Environmentalism – Page 4 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

October 3, 2022October 5, 2022

“Fumes Never Smelled So Sweet”

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Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow enthused about receiving her new electric car (EV) by saying in a June 7 Senate hearing, “I got it [EV] and drove it from Michigan to here [Washington DC] this last weekend and went by every single gas station, and it didn’t matter how high it was.” Adding, “And so I’m looking forward to the opportunity for us to move to vehicles that aren’t going to be dependent on the whims of the oil companies and the international markets.” Well, the Wall Street Journal had eight of its reporters in four countries, most in the U.S., spend three weeks of their lives in reliance on an EV as their principal mode of personal transportation (watch below). One main conclusion: Don’t underestimate the ability of partisan ideology to cloud a senator’s mature judgment. Either that, or she’s lying.

Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan, speaks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., US, on Tuesday, June 7, 2022. (Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Here’s some takeaways from WSJ’s experiment. First, some of the people with power in the corporate boardroom are looney. Take GM’s Rick Spina, VP of EV Infrastructure. He details three reasons for the shift to EV’s in the industry: (1) “public opinion, public awareness of climate change”; (2) “there’s legislation around the world supporting the move”; and (3) “in the long run, electric vehicles are going to be cheaper to own and operate”. Two of the three reasons are political, not empirical, in nature. The highly touted wave of climate change concern might show in opinion polls, but it hasn’t translated into a rush to the showroom to buy them. Why? They’re impractical . . . as you will see.

Spina’s claim of the supposed rise of “public awareness” in climate change ranks a fourth-place tie with health care behind the economy, immigration, and abortion in a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst survey. And “awareness” doesn’t mean a broad public embrace of the EV as the solution. The public is simply not buying them in sustainable numbers. The climate change concern could just as easily translate into greater support for the increased use of natural gas and nuclear power than a willingness to pay a $10,000-$20,000 premium on a car of limited practicality. GM is making a bet on something that isn’t a clean match with the so-called “awareness”.

#2 in his rationale is purely political. Legislation is politics pure and simple. Politics has never been shown to bring the greatest good to the greatest number. When politics becomes the arbiter to separate winners from losers, life quickly becomes a zero-sum game: some people win only at the expense of others. Boat loads of subsidies, cash, capital, tax preferences, and punishments for making the politically incorrect decision deprive resources to other pleasant and more appealing alternatives. The economic concepts of opportunity costs and tradeoffs explain the reality. People are herded like cattle down the wrong chute, or the chute that they wouldn’t take voluntarily. Free markets do that – operate on voluntarism, that is – but people like Stabenow and her colleagues want to substitute their judgment for ours. The result is the Soviet world of central planning, queuing up, shortages, and junk nobody wants, and no amelioration of “climate change”.

The last of Spina’s justifications is based on hope, the wishful thinking that the things will be cheaper . . . in the future. They might be more affordable if we sink enough government coercion and largesse into them, but remember, you’ll never realize the things that you gave up (after all, the government aborted them before they were allowed to be real) as gazillions are pumped into making the EV work. It’s like taking one step forward and then three steps back in terms of prosperity.

Enough of Spina. Back to the real world. Notice the appearance of “range anxiety”, the worry that you’re running low on juice and may be stranded before you get to a charging station? It’s much more than a shortage of charging stations. It’s the whole technology. More charging stations means more opportunities to wait hours. It might mean spending a Michigan winter night in the car waiting for a station to free up and charge the batteries so you can get to safety. Speaking of those outside temperatures below freezing, those lithium-ion batteries don’t like the cold. They take even longer to charge. And don’t forget, the batteries that power the wheels energize the heater element and blower to keep you and your kids from hypothermia. More anxiety. A 10-hour trip quickly became 30-hour one.

Which brings up another matter: “gaming” the technology to get more range out of it. What does that mean? You’ve got to turn off all systems to free up more power to the wheels making for an interesting experience driving from LA to Las Vegas in 100+ degree weather on Interstate 15, not to mention a winter drive up the MIchigan peninsula. Range anxiety is instantly transformed into survival anxiety.

Another interesting aside is the identification of EV success with tyrannical regimes, like Red China, the only place with fewer complaints in the test. It makes sense for a system whose stock-and-trade is social engineering. The politburo can simply order an all-EV existence, no great surprise for a Big Brother regime controlling individual conscience, religion, massive surveillance of the population, and genocide, with a gargantuan secret police to make it all happen. Pushing EV’s is small potatoes. But still, if you watch closely, the air is filthy as an American auto exec in China is driven around Shanghai or Beijing. The totalitarians may be shoving their people out of gas cars, but they aren’t so deluded as to think that windmills and solar panels will be sufficient to charge the all-electric things. They are a prime customer for American coal. Imagine, if you will, EV traffic jams in polluted air basins. Has anything about climate really changed?

The WSJ report proved that the EV is almost purely an urban artifact. They’re great for people who live their lives within the city limits running errands. Get out on the open road and range and survival anxiety overhangs the excursion. Plus, unsurprisingly, the published 250–300-mile range is a fantasy. Due to weather and the use of the car’s other system’s such as cabin climate and entertainment, the purported range evaporates. All of this doesn’t matter to a person whose idea of a road trip is to the airport. The EV is a car for a strictly urban life. Outside of that, life is riskier in it.

That’s why some participants in the test suggested a gas-powered car to supplement the EV. So, in Stabenow’s version of the proper life, a one-car purchase is suddenly a two-car purchase. For a family struggling to make ends meet in an existence crafted by Stabenow’s policies, a $40,000 compact EV requires an additional $30,000 fossil fuel sedan if the family wants to have a vacation and family visits beyond the city limits. Maybe in the millionaires’ club called the U.S. Senate, living in domiciles with multi-car garages, having two SUV’s in both modes is pro forma. For the rest of us reeling from inflation, crime, high taxes, rampant homelessness, skyrocketing housing costs, spikes in utility costs, poor schools, and transgenderism threatening to change the lives of our kids forever, an additional car purchase to make the first one practical is lunacy.

