The Irrationality of Western Energy Policies
What leads a country to begin winding down domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood – a wasteful and inefficient fuel — for power generation?
What leads policymakers to shut down a nation’s last and still-functional coal generating power plant after almost 150 years of using coal and within months arrive at a situation where blackout prevention notices have to be issued to its power generators?
The UK is by no means the only Western country to go down this perverse path of deindustrialization and national economic suicide. Why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality?
The Western World is in a hypnotic trance from 30 years of relentless propaganda pushing climate alarmism.
Energy Policy Mayhem
Evidence abounds of the mayhem that passes for energy policy in the West. It is only appropriate to start with Germany, the epicentre of the green trance that policymakers there have been hypnotized into. This follows decades of worship in the Church of Climate in the media and spouted by its intellectual chattering class.
Let’s start with the destruction of thousands of acres of ancient Teutonic forests – the setting for the folktales of the Brothers Grimm — to make way for wind farms. The irony is lost on Germany’s green ideologues that their energy policies threaten endangered species of birds and bats in its sacrifices at the altar of Mother Gaia. Consecrating thousands of windmill crucifixes with arms of petroleum-based glass-fiber-reinforced polyester resins manufactured in Chinese furnaces fueled by coal or natural gas may seem particularly absurd to those not steeped in that miasma of green ideology.
Another example of Germany’s green lunacy include the shutting down of their nuclear power plants, only to then approve putting dirty lignite-fired power plants back online for German households to keep warm in the winter of 2022/23.
German commentator Pierre L. Gosselin published an article earlier this year that asked bluntly, “The ‘greener’ Germany gets, the bloodier its economy becomes. How much can an economy bleed before it dies?” Adding to the economic gloom afflicting the country for the past two years, Reuters reported in July that the economy is expected to contract by 0.2% in 2024 from a previous projection of an anaemic 0.3% growth. It beggars belief to call this an “unexpected” contraction as the news wire does when the link between high energy costs and deindustrialization has been so widely discussed in the media.
Let’s turn to other absurdities. We recently learned that in the wisdom of Scandinavian planners, dairy farmers in Denmark face having to pay an annual tax of 672 krone ($96) per cow “for the planet-heating emissions they generate.” This policy proposal came in the wake of widespread farmers’ protests in Europe which escalated – across the width and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal — since they first started in the Netherlands in October 2019.
The Great European Farmer Revolt led to the shocking win in March by the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the Netherlands, putting it ahead of the governing party in the Senate. In a reaction to left-wing green parties in government, farmers became an important part of the equation in the country’s political future. As part of the EU Green Deal to make agriculture consistent with being “carbon-neutral” by 2050, Brussels’ bureaucrats assured their citizens that their farms would be rendered more “sustainable”, “environmentally friendly” and “biodiverse.”
Perhaps the pride of place belongs to Ed Miliband (“Mad Ed”), UK’s Secretary of State for the oxymoronically-named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. UK’s “net zero” policies, pursued by both the Conservatives, in power for 14-years, and the new Labour government, have compromised the country’s energy security like nothing else. In Mad Ed’s short time in office, the country’s last coal plant and its Port Talbot steel plant shut down, regulatory approvals for solar farms were rushed through over-riding local community objections, and the North Sea’s oil and gas field development have been sacrificed to an unchallenged climate lawsuit launched by Greenpeace.
Unsurprisingly, it was reported in July that Britain fell out of the top ten manufacturing nations list for the first time. Mr. Miliband’s decision not to challenge a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace has compromised the country’s investment environment. According to Brendon Long, director of research at investment company Zeus Capital, Mr. Miliband’s decision would put wider investment in Britain at risk. He said: “London has fallen out of the top 10 capital markets in terms of monies raised from initial public offerings. That might reflect that financial markets are increasingly concerned with the UK as a jurisdiction that values and defends property rights and the sanctity of honouring agreements made.”
To be fair to Mad Ed, some of these developments were already underway during the previous Tory government’s term of office. Nevertheless, he has built up a CV that would be the envy of the wildest left-wing Brussels bureaucrat. One could even ignore his cringe-worthy bizarre video of him singing and strumming a ukulele in front of a windmill.
