I think that we fossil-fuel fans can see light at the end of the tunnel as the global government’s green-energy transition experiences a head-on collision with reality.
I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but really, it’s the only way to tell the climatistas that their god is dead. Facts and logic won’t do it.
Instead, the believers must experience decadence and nihilism and dead bodies floating down the Rhine and know, in their eternal recurrence, that their climate god isn’t going to save them. [bold, links added]
It’s Not Funny, but the prospect of a cold winter without Russian gas in Europe seems to be the one thing that the Klausi babies and the Greta Thunbergs and the gubmint-funded scientists didn’t think about in planning their glorious Great Leap Forward to the green-energy transition.
Good point, young Mao, in the back row. If backyard steel plants were such a good idea, why don’t we all cook up lithium batteries on the backyard barbie?
A question for you sons-of-Mao green-energy geniuses. Are there no wars? Are there no rumors of wars? Or did you think that your highly elevated discussions up on WEF’s Magic Mountain were above all that grubby stuff?
Some people might say that this all proves Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of The Black Swan. I think not. If you believe that the current green-energy meltdown was a totally unpredictable Black Swan event, I got a bridge…
I think it proves instead Taleb’s recommendation in Antifragile that you want your life, your home, your nation, and your WEF meeting up in Davos, Switzerland, [can continue] despite minor glitches in the supply chain arising out of sordid little quarrels that flare up from time to time between the inheritors of the glorious Ancient Rus.
But the rubble bouncing in the Ancient Rus is the least of the green-energy problems.
See, geniuses, there is this little concept called “time preference.” It says that humans discount possible events in the future.
That’s because it is more important to put gas in the car right now — or plug your climate-friendly EV into the free recharging station at the supermarket — than to worry about what gubmint- and billionaire-funded scientists say about the climate in 80 years.
And it is not a good idea to wreck the economy with green-energy subsidies and pay-to-play research grants, just because you can.
And another thing, the gubmint scientists may be wrong. Ask Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s pet scientist, about that.
I fearlessly predict that by the end of the 21st century, the Big Thing will be the grandsons of Elon Musk fighting over their SpaceX inheritance to see who gets to make the next trillion by sending people to Mars on the Starship Premium Frequent Flyer Program.
And, finally, humans have thrived thus far not through fearless predictions — despite the union of seers and prognosticators insisting on rigidly defined areas of prediction and prophecy — but from humans adapting, again and again, to new conditions.
Yes, cupcake. That’s what Science says, ever since Darwin. Species survive and thrive by adapting to changes in their lived environment, not from top-down edicts from the great and the good or from the shop stewards of the union of seers and prognosticators.
Of course, I am rather more advanced in my understanding of the world than that. I subscribe to the latest hottest science — that for some reason has not yet become fashionable among leading hostesses on Martha’s Vineyard — that we live in The Self-Creating Universe of J.J. Clarke, and that the new things “emerge” from the various Keystone Kops pratfalls of gases, liquids, solids, plants, animals, humans, and fossil-fueled SUVs and we don’t know why.
We cannot know yet how big the butcher’s bill for green energy will be. But we do know this: the sooner the moment of truth arrives the less ordinary humans will suffer. Naturally, we all hope that the liberal ladies of Martha’s Vineyard won’t be inconvenienced too much.
The whole green-energy roadshow demonstrates why the market economy beats elite diktats every time it is tried.
It is because nobody knows which of a hundred brilliant new ideas will work, what will stave off disaster, or whether the climate will heat up or cool down. All we know is that a thousand Anybody business owners will outperform an administrative hierarchy of Somebody elitists by a couple of orders of magnitude, every time.
All the flap about green energy has helped me appreciate what an amazing boon to humanity gasoline is: with a hundred pounds of gas in the tank you can drive the kids all day across the fruited plain to grandma’s house.
But it takes 6,000 pounds of battery to get your EV halfway to grandma’s: assuming that the charging stations have electricity, California.
Read rest at American Thinker
The following is from “Science & Mechanics” magazine, August 1974, page 88.
(Quote)
Any attempt to predict the future stands on very shaky ground. In spite of a steady improvement in the sophistication of future-predicting techniques — from cattle entrails to crystal balls to computers — our ability to predict even the short-term future remains poor, indeed. Observe what happened to President Nixon in the four months from November 1972 to March 1973. Anyone who talks about what life will be like in 30, or 100, or 1,000 years from now is talking nonsense.
This is so because of three reasons:
1) There are facts to be discovered about our world which are unknown today.
2) Even if we knew all the facts, there is nobody with wisdom enough to understand how all of them are related and interact with one another.
3) Even if we knew all the facts, and how they interact with each other, there is the additional and most important obstacle to future-prediction: Social, political, economic, legal and military considerations often override the scientific and technological information. This is why America’s vaunted technology, so brilliant in putting men on the moon, is utterly impotent in trying to solve social problems involving people. Humans are individualistic and unpredictable — not at all like electrons or spacecraft that can be manipulated precisely at the experimenter’s whim.
It is for these three reasons that the future 10 years from now really cannot be predicted. But the seeds of the future — the technological, scientific, social and economic factors that can determine it — already are planted today. And some now are beginning to germinate and blossom; they shortly will bear fruit.
So, the nature of our future lies more with moral issues rather than with science and technology. In a convocation address in 1945, Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, then chancellor of the University of Chicago, told the graduating students, “The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.”
Orwell would have agreed.
(End quote)
Thanks for that, Graham. Orwell didn’t name Big Brother but now we know, it’s WEF.
We don’t have to drive over a cliff to know that’s a very bad move. Recent events should have raised society’s awareness that “zero carbon” is a cliff. Don’t go there. Admit (confess?) that fossil fuels and nuclear energy will be needed, in abundance, for generations to come. If Putin were to retreat from Ukraine, a possibility, Europe should remember how close they came to calamity . Bad policies made them vulnerable.
Green Energy Transition just rode their bicycle into a brick wall of reality