That’s why one of the reporters exclaimed in a sigh of relief after the test that “Fumes never smelled so sweet.” First, watch the video if you’re inclined to heed the advice of Gavin Newsom. Don’t say that you haven’t been warned.

RogerG

Sorry, San Francisco and California, You Can’t Suspend Tradeoffs

May be an image of 1 person — Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” (Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles)

May be an image of food — Dead fish on the shore of Lake Merritt, an estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Sowell is right, and it’s playing out in California’s San Francisco Bay. The Bay is beginning to resemble a toxic waste dump. One of the chief culprits is Heterosigma akashiwo, an organism responsible for one of the biggest threats to aquatic life in the Bay. It feeds on wastewater rich in nitrogen and phosphorous which streams into the Bay from the area’s sewage treatment plants and storm drains. The subsequent algae bloom suffocates the natural plant and animal life in these waters. One would think that the millions and billions shoveled out to fashionable victims’ groups (illegal immigrants, etc.), abortion tourism (anyone from anywhere gets an all-expenses-paid trip to end unborn life on the California taxpayers’ dime), the dole, and the Sierra Club’s greenie utopia could be redirected to cleaning up the Bay. Sorry, in this case, ecotopia cancels real ecology, the ecology of the Bay. A classic tradeoff: eco-calamity in exchange for the progressives’ dreamland.

May be an image of body of water and nature — Birds float on an algal bloom in the Bay near Berkeley. (photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle)

May be an image of outdoors — An algal bloom at Lake Merritt in Oakland. (photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle)

That’s right, a tradeoff is actually about how one thing subsidizes another. Not covertly, but in reality. More money for one thing is less money available for something else, like updating and maintaining the area’s sewage treatment plants, and getting the region’s homeless off the streets and keeping them from turning the sidewalks, gutters, and storm drains into a huge open toilet. That stuff gets directly flushed into the Bay. And they used to say about Mexico, “Don’t drink the water.”

The Bay area’s descent into pre-modern times is what the residents unknowingly – and maybe knowingly – voted for. They chose in their elections to be distracted by a progressive pseudo-nirvana and into boom-and-bust electricity, and therefore blackouts, massive wildfires from eco-crazed forestry practices, and decaying infrastructure in everything from some of the nation’s worst roads to its overburdened aqueducts and empty reservoirs. Eco-nirvana makes it easy to pillage public safety in campaigns to defund the police – oh, I mean “reform the police”. Crime spikes and smash-and-grabs frighten retailers out of the state. The regulatory strangulation of the state’s housing industry has created a supply for the 20 million of the 60’s and not the 39.2 million (and rapidly declining) of today. This was a broad political choice to trade prosperity for devolution. The classic tradeoff.

Pedestrians walk near a pothole at McCadden Place and 4th Street in Hancock Park. — Pedestrians walk near a pothole at McCadden Place and 4th Street in Hancock Park, from Los Angeles Times article titled “Road conditions in L.A. region judged worst in country”. (photo: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Don’t blame “climate change”. Be honest, the science is unsettled, and, anyway, California can’t do squat about it. 2.8 billion in India and China, and their cheap electricity, cancels the Golden State’s mere 39 million (and rapidly declining) and its EV’s and expensive and unreliable juice. It’s amazing that Newsom retains approvals in the 90’s among the state’s Democrats, who easily double the registration share of Republicans in the state. Lunacy is popular.

The cause of the Bay’s aquatic predicament is something very simple: If you’re going to have 7.75 million people packed around the Bay, an upgraded sewage treatment system is a necessity to match the 2 million flushing toilets and the expansive open-air john that is the preferred choice of its huge drug-addled, mentally disturbed constituency on the streets and in the parks. Don’t hold your breath waiting for something benign to happen. The necessary upgrades could double or triple property taxes and water rates. There’s one thing that these people are: they are overwhelmingly lefties, yes, but they like to keep as much of their money as anyone on the farm. They are already the most heavily taxed population in the nation, if not the planet. On top of everything else, I don’t think they’ll be in a mood to be taxed into the poorhouse, which is what will have to happen if they are to have their eco pseudo-heaven and a healthy Bay.

Something will have to give. How about exchanging some of the eco-nuttiness and giveaways for a healthier Bay? Sorry, San Francisco and California, you can’t suspend tradeoffs, or have it both ways, unless you’re in the mood for rapid depopulation. People still have to balance checking accounts.

You can read more on the issue here:

* Read about the decline of the Bay at “Poop and pee fueled the huge algae bloom in San Francisco Bay. Fixing the problem could cost $14 billion”, San Francisco Chronicle, Tarra Duggan, Sept. 5, 2022, at https://archive.ph/hAhrn#selection-137.0-137.104.

* Further reading on the problem can be found at “Wastewater, Not Climate, Fueled Massive Algae Bloom in ‘Epicenter of Supposed Environmentalism’”, Ryan Mills, National Review, Sept. 23, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wastewater-not-climate-fueled-massive-algae-bloom-in-epicenter-of-supposed-environmentalism/.

* An account of San Francisco’s descent can be read at “San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide”, Michael Gibson, founder of the venture-capital 1517 Fund, National Review, April 8, 2019, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/san-francisco-decline-failed-government-policies/.

* California’s designation as having the nation’s worst roads (tied with DC) can be found in “These States Have the Worst Roads”, US News and World Report, Dec. 4, 2020, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-12-04/these-states-have-the-worst-roads-in-america.

RogerG

August 28, 2022August 28, 2022

Californios, Get Out While You Still Can

The people running the state of California have issued a ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars, minivans, SUV’s, and pickups by 2035. A centrally planned edict, with little sound reasoning, will descend upon everyone in the state. Of course, the commissars’ dream is to force the lunacy on the entire country. The irony is that California is losing population at a rapid pace – over a quarter million from 2020 to 2021 alone – but the kulturkampf crackpots ruling the state fantasize that the state’s weight of population will force upon the whole country the lifestyle preferences of the California coastal plain. I hope not. In the meantime, Californios, get out while you still can.

