Amerika

Many of us support all things green, but insist that they produce results instead of merely sabotaging our society in order to please the contrarians. On the other hand, the contrarians have only one agenda, which is absolute individualism with subsidies and no consequences to speak of, so they are not interested in results.

If we were serious about avoiding The Ecocide that is going to terminate most life on this planet through human activities, we would cut back on urbanization, avoiding shipping products across the globe, end immigration, and slash welfare so that we stopped supporting excess people.

These things however clash with the contrarian vision of Utopia that they promise simply so that they have a reason to hate what exists now, and so they are a threat to anyone who wants to stay on the good side of the contrarians, which means that these alternatives are widely ignored.

However, we are seeing their necessity because of the failure of green energy to provide the stability that we need to remain a functional society:

Ercot says Texas set a new September record for peak demand on Wednesday, which follows 10 records this summer. Don’t blame a warming climate. The problem is that Texas’s booming population and economy have caused electricity demand to grow faster than the reliable supply—emphasis on the reliable.

The state’s refineries, manufacturing plants and data centers need huge amounts of power. Texas produces 10 times as much solar power as it did five years ago. An estimated 7.7 gigawatts of solar power capacity will be installed this year—about 9% of the state’s peak demand on Wednesday. Renewables at times can generate 40% of the state’s power.

But neither solar nor wind provides reliable power around the clock. Solar predictably wanes during the late afternoon, and the state doesn’t have anywhere close to enough large-scale batteries to make up the shortfall. So as usual Texas on Wednesday leaned on natural-gas plants to ramp up, though this still wasn’t enough.

Texas can generate all of its energy with natural gas, ideally in addition to its nuclear power plants and where appropriate, solar panels, windmills, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy. If it sent home its illegals and dropped all welfare activities, its usage would drop radically as its size decreased.

Instead we get Jimmy Carter style feelgood activities that follow what the Leftist voters think is great because they read it in The New York Times and see it on CNN. These are symbolic activities, driven by social pressure that reflects the optics and not the reality, and because they are anti-realistic, they do not work so well in reality.

We are following the 1970s playbook as well by enriching the middle east, who are riding a surge of oil and gas wealth now that the West has taken itself out with fanciful green dreams:

Middle East monarchies eager for global influence are having a moment on the world’s financial stage. They are flush with cash from an energy boom at the very time traditional Western financiers—hampered by rising interest rates—have retreated from deal making and private investing.

The region’s sovereign-wealth funds have become the en vogue ATM for private equity, venture capital and real-estate funds struggling to raise money elsewhere.

Naturally this shifts the balance of power in the world and will lead to further instability which will provoke calls for American intervention. Over and over again, democracy repeats its cycles: the 1860s or 1960s are followed by a decade of chasing illusions which creates instability that will propel future conflicts.

Tags: energy, middle east, oil and gas