Religious Mass Hysteria: The Campaign Against Fossil Fuels

In her most recent post, Jane observed the substantial resemblance between the current wave of “gender dysphoria,” and various religious mass hysterias throughout history, notably to some during the medieval period.

Yet as much as it may be widely discussed and prominently featured in the media in recent years, gender dysphoria still affects only a relatively small number of people.

But how about the campaign against fossil fuels? That also bears a great resemblance to religious mass hysteria. We have the tale of grave sin and the possibility for redemption.

We have the priestly caste — politicians of the Democratic Party — that has been anointed to instruct us and lead us into the path of salvation.

We have the expulsion of all heretics from the seats of the religion in academia.

We have the holy people sermonizing about their own saintliness and our sin. (Greta Thunberg and Bill McKibben come to mind.).

By contrast to transgenderism, this fossil fuel hysteria affects us all.

Just in the past few weeks, we have the wave of Executive Orders from new President Biden, now empowered as our high priest to mete out punishment on us for our sinful ways, and force us to stop.

Already, pipelines are being blocked, fracking has been banned on federal lands, and fossil fuel prices are being intentionally driven higher.

The price of oil (WTI) on the commodity markets has suddenly gone from $37.66 per barrel on Election Day to $59.47 at Friday’s close, an increase of more than 50%.

Based on past experience, that increase will very quickly be reflected in the price of gasoline, and somewhat more slowly in the price of electricity.

Has anybody considered that the devil could still be out there working his evil ways? Consider, for example, this report on February 9 from World Oil, headlined “Russia Will Replace All the U.S. Oil That Biden Wants to Ban.”

Excerpt:

[Russia’s] government doesn’t have a plan to transition away from fossil fuels. Instead, its state-owned energy companies benefit from some of the world’s lowest production costs and tax breaks, making them well placed to gain in the short term. Global oil companies will stop investing in exploration and shift to clean energy, “but somebody still needs to produce oil,” said Ekaterina Iliouchenko, a money manager at Union Investment Privatfonds GmbH in Frankfurt, who increased exposure to Russian oil stocks last year. “That’ll be the Russians and Saudi Aramco.” Rosneft and Lukoil have been among the best performers in Russia’s benchmark equity index so far this year, handing investors total returns of 15% and 12% in dollar terms.

Then there is this report from The Guardian, also on February 9, with the headline “State-owned fossil fuel firms’ plan to invest $1.9tn could destroy climate hopes.”

The state-owned companies that are the subject of the piece include principally those from Russia, China, and India. Even as the forces of good strive to save the planet and your soul, these forces of evil work in the darkness:

National oil companies (NOCs) produce about two-thirds of the world’s oil and gas and own about 90% of reserves. They are rarely scrutinized, however, as their state ownership means they can operate secretively, without publishing much detail on their finances or operations. . . .

And don’t forget India, with four times the population of the U.S., rapidly building its capacity to generate power from coal. From a Global Warming Policy Forum report on February 12:

Speaking at an event last week, India’s Coal Minister Pralhad Joshi reiterated that Coal will remain the primary energy source of the country, calling the coal sector as “backbone of the country” and assuring that the government will offer “full support.”

That is understandable, for the country’s peak demand is predominantly met by coal and the government recognizes it to remain their priority even by 2030.

It seems that the chances for the new religion to succeed in abolishing sin are just about zero.

On the other hand, the chances of the new religion succeeding in multiplying your cost of gasoline and electricity by, say, a factor of five sometime over the next few years are rather good.

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