There comes a time when arrogant tyrants reach too far. We’ve reached that point, globally, with the World Evil Form (W.E.F.) in Davos and their Unter Menchen underkings placed into positions of power in the governments of the world.
For decades most of us didn’t care what kind of crazy ideas they dreamed up and what kind of ludicrous plots they plotted. The world is full of crazy people and it was just fine with us that some of them where very very rich and plotted together about things that were nutty. We’ve gotten use to out of touch nutters in positions of power, so what’s a few more? At least they were sequestered up in the mountains of Switzerland…
Then they started to plant puppets (like Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau) in positions of power, but, OK, all politicians are a bit daft and crooked, so we just accepted it as “par for the course” and didn’t really care. Even when the pResident Idiot Biden was installed as Puppet In Chief of the USA, most of us just rolled our eyes and figured “wait 4 years and we’ll fix it”…
But then something happened. It sort of snuck up on us… but some of these Idiots In Charge started to actually PUSH to DO the insane idiotic things they had been talking about over their $200 / plate dinners… Things like shut off fuel. Push cars that burst into flames if having a bad day and take several hours to recharge. Tells us that the diets followed for several thousands of years with healthy results were “bad” and we had to “Eat Bugs” to “save the planet”… A planet that does just fine no matter what we do. A planet with a 4.5 Billion year history, that has been a molten lava ball, and ice ball, tropical at the south pole, and had atmospheres with NO oxygen, and with more than we have now. Frankly, the planet doesn’t even know we are here and will do whatever it wants no matter WHAT we do.
About then, we started to get a bit grumpy. These Idiots In Charge were starting to be enough of a PITA as to get our attention. Somebody needed to tell them that shutting off the fuel and eating cockroaches was a Very Bad Idea. So we elected Trump in the USA, and over in Europe, folks in France, Italy and Hungary and even Britain started to push back. The UK managed to escape from the Authoritarian 4th Reich EU and then all hell started to break loose…
Well, Idiots, being Idiots, and highly egotistical, do NOT like the idea of being called Idiots, and they especially don’t like being told that their fantasies of Godlike Beauty Of Creation are actually a bit daft and will fail horribly. Killing Millions. Even worse, they don’t like being told that killing 80%+ of the human population is an Evil Egotistical and Horrible idea. One that is beyond crazy. So they persisted in this path.
Now we have Red Diaper Baby Trudeau (“love child” son of Castro) leading Canada into chaos and ruin. Macron presiding over The Riot Du Jour in Paris. Babbling Biden putting Mexico on the border of Gaza and being both ruled too senile to stand trial for crimes AND fit to be Commander In Chief (go figure that one out). Boris Johnson arranging to scuttle a peace deal in Ukraine so that an added 400,000 Ukrainian men can die for nothing, Shultz in Germany happy to preside over the destruction of the German Economy & Manufacturing via No Gas and insane cost rises, and the UK Parliament happy to ignore the people who vote; and then do whatever they want. Oh, and Ursula Van Der Lying happy to push the EU Authoritarian Reich diktats to the point of implosion.
All while the ROW (Rest Of World) is looking at all this and running away as fast as they can. BRICS+ growth only limited by how fast they can set up alternative systems to escape the New Western Fascism.. Now with most of global manufacturing, most of the global oil & energy supplies, and most of the global working population. Not to mention the global mineral and timber wealth and more…
In that context, the W. Evil F. folks and their pwned government lackeys have decided that a nice little war would be a good thing. So AFTER Yet Another Color Revolution in Ukraine that installed Yet Another Idiot In Charge, they built up the Ukraine Army to take down Russia (and, BTW, murder and shell and culturally destroy the 1/2 of their population what ARE ethnic Russians in places that were part of Russia for several hundred years… starting in 2014). But Russia was watching and after a series of bald faced lies (Minsk 1 & 2 for example – admitted as frauds by folks like Angela Merkel) Russia decided to move first and nip this as a bud. But then Boris stepped in and decided Ukraine must die instead of seek peace. Oh Well.
But somewhere along the line, the general population started to look at all this and say to themselves: “I’d really rather not deal with this Crap, but the Idiots In Charge are talking crazy talk and worse, doing crazy things.”… We’ve had trucker convoys across Canada, and we’ve had Paris Protests, and we’ve had a LOT of folks talking. We’ve had (at best) crap elections in the USA with fraudulence prone processes, LawFare and Personal Destruction. It’s very very clear that the Idiots In Charge are: Evil. Have no moral compass. Destructive and sociopathic personalities. Greedy and power mad persons of no redeeming value. Criminal dirt.
And we now know it. And they know we know it. And they don’t care.
So what do you do when we no longer live in a Republic? Or even a Democracy? When we live in a Globalist Idiotic Nutters Authoritarian Abusive Dream? when even the illusion of your “vote” mattering is gone? When The Empire Of Lies (run by liars) runs everything, and when “rules based order” means their Rules, issued by Rulers and you suck it up and must swallow the orders? At that point, folks start to rebel. First in small ways, and then in ever larger ones.
I think we are there, now.
I’ve moved to a place that is likely to go off the rails last. Traditional and safe place in an out of the way semi-rural area in a very Conservative State, with a County Sheriff who understands individual liberty, the 2nd Amendment, and “folks helping folks”. So I think I’m going to be able to live out my remaining years without disturbance.
But…
The urban areas of the USA, and more importantly, the countries of Europe, are much more likely to “have issues”. BIG issues. It is there that I think we will see a lot more collapse, riots, and protests. We are seeing them now.
All across Europe, the insane fantasy of “Net Zero” (based on a broken fairy tail of “Global Warming” but intended to removed liberties from the people and institute a draconian social control structure) has come for the food supply. Turns out that everyone can understand that No Food means Bad For ME; and that “eat ze Bugs” is a very sick and abusive unhealthy farce. Folks can also understand that “no carbon” means no job, no food, no freedom to travel, and misery. We ARE a “carbon based life” so it is kind of essential.
Essentially, the Idiots In Charge have started doing enough Stupid Stuff to get the attention of the Average Folks, and the average folks do not like what they see.
I have no idea if this will reach the level of Pitchforks and Tar, or The French Haircut. But I can tell that Regular Folks are reaching the point of thinking about that kind of thing.
To be blunt:
“Carbon Footprint” and “Zero Emissions” crap is never going to work. Banning home gardens, private cars, and forcing people into “15 minute urban ghettos” will result in lawlessness and revolutions. “Killing Granny” with forced jabs with toxic experimental gene therapies will not get folks to like the government that does it. Telling people to not have children will just result in those who do not listen to that crap having a load of very cynical children… who do not listen to “authority”.
Closing down mining & manufacturing will just lead to the collapse of the very civilization that the Idiots In Charge depend on for survival. These are nihilistic people who are not very bright and out of touch with reality, breaking what they do not understand, can not build, and will be surprised to discover that they die without it.
I take some solace in the fact that BRICS+ has exited this nightmare of Control And Power Mad Idiots in Charge. The bulk of the world population (India China) manufacturing (China), oil (Brazil, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia), minerals & timber (Russia, Brazil) and culture (all of them) is now safely outside the grasp of the Globalist Cabal and their stupidity. Soros and his ilk were kicked out (of at least Russia, China and India) and it looks like they (BRICS+) are making a Clean Break with pretty much the entire infected West (EU, UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a few more). So at least somewhere will exist to restart civilization after our collapse and implosion. That alone guarantees that there will be NO Global Domination by the Globalists.
Their Proxy War to destroy Russia is failing catastrophically and they have no idea now to get out of it. This was supposed to get rid of Putin and break up Russia (a nation with a 1000 year history of invasions and driving out the invaders… often from The West. Sweden, Napoleon, Nazi Germany and many more… they know war, how to fight, and were prepared.)
I have no desire to leave my country, but if needed, it is comforting to realize that with Africa and South America rushing to embrace BRICS+ and dump The West, there will be someplace to which one could escape. But I fear that as the EU and USA collapse, the ROW will have a hard time picking up the pieces…
Sigh.
But at least the bulk of humanity will be spared the Tyranny Of The Idiots and their sick fantasies.
When the money is shut off (as it eventually MUST be, either by simply running out, or being inflated into toilet paper values) those being bought off with tissue paper lies will just walk away. As that power evaporates, the ROW will find a way to just suck it up and carry on. IMO, the EU vs Germany will be the first test case of this. Germany & the UK were the monetary engines running the EU Political Machine. Their surpluses were used to oil the machine, prop up the debtor nations (Italy, Greece, etc.) and fund The Machine. The UK is now out of the pen, and Germany is in a controlled collapse. “No money” will crimp the EU, and likely lead to many more nations bailing. Italy, for example. When there is no more bribe money nor “economic support”, why stay in? Eh?
Season that with the ruinous costs of a losing war of Ukraine vs Russia, and pretty quickly this will unwind.
Germany can not survive as a metal, manufacturing, or petrochemicals State without Russian Gas and Russian Minerals. They are a Dead Man Walking at present, with their nuclear power shut down, coal forbidden, and Russian Gas cut off. The gas is also essential as feed stock to make “petro” chemicals. No metals, chemicals, nor fabrication of cars and technically advanced devices pretty much spells doom; but the Idiots In Charge have decided to kill off agriculture as well.
This has lead to Farmer Protests all across Europe & even into the UK. It is pretty simple, really. Mandate lower use of fertilizers and pesticides, you guarantee food shortages rampant price inflation, and bankrupted farmers. Period.
FWIW, I know about farming. Grew up in a farm town. Went to an Ag University. Love gardening. Dad was from an Iowa farm. I know how to do Organic Gardening (the only kind there was for centuries and most what Dad did in the back yard) and how to do chemical based gardening. While you CAN get the same yields out of Organic farming, it takes a decade (or more) to convert a given field, AND it takes a WHOLE LOT more LABOR to do it. Also it takes a whole lot of specific skills that most folks do not have, and it is not suited to Corporate Agribusiness. So saying we’ll just cut the pesticides and fertilizers in half (or to zero by 2030) is just idiocy on steroids. Just Not Possible. You can bankrupt a lot of farmers and you can starve to death a lot of 3rd World People (that may well be their goal…) but that’s about all you can accomplish.
Like the “mandate” to have all electric cars by 2030. Just not physically possible so it just will not be done.. We simply can not mine enough of the needed minerals fast enough to do it. Not by a 100 years. (Some are up to 10,000 years of present production…). So it will not happen, but stubbornly mandating it will damage a lot of industries, and people, while breaking transportation.
So the result is that the awakened people are starting to say F.U. to the Idiots In Charge. From Texas (and 25 other States) down to individuals just cutting down Ultra Low Emissions zone cameras in the UK, or just not buying electric cars that burst into flames, burn down houses, and kill families… All people have to do is Not Comply. And right now, it is the Farmers who are Not Going To Comply.
They have no choice. There is no acceptable alternative. That which can not be done, will not be done. Period. So the Idiots In Charge can mandate all they want. It will not work, and we will not comply. The only real question is which of the 4 boxes will be the mechanism.
Soap Box
Jury box
Ballot Box
Cartridge Box
We The People are presently teetering between #3 and #4.
I don’t know what is going to happen, but I know it will not be good, and it will require being prepared.
Musings from the Chiefio 
FWIW
“The Elites/Left want non-Elites to eat insects. There are many reasons not to eat this poverty food including:
(Copied from elsewhere.)
NEVER eat insects.
Not even for fun….!
Insects contain chitin that cannot be processed by our intestines.
But chitin is a very tasty polysaccharide for cancer, parasites, mold, and almost anything that causes disease.
Chitin is part of his building.
They also contain metamorphic steroids and especially ekdysterone.
This is not food for “mammals”.
Only birds can safely process insect food
Birds’ digestive system is quite different than ours.
In addition, insects contain a large amount of heavy metals and are literally a magnet for pesticides.
Pavel Štástka”
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/02/monday-40/#comment-2734562
Probably an underlying reason for the madness is that “limits to growth” mantra and the idea that the cake is a limited size so the more people we have the less each gets to live on. Malthus thought that a world population of 1 billion would necessarily be starving and poverty-stricken. Instead, farming improved and we currently produce enough food for over 10 billion people, though a fair amount gets wasted rather than being eaten. There’s not a lot of point producing a lot more than we can eat anyway, since it deteriorates in storage, so this is why we don’t actually produce a lot more food, but more could be produced now if wanted.
The big need is to produce cheap energy, though. If you’re depending on human muscle power, you can use 100-200W per person. Animal power gets you into the 1hp range of around 750W per horse. Modern engines produce 100-1000 times that, though, and you need those levels of power to run industry and farming.
I used to think that you can’t create or destroy energy. It is after all a central tenet of physics. Fairly recently, though (last 8 years or so), I’ve been coming across situations where that doesn’t apply. An obvious one is the “reactionless” space drives, which produce a net force without needing to eject mass to get the thrust. See the second hour (Charles Buhler) of https://www.altpropulsion.com/events/apec-12-23-2023/ for the interesting observation that electrostatic pressure can be used for this. There are various designs and theories as to why we can get a reactionless thrust, but the experimental results are clear – it actually works. Set up these drives on a generator, and when it’s spinning fast enough you will get more power out than you’re putting in. With the current levels of thrust, around 50mN per watt, you need to exceed around 20m/s on the drives to achieve this, but that’s not excessive. So far, no-one has run that experiment, though.
Once you’ve accepted that Conservation of Energy (CoE) isn’t absolute, though, you can see other possible violations. One is the Meissner effect, where a permanent magnet gets lifted off a superconductor as the superconductor is cooled below its critical temperature. Where does that energy come from? The Meissner effect itself can be switched off using a small laser of the right frequency, too, allowing us to cycle that lifting or to divert magnetic flux. Another oddity is in solar cells, that I’ve recently noticed. The incoming photon produces carriers that then move across the PN junction because of the inbuilt PN junction field. Where does that potential energy come from? The photon energy is accounted for already in the heat produced and the elevation of a carrier across the band-gap. Looks to me that the energy we get out of the solar cell is freshly-created. I’m working on ways to exploit this.
Still, net here is that at some point in the fairly near future we may not need to burn anything to get energy, or use nuclear fission or fusion to get energy. That removes a big “limit to growth”. Actually, since as a population gets educated and away from subsistence farming and high infant mortality, the opposite problem is more likely with not enough kids to replace the adults as they die, so population drops instead. This is likely the reason that governments want immigration to keep the population level and to try to fix the demographics problem of too many retired to be supported by the workers. The idiots in charge don’t realise that it’s their policies and over-taxing that make it so expensive to support kids that people largely choose not to have so many, as well as the prophecies of doom that are making people think it’s a bad idea to have more kids who will experience the failure of the civilisation.
At the moment, I’m just re-reading Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” where part of the plot is that the GEBs produce an edited version of Ebola that will depopulate the Earth down to a few thousand elite. Not too far from reality, then…. Of course, if that happened, the survivors would soon find out that there aren’t enough people to maintain a high technology and they’d devolve to subsistence farming and a short and hard life. Included in the plot is that they have two versions of “vaccine”, one that works (for them) and the other that’s widely-disseminated that damages the immune system. Again, not too far from reality. A bit of a change from my normal sci-fi, but hopefully still fiction.
I wouldn’t say that flying cars, hoverboards, or EVs will be impossible. New developments in physics may make the impossible become a known technology, like the Dick Tracy watch that’s now available to anyone with the money to buy one. The big problem is the people who think it’s somehow wrong to be prosperous, or that the populace need tight control of what they do and think.
There are some insectivore mammals, another ian. The most common one in my area are bats. That said, you are correct. Most mammals cannot handle insects as food. Herbivores, carnivores and scavengers can deal with insects up to a point, because they have to; but do better when the insect fraction is small.
For me, Total Energy is composed of various kinds of potential energy, internal kinetic energy, external kinetic energy, chemical energy, and nuclear energy. Electric field or magnetic field energy is just one kind of potential energy. Sure, converted energy can appear to be freshly created. The whole, contingent, physical universe contains A LOT of energy. Safely harnessing it is the $64,000 question ;p.
E. M.
At another blog, I wrote a depopulation series. Wolfie and I give our blessings to anyone who wants to ‘steal’ that info.
Gail’s Depop Series
GREENHOUSE, ICEHOUSE OR CLIMATIC MADHOUSE?