If you’re the owner of a business or a person planning to make a huge investment in a home, a car, retiring, or settling your kids into one of the many schools in the state, you might be making one of the biggest mistakes in your life. California is no place to make life-shaping commitments. Millions already got a whiff and fled over the past number of decades. A decline in the rate of increase in previous decades has been replaced by an absolute reduction. 39.5 million became 39.2 million from July 2020 to June 2021. The same people that think they can dictate their lifestyle preferences to the nation are the same ones who can’t keep their people.

Their justification for imposing their choices gets weaker with each passing year. California must be stopped from dictating to the rest of the nation. They get away with this by throwing their demographic weight around which intimidates the Fortune 500. A ban on the sale of conventional cars in cuckoo land, it is hoped, will soon have Topeka and Wichita dealerships flooding Kansas with ev’s against the wishes of the sunflower state’s consumers. That’s the hope of Sacramento’s potentates. But watch the dream get dashed by a lack of appreciation for unintended consequences, which is a persistent blind spot for this breed of power-hungry zealot.

That’s right, they pretend that the unintended consequences are fabrications of “deniers” at the same time that the “fabrications” come crashing into the quality of life. Unintended consequences are either a product of child-like naivete or the belief that the economic law of tradeoffs can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. The central planners’ assault on living standards will happen nonetheless. There is no future in boarded up gas stations and skyrocketing fuel and utility rates. An already decrepit grid teetering into chronic blackouts will be expected to power the state’s new fleet of personal transportation by fiat. Get real. No smothering of the state in a widening blanket of windmills and solar panels can turn intermittent into non-intermittent. Money subtracted from grid maintenance shows up in the massive expansion of “renewables” (tradeoffs), turning the dilapidating grid into a gargantuan arsonist of cataclysmic wildfires. The fires aren’t due to climate change but are the unintended consequence of people obsessed with climate change.

Aerial detection survey photo of dead and dying trees on the Sequoia and Sierra National forests, August 2016. (USFS photo)

Thomas Fire 2 — Firefighters attack the Thomas Fire’s north flank with backfires as they continue to fight a massive wildfire north of Los Angeles, near Ojai, California, Dec. 9, 2017. (photo: Reuters)

There’s more. Going back to those abandoned gas stations, the price of fuel will rise as it becomes harder to get because the market is forcibly shrunk by government dictat. For the diesel heavy vehicles and equipment, their fueling costs will skyrocket since the fuel market dwindled to cover only them. Truck stops are rarer.

The immense total societal investment of over a century in personal conveyances will have been wiped out virtually overnight. In its place will come disposable cars, thrown away because the heart of them, the batteries, is no longer composed of moving parts. The great and proven reservoir of human capital (experience, skills, and knowledge) in mechanics will no longer have a place in this new way of life, having been made useless not by the voluntary choices of people in a free market but by edicts of an activist nomenklatura.

Scrap yards, fields, or overgrown back lots will fill up with the things, scavenged for the few things sellable. If the track record of recycling is any clue, subsidies for the recycling of the batteries will be required. All government subsidies are a replay of the student loan forgiveness scam. One group gets a benefit at the expense of another. I don’t care how it’s configured. If a benefit flowed to one group (recyclers) by government command, it must be shaken from the consumer or taxpayer at the end of the day. Any burden on the manufacturer is a pass-through down to the buyer.

The huge battery packs for the bliss of all-electric will come from the ChiComs, unstable and unfriendly Third World kleptocracies, or domestic oligarchs like US RareEarth. I have yet to see an eco-activist with a love of mining, especially of the open pit variety. Where will the rare earths (lithium, gallium, hafnium, zirconium) and magnets come from? The enthusiasts don’t have a clue. They just have faith in a “market” that they detest. The grand viziers dictate and people must bow to suit. The only innovations are those contrived to fit the commands. They aren’t a product of liberty, for they are a product of kowtowing to the state. Few in their right mind would stake a trip to the emergency room on a vehicle that doesn’t perform well in a blackout. The contraption works best if you don’t live far from the emergency room, and, better yet, if you’re a block away and can quickly push the wheelchair that far.

Pray to God that the ambulances aren’t electric. If they are, you’re screwed in a blackout, and doubly so if they’ve had a number of runs that night. The station house might have a generator but it relies on the same fossil fuel from the same rapidly disappearing fuel supply. All in all, you’re still screwed.

An all-electric future is no nirvana. Even so, they tell us, we’ll benefit from saving the planet. Will we? How are 39.2 million souls, and falling, going to counteract the voracious energy appetite of 2.82 billion? India and Red China have no qualms about burning coal, even our coal. They love jobs and air conditioning too. Get this straight: we are expected to believe that 1.4% of the population of India and Red China will save the planet. Uh?

My greatest sympathy goes to the rest of the state east of the Coast Range. Crossing the Coast Range west to east is departing one cultural entity and entering another. California is two states: the nearly 27 million west along the coastal plain has Sandinista sympathies and the 12 million remainder to the east would hang Sandinistas. It’s a schizophrenic state with the largest portion of the state’s brain psychotic. The diseased two-thirds overwhelms the sensible third. If the analogy was perfect, the healthy cells would seek an escape to a healthier body, which many are doing at a fast clip. They can jettison the state since we have a US Constitution which makes us citizens of the USA and merely residents of a state. We have the right to travel.

So, travel. Get out while you still can.

