Nassim Taleb, if you’ve never read his stuff, is an odd and fascinating character; a writer with towering intellect, vast wealth, and an odd sort of humanistic humility, yet at the same time he provides a reliably volcanic reaction to pomposity or ineptitude. When those two are combined, he goes full nuclear (from his book Antifragile: “Risk management as practiced is the study of an event taking place in the future, and only some economists and other lunatics can claim – against experience – to ‘measure’ the future incidence of these rare events.…the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.”). I mention wealth as a defining characteristic not because it directly implies some great talent in itself, but because it supports Taleb’s case of DGAF (Google if you must), the most magnificent you’ll ever encounter.
A favourite Taleb topic is what he calls IYIs, Idiots Yet Intellectuals. While it is no doubt a provocative title, its widespread existence has proven remarkably valuable to many people and industries by highlighting that there is no guarantee that anyone currently lodged in the intellectual/academic field is not an idiot. Said person may be a global authority on, say, leaf pigmentation or Greek inflation or the dietary habits of incarcerated pimps, but those credentials do not mean they hold valid or even sensible opinions on anything beyond that.
There is a subtlety therein that Taleb explores in great detail, in a way few others do. A big part of Taleb’s value is to empower those that don’t feel like intellectuals (most of us) with the knowledge that we can, and should, feel free and able to call out BS if it appears to be nothing more. Everyone is an expert at something, whether a truck driver or brick layer or plumber or pilot or doctor or crude oil marketer. Each expert has a community of similarly skilled individuals, and we are lucky to be able to access these talent pools via trade publications and, yes, academic journals. We just need to remember that expertise is not universally transportable to other fields.
We especially need to remember that when it comes to energy. There is a desperation in the air to transform the global energy system, a desperation shared largely amongst the western elite ruling class. The other 7+ billion people are more interested in survival, but hey, they don’t call the shots, do they?
Those most ardently pushing a rapid energy transition are doing so on a case of escalating urgency. The head of the UN recently declared the phrase ‘global warming’ to be passé and apparently effete; he has adopted (as will his followers) the term ‘global boiling’. The mayor of London (UK London, the big one) quickly joined the chorus, tweeting the obligatory picture of a burning globe and commenting that “We need urgent green action on a colossal, unprecedented scale.”
Given that the western ruling class is of the highest academic credentials, that is where they turn for energy policy; an academic sub-industry has rapidly blossomed to provide the rulers with full support for their “Yes we can!” energy transition plans.
They’re trying to run in mud, but they just don’t get it. They think that because urgent action, accelerating action, at unprecedented scale is requested, all they have to do is map it out.
Academics tell governments: Absolutely, a colossal, unprecedented-scale energy transition is possible. Just look at our model! Build a million wind turbines. Wire them all together. Oh yeah, they’re intermittent, so throw in a million batteries. What are you all waiting for? Oh, and don’t talk to those crooked fossil fuel people. They should be in jail (Biden).
Taleb’s ideas bring quick clarity to an assessment of why these grandiose schemes leave us with a queasy feeling. We can look around and see a lot of successfully built wind, water and solar projects (WWS). But we can’t look forward and assume they will all be similar just because we have visual evidence of past successes. We may have kicked several thousand Indigenous people off the land to build hydroelectric dams in the past; are we so sure we can do that anywhere ever again? We built the first 100,000 wind turbines easily, do we know how hard it will be to build the next 100,000? Do we have materials? Approvals? Resistance? Will those problems grow? If so, by how much?
The industrial landscape is littered with examples of unplanned and huge roadblocks. A new high voltage transmission line across the southeastern US has taken 17 years to get approval. Another proposed high-voltage line in the northeastern US that would have brought “green” hydroelectric power (damming up a natural wonder to generate power is not unequivocally green, by any stretch) to the heavily populated US northeast was successfully blocked by environmentalists. A potentially huge lithium mine in Nevada has been held up for over a decade because of the existence of a rare flower on a key few acres. California’s high-speed rail project from LA to SF, initially targeted at $33 billion and to be in service by 2025, has a 2019 cost estimate update of $100 billion with an in service date of “unknown”. Robert Bryce, a Substack guy worth following, tracks renewable energy projects that have been cancelled due to public outcry and the number is significant and growing.