But most egregious in the Labour government’s short record of rule is its move to cut winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners while pledging nearly £22bn for projects in unproven technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. Rubbing salt into the wound, Ed Miliband insisted in July that Labour will honour its pledge of £11.6bn in overseas climate aid.
It is not much better across the pond. President Biden promised to make climate change front and center of his administration’s policies across the whole of government. This has been followed by the duplicitously-named Inflation Reduction Act which unleashes a debt-driven tsunami of subsidies on favoured “green” industries – solar, wind, EVs, batteries, hydrogen. I have written on Biden’s fractured and contradictory energy policies elsewhere (here, here and here).
Models Not Fit For Purpose
These absurd and immiserating “net zero” policies of the West imposed at great cost to ordinary working men and women are justified by the true believers in the Church of Climate by invocations of the “climate crisis”. Mr. Miliband and his ilk would respond along the lines that when the house is on fire, you don’t muck about but do “whatever it takes”. Doubtless, the lockdown and vaccination mandates imposed by “experts” in response to Covid would be offered as an example.
These twin hysterias – Covid and climate — share much in common. Both spring from not-fit-for-purpose and impossible to validate computer models that escalated alleged risks on flimsy assumptions. An unpublished 16th March 2020 bombshell report by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately adopt a Covid suppression strategy.
By March 25th, Ferguson’s predicted half a million fatalities in the UK was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction was credited to the UK’s lockdown which, however, was imposed only 2 days previously. It was later found that Dr. Ferguson’s model was not fit for purpose.
Much as Ferguson’s model drove governments to impose Covid lockdowns affecting nearly 3 billion people on the planet, Professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” model was used by the UN’s IPCC, mainstream media and politicians to push the man-made global warming (now called climate change or climate crisis) hysteria over the past two decades. But like Prof Ferguson’s model, Dr. Mann’s work seems more in keeping with junk science.
Hysteria attracts governments, activist academics in search of research grants, and left-wing billionaire foundations that support the vast enterprise that is the climate industrial complex. The great essayist H.L. Mencken had this to say about governments: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
But it would be naïve to view the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy. Steve Koonin in his book Unsettled offers a more plausible explanation, seeing a “self-reinforcing alignment of perspectives and interests” devoted to promoting climate alarm. Thus, governments do practical politics a la Mencken, hubristic academics “save the planet” with junk science and hyperbolic claims, NGO’s and crony businesses grift for regulatory rents, intellectuals virtue signal with luxury beliefs and the mass of followers know little but feel a lot.
A version of this article was published by The Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/19/the-irrationality-of-western-energy-policies/)
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO2 Coalition.
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Nobody in authority is listening.
There are three fundamental aspects to Green Madness.
First is ‘scientific’. Mann thought trees made reliable paleoclimate thermometers, when McIntyre proved several ways (strip bark bristlecones, centered PCA red noise) that they didn’t. Yet Green Madness belief in treemometers persists—hockey stick green madness.
Second is also ‘scientific’—fearing ruminant methane. True, methane is a GHG in the lab in a standard dry atmosphere. But NOT in a real world with about 2% average specific humidity. In the real world, the two puny narrow methane IR absorption bands are overwhelmed by much bigger and wider water vapor absorption bands. Despite Green Madness, ruminants matter not.
Third is the belief that renewable intermittency can be overcome by just building more renewables in different places. Like in Northern Europe or New England for winter intermittency. Basic arithmetic says that even infinity * sometimes 0 always = sometimes 0. A BIG grid reliability problem created by Green Madness.
The problem Green Madness now has is that ‘the chickens are coming home to roost’. The more Green, the more evident Madness becomes. If David Mackay were to rewrite his classic book on ‘the Madness of Crowds’ today, he would start with Green Madness rather than Dutch tulip bulbs. Easier to explain—at least tulips were then exotic and beautiful and a bit valuable, providing a Madness rationale. Green Madness has no rationale other than lucrative ‘climate science’ careers (Mann) and renewable subsidy farming off their resulting faulty ‘climate science’.
