Quotulatiousness

November 6, 2024

Running out of minerals means we’re all going to dieeeeeeeeee!!

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall responds to another pants-wetting panic attack that we’re running out of atoms and that means we’re all going to die unless we do this thing I wanted you to do anyway:

“Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo” by The International Institute for Environment and Development is licensed under CC BY 2.5 .

There’s a guy working up in Finland who keeps trying to tell us that we’re all about to run out of lovely metals. Therefore — as with the Club of Rome beforehand, Blueprint for Survival and all those guys — we’re all gonna die.

Aiee, eh?

Now it is possible to work through all his assumptions and nip at them in detail. For example, he assumes we need about 20 million tonnes of lithium in order to replace the global internal combustion engine fleet with battery powered. Not a bad assumption. The Tesla Master Plan 3 comes to the same answer. But if we want to have weeks and weeks of battery power for the whole of society we’re going to need much more than that. Which is a problem, mineral resources are only around 90 million tonnes, so, we’re stuffed.

And, well. Here’s the problem. We’re all — including Michaux — using United States Geological Survey Numbers. In 2023 lithium:

    Owing to continuing exploration, identified lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 98 million tons.

In 2024:

    Owing to continuing exploration, measured and indicated lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 105 million tons.

Wait, what? We can get more mineral resources if we go looking for them? Well, if that’s true then the size of mineral resources cannot be the limitation on how much is out there, right?

This then brings us to the basic mistake that has been made here. We’ve been through this here a number of times.

It’s this:

    Figures 28 & 29 shows the needed quantity of metal to phase out fossil fuels (assuming all four power storage buffer capacities) is compared against the total metal content in the whole planetary environment, including the deep ocean polymetallic nodules under sea resources (Hein et al. 2020). So, Figure 28 shows reported mineral reserves plus estimated mineral resources on land plus estimated undersea mineral resources. This is the summation of mineral reserves, resources, on land and under the sea, in the planetary environment. Even with this extreme summation of conventional and unconventional sources, there was not enough copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, or vanadium to manufacture even just the first generation of renewable technology to replace the existing fossil fuel industrial system.

That’s on page 240 and yes, I had to read (OK, speed read/skim) to get to his simple statement of his mistake. You owe me guys, 239 pages worth.

He’s right that mineral resources can be converted into mineral reserves by the application of time and effort — capital, really. But he thinks that mineral resources are the definition of the mineral deposits that exist. Which just ain’t true — mineral resources are mineral deposits that people have applied time and effort — capital really — to defining. That’s how mineral resources, as defined by our common source at USGS, can increase year on year.

October 26, 2024

Our solar energy future – “In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in with what’s been happening in Germany, eugyppius explains why solar power is far from the cost-free energy source that politicians and scam artists try to claim:

Photovoltaic panels on a roof, 28 April, 2015.
Photo by Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons.

Climatism in Germany is attended by all manner of naive ideas and bright pink fairytale slogans. Among the latter is a dubious proverb proclaiming that “The sun doesn’t send any bills” (in German: “Die Sonne schickt keine Rechnung“). Such proverbs always seem initially plausible (is there anything freer and more democratic than sunshine?) while proving to be basically the opposite of the truth. In fact, the energy transition has landed German taxpayers in the position of paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine. It is becoming an unmitigated disaster, and what is worse, the more we expand solar capacity, the more we will have to pay. For something that does not send any bills, sunshine has sure become very expensive here in the Federal Republic.

Welt calls it “the solar trap,” and it works like this: Our Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) pledges to pay renewables producers fixed tariffs for every kilowatt hour of electricity their installations feed into the grid. Whether you are an ordinary climate-conscious person with solar panels on your house or you run massive solar farms, the EEG entitles you to receive these fixed “feed-in tariffs” for a period of twenty years. The EEG also requires grid operators to accept your electricity regardless of demand and to sell it on the electricity exchange.