I’m not picking on green energy here. It’s the same for all energy. The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 300-mile natural gas line under construction for years in the Appalachia region, is all but completed – only about 15 miles to go. Yet it has been held up in court indefinitely by activist campaigns. Recently, the ground shook as US President Biden stepped in to authorize removal of all barriers to the completion of MVP, and Secretary of Energy Granholm, who loathes hydrocarbons, declared MVP to be in the public interest. Yet even after these actions, activists still found a way to delay it further – they challenged the presidential decree in court and won a subsequent delay.
Here is where Taleb’s concepts gain particular value. His book Antifragile is in part about the robustness of that which has been proven. We know what works; it has been time-tested and honed and has the bugs worked out. Some might say that sucks, emissions wise, but it is the machine that has been built that we know keeps 8 billion people alive.
The sensible path to a transformation, particularly one as massive as an energy transition, is to integrate each new component at a pace that does not blow up the entire system, a pace where any errors are localized and not mass-destructive (Taleb: “The wise, like the fool, makes mistakes. The difference is that the wise is prepared & knows way ahead of time the cost of every mistake. For the wise, a mistake is local; for the fool, the mistake is global.”). Don’t confuse an energy transition with a cell phone transition; cell phones revolutionized communications by allowing us to speak and do almost anything from anywhere, an unfathomably more useful device than a landline. An energy transition offers nothing new to energy users, or nothing positive anyway, but it can offer much worse, if it is less reliable.
Anything to do with energy is anchored in the existing system, whether we like it or not. Renewables are possible only because of the existing hydrocarbon system. That fact has nothing to do with the potential of renewables; who knows what could come out of the search for new types of energy.
Many anchor-less energy transition commentators don’t understand the nuance involved. They argue for policy that will punish hydrocarbons and squeeze them out of existence, or, at a minimum, stand by silently while opponents do that exact thing via endless lawsuits, divestment campaigns, etc. The assumption is that by burning bridges we can only go forward.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
They do not understand risk. To activists, the risk to humanity is that temperatures may rise due to additional carbon in the air, which may have certain consequences, which may have significant negative effects to humanity. They can’t comprehend the risk of dismantling the existing/functioning energy system too rapidly – a system that is responsible for everything man made around us.
They do not understand that the path to dealing with those potential issues is not to kill off the old energy system and replace it with a theoretical one. The International Energy Agency is one of the few entities to attempt a concrete net-zero 2050 roadmap; in it they conclude that the goal relies heavily on technology that does not exist yet or has never been proven at scale.
Of course there will be technological breakthroughs and advancements and maybe even the holy grail of energy systems like some miracle battery or cold fusion of superconductivity. Go inventors. Yet it is not much of a thought exercise to see that even any of these will be a massive global challenge to develop, test, construct, and integrate. For instance, what would room temperature superconductivity do to our existing electrical grid? What about the trillions of dollars of existing installations that work with known technology but might not with new? Where will the raw materials come from? How will we get them? Will we destroy excessive physical habitat to do so, if we try to do it too quickly?
Critics call this sort of thinking ‘foot-dragging’, and make accusations that such thoughts are simply pro-fossil-fuel barriers hastily thrown up to delay an energy transformation. These critics are powerful; Robert Bryce chronicled recently on Substack how famed economist Paul Krugman stated in the New York Times how technological advances in renewables mean that we can go all-renewable with little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards. “All gain-no pain” is the term used by NYT to describe this…stuff. (I reference Mr. Bryce’s writing on the NYT article rather than the article itself, because Mr. Bryce’s knowledgeable takedown of Krugman’s unreal thinking is far more relevant. (And I link nothing: C-18 paranoia)).