You’re right about Green Madness. But the problem the detached observer has in explaining it is that its only one instance of a series of crazed ideas that seem to go together and which have become pervasive in the English speaking countries. The woke ideologies on gender and race are two more.
The thing we need to explain is not so much how Green Madness took root, but why a whole series of irrational manias overtook the West, or at least the English speaking part of it, at the same time. Why did post modernism and moral and epistemological relativism take over higher education? Why did the current left consensus on gender and race take hold?
Is it just a coincidence that all these manias arose at the same time, and seem to have started in universities at the same time? Why these, why now? Why the English speaking world in particular?
I wish I knew! But I am at least sure that the explanation will go beyond climate and energy madness, and will address the problem that we seem totally to have lost all sense of intellectual rigor when it comes to public policy, and politicians and media alike seem to be competing on how many impossible things they can believe, or claim to believe, before breakfast.
Good points. Elon Musk calls it – or at least part of it – the “woke mind virus.”
Naomi Seibt gets it:
https://x.com/i/status/1848474459055001995
I have a hypothesis about this ‘crazed ideas ignoring reality’ concerning also gender and race. The left went empathetic soft, divorced from harsh reality. ‘Feels’ dominated ‘facts’.
Take gender. It is objectively a mental disorder. Subjectively, it is ‘what you feel’. In objective reality, gender disphorics will sort themselves out of reality via Darwinian selection—just takes a while.
Take race. In theory, as implemented since decades in the US, it shouldn’t matter. Yet it does concerning births out of wedlock and crime. To pretend it doesn’t ignores reality. Equal opportunity never guaranteed equal results, as only DEI presumed.
“Take race. In theory, as implemented since decades in the US, it shouldn’t matter. Yet it does concerning births out of wedlock”
Are you seriously suggesting that humans evolved a gene for marriage?
There is no genetic basis for race. That has been proved time and time again. Genetic diversity does not overlap in any meaningful way with the social constructs of race.
I think Rud is suggesting nurture over nature but Rud is more than capable of answering for himself.
“There is no genetic basis for race.”
So why are far-leftists dolts and politicians always going on about race. ??
Hypocrite !!!
I think humans evolved a capacity for structure, family being one such structure. The destruction of the family is a prescribed necessity for replacement by government as the sole structure.
Replace “race” with “tribe” or family. Genetics has nothing to do with it. It is all about societal constructs, and unfortunately, the social engineers found a vulnerability in the historical racial divides. The black community was but their first target and their ultimate victims. Destroying that familial structure served the purpose of creating a perpetual victim class, just as creating an imaginary climate crisis served as a belief system akin to religious fervor. Indeed, all accepted social constructs including the most basic of male/female must be disrupted to serve the ultimate purpose of control.
Replace “race” with “tribe” or family.
That’s very much the issue. It’s a matter of “us” vs. “the other” and goes back to some very primal (tribal) instincts. Race isn’t the only thing that defines us/other – J. Michael Strazynski wrote about a very telling observation while working on Babylon 5: At breakfast, when nobody was in makeup, the extras all gathered in groups mainly separated by race (skin color): black with black, asian with asian, etc. But at lunch, after they were in makeup, they all gathered in groups mainly separated by “race”: Narns with Narns, Minbari with Minbari, etc.
Humans with Humans, regardless of skin color – it was no longer enough of a factor to “other”.
They weren’t even aware they were doing it. It was an instinctive gathering of like and separation from other.
“Take race. In theory, as implemented since decades in the US, it shouldn’t matter. Yet it does concerning births out of wedlock and crime. “
In the US, this is in large part to the Civil Rights Act. Therein, homes with single mothers are given more welfare than those with fathers and mothers. Before the CRA, the fatherless rate in black families was about 20%. After, it jumped to 80%.
This is typically what happens when government gets involved.
Another example is the Great Depression of 1929. Unemployment jumped to high single digits, then started to settle down. Then government got involved, and unemployment leaped to mid double digits.
“Take gender. It is objectively a mental disorder.”
