Progressive Liberals have often accused me of “bothsiderism” (when what they really mean is false equivalence), any time I have pointed out how censorious and authoritarian the Democratic party has become, when they are accusing Republicans of being censorious and authoritarian. Progressive Liberals have many times accused me of being a Trumpist, simply because I critique Democrat policy, and because I won’t gang pile on hatred toward Republicans.
It is true I tend to be more critical of the progressive liberal descent into madness, because they have made an unholy alliance with legacy media, the banks, most corporations, big tech, military elite, the intelligence community and global governance as represented by the World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations, while turning Covid into an outright attempt to normalize Health Care authoritarianism, and using “trust the science” as a blunt stick, to institute climate, gender and race ideologies that are fundamentally anti-science.
But Republicans practically invented crazy these last four decades, so in a very true sense they have no one more to blame for the dismal state of America than themselves.
Currently, Republicans are in a kind of race as to which side is more anti-science and ideological, no where more than around energy policy.
I heard a conservative recently, who I normally consider rational, tell me that oil is abundant, right here in America. I heard him say it twice, before he told me we have 400 years of oil domestically. It is common in Right circles, to say gas would be a dollar or two a gallon, but Biden. It would be more scientific to say that the entire globe is facing a reckoning on oil sometime before 2030, and that reckoning may already be here (though the internet is full of oil propaganda suggesting demand will peak before production will, because you know, those billions of people without ready access to oil don’t really want it.) The Biden administration is only exacerbating that predicament (as if he/they don’t know or care how many deplorable poor that will kill, forcing/allowing fossil fuel prices to climb so as to force a move into renewables that is more ideological than scientific.)
Republicans love to mock the grand delusions progressive liberals have about renewables. I share the sentiment. Electric vehicles (EVs) are elitist in the extreme, as limits on the grid and of lithium and other rare earth metals (they are called rare for a reason), mean only 10% of Americans could drive EVs (so maybe 0.1% of people globally), unless maybe we turn the whole earth into an (automated) mining camp and (have robots) build and maintain a few thousand more nuclear facilities (so that we can lay back in the Metaverse and get high in our rented automated pod-auto.) Which sounds to me like taking the logic of progress to it’s most pathological extreme, about as economic and ecological as saying there is no such thing as a woman.
But you have crushed beer cans for brains if you think a bigger boat, bigger truck, bigger house, bigger bank account, bigger waist is the ticket to heaven. How much energy did we burn doing that? What, do you think oil is abiotic like burps from the devil himself, and as eternal? Even if we feed him more and more beer that isn’t going to make him burp and fart enough to keep us from having to drill deeper than three miles deep in the ocean to find it.
So you think it’s all a commie scheme to enslave us, to destroy democracy? More like a global, corporate technocracy that is the amalgam of all the worst of fascism and Marxism. Your commie fixation is just you getting played by homegrown anti-democratic oligarchs.
See, Democrats. I do think Republicans are as crazy as you are.
But seriously, my point is not to harangue my readers fer yer crazy not going to heaven.
I’m just sayin’, the idea that oil is super abundant forever or until long after everybody you care about is dead, is the same sort of crazy that is the idea we can have a renewable society that looks pretty much exactly like this one, except more equitable and ecological. Both are a kind of mass delusion, denial of the energy predicament we are in fact in.
So my friend Nick and I were talking about this, and we both agreed we could never have imagined hearing ourselves say it, but…drill baby drill.
Nick said, “Mostly because I don’t want to freeze to death.” I replied, “I can totally imagine the lefty technocrats dictating, no more burning wood to heat your home, to save humanity from climate change!” To which Nick replied, “Let them drill wherever they want, and when they realize they can’t fix it, then maybe we can have a serious conversation about energy.”
Energy is ruled by thermodynamics, which trumps (pardon the pun) economics, which is ruled by human needs. Human needs are filled by how much energy is available in the system, just like any living thing. We have gone far beyond need, especially in the West, and we have exported that desire globally. By hook or by crook, available energy per capita is in decline globally (regardless what the experts say about falling demand for oil, what with the WEF still assuming the population will be 9.8Bil by 2050.) There isn’t any solution but learning to use less, but it is sure as the rising and setting of the sun, neither right nor left in America is going to accept that. For them, renewables or drill baby drill are going to lead us to the grand utopia of more of everything forever.
Don’t be crazy.
(A note to readers, I will be offline for much of the next ten days, as I am taking my nephew for his first trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I expect to take a few pictures and discuss the place in the next post.)
This entire article is so spot on.
"But Republicans practically invented crazy these last four decades, so in a very true sense they have no one more to blame for the dismal state of America than themselves." - It is extremely hard for any of them to recognize this.
I also am in the camp of drill so we can get to the serious discussion (which will probably never happen, the discussion part I mean).
I assume you know of her work but I love me some Gail Tverberg on this subject.