It is a step backwards to talk about articles like Krugman’s, because his entire renewables assumption is flawed for all the reasons described above. But here’s the problem: Policy makers read the NYT, because of the elite/academic/activist axis (Canada’s arch activist and federal Greenpeace/climate minister Guilbeault is all of these, and has, of course, been interviewed by the NYT). They do not read Bryce or BOE Report, because why talk to the mechanic when you can talk to the designer?
All of this has nothing to do with adoption of a ‘can-do’ attitude, an accusation hurled at those who question the inevitability of an all renewable future. A proper can-do attitude says: “Hey, I can start a business and make it succeed if I try hard enough.” It does not say: “Hey, I’m going to build a skyscraper with free dead branches.”
I’ll leave last words on the topic to the two camps. US Secretary of Energy Granholm has staffed the Department of Energy with anything-but-hydrocarbon people, absorbing energy advice from places like Stanford and Princeton universities (from a Stanford ‘research’ paper: “This study presents roadmaps for each of the 50 United States to convert their all-purpose energy systems (for electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) to ones powered entirely by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS). The plans contemplate 80–85% of existing energy replaced by 2030 and 100% replaced by 2050.” (The assumptions made are simply bizarre: by 2035, all new small, short-range (<1,500 km) planes are battery- or electrolytic-hydrogen powered”…”[Within 5 years of 2015 study date] all heating, drying and cooking in residential and commercial sectors is electrified…”) They have built their future energy roadmap on such recommendations.
But here is what the mechanics have to say: Four of the largest US grid operators, covering 30 states and 154 million people, warned (ok, one link, it’s important), jointly in a statement: “With continued and potentially accelerated retirements of dispatchable generation [gas or coal], supply of these reliability attributes will dwindle to concerning levels…. the Joint ISO/RTOs are concerned about a scenario in which…needed technologies are not widely commercialized in time to balance out large amounts of retirements.”
They’re not talking about WWS as ‘needed technologies’; they are talking about ‘needed technologies that are not widely commercialized’. In other words, in order for federal energy planning schemes to work, new tech must become viable and commercial. Quickly. And what is causing the grief is only an infinitesimal fraction of what the Stanford paper says is feasible.
From the mechanic’s viewpoint, dramatic emissions progress can be made in a few relatively simple steps: replace global coal power with natural gas, utilizing the trillions invested in existing infrastructure. Rapidly (as possible) develop small, medium, and large scale nuclear power. Convert that power into whatever you want – electricity for EVs, hydrogen for fuel-cells, etc. – to the extent that raw material availability allows. Humans won’t revolt, and we’ll all get along quite well.
Don’t buy magic beans. And please, please don’t vote for anyone that doesn’t know the difference. No one has any idea how much is at stake.
Energy conversations should be positive and, most of all, grounded in reality. Life depends on it. Find out more in “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
The “signal my virtue” button should have a fire extinguisher nearby if the speed of adoption detracts from grid maintenance and brush fire safety. Better start connecting the dots here before more wildfires threaten.
Hawaiian Electric Knew Wildfires in Maui Were a Growing Risk, But Waited Years to Act – WSJ
Don’t blame the victims.
What caused the fires here and in the North and West? CLIMATE CHANGE.
Unfortunately, vote smuckering politicians make poor designers of future electric systems. When we put our faith back into companies whose objective is to get power to houses and industry, cuz that’s how they make a profit, things will work out much better for consumers and taxpayers. Politicians just want restrictions.
“…we put our faith back into companies whose objective is to get power to houses and industry…”
Sadly D. Mackenzie, there are few of those left. Government subsidies have made talking about such things just as profitable or morso as actually doing them. And the tools offered by the talkers just don’t work but the profit remains.
‘Unfortunately, vote smuckering politicians make poor designers of future electric systems’ Actually they are not good at anything except smuckering and deceiving the voters. This, they are only good at because of the stupidity and greed of the voters who will buy any lie they want to hear.
