If there’s any point to energy writing, it is to perhaps try to pull together disparate bits of information that the average citizen is too busy to notice, the sort of random and arcane stats and events that only genuine weirdos devote their spare hours to. Truffle pigs find the truffles.
People learning about energy from the daily news hour is like learning about anatomy by watching Jackass. To get the real story, follow the nerds. If someone hears an activist and/or federal cabinet minister in the news talking about the linear path towards Net Zero 2050 because of their wondrous policies, and said person thinks this to be true, it is worthwhile to check in with life’s data rats as they amalgamate and quietly haul out not-widely-disseminated statistics such as how the real story is that India and China (and Germany) are returning to coal usage, and that any net zero plan starts there.
Energy nerds wade through all this stuff, and find threads about how things are going in the world, and (usually) then bring it forward into the world on Substack and ask for fifty bucks a year. Others do it just because they can’t help themselves.
There are a great many people doing this sort of thing, to great effect, helping the world understand energy better than the cretinous, misdirected and ill-informed crap that the mainstream media dotes on. 29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
But every single energy analyst worth their salt is stopped dead in their tracks by the energy lunacy that western leaders have orchestrated. Some things can’t be analyzed or identified other than to say “There’s something decomposing over there and I can’t tell what it is.”
Politicians have abandoned the literary and logical framework by which we exist. It’s like they declare a new law that in order to save the planet all concrete will be replaced with tofu, effective immediately. How would you interpret that change into the well being of the world?
Thanks to the quality of our politicians, spectacularly definitive statements as unhinged as that example are not hard to find. I’ll warm you up with a small one: The other day, US President Biden proudly declared that this fiscal year, the federal deficit would fall by $1.7 trillion, “the largest reduction in history.”
If you go nuts and run your credit card up to the $30,000 max, ten times your normal max, then make a $15,000 payment, your largest ever – is that the point at which boasting begins? Hey, I can relate. In my spare time, I burn down houses for something to do, but I know it bugs a lot of you, so I’m thrilled to declare that this year I will cut ignition by 90 percent. A personal record, and you’re welcome.
Biden’s comment is just random political bragging though, with no consequence. The real problem is that politicians don’t seem to realize that when they are bringing their gibberish into the realm of physical reality, such nonsense can be deadly on a very large scale.
Here’s an example. The US has made a promise to increase LNG to Europe, meaning building more LNG export infrastructure and presumably increasing production to meet that need. Then there is a barely-earlier promise to slow US hydrocarbon production by suspending oil/gas leasing (2021: “We’ve already waited too long to deal with the climate crisis. We cannot wait any longer.”) which led him to implement ever-crazier hurdles to building any new oil/gas infrastructure. Two years before that was an election campaign suggestion by Biden to throw fossil fuel executives in jail for their contribution to emissions, but now he blasts oil executives for not producing more.
Biden’s politically-useful but vapid messaging has company. He (like most western leaders) has promised two things to the populace that cannot exist together. He/they have promised abundant, reliable, clean energy, and to phase out the hydrocarbon industry as soon as possible. His posse cannot have both. It is impossible.
There will be an energy transition, if and only if the hydrocarbon industry is recognized and treated as the bedrock of society, and if its full arsenal of talent and infrastructure is utilized to the maximum. There will be global chaos, food shortages, fuel shortages, heating fuel shortages, and a mass reversion back to coal if Biden, Trudeau, the EU and others follow on their polarizing path, if they continue to refuse to think.
Voters have to decide. Some of you have elected morons who, metaphorically speaking, are willing to burn down all your houses on the grounds that it is an opportunity to build back better and create a lot of construction jobs.
Forget about “hurting” the oil/gas industry. Lawsuits, preposterous “Scope 3” emissions accounting (whereby the US is proposing that hydrocarbon companies report the emissions caused by use of their product – a hopeless calculation exercise only a social scientist could dream up – does Exxon’s fuel go into Formula 1 cars, or ambulances, or Toyota Prius hybrids, or coal-rolling trucks? Or jets? Or tractors? Because the model needs to know).
