“The Great Green Energy Transition” in the West seems less based on data than a mixture of blind faith, corruption, ignorance, virtue-signaling, and vested interests. A picture is emerging of an aspirational Western industry and society captured lock, stock, and barrel by secretive, coal-loving Beijing. It’s a worry for the West’s economic development – never mind energy security and climate action.
EDITED AND COMPILED BY THE INTERNATIONAL CHRONICLES
The International Chronicles: Western countries are leading the charge in restructuring their economies around the issue of climate change. They’re committed to a comprehensive agenda to “decarbonize” their economies by 2050. What’s your take on this?
Doug Casey of International Man: To sum it up in one word, it’s insane. In two words, it’s criminally insane.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the overwhelmingly major fuel source was wood. After that, we went to coal, which was a big improvement in the density of energy and economics. Then, we went to oil, another huge improvement in energy density and economics.
These things happened not because of any government mandates but simply because they made both economic and technological sense. If the market had been left alone, the world would undoubtedly be running on nuclear. Nuclear is unquestionably the safest, cheapest, and cleanest type of mass power generation. This isn’t the time to go into the numerous reasons that’s true. But if nuclear had been left unregulated, we’d already be using small, self-contained, fifth-generation thorium reactors, generating power almost too cheap to meter. The world would already be running on truly clean green electricity.
Instead, time, capital, and brainpower have been massively diverted to so-called “ecological” power sources—mainly wind and solar—strictly for ideological reasons. The powers that be want to transition the whole world to phony green energy, like it or not.
I’m all for green energy in principle. There’s no question that solar and wind are worthwhile and effective for select applications—generally small, isolated, special locations where conventional fuel is inconvenient or too costly. The efficiency of solar has been tremendously improved over the last few decades, as has wind efficiency. But neither makes any sense for mass base-load power in industrial economies.
With further technological advances, they may become more economical someday. Perhaps people will eventually put large collectors in high Earth orbit and microwave the power down to the surface. There are all kinds of sci-fi possibilities. But right now, “green” is just a nice word for “stupid,” “ideological,” or “government-sponsored.”
Doing things the green way takes power away from the markets, which is where people vote with their dollars. It instead places power in the hands of ideologues and bureaucrats.
In brief, wind and solar are being promoted at the very time, nuclear and fossil fuels are being damned. It’s the opposite of what should be happening and a very bad trend from every point of view.
Put me down as liking the birds and the bunnies as much as anyone else, but I’m anti-green. Anyway, ecofreaks don’t really care about the birds and the bunnies so much. That’s just a veneer. They just hate people and want them to disappear. At a minimum, they want to control them. And the great global warming/anti-fossil-fuel hysteria is a great way to do it.
The International Chronicles: As a part of this agenda, the US, the EU, and OECD countries plan to phase out oil, gas, and other fuels, replacing them with zero or low-carbon sources of energy.
What kind of disruptions could we see as the transition is made to energy sources that may not be as reliable?
Doug Casey: Lots of disruptions, many of them both huge and currently unanticipated. The US has 330 million people. Why should decisions for hundreds of millions be made by bureaucrats and political hacks in Washington, DC?
Why should they be the ones who decide what kind of power should or should not be used? That’s a question that nobody asks. People simply assume that that’s the way it should be and largely do as they’re told. They never stop and consider that governments have set progress back immeasurably over history. The main products of government are wars, pogroms, confiscations, taxes, regulations, and the like.
Oil companies like Shell and BP are talking about getting out of the oil business. Oil companies and their employees and investors are looked down upon as the destroyers of the world. Nobody in polite society wants to admit that they’re in the oil business.
Before you drill an oil well anywhere in the world, it’s necessary to ask permission from one or more government entities. In the Western world, where the public has been captured by the notions of PC and ESG, governments are loath to issue drilling permits. Drillers don’t want to drill because costs are artificially high, and any profits will be subject to discouraging taxes.
Expect oil production to drop in the West. Throughout the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, more oil was discovered than was being used. Reserves went up. But that’s no longer the case. It’s not because the oil isn’t there; it’s because it’s too politically incorrect to look for it and exploit it.
Futhermore, scientists, engineers, and investors are staying away from anything to do with fossil fuels. You can plan on both fuel shortages and much higher costs. Markets are being subverted and are becoming ever more politicized.
