The irony was just too delicious. The driver of an electric car ran out of battery life Friday en route from Washington, D.C. to rural West Virginia for a Labor Day weekend getaway. To his rescue came workers from a nearby coal mine who pushed the car uphill to their mine where it could be recharged. The bottom of the vehicle was all plastic, with nothing for a tow truck to hook onto. As a parting gift, one of the mine workers gave the driver a “Friend of Coal” license plate to take home.
Coal is so abundant in this country experts estimate we have enough coal already mined to provide fuel needs for the next 400 years. But Democrats have long slammed coal for its high level of carbon dioxide, a contributor to global warning. They ignore recent innovations — like carbon capture and storage — that could cut emissions. Instead, like a chorus of Greta Thunberg wannabes shouting “You have stolen my dreams…with your empty words!” they pitch renewable energies like solar and wind that are simply not ready to sustain our current and foreseeable needs.
Amazon last year shut down solar panels on all its buildings after they caused costly fires. The panels were part of the company’s plan to zero out emissions by 2040.
At Portland General Electric’s Bigelow Canyon wind farm in Sherman County, one of the spinning blades on a turbine went flying into the sky, a potentially lethal projectile. A broken bolt was the culprit. PGE shut down its 217 turbines for testing and kept some out of service for at least four months. Fire-causing oil leaks — yes, the turbines run on fuel — are common. As for wildlife, estimates are that one million birds and bats are killed each year by wind turbines, though the Sierra Club says helpfully that power lines do far more damage. If they are okay with killing birds, I wonder what the green energy alarmists mean about saving the planet.
And then there’s the main event — fossil fuels. Elon Musk, Patron Saint of Tesla, recently acknowledged that the world cannot survive without them. As Europe grapples with an energy crisis, he said, “we actually need more oil and gas, not less.”
In a show of green energy virtue signaling, California’s Air Resources Board voted in August to ban sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035. Other states — Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Vermont — vowed to follow suit. Never mind that electric cars use batteries that are not recyclable, and that they rely on rare earth minerals from Myanmar, where strip-mining is destroying the natural habitat.
The main problem with EVs is the grid simply cannot accommodate demand. Within days of encouraging drivers to ditch their gas-fueled cars, heat-wave California banned drivers from charging up — or using air conditioning units, washing machines and the like — from 4 to 9 p.m. Rolling blackouts, here we come! And of course in keeping with the elites’ “rules for thee, not for me,” Gov. Gavin Newsom showed up at an event in a fleece jacket — with a polar bear logo — in an air-conditioned room while residents were sweating. Critics were quick to pile-on.
President Obama famously said, “We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” And besides, he added, manufacturing jobs weren’t coming back anytime soon.
President Trump proved him wrong on both counts — leaving us a booming manufacturing economy and for the first time in decades self-sufficiency in energy.
But never mind. Left-wing alarmism over the planet’s fate — odd that several doomsday predictions have come and gone, and yet we’re still here — has only escalated. On his first day in office, President Biden killed the Keystone Pipeline, destroying our energy independence and sending gas prices spiking. Then he announced the US would back Ukraine for as long as it takes — no matter the price — shutting off world supply of Russian oil. Then he depleted our strategic oil reserves. Now he buys oil from truly unsavory regimes like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The Greens remind me of the Malthusiasns, followers of English scholar Thomas Robert Malthus, who predicted in 1798 that the population would outpace the world’s ability to produce food. They believed that natural disasters and man-made wars would naturally correct the imbalance, killing off enough people so the rest could eat. What actually happened is the Industrial Revolution, which exploded agriculture’s ability to feed the planet — and workers’ ability to pay for it.
These days, globalists are trying to indoctrinate a new generation into an agenda of eliminating fertilizer, farmers, meat-based food and anything whose emissions would negatively affect the planet. Why they are targeting the food supply can only be understood if you understand that they are eager to cull the herd — of humans.
The World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset,” backed by the UN, is gunning toward “Sustainable Development Goals” it hopes to achieve by 2030, and I suspect these include worm eating. Already, these SDG policies have collapsed agriculture in Sri Lanka, tumbling most of the country into poverty and fomenting a political firestorm that toppled the president from office. His offense? He signed on to the WEF’s campaign for Sri Lanka to embrace organic farming. Backed by woke US companies like Google, Disney and J.P. Morgan, the Sri Lankan government banned the chemical fertilizers and pesticides used by 90% of the country’s farmers.