What’s left of the industry is producing something the world needs so desperately that prices will be bid up for the foreseeable future to ridiculous levels. Any further arrows sent towards the hydrocarbon industry will only further limit supply, and drive prices up further, and those companies will make even more profit.
The choice of voters is to save life as we have come to know it, or to keep electing energy idiots.
You have to pick your emergency; you can’t run from both. Is the emergency a fuel shortage, or is it worst-case speculation on the temperature in 2070? Are you part of the “fossil fuel lobby” or part of the “fossil fuel lobotomy”? Has Greta left the room yet, with her demand to “see leaders panic”?
The “fossil fuel lobby” is every one of us, because we owe our lives to the stuff, and the government actually knows this. That is why they are leaving boot prints on the backs of all the activists that have crayon-drawn all their childish energy policies.
For long-time energy nerds, the ones paying attention to reality, the focus is shifting. I have no interest in debating the efficacy of government net-zero policies. I have a stockpile of food, the shaping and maintenance of which I find far more interesting.
Hang in there Ukrainians! Find out how the world got into such a calamitous energy state, and how to get out – pick up “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks for the support.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here. PS: Dear email correspondents, the email flow is welcome, but am having trouble keeping up. Apologies if comments/questions go unanswered; they are not ignored.
It’s disconcerting to think how either gullible or stupid the herd instinct voters are, they cause the rational approach to government to lurch from side to side. The simple fact that china and India will burn sufficient coal to offset any possible reduction by western societies, making Net Zero an obvious scam that not even a regular fool would support. Things are getting worse at a rapid rate. Maybe the onset of the next glacial cycle should hurry up?
You know the Climate Change, and other looming panic fear mongering porn are simply a poster child to cover up the most ever higher criminal frack up in modern times and also a mean to take firm central control ASAP, of the humanity in a Global scale… via globalization of governance.
It is urgent because the shcist has literally hit the roof.
It is many decades now that each and every nation not only has an insane ever increasing national debt but also, the very much interested party, the international financing banking structure, has secured a firm control of the governments of the nations by influencing the political leading structures of the national governments via corruption, compromise and blackmail.
Not only that, but in the same time, in individual and groups as businesses, many are in debts and loans up to the neck, literally owned.
This is one part of reality, the other one that seems so pressing to the usual suspects is that;
The Russian Ukraine war, with all it’s bad and wrong and all whatever one may point out,
It still shows clearly, very clearly, beyond any doubt:
That, that the very International Financial Banking structure is not only just wholly compromised, wholly decadent and wholly corrupt, but it is also wholly Bankrupted… in it’s entirety.
As within the premise of, that the guy with the bigger stick wins the day, the very usual suspects behind all this charade, are in a race to get hold of the big stick by any means ASAP,
as else schist at some point in time, sooner rather than later, will hit where it hurts them most.
cheers
Putin has a big stick and is sticking it up the west. This chart shows how effective that has been:
https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD
The EU is in need of RUBs to continue to pay for Russian gas and oil since the US cut off their access to international exchange.
In a civil society, energy rules and Russia has an abundance. In an uncivil world, nuclear warheads rule and Russia is in good shape there.
USA is inflating the USD out of existence and international sanctions on the USD holders will hasten its demise as the world currency; China is looking on. That will place the USA in deep poo because it exchanges USDs, created from nothing, for tangible goods. USA owes the rest of the world almost one years output. It will be tough for the USA to live within its means when it has shut down acmes to energy internally and needs to buy wind turbines and solar panels from China to keep the utopian green dream alive.
Most low-information voters aren’t voting for Nutty Zero. They are voting for more goodies and the moral code of licentiousness and hedonism. That and mean tweets bad.
Before you blame brainless voters (of which there are plenty), see the movie 2000 Mules.
It’s been a decade at least since the majority of voters got what we voted for.
Seems we got lucky and the return of glaciation will be delayed by tens of thousands of years, due to the pathetic peak we just had in the Milankovich cycles.