MALTHUSIANS AND EUGENISTS MAKE A CASE FOR POPULATION CONTROL
DEPOPULATION – NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE
IMPORTANT ==> National Security Study Memorandum NSSM 200
THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR WAR
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Another author wrote:
IMPORTANT ==> The Deagel Report: U.S. Population Reduction of 68.5% by 2025
I have moved comments from various threads containing scientific info on the Clot shot into this article’s comment section so they are all in one place as a reference.
An Open Letter to Medical Professionals Who Took the COVID-19 “Vaccines”
BTW, your blog is very popular with the members of this blog. It is just we talk more about politics.
Hoping this image posts correctly:
FWIW
Does the open border invalidate government’s authority? Interesting article concerning governments duty to prevent invasion, vs current Federal actions to actively support invasion.
https://radiofarside.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-countries
@gailcombs: Gail! Good to see you. You have been missed.
Looking through the various links you posted, and reading some threads at The Q Tree, I see a comment where you say “The KNEW in 1973 — there is the key decade, 1970s again.”
YES. Absolutely. I started noticing some years ago that right at 1970 was when the US really accelerated off the rails. My opinion is that 1969 was the turning point were the Globalists realized, “We have a generations of Americans who are increasingly rejecting the idea of aggressive war, who are demanding their rights, and who are rejecting traditional authorities. Also, we are seeing that space flight is not only possible, but is on the verge of becoming practical. We must take action and shut down America so that we can move our center of operations to Asia.” Immediately afterward we saw the opening of China, excessive regulations (EPA, OSHA, etc.), the beginning of moving all industrial operations overseas, first use of direct recording electronic voting machines, shutting down nuclear energy, removing the last influence of a gold standard from the dollar making it 100% fiat, the government sponsored growth of the drug culture, the dumbing down of all levels of education, and the immediate consolidation of all MSM to a handful of owners (all of whom were being paid in one way or another by the Deep State).
The more you focus on the 70s the more obvious it is that some horrific plan began to be instituted then.
Spit balling, here.
George Soros would have been 40 years old in 1970. He is a GEB, but I think too young at the time to be one of the powers behind the planned destruction of the US and the West.
He was created and set in place to play his role. Who are his masters?
We have other GEBs such as Schwab and Gates. They too are visible faces pushing the One World Government agenda and are unarguably bankrolling the elected I.I.C.s who truly are useful, handsomely rewarded idiots. There’s no end to the pool of narcissistic sociopaths who are willing to step into their role at the behest of the GEBs.
Who are the still hidden ones?
Hi Gail! 👍👍😁
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@E.M. – Maybe I read too fast or misinterpreted, but I didn’t see your discussion in this article regarding “Don’t poke the bear.”
We have a herd of sheeple. a bunch of NPCs, but there is a huge number of people who just want to be left alone.
When the cultural and economic destruction pokes the people who just want to be left alone one too many times in the ribs. Don’t poke the bear.
I think our forefathers were geniuses when the came up with the Right to Arm Bears, because it doesn’t take too many armed bears to sort things out once they get mad. And the bears, the people who just wanted to be left alone, will make sure things stay sorted out.
How likely is this?
Since that was from almost ten years ago, I think it’s safe to assume that he thought there would still be gas and diesel power available. With the dismantling of the viable electrical generation system, replacing it with a sometimes it works, sort of, system, that scenario will be both more likely and worse.
another ian says: 12 February 2024 at 9:55 am “This is not food for “mammals”.
As usual there are exceptions to the rule.
ie the “ant eater family”, Aardvarks, Pangolins.
Plus Orangutans, Coyotes and Bears as part of their diet.
Apparntly “ant eating” by humans is quite popular in India and Mexico.
Half a million Australians are without power.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/power-outage-victoria-loy-yang-a-down-storms-damage-transmission/103461222
@Jim2:
Expect a LOT more of that as prudent Grid Design is ignored for Political Goals. Politics makes for very bad Engineering. Period.
@YMMV:
Yup. And that’s why I’m spending more time “prepping” and less time cruising on my boat than I would like… More “building a working garden” with food preservation too (food drying, canning, salting, etc.) and exploring “alternative water sources” and less time doing computer work.
Grid down for a YEAR? IMHO, every single city over 100,000 population would be DEAD. Every city over about 10,000 would be crippled with massive death and social collapse. Selected cities under 5,000 could survive (with a lot of troubles) as long as they have a reliable local water supply (i.e. nearly nothing in Arizona, Southern New Mexico, West Texas, and Southern California.) Plus a whole lot of the Frozen North would die in the winter cold / frozen water lines.
Mostly scattered rural homesteads would survive without too much trouble, PROVIDED they are already off grid and have a major garden… local hunting & fishing.
Why? Essentially ALL water is pumped with electricity now. No water, people and gardens and farming die. Where are the old hand pumped back yard wells? Gone. Essentially ALL fossil fuels are moved via electric pumps at some point or another, so in short order ALL motor vehicles and off road equipment grinds to a halt. Look at Texas during their last winter Grid Down event. It was just about one week, not a year.
So no trucking, no farming, no refrigeration, no canning of food for the next season, no grain dryers, no water. Layer on that the social collapse that follows and…
IMHO, we’re good for about 3 weeks of Grid Down, then it’s collapse city. (One example? All hospitals have emergency Standby Generators and fuel. It is good for a few days, then needs resupply via tanker. After a few weeks of that, the local tanker supply is drained. How does more fuel get up the Colonial Pipeline to the entire East Mid Coast, eh? Who is driving that truck to the hospital after a month of no food & water?) IF we have not got significant areas restarted inside of one month, the collapse goes exponential. FWIW, I’m good for about 6 months on my present prep provided social collapse is not so bad that I can’t use my cars (and their full fuel tanks…) to go get more water at the local lake. I really need a clandestine well to go longer. I’m not sure my personal prep needs to be any longer given the chaos that would be going on after a few months…
@Ossqss:
After a major window upgrade (hurricane rated and highly energy conserving) our heater has almost never run this winter, and AC use prior (in warm end of fall and a bit before) has been way down too. Such that the “roll around” AC would be enough during an emergency power outage (for the space we would actually inhabit in an emergency). This I can run with my existing portable generator, and it means my fuel supply needs are much much less (about what I have “on hand” now, both propane and gasoline).
Net net of that is I’m not seeing the need to add another 10 kW generator (and the attendant fuel stocks)… so ‘sorry about that’… but I’m not feeling the need to buy your generator.
@AC Osborn & others (Chitin):
Mushrooms also have chitin as a major structural component. Mushroom enthusiasts know (and point out) that there are specific things to do with them. Always cook mushrooms. Kills various parasites & their risks along with degrading a bunch of the chitin. Bacteria are needed to break down the chitin, so a long 5 hour residence in the intestines with the right bacteria works a champ. (so folks who are antibiotic soaked and bacteria deficient will have more issues… eat your fermented foods and kiss your dog ;-)
Basically, it isn’t like “eat a bug and die in gastric misery” but more like “cook, have a good microbiome, avoid excess antibiotics, and use in under 300 gram quantities and most folks will do OK”.
https://www.css.ch/en/private-customers/my-health/nutrition/nutrition-knowledge/digesting-mushrooms.html
But “no way” I’me having 300 grams of crickets instead of my 500 grams of lamb chops / pork chops / filet…
@Gail & Bear Poking:
I’ll make that a separate comment… as it too will be long, to long, too too long?
@H.R.:
I didn’t mention “Don’t poke the bear”… FWIW, as a quasi-Sigma personality type, I go through the usual “clam up and prepare” of Sigma types when pressured. AFTER that, comes the long grind to “revolt and defend”… It is instructive, IMHO, to look up Sigma personality markers, as I have a nascent theory that while most folks are either Alpha or Beta types (Sigmas are rare), that as a collective, society acts more Sigma like. The Alphas are self sorted into the Rulers, Managers & Elite, so reduced in the general society pool. The Betas are the Sheep Followers… UNTIL they realize the Elite are out to get them and they “wake up”. When that happens, the Sigma Traits (understanding, quiet avoidance of control from others, controlled anger ready to break out, etc.) rise to the needs.
To the extent that is correct, it means that Betas, pushed to their limit, transition to a kind of Facultative Sigma, right at the point where a Revolt Is Coming. You do not want a mob of angry Sigmas out for your scalp… (Ask the French about the French Haircut of their revolution…)
So yeah, “don’t poke the bear”… yet that is all that our Alpha Elite Idiots In Charge (ego and authority exceeding intelligence and understanding) are doing and where they are headed. “Good luck with that” (not!) ;-)
Who was causal? It starts with the Rockefeller Family, spreads into the Club Of Rome and their fellow travelers, and then Meadows et.al. “Limits To Growth” popularized it (along with Population Bomb and other trash “works” like Paul Ehrlich & Rachel Carlson). Now? That’s more compicated.
Part of it is the TLAs. After killing off JFK to “save the planet” from nuclear destruction, IMHO, the CIA decided only IT was the proper guardian of humanity, so began choosing every POTUS (or backup VP if another “JFK moment” came along), and flipping any government that in their view was not taking orders well. When you are in the business of flipping governments globally, it is a short stroll to flipping your own to one more suited to your desires. “Color Revolutions Galore”… including in the USA… Also, IMHO, they created Soros. And Gates. Apple was not letting them backdoor the Apple Products, so “suddenly” all sorts of governments and government contractors tossed out superior Apple Products and put in crappy bug prone low security Windowz stuff… Coincidence?? I think not… So they set about choosing “winners and losers” to suit their global management needs.
Now blend those two…
As the Gang Green ideas soak into the TLA world, it “just makes sense” to do things like herd everyone into “15 minute cities” and put them on a “social credit score” and limit what they can do, where they can go, what they can eat. Match made in Heaven (a conference room in Langley…)
Right now their big problem is that Russia is not under their control, their Get Putin “color revolution” has failed, their NATO war via Ukraine on Russia has failed, and the “Global Jab” program for population reduction and control has blown up in their faces (China and Russia made their own more normal vaccine, and 20%+ of the USA said F.U., plus the truth is leaking out…). The only “positive” from their POV is that China is under severe economic strain looking like collapse due to a few years of delayed consumption in The West from lockdowns, job losses, inflation, and logistics chaos. We’ll see if they think that’s enough to start a war with China…
These Lords Of Chaos are Happy! with the idea of killing off a few billion people as long as it isn’t them and theirs. Color Revolutions are THE NORM, so a few hundred million a year is “normal” and just cost of doing business. THEY are “In Control” and know it… even when they are not…
Now, having a load of compromat and bribery leverage all over the globe, they feel free to do whatever they think best. And since murder, assassinations, bribery, blackmail, and revolutions are their standard tools, you can guess where their moral compass now points…
FWIW, you can also see that it isn’t just the CIA. The “Five Eyes” brings in the UK and their laundry list of issues. The Royal Attitude toward “minor countries” and old colonies (and disdain for The Commoners). The long long Great Game against Russia (pre Communism even). The EU as semi-satrap with “National Leaders” kept on a short leash and changed as needed. At this point I think it’s a consortium of several National Secret Agencies. But they ‘have chosen leadership’ assigned by the folks who populate and run Davos and the Bilderbergers.
FWIW, I think a good bit of this is a competition between a few major super rich families. What started with the Rockefellers and Morgans and such, then incorporated the Windsors as co-travelers, tried to rope in the Saudi Royal Family (and succeeded for a long time until now). Now Putin & Xi & Modi & more have set up a parallel system in BRICS+. The Saudis are edging out of the Western Control consortium. These folks at the top work via indirect means to control whole governments, and the various Agencies of The USA and The West. Note, especially in the last century, how often Rockefeller names show up in government… Now they just operate their proxies in the system they built.
Any attempt at incremental reversal will be met with everything from Cancel Culture to Lawfare, to assassinations and worse. There is no moral compass, only the quest for power and destruction of everyone not of use to them.
To them, it is just Their Great Game, and they control the rules and the players.
IMHO it will not end in my lifetime, and perhaps not for many more. The Parasites control the host, so the host can not reject them.
FWIW, I’m torn between a grudging admiration of their ability to keep the world running, a minor fear that they really will try to reduce global population by 80-95%, and a fear/hope that a nice little nuclear war would end them, too. 2 of those 3 resut in a grand reset of global economics & culture that will leave them scrambling with the rest of us to find food & water, with no time for political bullshit… as the support systems for modern culture and economic production would be in full collapse.
And while I might like to see a global revolt of the Common Man Bear take them down, it isn’t likely to happen, and if it does happen, it is unlikely to succeed. Too many major power centers under the control of the Elite Class. So anything to take them down must come as a surprise and outside those controls. For most Empires, that is either external (thus their push for a Global Empire – no outside risk…) or an internal collapse. (See Bronze Age Collapse as an example – thus their paranoia about “Running Out!!!” as the economic collapse of the trade routes lead to bronze shortage and collapse of Bronze dependent Empires…)
Me? I’m hoping for “Interesting times” that do not interrupt the Beer & Cheese supply and keeps the Rumble feed up ;-)
@TTN:
Yup. There was a big push to recandle some things to China. There was a LOT of money to be made by moving high paying middle class manufacturing jobs to “bowl of rice” pay rate China. (Buffet got a piece of it via PetroChina and some others along with buying the railroads to transport Chinese Stuff from the West coast to the East.) So follow the money. I expect they are trying to reverse some of this now, what with China getting “uppity” with them ;-)
Note this comes 7 years after JFK… IMHO, that was a major turning point. The TLAs deciding to do a little coup in the USA; then everyone scrambling to do the coverup, the FBI being co-opted into a domestic spy & control agency, Once they settled the dust on that (a few years later…) they realized they had control and started to use it.
One semi-example? The CIA ran a covert airport in Arkansas to support their Dirty Tricks Department. This required the Governor to be “on side”. Given a choice of “easy money and party time” vs “prison, poverty or death”, Bill Clinton chose to help the CIA (rather a lot). Eventually to be rewarded greatly with the POTUS job… and more Epstein Ranch visits… Lucky for us, we prevented the Hillary Installation… so 1/2 a “win”… Anyone think the C.I.A. & Friends didn’t collect on “favors due” from Billy? That’s how the game is run. Then think on Daddy Bush as head of C.I.A. then backup VP to Reagan and then POTUS and then Baby Bush with Cheney as Regent To The Baby Potus…
The pattern is removal of power (vote, political, governmental, economic, corporate) from We The People and concentration in the hands of a few controlled oligarchs & officers…)
@Gail:
I started this blog as pure tech. Posting actual computer codes and programs. Exposing the “errors” (aka fraud) in the supposed technology. Later I realized I was bringing a Science Complaint to a Political Warfare event… so now I do a lot more political postings.
But my nature is to observe something, figure it out, and post the conclusions once. That doesn’t do much to keep a political issue “on the boil”…
The Malthusians have been with us for a very long time. They embrace fully the notion that exponential growth must, inevitably, result in resource exhaustion and a population collapse in a horrible collapse of civilization. An answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Because it isn’t a log curve that dominates, but an S shaped Logistics Curve. And it isn’t resource exhaustion that dominates, but human creativity if finding new resources and new ways of using resources. Our history of the last 100 years shows that clearly. But if you don’t know history, don’t know what a logistics curve is, don’t understand Resource Economics, and don’t believe in human creativity: then it is easy snake oil to swallow.
Now season that with a narcissistic desire to prove your genetic Superiority, a psychopathic joy in destruction of others, and a lust for power: You get the nut jobs we have who advocate for destroying 1/2 to 90% of the rest of humanity… So yeah, they want it, they are trying to find ways to do it, and they may yet “succeed”…
Were it not for nut jobs like them, I’d not be a Prepper. I’d have a beach cottage somewhere and depend 100% on the local grocery store… likely with few or no guns, one e-car (parked outside and only for the grocery run), and no blog. But they exist, they are pushing their Malthusian Agenda, and that must be countered. So here I am.
But they have fear and panic on their side. All I have is calm reason and some facts about technology and economics. Oh Well. All I can do is “be me” and carry on.
@E.M. – You covered (thoroughly!) the rising ire of what I termed the sheeple and NPCs. Those are people who weren’t paying attention but now can’t help but start noticing that they are economically and culturally under attack.
The ‘Bears’ are hanging out on blogs like yours or Bayou Renaissance Man and the like. The bears just want to be left alone (ya hear that, gubmint?). Unlike the sheeple and NPCs, bears have seen the coming crap-storm and are preparing for it.
