Still the Only Thing We Have to Fear

On March 4, 1933 newly elected President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt made this famous declaration during his inaugural address: “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself; nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” FDR had his faults, as all leaders do, but uttering those words to a nation terrified by hopelessness and dread was a shining moment in his career.

On February 20, 2023 The Pipeline's editor Michael Walsh wrote this: “…democracy does not "die in darkness." It dies in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty and birthed of instability…” While I’m not willing to suggest that Walsh's eloquence should move him to seek elected office, or to be regularly photographed grinning with a fancy cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, I do believe that his declaration is every bit as profound as Roosevelt’s was ninety years prior.

In 1933 Americans were terrified by enormous economic upheaval few citizens understood. The disaster seemed unsolvable to most. In 2023 Americans are terrified by rapid advances in technologies and the sciences that – to many – seem to create problems as equally dangerous and apparently unsolvable as the Great Depression did in 1933.

FDR: Fear itself.

This writer is not an expert on all technologies and all of science. We’ve advanced way to far for anyone to lay claim to being a modern-day Da Vinci. That said, this writer is an expert on the complex intersection of chemistry, environmental protection, risk evaluation, and public policy. In that world Walsh’s description holds true: all rational parts of that equation are dying in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty, and birthed of instability. Moreover, I firmly believe that is the case in many, likely most, other areas of scientific discipline when they intersect with public policy or popular trends. In this era of mass, instantaneous communication, nothing is guaranteed to attract more attention than communicating fear.

Consider how many people routinely purchase indoor “air purifiers” that are designed to remove air contaminants from indoor air by generating the most widely regulated air pollutant in America: ozone. Ozone is basically oxygen on steroids; three oxygen atoms bonded together rather than the usual two. The extra atom gives ozone some unique properties, among which is its ability to react with a variety of air contaminants and remove them from the air we breathe. So far so good, except for the fact that ozone is itself a highly regulated air contaminant. Reducing ozone in the air we breathe has been the focus of EPA and environmental group efforts for over fifty years.

The EPA has reduced the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone three times since the original Clean Air Act was promulgated. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all reduced the ozone standard, largely in response to environmental group claims that the preceding standard was not sufficiently protective of human health. There are mountains of regulations designed to reduced ozone formation. Vehicles have catalytic convertors largely to reduce ozone formation. If you live in an urban area, you pay for low vapor pressure gasoline in the summer months to reduce ozone formation. The push to reduce ozone formation affects the price we pay for electricity, natural gas, consumer goods, and a host of other areas.

Liberals have toyed with the ludicrous idea of banning natural gas-fired appliances, but none seems moved to grab this incredibly low-hanging fruit: Americans are routinely purchasing air-pollution generators in the name of improving air quality! It’s the sort of exploitation of fear and ignorance that would have amazed even Orwell.

Beware the O-Zone.

Ozone-generating air purifiers are just one example of the ignorance and hypocrisy that infects issues involving science and technology. Fire up your favorite search engine and try out the following queries: “manganese pollution,” “lead toxicity,” and “poly-aromatic hydrocarbons cancer risk.” You’ll find some dry, technically-accurate but boring as hell to read discussions involving those keywords published by government agencies and academics, and you’ll also find articles in which “experts” warn readers about the extreme danger associated with exposure to those compounds.

But how significant are these supposed dangers? Let’s start with manganese. Do you or a loved one take a multi-vitamin on a regular basis? Take a look at the ingredient list. Chances are you’ll find manganese listed among the minerals included.

This may give you pause. There are plenty of stories out there that describe manganese as a dangerous neuro-toxin. There are plenty of community leaders, political types, and environmental activists wringing their hands about the fate of the poor, innocent children exposed to this poison. So what the heck is it doing in your vitamins?

The answer is that manganese is an important and necessary micro-nutrient. Your body doesn’t need a lot of it, but it needs some of it. Chemicals are neither inherently toxic or non-toxic. The dose makes the poison, so it’s the amount one is exposed to and the route of exposure that ultimately matter. Good luck finding any member of the modern intelligentsia who understands, much less can explain, that simple fact.

Most everyone is aware of the dangers associated with ingesting lead. Less well known is that virtually every kitchen in the United States contains bowls and utensils that contain lead. For lead is a minor, but measurable, component of many grades of stainless steel—and whose kitchen doesn’t have a stainless item in it?

Does the amount of lead contained in stainless steel or how it is held within the lattice structure of the metal present any concerns about lead exposure? Not really, but don’t expect the fear-mongers to figure that out, even if they cared to do so.

Safety first.

And Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH)? There’s plenty of literature talking about how these potentially toxic and/or carcinogenic compounds can be formed during the combustion of coal, oil or natural gas. True, so far as that goes, but in very tiny amounts that will expose the average citizen to concentrations so low they are hardly of concern.

On the other hand, the smoke from your campfire, the cloud coming from your charcoal grill and any smoked food you consume will contain much more PAH compounds than anything a power plant will expose you to. That doesn’t keep me from enjoying smoked and barbecue foods, but then I’m not a hypocrite.

If you’re reading this piece, most experts agree that you are probably alive. Other experts tell us that sometime in the future you will cease to be alive. In between then and now, do yourself a favor: enjoy life. One of the ways you can enjoy it best is by tuning out the sad, ignorant masters of exploitation and propaganda who dream up ways to try to control your behavior by exploiting your natural tendency to exercise extreme caution when facing fear itself.

'Climate' Scam in Oz Goes from Bad to Worse

As a major producer and exporter of thermal coal and natural gas, with lots more to be tapped, Australia is well placed to ride out the forlorn pursuit of renewables. Instead, Australia’s governments fancifully see themselves leading the daring quest to save the planet. Accordingly, policies of uncommon futility and inanity ensue. Two prime examples came to malodourous fruition in the lead up to Christmas. Christmas gifts, if you will, for a population which richly deserves all that it gets having swallowed the climate scam hook, line and sinker.

The Energy Security Board (ESB), just one of a multiplicity of climate-change authorities, had an integral part in the derring-do. Alas, though full of activists, the ESB didn’t stay the course. Bizarrely, common sense won out. The ESB oversaw a scheme, called the “capacity mechanism,” intended to ease Australia through the transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar. The scheme calls for payments to energy providers in order that they might have capacity at the ready when renewables failed to deliver. Natural gas was very much in the mix, as you would expect, as also was coal for the time being. A detailed design of the scheme was to be delivered to federal and state governments in early 2023.