In addition, so-called “green technologies” aren’t really green. They just seem green on the surface. Giant windmills and solar farms rely on massive amounts of fossil fuels and metals to be manufactured and installed. They have limited lifespans, and they must be disposed of. Not only can’t they provide mass quantities of power consistently, but they all show losses, even after-tax benefits disguise them. That destroys capital. They’re not signs of progress but monuments to waste and destruction. We’re going to have huge disruptions in the energy markets in the years to come, and since the whole world runs on energy, it’s really serious.
The International Chronicles: Broadly speaking, is the new climate change “crisis” an invitation for more government intervention in the world?
Doug Casey: Yes. It’s like inviting a vampire into your house.
For many decades, kids have been indoctrinated with ideas about counterproductive conservation and Greenism. Comic books, schoolbooks, teacher’s lectures, television—you name it—present the earth as being under attack from the forces of darkness. Mankind—especially the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs—are shown exploiting and raping Mother Nature and her natural resources. They’re presented as evil.
Bronowski’s Ascent of Man has been subverted into a battle of good versus evil, where all the values have been turned upside down. The problem has permeated society, and it’s even worse in the education system.
St. Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Jesuits, and Vladimir Lenin, who founded the USSR, both said words to the effect of “If you can indoctrinate a child during his early years, you’ve basically set his direction of thinking for life.” They were right.
Government is always presented as noble, wise, and forward-thinking. It’s presented as the savior stepping in to stop the evil producers.
It is one of several false and destructive memes stalking the earth today like specters. The increasing belief in government as a magic solution to problems decreases the average person’s standard of living tremendously and creates all kinds of distortions throughout society. It’s turned the study of economics into a pseudoscience, and its incursions into science are discrediting the idea of science itself.
The two big hysterias plaguing the world right now both center on the State involving itself in science—or at least scientism. One is COVID, a relatively trivial flu blown out of all proportion. The other is AGW, anthropogenic global warming, which was relatively recently rechristened as climate change.
In my view, both will eventually be completely debunked and discredited. But if you run counter to the narrative on either of them right now, you’ll be canceled, fired, and/or ostracized.
It’s very much like what happened to Galileo when he ran counter to the prevailing wisdom of the Middle Ages. They don’t burn books anymore, but only because books today are mostly electronic. But they do the equivalent of that on places like Google and Twitter.
There’s an excellent chance that these people will discredit the very idea of science because they’ve wrapped themselves in the veil of science. Or, more precisely, what’s become known as “The Science.” They’re creating something much more serious than just another economic disaster.
The International Chronicles: This trend seems to be growing in momentum.
For example, Google Flights now prominently displays the carbon emissions of each flight it lists.
Is that a small first step toward charging individuals for the carbon they emit?
Doug Casey: I can assure you that I pay no attention whatsoever to the amount of carbon that I may be burning on a plane or anywhere else. It’s part of a psychological war the Left is waging, using guilt and shame as weapons. It’s another indication of the lockstep, the groupthink, that people are subjected to today.
Life on this planet is based on carbon. The element itself is indestructible and essential, but it’s been transformed into a deadly enemy in the minds of the public. But if you deny that it’s destroying the earth, then you’re committing heresy. It’s like denying the existence of God in the Middle Ages. Hating carbon and worshipping “The Ecology” have become tenets of a secular religion.
A new carbon tax will be implemented. It’s definitely in the cards. Most people will stupidly roll over and say, “Yes, this is for the good of the planet. It’s a tax we should all pay.”
Of course, governments and the powers that be always want more resources directed towards themselves. In a time when governments are bankrupt and can only generate more money for themselves by printing it, it’s an absolute certainty that the next tax will have a patina of righteousness. A carbon tax on individuals, as well as companies, checks all the boxes.
The International Chronicles: Will carbon credits become a new government-created “commodity” that corporations and individuals will be forced to purchase?
Doug Casey: Without question, it’s a clever way to turn a tax into something that looks like an asset, an investment.
Look, this is all about politics and money but disguised as a religious movement, which is quite clever. There’s no question that Greenism is being promoted as a new religion.
Christianity is a dead duck in Europe, and it’s dying in North America. But people need some type of religion, a replacement for Christianity, to hold on to.