I keep saying it, because it’s not changed; where is the alternative in the UK? It’s all very well urging people to vote out the politicians behind this scam but when all of the UK political parties have wholeheartedly embraced the delusion, who can we vote for to end it? People are waking up to what’s going on but it’s still not enough – it will take a seismic shift in UK politics to get the Green/Net Zero insanity reversed and the woke stranglehold removed.
Unfortunately, politicians are only concerned with their own survival. They will only change their policies if they suffer under the same conditions that their constituents have.
Politicians and elites NEVER suffer anything. Look at Bojo and his Covid lockdown parties. Look at all the private jets going to Davos to lecture us peasants on our CO2 footprints. You can be sure that as heating fuel and electricity runs short in Europe this winter that not one of those elites will suffer.
Seems to me there was a time when a ruler was told off and it worked.
WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
Agreed . As I have oft posted – net-zero energy policies as posited by the politicians won’t happen because “laws of thermodynamics”
in the absence of a serious political party that offers sensible alternatives, I am afraid that in the UK we will just have to run into the buffers first….
very depressing…
All along the Nick Stokes of the world will be cheering you on 🙁
When starvation and freezing hits the First World people will drop their yellow vests and protest signs and pick up ballistic vests and lethal weapons. It may already be developing in Third World countries.
It’s too late. The collapse is starting and will accelerate. More than a few want it to happen, but only to other people, they don’t realise that they will also be in the firing line
The situation was very clear a decade ago so a pragmatic approach to energy planning for themselves would have placed people in good stead if they acted then. It is getting harder now.
Hybrid vehicles are a good option if you use a motor vehicle.
You can still buy coal retail in the UK for GBP500/tonne or roughly GBP10/GJ. That is half of the current wholesale price for gas in the UK. No idea what you pay retail.
Space is required to get any value from solar panels and batteries in the UK. Home systems that are set up properly will always produce lower cost electricity than grid scale solar and batteries because the cost of transmission and distribution is eliminated. So with full-monty Net-Zero it will be cheaper to make your own electricity. There is no current technology that will make it better.
If you are an office worker, working from home is now much more common and saves travel cost but also means you can move to land that offers security benefits in a woke world ; fruit trees, trees for wood burning, vegetables and food producing animals if inclined.
Reform. Reclaim. Rebuild?
JF
Build alternative networks. A proposal, based on what is happening in other parts of the world, is to start building up support networks among groups that feel that the government has failed them. While it may have faintly ‘survivalist’ or ‘conspiracy theory’ overtones it’s not a bad idea in an age when government itself is undermining the very fabric of society.
The introduction of a democratic system in the UK would be a good first step. The Harrogate Agenda fits the bill.
Net Zero chance of Net Zero.
Can you find wind and solar on this graph?
Data & Statistics – IEA
Politicians are geared towards the appeal to emotions, not facts.
If they can get you to believe absurdities, they can get you to commit atrocities.
The dumbing down of the education system, the leftist takeover of government, the leftist lobbying of industries, and the leftist takeover of mass media make this an uphill battle in most western countries. Authoritarian countries don’t have to deal with the burden and are probably assisting in our downfall.
I’m curious how India avoids this burden and how we can emulate the process. Are they just smarter or less susceptible to the leftist propaganda.
I haven’t voted much in over 20 years as rarely have there been candidates to vote for.
As for all of us being lobbyists…sure. But the fossil fuel companies themselves have to join the debate. Instead of investing time and money to explain to the public the benefits of their products versus the supposed dangers, they spend their time and money building up their ESG scores. This adds to the problem.
If Exxon can figure out how to achieve an ESG score higher than Tesla’s, surely they can explain the benefits versus the risks of their products in a way the public can understand. Perhaps I’m wrong on that, but to date they haven’t even tried. Which leaves citizen scientists and journalists risking having their own caareers cancelled to put the record straight to the benefit of society as a whole, and to the fossil fuel industry in particular.
You don’t have to actually vote for anyone on the ballot paper.
Writing No more Net Zero will put you in the spoilt papers pile. Politicians at the count will take note of how big that pile grows.