May be an image of road and text that says 'LEAVING California 'hol Photo illlustration'

RogerG

Sources:
* “California to ban sale of all new gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035, a “historic turning point”, The Mercury News, August 27, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/08/24/california-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point/?utm_email=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&g2i_eui=4hjus%2bKiCR9WZhjuKq1urjE8uS5QtgSd&g2i_source=newsletter&lctg=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&active=no&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3a%2f%2fwww.mercurynews.com%2f2022%2f08%2f24%2fcalifornia-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point%2f&utm_campaign=bang-mult-nl-weekend-morning-report-nl&utm_content=manual
* “Editorial: Yes! California just banned the sale of new gas cars. This is a big deal”, LA Times, August 26, 2022, at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-08-26/california-gas-car-ban-zero-emission
* “A New Demographic Surprise for California: Population Loss”, NY Times, May, 7, 2021, at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/california-population-loss.html
* “These 10 maps explain California’s changing population: The state lost more than a quarter-million residents during the first year of the pandemic, but some counties grew and shrank for different reasons”, The Mercury News, April 4, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/04/these-10-maps-explain-californias-changing-population/
* “US Needs 10X More Rare Earth Metals To Hit Biden’s Electric Vehicle Goals”, Forbes, Sept. 29, 2021, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/09/29/us-needs-10x-more-rare-earth-metals-to-hit-bidens-electric-vehicle-goals/?sh=70e13a093e41
* The east/west breakdown of California’s population in “Economics and Demographics”, NOAA, Office for Coastal Management, at https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-demographics.html#:~:text=California%20tops%20the%20coastal%20populations%20chart%20with%2026.7,6.8%20million.%205%20461%20People%20per%20Square%20Mile

August 19, 2022

Going Green Had Many Fathers But Watch It Be Orphaned.

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” It was the response of President Kennedy to NBC reporter Sander Vanocor at a press conference on April 21, 1961 as his way of taking responsibility for the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Where did JFK get it? The line of descent can be traced to the movie “The Desert Fox” and before that to Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Foreign Minister.

Why mention it? It could apply to popular manias and their failures. A fashionable idea is embedded in the imagination of a sizeable segment of the population, i.e., fathers, and once it falls out of fashion due to its real-world effects, its parentage is forgotten, i.e., an orphan. It disappears into deep space.

The paramount craze of today is “going green”. It is both science and anti-science: a blending of real science – but without cost/benefit modification – and many pop-culture phobias. They are sourced in ideological, theological, and secular-utopian notions. We are experiencing the frenzies in everything from forest management, food production, energy renewables, zero-carbon, and the eco-iconic electric vehicle. We are quickly learning unfortunately that, contra to a one-with-nature ecotopia, the reality is obsolete water projects, massive fire storms, an unreliable grid producing rolling blackouts, decaying energy infrastructure, skyrocketing energy prices, outrageously expensive grid-dependent and unreliable personal transportation, and a smaller and more costly food supply. If you haven’t noticed, some of this “future” is playing out in Sri Lanka.

Protesters in Sri Lanka in July 2022 force the resignation of the country’s president after the onset of an economic collapse due to the adoption of many green policies such as bans on the use of many ag chemicals.

In many conversations going back decades, I’ve heard people express the most fanciful beliefs. Do you remember the cliché of those fleets of oil tankers anchored of the coast during the oil embargos of the 1970’s supposedly as part of the oil companies’ conspiracy to jack up fuel prices? It’s baaaack! Or how about the Non-GMO, Whole Foods fever of today? Or the fanatical and popular in elite circles preservationist forestry policies that produced vast landscapes of dead trees in a drought-prone, dry-summer climate, just waiting for the poorly maintained electrical grid or dry lightning to spark a conflagration? Or the popular war on herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that promises famine and economic and social collapse (once again, Sri Lanka)? Or the pricey but government-preferred electric vehicle running low on juice that’ll ensure that you can’t get out of the path of a hurricane because of the blackout from category-five winds and a monstrous sea surge? Or the huge forests of windmill towers and seas of solar panels scarring the landscape that can’t keep the lights on? “Going green” is a rediscovery of life in the Middle Ages. It’s a future of going backwards.

May be a cartoon of text

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

The Dark Ages looms as we fancy a food supply without Safeway – or Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, General Mills, the Great Plains ocean of grain, and meat packing plants, etc. Anything produced on an industrial scale whether it be lettuce, eggs, bacon, burgers, fryers, Minute Rice, or bread is made suspect. But anything “free range” means less of it and more expensive. Ditto for Non-GMO. The world cannot be fed with farmer’s markets and Jeff Bezos’s boutique Whole Foods. The eco-stuff rots which limit its range of availability. It may taste better and be marginally healthier, but what difference does that make if you can’t get it, or is priced out of the family budget? How are barren cupboards healthier?

Do you think that the equivalent of victory gardens will make a dent? Farmers markets would collapse and quickly run out of product if the throngs who filled the parking lots of Walmart flocked to the stalls and easy-ups on a few acres off I-95. Some actually think that we ought to live on what we personally grow. To do that, everyone must have the equivalent of “40 acres and a mule”, er, tractor (Civil War Order No. 15, Gen. Wm. T. Sherman). But what eco-nut would tolerate the invasion of 330 million people scattered over their wilderness hiking paths? They’re already up in arms about people choosing to live in the land of bears and chipmunks. They even have their own arcane vocabulary for it: Wild Urban Interface (WUI). In other words, places where you oughtn’t be if they get their way. Of course, the irony is that all places at one time or another were WUI’s.

Anyway, who could afford the real estate? Let’s face it, these are the fancies of a hyper-wealthy society with a large cohort of people who can afford to live expensively. Coincidentally, small family size tracks the lifestyle: the fewer disruptive mouths to feed in the family unit, the easier it is to indulge in eccentric, pricey, and ideologically laced lifestyle choices. Speaking of fewer mouths, guess the demographic with one of the lowest fertilities. Non-Hispanic whites dredge near the bottom of all groups at 1.64 children per woman (2018). Non-Hispanic whites in the District of Columbia are even less productive at 1.012, demographic suicide levels. This element – government workers, white collar and overwhelmingly college educated – has much in common with the residents of college communities, bi-coastal exclusive developments, Silicon Valley, and other areas of like complexion. Maybe this is the reason for their enthusiasm for massive immigration, legal or illegal, since they can’t rely on their own organically produced offspring to provide the medical supports and entitlement contributions to keep them comfortable in the autumn of their lives.

So, they grow old and are free to wallow in the hang-ups of their youth. Prominent among them is the “nuclear” bogeyman. A steady diet of movies (“Them”, Godzilla, The China Syndrome, et al) and classroom atomic bomb drills in their youth nurtured nightmares of looming apocalyptic dooms. The boomers and X’ers transmitted the aversion to their sparse offspring. A nearly permanent political base against nuclear power has arrived.