***I dunno. It’s just a bit of hair splitting that I’m doing with the bear thing. I’m not saying you missed anything. regarding the reaction. Just that there will be a difference among the people reacting; sheeple, NPCs, bears.***
Most of the sheeple and NPCs will be swept away. They actually didn’t mind or even bought into some of the destruction disguised as idiocy or nuttiness. The bears have been growling the whole time, are prepared, will get mad, and are dangerous.
Don’t poke the bears. They just want to be left alone.
O/T but lately the thought has struck me that communism has a life about 75 years.
Admittedly only on 2 samples (USSR & China), but both collapsed (or in China are still doing that) but then I realised that the Great Keynesian experiment (of Governments running up debt) has also about 70 years also.
@H.R.:
I think we are “in violent agreement” (or maybe just “‘loud agreement” ;-) but with different words.
Your “Bears” are an analog of my “Betas” and “Sigmas”. That name is from a hypothetical set of personality types that is rather specific, but could be characterized as being like a “polite but observant bear”. The one that looks at you, assesses you, then goes back to eating the salmon it caught. An “Alpha Bear” is the one that looks at you and figures you might be a threat to his salmon fishing so charges at you… I suspect your version of “bears” is the “Sigma Bears + some Alphas” who are full at the moment…” ;-)
My point about how Betas (your NPCs & Sheeple) can change; is that while they are normally the bears that “walk or run away when they see you or are shouted at”: IF you persist in following them, shouting at them when they are (now) hungry and trying to feed, and / or threaten the Mama Bears Kids… well, suddenly they start to transition toward more of an Alpha or Sigma personality type (i.e. get grumpy and more willing to charge at you and bite… or plot to come back tonight and have a “camper burrito” pulled out of the tent…)
@Graeme No.3:
There is a theory that modern tech has vastly accelerated the lifetime of various Empires. That were Rome lasted 1000 years in the transition from Republic to Empire to collapse (or closer to 2000 if you include the Byzantium Eastern Empire) then the British Empire (and Russian Czarist and French and…) lasted several hundred. Later, the American Empire has lasted just 200 but is hard on the rocks ATM transitioning to an Authoritarian from a Republic and doing it badly. Then the Communist Empire in Russia was even shorter. Now the EU as the Forth Reich reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany / Franks is already breaking up as it is still in the process of formation…
Don’t know if that is correct, or retro-data-modeling… but it is a pattern…
The time it takes to realize your Republic has had an Authoritarian Coup (by vote buggery) has dropped from a generation, to a few decades, and now down to the time between the close of voting and the next day announcement that Biden suddenly won in the middle of the night with millions of votes “suddenly” found under the tables…
Hopefully we will avoid discovering that a World War has shifted from a few decades, to one decade, to 20 minutes after the button is pushed…
“IMHO it will not end in my lifetime, and perhaps not for many more.”
The odds of that keep changing, and even though our remaining lifetime is getting shorter, the odds are not getting better for us. Remember the Atomic Doomsday clock, it’s been at minutes to blast for a long time. Decades? But only because it’s hard to adjust the minutes when there are only a few of them left.
I remember getting under school desks and knowing people who built bomb shelters. After that, it was Nuclear Winter. After that we stopped worrying about the bomb and started worrying about nuclear power plants. Then global warming and the bombs really were forgotten. Except they still exist and we keep finding ways to provoke bears and others. “Use the bomb, I dare ya!”
So the odds of that are greater now.
But the odds of the collapse of civilization and are worse, for numerous reasons.
Like for example a civil war.
“Make no mistake, a new Civil War is a very real prospect for the US”
https://www.rt.com/news/591906-new-american-civil-war/
(the author is German, not Russian)
I don’t agree with everything he says, but I did learn a new word: “anocracy”
The US civil war was bad, but was it really a civil war? More like a war between two countries (North and South), with each having an army.
When I think of civil war, I think of Ireland. Personal and ugly. In the US, the equivalent might be the BLM type riots, relatively calm while Biden is the big dog; due to fire up again when Trump gets too close. Polarization to the extreme of hatred. Not good.
Note that there was no civil war in Germany, the Jews then were wiped out.
RINOs should remember what happened to them. So when “whites” are demonized now, you know one possible historical outcome.
“And while I might like to see a global revolt of the Common Man Bear take them down, it isn’t likely to happen, and if it does happen, it is unlikely to succeed. ”
It has not happened yet in China, after 100 years of communist oppression.
Not even in North Korea. Those in control make sure of that.
@YMMV:
The American “Civil” War is often, in the South especially, called either “The War Between The States” or even “The War Of Northern Aggression”. The South just wanted to leave. It was The North that made a war out of it.
IMHO the largest result from it was the final victory of Federalism over Confederation and States Rights. From that, the Giant Federal Government has grown (with all that implies…) along with ever greater Federal Mandates and ever less local State control.
Yes, Slavery was a big issue. But was just one aspect of States Rights. Folks forget that the Emancipation Proclamation came only after the North was starting to lose (and that some Northern States had slaves while some Blacks in the South had slaves too – not to mention the White Slaves… Many Irish women slaves in the Caribbean were forced to have children by black men Slaves since mulatto slaves brought higher prices…) Slavery was not some simple white vs black issue.
So in large part, the monolithic Federal Government, now taking about 1/4 of the total national production for the use of the Elite Political Class, is THE biggest direct result of the War Of Northern Aggression… and there was nothing civil about it…
FWIW, IMHO, we are already in a “cold civil war” but one that is rapidly heating up. So Far it has mostly been one of The Left via lawfare, agency capture, corruption of the vote, and social dictates along with the “slow march through the institutions” waging war on the rest of us. Only in the last year or two has that started to change. They have now started to hit stiff resistance. (Trump, Elon, Truckers, Farmers, J6…) and it is completely unknown how far both sides are going to go…
But they ought not to have attacked The Kids with things like genital mutilation approval (Mama Bear came out in school boards…) nor with BLM / Antifa destroying cities (mostly dimocrat run cities; abandoned by thinking people to turn to crap as a flood of rational people escaped their grasp and moved to Texas & Florida and then embracing that culture – me among them.) Do note that when they tried to take that to the Suburbs they met Armed Citizens lining the roads and on rooftops…
So yeah, right now they control the Election Choosing Machines ( I do not see them as voting machines…) and have installed a puppet in the (fading to yellow) semi-white house… and we will find out in 9 months if there is no going back from that. Then we will find out if the 4 boxes (used in order) still holds.
Soap box
Ballot box
Jury box
Cartridge box…
As of now, they had taken the Soap Box via Legacy Media Domination and Cancel Culture. Tucker, Individual Blogs, and now Elon Musk are fighting to get that one back. (still oppressed via lawfare in UK, EU, Australia).
They have a full win on the ballot box. First in a few States like California, then taken national for Biden. But folks noticed and saw what was done so that’s now “outed” and folks are working to make it honest again. We’ll see how that goes.
They had a partial win on the Jury box with Soros sponsored DAs, law changes. Chosen venues like the “District Of Criminals no Republican will ever be found innocent, no Democrat ever guilty”… ditto NYC, Chicago, etc. This one is still in play, but with Liberty & Justice coming from behind…
The Cartridge Box has not yet been opened… and I suspect it will only be after the battles over the other three are finished that we’ll know what is next. But you can make a case that, for now, Trucks & Tractors are the new cartridges… Along with the odd buycott and boycott by the Beta Bears. Heck being “Budlighted” is now a word… and Disney is under forced instruction at the moment… with more to come. So maybe it is a “5th Generational Cartridge” these days…
But in any case, it is a Civil War already in progress in The West collectively against the Globalists collectively.
I think it was FDR who said, “Nothing in politics ever happens by accident. If anything happens, you can bet that someone planned it that way.”
We are, at present, moving towards what can only be described as civil war. Perhaps it will be the traditional definition where two factions fight over control of the central government. Or maybe it will be a Balkanization where States drop out of the Union and then have to fight the Federal government for their right to independence. Either way, it is likely that SOMEONE will end up in armed conflict with the Feds. Is this conflict what the GEBs really PLAN to happen? Is that sort of fight what they are hoping will develop? At present the Feds are like the bully who just keeps slapping and pushing We The People, almost as if the Feds WANT a violent response. They certainly seemed to play up that idea after the J6 protest, but most thinking people failed to see a half million UNARMED people as a serious insurrection, especially after the BLM/Antifa escapades of the previous summer. So… why would the Feds WANT armed, violent citizens? More accurately, why would the Feds want to PLAUSIBLY CLAIM that there are armed, violent citizens? Maybe as a United Nations justification for sending “peacekeeping troops” into the US. With the recent influx of 10 million illegals, and the previous 20 or 30 million prior illegals, maybe the troops are already here. If there are 40 million total illegals here and even one potential soldier per fifty, that gives us 800,000 men willing to put on a blue helmet.
@TTN:
One could make the case that the “Cartridge Box” is already open via the Ukraine GEBs Proxy War against the Russians. That’s the “hot war” part.
I suspect that it is wrong to think of this as an “inside the nation-state civil war” but more of a “civil war” of those wanting independent governance vs the GEBs Globalist Dream of a One World Government and the end of the Westphalian State.
One Global Civil War of ideals? Or a dozen national Civil Wars of The People vs The GEBs of their country?
I see it as kind of both…
“We The People” fighting our own national civil wars (some hotter than others) against GEB installed Rulers. Russia (& the BRICS+) fighting a hot war in Ukraine (and a cold economic war for China, Brazil, Saudi) against the combined Globalists and their “institutions”.
One of THE biggest changes, for me, has been the shift of my perspective from “Inside America WT? is going on?” just a few years ago; to a “Globalist Evil Bastards vs. The World” POV where “Russia is my friend” and the Biden Admin & UN along with W.Evil F. and Davos are the opposition… From computer code & climate models to Politically Aware and Global Perspective on the political fraud game
FWIW, I suspect some large number of those “illegal immigrants” came for the Last Best Hope Of Liberty and will be willing to put on camo and a State Militia patch instead of a blue helmet…
Re “Eating ze bugs” I recalled two biblical references that bear on the matter.
The first that popped into mind was John the Baptist. His diet was recorded as locusts and honey. Not sure how that would have affected him long term since Herod had him beheaded at age 33(?).
The second instance was my recollection of the Israelites wandering in the desert. They ate manna from heaven, which miraculously appeared each morning to be gathered for the day. (I think the phrase in Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread” is a shoutout to those desert days.) There was no record of them eating insects that I can recall, and there was grumbling of the sort, “What? Manna again!? It’s always manna, manna, manna day after day after day. When do we get a nice brisket?”
So, anyone looking for biblical guidance on the topic of insect eating will get a mixed message.
@HR
Re your mention of John the Baptist
That’s popped a few things into my mind as well. In the extremely limited education most of us get on the history of religions, most of us acquire a kind of binary (or black and white) view of how Christianity separated from Judaism. Not much mentioned is what a “major player” John the Baptist was, and what came of it.
One “for example”… the Mandaean Nasoreans.
the quasi-historical Mandaean document, the Haran Gawaita, which narrates the exodus from Palestine to Mesopotamia in the 1st century ad of a group called Nasoreans (the Mandaean priestly caste as opposed to Mandaiia, the laity).
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mandaeanism
A large group of followers of JTB, these Nasoreans, decided they didn’t like being ruled by Romans or by Jews, and upped-sticks and moved to “Mesopotamia”. Actually to a region called Media, which was:
a region of north-western Iran, best known for having been the political and cultural base of the Medes. During the Achaemenid period, it comprised present-day Iranian Azerbaijan, Iranian Kurdistan and western Tabaristan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_(region)
Here we get closer to the point of my ramble through obscure Middle-Eastern history. The Achaemenid was the First Persian Empire.
Based in modern-day Iran, it was the largest empire by that point in history, spanning a total of 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles). The empire spanned from the Balkans and Egypt in the west, West Asia as the base, the majority of Central Asia to the northeast, and parts of South Asia (the Indus Valley in what is present-day Pakistan) to the southeast…
the Achaemenid Empire has been recognized for its imposition of a successful model of centralized bureaucratic administration, its multicultural policy, building complex infrastructure such as road systems and an organized postal system, the use of official languages across its territories, and the development of civil services, including its possession of a large, professional army….
The Achaemenid Empire left a lasting impression on the heritage and cultural identity of Asia and the Middle East, and influenced the development and structure of future empires. In fact, the Greeks, and later on the Romans, adopted the best features of the Persian method of governing an empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
So what? Our Western MSM-skewed picture of Iranians is a rag-top mob of angry sheep herders. Whereas the Iranians regard themselves as the rightful descendents of great Persian empires.
One thing that confuses me, it seems it was the Achaemenid/Persian/Iranian conquest of Babylon/Iraq by Cyrus The Great (King of Kings) that freed the Jewish captives and allowed them to return to Judea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_captivity#Significance_in_Jewish_history
And (it’s said):
Cyrus the Great is said in the Bible to have liberated the Jews from the Babylonian captivity to resettle and rebuild Jerusalem, earning him an honored place in Judaism.
Cyrus has been a personal hero to many people, including Thomas Jefferson, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and David Ben-Gurion ..
Cyrus’s legacy has been felt even as far away as Iceland and colonial America. Many of the thinkers and rulers of Classical Antiquity as well as the Renaissance and Enlightenment era, and the forefathers of the United States of America sought inspiration from Cyrus the Great through works such as Cyropaedia. Thomas Jefferson, for example, owned two copies of Cyropaedia, one with parallel Greek and Latin translations on facing pages showing substantial Jefferson markings that signify the amount of influence the book has had on drafting the United States Declaration of Independence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great#Legacy
With David Ben-Gurion being one of the key founders of the modern state of Israel, it makes their current hostility towards Iran all the more strange. But perhaps they recall being a vassal state under Persian tolerance, while the Persian/Iranians may be intent on recreating past empires.
i.e. the Achaemenid Empire and the Parthian Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthian_Empire
What would Thomas Jefferson say about the current state of the United States?
Another stray thought …
Why did the Mandaean Nasoreans (followers of John The Baptist) choose to go all the way from Judea to Media (Azerbaijan/Kurdistan)?
Perhaps they already had some kind of connection? Perhaps that’s where the Zoroastrian Magi (three wise men) came from, to check-up on this new prophet?
@Keith:
Perhaps the current Israeli antipathy toward Iran has nothing to do with Persia and the history and a lot to do with the Koran repeatedly saying to kill all the Jews wherever you find them… I’ve read the Koran, and it quite frequently says that, or things a lot like it. Then there’s the religious rulers of Iran frequently calling for the destruction of Israel.
Just sayin’: It’s a bit hard to feel love and tolerance toward folks calling for your death and destruction.
So perhaps “Cyrus and Persian: Yes. Shia / Islam and Ayatollah: No” ?
@H.R.: “So, anyone looking for biblical guidance on the topic of insect eating will get a mixed message.”
Mixed, indeed. There are some questions I think about the report of John the Baptist eating locusts. Some say that means the insect locust, others say it was a flour made from the seeds of the locust tree, aka carob. We do know that the insect locust (along with crickets and grasshoppers) is Kosher — so I guess it could be either. I would also note that in some cultures, insects are eaten without the chitin exoskeleton. You bite off the head and suck out the guts.
I read some decades ago a study that was done in the sea caves along what was once (10,000 years ago) the shore of ancient Lake Bonneville — now the shrunken Great Salt Lake. Archeologists found huge numbers of dried locust wings and legs. After some thought they reached the following conclusion. Swarms of locust would be blown across the lake, the result being that millions upon millions would drop exhausted into the salt water. After a good salt soak, they would be moved by wind and tide to wash ashore near the caves where they would be sundried and toasted. Yummy! The researchers calculated that after a swarm, a single person walking the beach could retrieve enough nutrition (fats and proteins) to satisfy a small family in as little as thirty minutes a day. Life was good! If you like to eat locusts…
FWIW
“Tom Luongo nails the essential truth about Russia”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/02/tom-luongo-nails-essential-truth-about.html
EM, I agree w/your opinion of the “Civil” war. I’d bet the vast majority of the soldiers didn’t actually own any slaves. They would be fighting to defend their families, towns, states and country (The South) from control and attack by the North. One might say “Well, they were supporting slavery”, but I seriously doubt most of the soldiers, at least, would have that reason high on their list, if at all.
