posted since joining Substack, Robert. Look at Doomberg's energy/environmental-related work. Same with BF Randall. Same with Roger Pielke, Jr.
From this very post today:
"Last June, McCarthy (who has since left the Biden administration) declared that she was in favor of having big tech companies censor speech involving climate change. In an interview with Axios, she said “tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.”
We are threatening a lot of people in the Climate-Industrial Complex (our preferred term for 20 years). This includes a lot of people in California behind what we exposing, including many with money from, and in, Big Tech. Including specific people and NGO's.
It occurs to us that eventually these same people are going to lean on our publisher to do what McCarthy is suggesting.
When, not if, that happens, things are going to get interesting. Suffice to say it will be a big test of free speech for this platform we've fallen in love with. And for free speech in western civilization.
All of us are using publicly available information to do the heavy lifting of investigative journalism that the mainstream media won't do. (We all know why.) I
Imagine how different the world would be had it never been allowed to have the Gutenberg press.
Imagine how different it could be if the best thing since - Substack - were pressured by the same forces we're writing about to shut down this Brandeis sunlight machine as "disinformation".
We live in interesting times. We love writers who have courage in interesting times. Keep up the super work, Robert!
It is truly unfortunate that Elon Musk's intellect stops before striking wisdom. He is captive to an absurdist belief in renewables and battery tech as forces of incredible, wonderful change for the planet. Given his otherwise rational views on speech and liberty, I can only hope that he puts the environmental Kool Aid down and thinks deeply on these matters. We would all be better for having a rich cast off from the Mind Head of lefty dogma.
Well he is pro-nuclear. But he is making serious cash on the wind/solar/battery scam. With his utility storage megapacks he was able to boost price 50% from 2021 to 2022 and still has a 2 yr backlog of orders.
If he tried to make nuclear reactors the NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission) would stonewall him so bad he would lose his shirt. Take the NRC out of the picture (and the EPA which is also allowed to blockade nuclear to add misery to madness) and Musk would have factories cranking out thousands of SMR's every year on a big assembly line, every production run an improvement over the previous one. Guaranteed, the cheapest energy on the planet, in fact there would be no competition, the oil price would plummet to $5/bbl and Gas to $0.50/mmbtu and mentioning the words wind & solar would bring on a chorus of deep belly laughter.
Agreed. But Elon is also all in on the wind and solar madness. He isn't that far removed from Jacobson in his utopian version of reality in which a little slice of west Texas could be dotted with solar arrays and wind farms and voila! Energy solved. No mention of the necessary concrete, steel, precious metals and minerals, etc necessary to complete the transformation. And after all, as a guy who owns a largish battery company, Musk isn't going to note it will take several hundred years of mineral extraction compressed into a few to create the batteries necessary to back up the continental grid for even 30 minutes.
Though he is a visionary, Musk's outlook is captive to a static outlook just like the myriad of PhD's at universities who swallow their skepticism amidst a sea of federal grant money.
Seriously, if you had a business that was on a public financed gravy train like he has, are you going to screw that up? Look at all the weapons manufacturers who are on the Ukraine Proxy War gravy train, no matter how insane it is. As CEO you have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. He did enough damage by not going along with the Davos censorship bandwagon. They dumped Tesla shares by the $billions.
By all measure, what he is doing with SpaceX by far and away compensates and overwhelms the $scam$ he gets from the wind/solar/battery racket. And history will prove that true. SpaceX will change the World.
I'm right there with you. SpaceX has already fundamentally changed space travel by orders of magnitude.
Not only is natural gas the cheapest fuel but its also the cleanest and most efficient.
Hard to imagine why a group of people would be working overtime to destroy Western Civilization.
These people share a mechanistic ideology, according to the author of "The Psychology of Totalitarianism."
Not really.
Not once you understand that those same people figured out something 30 years ago and have used it in this manner every since.
No voting booths or revolutions are needed. Too slow and bloody. Too many phones to capture it all.
All one needs to do in order to achieve the same is control energy. Energy underpins EVERYTHING on which modern voters rely.
And to do that, all one has to do is scare the public into believing that profligate energy use is going to kill them. Or worse, their kids.
That's the running tragicomedy on planet earth since 2000.
This Pivotal Moment - Episode 2 - Part 3 - CBDCs and Universal Basic Income:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhB-6qcHYMM
This Pivotal Moment - Episode 2 - Part 5 - The Real Great Reset
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdAaaIjZkXE
"...The World Economic Forum's much publicised Great Reset heralds the end of human freedom for all but those at the pinnacle of the new social hierarchy that is emerging with billionaires and technocrats at the top, as the new techno-feudal lords, and everyone else as a surveilled and controlled neo-serf class. This is not the type of world you want live in...."
This Pivotal Moment - Episode 2 - Part 6 - The Time to Choose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj729K0Kbfo
"...For hundreds of thousands of years humanity has strived against adversity, overcome incredible odds, grown and flourished on this planet. We have not come this far to become mere cybernetic nodes in some soulless AI-driven digital prison. It's time to wake up, to stand together and reject the dystopian Great Reset agenda and then start building a more beautiful world in which human freedom is not sacrificed on the altar of the technocratic state...."
They are NAZI's who want absolute power over the world. THE FOURTH REICH.
Unfortunately, their surnames and pedigree would seem to suggest otherwise.
I feel like one of those "ping pong balls" in the nuclear fusion videos from years ago.
So much crap being thrown at us these days from every direction. It is having the effect they intend; wearing us out and depressing us. Wearing us down until we have little energy to keep fighting. Just once it would be nice to feel like we had some big guys on our side. We are Davids fighting numerous Goliaths but the outcome appears to be different. 🥺
It seems like only yesterday when robber barons did things like build a national library system and unnecessarily employing thousands of workers building Rockefeller Center as the Depression raged. Now they just want to take your home, force you to eat grasshoppers, sell you scratchy sweaters to keep you warm in your hovel between shifts at the Central Committee Wind Turbine Plant Number 1, and pledge obeisance to our overlords for their kindness and elite knowlege and power lest you be thrown in prison. Gee that sounds an awful lot like Communism under Stalin
Focus on one Goliath and do like David... Cull him! Anything else is indeed a waste of Time and Resources.
If you aren't willing to cull, then I suggest you stop using the WWW and "smart"phones and just Live in the most Balanced way you possibly can.
Robert, remind me to tell you about McCarthy’s activities in and around the King Gold Mine disaster and the Clean Power Plan.
The GOAL of the Secular Ruling Families & Billionaires is to reach 2030 with a smaller Herd of modern moron slaves. They will use all the tools available to Them in order to reach the GOAL.
Unless modern moron slaves are willing to cull instead of being culled there is no point in wasting Time with this sort of information mainly because modern moron slaves really don't care about reading about this sort of stuff. And the few that read are aware that they can't do anything about this.
Our current Civilization was built by Them... They own the MAIN SYSTEM and this simple fact allows Them to control all the myriad of sub-systems.
If anyone reading seems this is exaggerated look for evidence no further than to the absolute SUCCESS of OPERATION COVIDIUS.
If They want to stop giving modern moron slaves GAS, They will.
😕😕😕
Why so much confusion?! 1st time reading about Reality?!
Here, this might help... https://postimg.cc/t7by4c9n
Now you have a glimpse of what we are facing.