It is the textbook example of delusional behavior.
This is JK Rowling on gender in Scotland. Story from the Spectator.
Gender ideology is, as the author JK Rowling notes, turning Scotland, home of the Enlightenment, into a seat of what she calls the ‘Endarkenment’. It is a condition in which highly-educated people start talking utter nonsense, fearful that by not speaking the language they will lose their jobs.
Rowling wonders why people should not be able to record their astrological identities if this differs from that which they were ‘assigned at birth’. It’s a good question and one that will no doubt be addressed the next time the Scottish government expands the identitarian dictionary of neologisms. There’s certainly evidence that Swinney was born under a bad sign.
Western society has mostly lost the carrot and stick of Christianity .
The de-industrialize crowd just took on any and all crazies to increase the size of their power block. A vast majority of the population just goes along with whatever if fashionable. That explains it all simply enough.
Tatoos explain perfectly the result of fashionable behavior in the west. Once the realm of sailors, gangsters and drug addicts, the current trend boils down to one reason only. My friends have them so I want them too.
a lot of people will regret having them, eventually
I’m a bit too old to have fallen victim to the “tattoos are cool” meme.
When I hear the typical explanation of “expressing my individuality”, I reply “exactly like everyone else?”.
I choose the word “meme” carefully, referencing Dawkins. The woke mind virus is itself a powerful selfish meme.
It’s narcissism.
‘Is it just a coincidence that all these manias arose at the same time, and seem to have started in universities at the same time?’
No. So-called ‘intellectuals’ have always been miffed that, notwithstanding earning multiple degrees that signify high achievement in academia, they are not rewarded in the marketplace to a similar extent as successful entrepreneurs. This has resulted over time in the development of a symbiotic relationship wherein academics fervently support government economic intervention in return for the government’s provision of academic sinecures beyond those that would normally exist in a free market.
the burro-ocracies also get great sinecures-here in Wokeachusetts, they are very well compensated- far beyond what they could earn in the real world- so even if they disagree with the policies, they’ll never dare say so- here, all the state agencies are all pushing hard for net zero policies
I think the general answer to your question of why this is happening now, relates to the preponderance of far-left political theory in our institutions which has taken decades to culminate in this green quasi-Marxist garbage we are experiencing. The environmentalists have converted their climate religion into a
save the planet' crusade from the tyranny of capitalist prosperity growth through industrialization and new technology.forking out’ real money to keep their privileged technologies and unreliable energy systems going.We scientists know this theory is garbage but the green loonies and climate alarmists infesting western institutions really believe in it and won't stop their stupid anti-growth tirade until our economies tank, and they have to personally start
Hopefully the average person in our societies will wake up to this climate/energy political scam that is reducing their standard of living and vote to stop Net Zero policies and rethink our energy agenda for the common good. Climate zealots have had their day, it’s time for the rest of us to have our say and reclaim our energy sanity.
Start looking in the 50s. Identified was a need to create a crisis so the world could be transformed. Look in the 60s when socialists started indoctrinating college kids who are doing the same with an explosiveness akin to a nuclear chain reaction.
Also look at The Population Bomb, statements from UN officials, etc.
Then look at television advertising. Add to the mix near instantaneous social and digital media.
In the 60s we developed reliable contraceptives so women could control that aspect.
Computers never lie. If it is written, it must be true. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
How can you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving.
It’s all in front of us. Not much effort needed to connect the dots.
Why these, why now?
Ayn Rand wrote several essays on the rise of these philosophies in colleges – many are collected in “For the New Intellectual”
I don’t recall exactly her base premise, but it had to do with the rise of subjective philosophies – where “my truth” ascended over “the facts”.
She was observing and warning about this in the 60’s.
To go along with “fearing ruminant methane” there is the irrational fear of N2O being used against high-productivity agriculture. Not so much yet in the U.S., but we’ll see what happens with the election here.