Spot the problem? The envisaged use of fossil fuels in the transition is not nearly pure enough for these clean-climate times. And, last August, the ESB was given a damn good telling off by pedigreed greens and lost its carriage of the capacity mechanism – sullied and shamed by its continued flirtation with coal and gas. Each state decided that it would do its own thing and that thing did not include “dirty” coal or gas.

No coal, please, we're Australian.

At this point, sane people might think that they're being gaslighted. Surely, a shortfall of wind and sun must be met with a flow of baseload power. Logically, that’s where gas-fired peaking plants might fill the breach. Apparently not. Pumped hydro is envisaged, though it is missing in action. Batteries are envisaged, though their effect is trivial in the scheme of things. Green hydrogen is envisaged, though it is pipedream. Finally, interstate power swaps are envisaged; based on massive overbuilding of not-yet-built wind and solar farms and thousands of not-yet-built kilometres of transmission infrastructure. And, still, what will happen during evenings of extensive wind droughts? Cold candlelit suppers ahead.

It’s senseless. But, best to remember, when it comes to climate policies, it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse. And so it is that Australia’s government, headed by Anthony Albanese of the far left of the left-wing Labor Party, recently had a well-worn idea which had proved popular among the apparatchiks in communist Eastern Europe.

Natural gas and coal prices have soared in recent times, as they have throughout the world. Consequently, the Australian Department of Treasury forecast that electricity prices would rise by 56 percent over the period to June 2025 and gas prices by 44 percent. What to do, when you’ve foolishly promised repeatedly that electricity prices would fall? Encourage new supplies of coal and gas? For example, give the go ahead to the Narrabri project which promises to deliver vast quantities of coal-seam gas to the domestic market. Certainly not. To wit, a spokesperson from Santos commenting on the continuing impasse:

Since 2012, Santos [Australia’s largest producer of natural gas] has spent more than $1.5 billion trying to get our Narrabri Gas Project approved and developed; a project that is 100 percent committed to the domestic gas market.

Heck, more dirty gas is needless when socialist economics has the answer. When prices rise too much for comfort impose price caps. Consequently, without meaningful consultation, the federal Government rushed through legislation before Christmas; titled, in true newspeak fashion, the Energy Price Relief Plan. This capped the price of gas at A$12 per gigajoule for one year with a permanent regime to ensure gas prices are set on “reasonable cost-plus basis.” Whatever that means in Newspeak.

Of course, the legislation also gives the government power to compel gas producers to supply gas at the capped price. Socialists have their playbook and know how nasty profiteering capitalists will try to wriggle out of supplying their products at below market value. Separately, the states of Queensland and New South Wales have agreed to cap the price of black coal to $125 per tonne and lose royalties; in exchange for lots of free federal money.

Role model for the future.

To show how far-gone things have gotten rotten down under, the head of Treasury Steven Kennedy supported the idea of price controls. No surprise that he was recognized in 2016 for outstanding public service in the area of climate-change policy. Climate activists have infiltrated every aspect of Australia’s public life.

Kevin Gallagher, CEO of Santos, described the legislation as a form of "Soviet-style nationalization.”

[It] will result in companies needing fiscal stability agreements with the government before new gas supply projects can take investment decisions in order to secure capital, just as would be the case if they were operating in Argentina, Venezuela or Nigeria.

Meg O'Neill, CEO of global oil and gas producer Woodside and chairman of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, made the point that price controls will lessen investment and drive supply out of the marketplace. I wonder where she got that strange idea. Probably from economics 101. In any event, it doesn’t seem to have yet penetrated the minds of the geniuses who form the Labor government’s brain trust. Woodside claimed that contractual talks to supply gas to twenty customers had been suspended. Shell made a similar point. Not surprising. How can supply contracts be finalized when no one knows what the regulated price will be in twelve months’ time?

Socialists wear mind-limiting blinkers. How else to arrive at simplistic solutions and think them sublime? Unseen effects of their superficial solutions, as the 19th-century French Economist Frédéric Bastiat put it, are studiously ignored. The rest of us are condemned to live them out. "Where did you put the heavy sweaters and candles Ma?"

Your Papers Please, Comrade

We are seeing the beginning of the end - or is it the end of the beginning? – of the CCP (the Climate Covid Party) "emergencies." For those who may have doubted these were linked, I give you the G20 summit. It seems the G have decided that Covid digital passports are to be required to move freely about the planet. For those who wondered what Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab were doing speaking this week to a meeting of national leadership: now we know.

Because the G20, with the exception of China, are at least putative democracies, an objective observer would assume this is the result of what the people wanted. One would be wrong. No one voted for or against this; it's never been presented for the approval of the representative governments, or citizens or subjects of the G20, or the people of any other nations.

We know these passports have nothing to do with the spread of this manufactured virus. Just last month BigPharma testified to the European Parliament that these injections were never tested for their ability to repress or stop the transmission of Covid-19. If an injection won't stop transmission, which has been the stance of the CDC for months, the purpose of getting a "vaccine" to travel, would be... what, exactly?

Yup.

At the same time as G20 is COP27, the annual boondoggle of those so worried about the climate that they all take private jets from around the planet (spewing millions of tons of "greenhouse gasses" along the way) to consume vast quantities of exotic foods (flown in from around the planet) cooked (with GHG) and served to them as they meet in air-conditioned ballrooms to discuss how we, the workers and families of the world—the productive classes—are destroying the planet with our transportation, stoves, and HVAC.

As we've discussed here before, this virus was most likely man-made. No trace has been found of it or a progenitor in nature in well over two years of investigation or the testing of over 50,000 animal subjects. Once Dr. Fauci admitted the “possibility” of its creation in a lab and covering emails began showing up, that jig was up. The "vaccine" was created and patented ten days after the first sequence of the Covid genome. This simply is not possible unless both were concurrently designed and manufactured. And, yes, the "vaccine" was designed; it is not from an inactivated virus, as all other,genuine vaccines have been in medical history. It's an artificially-created DNA map.

Various studies based on governmental databases of adverse events show that these "vaccines" may have killed as many as 600,000 Americans, and perhaps, millions, worldwide. While these numbers may or may not be high, the numbers of adverse events are so high that many countries are recommending against vaccinating people under 30, and Big Pharma, belatedly, has decided to investigate whether their injections are causing myocarditis, a term in common use today of which few of us were aware in the Before Times.