People will be encouraged to treat their taxes as tithes to wash away their sins against Mother Nature—much the way they tithed the church to expunge their sins in the Middle Ages. It’s an exact analogy. They’ll buy “carbon credits” as an analog for building cathedrals and monasteries.
As an economist, as well as someone who reads a lot of science, I think it’s ridiculous and destructive. The whole anti-carbon, carbon sequestration, and Greenism thing is a political hysteria promoted by people who like to control other people. I’m completely opposed to carbon credits or carbon taxes from that point of view.
But when I put on my speculator’s hat, I’m all for it. Companies are being formed to cleverly capitalize on all this destructive nonsense. It’s still very early days, and the public will pile into the space with a combination of religious fervor and fin de siècle greed. I expect a massive bubble in the space. I’m all for bubbles—if I can buy in early.
A speculator is a cynic, not a philanthropist—although I hasten to add that most philanthropists are hypocrites. It’s a pity that the vast majority of people have been brainwashed by Greenism, and carbon stocks are a great way to turn the lemon into lemonade.
The International Chronicles: Politicians, the media, and large corporations promote solar and wind energy as replacements for fossil fuels. Western governments are trying to pick winners and are subsidizing wind and solar energy to the tune of billions. What’s going on here?
Doug Casey: Solar and wind energy can be useful. But generally only for special applications or remote locations where regular power is uneconomic or unavailable.
Wind and solar make no sense for mass power generation, however. They’re completely unsuitable for a complex industrial civilization. The Greens aren’t trying to solve a technological problem but make an ideological statement. Which is fine, except they’re doing it at the public’s expense. Meanwhile, the public has been so propagandized that they now feel it’s morally righteous to be hornswoggled.
No problem if someone feels that covering his rooftop with solar panels can cut his electricity bill and pay back the cost in 7 or 10 years—which is roughly the case today. It’s something else entirely if a government puts a society’s electrical grid at risk to virtue signal.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for alternative methods of generating energy. Geothermal can work in places like Iceland, where near-surface magma hotspots currently generate around 30% of their electricity. Tidal power works in certain locations. As does hydro, although it’s increasingly unpopular because dams inundate a lot of land, silt up, displace the locals, destroy existing fauna and flora, and eventually collapse.
It’s a fact solar tech has been improving for decades. For instance, there’s been an annual 3000 km race across Australia for solar cars since 1987. They’re still basically experimental toys, but they get faster every year. Still, it’s only possible in a place like the Australian desert where the sun is usable 12 hours a day, every day. Any kid who’s played in the sun with a magnifying glass can tell you solar power is real—but that doesn’t mean that it’s suitable for base-load power in an industrial civilization. Someday we may use gigantic collectors in high earth orbit to capture the sun’s power and beam it down to earth by microwave. But that’s for the future.
So-called “green” technologies will continue developing and getting cheaper. Excellent. But progress will be much faster if entrepreneurs make the necessary decisions for economic reasons rather than bureaucrats for political reasons.
Coal and natural gas still make sense for mass power generation, but the real answer is nuclear in today’s world. It’s by far the safest, cheapest, and cleanest form of power generation. And it would be far safer, cleaner, and cheaper if only it wasn’t treated as such a bugaboo. We’d now be using very small, foolproof, ultra-cheap, self-contained thorium-powered nuclear plants if it wasn’t for the obstructionism of the Greens and their allies.
Unfortunately, governments everywhere, driven by uninformed and misinformed public opinion, are trying to make solar and wind the exclusive sources of power. Public opinion is shaped by leftists. They have almost completely captured academia, the mass media, celebrities, corporate boards, and other centers of influence. It’s perverse that coal and natural gas are being made artificially uneconomic because they have to be stopped and restarted constantly during times when so-called alternative energy can’t generate adequate power.
A good case can be made that the whole green movement is insane. I’m not at all convinced they’re even well-intended. These people are like poisonous watermelons, green on the outside, and red on the inside.
The International Chronicles: Governments also heavily subsidize electric vehicles (EVs).
Absent this intervention in the market, would EVs be economical? Will EVs ever be able to exist without government support?