See the source image

“Nuclear” was a monster like Godzilla, but their depiction of it is in open conflict with the worship of the newest deity in an increasingly secular age, Gaia. Combine the fear with the climate-change hype and we have only the latest in a long line of self-negating philosophies. Don’t like nuclear power because characters played by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas said so in a movie (The China Syndrome)? Well, we still can’t have it even if it’s carbon-free and safe and will help address all manner of Chicken Little catastrophes that’ll befall mankind like category ten hurricanes and the oceans lapping onto the Obamas’ estate on Martha’s Vineyard, and further reinforced in another movie (An Inconvenient Truth) produced by the politician-Moses of our time, Al Gore, and followed by a steady stream of more (The Day After Tomorrow, etc.).

So, the message is no abundant and affordable energy, and we must accept less and live with more aggravation and disruption in our lives. We are told that we can’t have fossil fuels, which is plentiful in our own backyard. Thoughts of R & D in carbon capture are verboten, still born in the crib. And don’t dare build those efficient, safe, cost-effective Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) for carbon-free and plentiful electricity. Instead, it’s small in everything from calorie intake to living space to appliances to travel distances.

With the political assault on more land for housing, we’ll be crammed into more Hell’s Kitchens, infected with crime due to DA’s who are committed to ending incarceration, infested with pandemic-level contagions, and public transportation where the filth, threats, and smells of the outside envelop you on the inside. Is this where Pete Buttigieg plans to bike to work?

Going green isn’t a better world. If we’re not careful, the DNC plans to give it to us. We may wake up one morning with the urge to escape the workers’ paradise, but the all-electric Chevy Bolt is dead because of the regular blackout from a grid connected to overburdened windmills and solar panels. Anyway, where are you going to go? The roads are unpassable because of striking road workers and less of the infrastructure money going to asphalt and more to expanding the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department. You’ll have to invest in a Sharpie and carboard to beg your way to the expanding homeless camps on the outskirts adjacent to the lavish, walled, and secure estates of the DNC donor class.

Now, all of this assumes that you still have a job in a country governed by the fairy tale principles of Modern Monetary Theory. And if you did, would it make any difference in the chronic inflation from the fire-hosing of the country in paper money? What began as a scheme with many fathers will soon be orphaned. The parentage relegated to the misty past.

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

RogerG

Sources:
* “Fertility Rates In The United States By Ethnicity”, World Atlas, at https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/fertility-rates-in-the-united-states-by-ethnicity.html

July 23, 2022July 23, 2022

Making Energy Sense, Not a Biden Skill

May be an image of 1 person

President Biden is noticing the inverse relationship between gas prices and a politician’s approval rating: one goes up, the other goes down. So, what does he do? Sacrificing intelligibility, ignoring human nature in the laws of supply and demand, and contradicting the crux of his green-energy agenda, he spirited off letters to energy company CEO’s on June 15 haranguing them for taking his war on fossil fuels seriously. He attempted to strongarm them into dropping prices at the pump by threatening,

“. . . at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable. . . . I request that you provide the Secretary with an explanation of any reduction in your refining capacity since 2020, and any ideas that would address the immediate inventory, price, and refining capacity issues in the coming months — including transportation measures to get refined product to market.”

For decades now, our cultural hegemons have inundated the whole of humanity with climate-change doom. The drumbeat is everywhere; can’t miss it. Now, we have a government of doomsayers, who have put combative policy teeth to the apocalypse story. The hostility to the CEO’s principal product – fossil fuels – is impossible to avoid, even for the pressed suits in the c-suites. They’ve adjusted to the cultural lynch mob by running ads touting their greenie bona fides and a redirection of investments to match. They see what’s in the wind. They see a government on an eco-jihad. Cancellation of pipelines, ending new leases on federal lands, greenie Bolsheviks in charge at the EPA, greenie Bolsheviks running the show at Transportation and Energy – indeed, throughout the Article II branch – and the regulatory and permitting process under the zealous gaze of a greenie Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB), isn’t exactly a green light to increase production, “to get refined product to market”. What Lord Biden taketh away, he expects them to give.

May be an image of outdoors and text that says 'Snack Shop Regular 579% 589 599% Plus V-Power Gasoline' — Gas prices in Los Angeles in May of 2022.

Just think like a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar energy behemoth. He or she would be crazy to commit years and $5-15 billion into building a new refinery or maintaining an existing one, which mostly explains why we haven’t added a new one since 1976 and some are closing. Additionally, why commit millions – without commitment to an asylum – to exploring and extracting the stuff that is constantly portrayed to be the environmental equivalent of monkeypox?

Why do that when Biden’s commissariat, and the sub-commissariats in the blue states, have adopted the Stalinesque “Energy Portfolio Standards” (EPS)? EPS’s are Five Year Plans to shoehorn the entire population into the greenie utopia of blackouts, cramped and overpriced housing, expensive ev’s, and filthy, crime-ridden, and time-guzzling public transit, specifically subjecting it on the most hesitant in the aspiring middle class and proletariat (regular or lumpen). Imagine your standard of living being forcibly molded to fit the conscience of the Sierra Cub executive board, or the lunchroom at Google.

Don’t be a bit surprised that your life takes on the appearance of the beneficiaries – err, victims – of the New Deal-inspired urban renewal extravaganzas of the last half of the 20th century. Is Chicago’s Cabrini Green our future writ large?

May be an image of train, railroad and text that says 'not onter ΔE enter tracks' — A key goal of the Green New Deal is to herd the population into mass transit like this in NYC.

May be an image of sky and skyscraper — Another key goal of environmentalists is dense housing, much of it public, like this one in Chicago. It became a hive of crime and drugs and was demolished in 2011.

May be an image of 4 people and people standing — A policewoman searches the jacket of a teenage boy for drugs and weapons in the graffiti-covered Cabrini Green Housing Project.