Which brings us to Klaus Schwab. Herr Schwab, of course, leads his WEF creation, a cohort believing that the global population must be reduced to under one billion souls from the current eight-plus billion. “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” in the words of WEF Advisor/Historian Yuval Noah Harari, because most of us, evidently, are “useless eaters.” An invented virus that kills millions, an injection killing millions more and inducing infertility to reduce future populations are but two steps on the road to the goal of our elites, those running the Covid & Climate scams.

[The accuracy of the documentary linked above, which has been of course banned by YouTube, has been questioned by the usual suspects in academe, the medical establishment, and the media. A sample:

Members of the anti-vaccination movement and of its media arm excel at portraying themselves as “those who care.” The rest of us—scientists, doctors, politicians, journalists—are represented as either apathetic or simply evil. The latest “documentary” to emerge from this movement, Died Suddenly, is an exercise in reframing compassion. It also represents the apogee of conspiritualist ideas, where grand conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines are painted on a canvas so large, they involve a Biblical war between the forces of absolute good and those of pure evil.

Who are portrayed as ringing the alarm for Armageddon in Died Suddenly? Embalmers... The problem is that embalmers and funeral directors are not medical professionals. Don’t take it from me, but from the National Funeral Directors Association in the United States, whose representative told me as much, and from Ben Schmidt, a funeral director and embalmer with a bachelor’s degree in natural science. Schmidt wrote a detailed explanation of what is happening here. Clots can easily form after death, as the liquid and solid parts of blood separate and as formaldehyde and calcium-containing water used in the embalming process catalyze clotting. Refrigeration can also be to blame, especially when a rapid influx of bodies due to COVID necessitates longer stays in the cooler as embalmers make their way through their backlog.

[Watch it and decide for yourself.]

Another step down the road to perdition is digital "money." If I must have a digital passport to travel, why not just digitize my money as an added convenience? And since Schwab has told us we "all" will be chipped one day, coding "our" money and vaccine passport into an injected chip that automatically access “our” “money” at the Fed (banks will be useless and so closed; think of the taxing advantages!) and provides our "vaccination" status to a digital reader, perhaps even as we just walk past a sensor entering a store or airport or transit station, would be convenient, no? Hello, Bill Gates.

President Biden has decreed via executive order, without presentation to representative government or to the citizens of the United States (perhaps it is now "subjects") for our approval, that the Federal Reserve explore the creation of a “Central Bank Digital Currency,” “CBDC,” or digital “dollar,” and MIT is working it out.

President Biden will sign an Executive Order outlining the first ever, whole-of-government approach to addressing the risks and harnessing the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology. The Order lays out a national policy for digital assets across six key priorities: consumer and investor protection; financial stability; illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation. Specifically, the Executive Order calls for measures to:

  • Protect U.S. Consumers, Investors, and Businesses by directing the Department of the Treasury and other agency partners to assess and develop policy recommendations to address the implications of the growing digital asset sector and changes in financial markets for consumers, investors, businesses, and equitable economic growth. The Order also encourages regulators to ensure sufficient oversight and safeguard against any systemic financial risks posed by digital assets.
  • Protect U.S. and Global Financial Stability and Mitigate Systemic Risk by encouraging the Financial Stability Oversight Council to identify and mitigate economy-wide (i.e., systemic) financial risks posed by digital assets and to develop appropriate policy recommendations to address any regulatory gaps.
  • Mitigate the Illicit Finance and National Security Risks Posed by the Illicit Use of Digital Assets by directing an unprecedented focus of coordinated action across all relevant U.S. Government agencies to mitigate these risks. It also directs agencies to work with our allies and partners to ensure international frameworks, capabilities, and partnerships are aligned and responsive to risks.
  • Promote U.S. Leadership in Technology and Economic Competitiveness to Reinforce U.S. Leadership in the Global Financial System by directing the Department of Commerce to work across the U.S. Government in establishing a framework to drive U.S. competitiveness and leadership in, and leveraging of digital asset technologies. This framework will serve as a foundation for agencies and integrate this as a priority into their policy, research and development, and operational approaches to digital assets.
  • Promote Equitable Access to Safe and Affordable Financial Services by affirming the critical need for safe, affordable, and accessible financial services as a U.S. national interest that must inform our approach to digital asset innovation, including disparate impact risk. Such safe access is especially important for communities that have long had insufficient access to financial services.  The Secretary of the Treasury, working with all relevant agencies, will produce a report on the future of money and payment systems, to include implications for economic growth, financial growth and inclusion, national security, and the extent to which technological innovation may influence that future.
  • Support Technological Advances and Ensure Responsible Development and Use of Digital Assets by directing the U.S. Government to take concrete steps to study and support technological advances in the responsible development, design, and implementation of digital asset systems while prioritizing privacy, security, combating illicit exploitation, and reducing negative climate impacts.
  • Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) by placing urgency on research and development of a potential United States CBDC, should issuance be deemed in the national interest. The Order directs the U.S. Government to assess the technological infrastructure and capacity needs for a potential U.S. CBDC in a manner that protects Americans’ interests. The Order also encourages the Federal Reserve to continue its research, development, and assessment efforts for a U.S. CBDC, including development of a plan for broader U.S. Government action in support of their work. This effort prioritizes U.S. participation in multi-country experimentation, and ensures U.S. leadership internationally to promote CBDC development that is consistent with U.S. priorities and democratic values.

Which now brings the climate scam into the discussion. What has digital money to do with climate? Lots.

If I've consumed my "climate allotment" of gasoline this month I could be prevented from using “my” digital “money,” to fill my tank. You didn't think a "climate lockdown" would be voluntary, did you? The jet set wouldn't trust us to stay home, even after so many millions of us voluntarily did so for "two weeks to flatten the curve," wore one mask or two, and agitated against, and sometimes attacked, our fellow human beings for not going along with the crowd.

So you were on your way to Yellowstone and now neither can continue nor return home with the kids? Sorry! Buy a steak for supper tonight? But you had one two weeks ago! Your commute uses so much gasoline you'll need to move to an apartment near a mass transit station in the inner city? It's for the common good. You run a feedlot and can't buy feed for your hundreds of heads of cattle? Oh, well. You need to restock your ammunition? LOL.