Doug Casey: Speaking as a lifelong car guy, I like the idea of electric vehicles (EVs). Their low center of gravity means they tend to handle much better than cars with internal combustion engines (ICE). They can accelerate faster and achieve speeds just as high as ICE cars. They have only a fraction of the moving parts of ICE cars. And battery technology keeps improving; even now, you can get 300, 400 miles, or more of range. At least when it’s not too hot or cold out.
The main problem with EVs at the moment is that they can be inconvenient to charge. But there’s a much bigger problem on the way. If the world goes to EVs in a big way—which they want to do—the grid won’t be able to handle all the power needed to run them. The transmission capacity doesn’t exist, and new high-voltage lines are a real NIMBY issue. That’s entirely apart from the fact that the main baseline power simply won’t be there in a world of wind and solar.
Innovation, technology, and capital accumulation can solve those problems. But in the kind of highly regulated and highly taxed world that the Greens advocate, we’ll have constant blackouts and higher costs. People are afraid that fossil fuels are going to run out, but they won’t. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, nor will the fossil fuel age end because we ran out of hydrocarbons.
If technology is free to develop, better forms of power will appear. In the meantime, the answer is nuclear and fossil fuels, of which there are hundreds of years of supply left. In the meantime, subsidized “green” or “alternative” power isn’t the answer. If something needs a subsidy, it’s because it’s uneconomic. And if something is uneconomic, it means you’re destroying capital, not building capital. You’re making the world poorer, and poor countries have a hard time making technological advances.
Electric vehicles have a great future, but both the grid and power plants will have to evolve greatly to make them viable on a big scale. They shouldn’t be legislated into existence, which is what’s happening now. The result will be another major crisis.
The International Chronicles: Many people think they are absolving their alleged climate sins by using EVs, promoting solar and wind energy, and demonizing fossil fuels.
Are these things really as “green” as the average person thinks they are?
Doug Casey: No. Greenism is a sham and a delusion. It’s an example of a meme that has spread not because it’s true—it’s not—but because the public feels that “everybody” believes it, and therefore it must be true. People who know nothing about basic chemistry, physics, or science, in general, think magic can happen. It’s really like a religion that way.
They confuse scientism with science, much the way they confuse Marxism with economics. An early example was the attempt to impose something called “energy accounting.” It’s largely forgotten now. They disregarded costs in terms of dollars and cents, trying to compute costs by figuring how much energy one thing might use as opposed to another. It became insanely complicated, impractical, and irrational. In the real world, some forms of energy are worth more than others, depending on time, place, and circumstances. Just as Marxists believe that all labor is equally valuable, energy accounting assumes all energy is equally valuable.
Windmills and solar collectors are the two basic technologies that Greens are relying on. They overlook the fact that constructing windmills takes a lot of concrete, steel, copper, exotic metals, and petroleum-based plastics, plus a lot of power to build giant structures. Their blades have limited lifespans, can’t be recycled, and have to be thrown into landfills. The same is true of solar panels. They’re a long-term blight upon the environment.
Once again, it’s fine to use windmills and solar for personal convenience, special situations, or remote locations. Otherwise, they make no sense at all—except to ideologues who want to virtue signal.
The International Chronicles: According to the consulting firm McKinsey, getting to “Net Zero” carbon by 2050 would cost $275 trillion in capital spending on physical assets by 2050, or $9.2 trillion a year.
It’s a ridiculous amount of money and an impossible proposition. Yet, governments are enthusiastically jumping on board with this plan.
Is Net-Zero a giant swindle? How does it end?
Doug Casey: Net Zero means getting down to net-zero carbon emissions. That’s insane. Partly because it would direct even more power and resources to the State and partly because carbon is a good thing.
Carbon is the basis of all life; you shouldn’t try to eliminate it. It’s as if the Greens have declared war against the Periodic Table of the Elements. Uranium, sulfur, fluorine, chlorine, cadmium, and lead have long been declared enemies. Someday I expect they’ll discover that argon is almost 1% of the atmosphere and will ask the government to “do something” about that too. God forbid they discover that nitrogen, which is 80% of the atmosphere, is key to making most explosives…
The atmosphere has about 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide or less than 0.04%. That’s a teeny weeny amount. Frankly, we might be better off if it grew to 10 times that level—to 3,800 parts per million, which is still less than half of a percent of the atmosphere.
Why? Greens seem unaware that through most of the earth’s history, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has been many times what it is now. As a result, the earth was covered with massive forests, giant plants, and animals. Carbon is conducive to life.