No. Not to be rude, but that’s a dumb idea. It’s simply a wasted vote. Just thrown out. The winner won’t care.
Many years ago, when I had a regular schedule and a job to go to, the clock radio awoke me and played the Rush Limbaugh show while I got ready. At one time he was a big advocate of ‘influencing your politicians”, especially by writing to Congress and Senate persons in support of ones own preferences, a practice he believed would strongly influence public policy.
From time to time he had guests, especially people he particularly admired. One day it was one of those Congress, or Senate, persons that he frequently referenced. He made his spiel about writing letters, partly as a question, mostly as a statement expecting validation.
His then hero said something to the effect ‘No, letters don’t matter. We know why we are there and what we are doing. Oh, occasionally one has to go through the motions to make it seem as though we are supporting the voters just so we can be certain of re-election, but that is just window dressing.’
There was a small breath release sound from Limbaugh, then nothing more on the subject, either that show or afterwards that I ever heard. I wasn’t a close follower, I turned off the show when I left the house, so I don’t really know what Limbaugh might have said at any future time but I guess his guest of the day left a more lasting impression on me than anything he himself talked about.
How quaint! I thought those ballots all got counted as Democrat!
You may not have anyone to vote for but plenty to vote against.
As Kirk of HSBC pointed out, no matter what happens FF companies will profit. Lower production with much higher profit margins is always a winner for a company.
While profit margin is good, it’s total profit that keeps a company from going under.
Making twice the profit on a tenth the volume still means that you are earning one fifth as much money as before.
Any company that has revenue drop by that much will be talking with a bankruptcy judge in short order.
It isn’t beyond possibilities that those ‘they’ spending “their time and money building up their ESG scores” are nothing more than a fifth column who believe they also will profit from the looming collapse. They are deliberately acting towards an intended goal, not fumbling a poor defense.
I believe that they are deliberately acting towards an intended goal, but that they firmly believe it will be a great opportunity and have no real understanding of the harm they are causing or what the unintended (but foreseeable) consequences might be.
Voting is important.
If you don’t vote, the political critters figure you don’t care about much so that gives them free rein to do what they want. The more people that show up to vote, the more eyes on a politician – and they all need eyes on them. If nothing else, you pick the lessor of the evils.
I agree that energy companies could do a better job at communicating the benefits of their products. A lot of morons don’t realize that their fertilizer, medicine, and clothing rely on petrochemical feedstocks.
As far as Exxon’s ESG score beating Tesla, I think that was more a swipe at Musk than anything Exxon did.
The reason citizen scientists and journalists have to do the work that should be done by the people that get paid for explaining things is that we’ve let the leftists gain control of the schools, institutions, and government. We have to actively push back from the propaganda and let the school boards and government officials know they will get voted out if they go for that crap. Businesses have to be told they will lose you as a customer if they go for that crap.
The easiest thing you can do is vote. It has a lot more effect than commenting on a blog.
‘I’m curious how India avoids this burden and how we can emulate the process. Are they just smarter or less susceptible to the leftist propaganda.’
They’re smart enough to know that they were desperately poor at the same time their political elites were avid socialists.
There must be some more intelligent and uninfluenced politicians there. While I don’t know the current status, I remembered when they passed legislation that reportedly banned any international Greenpeace operations within their borders.
Didn’t they also kick Soros out?
A California court has just ruled that as far as environmental law is concerned, a bumblebee is a fish.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-court-bumblebee-fish-environmental-law
Does this mean fried trout will count towards my government-mandated insect consumption?
I haven’t voted much in over 20 years as rarely have there been candidates to vote for.
As for all of us being lobbyists…sure. But the fossil fuel companies themselves have to join the debate. Instead of investing time and money to explain to the public the benefits of their products versus the supposed dangers, they spend their time and money building up their ESG scores. This adds to the problem.