They're coming for us, too. Once we all are chipped and our travel and spending controlled, the “emergencies” will be over. None of this has ever been about a virus or the weather. It's always been about destroying the middle class, our representative governments, and the liberty have convinced ourselves we have. We don't.

"Papers, please!" to travel our world, and needing the government's permission to spend our own money—the fruits of our own labor—are but the end of the beginning of global totalitarianism. These are why we are, and why you should be, Against the Great Reset.

The Great 'Global Warming' Hoax Refuses to Die

Insistence not only that the earth is getting warmer due to the actions of mankind, but that this will or even can result in catastrophic warming, permeates Western governments, media, entertainment, corporations and academia. This is an increasingly expensive hoax. The “follow the science” crowd, scientists dependent on government largess for grant funding and elites on trend-following for status, refuses to accept actual science, so the average voter, educated only by a biased media, continues to go along with it and insist all others do, as well.

The facts are, Earth has not warmed since 1997. More CO2 is expelled each year, yet no warming has resulted. This is partly due to the fact that the greenhouse theory is nonsense.

Detailed information on air temperature and CO2 levels disproves that a rise in CO2 will cause a rise in temperature. The core samples from EPICA Dome C ice core on the Antarctic Plateau establish that temperature rises first and CO2 level follow in a lagging manner.

Sure it can.

If the Greenhouse theory were correct (it's not), CO2 would drive temperature. In fact, the opposite is the case. It may well be that CO2, the bogeyman of the Klimate Kult, the gas we are closing factories, starving and unemploying people, and shuttering economies to reduce, is the same gas responsible for the cooling of the past few decades.

A recent study by the Naval Research Laboratory showed “the biggest contraction in the thermosphere in at least 43 years.” The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, announced that the thermosphere shrank by thirty percent because of a sharp drop in radiation from the sun. Whatever the media and future historians call the coming solar minimum, it may indeed be very cold.

It might be that terminating fertilizer production and natural gas in the name of fighting a man-made "global warming" that doesn’t exist will ensure that farmers on an already-cooling Earth produce even less food, ensuring even greater starvation.

NASA’s forecast for the next solar cycle (25) reveals it will be the weakest of the last 200 years. Perhaps this will not be as deep as the Maunder Minimum or the Dalton Minimum. Perhaps. Earth’s oceans store most of the planet’s heat. They may be cooling. As the oceans cool, the air circulating above them, and drawing heat from them – which is how hurricanes are formed – will begin to cool. Next thing you know, Amazon is out of ice skates and hot chocolate.

Better yet, just go home.

How do we know the oceans are cooling? NASA sensors. "A map of heat change at depths of 500 meters (top) showed an unrealistically widespread and dramatic cooling of the entire Atlantic Ocean." Along with altering our global temperature data sets to meet the needs of the political establishment, however, NASA is altering the ocean temperature readings, as well: "When the errors had been corrected, the global-scale cooling trend disappeared."

Earth experiences a 100,000-year ice age cycle (an ice-covered earth is far more “normal” than a temperate earth), a 2,200 – 2,400-year climate cycle, a 200-year “Bicentennial Cycle,” a 40-year “Relational Cycle,” and an 11-year “Schwabe Cycle.” (Dark Winter, Casey, 2014). Each of these alters the global climate. Each of these has immeasurably more impact on Earth’s climate than the internal combustion engine or electricity generation or your natural gas stove.

If we “Follow the science,” it may well be that we need to begin moving toward technologies and behaviors that warm the earth. Or at least stop trying to cool it. No one stops an advancing glacier.

Dumb and Dumber, To

Must be the passing years. More things irritate me. For example, the chap at my club’s gym the other day who spent some ninety percent of his time poring over his smart phone. People still wearing masks outside. Then there was the (retired) bishop at my church who had the straightforward job of delivering the sermon at a memorial service for the late Queen Elizabeth. On the throne for seventy years, she had kept her views on political matters to herself. The bishop couldn’t manage it for fifteen minutes. Unmistakably congratulating the new King Charles for his former princely far-sighted views on the environment (go figure), and then clearly signaling his own support for the monarchy, about which there is a lively debate within Australia.

Now I happen to think that Prince Charles’s views on the environment were inane, while agreeing with the bishop that the monarchy has served Australia well. However, whether I agree or disagree is beside the point. The pulpit is for preaching the gospel; and, in this special case, to honour the Queen’s life. It is not for political posturing. Unfortunately, unlike the late Queen, many churchmen are incapable of keeping fittingly shtum. And climate change, in particular, excites their appetites to be heard and seen being virtuous (apropos Matthew 6:5) at whatever cost to Christian good fellowship.

No gas emitted!

From discordance to discourse. I was to be at lunch recently with someone who works within the renewable energy industry (everyone has to earn a living) and yet retains a balanced outlook. We discussed hydrogen harmoniously. Why not. He made the logical point that while blue hydrogen made of natural gas, with CO2 sequestrated, must by definition result in more expensive power than using natural gas directly, green hydrogen faces no such inherent limitation. Thus, conceivably, the price per kilowatt hour of electricity generated using green hydrogen could eventually fall below the corresponding price using natural gas. At the same time, he acknowledged the size of the task and the possibility that it might prove to be infeasible. Indeed, it might.

Cheap green hydrogen. That’s the goal of mining billionaire Andrew Forest in Australia. He’s not alone. He’s part of a global pursuit for a stash of loot; akin to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, if you want to strike a movie parallel. In the movie, if you recall, there was the possibility of only one winner, such was the level of avarice among the competitors. There could be more than one winner in the green-hydrogen stakes. But pointedly not all nations can be the leading exporter of green hydrogen and surely only very few can be among leading exporters. I suspect that a fallacy of composition is afoot. The world isn’t big enough. Be that as it may, notwithstanding the geographical limitations of the world, Australia, according to its governing powers, is on track to be a leader, if not the leader.

Yet, unaccountably, when that esteemed body, the World Economic Forum identified six likely leading candidates for producing green hydrogen, Australia was missing. There was China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Come on guys. Where’s Australia? A mere afterthought, as it happens. Appended among Chile, Namibia and Morocco, et al.

But surely, that can’t be right? It was only in September this year that an international conference on green hydrogen was held in Australia’s so-called Sunshine State. Plenty of sun and wide-open spaces in Queensland to plant solar and wind farms in order to power electrolysis; lots of water up north too. Also, I misspoke, pardon my slip. It wasn’t a mere “conference” but a “summit” no less. Hydrogen Connect Summit, it was called. Henry Kissinger comes to mind. There you have it. Australia is surely at the epicentre of the green hydrogen revolution.