Now the sun, although it may not charge for its services, turns out to have this naughty habit of shining in many places all at once. When this happens, electricity supply often exceeds electricity demand and exchange prices fall. They can fall all the way to zero, or in extreme situations of excessive sunshine they can even go negative. Negative prices mean that you have to actually pay “buyers” to take the excess power off your hands. Whether the prices are merely very low, or zero, or negative, the German taxpayer has obligated himself, via the EEG, to pay these producers of unwanted if extremely green and climate-friendly electricity their fixed feed-in tariffs anyway. That is, we are on the hook for the difference between the actual exchange value of excess electricity and the feed-in tariffs promised to producers. In this way we have ended up literally paying for the sun to shine.

In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.

This problem will get worse before it gets better. The more solar panels we install, the greater oversupply we’ll face when the sun shines, and the larger the spread between the fixed feed-in tariffs and the actual market value of this green electricity. In 2024, as I said, the government projected that feed-in tariffs would cost 10.6 billion Euros, but they’ll probably end up costing 20 billion at least. Next year, the costs are projected to be even higher, and the year after that, they will be higher still. As Welt report, the German government plans to triple our solar capacity to 215 gigawatts over the next six years – “the equivalent of 215 nuclear power plants” every time the sun emerges from behind a blessed cloud.

The energy transitioners know they messed up. The new plan is to change the rules for solar subsidies. When prices go negative, larger producers won’t receive their fixed tariffs, and they’ll also have to sell their electricity themselves. In this way, they will become newly sensitive to market demand and stop overproducing electricity when nobody wants it. It is almost like creating a blind system totally oblivious to market incentives was a bad idea. Unfortunately, the new rules will apply only to new solar installations. The German government will still have to honour its insane agreement to pay the operators of older solar plants for years to come. We will light billions on fire for nothing.

October 4, 2024

You know the jig is up for “renewables” when even Silicon Valley techbros turn against it

Filed under: Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

JoNova on the remarkably quick change of opinion among the big tech companies on the whole renewable energy question:

Google, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to reach “net zero” with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock.

In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race.

It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants.

Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services has bought a data centre next to a nuclear plant, and is running job ads for a nuclear engineer. Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke about small modular reactors. The chief of Open AI also happens to chair the boards of two nuclear start-ups.

February 11, 2024

Charlie Angus, Canada’s one-man campaign for struggle sessions, re-education, and prison for people who say things he doesn’t like

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines the inside thoughts of NDP MP Charlie Angus, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week to criminalize speech that even hints at not being fully onboard with Team Climate Catastrophe, especially anything supporting the use of fossil fuels:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Monday
It’s an odd thing to work in the House of Commons; a place where the country’s most cynical, power-mad misanthropes are gathered together into one distilled mass of treachery.

This is why I aligned myself with the only true bastion of moral rectitude in this wretched, faithless town. The NDP does not court power, and thus remains untainted by it. Only by insulating ourselves against the corrupting lure of ambition can we truly know we are on the right side of history.

And today, more than ever, I know the only true moral course is to introduce a federal program of jailing any Canadian who expresses positive opinions of a non-renewable fuel source. Not every Canadian, mind you, just those who can’t provide evidence that an oil company doesn’t indirectly benefit them in some way.

Tuesday
As predicted, the usual agents of disinformation have libelled my bill as “illiberal” or “fascistic”. We’ll prescribe appropriate criminal consequences for this kind of mendacity in due course, but for now I would only ask these deceit-merchants to consider what we’re up against.

Oil companies are, quite literally, the knowing architects of the complete destruction of the human race. If the so-called “market” had been left to its own devices, the world would currently be a utopia of bottomless green energy. But instead, the oil and gas industry has tricked humanity into believing that fossil fuels are bringers of anything except slavery.

Against this kind of perfidy, I was forced to devise legislation that was broad enough to eliminate any conceivable loophole. If we banned pro-oil commercials, they would simply pour their advertising dollars into billboards. If we banned billboards, they would start embedding secret pro-gasoline messages in popular music. If we banned that, they would train armies of crows to attack e-cyclists while cawing the words “Suncor” and “pipelines”.

And you know what they would say when I tabled a bill to ban the attack crows? They would call it “illiberal”.

October 28, 2023

The transition from burning wood to burning coal

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The latest Age of Invention newsletter touches on some of the details Anton Howes uncovered while researching some work on commission for Britain’s NESTA (formerly the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts):

An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.