130 parts per million is the minimum amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere necessary to sustain plant life. It’s plant food. Believe it or not, we’re at the ragged edge of killing both plant life and ourselves if we reduce it much further. The amount of CO2 may be going up, but there’s little proof that humans are to blame. Most of it is because of natural forces, like volcanism.
Global warming is tied to the reason we’re supposed to hate carbon. But climate change is largely controlled by the sun, in combination with a myriad of other factors ranging from cosmic rays to the changing tilt of the earth to possibly the solar system’s rotation around the galaxy. Contrary to the hype that saturates the planet, there’s plenty of reason to believe the climate is now headed toward a long cooling spell. Don’t worry about Global Warming. It’s the least of our problems.
Warm is good, cool is bad, from the point of view of life, civilization, and everything else. The Greens have everything upside down and backward. I think a good case can be made that they don’t love nature nearly as much as they simply hate humanity, including themselves.
The International Chronicles: The green agenda will cause unimaginable government-caused distortions in the economy.
What are the investment implications?
Doug Casey: If they continue along this path—and it appears that they will—huge amounts of capital will be misallocated or destroyed. Trillions of dollars will be wasted by governments for political reasons. A huge amount of debt will be incurred, devastating the standard of living of future generations who have to repay it—exactly when all the solar collectors and windmills have to be junked.
If we continue along this way, it’s going to be an economic disaster, making the world poorer, not richer. When the world gets poorer, unhappy people will start wars to blame somebody else for the problem or steal resources.
The US economy is being Sovietized. Which is to say, directions increasingly come from apparatchiks and political cadres, as opposed to letting people decide what they want in the market. If you value democracy, the only democratic way of organizing things economically is to let the market decide. But in a Green society, humans and markets are seen as the enemy—things to be reduced and eliminated.
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China has the world over a barrel in more ways than we have been led to believe.
It isn’t so much that China has the biggest resources of these minerals. Rather it has the refining capacity to produce these materials. Note that most of these “lesser known base metals” don’t occur naturally on their own (like copper or tin), rather they occur concurrent with other minerals and are essentially a by-product of refining common base metals. Of course, refining minerals is a messy, polluting, and energy-intensive business that few countries want to engage in or allow. In doing so, they open themselves up to national security issues.
All rather interesting, but what I’d like to point out is that there exists the probability that this all becomes weaponized. Reducing or eliminating the supply of these critical resources to “non-friendly” nations is increasingly becoming a real threat. That in itself would entail significant supply disruptions, higher costs of production (much higher), and subsequent acceleration of stagflation.
The New vs the Old Economy
We thought we had it all before with the TMT bubble of 2000 (goodness, that is now 24 years ago). But history has been rewritten highlighting the extreme performance of one theme against another. Real assets are more out of favour compared to financial assets than at any time since the 1920s. Some random charts we found on the information superhighway provide an illustrative view of what we’re saying.
Any relationship between the chart above to the one below?
OK, let’s put it another way. What if the US 10-year yield is 10% 10 years from now? How do you think real assets would have performed vs financial assets?
Just a reminder of how out of favour materials and energy are compared to the broader market. Granted this is over a year old, but not much has changed since then.
We recall a couple of years ago when Tesla had a greater market cap than the S&P 500 energy sector and Microsoft had a bigger market cap than the S&P Materials and Energy sectors combined. Seems like not much has changed on a global scale.
Taking out Saudi Aramco, Microsoft, and Apple have about the same market cap as the global energy sector.
A Think Piece on Solar Panels
Finally, someone who has dug deep into the assumptions:
You have to read the article. It’s a humdinger. But first, a warning to the tree huggers who buy the concept of paying more taxes to multiple home-owning, jet-setting globalists to eliminate a gas that is 0.04% of the atmosphere and upon which all plants are dependent. My friends and colleagues over at International Man said it well:
But back to the report. Check out these snippets:
Last August, in an amalgamation of “The Green New Deal” meets “Build Back Better,” President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gifted the renewables industry with billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded subsidies.
What few backing the bill realised was that the largest beneficiary would likely be China due to its expansive grip on the global solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. Worse than that, it might end up misdirecting the world’s clean energy efforts into dirtier than appreciated energy technologies because of the country’s ongoing dependence on coal-fired energy.