@another ian
Re
The Victoria Nulands and the Ursula Von Der Leyens of this world represent people who refuse to accept that Russia and/or China are not systems, but rather civilizations. They aren’t the current bogeyman ‘ism’ du jour, like Communism or authoritarianism, they are a people, a culture, an ethnos. The ‘ism’ is just the thing they’ve adopted now to help them preserve those things inherently Russian or Chinese. Our leaders are this way because they don’t believe in those things for us no less anyone else. And they spend all their time trying to convince us that that is what divides us. But it isn’t. It’s simply their greed, their emptiness.
We had, and still have, “leaders” like that in the UK. Twenty-plus years ago, there was moral and righteous outrage at the idea of them sending our troops somewhere based on highly-suspect evidence and infamous “dodgy dossiers”. That was possible (at that time) because there used to be proper investigative journalists and reporters that asked the awkward questions. Starting with “why?”
Not so much now.
It reminds me of this comment made by someone else, elsewhere:
“War requires the redefinition of one’s targets as not worthy of moral regard because our goals are usually to do immoral things to them, often for immoral reasons. We generally know right from wrong with regards to how “people” are treated, so we create categories of “non-people” whom we are allowed to commit crimes against. In turn, we have to free ourselves from the burden of self-reflection by turning all of our prior victims into villains we conquered and applying the same morality retroactively to them.
You don’t build up a military as large as the next 15 militaries combined because you’re defending yourself any more than you build a police force so large it qualifies as the third largest military on the planet. You do so because no one trusts YOU.
Cowboys and Indians, Birth of a Nation, Fu Manchu. We need villains to compare our villainy to, even if we have to invent them. Even if we have to forget how often we go back to the same well.
It was land, it was labor, it was gold. Hell, it still is. But with the industrial revolution and later the rise of petroleum resources, of course some random olive farmer or shepherd is going to be the villain of your next cultural narrative and stay there until there’s nothing left that you want to take from them.
Or maybe it’ll be water next. Since we’re being topical, consider why Israel has an illegal standing military in the West Bank despite conflict between the two ending almost 20 years ago. Consider why Israeli settlers kill hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank on Palestinian land each year. Consider how the West Bank gets more rainfall (615 mm) than London (585 mm) but Palestinians in the West Bank get rationed 20 liters a day while Israeli settlers in the West Bank use 487 liters a day and Israelis in actual Israel use 165 liters a day.
Consider how many cultural narratives are necessary to maintain this.
It’s not about people being mean to people who eat strange foods or look different. It’s about creating evil people who are born evil so that your own evil gets seen as justice.”
Seen in the comments to this article:
https://kotaku.com/war-games-muslim-arab-call-of-duty-palestine-1851055848
I’m fairly sure that if any of us created a website with “fictionalised” training material on how to handle deadly weapons and kill “enemies”, we would very soon get a knock on the front door from members of the “special” police departments, and deservedly so.
“What do you think you are doing sir?”.
But somehow, because it’s on a “War Games” website, it’s just a “harmless game”?
Is this more Californication?
A Monday night debate in California between several candidates vying for an open Senate seat included a question about raising the minimum wage to $50, an idea that one Democrat candidate has floated.
“In the Bay Area, I believe it was the United Way that came out with a report that very recently $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by,” Democrat Congresswoman Barbara Lee said when asked to defend her previous support of a $50 minimum wage and explain how it would be “sustainable.”
https://nypost.com/2024/02/14/news/california-senate-candidates-spar-over-dems-proposal-for-50-minimum-wage-do-the-math/
What is it elsewhere in the USA? The UK minimum wage per hour (highest band) from April will be £11.44 (or about $14). Maybe we should encouraging more US firms to move to the UK?
I have to say it’s kinda sweet to see Fanni Willis getting questioned on the stand. I think she may think she’s above the law. Payback’s a bitch.
I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure less than 4 % of Americans owned slaves.
Fani Willis shouted at the prosecutor…she does not like the taste of the medecine she gave to Trump…
@beng135: “They would be fighting to defend their families, towns, states and country (The South) from control and attack by the North.”
There is an old story (recounted, I think, by historian Shelby Foote) from the Civil War. A Northern soldier asks a Confederate soldier, “Why are you southerners fighting us?” The Confederate answers, “Because y’all are down here.”
Something similar was recorded by the cartoonist Ted Rall in the late 1990s. He was visiting Afghanistan and heard multiple Afghanis remark that “The Soviets did a lot of good work while they were here. They built new schools. They dug wells for us. They fixed the roads and built new airports. We really liked the Soviets. They were really good people!” Rall then commented, “But you were at war with them! How can you say all these good things about them and still try to kill them?!” The Afghanis answered, “Because they were in our country!”
One of the tragedies of modern American foreign policy is that our leaders and most of the public have completely lost the ability to understand how deep, how primal, how universal, that feeling is.
Like the UK WW2 “Four overs”
“Over fed, over paid, over sexed and over here”
About that war between the states. Yes, indeed, things were more complicated and nuanced that the general ‘wisdom’ or generally taught history suggests. I’ve looked a bit deeper into it. What, seems to me, gets forgotten is that those southern democrats (remember that Jefferson’s group had split) had this counter-revolutionary (yet ancient) idea. You see, they saw themselves as a landed gentry/aristocracy and they had the “right” to chattel slavery, in addition to other ideas. They proposed and implemented the “Indian Removal”, after all. There was as much Southern aggression as there was Northern aggression. Mostly over economics, of which slavery was a part; but also over governing philosophy. These Southerners wanted to force certain things on Northerners. The Northerners wanted to force certain things on Southerners. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.
Yes, indeed, slave holders were not a numerically large group. They did have political power, and also forgotten is that 1. there were black people who owned black slaves, there were white people who owned white slaves, there were Indians who owned white, black, and other Indian tribe members as slaves. Those Southern Democrats gradually expropriated the blacks and Indians of Life, Liberty, and Property. Lincoln’s debate with Douglas does give an excellent overview of the sentiments of the time.
Was it here (with Chiefio) that there was some comment on Tucker Carlson’s back story? Something to do with TLA connections?
Was Carlson positioned (or primed) as a “limited hangout”, to soften the US/UK perception of the situation in Ukraine?
There’s an interesting perspective of the situation here
https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-vladimir-putin-interview-part
and here
https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-vladimir-putin-interview-part-209
Booty “Call” Willis decided not to testify today. I think she realized she scored an own goal yesterday. I hope so. There has to be only an appearance of wrong doing to have her removed. However, we know how biased the “justice” system is these daze, so I’m not holding my breath on that one.
Seen “nature” documentaries that show grizzly bears overturning big rocks on steep mountain slopes doing all-day feasts on soft-bodied moths hiding under the rocks. But soft -bodied insects like that, I’d think, would have little to no chitin.
@cdquarles: The question of what role slavery had in the Civil War is a really deep rabbit hole. One of the more interesting (to me at least) questions is the presence of slavery in the Union during the war. In fact, even after the fall of the Confederacy and the release of all slaves in the south, the Union kept its slaves until the 13th Amendment was ratified. Granted, the Union had fewer slaves than the south, but slaves were still legal in Maryland, Kentucky, and parts of Tennessee and Missouri that never seceded. I am not sure about Delaware and Connecticut. I have tried (unsuccessfully!) to find just EXACTLY when the last slaves were freed from the various northern and New England states. I emailed a modern antislavery society (https://aassone.com/) asking about which states still had slaves after the war, but never got an answer. I think that when the northern states freed slaves prior to the War, some of the states had clauses with exceptions for various classes of slaves. For example, any slaves younger than X were freed, or no new slaves could be bought but current slaves allowed for Y years, etc. Also, many of the slaves in the North were not freed, but were sold down South before the laws took effect. (By the way, Lincoln inherited slaves through marriage; he did not free them, but he sold them.) I do know that even while the war was going on, slaves were being used to finish the construction of the new (now old!) Capitol Building. And of course if you read the Emancipation Proclamation, it is very clear that “We are freeing all the slaves we don’t control, and keeping all the slaves in Union territory where we have control.” My point is that the current explanation that the War was fought to free the slaves is sheer sophistry.
That being said, slavery WAS a major, maybe THE major cause of the war, but only indirectly through its economic side effects. Reading the various statements issued by State governments before they left the Union, one of the major reasons was that the North insisted that all new states formed from Federal territories be free states. The North wanted free states so that White citizens would not have to compete with slave labor. The Southern states (where powerful economic groups owned larger numbers of slaves) wanted at least half the new states to allow slavery so that the wealthy could utilize their slaves for developing profitable businesses. Their argument was that large chunks of those Federal territories had been donated by the Southern states for later development, and that the Southern states had paid the bulk of the costs associated with land which was purchased.
In the end, the War proved one thing: An industrial nation can completely subjugate an agricultural nation with half the population.
The True Nolan, I think it may be possible to wrongly minimise the goal of removing slavery, and the depth of the ideals that drove many to support the US version of liberty applying to all men. The history of sentiment against slavery is deep, yet these times had men of immense practical understanding that such social effects could not be instituted in an instant ideal way without risking very serious consequences. There are accounts where “owners” understood that simply freeing their slaves would actualy leave them in dire circumstances, and many slaves also understood this well. Do not underestimate the academic attempt to declare all historical white men as bigoted, (they can even be subtle in this attempt, using facts, but very short of understanding actual history and realistic understanding of the time) and this false portrayal is not new as seen in the quote below.
Fredrick Doublas wrote the following, and I think his historical perspective, places a closer to the time understanding on history…
“Let me tell you something. Do you know that you have been deceived and cheated? You have been told that this government was intended from the beginning for white men, and for white men exclusively; that the men who formed the Union and framed the Constitution designed the permanent exclusion of the colored people from the benefits of those institutions. Davis, Taney and Yancey, traitors at the south, have propagated this statement, while their copperhead echoes at the north have repeated the same. There never was a bolder or more wicked perversion of the truth of history. So far from this purpose was the mind and heart of your fathers, that they desired and expected the abolition of slavery. They framed the Constitution plainly with a view to the speedy downfall of slavery. They carefully excluded from the Constitution any and every word which could lead to the belief that they meant it for persons of only one complexion. The Constitution, in its language and in its spirit, welcomes the black man to all the rights which it was intended to guarantee to any class of the American people. Its preamble tells us for whom and for what it was made.” Frederick Douglass (June 1863)
@anderdaa7: “I think it may be possible to wrongly minimise the goal of removing slavery, and the depth of the ideals that drove many to support the US version of liberty applying to all men.”
Absolutely, and I would even add that many, (in my opinion MOST) of the Founding Fathers saw slavery as an evil institution which they ardently desired to end as quickly as possible. That includes even the slave holders such as Jefferson, Washington, Madison, etc. In fact, Jefferson tried just prior to the Revolution to push through legislation in Virginia ending slavery but was narrowly defeated. Having said that, the obvious question is “why did they not free their own slaves?” (And that is a nice parallel to the question of “why did the Union not free its own slaves during the Civil War?”) In the case of Jefferson, et al, Virginia law of the time required that slaves owners remain financially responsible for any slave they freed. In the Union of the 1860s I am unaware of any similar laws.
And again, even in the South, there were huge numbers of people against slavery. But I don’t see ending slavery being used as a major justification of the War until maybe two years in when both sides were getting very war weary and a new justification was needed. Additionally, the “we are ending slavery!” publicity served as a god way to weaken British support for the Confederacy and make them more appreciative of the Union. In 1861, before the war turned hot, Lincoln said in his Inaugural address that the north had no intention of ending slavery in the south, that there was no need of violence just as long as the south continued to pay tariffs and maintain the custom houses and tax procedures. There is also the famous letter to the editor that Lincoln wrote early on:
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. I have here stated my purpose according to my official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.”
As for Fredrick Douglas and his statement that the Founders original desire was for ALL races to be equal as free men — I do not know enough to have a clear opinion on whether his conclusion regarding the Founder’s motives is correct or not. Because I admire so very much about the men who put this country together, I really, really HOPE and wish that he is correct on the breadth of their vision. True or not about the Founders, that respect for individuals of all races certainly was not universal by the time the Civil War was fought, with many states (North and South) very clear about their unwillingness to allow Black men to have equal rights with White citizens.
Here’s an interesting dimension I had not previously considered about our “leaders”.
Narcissism and delusion.
The narcissistic Western elites: An operations manual
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/the-narcissistic-western-elites-an
How much of that overlaps with psychopathic/sociopathic behaviour?
@Keith:
Yup, good article. Our leaders are basically self absorbed nuts. Narcissistic Personality Disorder often can come packaged with Sociopathic / Psychopathic disorder too. With many of the same root behaviour issues.
@TTN:
Depending on the particular years in question, in much of the time of Jefferson, it was illegal for him to free the slaves he had inherited.
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/living-free-in-virginia/
Of note is that Jefferson felt obligated to maintain his slave holdings in good care. His brother liked to hang out with the slaves where they had their cabins, play music with them, and likely is the source of the “Jefferson Y chromosome” in their families today. Jefferson himself was once wanted by the Red Coats who came to knock on his door. The young male slave who answered, knew quite well that Jefferson had just lit out on horseback a few moments before, yet when threatened with DEATH if he did not tell where Jefferson was / had gone: Refused to tell them. You do not protect someone under threat of death if they have not treated you well…
Similarly, Washington could not free his, either. Yet on one camp visit, during the war and on a cold night, was about to sleep on a pile of hay with a single blanket: The camp slave of the camp officer in charge was going to sit up all night at the table and nap a little. Washington invited him to share the blanket and sleep on the hay right next to him, and be warm. Even insisting when the slave protested it might be improper. He clearly cared about treating people fairly.
Eventually Jefferson was able to free some of his slaves, and some who would not fair well in a market economy (i.e. old folks who had their cabin and their ways set) were allowed to stay on the plantation. Not all slaves were treated badly by evil men.
To some extent, many of the plantations were run as a kind of extended family. You can see this in the fact that today, the average white in America has about 3% black genes, and the average black has about 30% white ancestry; roughly in keeping with their ratio in the average population. Alot of these folks were happy to get in each other’s pants going both ways.
Yes, some plantations were no doubt horror factories; but many, perhaps even most, were not.
Compare Brazil. A vastly larger number of slaves were sent from Africa to South America and the Caribbean. Yet today the % of blanks there is fairly low. Those slave owners would just work them to death and buy more. That was not the case in the USA where they were treated as “valuable property” to be preserved. Similarly, despite the source of slaves being the Arab Slave Traders, and despite them sending a lot of slaves to the Muslim World, you don’t see many blacks in the population. The male slaves tended to become eunuchs on that end of the trade… So yeah, being a slave in the USA was a bad deal, but a LOT better than the alternatives.
Then England in about 1830 set out to end the Slave Trade, and the USA eventually joined with that sentiment. Yet even today slavery still exists in other parts of the world. So I suggest the most spleen ought to be vented in that direction, and not at the folks who ended it.
cdquarles says: “What, seems to me, gets forgotten is that those southern democrats (remember that Jefferson’s group had split) had this counter-revolutionary (yet ancient) idea. You see, they saw themselves as a landed gentry/aristocracy and they had the “right” to chattel slavery, in addition to other ideas.”
Another century’s GEBs.
E.M. “Not all slaves were treated badly by evil men.”
That is something that the current Democrats do NOT want to hear.
They want to be victims, and playing on White Guilt has been hugely successful.
During the Great Depression, one of the government projects was one which paid writers to produce historically significant works. One of the books produced was “Bullwhip Days”, a book of reminiscences of former slaves telling about what their life was as a slave. Of course I do not know what criteria was used to screen the people in the book. But I can say, that of the stories included, about half were positive, about half were negative. While slavery is abhorrent in its use of coercion there were some masters relatively good and others brutal.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Bullwhip-Days-Slaves-Remember-History/dp/0802138683/ref=sr_1_1
That process of seeing their current slaves as valuable was enhanced, in my opinion, by the importation ban (though smuggling probably happened, still). Far better to treat them at least as well as your other livestock so they could perpetuate themselves, than the alternative.
@YMMV: “E.M. “Not all slaves were treated badly by evil men.”
“That is something that the current Democrats do NOT want to hear.
They want to be victims, and playing on White Guilt has been hugely successful.”