“…Green Madness has no rationale other than lucrative ,,,”
There’s something in it for everyone:
Insurance company wants to raise rates… Hey Climate Change
Government wants more power and taxes…Hey Climate Change
Need to get that crappy paper published…
NGO needs more government grants…
Electric utilities want to increase their billable capital base…
Universities need that new department/building/research grant…
Rent seeking developers want someone to force their payment at the point of a gun…
Something for everyone except the rate/taxpayer.
Oh, and I almost forgot:
Need an excuse when your crappy policies lead to fires, floods and crumbling infrastructure and your emergency management agencies are completely incompetent and unable to cope…
Number 1 on your hit parade.
Rud,
I rely on your expertise to keep informed, so don’t confuse me by making mistakes. It’s Charles MacKay. : > )
“First is ‘scientific’. Mann thought trees made reliable paleoclimate thermometers”. I would question what Mann really thought. Otherwise, there is no reason for the statistical shenanigans.
Mann likely knew trees weren’t reliable thermometers. So he had to use “novel statistical methods” to obtain the desired result.
I don’t get how anyone who has even seen a tree could believe they were reliable thermometers.
From the story: “But it would be naïve to view the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy.”
Perhaps that’s partly true. But Mann’s “the cause”, Jones’ “redefining peer review” in the CRU emails tells us there actually was/is a conspiracy.
In the sense that it’s a few powerful people secretly paying and organizing armies of minions to support their grabs for power and money, it’s not completely untrue…
In the sense that bureaucratic incentives maximize extraction of money and power, and they all talk to each other and believe whatever they think best justifies that — well, it may be out in the open, but that’s surely still somewhat a conspiracy?
A half-vast conspiracy, it could be called.
I have often wondered how all this climate nonsense keeps going until I came across this online. I saved it as “Something for Everyone” and I would like to thank whoever put this together as it hits the nail on the head:-
The idea behind the climate change scare succeeds because it offers something to everybody.
For the Left it offers their salvation – capitalism really is evil after all.
For the Messiah Complex politicians (more of those than there used to be) it allows them to Save the World.
For the opportunists and rentiers it allows them to become rich whilst appearing virtuous.
For the scientists it allows them to bask in glory and prizes.
For the upper classes it allows them to ban all the stuff they don’t like, plebs on cheap flights to places that should only be for the right sort of people for example.
For the Waitrose middle classes it allows them to feel they are doing their bit.
For the mad Greens, they can finally destroy the hated oil companies.
For the neoRomantic fantasists they can believe they are going back to nature and we will all live in beauty and harmony.
And who dares oppose “science”? Who wants to be a Denier? So most other people simply keep their heads down and go along with it.
nailed it!
For the most thoroughly indoctrinated / brain-washed, e.g. XR and JSO activists throwing various substances onto paintings and glueing themselves to roads / walls etc., they genuinely believe that it’s not just a case of
“Silence = Agreement”
but that
“Silence = Enthusiastic agreement”.
Yet they ALL use FF every day and if FF were taken away they would HOWL with pain.
I think it more boils down to the Marxist long march through the institutions, in an effort to weaken or destroy the west. All of your other points follow from that.
Ignore Pournelles Law at your peril, it always applies.
Of a half-dozen, I’ll guess you mean this one: [from Wikipedia]
“Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy”:
The problem is government, the problem with that is that we have multiple generations raised to believe that governments are here to guide and protect us. My family thinks this way, my grandparents did, my mom and dad did, my siblings do, my siblings children do. We have to work hard to teach people that putting the government in charge is not the answer. Even well meaning governments suck at being in charge. No council, committee, agency or whole government can come close to working as well as a lightly regulated market. Some might not like that but you can’t get away from it.
The first principle of government, the primary duty is to protect its citizens FROM the government.
Of the People. By the People. For the People.
I found an invoice from 2022. The mechanic was charging $110/hr. Just got a quote $195/hr. That is climate change. 3% inflation my ass.
“Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. The opportunities for taxation, for policies, for control, for crony capitalism are just immense, you can see their eyes bulge,” he says.
— Dr Richard Lindzen
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
— Maurice Strong
Government policies that drive up energy costs is a good start.
Government policies that divide society into violent opposing camps is the second step.
Then fan the fires. Elevate slivers of society above the general population continues this.