In essence, the IEA are basing their assumptions of how much CO2 is produced in manufacturing solar panels based on European energy data rather than Chinese energy data. China relies on coal more intensively than Europe:
the IPCC claims solar PV is 48 gCO2/kWh. But, as we’ll see below, a new investigation started by Italian researcher Enrico Mariutti suggests that the number is closer to between 170 and 250 gCO2/kWh, depending on the energy mix used to power PV production. If this estimate is accurate, solar would not compare favourably with natural gas, which is around 50 gCO2/kWh with carbon capture and 400 to 500 without.
Here is the conclusion:
A picture emerges of an aspirational Western industry captured lock, stock, and barrel by secretive, coal-loving Beijing. It’s a worry for the West’s economic development, never mind energy security and climate action. If solar is anything to go by, the great transition seems less based on data than a mixture of blind faith and vested interests.
Perhaps the broad populace will awaken to this blind faith when electricity prices go through the roof and standards of living decline significantly. Either way, the truth will eventually come into plain sight.
Reports of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Here’s a very useful resource:
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-world-consumption-data.html
Take a look at the global consumption of coal in 2022:
China, India, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey (and other emerging nations) make up about 86% of world coal consumption. Don’t be expecting them to buy into the “Net Zero” narrative anytime soon (this side of 2050 at least). Either way, coal consumption will continue to rise in line with global GDP. There is no other way around this. That is unless those countries are willing to see a deterioration in standards of living… which, as I sit in Turkey, I can tell you ain’t gonna happen without a fight.
By the way, here is global oil production by country.
Notice the importance of the US… or should we say US shale, because some 66% of US oil production is accounted for by shale oil. If shale is indeed peaking (or perhaps it has already peaked) as we believe it is (we’ve written about this previously and extensively), then we have ourselves a unique and long-performing investment opportunity.
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25 refrigerators.
That’s how much the additional electricity consumption per household would be if the average US home adopted electric vehicles (EVs).
Congressman Thomas Massie—an electrical engineer—revealed this information while discussing with Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, President Biden’s plan to have 50% of cars sold in the US be electric by 2030.
The current and future grid in most places will not be able to support each home running 25 refrigerators—not even close. Just look at California, where the grid is already buckling under the existing load.
Massie claims, correctly, in my view, that the notion of widespread adoption of electric vehicles anytime soon is a dangerous fantasy based on political science, not sound engineering.
Nonetheless, governments, the media, academia, large corporations, and celebrities tout an imminent “transition” to EVs as if it’s preordained from above.
It’s not.
They’re trying to manufacture your consent for a scam of almost unimaginable proportions.
Below are three reasons why something sinister is going on with the big push for EVs.
But first, a necessary clarification.
You no doubt have heard of the term “fossil fuels” before.
When the average person hears “fossil fuels,” they think of a dirty technology that belongs in the 1800s. Many believe they are burning dead dinosaurs to power their cars.
They also think “fossil fuels” will destroy the planet within a decade and run out soon—despite the fact that, after water, oil is the second most abundant liquid on this planet.
None of these ridiculous notions are true, but many people believe them. Using propaganda terms like “fossil fuels” plays a large role.
Orwell was correct when he said that corrupting the language can corrupt people’s thoughts.
I suggest expunging “fossil fuels” from your vocabulary in favor of hydrocarbons—a much better and more precise word.
A hydrocarbon is a molecule made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms. These molecules are the building blocks of many different substances, including energy sources like coal, oil, and gas. These energy sources have been the backbone of the global economy for decades, providing power for industries, transportation, and homes.
Now, on to the three reasons EVs are a giant scam at best and possibly something much worse.
Reason #1: EVs Are Not Green
The central premise for EVs is they help to save the planet from carbon because they use electricity instead of gas.
It’s astounding so few think to ask, what generates the electricity that powers EVs?
Hydrocarbons generate over 60% of the electricity in the US. That means there’s an excellent chance that oil, coal, or gas is behind the electricity charging an EV.
It’s important to emphasize carbon is an essential element for life on this planet. It’s what humans exhale and what plants need to survive.
After decades of propaganda, Malthusian hysterics have created a twisted perception in many people’s minds that carbon is a dangerous substance that must be reduced to save the planet.