The party political system is a platform for promoting lies and liars. It makes fools of the voters and propels rubbish to the top. The voters need to look to people who can offer nothing but themselves. Independents are the way out of the mire.
even the holy grail of
Pointing the finger
“”Attributing extreme weather events to climate change, as I do through my work as a climatologist, means we can hold countries and companies to account for their inaction, says Friederike Otto””
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2387333-why-knowing-how-climate-change-contributes-to-extreme-weather-is-key/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_content=news&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=NSNS
She recently pointed the finger at Alimonti et al – with Mickey Mouse
Ah, ‘Fredi’ as she is known to her friends is a physicist with a doctorate in the philosophy of science. She knows all about climate change because she has loads of models which tell her what is going on – in fact she loves her models and their “hundreds, thousands of simulations”
“What were concerns over the impact of climate change are understood realities, it is costing thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths globally every single year”
“37% of deaths from heatwaves over the last 30 years have been caused by climate change. And that is a conservative estimate”
All those models – she must be right!
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/oxford-people/fredi-otto
Climate modelers earned the Nobel Prize in Physics for their accurate work.
Who are you?
Just like Yassir Arafat and Barack Obama “earned” the Nobel Peace Prize.
Vote for the least dangerous candidate? To make it as simple as possible….EXTREMISM throughout history has always been a disaster and extreme CO2 ideology will also end in disaster….you saw it here first. Only extremism in defense of liberty is no vice….hehehehe.
It so happens that the least dangerous candidate will always be an independent. If the voter chooses wisely that person may also be the most useful.
Unfortunately, voters want cheap (or free), easy & fast, which is what politicians sell, and of course are unable to deliver, usually at great expense.
I want the pols to do nothing on climate….NO! is the most important word in the language…..and just say NO to that crook Biden. Just do the opposite of what Joe would do and you will not go wrong.
Have the courage to do nothing!
Unfortunately, that doesn’t get many votes. What was the best way to handle the economy in 2008? Do nothing, or as little as possible. But doing nothing doesn’t get those PAC donations flowing and doesn’t make bungling politicians appear to be heroes.
Adults say “no”. Unfortunately, we have few adults in America anymore.
Much like the undercover consumer protection reports of residential solar scams and offshore wind cost/incentive renegotiations, political leaders are right there with the scammers in the over selling.
hidden camera new story
I-Team: Hidden cameras reveal dark side of solar power – YouTube
Yes. The voters are entirely to blame for what they get but it is easier to blame politicians than yourself.
Back to the “future” computer-server logic … you’re going to die if you don’t listen.
Pick your reason for the current narrative: stupidity, ignorance – or craving for power. The answer is, it´s all about power (economy/oikos/oeconomia) not the truth. Why the parantes, because, economy, oikos, oeconomia, means if you translate it, The Art of Living – and to understand welfare, you have to know this, welfare means, to fare vel.
The following news special from the Australian Public Broadcasting Service was aired in 1973, not long after the Club Of Rome was founded. It is surprisingly blunt about the purposes of the organization:
Computer predicts the end of civilisation (1973) | RetroFocus – YouTube
What can we derive from this broadcast and its message five years before I was born? The globalists want two specific outcomes most of all – They want the end of national sovereignty and the end of private property through socially incentivised minimalism. The exact same objectives the Club Of Rome outlined in the 1970s are the driving policies of the UN and the World Economic Forum today. The “sharing economy” concept that Klaus Schwab and the WEF often proudly promotes was not thought up by them, it was thought up by the Club Of Rome 50 years ago.
When talking about “ordinary” voters the problems we are facing can generaly be described with the terms “TMI” and “TLI”. The people who believes that the era of “global boiling” has begun falls under the term “TMI” to much informations, on the other hand, we, the so called “cliamte-deniers” would say, acting on the presence of headlines alone is “TLI” to little information. It´s just as stupid as using the word climate-deniers.
To make it short … to divide people with fear-bombing, as written in the first global revolution is to influence the human ingenuity why it all falls back to somekind of brain-power-processer paradigm thats why they are teeling themself that they in numbers have the cumulative calculation powers.