The results have been predictable, and horrifying. Rice production, a staple, fell by 43%. Food prices have risen by 80%, gas is up 24% and diesel 38%. As the nation’s bankruptcy became evident, even to green elites who care little about the consequences of their misguided enviro experiments, the UN reported that more than three-fourths of Sri Lanka’s 22 million population has reduced their food consumption due to shortages. Protestors are vowing to fight on, but sadly the new president calls them fascists and threatens a crackdown.
In the Netherlands, the Dutch government recently launched a campaign to force farms in the Netherlands to reduce their nitrogen emissions by 70 to 95% by 2030, in accord with the European Union’s Natura2000 agenda. Farmers have been protesting ever since, as they would have to kill off their livestock and stop growing grains. A few months ago they protested outside a paper factory, pointing out the government’s green hypocrisy. The Parenco Paper Mill, which farmers said ranked 54th among companies in the Netherlands in terms of emitting nitrogen oxides, is under no pressure from the government to reduce them. So paper good, food bad. What gives?
To understand why world leaders would want to kill off people, I began reading the books of Alex Epstein. I suppose you could call him a philosopher of science. Even the titles are delightful in their deliberate trolling of green hysterics, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and his latest, Fossil Future. At first I wondered why he hadn’t been censored by those SM “Fact Checkers” so easily triggered by people of independent thought. Turns out that Epstein deftly avoids cancellation by acknowledging what was once called global warming and is now referred to as climate change, the name change encompassing whatever weather the Gods might provide — cold, hot, temperate.
“I’m not going to make … some ‘climate change denier’ argument that fossil fuels’ CO2 emissions aren’t impacting climate; I totally acknowledge that they have contributed to the 1-degree C warming we’ve experienced over the last one-hundred-plus-years, and they will contribute to further warming going forward,” he says.
Ah, so if he grants the planet’s modest warming, why is he promoting fossil fuels? Because, he argues, the good outweighs the bad. Fossil fuels already provide 80% of the world’s energy, bringing global poverty to an all-time low.
“Fossil fuels continue to have the unique benefit of providing low-cost reliable energy to billions of people in thousands of places — a benefit that is desperately needed in a world where some 3 billion people still use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator. Eliminating fossil fuels would have “truly apocalyptic consequences — making the world an impoverished, dangerous and miserable place for most people.”
So if all that is true, and if it’s true that renewable energies like solar and wind are simply not ready for prime time, and besides rely on fossil fuels for 24/7 backup (much as iPhones and electric cars rely on fossil fuels for their very production) why are the greens — and much of the political, global establishment — pushing this agenda?
Turns out that, much like the Malthusians, the green brigade wants humans to die. “The moral case for eliminating fossil fuels is a deeply anti-human argument,” he writes. Climate change is not inherently bad — especially if it involves more plant food in the atmosphere. The ideal policy would increase “climate livability” by adopting policies that improve the planet, not just refrain from impacting it.
Yes, I was a bit dizzy too. But pushing wind and solar renewables before they are, how you say, “sustainable,” is a bit like driving an electric car with not enough charging stations to get you from your home in DC to West Virginia.
Next I stumbled on the work of two scholars at the Toronto-based Energy Probe and Consumer Policy Institute. Patricia Adams is an economist. Lawrence Soloman is the author of several books — including The Deniers. In a commentary for Epoch Times, they argued that making CO2 emissions the villain of the story is silly. They call it The Big Green Lie, so pervasive among the political class — conservatives and liberals, along with journalists and commentators — that all debate is stymied.
“The fantastical claim that CO2 is a pollutant was cut out of whole cloth,” they wrote. The 2008 statement by the 31,000 experts—that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate” is as true today as it was then, and as it always has been. “No scientist anywhere at any time has shown that man-made CO2 emissions—aka nature’s fertilizer—do any harm to anything.”
Team Biden, especially that deer-in-the-headlights Pete Buttegieg, likes to talk about the pain of rising gas prices and collapsing farm economies as a transition. Recently when they mustered the votes to pass the euphemistically titled Inflation Reduction Act, Dems delighted that the $750 billion bill — which will raise taxes on all but the rich and inevitably make inflation worse — is so filled with green energy goodies.
Now they will line their pockets as farmers, manufacturers, gas workers and yes those coal miners from West Virginia who pushed a stalled EV up hill, all will pay the price.
Yes, let’s save the planet – from virtue-signaling liberals who don’t care if we die.
Just over two years ago, the Sierra Club publicly denounced its founder, John Muir. I love reading anything that points out the hypocrisy, the leftist politics, and insanity of the Sierra Club. They routinely write to me, begging for money. Their magazine is nothing but disgusting lies and propaganda.