So, we are set to replace $2-per-gallon gas and air conditioning for the “intermittency problem” of windmills and solar panels, which means regular episodes of things going dark and summer sweltering. The polar vortexes present particularly vexing problems for a grid with an irregular heartbeat. Be prepared for forests of windmills and seas of solar panels to mar the views during the family drive in the expensive ev, which could be a dangerous activity if no one thought to plug it in the night before.

And where will the electricity come from to charge the thing? Not much chance of charging the ev if the town went dark. I always thought that a continuous flow of electricity, one that can be ramped up as needed, was preferable to one interrupted by clouds, the rotation of the earth, or the lack of air movement. If we are so paralyzed by the thought of burning coal that we are willing to rush into the arms of “intermittency”, natural gas and nuclear could offer a way forward without upending the entire system from the generating plant to coffee maker. Building new gas and nuclear plants to power the grid makes more sense than trying to repeal the laws of physics regarding intermittency, energy density (remember the vast panoramic expanses of windmills and solar panels – the very opposite of density), and the dumping of trillions into R and D to make something work that by nature is inclined not to.

May be an image of cloud and twilight — Intermittency in action: Rolling blackouts in Southern California, 2021

May be an image of standing, nature and text — A picture of intermittency: Mojave Desert windmills, California.

We know much more about natural gas and nuclear generation and the necessary tweaks to make them safer and more efficient. Instead, we are offered the huge opportunity costs of the Green New Deal. Money sunk into this basket of extravagances is money not available for the obvious and accessible. In fact, the obvious and accessible is sacrificed on the altar of will-o’-the-wisp “renewables” as gas-powered turbines are shut down and nuclear power plants closed. Oddly, the most emissions-friendly one, nuclear, has been especially targeted. Globally, nuclear power accounted for 17% of total energy production in 1996. Today, it’s 10%. The picture in the U.S. isn’t any better. Nuclear’s contribution to our energy total is scheduled to fall to 11% by 2050 from the 20% of today. The scare stories of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the damage to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plants in 2011 are dredged to make the inefficient – the aforementioned “renewables” – seem plausible.

May be an image of coast and nature — Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, California, scheduled for decommissioning in 2025.

It will turn into the classic example of government-engineered socio-economic devolution. Where will this lead? Think of the Middle Ages, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Venezuela, North Korea, anywhere coercive utopians seized absolute control of the government to compel others to build their dreamland.

Meanwhile, two words – “carbon” and “capture” – go down the memory hole. A fraction of the money going into R and D for overturning a civilization’s entire way of life could be devoted to “carbon” and “capture” with a much more salutary effect. The remainder of the GND price tag could remain in the pockets of the people. But all that makes too much sense.

And making sense is not the forte of eco-zealots drunk with power in the age of Biden.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

* Biden’s Full Letter to Oil Companies Demanding Help on Gas Prices, https://www.mediaite.com/news/read-bidens-full-letter-to-oil-companies-demanding-help-on-gas-prices-historically-high-profit-margins-are-unacceptable/
* The Global Nuclear Power Comeback, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-nuclear-comeback-green-energy-fossil-fuels-supply-climate-mandates-power-generation-11658170860
* The Blue-State War on Nuclear Power, by Nate Hochman, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-blue-state-war-on-nuclear-power/

July 5, 2022July 5, 2022

Running Out of Puff

May be an image of 1 person, outdoors and text that says 'MAR NIWING 35 VEHIGLE WEMISSION GNP POLICE CE POLICE FXI8 FXI8EEN EEN' — UK police EV

Yes, that’s right. The UK’s Daily Telegraph reported on July 5 “Electric police cars ‘running out of puff’ on way to emergencies”. It’s the kind of thing that Democrat politicos wish for America. Just think, as an angry neighbor is about to go postal and you call 911, the 5-to-6-minute response time turns into . . . never. The cops’ EV ran out of juice on the way. It’s time to call the coroner.

It seems that all the EV’s accessories such as a/c, heater, radio, computers, lights, and siren run off the same battery as the one powering the wheels. The existential crisis of climate change turned into the existential crisis of a dead family member.

Following Biden’s lead, who is following the lead of California, who is following the lead of the UK – a pied piper of delusionals – the “best and brightest” have either outlawed the production of diesel and gas vehicles by date certain (2030 in the UK) or a target date of 2030 or 2035 is set for achieving 100% EV fleets. Utopians are habitual central planners and love numbered targets to force other people into meeting, no matter the disruption or loss of life.

Officers responding to emergencies in EV’s report the well-founded worry of not getting to the crisis. Batteries drain, charging stations haven’t kept up with the government mandates for EV’s, god-awful charging times (45 minutes to 8 hours), and the grid providing the power is being made more precarious at the same time by the same clowns.

It’s a cascade of absurdities. Going all-electric is quickly turning into all-farce, and a deadly one at that.

RogerG

May 26, 2022

Batty Elites at Davos 2022

May be an image of 9 people, people standing, screen and indoor — A gathering of eminences at Davos 2022.

In a previous post, I complained of the embarrassingly poor quality of our current elites, calling them dunces. The latest gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos is proving the point. Their prattle was full of advocacy for a distasteful future. Snooping from outside and within our bodies, lifestyle controls in minute detail, living on less, and an overall abysmal existence, while calling it progress, were an important part of the gaseous blather. Of course, don’t expect these people to relinquish their private jets, mansions, and second-home paradises.

La Rochefoucauld once said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I rework the aphorism for the present moment: hypocrisy’s tribute is actually the price the rest of us must pay for living their conscience.

Absurdities rolled off their tongues in an endless parade at Davos. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in glorious rapture, spoke of swallowing pills with chips to alert God-knows-who about what passes through our digestive tract. The complete lack of self-awareness was astounding.

Indeed, an absence of self-awareness is at epidemic levels among these plutocrats. China’s multinational Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans talked of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor everything from our kitchen cupboards to our travels to the multiplex. Stalin would be proud. Xi is beaming.

That grand eminence, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, was gushing in his praise of artificial intelligence as a “co-pilot of every cognitive task”. Is he so certain that it will make us better or just more controllable? The possibilities are endless in the campaign to eradicate the next class of kulaks, or the Joes and Jennies who love RV’s.