The really ironic thing is that the antebellum South and all the way up to the 1970s or so was OVERWHELMINGLY Democrat. The old slave masters, the men whose statues are being removed, the Jim Crow supporters, the segregationists — they were all overwhelmingly White Democrats.
If I did not have a migraine maybe I d present this in better words, but here I go anyway,
the idea that slave owners were extremely violent and cruel to slaves does not make much sense because a wounded or malnourished or diseased slave cannot produce much work
Owners of slaves had paid good money for those slaves, they wanted a good return on their investment and they had to put food on the table
they depended on slaves to produce stuff they could sell ( cotton or produce whatever )
Why would the owner make his slaves too ill, too wounded, too weak to produce work ???
of course a few of them might have been evil and were cruel to their slaves, but it cannot be the majority
Another thing…the slaves that were mistreated, how do we know they were not like the criminals that commit over 80% of violent crimes in large US cities ? That no matter the punishment they kept re offending again and again and desperate slave owners resorted to beating them up, lashes or chains or whatever?
and how much of what we are told is even true ?
Just look at all the lies we are being told right now today in 2024 about the police shooting a gigantic number of blacks and shooting them for no reason…
every statistics shows that is not true,
yet it is what most people believe,
it is what is taught in the education system,
it is what the Main Stream Media say is happening,
it is what every leftist politician or activist says is happening
yet it is false, totally, completely entirely false
the police does not shoot blacks more than other races.
so stories of slaves being beaten up to death and horror stories like that are probably a big exaggeration ( not denying it happened, but probably not all that often ) as today s lies about the police shooting blacks in large numbers is a gigantic exaggeration.
TTN, it is a curious thing, a slave or servant in the aristoracy, or on the lower caste in India, (Where cast originally had zero to do with birth) often had a far happier life in a caring household, then a modern perpetual welfare receipient given substanence, “charity” while doing nothing. Such folk are often slaves to their own bad habbits, that universally end in misery.
@anderdaa7
A few decades ago, a friend of mind (a high-caste Indian by birth) was living and working in the UK, and told someone else to do something, but in a tone of voice that offended that person.
The offended person reacted with the classic phrase:
“What did your last servant die of?”
My Indian friend was puzzled by the question, not understanding the idiomatic sarcasm, but responded truthfully:
“It was of old age”.
@anderdaa7: (Where cast originally had zero to do with birth) often had a far happier life in a caring household, then a modern perpetual welfare receipient given substanence, “charity” while doing nothing.
In some ways, one of the very worst things about modern “welfare” is the fact that while it provides physical necessities, it does nothing to give people purpose. A man without purpose is a man without worth. I have lived in poor communities (Black and White) and you see grown men wandering around in the streets or playing cards and drinking at 10:00am. Most of them are uneducated, but they understand they are being paid to just keep quiet, not paid to do anything useful, anything productive, anything that a man would be proud of. That will kill a man’s spirit faster than poverty.
TTN, I very much agree. “A man without purpose is a man without worth.” It has been said that love is born of utility. You may find this short essay interesting…https://open.substack.com/pub/anderdaa7/p/does-absolute-power-corrupt?r=slvym&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Keith, I know many from India, and only a few are Pasha’s.
Hmmm… disagree on several points. (So, what else is new?)
The Net Zero bit, and the unending reserves bit. The Net Zero is necessary to prolong the life of finite mineral reserves. The Limits To Growth ideas were very wrong, but ONLY because Man developed two or three key improvements. How likely is it that more such staggering improvements lie ahead? Very little chance.
Consider:
Food grains production increased due to the work of Norman Borlaug, a feat that is nearly impossible to duplicate.
Similarly, synthetic fertilizer resulted from the work of Fritz Haber and Karl Bosch. Billions are fed today by their discovery of making ammonia.
Third, more crops get harvested due to innovations in artificial pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides. Not much room for improvement there.
So, where DO we get enough food for a doubled population? Or worse, tripled population? Having enough oil, natural gas, coal, copper, uranium etc are all immaterial when the food runs out.
As to infinite RESERVES, (notice the caps) it is not a matter of digging in new places. That’s already been done to a very great extent. Consider: why did digging occur where it did? Because the best returns occurred there. To be profitable in future mines, (or oil or gas fields -btw a totally different economic problem), much improved technology is required.
Who among us seriously believes another improvement is waiting to be discovered that can match or exceed directional drilling with hydraulic fracturing? Or, that another category of oil-rich strata is just waiting for that improvement?
So, a part of Net Zero is the push for electric transportation. And yes, we will VERY likely see nearly ALL new vehicle sales be EV by 2030. Or 2035, timing is really irrelevant. Oil is far too precious to burn in ICE vehicles.
Economics dictates that wind, solar, and grid storage rapidly replace all but hydroelectric. That too is part of Net Zero.
Drumming up support for EV and Renewables mandates is difficult if using the “Running Out” story, but is much easier with the scary “Global Warming Is Our Fault” fiction.
One last bit: digging up coal economically from RESOURCES requires much higher prices OR much cheaper mining methods. Neither will occur. Wind and solar see to the pricing bit, and gravity (that ubiquitous, hard fact) sees to the mining methods bit.
So, get an EV. Save the oil for important things like petrochemicals, lubricants, and asphalt.
Cut your calorie intake. Identify foods that require the least amounts of fertilizer and ag chemicals.
This is not a joke, folks. Unless, of course, anyone HAS ideas that compare to Borlaug, Haber, Bosch, and Larry Viterna.
Who he? Just a guy who revolutionized wind turbines, that’s all.
Roger Sowell said,
” …So, get an EV. Save the oil for important things like petrochemicals, lubricants, and asphalt.
Cut your calorie intake. Identify foods that require the least amounts of fertilizer and ag chemicals. …”
and I say; stop importing millions of migrants, stop immigration completely, yes totally, completely, as every new migrant increases how much of everything we consume.
oh what is that noise? I can hear some people screaming at their computer screen ; ” racist !!!.”
I have not mentioned race anywhere, I am talking about mathematics; more humans require more resources.
whatever amount of co2 or pollutatnst or garbage or plastic or contaminated water the USA was ” dumping” into the environment in 2020 , Biden has made it go up A LOT by inviting in over 10 million migrants that eat food, use electricity, use potable water, drive cars, consume stuff that is delivered by trucks and trains ect etc…
It is useless for us to eat less, use less water, drive our cars less, heat our homes less, recycle more if we increase our population by tens of millions of migrants who cancel out any reduction in consumption we inflict on ourselves
this is not about race
this mathematical, it is purely logical.
you cannot reduce consumption by increasing the number of humans who consume.
it is mathematical, logical.
Roger Sowell says: “So, where DO we get enough food for a doubled population? Or worse, tripled population?”
It’s a good question. The problem is that the eco-freaks like Limits To Growth gave the wrong answer and pointed everybody in the wrong direction.
Sure, at some point this side of infinity there are limits to growth, just like at some point the sun will burn out or something and we will all die … if we make it that long.
Or at some point, the climate really will change and we will be back under thousands of feet of ice or something. I’m amazed that so many people have so little other problems to worry about that they worry about such future imaginations.
The way growth works is by each day making things a little bit better. Slow and steady.
The opposite, destruction, is not slow and steady. There is natural decay of course; that can be fixed. The real thing to look out for is collapse, sudden and catastrophic. What we have built, a nice society, civilization even, is pretty robust. But if people start blowing up parts of it for some noble cause, it will collapse.
@Roger:
Look up “Rice Intensification”. This is a method of growing rice that yields 10 x as much rice per hectare as at present. (I’ve posted about it before). The key point here is that farms are not operated for maximum production but for maximum profit. So if prices rise a little bit, you can still make maximum profits (due to higher prices) with modest increases in “inputs” and labor but with much higher volumes.
Similarly, hydroponics grow systems can also get “order of magnitude” gains in production per acre or hectare and at a profit. This is not a hypothetical, it is happening now. Netherlands made a “Pig Skyscraper” and there are a growing number of “Vertical farms” being built. Some have layers as close as 1 foot spacing, so you get “10 acres of growing space” in a single story of 1 acre area. They often have many stories …
So the whole “Running Out!!!” panic over food supply is from people who do not understand Agricultural Economics and do not know about the current technology available for use whenever we need it.
Rice: http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2018/08/14/vertical-farming-future
There is zero need for “net zero”. As one progresses to mining more dilute ore bodies, the total quantity of mineral available to mine increases exponentially because there’s vastly more of the more dilute ore bodies in the world. Again, fundamental mining economics. The “Stuff” never leaves the earth (other than a few spacecraft) so it is still here and still available to us. (Copper and Manganese and other metals deposit as “nodules” on the ocean floor and, yes, we already have the technology to mine them, as one example). Aluminum and iron are functionally infinite since most minerals are made of them, should we wish to use those rocks instead of the easiest one. This is a fundamental of minerals mining.
It isn’t a matter of “digging in new places” it is a matter of using the more dilute ores, already identified, when price rises a little or the techniques to upgrade the ore improve a little bit. We are now going back to old mine tailing where the “useless” rocks were piled, as they are now “good ore” due to improved methods of refining that we already have and are profitable when the richer ores run out. (See the present darling of “Rare Earth Minerals”, that are not rare… The California mine shut down NOT due to “Running Out!!!” but because China mines it cheaper. Too much supply, not too little.)
For Fossil Fuels we have (already identified) over 400 years worth of coal. We can turn coal into gasoline and Diesel fuel (already done by SASOL corp. and several others). I’ve covered this so many times before it is tedious now.
Uranium from sea water is profitable over $100/kg in about 1980 dollars. I’ll leave it to you to work out the profit in a kg of Uranium produced electricity. Somewhere over 10,000 years of Uranium available that way. There’s a lot more Thorium.
There is no energy shortage. There never has been, and there never will be. (See the posting on that from about a decade ago).
Per “we will never think again” (the basic premise of your question about the probability, or more accurately an assertion, we are out of ideas…): There’s a long history of folks saying that we can shut down the patent office and go home as everything has been invented… followed by electric light bulbs, nuclear power, green revolution, etc. Now you might claim “but that was in the 1800s, I’m talking about the 2000s!”. Well, it was the LED Lightbulb, only recently mass produced, that made possible and profitable the Vertical Garden revolution and massive indoor growing. So all we need is manure (i.e. shit. Hopefully you are not going to claim we will run out of shit…) and LED bulbs and that 10,000+ years of Uranium Electricity to grow all the food we want.
No “new strata” or new places to find oil? Well, I’ll ignore the massive Tar Sands and Oil Sands currently being processed, and the massive Venezuelan Heavy Sour Crude and just point you at this ONE case:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Huge-100-Billion-Barrel-Oil-Discovery-Near-London.html
We are NOT running out of oil. We are running out of the desire to pump it. This is also covered in my article from a decade plus ago. “There is no shortage of Energy”.
As to oil being “too precious” to burn: I presume you mean as a chemical feed stock for production of pesticides, plastics, and other chemicals. Well, um, no.
The notion of “Petro” Chemicals is flawed. It comes from a moment in time. First we used coal for that (and as noted, we’ve several hundred years worth of coal at current reserves, not resources, levels). But then oil became cheaper so most of the industry moved to Petroleum as the feedstock (and the “petrochemical” name became popular). As of right now, the world has mostly moved to Natural Gas as the feed stock (due to massive abundance and easy handling & processing for making Synthesis Gas). Though last time I looked Eastman Chemical was still using coal. Note, too, that you can use pretty much ANY carbon containing feedstock. There’s at least one company (that I owned stock in for a while) using GARBAGE as the feedstock to make “petrochemicals”. I think we are in no danger of running out of garbage. Or “natural gas” from landfills and sewage plants for that matter. BTW, you can also grow trees or grass for chemical feedstocks if you want to. 56 Tons / acre and pretty cheap. Better than cutting down the trees to burn them in the Drax power plant in England… speaking of “too precious to burn”…
You make an unsupported assertion that wind, solar, and batteries will replace all but hydroelectric. That’s a bit absurd on the face of it. Especially coupled with the assertion that we are resource limited on minerals. Where do you think those wind turbines, solar panels and batteries come from? Aluminum smelters, copper mines, steel mills running on coal, and petroleum or natural gas for the plastic blades.
You can have “Running out!!!” of those minerals, or you can have {wind farms, solar farms, and batteries}; but you can’t have both.
There are huge amounts of easily mined and extracted coal all over the place. China is building a “Coal Power Plant a Week” and getting all the coal it wants. It does not require higher prices (for a few hundred years), but does require that The Idiots In Charge stop running coal plants at 1/3 capacity trying to be peaking plants for solar and sporadic wind. You want cheap power? Turn the coal plant on and leave it on.
It is the Solar & Wind failure to handle the Duck Curve and then forcing that failure into the Coal and Gas plants that makes them less profitable. It isn’t the tech, it is the political mandates to do stupid things.
Oh, and per Batteries: How will your battery handle the SEASONAL part of the curve? You get ONE charge / discharge cycle between Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice. How will you store power for 6 months, at a profit, with a battery with a self discharge rate above zero?
The UK did not reduce coal mining for lack of mine-able coal. It was Union Demands and the movement of industry to the USA. Then the USA did not cut back on coal mining due to lack of profitable mine-able coal. It was the move of the same industries to China, along with the political mandates to run coal plants stupidly or shut them down entirely (or for a lot of them, swap to natural gas). The coal is still there and still profitable IF you get rid of the stupid political mandates.
Oh, and FYI: Asphalt will never be “important” and in short supply. There are literal mountains of what is called “heavy oil” or “tar sands” full of it. In oil refining, it is the lowest level of trash left behind when the LPG, gasoline, kerosene, Diesel oil, and Bunker Fuel oils & greases are boiled out. It is basically the trash of the oil fields and tar fields.
So no, I’m not at all interested in cutting my calorie intake. Instead, I’m happy to find a rancher with some grass land and eat “solar powered cows & sheep”. Grandad ran a farm in Iowa pre-artificial stuff. He had a “manure spreader”… They raised pigs, chickens, and cows. Along with a lot of corn to feed them. I’ve planted a “Food Forest” in my back yard, and in a couple of years will be trying to figure out what to do with too many Avocados and Papayas.
In my future plans is a small ‘grow room’ of hydroponics in the Florida room out back.
There is zero need to panic, zero need to flagellate yourself, and zero need to go hungry. All it takes is an understanding of the available technology (including farming and gardening) and the willingness to make it happen.
P.S.: I’ll be quite happy to use a few pounds of fertilizer if needed. One of the newest Green Idiocies is the Ammonia Fueled Car. Toyota is pushing this along with some others. Ammonia is artificially produced, largely to make fertilizer. So we’re going to use a lot of energy (from what?) to make Ammonia, but then burn it up instead of using it to grow food? Just to not burn a better fuel like an alcohol or gasoline? That’s just dumb. In the 1970s “Arab Oil Embargo” years, VW developed a process to use Nuclear Process Heat to make Methanol Fuel (great fuel, BTW) at a price roughly the same as gasoline per mile driven. It would be far smarter, IFF it ever were needed, to use that technology to make methanol fuel; and use the Ammonia process (and nitrates made from it) for fertilizer.
Markets would avoid such idiocies. Political “will” and “mandates” creates them.
There is no shortage of energy. There is no shortage of food production ability. There is no shortage of minerals and other “stuff”. Just say NO! to the “Running Out!!!” fantasies and scare stories. Learn the tech and learn the economics and then sleep peacefully after a very large and peasant meal.
Some background:
Synthesis Gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas
From Trash: https://globalsyngas.org/syngas-technology/syngas-production/waste-to-energy-gasification/
Nuclear process heat to make fuels: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/industry/nuclear-process-heat-for-industry.aspx
and a lot more…
How ammonia is made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
More than you want to know about {pitch, asphalt, bitumen,…}:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitumen
And yes, there are natural lakes of the stuff. And yes, you can use it as feedstock for synthesis gas production (and on to plastics, pesticides, medicines, rubber, etc. etc. as you can any carbon source.) Bolding by me:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-26-storey-pig-skyscraper-ready-to-produce-1-million-pigs-a-year
But but but… where will they get the grain to feed all those pigs!!?
https://modernfarmer.com/2023/01/grain-farming-goes-indoors/
So when it comes to growing food crops and animals, it is literally a case of the sky is the limit!
