We live in a world where our leaders routinely deceive us.
A cousin in Chicago told a joke about a fellow released from an insane asylum. Before his departure, he requested and received a diploma with his name and a statement that the person holding his document is sane. Wherever he went, he took his diploma with him. He would show it to people on the train or bus and ask if they had something similar. Everyone just shrugged their shoulders and said that he didn’t. After a while, he concluded, “Everyone around me is crazy. I’m the only sane person around here.”
Chuck Schumer proudly declared that he would defeat a proposed law because, without Democrats, the Republicans do not have the 60 votes needed. What could be the law that Schumer wants to kill? It would require that a person prove his or her citizenship before being allowed to register to vote. Wow, that’s pretty radical, isn’t it: guaranteeing that only kosher citizens vote in federal elections? Like everything else, Donald Trump is on the side of the vast majority of citizens who want honest elections; the Democrats invoke anti-Trump sentiment and choose a completely ridiculous position. Does this man understand why he and his party have approval ratings similar to his shoe size?
In the past, technological transitions were natural, even with hiccups. No government had to force people to abandon the horse and buggy for cars. The transition took time, with the requirement for enough gas stations being one of the limiting factors in the acceptance of the automobile. Ever wonder why the tire company, Michelin, is the last word on gourmet restaurants? Their original guide came out to give people valuable destinations to which to drive—and use their wonderful tires. The first cellular phones were clunky, had short battery life, and usually had one line of screen with orange numbers. No matter. With massive consumer demand and investment, we moved to the iPhone and the wondrous devices we have today. Most phones sold today are smartphones as they provide enormous capabilities at an acceptable cost.
Whereas most technological transitions are shaped by market forces, the renewable energy drive is forced on the people from above. Electricity from renewable sources is generally more expensive than traditional alternatives and less reliable. A few years back, there was a heatwave in Texas. To my surprise, that state gets 15% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind. Well, on those days, there was no wind and the system was short of power by a good deal. Blackouts followed, and Google chose to be the Orwellian curator of the internet. I tried to find contemporaneous reports from that time, and they were not to be seen, as they make green energy look really bad. I worked for the man who was the founder of the company whose mirror-based generator system is being shut down on the California-Nevada border. It never performed as expected, and other technologies have raced by it to make it outdated.
Last week, there was an extraordinary event in Europe. Spain and Portugal lost all electrical power. No planes, no trains, no internet, no light. The cause would appear to be due to fluctuations in the electrical frequency of the grid which is majority renewables. This is a warning. Renewables are not anywhere as reliable as hydroelectric, nuclear or carbon-based fuels. Coal and natural gas are reliable sources of relatively cheap electricity. Natural gas is even labeled as a “green” energy source in Europe. But our “net zero” zealots are enamored with forcing technology rather than allowing the market to choose what works best. What happened last week ended in less than 24 hours, but it is a warning that moving too fast and too fully into wind and solar will come with potentially disastrous consequences. If carbon dioxide was actually a problem then nuclear would be the way to go. The issue is not climate change but human control, so Europe will not even consider adding more nuclear power to their now unreliable power grids.
Ever wonder why a plane uses jet fuel? Kerosene-based fuels have the highest energy density, and thus, with a fixed volume of space for fuel in an aircraft, the longest distance traveled goes with the fuel that can provide the most energy to power the engines. Boeing and others have played around with highly modified food-based “biofuels”. These fuels are very expensive to produce and have less energy than oil-based jet fuel. Do we want to go back to the days of “refueling”? I still remember stopping in Gander or Honolulu to tank up before continuing on a journey. Today, the most efficient jets can travel around 20 hours, connecting cities on opposite sides of the planet. If the greenies have their way, we will go backwards and once again stop every few hours to add less efficient green fuel.
The attempt to foist energy sources on us from above fits in very well with the COVID-19 tragedy. With the parts coming together, it would appear that NIH and Wuhan were partners in making the virus that destroyed the society that we had built up over decades. There was nothing natural about the engineered virus that got out of the Wuhan Institute, and the directives from the WHO and Washington did nothing actually to address the growing pandemic. We have learned recently that 90% of those put on ventilators died. We have also learned that the Trump administration has found nearly two dozen pre-pandemic modeling studies of how the virus would spread. Just as incompetence is a government trait, so the creation of the virus and its Keystone Kops response with potentially dangerous vaccines show what happens when the government is over its head.
In a normal society, energy sources would be used at the lowest price for maximum usage. If fossil fuels actually do run out, as we have been promised since the 1970s, then alternatives will become more attractive for cost and usefulness. But when the government forces its population to make an unnecessary transition to satisfy ideological nonsense, the masses will pay the price. Green energy is more expensive, less reliable, and not necessarily cleaner than carbon-based fuel sources. Don’t let them bully us into being left in the dark like our Spanish friends.
If the Davos crowd had its way, you would eat bugs, live in a very small apartment without air conditioning, drive an even smaller electric car, not travel much by plane, and be monitored by a digital passport and identity card. In Ireland, they have already asked retirees to downsize and give up their larger apartments to illegal aliens. We have the resources and technology for abundance; their Malthusian disposition wishes to make our lives miserable when there is no need. Not letting Democrats take charge is not just good political hygiene; it is a matter of national survival.