Here are a few key things that I hadn’t really fully appreciated until undertaking this particular commission, though each has provided even more threads I still need to pull on:

ONE. The transition to coal was started by finding ways to exploit the lower-grade, cheaper and more sulphurous coals: initially by finding ways to burn it in people’s homes that would not leave everyone crying and coughing from the stinking fumes; and then with the expanded supply of even the lowest-grade coals making it cost-effective to do things like boil seawater in pans to make salt. The very lowest-grade coal was termed simply “pan coal”. While I’m pretty certain that these innovations were responsible for much of the rise of coal — coal-fuelled salt pans were even the foundation of the Scottish Lowlands economy going into the eighteenth century — the actual inventors involved are still a bit of a mystery. It’s something I need to return to, as “lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.

TWO. Nobody ever talks about lime! Lime was one of the few things burnt with coal since ancient times, but largely to produce mortar for building. The increased availability of cheaper coal in the sixteenth century, however, meant that lime also soon found much wider use as a soil acidity regulator, as well as to control some pests and improve the absorption of fertilisers. It was especially favoured for sandy soils, allowing the conversion of barren heaths to agricultural land by increasing the soil’s water retention.

Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture. I have a rough and ready test of whether economic historians are paying enough attention to an industry, which is to look up the word in Stephen Broadberry et al.’s British Economic Growth 1270-1870, most scholars’ go-to resource on how historical British output is estimated. Lime is mentioned only once, and only as an input to the construction industry, for mortar. We should know more about lime’s impact.

THREE. Coal, through its various effects on agriculture, also led to an increase in the availability of grain, in turn leading to an abundance of muscle power. Horses were the literal workhorses of industrial cities, grinding the pigments for dyes and paints, tobacco for snuff, charred bones for shoe polish, tannin-rich oak bark for leather, flint for glass and ceramics, and grain for flour, beer, and spirits. Horses fulled cloth, pounded rags into paper, flatted metal into sheets, and bored pipes, guns and even cannon. And of course they powered the transportation infrastructure, hauling the waggons and barges laden with goods.

A theme I keep coming across when I do my research is that there was a lot of effort put into what we might call the “improvement of animals”. I’ve touched on this briefly before, but I get a sense that there’s a whole lot of iceberg lying in wait under the surface for me to uncover. It likely extended to dogs, for example, who like horses were also often used for mechanical tasks. Just yesterday, for example, I read an account by a visitor to 1630s Bristol mentioning how the roasting spits at its inns were driven by dogs in treadwheels. At some point I need to go through all this evidence I’ve inadvertently collected.

FOUR. The Dutch Republic’s Golden Age did not fail because it lacked energy sources. I had already suspected this, as it never rang true, but had not quite appreciated the extent of the evidence: the fairly rapid collapse of so many Dutch industries in the 1650s-80s was, if anything, accompanied by a super-abundance of energy. Both peat and grain were in fact cheaper than ever, largely as a result of plummeting demand. Even the products made using wind —such as the timber sawn for ships along the windy banks of the Zaan river — failed to survive the general collapse in demand.

If energy had been lacking, we would have expected the prices of peat and grain to have been at all-time highs, not in a slump. Indeed, the lack of demand for peat and grain, by sapping demand for infrastructure projects like bog drainage and canal-building, is what led to the re-flooding of much of the Dutch countryside. The causes of the collapse are still something of a mystery to me, but I now feel very confident in ruling the energy theory out.

October 22, 2023

The “Green New Deal” is great … for the well-connected wealthy elites

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson — who lives in British Columbia, hands-down the “greenest” province in Canada — somehow isn’t a fan of the way our kakistocratic “elites” are pushing us all toward their utopian “green” world:

A few years ago when I was building my house, I attended a “green” building conference in San Francisco. Gavin Newsom and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. were giving keynote addresses, and across the conference floor were strewn hundreds of booths of builders, engineers, architects, visionaries, and commercial interests selling every manner of material, equipment, skill sets, and propaganda. Buildings, I was told, emit 59 percent of carbon emissions, and green builders would shut that down. And it would be profitable.

At the time I was neutral but dubious. I had completed a “green” subdivision and had promised puzzlingly powerful members of “the community” that I would build a “green” house. It wasn’t a requirement but it was an acceptable challenge and I knew I would be fascinated by the exercise.