If Exxon can figure out how to achieve an ESG score higher than Tesla’s, surely they can explain the benefits versus the risks of their products in a way the public can understand. Perhaps I’m wrong on that, but to date they haven’t even tried. Which leaves citizen scientists and journalists risking having their own caareers cancelled to put the record straight to the benefit of society as a whole, and to the fossil fuel industry in particular.
“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let you do it”.. forget who
That has been my belief for decades. The last presidential election seems to have verified that belief.
Full disclosure: I’m carbon-based, emitted by mother impregnated by my father, who was emitted by her mother impregnated by my grandfather, and hope to emit my own Posterity, eventually, soon, without regrets in a circle of life. Hakuna matata!
I’m carbon-based and vote for the net green effect.
Hang in there Ukrainians!
North by West or South by East? The Spring progressive.
Sure, both father and grandfather love you very much, and very much proud.
🙂
For what it is worth, nice music;
‘Taylor Swift – Look What You Made Me Do’
What??
Are you a biologist? How can you be sure your mother is a woman? In the future how will SCOTUS rule on the applicability of laws designed to protect women and girls?
According to the woke, men are capable of getting pregnant. Therefore your insistence that your mother is a women is sexist, genderist, or something .
The rantings of climate botherers (looking at you IPCC) need to be separated from cool-headed study of what needs to constitute reliable, economic, sustainable energy production.
Were are the professional organizations that represent energy sourcing & electricity generation on this?
Come on, guys & gals – this is your back yard that’s being occupied!
Thank you Mr, my thinking.
Let’s face it, there has got to be some sort of energy transition in the future
The fossils ain’t gonna be there forever.
But what’s happeing is a mass hysteria, a blind panic, that such transistion has to happen yesterday.
I’m struggling an analogy, best I can think is a Titanic.
The cry has gone up:
“Something’s wrong with the ship, everybody run for the lifeboats”
Apart from the fact that the ‘something wrong‘ is a travesty of science, the significant problem is the lack of lifeboats.
=That there ain’t enough lifeboats of sufficient quality and that the shipyard hadn’t had a chance to finish building them before the old tub set sail
Where does that leave the punters?
They’ve been exhorted to abandon ship (on a false pretence) and there aren’t enough lifeboats
Absolute Blind Panic
I repeat, caused by an epidemic of chronic, chemically induced, depression brought on by a nutrient free diet of nothingness and mush
The Transition could work, it has to work but, it cannot happen overnight.
Or as is the UK way, at a ‘WTF’ party at Number 10 Downing St.
(Wine Time Friday)
Anything’s possible when you’re drunk, innit Boris?
Or away with the faeries as is Brandon, not just on Fridays either.
But when the hangover occurs and it dawns that The Idea was maybe not so bright, what then?
easy
Have another party
The date of this transition is so far into the future, that the odds are that whatever replaces fossil fuels hasn’t even been invented yet.
Not long ago there was a WUWT article about the farming mess in Sir Lanka from their ‘organic farming transition’. What happened was one politicians, with his/her supporters no doubt, declared that the nation would ‘go organic’ in ten years time.
Next year there was a new idiot in charge who declared ‘no waiting, we will do it NOW.’
Think what you like about “organic”, and whatever it means, ten years is at least a half way reasonable time to build up the soil and establish usable practices. Read the history of the thriving rice growing Lundberg Farms in California.
Western politicians, especially in the US and UK and Australia, are acting exactly like the Sir Lanka idiots, each trying to out-boast the other over how quickly they are going to create their dream world, skipping over all the details of establishing what can actually be made to work and how it can actually be implemented.
When the ICE was invented it took many years before they became commonplace, and they didn’t go and shoot all the horses immediately because in the future they would become redundant. (In WW2 the German army relied on 1.1 million horses for transport of supplies, and the soldiers marched on foot.)
Yet the present day equivalent of doing this by cancelling fossil fuels before there are practicable and economic replacements seems to be the line we are following.
Look where those, and many other organizations in Germany, were in the early 1930s.
“There will be global chaos, food shortages, fuel shortages, heating fuel shortages, and a mass reversion back to coal if Biden, Trudeau, the EU and others follow on their polarizing path, if they continue to refuse to think.”