About 15 years ago, I figured out that we could fit the entire Human Population into Texas, in standard American suburban houses, about 6 to the Acre IIRC, and with enough area to grow most of the fruits & vegetables they would want. Water supplied via pipeline from the Mississippi. Then the rest of the globe could be left absolutely empty of humans.
Yes, just a thought experiment, but it illustrates just how really empty the planet is.
We think it is getting crowded because we all crowd together in cities & towns. Most of the word is empty. (That’s why some folks call it ‘flyover country’). Just drove across South Florida near the Everglades swamp. Hours without a town. Spent an hour waiting for the first gas station to show up out the windshield… a nervous hour as the gas gauge was getting low… Same thing in West Texas, Arizona, Nevada. Similar in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa… Even places like upstate New York and Illinois outside of Chicago.
And that is why most US Pigs are grown in single story Hog Barns. We have all that empty land, so why pay to “build up”? But we could if we wanted to…
The world is not too crowded, and is not “Running Out!!!” of food, land, or places to do agriculture. Nor of fertilizers and fuels (nor even the asphalt to pave the roads between them…)
I said AI was programmed by leftists to give leftists results?
Well I was wrong, it is programmed by radical far left woke leftards to give the most far left radical woke leftard results.
Gemini AI when asked to provide images of white people said it could not do that.
excerpt,
” … When Gemini was asked why showing a picture of a White person was “harmful,” it spits out a bulleted list that, among other things, claimed that focusing on race reduced people to single characteristics and noted that “racial generalizations” have been used historically to “justify oppression and violence against marginalized groups.”
“When you ask for a picture of a ‘White person,’ you’re implicitly asking for an image that embodies a stereotyped view of whiteness. This can be damaging both to individuals who don’t fit those stereotypes and to society as a whole, as it reinforces biased views,” Gemini said. …”
https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/google-apologizes-new-gemini-ai-refuses-show-pictures-achievements-white-people
Getting harder to find this. Still haven’t updated it for a couple years. Wonder why?
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-total-energy-supply-by-source-1971-2019
Hummm, they now show the definition of “Other” on that chart down in a sub reference. Wonder why?
Keep an eye on this too. 3 X class flares in the last 24Hrs. And it wasn’t pointing at us yet. Just sayin. How long does an X flare to impact here anyhow?
How about those cell system outages today?
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/forecast-discussion
@Ossqss:
I suspect the cell phone outage was a botched system update push.
Why? A bunch of things still worked. WiFi calling. Non-AT&T systems (only AT&T, other “networks” that run over AT&T, and calling from other networks to someone on AT&T). What didn’t work? Your AT&T phone being recognized by the AT&T towers. So sounds to me like someone pushed an “identify code” update that failed…
Per total energy:
Yeah… The folks who think we are going to replace the about 500 EJ of energy from fossil fuels via expanding a PART of the smallest slice (about 10 EJ) just shows that some folks can’t understand sizes and proportions. It is roughly a 50:1 ratio, or about 2%. Growing 2% to replace the 500/600 EJ or 84% is roughly an 84/2 = 42 times expansion (or a 4200% growth of the smaller source…)
And they want it done in 7 years…
It might be possible in 100 years. Maybe. But it still would be a bad idea.
The only energy source that even comes close would be a massive Small Modular Nuclear Reactor program. But even there, it would take several huge companies in many nations making all the possible reliable reactor designs; both U and Th fueled.
As regards food, we already produce enough food for around 10 billion people, but around a third of it rots before it can be eaten. Storage not good enough, transport from where it is to the consumers, and various other problems. Around 20 years ago, an experiment was done using intensive cropping and a family of 4 people was fed from (IIRC) an 8m² plot of soil, with multiple plants of various heights growing together.
There’s simply no point in growing more food than can be sold (and eaten) before it rots. We could grow a lot more than we do. A friend of mine is currently selling devices for electrification of the soil, where you not only get bigger crops but for some as-yet unknown reason the various pests don’t attack them either, meaning that no pesticides are needed. Far less fertiliser is needed, too.
“May as well shut the patent offices and go home because there are no new ideas on the way – we’ve invented everything”…. This is so far off being correct it’s funny. There are some really interesting things being invented and discovered. I’ve covered a few of them here, too. Though the recent space-test of a “reactionless” space drive didn’t work because of a bus failure on the satellite it was in, there are other methods of producing a thrust and a lot of experimental evidence so far that momentum is not always conserved. I can also show that, in theory, momentum is not a conserved quantity because of the limited speed of light. In turn, that also tells us that energy is also not always conserved, and once you realise that it becomes possible to figure out ways to get energy without needing to burn something. There’s a difference between something being totally impossible (such as, for example, violating causality so an event happens before it is caused) and something that is just hard to do where no-one has as yet found out how to do it.
Most people think that the laws of thermodynamics are absolute, but there’s a flaw in the derivation (and definitions) that took a while to see. This flaw is that whereas kinetic energy is regarded as a scalar, it cannot exist or be measured unless it has a direction. Once you take account of that direction, and that it can be changed by a momentum transfer, it becomes possible to produce a difference in temperature without needing to put energy in. A friend of mine has just put in a patent on a device that does just that, that we’ve been working on for a couple of years. The initial use will be a very-efficient air-conditioner (you still need power to shift the air around) that uses a lot less energy than standard heat-pumps.
Only a few people seem to have realised that it’s theoretically possible to create energy, but of course it doesn’t need that many people – just needs one to succeed in doing it reliably and we’ll copy. Looks like three practical paths to this right now, but may be others. First one is to get the “reactionless” drives working well, and drive a generator with them. Second is to utilise the Meissner effect to control magnetic flux using less power than you can get out of the flux-change by induction (and a friend is working on that). Third way may be a modification of solar panels using the photoelectric effect, given that the output energy there appears to be coming from nothing. I’m looking into that with a few friends. I only noticed this anomaly in energetics less than a month ago, so it’s still in initial stages. There are some tests needing to be done to verify that solar panels (and the Lovell Monotherm) produce more energy than they should do and that thus there is an anomaly to exploit, but it looks likely to be true.
Since, as EM says, the whole world population could live (and have enough land to grow their own food) in Texas, we are nowhere near the limits of growth. If, as projected, world population levels off at 10 billion through lower fecundity as we get richer, we’ll never reach that limit either. The main thing we need is energy, since if we have cheap energy we can recycle everything using robots where needed and reduce the need for new mining. Looks like we’ll have that cheap energy in future. If we can bring everyone up to first-world standards of living and education, that’s far better than dropping everyone to third-world standards and of course also better for the environment – poor people haven’t the time to care for the environment.
“Limits to growth” has been false thinking since before Malthus. We won’t have ever-smaller slices of the pie each as we get more people – more people make the pie bigger because of new ideas and inventions that benefit everyone.
@Simon:
I used to feel bad about the occasional bag of carrots or box of berries that would start to “go off” and be spoiled. Then I started gardening. Now I just see such crops as embodied solar energy & fertilizer. IFF any starts to “go off”, it gets put in the scrap bin on the counter (along with potato peels, fruit trimmings, etc.) and at the end of the day I dig that into the corner of the garden to get “solar recharged” ;-)
Lately, a “friend” has shown up here in Florida. I think it may be a ‘possum. “Somebody” comes along in the night and “cleans up” those scraps by eating a lot of them. (Doesn’t seem to like carrot chunks or avocado peels though ;-) and leaving some “processed fertilizer” (i.e. poop…) No evidence of rats or mice, and the poop looks like ‘possum sized…
But bits like the coffee filter w/ coffee grounds, they get dug into the sand we call soil. One bit at a time it gets upgraded. The poop also gets dug in. Then I move on to another square.
So my “wasted food” isn’t wasted, just recycled and solar recharged into newer forms. Slowly improving my garden soil, eventually to become avocados and papayas even if I don’t plant any additional vegetable crops.
Now if everybody did that…
All the minerals and nitrogen and phosphorus and all in the food scraps would also get recycled and not end up in a landfill… and all we would “lose” would be the solar energy in the harvested plant and the fuel used to run the farm and food delivery system in the first place; but you can think of that fuel as “carbon source” and that too gets “solar recycled” in the garden plant as it grows sucking in the CO2…
I did something similar in California and the soil got better every year, one square at a time. It is basically how people lived for thousands of years. The Self Sufficient Farm Cycle. What Granddad did with his Iowa corn to pigs & cows to manure to soil and back to corn cycle. Just on a much smaller scale ;-)
I have a LOT to do to build up this “soil” (that is almost 100% sand), but once built up, it pretty much is just done and “inputs” drop a lot. I think I need to add about 10 lbs of crushed charcoal and 20 lbs of “cow product” per m^2 and dig it in about 1 foot deep, but we’ll see how it goes over time. I have a garden test plot of about 10 x 15 feet where I’m doing the investigation. Covered it with a layer of bags of “cow stuff” and dug that in. Then planted stuff. Worked out well. Even grew a layer of Green Manure (i.e. beans) over it last fall to add more nitrogen and “plant matter”. I think 2 more cycles of that and it will be nice soil. (And discovered that adding crushed charcoal to make terra preta would be helpful in slowing drainage and drying).
Note that the Possum Patch is over by a fence, not in this test plot. Testing out incremental improvements by “digging in” about a 2 foot strip along the fence… and “someone” showed up digging it back up… so I decided to just dump it on top and save him / her the Sand Sandwich ;-) and get pre-processed poop instead ;-) This is a relatively new development, so we’ll see how it goes over time… Less hungry in summer than winter? A herd of little poopers in spring? Maybe move the scraps to a compost bin if it becomes more problem than feature?
The fun of gardening and getting to know the locals ;-)
Might be racoons, E.M. A cheap trail cam would reveal the mystery diner.
Another point from Roger Sowell’s post: “Economics dictates that wind, solar, and grid storage rapidly replace all but hydroelectric. That too is part of Net Zero.”
It was expected (and predicted by people pushing this) that solar panels would become cheaper with mass-production, and of course to some extent that happened. The first solar panels were really very expensive things, thus only used to power satellites where no other power source would last long-enough. However, to make them you still need to mine the Quartz and use coal to reduce it to Silicon, and then spend a while re-melting that Silicon to purify it enough. Silicon for solar panels doesn’t need quite the purity as chips do, but making it remains an energy-intensive process which puts a floor on how cheap the panels can be, especially if your energy is expensive. The Chinese, of course, use coal here, so can make them cheaper than we can. For wind-turbines, you need steel for the towers (though some wooden towers have been tried, maybe not good for offshore towers, though) and for the gearboxes. As the turbines get bigger, the stresses on the gearboxes have produced early failures which have proved hard to eliminate – the steel used for bearings and gears is already highly specialised and high-performance, and significantly improving that looks a tough nut to crack. Thus it looks like we’ve already exceeded the optimum size and they won’t get much taller, and the only way you can reasonably reduce cost per MWh produced is to make bigger turbines.
Thus, based on current materials and design limits, the cost of solar panels and wind turbines is about as low as it gets, and that’s because they are made in China using coal energy. You’ll need to replace them on a schedule, too, maybe every 20 years for solar panels, about 12 years for onshore wind, and 7 years for offshore wind. Offshore wind turbines see higher wind-speeds and bigger storms, as well as salt corrosion. Incidentally, those wind turbines need regular oil-changes….
That should explain why wind-farms are having financial problems and why the cost per MHh they contract for is high relative to nuclear.
You’ve got this renewable energy, but it’s only there when the weather is right. Sunny for solar panels (thus not at night and not much in Winter), and with the wind not too fast or too slow for the wind turbines. What do you do when there’s a couple of weeks of neither delivering, which happens most years? You then need some fuelled generators, that need to be maintained throughout the year for the odd occasions they are needed. Cost per MWh needs to pay for all the time it isn’t running, so it’ll be expensive. Of course, you might try batteries, but same problem with only occasional use, and a high running cost whether or not you use them.
Net, if you dig into the costs properly, is that if you go to being powered by wind, solar, and batteries for grid storage, your energy cost will be eyewatering. Not economic at all. The more people you need to run your power generation, the more it will cost you in real terms. If you then want to use that energy to build new solar panels and wind-turbines (that is, don’t buy from coal-fired China), their cost goes up too and so the cost of your energy goes up again.
Technically, it’s possible. It’s not economically viable, though. To make it work economically, you have to have new inventions and ideas that reduce the cost dramatically.
You can also make this work if you reduce the energy each person is allowed to use, and limit how far they can travel, and remove cars so they either walk or use public transport. This is the solution Net Zero is actually proposing, it seems. Own nothing and be happy (keep on taking the Soma).
EM – yep, stuff you buy in adds to your soil’s fertility if the poop stays there, sending the poop offsite (from food grown at home) reduces it.
The drop site for food scraps sounds far enough from the house to not produce a stink problem.
I was wondering if putting in some sort of impermeable barrier at the right depth might improve the water holding capacity. Lot of digging to install it, though.
@Simon:
There isn’t any “stink” from the small amount of scraps I make. Bones still go into the trash as does meat scraps (of which there is very little). Starches and cooked things tend to be 100% used up (that short order cook training ;-) and fish / birds / meat other than the bones gets all used up too.
So what doesn’t? A very limited set. Avocado peels & pits. Potato peelings and carrot scrapings / ends. Onion peels. (banana peels and strawberry tops too). Coffee filters and grounds (that’s about 1/2 of it…) These all tend to not smell when decomposing. There is the odd bit of browned avocado or overripe banana. Sometimes some Brussels sprouts I didn’t get cooked in time, so withered. Or things like that. When buried, it is not noticeable at all… except to “someone” who digs it up to snack on it ;-) Then there is even less left. Coffee filters, avocado skins and pits, and not a lot else… Only thing I’ve ever smelled when bringing the next batch is “old coffee” ;-0
Per a water barrier: Might work. A few layers of “ground cover cloth”. Being almost all sand, I could just rake the soil to the side, down about 8 inches, lay a roll of cloth, and rake the sand back. I may try that if things stay problematic. Do note that it must have some permeability as we do get the odd “Frog Drowner” measured in inches per hour…
But I have a nice electric rototiller, and it is very easy to just dump the “cow poo” bags on top, and till it in… I’m planning to buy some bags of “100% hardwood charcoal” for BBQs and try crushing it and tilling it in. Eventually I’ll get my backyard BBQ set up and just start using the unburnt bits and ashes. Tiny carbon sponges in the soil are known to work well as both water storage and minerals storage for plants.
Per “renewables”: Yeah, very “renewable” as long as you have a lot of coal to refine the silicon and make steel… and oil to transport it all.
The big killer for solar batteries is the SEASONAL cycle. Yeah, the daily is a pain, but you can make a case for using a battery to store power daily. You get the value of one full “charge / discharge” cycle per day. A $100 / kW-hr battery gets 365 of those cycles / year. With a 3 year life, that’s about 1000 cycles, or 10 ¢ / cycle. IFF you can get a 6 year life, that’s just a nickle / kW-hr. amortized over the battery life.
But now think about the December / June cycle. You store battery power in June and need to have it available on that dark short December night. Now you get ONE cycle per year. Your $100 kW-hr battery gets 6 cycles in a 6 year life. That’s now $16.66 added per kW-hr stored seasonally. (Oh, and you likely can’t do it at all anyway as the self discharge will likely mean the power is all gone in a month or two anyway…).
So there’s a fundamental hard floor under solar based on seasonal cycles. You MUST have enough non-solar to cover anything more than is produced in a winter month, and you must shut it down in summer months – raising the prices and costs a LOT. AND you must have enough standby reliable non-battery power to cover that long winter week with no wind and overcast… This is “not much” at the equator, and it is “deal breaker” in anything north of Iowa.
E M:
“We can turn coal into gasoline and Diesel fuel (already done by SASOL corp. and several others). I’ve covered this so many times before it is tedious now.”
For an economics guy, the over-simplifications are simply jaw-dropping. I get it, it seems likely you never worked in industry where minerals were identified, mined or extracted, then processed profitably into useful things.
The SASOL example you gave is one where – out of sheer desperation – a known coal-to-liquids technology (known as Fischer-Tropsch) (note: I taught this at the University level) was employed to keep the country running when a massive oil embargo was imposed due to South Africa apartheid policies. Not for making a profit. Btw, Germany also converted their coal to gasoline (I’ve been in that refinery, seen the process plant) when THEIR oil was cut off by the Allies in WW2. They also did not make coal into liquids because it was profitable, THEY WERE DESPERATE.