I followed the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum template, contracted the job myself. I wanted to build a healthy house, which meant as little chemical off-gassing as possible. Despite my savings, which were considerable, it still cost 40 percent more than a traditional stick-frame. The geothermal system cost $35,000 more than traditional heating and no, I have not “made back that money.” Today that cost would be north of $150,000.

We’re all in this together, right?

The only reason I am not bankrupt is that where I live is so restricted as to land use, housing prices have skyrocketed. Only the rich can afford to live here. My property with its “improvements,” which is to say my money and labor, is now worth 30 times my initial investment. This is known as old-fashioned economics, wherein you restrict supply and prices, via demand, go up.

This too is a perfect micro-illustration of the “Green Economy” or the the “Green New Deal.” It is “green” only for the wealthy or privileged by virtue of education. It is very, very “green” for those who profit from it. The people who took my extra money, other than the giant suction hose of government, were mostly those demanded by “green” theology: engineers (5), lawyers (3), surveyors (2), wildlife consultants (2), and permitting bureaucrats. Those requirements have doubled in the intervening years.

Today, life is very green for the hosts of eager young professionals at that conference who have in the intervening years insinuated themselves into every government structure, inserting siphons whereby they literally suck money out of the system in torrents of green. When I think of that conference, full of bright-eyed (expensively educated) enthusiasts, who were hell-bent on selling their ideas to the wider culture, I think: who the hell brought you up? Because this is a moral question, a profoundly ethical question. And everything you do is profoundly immoral.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected an appeal that would overturn the econometrics of carbon pricing, i.e. that the Biden administration is placing too high an estimate on the future social cost of carbon emissions. Who can know the social cost of carbon emissions? But it means shuttering 450,000 shale jobs because think of the future.

May 30, 2023

It might be time to consider getting a home generator … while you still can

Filed under: Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille in today’s The Rattler newsletter suggests that if you’ve been considering getting a generator to power your house in case of blackouts, now might be a good time:

The regulatory body that oversees the nation’s power grid cast a bit of a chill over the coming warm months when, in mid-May, it cautioned that the country might not generate enough electric power to meet demand. Coming after multiple warnings from regulators, grid operators, and industry experts that enthusiasm for retiring old-school “dirty” generating capacity is outstripping the ability of renewable sources to fill the gap, the announcement is a heads-up to Americans that they may want to make back-up plans for a power grid growing increasingly unreliable. It’s also a reminder that green ideology is no substitute for the ability to flip a switch and have the lights come on.

Unreliable Energy

“NERC’s 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment warns that two-thirds of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls this summer during periods of extreme demand,” the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nominally non-governmental organization with statutory regulatory powers, noted May 17. “‘Increased, rapid deployment of wind, solar and batteries have made a positive impact,’ said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of Reliability Assessments. ‘However, generator retirements continue to increase the risks associated with extreme summer temperatures, which factors into potential supply shortages in the western two-thirds of North America if summer temperatures spike.'”

This is not the first time we’re hearing that the power grid isn’t up to meeting demand for electricity. Nor is it the first time we’re told that renewable sources such as wind and solar are coming online more slowly than power-generation capacity based on fossil fuels is being retired.

Dwindling Power Plants

“The United States is heading for a reliability crisis,” Commissioner Mark C. Christie of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) told the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources during a May 4 hearing. “I do not use the term ‘crisis’ for melodrama, but because it is an accurate description of what we are facing. I think anyone would regard an increasing threat of system-wide, extensive power outages as a crisis. In summary, the core problem is this: Dispatchable generating resources are retiring far too quickly and in quantities that threaten our ability to keep the lights on. The problem generally is not the addition of intermittent resources, primarily wind and solar, but the far too rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas.”

The federal Energy Information Administration foresees almost a quarter of coal generating capacity being retired by the end of the decade — a process already in progress. Just this month it announced “the United States will generate less electricity from coal this year than in any year this century.” Non-hydropower renewables are the only generating capacity sources really seen growing in the short-term.