Suitable for a "green energy" summit.

Not so fast. I searched. Quickly found summits everywhere; not a conference in sight. The FT [Financial Times] Hydrogen Summit in London in June; the World Hydrogen Energy Summit in India, coming in October; the World Hydrogen Summit in the Netherlands in May; the Asia-Pacific Hydrogen Summit in December 2021; the Hydrogen Shot Summit, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy in August/September 2021. No doubt there’s more.

All appear to be part of a chronological series of summits; more planned for 2023. "Summit," as presently defined in the dictionary, is clearly inadequate to encompass the modern-day renewable-energy world. Need a new twist. Let’s say, meetings of government apparatchiks and rent-seekers; particularly in the cause of obtaining taxpayer handouts to fund a fanciful green-hydrogen future.

It's hard to get reliable evidence on relative costs and prices of different hues of hydrogen. There is much noise and vested interest. I prefer to rely on those with a current stake in the game. Santos is Australia’s largest producer of natural gas. Here is its CEO Kevin Gallagher at a conference in June:

If we look at current prices in Australia, hydrogen made in Moomba from natural gas with carbon capture and storage would be about $14 per gigajoule before transport. Green hydrogen made at Port Kembla would be at least $38 per gigajoule before transport – a price Australian manufacturers could not pay.

This price differential quoted by Gallagher is in line with other estimates (e.g., an EIA estimate) which suggest that green hydrogen costs about three times that of blue hydrogen. Now those favouring green hydrogen claim that its cost will fall steeply over time as a result of technological breakthroughs and scale. The first is nothing more than wishful thinking. The second, debatable; when producing green hydrogen at scale is the essence of its predicament. But we’re missing something. We’re comparing dumb with dumberer.

In the ten years from 2011-12 to 2020-21, thus leaving aside this year’s artificial spike, wholesale natural gas prices in Sydney averaged a little over A$6 per gigajoule. Why pay $14 for blue, never mind $38 for green, when you can have it au naturel for single-digit dollars; and especially so, if drilling and fracking were undemonized? That’s the question lost to your average bishop and prince who are gung-ho for green and damn the cost to the hoi polloi.

'The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe'

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Canada recently begging Justin Trudeau for Liquified Natural Gas. “Canada is our partner of choice,” said Scholz, adding “we hope that Canadian LNG will play a major role” in his country's attempt to wean itself off Russian energy.

Trudeau was characteristically dismissive, saying there has “never been a strong business case” for exporting Canadian LNG to Europe. Of course, he was also letting himself off the hook for his government's entrenched anti-resource-sector policies: Canada currently has not one single LNG active export terminal, and Canada's regulatory framework is responsible for the outright rejection of sixteen of the eighteen proposed terminal construction projects since Trudeau took power. In any event, Scholz had to content himself with a far less value hydrogen trade agreement.

Humiliating, but what else could he do? Beggars can't be choosers, and Germany is very much a beggar. As we've discussed before, Germany's mad environmentalist politicians pushed the country into transitioning to "renewable" energy sources which don't produce anywhere near the amount of power necessary to run a first world country, let alone the largest economy in Europe. The only way to make the transition "work" was to import large amounts of Russian gas to make up the difference. Now they're trying to break their reliance on that so as to comply with Western sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and it isn't going well.

And Russia knows it -- that's why they've cut down natural gas flows to Germany by 60 percent, blaming mechanical problems while ostentatiously burning $10 million worth of natural gas per day at the mouth of the Nord Stream pipeline rather than sending it to Germany. It's their way of reminding the Germans who really needs whom. Putin can afford to cut them out because western sanctions have contributed to a worldwide energy scarcity, driving up prices significantly to nobody's benefit but Russia's.

The story is much the same throughout the continent -- in Poland people have been lining up in their cars for multiple days in the hopes of buying rationed coal to get them through the next several months (the E.U. has also embargoed Russian coal imports). The manager of Finland's power grid has begun telling the country to "prepare for shortages this winter." The British were recently informed that their heat and energy costs would increase by 80 percent as of October 1, and their national grid managers, too, have begun to talk more about shortages than cost.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo recently said that Europe could be looking at ten years worth of tough winters, as far as heat and power were concerned. Dutch energy prices are currently sitting at "15 times the average for this time of the year," according to Bloomberg. Italy, which is also heavily dependent on Russian energy, is already on the brink of a debt crisis -- what will their economy look like after months of rolling black-outs, frozen pipes, and freezing people?

Sir Edward Grey in 1915: déjà vu vu all over again.

French President Emmanuel Macron speaking of the difficult months ahead, asked his countrymen to “accept paying the price for our freedom and our values,” referring to the cost of Europe's unreservedly supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Andrew Stuttaford rightly points out that "European voters are... entitled to wonder why they should continue to support politicians who left them so exposed to Russian blackmail in the first place." He's got that right -- this crisis has been brought about almost entirely by a western elite who cared more about rubbing elbows with Greta Thunberg and her comrades than about their national interests or the welfare of their countrymen.

It looks like they're about to get their reward.

Piercing the Electric Car Fantasy

Electric cars are having a big moment right now, with the supercilious wonderboy of the Biden administration Pete Buttigieg proclaiming last week that we could escape the pain at the gas pump if more people could “access” electric cars (EVs). Very telling that he chose to say “access” rather than “afford” electric cars, because without the $7,500 tax credit, very few middle-class people can afford to buy an electric car. And very few middle-class people do: the lion’s share of “clean energy” subsidies are captured by high-income households.

But press beyond the typical economic illiteracy of leftists like Buttigieg who think having the government pay billions in subsidies makes something “cheaper,” and note that electrons aren’t printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve like our fast-depreciating currency. With electricity rates rising fastest in those places that have overemphasized “renewable” energy such as California or Germany, it's not clear that consumers will save much by driving a more expensive electric car and paying higher utility rates. And that’s if you can still fill it up with electrons whenever you want to. During recent power crunches, which are threatening to become endemic in the U.S. under the current policies of the Biden apparatchiks, grid operators have asked EV owners not to charge their vehicles in the evening, when power demand is highest and the time of day when most working people will want to charge their cars.

The truth hurts.