Sadly, the educational system in the USA has failed (“dumbed down”) the last two generations of students to the point that I suspect only one-in-ten voters, at best, would be able to read the above article by Terry Etam and understand its main points.
Even more sadly, this situation appears to be just fine with most of today’s entrenched politicians and bureaucrats.
It suits the aims of most of todays entrenched politicians – uneducated people offer less resistance, they know you are doing what’s best for them, because you told them so
Depending on stupid voters, who are lied to by corrupt socialist politicians, to suddenly vote smart is not a workable strategy. People need to suffer some more before any political progress hope. Wait for it, and meanwhile keep telling the truth.
The quality of a democracy is always reflected by the education and mortality of the voters. This is how it must be. However it doesn’t have to be the average education and morality such as the party system delivers. The voters would be smart to choose their very best. This is possible by looking at the candidates as independent individuals who have no party or platform from which to beguile voters with fantasies.
Who is the biggest player in the renewable scene? Is there one? Who
owns the most windmills? Sells/produces the most solar panels? Just
asking for a friend.
China
Yep, China provides most of the fodder for the entire green energy scam
I invite you to read “The Future of the Hydrogen Economy, Bright or Bleak” at https://planetforlife.com/pdffiles/h2report.pdf for a quick survey of the practical impediments of a hydrogen economy based simply on the thermodynamic properties of the gas. My conclusion, from having read it, is Bleak.
“dramatic emissions progress can be made in a few relatively simple steps”…
Simple, maybe. But is it at all necessary?
I don’t always agree completely with Terry Etam, but his opinions are well-written and worth considering. This particular essay is a beauty. Thank you.
This is the thinking behind the engineering principle of “robust design”, which is not taught in all engineering schools nor apparently taught at all in science departments; also the common sense adage of “look before you leap.” Which is more robust: mitigation or adaptation? Which presents less expense? We don’t know until we examine each with equal care.
Magical thinking has degraded the electrical grid to the point that operators, some utilities, and the RTOs (those behind the quotes in italics in the essay) are telling us to prepare for outages; something that was a remote worry just five years ago.
‘Magical thinking’. In the oil crisis of the late 1970s/early 80s wind power was seen by many academics as the answer. In the UK, however, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) dismissed wind because of its variability. How times have changed!
Story tip – EVs and charging – Those EV Shortcomings Aren’t Shortcomings at All – American Thinker
Human beings have a wonderful and often maddening ability to fall in love with an idea and turn a blind eye to all of its shortcomings.
A franker way to state this is EV advocates are delusional.
All good points, but I don’t think we can just vote our way out of this mess given the Left’s grip on the institutions. Nor will they let us do so, because for them total ‘victory’ is both close at hand and inevitable.
Fortunately, those who believe in a republican (small “r”) form of government will eventually realize they have both the right and the ability to nullify the unconstitutional policies emanating from the Left.
Energy is life – we all need it – we need cheap efficient safe abundant electricity like Thorium Liquid Salts Cooled Reactors can produce.
A better world is….. get rid of the dictators – Russia, China, N. Korea, Iran…and a few others. Less military spending would then be needed and free economies mean a higher standard of living for all. S-E-P-A-R-A-T-I-O-N means the CO2 people need their own country where they can pursue their idiocy w/o disturbing others…I know….CO2 is diabolical and they claim all must heed CO2 becuz it’s worldwide….but I don’t care…CO2ers need their own country.
_____________________________________________________________
John Podesta
President Biden’s
Clean Energy Adviser
“We got so good at stopping projects that
we forgot how to build things in America.”
The Greenie Weenie “can-do” spirit is “We will no longer build skyscrapers with steel, because steel is bad. From now on we will use scraps of wood, or compressed trash, because hey, there’s lots of trash to get rid of”.
“ to empower those that don’t feel like intellectuals (most of us) with the knowledge that we can, and should, feel free and able to call out BS if it appears to be nothing more. “
The ability & willingness to do this ought to be part of the job description of elected representatives. But those with independence of thought must either be being screened out in the candidate selection process or brow-beaten into submitting to the party line once elected.