In February of this year, PJM Interconnection, which manages grid operations in much of the eastern United States, warned of “increasing reliability risks … due to a potential timing mismatch between resource retirements, load growth and the pace of new generation entry.”

April 29, 2023

Justin can’t let Joe steal his thunder on this critical issue!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Justin Trudeau’s love of the vastly expensive and utterly useless virtue signal is almost unmatched among western leaders, but as Bruce Gudmundsson relates here, some of Joe Biden’s lower-echelon cronies in the Pentagram Pentagon have put up a virtue signal that will be very hard for Justin to top:

In the United States, the president enjoys the privilege of appointing 4,000 of his supporters to positions within the Executive Branch. When the president is a Democrat, the best connected of these invariably prefer perches in the vast social service bureaucracy, there to reign (but rarely rule) over like-minded civil servants.* Those with the fewest friends, alas, end up in the Pentagon.

I’m honestly surprised that the number of direct appointees is so low … I’d have guessed at least ten times that number. I was vaguely aware that the formal “spoils” system was broken up late in the 19th century, but the US federal government and its various arms-length agencies are several orders of magnitude larger than they were back then.

The appointees who suffer the latter fate know nothing of the work they supposedly supervise. Indeed, having been raised in homes in which there were “no war toys for Christmas”, they cannot distinguish a sailor from an airman, let alone explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine. What is worse, like impoverished Regency belles, obliged to spend the Season wearing last year’s frocks, Defense Department Democrats live in constant fear of losing caste.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that the aforementioned appointees embrace, with great enthusiasm, projects of the sort they can discuss at Georgetown cocktail parties. During the Obama years (2009-2017), many of these bore the brand of “green energy”. (No doubt, the appointees in question made much of the double entendre.) As might be expected, many of these programs went into hibernation during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021), only to spring back to life after the inauguration (in 2021) of Joseph Biden.

In a recent post on his Substack, the indispensable Igor Chudov lays bare the folly of one of these initiatives. Part of the Climate Strategy unveiled by the US Army in 2022, this plan calls for the progressive replacement, over the course of twenty-eight years, of petroleum dependent cars, trucks, and tanks with their battery-powered counterparts.

I mean, on the plus side, it would mean that wars could only take place on sunny days (for solar-powered tanks) or windy days (for wind-powered tanks). The sheer stupidity of the notion would be laughable, except they really seem to be serious about military combat vehicles running on batteries recharged with solar cells, windmills, or unicorn farts. I’d call it peak Clown World, but it’s a safe bet that they can get even crazier without working up a sweat.

Searching for an appropriate graphic to go with this article, I found this gem at Iowa Climate Change from back in 2021:

    * Lest you think, Gentle Reader, that this post serves a partisan political purpose, I will mention that am convinced that the one Republican political appointee with whom I am well-acquainted is a knucklehead of the first order. Indeed, if I ever manage to locate the proper forms, I intend to nominate him for a place of particular honor in the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.

April 27, 2023

It’s not environmentalism I object to, it’s environmentalists

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I thoroughly agree with Tom Knighton here:

I tend to be pretty critical of environmentalism. It’s not that I don’t value things like clean air, clean water, and pristine land free of pollution. I actually do value all of those things. I actually care about the environment.

What I don’t care about, though, are environmentalists.

Much of my issue with them is that they don’t seem to recognize reality or, if they do, they just want everyone to have to pay more and make do with less.

Most evironmentalists I’ve dealt with fail to understand one of the basic tenets of economics: There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Yes, we can make certain changes to how we do things to reduce our impact on the natural environment, but such changes are almost never free and sometimes the potential cost is significantly higher than any rational expectation of benefit from changing. Economics — and life in general — is all about the trade-offs. If you do X, you can’t do Y. If you specialize in this area, you can’t devote effort in that area, and so on. Time and materials limit what can be done and require a sensible way of deciding … and most environmentalists either don’t understand or refuse to accept this.

For example, take the electric cars that are being pushed so hard by environmentalists and their allies in the government. They’re not remotely ready to replace gas- or diesel-powered vehicles by any stretch of the imagination. They lack the range to really compete as things currently stand, and yet, what are we being pushed to buy?

Obviously, little of this is new. I wrote that post nearly two years ago and absolutely nothing has changed for either better or worse. Not on that front.