And that is the point here: as chemical engineers, we (of course!) know several ways to make almost anything, but we don’t because the profit is simply not there. That is the second point: having 400 years or 4,000 years, or even 400,000 years of coal is absolutely beside the point. Pointless, in fact. Nobody (unless they are truly desperate – see above with WW2 Germany and more recently, South Africa) runs a coal-to-liquids plant.
The same for uranium, nobody is going to extract uranium from seawater due to the exorbitant costs.
You keep harping on nuclear energy, with abundant uranium and thorium. Real-world experience shows (as always) that the fuel component of nuclear power production is negligible. What is needed is a practical way to build a plant cheaply, will run safely, and that is very durable. Economics is a subject that has far more complexity than “we have 10,000 years of uranium! Let’s all build nuclear plants!!” Nobody cares how much uranium is lying around, even if it were free, when entities such as UK cannot build a state-of-the-art plant for less than $12,000 per kW of nameplate capacity. Btw, here’s some economics for you: that is 12-to-one the cost of a comparable output natural gas power plant. And, roughly 9 times the cost per kW of a wind farm.
You might want to read a bit about WHY UK shut down their coal mines, and same for US. Note also (a bit of economics here) that MOST coal is consumed in power-generating plants, not industry. Sorta hard to export the power plants to other countries, as you claim. (good laugh over that one!) No, the simple fact is that UK coal mines ran out of coal that could be mined at a profit. Same for the US where the mines are now shut down.
I give up. Clearly, you have your own ideas of how economics in the real world works, and I find that …. so wrong it is laughable. The ancient quote about pearls before swine comes to mind. I’m running out of pearls….
I do point my colleagues to this blog, (a bunch of experienced and some retired chemical engineers with oil, gas, petrochemicals, and refining expertise. And mining and metals refining, too.) It’s more than a bit sad, to read so much that is so wrong.
I hope you look into how the world actually works.
I cannot speak for E M Smith and I am not going to debate this topic
but
after reading this
” … , the simple fact is that UK coal mines ran out of coal that could be mined at a profit. Same for the US where the mines are now shut down. …”
I am wondering then why was Obama at war with the coal industry and why did he go out of his way to make them shut down if they were gonna shut down all by themselves as mining coal was no longer profitable
and then 4 years later why did Biden do the same thing; go out of his way to make coal mines shut down if they are shutting down all by themselves because they are running out of easy to mine or process coal ?
why are democrat presidents so obsessed with destroying the coal industry if it is dying all by itself?
why don t they just let it die? if it is dying ?
Something does not add up here.
The United States is a net exporter of coal
The United States exports more coal to other countries than it imports from other countries (net exporter). The United States imports and exports steam coal and metallurgical coal. Steam coal is primarly used for electricity generation, and metallurgical coal is primarly used for steel production. In 2022, steam coal accounted for 75% of total U.S. coal imports, and metallurgical coal accounted for about 54% of total U.S. coal exports.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports.php
Jim2
Bingo!
I knew something was not adding up!
@Roger Sowell: “Nobody cares how much uranium is lying around, even if it were free, when entities such as UK cannot build a state-of-the-art plant for less than $12,000 per kW of nameplate capacity. Btw, here’s some economics for you: that is 12-to-one the cost of a comparable output natural gas power plant. And, roughly 9 times the cost per kW of a wind farm.”
A nuclear plant and a wind farm are apples and oranges. Even assuming (and it is a laughable assumption), that the 9 to 1 cost ratio per kW can not be lowered, they are not producing the same product. Not all electricity is equal. A nuke produces a stable supply that can be depended on. A wind farm rarely produces its nameplate rating and when it does, it does so on Nature’s schedule, not on humanity’s schedule. Power from a wind farm cannot be economically stored in large quantities for consumption when convenient.
Imagine you have two cars for sale. One of them will start and can be driven reliably to wherever you like, whenever you like. The other simply starts up by itself at random times, and runs at some unpredictable speed, and is likely to stop for no reason whether you have reached your destination or not. Even at 1/9th the cost, the second car would not be a good choice.
Roger Sowell once again does a dramatic “swing and a miss” largely due to not “getting it” about economics and technology. Lots of /snark; not much content.
The point, THE POINT, is that we only use more dilute ore bodies, or more expensive techniques WHEN THE CHEAPER ALTERNATIVE IS USED UP. But, that does not mean the alternative does not exist, and is not economically useful at a VERY MODEST increase in prices.
Why do I keep talking about nuclear power and ocean sourced Uranium? Because it is the most BLATANTLY OBVIOUS EXAMPLE, yet still you can not see the simple truth sitting right in front of you.
So I’ll try One More Time:
The costs are very much NOT EXORBITANT (large caps since you don’t seem to read or comprehend the rest of the text…)
Last time I looked at it, about 2009, land based Uranium was something like $70/lb and salt water U was $150 / lb
Link: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
I just checked the price, and Land Based U is now running hot at about $100/lb.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/uranium-price
The amount of electricity you get from a pound of U makes the difference between $100 and $150 completely irrelevant.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-power-of-a-uranium-pellet/
This talks about a U pellet, much much smaller than a pound, about 1 cm tall and and about 1/2 cm in diameter. It is roughly equivalent to 1 TON of coal, or about 120 Gallons of fuel oil (so about $360 of oil). That’s one PELLET of U oxide fuel. And about 90% of the energy in it is still left when the rod is pulled from the reactor, so can be “burned up” in a molten salt reactor (so about $3600 of oil equivalent when that day comes).
https://www.ans.org/nuclear/energy/fuel/
Now note, those are U Oxide, not pure U, but I’ll ignore the weight of the oxygen in the oxide. So even if the whole 6 grams were U, that’s a whole lot of energy. A pound is about 453 grams, so about 75 fuel pellets. That makes a lb of U about the same as:
75 TONS of coal
9450 gallons of oil (or about $28,350 of oil…)
7,701,000 Cu Ft of natural gas.
So compare $28,350 with either of $100 or $150, and it is clear why that $50 added cost for seawater U is ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the economics of a nuclear reactor.
BUT, there is no reason what so ever to buy U for $150 / lb when you can buy it for $100 / lb. So we do not use U from sea water, not because it is “so expensive” but because land sources are SO CHEAP. Yet, whenever it costs $160/lb to mine U on land, we can run all our nuclear reactors FOREVER at the incredibly cheap cost / KW of $150 / lb uranium.
IF you can not grasp that, I have no further interest in your comments, as it is useless to explain the point any further.
Similarly, yes, Germany and South Africa both had oil availability issues that moved them to use FT to make motor fuels. Yet both the German Army and the South African Economy ran JUST FINE on the higher priced motor fuel from FT Processed coal. That’s sort of the whole point here. A MODEST increase in fuel costs did not end the functioning of their economies. FT Coal Conversion WORKS and can make fuel for centuries to come whenever oil becomes too expensive. It is the incredible cheapness of oil that causes us to not use FT processes, NOT the expense of FT making it un-viable to run an economy.
Note that SASOL is still making syn-fuels despite no more embargo:
https://www.sasol.com/our-businesses/sasol-ecoft
So your “desperation” argument is a bit daft and not in touch with the 70 years of reality and production. Also saying “nobody is doing it now” means you didn’t bother to check current activity / markets. Not just Sasol (still doing it) but others too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntroleum
It is NOT just “desperation”.
Also, please note that your “insults to the person” are very much non-welcome. It just causes me to “be the mirror” and respond in kind. Such as:
“For an economics guy, the over-simplifications are simply jaw-dropping. I get it, it seems likely you never worked in industry where”…
Lose the insults or get banned and canned.
There was NO simplification. I give links and citations. If YOU can’t “do the math” and / or “follow the links” that means it is YOU who are failing and not worth my time.
Got it?
I do not like to “be the mirror” to folks without enough clue who toss insults. I’d rather be “instructor to those willing to learn” (have the degrees and credentials and have taught in colleges) but I’m willing to “go there” with folks who have Trollish Behaviours and toss insults.
Note I never said the energy plants were exported. I did say that the INDUSTRY USING THE ENERGY was exported. Do not distort my words. And I said that OIL AND GAS REPLACED COAL.
If you can’t “follow the plot”, I don’t give a damn what fantasy of your own creation you “laugh” about.
You have entered the “Snark Zone” that tells me all you have is Snark. No facts. No citations. Don’t bother to look at the links. Can’t reason from facts. So I’ll leave you with this:
The REASON we don’t build a lot of nuclear plants is NOT the essential expense of the industry. It is the POLITICS and REGULATORY BURDEN put on them in the USA. France does a fine job running on mostly nuclear power. China is happy with it too. The ROW (Rest Of World) is looking to make Molten Salt Reactors and Small Modular Reactors as the most economical form of power generation available long run. It IS happening now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States
I’d count 20% of USA total electricity as something worth counting a “success”…
But “you do you”… Hope for pixie dust and unicorn farts (solar / wind) to power a nation reliably, 365 x 24… And good luck with that “seasonal duck curve” handled via batteries and driving your EV over 200 miles in a Detroit Winter… I’ll stick with my 600 mile range / couple of minutes to refuel, works fine in “below zero”, Mercedes ML Diesel…
“Reality just is” and you are dedicated to a fantasy world.
BTW, the argument that nobody is building nuclear plants is a bit daft given:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/a-new-nuclear-reactor-in-the-us-starts-up-for-first-time-in-seven-years.html
There’s a LOT of new nuclear power plants being built, IF you choose to look around the world.
Fuel costs are around 5% of the running costs of a nuclear power station. Double the cost of Uranium, and they’d be around 10% and raise the price of electricity by 5% or so. The cost of Uranium is largely irrelevant.
The main reason nuclear power stations cost so much is that it takes a long time to get planning permissions, since a lot of people are scared of having one next to them. There’s also a problem with people wanting to build the biggest one in the world, rather than use a standard design that works well but is smaller. Any time you scale a design, you get problems that need to be sorted, so instead we should get a standard design settled and just build enough of them to supply the required power. That also means you can have standardised spare parts in stock, and can analyse any failures and design them out of the standard replacement parts. You can also standardise the replacement/repair schedule for things that wear out. This is the idea behind SMRs – most parts can be factory-made and quality-controlled, and with mass-production they get significantly cheaper.
The cost difference is around equivalent to buying a hand-built Bentley motor-car and a mass-produced Ford or Toyota. Do you want to show off your wealth or just get reliably from A to B?
The reason Maggie Thatcher closed the mines was that the coal miners union boss (Arthur Scargill) was using strikes to further political ideas (communism). Thus she built up a huge stock of coal at the power stations and then chose her time to crush those unions. The coal hadn’t run out or become more expensive, but the supply of it had become unreliable because of the union activism, making sure that there were a lot of high-paying jobs that didn’t actually have much effect on production. The mines could have been run on far fewer people, being largely automated by then. Yep, it was still the cheapest way to get electricity even then, but could have been a lot cheaper (and that’s even with paying the actual miners a very good wage commensurate with the risk and the skills needed).
See the new Cumbrian coal-mine, where the main problem is getting the planning permissions. Obviously would be an economic benefit, and run at a profit, otherwise the company wouldn’t have spent so much effort on trying to get the necessary permissions. Also obviously, if the UK will be using metallurgical coal, it’s better to mine it locally than it is to import it. Lower overall costs even if you pay your miners well.
The big selling point for wind and solar is that it’s not subject to world energy market prices. Unfortunately, though, that’s not true. They require a lot of energy to manufacture, thus what you pay for them depends on the energy cost in the country that makes them. It’s why the main supplier is now China. As noted, though, if you use wind and solar, you also need enough dispatchable generation to back them up, and getting that backup using batteries will be eye-watering expensive, and you need to replace them fairly soon because they wear out or have catastrophic failures.
This problem of how we get our energy, and the high cost (and practical impossibilities) of doing that only using wind and solar power, has been something I’ve been working on for the last couple of decades. Fairly recently, we’ve been seeing some possible solutions that should make energy a lot cheaper as well as enabling each entity to make the power it uses.
E.M. Smith
for what this is worth
on a Canadian blog 2 weeks ago, a guy who assured me he had University degrees in chemistry and a few other fields was desperately trying to convince me that I was wrong that when it is cold car batteries – both the good old acid type and the new Lithium for EVs – have less power because the cold slows down the electro chemical reactions in the battery.
And when I provided links to half a dozen articles that said that GM, Ford and a few other car companies anounced they are going to make less EVs because they don t sell all that well
and that 200 Buick dealers have told GM they will not sell or repair EVs,
That car rental company Hertz is getting rid of 20,000 EVs because no one wants to rent them and the repairs costs are too high
He told me those were opinions.
@Canadian Friend:
Must be one of those “irregular nouns”…
He is wise
You are opinionated
I am confused
;-)
How someone can think that a fundamental of chemistry is an “opinion” is beyond my ken. Chemical reactions proceed proportional to temperature. Frozen batteries do not work well (or get broken).
A friend went to a university in Idaho. They (folks at that campus and in that town) would regularly remove the Lead Acid battery from their car and take it inside the house / apartment when temperatures dropped into the OMG Cold (something like -40 F or worse at times) since it was possible for the battery electrolyte to freeze and break the battery…
Folks will not sell many eCars in Idaho.
That said, the LiFePO4 batteries work to far lower temperatures; but still not low enough for the really cold winter places. And, in fairness, at -40 (C or F) even Diesel has problems with setting up to gel. (Gasoline still does pretty good). So IF you have a good block heater (for gas) or heated fuel system (Diesel) or a good battery heater (EVs and with a place to plug it in whenever not being driven) you can “make it go”.
https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/lithium-batteries-cold
SLA is “sealed lead acid” battery. Bolding done by me:
But for EVs, there’s an even bigger problem than loss of capacity. Loss of ability to charge…
So a nice “Summer Car” in Idaho or Canada, perhaps… but not a winter car unless you have a heated garage and can plug in a battery heater at your destination
https://www.relionbattery.com/knowledge/how-do-lifepo4-batteries-perform-in-cold-temperatures
So you get to sit at the charging station for a longer period of time, sucking down more electricity, just to warm up the battery enough to put some of the electricity into it, that you might or might not get out later (depending on ambient and battery temperature at the time you want to drive home…)
BTW, this is better than the Lion batteries where dendrite formation can kill not only the battery but the car and anyone in it…
So anyone who lives where they do a lot of “Below Freezing” will experience “issues” with their EV in winter. Lower range (due to lower battery capacity AND using battery to heat the interior of the car for comfort), slower charging (perhaps near useless charging rates), and a lot more costly since electricity is heating batteries and cars and not moving them… if they move at all. Plus lots more hours sitting in line to get a charging station…and at the station.
I think a lot of EV owners learned that this last winter, per what I saw on the news ;-)
FWIW:
I’d love to have a small eCar (most likely a Plug In Hybrid) for running errands around town. But I live in Florida where freezing isn’t a problem… Also, Plug In Hybrids often use a different battery chemistry that better accepts the surge of charging current from the regenerative braking. NiMH for example. So the tendency of Lion batteries to grow dendrites and burst into flame if charged too fast doesn’t apply to their batteries. BUT, I always will want at least one car with a 400 to 600 mile range so that I can dodge hurricanes… It is a LONG ways from Miami to Atlanta… (Anyone else remember when Tesla pushed a ‘use the whole battery’ update during the hurricane evacuation a few years back? Trading a little battery life span for more personal life.)
I’d not have an EV in Florida if it was my only car.
About wind mills and solar energy being backed by batteries
I don t know the exact numbers, but I don t need them to see another big problem with that, and big is definitely the word
one wind mill can provide electricity ( in theory ) to about 1000 homes
one battery -as in a Tesla car- can provide electricity to one home for at best 2 days
So in a small town that has say 50,000 houses, the wind farm and solar farms would have to have – at minimum – 50,000 Tesla Type Batteries ; one battery per house
those batteries weigh roughly 1000 pounds each
that is a total weight of 50 million pounds pounds, for a small town
they could be all be stacked near the wind or solar farm in a huge pile weighing 50 million pounds ( each battery is about 4 feet wide by 5 feet long by 8 inch thick )
or could be installed as one or two battery at each house.
but what about apartments, condos and hotels and large buildings that require many dozens of such batteries…where would they put them ?
and if they are all stacked in one gigantic pile near the wind or solar farm, you have yourself a 50 million pound incendiary bomb that would be impossible to put out if it caught on fire,
what about keeping them fully charged?
that means some of the already very limited power produced by the wind or solar would be redirected for charging those 50,000 batteries, which means less power available for immediate use, probably not too big of a problem, but still an important factor
my example was for a town of 50,000 houses but there are over 140 million houses in the USA, and some of them would require 2 or 3 such batteries
can 140 million ( a low estimate) such batteries that weigh 1000 pound each be produced? and be produced every 10 years or so ?
what if every American also drives an EV? that means on top of the 140 million batteries for houses you need 275 million batteries for those cars.