It’s too bad that Democrats have lost their way on this. The choice currently is between dealing with their silliness on this and Trumpian fascism. I have to go with Democracy until Trump is a nonfactor again. I can start voting republican again after that.
Are Democrats a better choice than Trump? Unlikely.
They lose even against that questionable character.
I often wonder what people mean by ‘fascism.’ The left has clouded the meaning of that word so much that it is essentially meaningless.
Let me help:
Antifa — Fascist.
Progressives — Fascist
Democrat party — Fascist
People who talk about Democracy — Usually Fascist
Putting political opponents on trial – Fascist
Capitalism (free markets) — NOT Fascist
Deregulation –NOT Fascist
I dunno…that demrat party seems to be kinda commie….one demrat leader sez opponents will reap the whirlwind.
Is there a fart in a tornado’s difference between Communist and Fascist?
Communists killed everyone who knew how to run the factories so they could put their own people in charge. Fascists weren’t so stupid – they left the owners and managers in place as long as they gave high-paying no-work pr make-work jobs and a big cut of the profits to those men favored by the government.
Communists lied that they were creating equality, but the gap between the masses and the nomenklatura was deeper than ever. Fascists honestly gave themselves great privileges.
Before attaining complete power, Communists created violent, barely organized mobs in scruffy dark clothes to terrorize their opponents – these have had many names, in the US now they are “antifa” and “BLM”. Fascists did the same thing, only their violent mobs had fancy uniforms, Blackshirts in Italy and Brownshirts in Germany.
Correct – the far left German Nationalist Socialist Workers Party (nazis) were also fascists
National Socialist German Workers Party — NSDAP. The Democrats haven’t proposed anything lately the NSDAP didn’t enact. Watch out for a climate emergency declaration. It will turn out exactly like the Enabling Act.
All political parties have fascist tendencies and that includes republicans. Power corrupts….
Thanks for that warning, but while the Republicans might be a danger in some hypothetical future the Democrats are an immediate problem.
The immediate problem is political parties. It doesn’t matter what stripe they are.
I still can’t figure out the Trump hate. The guy’s been a public figure since the 1970s. He was everyone’s favorite millionaire/billionaire. He had a cameo in “Home Alone II” (bet that’s been cut out). He had that stupid TV show for years. He was an honored guest on late-night TV shows for decades, right up until it started to look like he might have a chance in the 2016 election, and then the hate sessions began.
Now, suddenly, he’s a fascist, dictatorial threat to the Republic.
As a human being, he’s everything you might expect of a rich New York City native.
As a president, he did a lot of good things, though he was terrible about choosing staff. But I’d rather see a president picking people he thought might be good at the job than picking them by how many boxes they check on the virtue serving Bingo card.
Trump became a fascist when he became a Republican. Am I right?
I see Trump as a failed president. Most of his achievements were through executive orders, which were reversed by Biden on day one. Trump failed to make allies in the press, failed to reach out to the establishment to make deals, failed to contain Fauci, etc., etc.
Mostly I see Trump failed to learn from his mistakes. Is there any reason to believe things will be different if by some miracle he gets elected again?
Gasoline cost half as much. We were energy self-sufficient. Food costs were way lower than they are now. The economy was booming. Foreign policy was strong – no wars, no supporting foreign wars.
We need more “mistakes” from “failed” President Trump!
As far as I’m aware Trump was a close friend to the Clintons – Bill and Trump were ‘associates’ perhaps of Jeffrey Epstein and were seen together away from the White House. Then Trump ran as a Republican and, worst of all, blocked Hillary when it was ‘her turn’. The Democrat party now hate and fear him rabidly.
He’s been designated the role of Emmanuel Goldstein.
A word that is widely misused these days. You should really take the trouble to learn about fascism, as invented by that Italian guy who made the trains run on time, and later perfected by a German chap with a moustache. You will find that fascism involves extremely authoritarian government, and a private sector where big companies work hand-in-glove with said government (either voluntarily or under compulsion), while small businesses and individual citizens are free to go about their activities as long as they don’t have the wrong thoughts, or say the wrong things.