But there have been some changes, and they really show me why I’m glad I don’t describe myself as an environmentalist.

Actually, I take back a bit of my accusation that environmentalists don’t see the trade-offs: they do see some of them. They see things that you will have to give up to achieve their goals. That’s the kind of trade-off they’re eager to make.

Even if you don’t think climate change is real and manmade — I don’t, for example — I like the idea of clean, cheap sources of energy. Solar and wind aren’t going to produce all the electricity we need, but nuclear can.

Yet why do so many environmentalists focus on wind and solar? It can’t make what we need. It won’t replace coal power plants, especially with regard to reliability. Coal creates power when it’s overcast and when there’s no wind to speak of.

Nuclear can.

Nuclear, in fact, could create power on a fraction of the footprint, minimize pollution due to power creation, and do it safely. For all the fearmongering over nuclear power, there have been only two meltdowns in history — both of which were at facilities with reportedly abysmal safety records and one of which still needed a massive earthquake and tsunami to trigger it.

But wind and solar don’t just create “clean” energy. They also require Americans to make do with less.

That is the heart of the environmental movement. It’s not so much about saving the planet. If it’s not about a cult of personality, as Lights encountered, it’s about making people step backward in their standard of living.

April 13, 2023

Old and tired – “Conspiracy Theories”. The new hotness – “Coming Features”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kim du Toit rounds up some not-at-all random bits of current events:

So Government — our own and furriners’ both — have all sorts of rules they wish to impose on us (and from here on I’m going to use “they” to describe them, just for reasons of brevity and laziness — but we all know who “they” are). Let’s start with one, pretty much picked at random.

They want to end sales of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, and make us all switch to electric-powered ones. Leaving aside the fact that as far as the trucking industry is concerned, this can never happen no matter how massive the regulation, we all know that this is not going to happen (explanation, as if any were needed, is here). But to add to the idiocy, they have imposed all sorts of unrealistic, nonsensical and impossible deadline to all of this, because:

There isn’t enough electricity — and won’t be enough electricity, ever — to power their future of universal electric car usage. Why is that? Well, for one thing, they hate nuclear power (based on outdated 1970s-era fears), are closing existing ones and will not allow new ones to be built by dint of strangling environmental regulation (passed because of said 1970s-era fears). Then, to add to that, they have forced the existing electricity supply to become unstable by insisting on unreliable and variable generation sources such as solar and wind power. Of course, existing fuel sources such as oil. coal and natural gas are also being phased out because they are “dirty” (they aren’t, in the case of natgas, and as far as oil and coal are concerned, much much less so than in decades past) — but as with nuclear power, the rules are being drawn up as though old technologies are still being used (they aren’t, except in the Third World / China — which is another whole essay in itself). And if people want to generate their own electricity? Silly rabbits: US Agency Advances New Rule Targeting Portable Gas-Powered Generators. (It’s a poxy paywall, but the headline says it all, really.)

So how is this pixie dust “new” electricity to be stored? Why, in batteries, of course — to be specific, in lithium batteries which are so far the most efficient storage medium. The only problem, of course, is that lithium needs to be mined (a really dirty industry) and even assuming there are vast reserves of lithium, the number of batteries needed to power a universe of cars is exponentially larger than the small number of batteries available — but that means MOAR MINING which means MOAR DIRTY. And given how dirty mining is, that would be a problem, yes?

No. Because — wait for it — they will limit lithium mining, also by regulation, by enforcing recycling (where have we heard this before?) and by reducing battery size.

Now take all the above into consideration, and see where this is going. Reduced power supply, reduced power consumption, reduced fuel supply: a tightening spiral, which leads to my final question:

JUST HOW DO THEY THINK THIS IS ALL GOING TO END?

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that increased pressure without escape mechanisms will eventually cause explosion. It’s true in physics, it’s true in nature and it’s true, lest we forget, in humanity.

Of course, as friend-of-the-blog Severian often points out, these people think Twitter is real life. Of course there’ll be enough pixie dust to sprinkle over all their preferred solutions to make them come true. Reality is just a social construct — they learned that in college, and believe it wholeheartedly.