Let’s entertain this bogus premise momentarily and assume carbon is bad.
Even by this logic, EVs do not really reduce carbon emissions; they just rearrange them.
Further, extracting and processing the exotic materials needed to make EVs requires tremendous power in remote locations, which only hydrocarbons can provide.
Additionally, EVs require an enormous amount of rare elements and metals—like lithium and cobalt—that companies mine in conditions that couldn’t remotely be considered friendly to the environment.
Analysts estimate that each EV requires around one kilogram of rare earth elements. Extracting and processing these rare elements produces a massive amount of toxic waste. That’s why it mainly occurs in China, which doesn’t care much about environmental concerns.
In short, the notion that EVs are green is laughable.
It’s simply the thin patina of propaganda that governments need as a pretext to justify the astronomical taxpayer subsidies for EVs.
Reason #2: EVs Can’t Compete Without Government Support
For many years, governments have heavily subsidized EVs through rebates, sales tax exemptions, loans, grants, tax credits, and other means.
According to the Wall Street Journal, US taxpayers will subsidize EVs by at least $393 billion in the coming years—more than the GDP of Hong Kong.
To put that in perspective, if you earned $1 a second 24/7/365—about $31 million per year—it would take you over 12,677 YEARS to make $393 billion.
And that’s not even considering the immense subsidies and government support that have occurred in the past.
Furthermore, governments impose burdensome regulations and taxes on gasoline vehicles to make EVs seem relatively more attractive.
Even with this enormous government support, EVs can barely compete with gasoline vehicles.
According to J.D. Power, a consumer research firm, the average EV still costs at least 21% more than the average gasoline vehicle.
Without government support, it’s not hard to see how the market for EVs would evaporate as they would become unaffordable for the vast majority of people.
In other words, the EV market is a giant mirage artificially propped up by extensive government intervention.
It begs the question, why are governments going all out to push an obviously uneconomic scam?
While they are undoubtedly corrupt thieves and simply stupid, something more nefarious could also be at play.
Reason #3: EVs Are About Controlling You
EVs are spying machines.
They collect an unimaginable amount of data on you, which governments can access easily.
Analysts estimate that cars generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour.
Seeing how governments could integrate EVs into a larger high-tech control grid doesn’t take much imagination. The potential for busybodies—or worse—to abuse such a system is obvious.
Consider this.
The last thing any government wants is an incident like what happened with the Canadian truckers rebelling against vaccine mandates.
Had the Canadian truckers’ vehicles been EVs, the government would have been able to stamp out the resistance much easier.
Here’s the bottom line.
The people really in charge do not want the average person to have genuine freedom of movement or access to independent power sources.
They want to know everything, keep you dependent, and have the ability to control everything, just like how a farmer would with his cattle. They think of you in similar terms.
That’s why gasoline vehicles have to go and why they are trying to herd us into EVs.
Conclusion
To summarize, EVs are not green, cannot compete with gas cars without enormous government support, and are probably a crucial piece of the emerging high-tech control grid.
The solution is simple: eliminate all government subsidies and support and let EVs compete on their own merits in a free market.
But that’s unlikely to happen.
Instead, it’s only prudent to expect them to push EVs harder and harder.
If EVs were simply government-subsidized status symbols for wealthy liberals who want to virtue signal how they think they’re saving the planet, that would be bad enough.
But chances are, the big push for EVs represents something much worse.
Along with 15-minute cities, carbon credits, CBDCs, digital IDs, phasing out hydrocarbons and meat, vaccine passports, an ESG social credit system, and the war on farmers, EVs are likely an integral part of the Great Reset—the dystopian future the global elite has envisioned for mankind.
In reality, the so-called Great Reset is a high-tech form of feudalism.
Sadly, most of humanity has no idea what is coming.
Worse, many have become unwitting foot soldiers for this agenda because they have been gaslighted into believing they are saving the planet or acting for the greater good.
Carbon Credits Are the Biggest Scam Since Indulgences—How You Can Avoid Being Fleeced
In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church convinced the commoners to buy indulgences to alleviate their sins. And they made a fortune in the process.
Similarly, today, our overlords—the mainstream media, central bankers, and their political allies—are working overtime to convince the commoners to pay for their alleged climate sins.