Which is a very precise picture of present-day Russia, but it also has disturbing similarities to the current regimes in your country and in other industrialised democracies around the world. Where history is re-written, propaganda replaces news, and where saying and thinking the wrong things can result in losing your livelihood, deplatforming, debanking, unfriending or public character assassination, but only rarely in incarceration (yet). The current Biden regime is striving mightily to expand the incarceration option. Russian fascism uses actual assassination; but the west hasn’t got to that point (yet).
Fascism relies heavily on contrived external, existential threats against which the state and the people have to “fight”. In Italy the threat was communism, in Germany it was communism and the you-know-who, and in our current world it’s carbon dioxide and Donald Trump.
My impression of “Trumpism” is more of an attempt to re-create the prosperous, free-and-easy world of the 1950s, with some of the softer elements of 19th century robber-baron capitalism. Which you may agree with or not, but it ain’t fascism. It also relies on a uniquely combative, in-your-face public persona that causes its opponents to lose their collective marbles.
“Fascist” and “far-right” are just terms used by the left/woke/elite to describe those who look to me like normal people. Because, from their perspective, even old-school moderate lefties like me are so far off to the right that they hardly think of us as human.
Trumpian fascism
What, specifically, did he do that was fascist?
Trump isn’t fascist; he’s narcissist. There’s a big difference.
I don’t know what I’ll do if/when he wins the nomination. He had four years to do whatever it was he said he’d do. He did some of that – got to give him huge props for the Abraham Accords and making some progress (since lost) on getting NATO to understand its responsibilities.
But if you’re looking for fascism, you’ll more likely find it on the left these days. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, the party that’s often called too liberal is anything but these days.
So there’s no way I could vote Democrat. Not even for someone who used to (when the Democrats were much better at rooting out fascist principles) lead on that side of the fence. Biden was pretty decent until he was picked by Obama to be his attack dog. Now he’s senile and fully controlled by the fascists.
We talk about common sense here. To fight this nonsense, we need a leader who isn’t all about himself. Which unfortunately eliminates most of the Republican party as well. I’ll hold my nose and vote for DeSantis if he somehow reverses course and wins. He’s too busy fighting Mickey Mouse to come up with sensible policies, but it’s something. And probably any of the others. If it’s Trump, though, I think we’re screwed regardless, because he won’t win next November and even if he did, he’s incapable of what we really need here.
Ummmm – preaching (verrry slowly) to the converted.
Another great article by Terry Etam
The inherent problem with energy, as all things, is that people do not know what they do not know and this has become weaponised by the alarmist community, to never ending, ramped up levels
There is a TV advert in the UK by Eon, a German energy company that is one of the big 6 suppliers in the UK – it is 3 minutes of deceitful climate gluttony that is designed to scare the pants off you, they then at the end, assure you they have all the solutions to stop this climate carnage, including renewable power sources, heat pumps and smart meters – just book in and you can start to heal the planet
Now I, as a 40+ year experienced professional Electrical Engineer in the power generation sector, can see this for what it is, blatant deceit and doom peddling to increase business, hence profit, all wrapped up in earth saving religious zeal, but millions won’t see that, they see a burning planet with human life (theirs and their children’s) gone
The fact that Ofcom, the Govt regulator, has approved this TV advert for showing, tells you exactly where the blob is
I’m afraid the only things that will wake up the masses are a really long, bad, cold winter with power blackouts as renewables fail and the man made shortages of fossil fuel / nuclear power sources do not have the required capacity to keep the grid afloat, or the west forges ahead replacing stable fossil fuels & nuclear with more & more renewables without sufficient storage and the grids simply collapse under dunkelflaute conditions for days / weeks at a time
All will be affected, except maybe the elites with their diesel or gas back up generators
If we are to believe that Dementia Joe got 81 million votes, I think that means the choice has already been made – to descend into chaos.
What is the explanation for the following of 2016?