March 27, 2023

The vicious – not virtuous – circle of green

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson thinks that our societal pursuit of green technology will be the undoing of everything we have built:

Some of us have been saying this for a very long time: green will bring down the world. Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101. It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results. That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy. It has skewed every single market. No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within. This. This is what threatens to bring down the world.

Green is built on subsidies. And not just government subsidy. Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth. Every local, regional and state government leaks millions to green morons promising to “bring sustainable prosperity”. The only prosperity is theirs. They fiddle around in lakes and watercourses, producing “studies”, all of which are hysterical and exaggerated. They muck around in forests, buying as much as possible, shut them down, never visit again, leaving them to desertify. They buy farms and ranches, leaving them to rot. They are termites, eating us alive.

These outfits have burrowed into every level of government and every ministry. They are purely extractive. They do not produce anything of value. They leech. They move in and out of government. When in government, they identify sources of funds to plunder once out of government. In 2015, I did a cross-ministry analysis of just how much money these folks take from the government annually. It is in the hundreds of billions in the US alone. From private foundations they take more billions. All this money is used to shut down economic activity.

[…]

Here is the nasty little secret that lies at the heart of environmentalism. It has been long captured by plutocrats and WEFers, who use it to take resources once thought to belong to the people, to everyone, to use in order to innovate and develop. This freedom and access, and only this was the source of prosperity in the United States. It powered the entire world. It made America the beacon, the lighthouse of the world. It produced strong healthy brilliant young people who performed one feat of innovation, athleticism, and creation after another. All those kids today are working on ever more vicious ways to surveil, control and supress via AI.

And the interior is being cleared of people, businesses, farms, ranches, working forests, mines, and oil and gas installations.

In pursuit of 2030 goals, Biden’s agents are busily acquiring hundreds of millions of acres from private owners, from state and regional land banks, which they will then lock down. Many ranchers, including the heroic Wayne Hage, believe that government is taking that land to use as collateral for its massive debt to the Bank for International Settlements. The only people who will be able to use those resources are multinationals who pay a fee to government and to the BIS to pay down the loans. No citizens will be able to access those resources to make money for themselves, to build families and businesses and towns and cities. The environmental movement has, within 40 years, returned us to serfdom, where we eat what we are told to eat, go where we are told to go, take whatever medicine they want to give us, and eventually, fight when we are told to fight.

The environmental movement is so evil, it has twisted ethical standards to the point where we are able to kill each other with impunity. Their PR is so strong, so invasive, that every school child now believes there are too many people (this is nonsense), and population must be drastically drawn down (a genocide unrivalled in history). Every adult secretly fears this is true. This appalling lie has created a culture of death. What are the effects of this thinking, that life is no longer sacred, but a threat?

March 22, 2023

California – Embrace the Unicorn! No, the other Unicorn!

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on California’s hoped-for path to transition away from fossil fuels:

California has the progressive vision to go all-electric, with laws and regulations that phase out gas water heaters, furnaces, and cars in the near future — while transitioning away from the production of electricity through the use of nuclear and natural gas technologies. Putting the teensy-weensy engineering questions aside and embracing the unicorn, this deep blue vision of the future means the state needs to build wind and solar power facilities in massive quantities, and now. California currently has about half the power it needs to do what it says it plans to do in just ten years.

But President Joe Biden just announced a move that aggressively advances the progressive vision of preserving wilderness and preventing development, naming the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in the Mojave Desert — preventing solar and wind development on 506,814 acres of lightly populated and federally owned desert land. The coalition of tribal and community groups that has worked to get the national monument designated make the anti-solar point explicit on their website:

Where progressive coastal urbanites see the progressive project of decarbonization, people in wilderness-adjacent areas see industrial blight, and express that view in the language of progressive conservationism. To a degree not explored by the false binary of media-defined American politics, in which good people on the left face bad people on the right, California’s future is an increasingly sharp conflict between left and left — and note what kind of permits energy companies have to get to build big wind and solar plants in the desert:

When progressive California builds its progressive energy infrastructure, it’s going to incidentally take a shit-ton of bighorns and tortoises and birds. I assume I don’t have to explain the euphemism.