They do not think, they have no need to. They receive their instructions from those who govern us. The elite’s puppets we elect are bribed, controlled, blackmailed and threatened to fulfil the wishes of the 0.01% who control 50% of the world’s wealth. There are only three things which will stop world population enslavement; the First Amendment, the Second Amendment and Putin. Yes, Putin. Still want Soros’s Ukraine to win?
I’m not sure how much will change after the election. Veto-proof majorities in both houses are needed for real change.
However, the Senate must approve high-level appointees, including federal judges and Supreme Court justices. A simple majority in the Senate is enough to stop radical activists from holding high-level positions. Assuming, of course, the RINOs don’t break ranks.
Nevertheless, majorities in both houses after this year’s elections will help in building a bigger majority in 2024.
Lest anyone think a drubbing in this year’s midterms will make big changes in the agenda for democrats, think again. The part is tone-deaf. They only listen to the far-left. For them, a loss means they weren’t radical enough.
Do you truly believe the RINOs are there just to make sure the Republican party doesn’t win?
What I meant to write was “Do you truly believe the RINOs are not there just to make sure the Republican party doesn’t win?”
Doesn’t look like the upcoming voter pool is getting any more insightful:
We pay more and more so kids can learn less and less.
Too bad he didn’t ask, “How many genders are there?” I’m pretty sure they would have got that one right.
At the end of the day, capitalism decides. All the politicians can do is make it more expensive and wasteful.
The comment about “Jackass” and my observations over 40+ years of the fluid and changing nature of what “experts” tell us is good and bad, reminded of the movie “Sleeper,” in which Miles Monroe (Woody Allen), a musician who goes in for routine surgery in 1973 and is awakened 200 years later, and much has changed. Physicians and psychiatrists run tests on him due to his bizarre behavior and notions. This clip gives a taste that could easily apply to global climate change (and a lot more): https://youtu.be/485Em2JF34M
Note the comment about Polaroid.
Bad times create hard men.
Hard men create good times.
Good times create soft men.
Soft men create bad times.
We are now clearly at the bottom of that list. Consider the possibility that Man is entering a phase of ‘thinning the herd’. Perhaps a hundred years from now the next decade or so will be called The Great Darwinian Purge.
Soft men outnumber hard men. They win elections and engage in policies based on ignorance and wishful thinking. The result is either war or mass famines, perhaps both. The metrosexual liberals and inner-city denizens will have no idea what to do when food and fuel deliveries cease in the major cities. They will not understand why the local grocery store isn’t making more food, or why nothing works even though plugged into the wall outlet. What does diesel have to with food? Taking those nukes offline and closing coal plants will improve our lives. That’s what we learned in uni.
After a purge of fifty to a hundred million in the U.S. (ymmv), the remaining will have been harden and learned not to trust government with their well-being. Then real progress can continue for another few decades.
Why is that those who speak for something the left opposes are called “Lobbyist” but those who speak for what the left likes are called “Supporters”?
Dmitri Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, put it very succinctly – cosmic cretinism.
Possibly caused by excess drug use. See Hunter Biden for details.
I am profoundly gateful to Mr. Watts for giving space to this author. America and western nations desperately need to hear this message. The dems are proving that they will have Joe Brandon at the podium saying whatever, while staffers right behind him cheer the overnight spike in gasoline and NG. I feel like the doctor in the final scene of “Bridge on the River Kwai”: Madness.
There will be global chaos, food shortages, fuel shortages, heating fuel shortages
Pretty sure that’s the plan.
In Australia, we cannot vote against climate change. Our “conservative” parties are to the left of most US Democrats in Australia.
Popular democratically elected politicians supporting energy security are driven out of politics, with real acts of violence in some recent cases. The rich are lauded as progressive and good by the MSM for buying votes in Parliament to support there subsidy farming in Green projects. They are similarly cheered for buying up base load power, and closing it, driving up power costs.
Currently Australian politics is corrupt. It’s all major parties. The consequence is the collapse of our energy infrastructure.