Right now, electric vehicles make up about 1 percent of America’s car fleet. If they pose challenges for the electric grid already, what will the challenges look like if the EV fleet reaches 50 percent of the auto fleet as Biden proposes? No wonder Elon Musk says we’ll need to expand electric power generation by 30 percent or more to meet the demand of a larger EV fleet on the road. And yet it is supremely uncouth to point out that electrons for EV batteries are generated mostly from fossil fuels right now, and thus EVs may not deliver a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when a proper life-cycle analysis is done.

Economist Mark Perry notes that nearly two-thirds of current U.S. electricity is generated by coal and natural gas, and the figure rises to 86 percent if you include nuclear power, which environmentalists irrationally hate and are trying to eliminate. When you raise this problem, you are met with a hail of green indignation about how we’re starting on an “incredible transition” to a carbon-free energy future (a phrase Biden and energy secretary Jennifer Granholm have both used repeatedly with the unsettling grin of the chiliastic fanatic). “EVs are just an early step toward the carbon-free nirvana, which is just a few hundred thousand more windmills and square miles of solar power away!”

A recent little-noticed report from Volvo punctures this green myth, even though the very green Volvovians try very hard to obscure this conclusion. The report notes what a number of neutral analysts have pointed out for some time now: EVs are more material-intensive than old-fashioned gasoline-powered cars, requiring more steel, aluminum, copper, and other rare earth minerals and specialty products like magnets that must be mined (which environmentalists oppose) and require an energy-intensive process to manufacture into shiny EVs. And that’s before you get to the huge quantity of lithium needed for the batteries.

Where "clean energy" comes from: lithium mining in Zimbabwe.

Thus it is eye-popping when Volvo admits that the carbon footprint for the manufacturing of its C40 Recharge electric car is 70 percent higher than its comparable internal combustion version of the car (the XC40). But not to worry, says Volvo: you’ll make up the higher manufacturing emissions when you drive the emission-free EV far enough.

How far? Kudos to Volvo for calculating that: at the world’s average electricity sourcing today, a C40 driver would need to drive his car 68,000 miles to reach a break-even carbon footprint with a gasoline-powered model. The average American drives about 14,000 miles a year, and thus would need to drive his Volvo EV almost five years before reaching a lower carbon footprint. What if we had a grid that was 100 percent wind- or solar-powered? Volvo calculates that an EV driver would still need to drive 30,000 miles before reaching a carbon-footprint breakeven point with a gasoline car.

It is all a ruse anyway. If electric vehicles drop in price and effectiveness, which may be possible with enough brute-force engineering, you can expect environmentalists to turn against them, by noting the huge environmental footprint to make them and the human-rights problems of child labor in Africa mining all the cobalt EVs need. They did it before with natural gas, which environmentalists embraced back in the aughts (2000-2010) as a “bridge fuel” when they thought they could bash coal with gas, and turned on a dime when natural gas became cheap and plentiful. They’ll do the same with electric cars someday.

Nationalize 'Big Oil'? Are You Crazy?

Since the Biden regime is busy reviving every bad idea from the late 1970s such as stagflation, the energy crisis, price controls, and weak foreign policy, it was inevitable that one of the worst ideas from that era is also trying to make a comeback: nationalizing “big oil.”

Back in the 1970s the proposal to nationalize the oil industry found support from some otherwise sober-minded figures such as Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, while today the idea is being flogged mostly by predictably radical figures such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and deep green climate alarmists, such as William S. Becker. But with President Joe Biden, surrounded in the White House by true believers in the climate mania, menacing the oil industry with demagogic charges of “profiteering,” it is not hard to see the idea gaining traction with the progressive left desperate to avoid electoral disaster in November.

And help us freeze to death.

Back in the 1970s, the premise behind nationalizing “big oil” was that the federal government could manage oil production better than private industry in the interest of consumers by stopping “profiteering” and smoothing out production epicycles. The proposal never got very far for the simple reason that most Americans didn’t think the same people who run the Post Office monopoly would be competent at running the oil industry. The record of foreign nations that have government-owned and run oil industries is pathetic. Consider for example the 75 percent decline of Venezuela’s oil production since Hugo Chavez expropriated private and foreign oil companies. The steady decline in production of Mexico’s ample oil reserves under Pemex finally prompted Mexico to open its oil industry to foreign private companies.

It is an unappreciated fact that over 90 percent of the world’s oil reserves are government-owned, rather than privately owned, and this contributes to instability in the long-wave oil price cycles. It is not the oil majors that manipulate oil for political reasons; it is governments. The world and the oil market would be better off if it privatized oil resources.

The argument today is quite different. Writing in The Hill, Becker deserves credit for being explicit: his purpose is nationalizing oil companies is to put them out of business: nationalizing the oil industry “would allow the government to manage the industry’s drawdown, a process the private sector is ignoring... The federal government typically nationalizes companies to save them. In this case, it must nationalize Big Oil to save us all from a future we don’t want.” Translation: the oil industry isn’t committing suicide fast enough to suit the environmental fundamentalists.

Windfall profits? What windfall profits?

To be sure, the major oil companies invited some of this with their ill-considered pledges to be “carbon-neutral” by 2050, no doubt thinking that the latest climate policy euphemism for “we don’t really mean it”—“net-zero emissions”—leaves plenty of wiggle room for creative emissions accounting. Rather than thinking they could appease the climate campaign with these virtue signals, they’d be better off straightforwardly defending their industry in the manner of Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services. Wright argues: “If you look at the bigger picture, our industry causes a dime of damage to the world and a dollar of benefit. The benefits versus the costs are enormously larger.” Or the oil industry could simply cite all of the official international government forecasts that conclude that the planet will still depend substantially on oil, natural gas, and coal in 2050.

The plight of Europe since the outbreak of the Ukraine War shows the folly of suppressing our own oil and gas sector and making ourselves wholly dependent again on foreign suppliers to fill the gap when “green” energy inevitably falls short of its extravagant (and extravagantly expensive) promises. Europe is already looking for face-saving ways to back away from its sanctions against Russian oil and gas while cranking up coal power, the most hated energy source. Germany faces a non-trivial possibility of running out of natural gas next winter. Meanwhile President Biden is groveling cap-in-hand before the oil sheiks of the Middle East, who may be no more inclined than Putin to help out the person who the day before, in the case of Saudi Arabia, labeled them human rights monsters. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize how much worse off the U.S. would be if we forcibly shut down our own oil companies.