October 25, 2022

A Multi-Trillion Dollar Pipe Dream

Filed under: Business, China, Economics, Environment, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PragerU
Published 16 Jun 2022

Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.
(more…)

September 24, 2022

The end of crisis culture – “[Y]ou can’t go on having a culture of crisis if people stop showing up for it”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the inevitable endgame of “all crisis, all the time” culture:

The journalist John Tierney has described the Crisis Crisis, “the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”. What we’re experiencing now is the Crisis Crisis crisis, the emerging crisis caused by the Crisis Crisis. Over and over again, interventions in some invented or overhyped form of the crisis, undertaken in the hysterical spirit of the Crisis Crisis, cause a form of the Crisis Crisis crisis, which eventually results in a course correction that may or may not be fully apparent for a while. Skip right over the next paragraph if you don’t need to see examples again.

The Sri Lankan government intervenes in climate change by instantly ending the use of commercial fertilizers in agriculture, which causes a dangerous decline in the production of food. The German government intervenes in climate change by declaring a commitment to 100% clean energy, which causes dangerous instability in the availability of actual energy (“committing national suicide“), with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which nobody ever could have seen coming. The Dutch government intervenes in climate change by declaring an intention to limit agricultural production, which doesn’t cause anything yet, because Dutch farmers won’t stand for it, but final outcome TBD.

All over the world, things that work stop working because of excessive and unwarranted interventions led by people who cry crisis and throw sand in functioning gears. Dutch agriculture was just fine; then the government decided to help end the crisis. The interventions — the interveners, the people who get in the way — are harming us, when their harm could be prevented by literal nothing, by the simple choice to not perform the interventions. What we need is for the interveners to go play Risk in their basement or something, and forget their important duty to help.

The entertainment industry has had its own intervention, famously described on Substack, in woke-facing talent purges and narrative shifts and insulting “It’s Ghostbusters … but with WOMEN!” reboots. And now some hint about the endgame of the one big cycle of fraud comes from woke Hollywood — which has pounded audiences with The Message for years, resulting in a catastrophic loss of audience. The result is starting to look like this:

The social justice intervention in Hollywood storytelling is harming Hollywood; the intervention in that industry is causing the decline of the industry. At some point, people stop eating shit.

June 8, 2022

The Climate Wars are dead, merely collateral damage from the Russia-Ukraine War

Filed under: Europe, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

JoNova links to this Foreign Policy article by Ted Nordhous, signfiying the end of a “lame Cold War substitute” as the conflict in Ukraine pushes it decisively off the agenda for most western nations:

Four days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment of the impacts of global warming. Leading media outlets did their best to pick out the most dire scenarios and findings from the report. But the outbreak of the first major European war since 1945 kept the report off the front page or, at the very least, below the fold. “Climate Change Is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt” simply couldn’t compete with “Putin Is Brandishing the Nuclear Option”.

Meanwhile, the headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe.

In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes — and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power — haven’t changed that basic existential fact.

Virtually overnight, the war in Ukraine has brought the post-Cold War era to a close, not just by ending Europe’s long era of peace, but by bringing basic questions of energy access back to the fore. A new era, marked by geopolitically driven energy insecurity and resource competition, is moving climate concerns down on the list of priorities. If there is a silver lining in any of this, it’s that a shift of focus back to energy security imperatives might not be the worst thing for the climate. Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik — and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide — could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades.

The issue of climate change burst into the global debate just as the Cold War was coming to an end. As one existential threat seemingly receded, another came into view. For much of the international community, particularly the United Nations and its agencies, climate change also became much more than an environmental issue, offering an opportunity to reshape the post-Cold War order to be more equitable, multilateral, and politically integrated.

Nonetheless, when the framework for climate action emerged in the early 1990s, it built on the experience of the Cold War era. U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements became the model for global cooperation on climate change. Just as the superpowers had signed treaties to gradually draw down their nuclear weapons stocks, nations would commit to draw down their emissions. Yet the first major agreement to propose legally binding limits on emissions — the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — was dead from the moment the U.S. Senate unanimously rejected its terms, even before the negotiations had been finalized. Combine U.S. opposition with the understandable reluctance of energy-hungry, fast-developing nations such as China and India to even consider limiting emissions, and the inefficacy of international climate action was set.

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