The luminaries at Davos preened each other with prognostications of growing veganism and the eradication of borders. The sanctification of German industrialist Klaus Schwab as the patron saint of the Great Reset – which is a Soviet Gosplan for our future – proceeded apace. Make no mistake about it, this is a totalitarianism of smiley faces in expensive suits.

They are billing themselves as Plato’s philosopher kings, but are proving to be the latest gaggle of fat cats with an unbounded yearning to be taken seriously on matters beyond their ken. Every time that they gather and open their mouths, they are proving that they don’t deserve it. Please, go back to your c-suites and do what you do best: make oodles of cash for spreading prosperity. Prosperity isn’t a dirty word. Drop the hectoring nanny routine.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'THOSE GUYS IN DAVOS HAVE THEIR HEADS IN THE CLOUDS. MORE LIKE UP THEIR... LEE'

*Kudos to Michael Brendan Dougherty for inspiring this piece.

RogerG

April 12, 2022April 14, 2022

What Gives? Don’t We Have Anybody to Defend Free Markets?

Yes, we have defenders of the proven economic creed of free markets. It’s just that it’s not evident among the high-profile windbags who inhabit today’s soapboxes, left and right. Go down the list from Trump to Bernie, Tucker Carlson to Rachel Maddow, France’s Marie Le Pen to French socialists, etc. All of them built fame and fortune on bashing free markets. For them, it stinks!

We should recall that old style conservatism in Europe meant a defense of feudalism, aristocratic prerogatives, and throne and altar. The old Right came by their distrust of the then-voguish ideas of free markets of David Hume and Adam Smith honestly. Choices in life were made to fit the prevailing order for these defenders of the status quo. It worked for a time. In Britain, the Parliament had its rotten boroughs (districts dominated by powerful gentry), an omni-powerful House of Lords (till the 17th century), the preeminence of the established Church and hostility to religious upstarts, its guilds to regulate labor, and taxes and legal privileges to favor local and national producers (Corn Laws, etc.). This web of government and custom restricted personal career choices and the basic staples of life. Competition and free mobility of labor and product were anathema. As such, putrid feudalism earned its reputation.

Corn Laws 1815 — A critical illustration of the British corn laws from the 19th century.

The conservatism of Reagan was originally the platform of the 18th century British Whigs, the other party vying for public support. Liberal meant Adam Smith and free markets, not the pablum of today’s faculty lounges.

In contrast, the old Tory attitude was reflected in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whether in the books or Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. Saruman’s and Sauron’s industrialized machine of war and subsequent despoilation of nature are the principal means to seize the ring and envelop Middle Earth in the Dark Shadow.

Catholic social teachings (Tolkien was a Catholic) abides criticisms of free marketeers. Protestantism wasn’t far behind. Concerns for the plight of the poor and condemnations of crass materialism, a la Dickens, while understandable, provided cover for government intervention. Religion wasn’t even necessary. In fact, for many critics of a free economy, the religion was left behind but the hostility remained. The modern Left was born. Marx showed how, and some Christians noticing the symmetry between their readings of the Gospel and the scribblings of this atheist revolutionary gave to us the Social Gospel movement. Marxist instigators in the raiment of the clergy became a fixture around the world.

Take Bernie Sanders, socialist and paragon of the modern Left. His faith commitment slinks into a word salad. One has to wonder if his belief is of a kind that requires nothing of him, the lazy man’s faith. He explains,

“I am not actively involved with organized religion. I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

Previously, in response to Jimmy Kimmel, he was even vaguer: “I am what I am. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” Whew, hiding your beliefs so as not to be repellant to the still-sizable Christian chunk of the electorate leads to a ramble through mind-numbing Bernie circumlocutions. But it works for him to advance “Workers of the world unite!” – “we’re all tied together.”

If you think that the Bernie of the Left can’t come around to meet someone on the Right, well, I give you Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s rants against billionaires could have easily emanated from AOC’s Twitter feed, or Bernie’s stump speeches . . . and maybe did. Not to say that the corporate suits’ propagation of the vile identity politics and race essentialism isn’t deserving of condemnation, but that’s not the only cause of Tucker’s bloviating. His is AOC’s gripe: the rich exploit the worker. Watch him from 2018 castigate the rich, play lefty class warfare, and embrace Bernie, while tossing into the spiel a few throw away lines for his right-leaning (me included) Fox News audience (below).

And then we have Trump. MAGA has become a cliché, a banality meant to push the view of a floundering America in need of Making America Great Again, meaning Trump. The “Again” part is a nostalgia for the 1950’s; however, it isn’t as simple as that. The 1950’s weren’t a time without troubles: massive pockets of poverty, Jim Crow, dead lakes, filthy air, filthy streets, filthy water, and society-wide health problems.

That’s not all for MAGA. For Trumpkins, the sight of too many Toyotas on the road is proof of the death of American manufacturing. The MAGA mantra is manufacturing good, fewer manufacturing workers bad. But chants only have a superficial truth to them. The decline in factory workers is real but not overall manufacturing. Technological innovation made each worker more productive and freed up others to seek fortunes in other lines of employment, as it did at the dawn of the industrial revolution when people left the farm for jobs in the cities and subsequently created a dearth of rural workers which spurred innovation on the farm. An economic need is filled by invention in much the same manner as nature’s disposition to fill a vacuum.

Contra Trump, 2016, the year of Trump’s ascendancy, set an all-time high for American manufacturing. And manufacturing’s prospects look bright if our government gets out of the way. Off-shoring may have lost its luster as more American firms see that life in kleptocracies and totalitarian nightmares isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In addition, off-shoring is a two-way street for foreign companies. Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest chip producer, sees the Taiwan Strait as not much of a shield from an increasingly bellicose Xi and his People’s Liberation Army and Navy. They’re opening up shop in Arizona. Those Toyotas are increasingly coming off American assembly lines – the Tundra from a Texas one. Do I need to list all the other foreign nameplates?