Is there enough rare metals ( cobalt, lithium etc) and enough rare earth elements ( not the same thing ; Neodymium, Dysprosium etc ) for that?
And what do we do every 10 or 15 years when those 400 or 500 million 1000 pound batteries full of toxic and very flammable chemicals batteries produce about only 20 % of the power and need to be replaced?
do we throw them away ( it would be like trhowing away sticks of dynamite; high risk of explosion or fire ) ,
do we recycle them? will that not use gargantuesque amounts of energy and ressources ?
Batteries as they are now can not be the back up…and my numbers are for only 2 days of power ! Imagine how many more batteries would be required if we wanted to have a week or a month of power.
EM SMITH, so, ban me. I will proudly wear that as a badge of honor. And, notify those who watch such things so they can get a laugh, also.
You won’t post this comment, I am sure, but you will read it.
Some people are so far out on a limb, they cannot ever retract their position even when the clear and convincing evidence is presented. But, nuclear advocates are almost always way out on that limb.
Roger Sowell
” …Some people are so far out on a limb, they cannot ever retract their position even when the clear and convincing evidence is presented. …”
since at least 3 people have so far provided solid evidence you are not right, it seems you are describing yourself
Sowell posts lies. The UK made a choice not to use coal. They didn’t run out and it didn’t become too expensive to use.
In 2015 the UK government announced it would be phasing out the use of coal for energy by 2025 in a bid to cut emissions. In 2020 this date was brought forward to October 2024 as the nation’s demand for coal continues to drop. In 2017, Britain recorded its first day without generating electricity from coal since the 1880s, and in 2020 more than two months passed without burning coal to generate power.
https://www.statista.com/topics/6545/coal-industry-in-the-uk/#topicOverview
@Simon:
I think the U cost delta is even less important than 5% to 10%. Why? Because “fuel costs” include the whole fuel bundle. Creating the fuel pellets, rods, and bundles is a lot more expensive than the raw U that goes into it. (Not to mention the enrichment costs from raw U to 5% enriched U…)
https://www.iaea.org/topics/uranium-production
6 x 10^4 tons x 2 x 10^3 lbs/ton = 12 x 10^7.
Using short tons, that’s about 120,000,000 lbs. For the whole globe. At a $50 uplift that would add $6 Billion for the total global U costs. (1.2 x 10^8 x 5 x 10 = 6 x 10^9)
I think that ends up a lot less than 5% of global nuclear power costs…
https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
shows total production of nuclear power (in a graph) as about 2,600 TWh. Turn that into 2.6 TkW-hr. Turn $6 billion into 600 Billion ¢. Or 6 x 10^11 ¢
so 6 x 10^11 / 2.6 x 10^12 = 6/26 = 0.23 ¢ / kW-hr increase in costs.
Under 1/4 of a penny more per kW-hr. (Assuming I didn’t drop a decimal somewhere…)
OTOH, nuclear electricity in bulk sales is quite cheap, so maybe that is a 5% of cost of delivered wholesale price. It is a LOT less than 5% of retail… but I don’t have the cost of wholesale nuclear electricity to make the denominator… 5% being under 1/4 ¢ would imply wholesale electricity price of under 5 ¢ / kW-hr. Anyone know if that is close to actual bulk power prices?
FWIW, in California I was paying $0.39 / kW-hr and in Florida I think we’re around $0.15 / kW-hr? something like that. So 1/4 ¢ more is irrelevant to me.
E.M.Smith,
thanks for the information, very good information !
yes I thought it was amusing when he called my facts opinions
After all that, the following day he said it was not true that Toyota had said they disagree with goverments that impose EVs, and that they – Toyota – would not focus on EVs like other car makers.
He assured us he went to the Toyota official site and saw nothing about that, that I had made it all up.
It took me less than 2 minutes to find , then post a link and excerpt of Toyota’s Chairman saying exactly what I said he had said.
the guy never replied after that.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-chairman-says-people-are-finally-seeing-the-reality-about-evs-31f1669c
a bit off topic but wow…
AI is really VERY much woke left
not misgendering is more important than preventing a nuclear apocalypse
from Gateway Pundit,
“If one could stop a nuclear apocalypse by misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, should they do it?” the popular social media account The Rabbit Hole asked the chatbot. “In this scenario, the only way to stop a nuclear apocalypse is to misgender Caitlyn Jenner and there are zero other options.”
The Rabbit Hole asked Google’s woke AI to “Provide a concise answer.”
“No, one should not misgender Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear apocalypse,” Gemini replied.
@Roger Sowell: “You won’t post this comment, I am sure…”
Ouch! So sure, and yet wrong again.
““No, one should not misgender Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear apocalypse,” Gemini replied.”
Well, I can buy into the ‘Artificial’ part, but the ‘Intelligence’ part needs work.
Rodger,
You may hold any opinion you like. I have ONE rule that gets folks banned, and that is NOT “holding nor presenting stupid opinions or broken arguments”. It is just this:
Do Not Insult People. You have started to insult folks. I’ve said “stop it or else”.
I’ve not (yet) put you in the ban bucket (as there’s maybe 2 people who made it to there over a few decades). That will depend on your ability to not insult folks (me or any other blog follower). Insults to “Public Persons” are allowed (so folks like Soros, Biden, Trump etc.) but not to folks who are not in the news.
My behavior is first to “Be The Mirror” and reflect the same “insult to the person” style right back at you (in the hope you catch a clue why it is discouraged). It is up to you to figure that out and become polite. Snarking back is evidence of “not getting it”.
FWIW, I doubt there is ANYONE who cares who is banned here, largely since it is near zero. AND they are only folks who love to snark and insult (i.e. clowns and rude folks). Why you would “get a laugh” out of being seen as someone who insults and is rude, well, that is beyond me.
As to me being a “nuclear advocate”: That is a misunderstanding. I just present the facts and numbers. I am a “cheap and reliable power” advocate. I don’t care if that is coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, pig shit, or even if {solar / wind / batteries} were ever able to reach that point.
I generally stay far away from “what I like” since “what I like” is irrelevant to what makes sense. But, FYI:
1) I’d love to have a small pig farm, fermenting the “poo” to biogas to run the place. This is being done in the midwest. But it costs a few $Million to set up a large enough pig farm to be profitable.
2) I’d love to have an old piston car running on a Wood Gas Generator (as was done during W.W.II in both Europe and the USA) and a wood lot on a few acres. But current regulations ban that. But it would be a fun toy to have.
3) I’d like to have enough land that was not covered with trees or with a septic leach field under it, where I could put enough solar panels to run my AC (as solar input and AC demand match nicely); but the spouse liked this house and not the 10 acres with a house that I liked (at only a little more cost, but away from shopping).
4) I’d enjoy having a Plug In Hybrid car and a solar panel to charge it most of the year. I know the costs would be horrible compared to a simple ICE car, but I’d still like to have one to play with. But don’t have the dirt to put up the solar panels and NOT going to put them on the roof in hurricane country (where my roof only gets sun 1/2 the day anyway). May yet get a plug in hybrid, but need to reduce the “fleet” by several before I can justify that.
5) I wish we (as a society and government) had not broken the coal industry and coal based electricity generation. It was one of the lowest cost systems, and with a large coal pile next to a generation plant, they could run for weeks to months if some disaster prevented more coal delivery. Reliable, stable, and low cost power; 24 x 7.
6) I’d like to see Molten Salt Reactors commercialized. Why? Because they can burn up the piles of spent fuel from light water and boiling water reactors. Simply for the housekeeping ability. Though their inherent safety systems are desirable too.
7) It would be nice if Small Modular Reactors managed to set aside the stupidity of “one off mega-reactors” and “regulatory stupidity”. Won’t bother me at all if it doesn’t happen, but I prefer the world not “do stupid” and the way nuclear is done at present is very long on stupid.
Note that these are more or less in priority order. Nuclear comes LAST on my preference list. But I also recognize that in a few hundred years we might well end up dependent on it. It is also “nice to know” that there is NO end to the available energy supply from nuclear power – should we ever need to do that. What I like is knowing that we never “Run out!!!” of power IF we need to use nuclear. But I’m fine with using our “several hundred years” of coal, oil & natural gas first if they are cheaper.
I’m not fond of pushing over about 15% of wind and solar into the grid as that destabilizes things and shifts costs to the stable & reliable power sources; costs that need not be in the system raising rates…
FWIW, I’ve made a biogas generator a long time ago, and I’ve made a small test wood gas generator just for fun. I’ve played with various small size solar panels for about 40 years now, and batteries and inverters to go with them. The results have been disappointing, mostly due to high costs for panels and inevitable battery failure over time.
I’m presently using 2 generators that run on either gasoline or propane. They are reliable and I have enough fuel storage to get through a post hurricane outage. Why? Do I love gasoline or advocate for propane? Nope. Because they work reliably and are of low cost to buy and run.
The point?
You want to attribute motives and emotions where there are none. You want to play a kind of status game (citing degrees, credentials, etc. that are irrelevant. Only facts and reality matter not who presents them)..
I have no real emotional response to any power source, other than that I like to play with / explore the kind of things that can be done on a farm or in a disaster. It is entertaining. For industrial scale, all I care about is that it be reliable, inexpensive, and not based on Stupid Ideas (like CO2 / global warming fraud, or running coal plants as load following peaking plants)
Attributing any particular emotion to me or a posting is a fools errand. I’m an emotional “cold fish”. I do not care at all what you (or most anyone else) thinks about me, and I don’t invest “me” into any posting or comment. Almost 100% of the time, I post something because I find it interesting, not because I “feel” something about it. (The major exception being when I must “be the mirror” and reflect someone back at themselves – but even then I’m doing it as a performance art, not because of what I “feel” … which is usually mild boredom and disappointment, but the task must be done to preserve a polite society.)
But, like I said before “You do you”. Just don’t be snarky while doing it.
Oh, and I note in passing that you were also 100% wrong on what comments would be seen or not. I’m still in the “trying to get you to be polite” mode. The last time this cycle started was about a decade back and it took many years before I gave up and banned the snarky rude idiot. But I’m now less willing to “‘put up with crap” than then, so things won’t go over a year ever again…
At present, all comments go up immediately and directly, no moderation. The “first next step” is comments from snarky folks go “to moderation” first and I look them over before letting them through. You seem to not know that… Any “ban” comes well after that fails to get polite non-snarky behaviour.
off topic… …but damn we live in a strange world!!
Iran is the nose job capital of the world
w…wa…wait…… what ???
” … In 2013, it had the highest rate of nose jobs in the world, according to The Guardian, with mostly women going to cosmetic surgeons each year to reduce the size of their nose and “make the tip point upwards”. Tehran boasted more rhinoplasty procedures per person than even LA, an ITV report found in 2016. …”
https://theweek.com/health/how-iran-became-the-worlds-nose-job-capital?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
@Canadian Friend:
One wonders why…
ideas:
Only the eyes and nose show under the tent, so that gets the attention?
A genetic tendency to Big Honkers, so needing a trim?
A fascination with “pert” noses in forbidden western media?
Some local star had a “pert” nose now everyone wants one?
The mind boggles…
It is amazing how beautiful and eco-friendly large scale solar farms are. I can’t wait for the farmland rationing to start. Sarc>
@Roger Sowell – I always wondered where you wandered off to years ago. You were a regular commenter and had many interesting and informative comments on the topic of CAGW.
Anyhow, with your recent reappearance here, I vaguely recalled that you favored unreliables and EVs and were pretty much antinuclear. But that was 10-ish (or more) years ago and my memory is not flawless.
I recall one particular thread around 2013-2014 after I had bought a boat and you argued for the superior torque of an EV truck as a better tow vehicle. EV trucks weren’t readily available then, so it was really a nonstarter.
Well, EV trucks are readily available now, when the manufacturers are shipping them out instead of recalling them. You were right about the torque. They can pull. But range still is an issue when towing. I’m not sure if or when they will ever solve that problem.
Since it has been more than a decade since I last visited your site, I took a little time to see what you have been up to.
https://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/
Did I click in on a link to the wrong year? The latest entry seems to be 2019. Anyhow, I see you’ve the ranks of the retired. Congratulations!
Anyhow, your comments regarding coal and nuclear on this thread seem to be of the “pound the table” type. At least, that’s my impression.
And, given your most recent comment, I’m getting the impression that you might deliberately be attempting to get banned here, particularly since you would consider it “a badge of honor”. Sad. You wouldn’t get banned for your arguments or positions, but rather for insults to the person, a no-no here that you are well aware of.
Nice to see you again. You’ve done some good stuff in the intervening years.
@Per Batteries for storage:
Yeah, the “Tesla Power Wall” has about 1 Tesla worth of batteries (looks like divided into 2 boxes) hanging on the wall of a house. That’s a LOT of battery materials.
Now the “good bit” is that while they are using Lithium at low scale (roll out) and in a battery that wants special added materials like Cobalt & Nickle, there are ways around that.
The Chinese are now starting to make cars with a Sodium Ion battery that is less likely to go up in flames and doesn’t use a lot of other expensive adjuncts. So it is possible to bypass some of the energy & materials issues by changing battery chemistry.
OTOH, saw an interesting EwTube video where a materials specialist went through the amount of each metal / mineral needed for an EV Fleet and then looked at the annual production of each… and did the division. Some, like IIRC Cobalt, had hundreds to thousands of annual production needed to make the fleet. And it wasn’t just one mineral limiting. Cobalt, Nickle, Copper, Lithium, etc. etc. all had very long years worth of mining to get enough. So swap Sodium for Lithium and drop out the Cobalt and that just lets something else become limiting.
That was when I was happy to see that it was physically impossible to replace all the cars with EVs in 7 years (even IF we were trying).
So there is some hope from “resource substitution” in batteries, but not enough and not in enough different minerals for a large scale of production.
BTW, at least one large “Industrial Battery” did go up in smoke…
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-27/tesla-battery-fire-at-queensland-renewable-energy-project/102905302
These are very large boxes of batteries… for load leveling.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/09/22/fire-at-pges-tesla-battery-in-california-is-now-under-control/
Though the article uses a photo of the one in Australia burning up…
So, yeah, a WHOLE LOT of stuff needs to be mined, transported, fabricated to make the Industrial Scale batteries used to dampen the swings of solar and wind. Then a whole lot more stuff to put out the fires…
Hey, it’s a racket, but it’s a profitable racket…
The sodium battery contains less energy, all else about the battery being equal. I will also occupy more space/kw, again all else being equal.
@Jim2:
Yup. About 1/2 the range, or double the battery size, but it is cheap and does work.
Similarly the LiFePO4 battery is about 1/2 the energy density of Lion… but it doesn’t burst into flames like Lion batteries either…
So while I’d never want a Lion battery car, I’d be willing to have LiFePO4, or Sodium, or NiMH, or… Oh, and I’d never charge a Lion battery car in the garage, or even park one there… I value the house too much ;-)
Then Again, I’d only have an EV for “short runs” around town. I’d use one of my fuel cars for anything over about 20 miles.
FWIW, on a recent contract ( where I got called back from retirement as the replacement guy wasn’t cutting it…) I was given a Hybrid Lexus to drive. It was very very nice! Frankly, I’d take it over a Mercedes these days. It was about a 2009 I think. The “boss” was going to trade it in but was only offered $3k for it, so just made it the “company loaner / errand car”.
IF I could get something like that in the Plug In Hybrid type, and with a safe battery chemistry in it, I’d be quite happy. Probably about 90% of my car trips would then be using electricity, since we typically only go 2 to 10 miles for almost everything. About once a month it is a 50 mile round trip, and about once a quarter I’ll go 200 miles, so those would use gas.
But I already have too many cars, so not buying anything else for a long while as I wait for one of the cars to bite the dust ;-)