"Fracking Damages Our Beer." OK, then!

To the contrary of claims that the oil industry is reaping “obscene” profits, we should entertain the proposition that the industry needs much bigger profits. It is tedious, but necessary for the slow learners on the left, to repeat some elementary facts about the oil industry. Its profit margin is close to the average for all manufacturing companies (and less than half the profit margin for tech companies like Apple), and often sees its profit margin collapse in the regular epicycles of global oil prices. Given that the Biden Administration and woke Wall Street have been constricting the oil industry’s access to capital, the industry is more reliant than ever on generating internal capital—not only for continued exploration and production, but for the investment necessary to develop new technologies that actually mitigates emissions, such as carbon sequestration or carbon air capture.

The oil majors, especially ExxonMobil and Chevron, did push back politely against Biden’s oil demagoguery. Chevron was the most candid: “Unfortunately, what we have seen since January 2021 are policies that send a message that the Administration aims to impose obstacles to our industry delivering energy resources the world needs.” If they really want to make progressive heads explode, they should follow up with the argument that they need larger profits.

'Green Energy'? Let's Do the Math

Rather than argue climate politics and ideology, let’s look at math, the language of the universe. Americans own approximately 270 million private gasoline vehicles (GVs) and drive 3.2 trillion miles per year, consuming 123 billion gallons of gasoline.  Why? Because we want to. Because we (still) are free to do what and go as and where we want. Democrats don’t like this. They prefer that we little people live in little boxes wedged-in with a hundred other little boxes, next to the (subsidized) light rail and the (un-air-conditioned) workplace and the (un-air-conditioned) grocery store selling bugs instead of food.

President Brandon read from his teleprompter that he wants to build 500,000 EV charging stations. By comparison, our 279 million GVs require only 115,000 “charging” (gas) stations. “Charging” a GV for the next 400 miles takes about 10 minutes. Absent fast chargers, charging an EV for the next 400 miles can take up to eight hours.  Spending less time per person charging requires having more stations – about four times more. How much CO2 will be expelled into the atmosphere to build this costly infrastructure? As with windmills, arguably more than using them will reduce.

America generates annually, using 99 percent traditional power sources (hydro, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium) about four trillion kilowatt hours (Kwh) of electricity to power our grid and run our homes, offices, stores, internet, etc. NOT in charging 270 million EVs. The additional one percent of electricity generation comes from small-scale solar. The EPA has created a metric, “MPGe,” for EVs. An EV will use 33.7 Kwh of electricity to travel as far as a GV on one gallon of gasoline. Replacing 123 billion gallons of gasoline will require four trillion Kwh, or double what the nation generates and uses today. See the problem? California can’t even keep the lights on today.

Not as easy as it looks.

Let’s add physics to math. How does the electricity we use get to a charging station, whether commercial or at our home? Electrons – electricity – travel in the vacuum of free space at the speed of light, which is the speed of electromagnetic radiation, of which light is a frequency. This speed is three million meters, or about 186,272 miles, per second. Through wire here on earth the electrons travel more slowly, but the speed of the electrical charge moving through a wire is nearly the same as in free space.

The transmission wires from a power plant to an outlet are not batteries; no charge is “held” in them to be used when turning on a light switch or plugging in an EV. The instant the switch is flipped to charge an EV and apply that load to the circuit, that electrical charge is created by releasing water at the dam, burning coal, natural gas or oil, or using the heat of fission at a nuclear plant.

What’s the point? If 270 million cars are sitting at home plugged-in overnight for their change, how much sun is shining? How much wind is blowing? None, and not much. As noted previously, the planet lacks the elements and minerals, and certainly the mining capacity, to create the amount of battery storage required to store all the energy hitting the earth daily from the sun to charge our vehicles overnight.

[A] rough conclusion is that getting all of our electricity from wind, solar and batteries would consume around 70 percent of all of the copper currently mined in the world, 337 percent of global nickel production, 3,053 percent of the world’s total cobalt production, 355 percent of the U.S.’s iron output, and 284 percent of U.S. steel production. Along with unfathomable quantities of concrete–which, by the way, off-gases CO2.

Plugging in the car, closing that circuit, requires that the electricity is created at that instant. Simply – this cannot happen with “sustainable” electricity generation and storage. It is mathematically impossible to replace America’s GVs with EVs and retain anything close to our rate of progress or standard of living. It also is culturally impossible; why do you think the elites have been attacking Western Culture?

Been around for thousands of years.

Economists talk about removing friction from the economy. Removing economic friction ostensibly is why we are going to (be forced to) go cashless, though the reality for that forcing may be entirely different. Moving to EVs will add friction to our everyday lives, to food and material consumption, to transportation, to the entire supply chain and the variety and quantities of goods and services we have come to expect and which all our jobs are designed to extract, produce, move, sell and dispose of. Removing friction aids progress; adding friction reduces progress.

Progress is the more productive use of natural and human resources, including energy. If we want to consume fewer resources, to use less energy, we need more progress...  and more electricity.

This seems to be a conundrum. Do we use less energy shopping online than going to a dozen stores around town on a Saturday? Sure. But do you know how much electricity the data centers hosting our online shopping used over a decade ago…?

In 2010, over 10 percent of electricity in the U.S. was due to computer and IT equipment usage…  assorted US data centers use a collective 7000 megawatts… ; this is more power than is used by the State of Mississippi.

We need electricity to create and maintain our standard of living, to continue to progress. “Sustainable” energy cannot replace hydro, fossil and nuclear, let alone double it. We can neither sustain our current standard of living nor advance it without more energy. This doesn’t factor-in the developing world’s need for more energy to achieve equity in living standards with the first world.

Can we generate the additional electricity we need to continue our current, and future-desired, standard of living? Of course. Can we do so and reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere (which may not be necessary at all, given that the CO2 levels have increased for years without warming)? Yes. How? Nuclear. No other generation capability can do so. Nuclear is such a good idea that even the founder of Greenpeace is all for it. It’s pretty hard to refer to him as an “anti-environmentalist.” But the left won’t allow nuclear, and our rulers don’t want us to have the freedom it provides.

Only way this works, greenies.

Friction – the Green Dream – is anti-progress. Which makes it anti-employment, anti-prosperity, anti-humanity, anti-liberty, anti-freedom, anti-natural resource and anti-future. The only people supporting adding this friction are those not understanding the ramifications, and those not having children so who do not care about the future. The former need to be educated and the latter ignored. The Green Dream is cultural and civilizational suicide. Because math.