But our government won’t stay out of the way, even for my friends on the Right. Trump has tariff-love and an unstated affection for a form of central planning called industrial policy. Enthusiasts of the so-called populist right have allied with Sanders to stiff our biggest companies with the cost of any employee on the dole. Unbeknownst to the goofs is the fact that the labor market is righting itself as companies compete for workers and come to realize that the costs of a constant churn in the payroll is deleterious to business health. The chest-pounding of Trump, Carlson, and congressional lackeys is a sideshow to more fundamental economic trends. True to form, though, that won’t stop them from taking credit for any good news.

The Right under the rubric “populists” has rediscovered its vintage inner-feudalist with their frozen-in-amber economics, but nothing at this moment can compare to the state-aggrandizement of the Left’s greenie zealotry. Here’s where the two sides part company.

Our nation could be crippled in a haze of the Left’s greenie visions. A Green New Deal (GND) in a totality or in pieces would turn off-shoring into one-way street out for anyone with a bottom line. The critical mass for the suicide pill has been building for decades. Relentless pounding in the schools and media has prepared the generational ground for greenie flights of fancy from boomers to millennials to gen z‘ers. Gavin Newsom’s “California Way” – the combination of high taxes, regulatory minefields, and gauntlet of greenie infatuations touching nearly all activity – once brought to the Beltway, will only imitate the state’s outbound migration crisis of business and the middle class on a national scale.

So, Tucker, Trump, and their sycophants will accomplish little with their tariffs, subsidies, and tax bribes if firms are forced to face a firing squad of the EPA, SEC, IRS, DOJ, and state counterparts back home. If you want more on-shoring and less off-shoring, then put Leviathan on a leash. Fact is, we’ve got a free-range Leviathan. A hellhole of Jacobins awaits them. Instead of Make America Great Again (MAGA), try Make America Competitive Again (MACA).

Congressional Republicans began the process with the tax reform of 2017 and their vetoes of Obama-era regulations by means of the Congressional Review Act. The whole country will take a leap backwards if the clumsy populist Right, intent on castigating “neocons”, joins hands with the clumsy populist Left.

Hoping for prosperity by bashing job-creators is an endorsement of masochism as an organizational principle. Slavery, besides being immoral, is the height of economic masochism: the belief that owning and beating people is sufficient to make them produce. Don’t expect the turning of the men and women of commerce into bondsmen of the state by regulation, prosecution, and taxation to be any more fruitful. Sen. Liz Warren and the Bernie bros will need a new Fugitive Slave Act to go with their wealth tax and coercive ecotopia to stop capital flight.

It comes down to the clown-theory of pain as pleasure in the junk-thought precincts of economic policy. It didn’t work for the American South and won’t work for the Right’s pining for the 1950’s or the Left’s eco-nuttery. The foolishness of economic masochism is a lesson that needs to be relearned by the Right and abandoned by the Left.

See the source image

RogerG

April 7, 2022April 7, 2022

A New Normal, And a Frightening One at That

Santa Rosa resident who used his 2013 Nissan Leaf to power his house during a four-day blackout in Santa Rosa, Calif., as a result of the Kincade Fire. (photo: Vanessa Romo/NPR)

Surely, this wasn’t the intent of the article (here), but any sentient being could imagine the horrors of an EV world with California’s electricity grid. Remember, the clowns running the state are ecstatic about EV’s but absolutely moronic about the generation of electricity. They seem to be saying, “Hey, go buy one [$40,000 -$60,000] but your charging station will be dependent on the vagaries of the sun and wind, or the combustible, matchstick forests that could flare up at any time. No nuclear power for you.” Go figure.

The reporterette (Vanessa Romo) blithely treated the problem of finding charging stations during blackouts and raging forest fires, a recurring theme in California’s present and probable future, as another wholesome family adventure. One guy was confronting the raging Getty Fire and luckily found an answer to charging his Chevy Bolt from a Facebook group. Since the fire is busy destroying the grid, his hookup to Facebook must be through his phone. That means an operative cell tower nearby, not destroyed by fire, with power, and in range and with an unobstructive path to his phone. What happens if the charge on his cell phone is as low as his Bolt? What happens if cell reception is spotty or nonexistent? This is a theater of the absurd.

Another Sonoma County resident was praised for the “ingenious” use of his Nissan Leaf in an area ravaged by the Kincaid Fire. The subsequent blackout forced him to resort to his Leaf as a generator. Board certification for brain surgery isn’t required to figure out the massive problems with this “advantage”. Using the car as a source of electricity for the house depletes the car battery. This option only works if a charging station with a functioning grid hookup or global-warming fossil fuel generator is nearby. A charging station could be, but the other prerequisites might not be.

By the way, the inverter used in turning DC into the AC for his house could be employed just as well, maybe better, with a Ford-450 Diesel truck, a vehicle more useful than a glorified golf cart. A Leaf, or some such, isn’t necessary for that purpose. So, what’s the benefit for being forced to live in an EV world? You are being shoved into such an existence for no good reason.

The truth of the matter is that the whole charade is pure political theater. Concoct a catastrophe, stampede the public into mistakenly believing that the family sedan is the problem, declare unremittent war on fossil fuels, bribe and punish worker bees with artificially inflated fuel prices, close down the two remaining nuclear power plants, make your public lands combustible nature preserves writ large, and make the whole contraption reliant on the most expensive and unreliable grid in memory, and you too can enjoy the “new normal” of an asylum that calls itself a state.

Get real! Are these people crazy, or what?

See the source image

RogerG

March 26, 2022March 26, 2022

A Religion for High Prices and Neo-Feudalism

An electrical contractor repairs a sign with gasoline fuel prices above six and seven dollars a gallon at the Shell gas station at Fairfax and Olympic Blvd, near a billboard of John Oliver, in Los Angeles, California, on March 8, 2022. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) (Photo by … — Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.

Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.

Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).

*************

Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.

Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.

But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.

See the source image

Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.

The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.

That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.

And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.

Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.

Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.

These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.

Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.

The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.

If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.

Biden blames Putin and his Ukraine war for the inflation rate and high gas prices. He won’t succeed. — Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.

The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!

Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.

But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.

You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?

Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.

He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.

Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:

“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”

Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?

That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.

RogerG