Enter carbon credits, government-issued permits that grant you the privilege to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide.
Although advocates promote them as a way to “save the environment,” in reality, carbon credits are nothing more than a devious mechanism to tax, regulate, and control you.
It’s not a coincidence that the most philosophically and ethically bent people are promoting them.
For example, at a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, participants revealed and touted an “individual carbon footprint tracker.” It will track where people travel, how they travel, what they eat, and what they consume.
Carbon accounting is already creeping into many places, like Google Flights.
A federal carbon tax is already a reality in Trudeau’s Canada, and it’s causing the price of food and other goods and services to soar. But Canadians haven’t seen anything yet—the federal carbon tax will triple by 2030.
In short, there’s a growing push to implement the carbon credit scam worldwide. And that’s not a coincidence.
Remember, central banks only exist to harvest wealth from the populace through inflation and redirect it to the politically connected, an insidious practice known as seigniorage.
Fiat currency is the usual mechanism central banks use to perpetuate this fraud. They get most people to run on a hamster wheel most of their lives chasing after confetti money they create with no effort.
However, there is a limit to this process.
For example, the governments in Venezuela and Zimbabwe have debased their currencies to such an extent that they are worthless. They have squeezed as much wealth out of their populations through seigniorage as possible.
Governments in the US, Canada, the EU, and others still benefit from seigniorage, but they sense they are not getting as much juice from the squeeze as they used to. Price increases are hitting multi-decade highs, and the US dollar, the euro, and other fiat currencies are quickly losing their luster.
In other words, central banks are debasing fiat currencies to the point where they can no longer extract as much seigniorage as they used to. That presents bankrupt Western governments with a big financial problem and is why they need to find a new way to harvest wealth from their citizens.
That’s where carbon credits come in. They’re the new mechanism of seigniorage designed to transfer wealth from you to the politically connected.
The idea is to get people to run on the hamster wheel chasing carbon credits, an artificial construct governments create with no effort.
Think of it like this…
Imagine if Tony Soprano forced everyone in his neighborhood to buy “breathing credits” from him, which grant you the privilege to breathe a certain amount of air. And that, naturally, it would cost Tony Soprano nothing to create as many of these “breathing credits” as he wanted. He could also hand them out to his friends and others who did favors for him, creating a corrupt patronage system.
This is basically what governments plan to do with carbon credits. Except they are also gaslighting you by telling you they are helping save the planet. Without that patina of propaganda—which the media, academia, and the rest of the establishment reinforce—there’s a good chance the people would revolt.
What To Do
The foundation is being laid to create a totalitarian system to track, control, and tax carbon—an element that touches every activity of human life.
Carbon credits are merely a way for governments, central bankers, and their allies to control the populace and secure continued seigniorage as the fiat currency system flounders.
It’s the biggest scam since the indulgences of the Middle Ages.
Numbers Don’t Lie
These 9 charts from the Statistical Review Of World Energy expose the myth of the energy transition & show hydrocarbons are growing faster than alt-energy
Amid the ongoing blizzard of propaganda about the “energy transition” and the tired antics of the goobers from Just Stop Oil — a pair of whom vandalized Stonehenge with orange paint last Wednesday — the Statistical Review, published by the Energy Institute, KPMG, and Kearney, provides a much-needed reality check to the narrative being promoted by major media outlets, academics, and the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.
Soaring electricity demand was, yet again, the big story in 2023. Global power generation increased by 2.5% to 29,924 terawatt-hours. About 32% of that juice (9,456 TWh) was generated in China, where electricity production surged by nearly 7%. The U.S. came in a distant second in power generated, with 4,494 TWh. Domestic power production dropped by about 1% last year. Power generation in India also increased by about 7% last year to a record 1,958 TWh, 75% of which came from coal-fired power plants.
I look forward to the release of the Statistical Review every year because the data can be downloaded in Excel. That allows me and others to make meaningful comparisons beyond the spin. Numerical comparisons are essential ingredients in the debate over energy and climate policy. The best advice I ever got on presenting numbers came from author and statistician Edward Tufte. He said: whenever you give people a number, give them a familiar metric so they can make a comparison. That advice changed the course of my career. Here are nine charts from the Statistical Review.
Chart 1
The numbers don’t lie.