Our elites know this. They aren’t stupid. The also aren’t replacing their motorcades with EVs, their seaside homes with inland apartments, and their steaks with bugs. Because they aren’t stupid. The Klimate Kult isn’t about the environment, the planet, the climate. It’s about control.

The Green Dream is about getting us in on the plot to destroy liberty and enable tyranny by brainwashing us to vote for our own demise. To destroy prosperity and spread poverty. To destroy the educated, productive middle class on which civilization depends.

Bernie Sanders may remark that we don’t need one thousand different kinds of deodorant that capitalism can provide and Marxism can’t, but I’m not at all sure I want a government that can’t win a war, can’t keep the homeless off the streets, can’t stop Capitol Cops from rioting against and murdering peaceful citizens, can’t stop BLM from burning down our cities and assassinating law enforcement officials, can’t stop meth and heroin junkies from shooting-up in the streets, can’t stop “teachers” from “teaching” 6-yr-olds how to masturbate, can’t stop pedophiles from attacking our children, can’t police our own border, can’t stop printing money to repair the damage from their last money-printing… telling me I can’t drive my GV to Yosemite or to a steak house.

Do you?

Practical Solutions to Pretend Problems

Let us assume, for the space of at least one column, that your not-so-humble correspondent agrees with the proposition that mankind’s increasing use of fossil fuels has released an unhealthy amount of heat trapping compounds into the atmosphere – primarily in the form of carbon dioxide.

People from Al Gore to Leonardo DiCaprio to Greta Thunberg cry that we are in the midst of a “climate crisis.” A few years ago AOC declared that we had only twelve years left to fix the “crisis” or else mankind was doomed. Just about every Democrat, and a disturbing number of Republicans, accept this point of view.

I don’t agree that we are in the midst of a “climate crisis,” along with millions of fellow scientists and a great many non-scientists. But let’s assume – for the sake of argument – that we’re all wrong. Let’s put aside our personal risk assessment and say that the “climate crisis” is real, that the world is in grave danger and that if we don’t do something to reduce carbon dioxide emissions substantially and immediately, there will be hell to pay. How would we react?

Apocalypse soon. Maybe. Some day.

If this is truly a “crisis”, shouldn’t we be doing everything possible to solve it? If a fire breaks out in your home, you do everything you can to put it out as quickly as possible. You grab a fire extinguisher. You turn on a garden hose. You use a rug to smother the flames. Etc.

You don’t do nothing. Sure, you can call the fire department, but if there are actual things you can do to mitigate the damage before firefighters arrive, without putting your life in danger, you do them. Using the fire extinguisher, or garden hose, or rug might result in some property damage that you will have to clean up later, but so what? Better cleaning up a mess than rebuilding your home once it’s a charred pile of rubble.

Were the climate crisis as bad as Al, Leo, Greta et al. assure us it is, wouldn’t you think they would do anything and everything to combat it? There a lot of actions individuals can take and a lot of programs that politicians can advocate that could have and still can make massive reductions in fossil fuel use. They are easy and unlike most actions that "climate change" alarmists demand of us, they are not costly to average citizens.

You rarely, if ever, hear about these alternatives in the Mainstream Media or among politicians who buy into the “climate crisis” narrative. The universal message on the Left (and all messages on the Left these days are universal – dissenters will be cancelled) is that all energy generation moving forward must be “renewable” and thus “sustainable." Practical and achievable are not features at issue.

Their formula involves a mix of wind power, which is unreliable; solar power, which is spectacularly unreliable outside of a very limited number of locations; and large-scale battery-storage, which has moved from the realm of “insanely impractical and expensive” to “crazily unreasonable and costly” after decades of research.

Not there when you need it.

Maybe there are other things we could do that could meaningfully reduce carbon dioxide emissions? Maybe some of those things are a lot less expensive than the windmill-solar -battery approach? Maybe they’re even practical? Let’s consider a couple of practical actions that alarmists could have and still can advocate if they truly believe that the “climate crisis” is real.

Like most of my fellow boomers, I grew up without air conditioning. Yes, those 100 + degree days in July and August sucked, but we got through them. People can deal with heat. If every member of the Sierra Club, every liberal celebrity and every Democrat pledged never to use air conditioning again, the savings in energy and the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the United States would be huge. So, why aren’t they taking this hit to save the planet?

In general, most fossil fuel generated power is produced using one of two thermodynamic “cycles”: the Rankine Cycle, which uses the heat generated by combustion of a fossil fuel to turn water into steam, which then spins a turbine to generate power, and the Brayton Cycle, which uses the expansion of gas to directly spin a turbine to generate power.

A boiler uses the Rankine Cycle. Burning a fuel such as coal or natural gas creates heat. That heat is transferred to pipes through which flows liquid water. The liquid water is vaporized to steam, under pressure. The steam then carries enough energy to spin a turbine that produces power.

Gas turbines, like jet engines, use the Brayton Cycle. Burning a fuel such as natural gas or kerosene makes the fuel expand in volume significantly. This expansion produces enough energy to directly spin a turbine that generates energy.

Kids today...

Both the Rankine Cycle and the Brayton Cycle are about 30 -35 percent efficient. That is, for every 100 units of energy you put into the system, you get about 1/3 the energy back in the form of useful power. But, that math changes when you combine the two cycles. There are plants in the U.S. that burn natural gas to generate power through the Brayton Cycle, and then use the heat of the expanded gases to spin a turbine generator. This heat is used to generate steam from liquid water, which spins another turbine, effectively taking advantage of the Rankine Cycle.

A plant that uses a the Brayton Cycle to spin a turbine directly and the Rankine Cycle to spin a steam turbine is called a “combined-cycle plant.” This type of plant is about twice as efficient as any other type of fossil-fueled power plant. An administration that seriously wanted to reduce domestic fossil fuel use would have subsidized and advanced reliable combined-cycle power plants rather than shoving unreliable, expensive, “sustainable” forms of power generation like wind and solar down our throats.

But, we know that the “Climate Crisis” charlatans are not even close to serious about their messaging. If they were, they would have introduced the two simple concepts above into the discussion. If they were, they would have also talked about the roles of Red China and nuclear power in any energy discussion—ideas we’ll discuss in a future column.