Leftist thinking is the root of all these insane low masses intermittent plans since they are running on pure cult based ideology ignoring the uselessness of low power producers and their inability to see the unfolding disaster they have created over time which is why Germany is going to collapse FIRST before the drooling moron voters finally feel the destruction of their country but it will be too late to fix it since the EU in general are not far behind..
Climate Change Policies
are just
Climate Change Politics.
I think you CAN see energy policies in the USA as a ‘conspiracy’, if and only if what Paul Craig Roberts has to say here (https://www.globalresearch.ca/nuclear-high-attitude-electromagnetic-pulse-the-united-states-has-zero-national-security/5848897 ) has cogency.
That article says that the entire US electrical grid can be put out of action for 12 months plus, just by one nuclear detonation high up in the atmosphere above Ohio. Imagine 5 above strategic sites across the Lower 48 and you can envisage total meltdown of the entire continental USA.
The reason this is conspiratorial is that Congress voted to block spending 4% of the annual defence budget on making the entire domestic energy grid safe from such a threat. All military energy supplies ARE safeguarded, but apparently ‘defence’ does not include ‘defence of the civil electricity grid for 330 million Americans’.
I have to say that US citizens should identify exactly who voted what when Congress voted down the proposal to safeguard US domestic energy supplies and all that voted it down should be declared traitors to the USA people, with all the connotations for consequences that that should have. Right up to- and including ex Presidents of the USA if necessary…..
Investigations should also be made as to whether any bungs were paid to those traitors to vote in a traitorous manner, since the payors of those bungs should also face wrath, vengeance etc etc.
Might also be worth looking at whether all the billionaires miraculously have their personal electricity supplies safe from such attacks. You know: links to military circuits etc etc.
Always good to know precisely who the enemy within is, after all…..
Surprised it made it into print. I’ve known that since the early 1980s but it was Top Secret.
Back then it was an air burst over St. Louis that would have the greatest effect. The grid has evolved since then so it could be Ohio now.
Back then it was not just that the grid would be out of action, but the banks and computers would be fried and the country would reset to the year 1900.
Rud as usual provides a well balanced sense of reality and Michel asks why have all these destructive policies now operating in the West and particularly in the English speaking West, become so pervasive?
We have all wondered why.
The advancements in civilisation in the past two hundred years are the result of human innovations involving energy. Those innovations even resulted in the discovery of new energy options e.g. electricity and nuclear. The enquiring and inventive mind of early inventers was allowed space to flourish. The industrial revolution/industrial era followed, because there was no coordinated resistance., Why would there be? We can ignore the Luddites. In fact it was the complete reverse, more technology was seen as a good thing and it was.
People became richer, lived longer, had better diets, were able to engage in hobbies rather than constant energy sapping work needed to feed and maintain themselves and their families.
The middle class evolved.
The gap that had previously existed between the lord of the manor and the serfs at his gate seeking work, was bridged by this new and expanding middle class.
That was all fine up until the academic movement decided this was too good to be allowed to grow unchallenged and along came the seed of change.
We tend to place the core malaise of the left wing mind at Karl Marx door. That is not a bad option, but he was clearly only the focal point of what today is a world wide deconstruction movement.
The Long March Through the Institutions advanced by Gramsci and others in the 20th century has now arrived in full horror here in the 21st.
The lack of questioning of the new academic overlords and the ready compliance of the younger generations to their wisdom (sic) is shocking and troubling.
Real scientific investigation is being suppressed while $billions are being channelled into fake science under the latest faux critical endeavour.
The lights are literally going out across the Western World.
A fresh and no doubt painful change to the so called authorities is needed.
Cometh the day, cometh the man…. we watch with some concern at where the denial of real science is taking us.
Chief German taxeater and EV mandater tells market carmakers not to be afraid of Marxist State slushfunding and dumping-
German leader tells carmakers to ‘not be afraid’ of Chinese competition
Come on guys you can do it!
Blah blah blah, we all get what is being done and agree it’s ridiculous. There are two questions : why are not unintelligent people driving it and how can they be stopped?
Everything else is yawn.