According to vote tallies from The Associated Press, Clinton amassed 65,844,610 votes across all 50 states and Washington D.C., 48.2 percent of all votes cast. Trump received 62,979,636 votes, 46.1 percent of all votes cast. Trump won.
For the 1960s World Series (baseball), the Yankees scored 55 runs, the Pirates, scored 27. The Pirates won.
Compare and contrast:
Notice then the bureaucrats weren’t hostile to human flourishing but aspired to make a greater world. Nowadays, its ration, punish, steal and drive into penury.
Imagine the trillions of dollars that would not have been wasted on anything associated with Gang Green’s stated goals. None of this foolishness with demonizing the petroleum industry – for if nuclear power did succeed, coal would have withered on the vine as a main-line base electricity generator but would remain for specialized use such as foundaries. Natural gas would have been used for peak and stabilizations. None of this trouble with hydro-electric, geo-thermal and every Rube Goldberg contraption to one way or another grift Green Graft.
Industry would not have to export to Chindia since electricity would have been so much cheaper.
We wouldn’t have fools vandalizing property and gluing themselves to streets over Climate Change or Stopping Oil (most likely they would find some other imaginary goblin)
Think further on the trillions of dollars that could have been saved not on this endless pursuit of the perfect energy-saving appliances and lightbulbs. EVs would have had a chance without massive subsidies, no hang wringing over using heat-pumps or traditional electric furnaces, Think of all of the extra money splashing around to solve other problems or to let people enjoy life a little bit more with more comfortable homes, businesses and other venues.
But no. We have to have these bastards spend trillions of dollars and have nothing to show for it except, misery and penury.
How quaint. The hoi polloi voters don’t get to change policy anymore. The voting process is now a choreographed show to fool people into thinking that we still have a participatory “democracy”.
“Voters Will Need to Decide If Our Energy System Remains Affordable and Reliable, Or Descends into Chaos”
There is more at stake than that. The future of our free nation is at stake. Will we live in a tyranny where innocent people are prosecuted and jailed endlessly or a free country where justice prevails?
The concept that “by burning bridges we can only go forward” is like saying, “By sinking our boat we will be forced to learn to walk on water.” Many boats have sunk, and very few have learned to walk on water. We need to be humble enough to take practical experience into account.
How is DGAF an improvement on Alfred E. Newman’s “What, me worry?” And what, one must ask, are the OP’s credentials for certifying “towering intellect”, “vast wealth”, and “humanistic humility”, whatever that means…? And “everyone is an expert at something”. What planet has this OP been living on? Most experts are total charlatans, especially the medical, legal, and economic experts. But the man in the street, the one who gets misled, bullied, and ripped off by these experts day in and day out, he’s supposed to be an expert too. It is to laugh…
It is merely one step further than DILLIGAF.
Do you still pay for electricity and gasoline?
Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, I had PV panels installed eight years ago, with my estimated payback of 15 years, . . the right thing for an eco-freak to do. Before they could be installed, we acquired a VW e-Golf electric car. The savings in gasoline alone took the solar system payback down to 3 1/2 years. So, we added a used Tesla Model S, and that took the payback down to less than three years, which means we now get free power for household and transportation.
But that is not all: We do not need to go to gas stations, we fuel up at home at night with cheap baseload power. During the daytime, the PV system turns our meter backwards powering the neighborhood with clean local power, which we trade for the stuff to be used that night. If we paid for transportation fuel, the VW would cost us 4 cents/mile to drive, and the Tesla would cost 5 cents/mile at California off-peak power prices.
No oil changes are a real treat along with no leaks. And since it has an electric motor, it needs NO ENGINE MAINTENANCE at all. We do not go “gas up”, or get tune-ups or emissions checks, have no transmission about which to worry, no complicated machined parts needing care.
Do you still pay for electricity and gasoline?
At the same time you are recharging your cars at night from “cheap baseload power”, you are supporting politicians that are closing those baseload fossil-fuel and nuclear plants and replacing them with solar panels.