Solar and wind are so yesterday. I realize most climate activists haven’t gotten the memo but as grid scale power sources, they are both pretty much toast.
Yes, yes, Scotland and the North Sea, most of the US Southwest, et cetera are indeed exceptions. Thing is, that’s exactly what they are: exceptions. Very few places on Earth have enough solar or wind capacity to use those sources at grid scale. Sure, you can pop solar panels on your house almost anywhere but to be economically viable, even homeowners have to be picky about where their house is located to use solar without just tossing money away. It is much worse at grid scale.
Cheap natural gas was fueling the ‘green revolution’ shell game. We could pretend that scaling up was viable beyond the few exceptions because natural gas was in the background actually doing the heavy lifting. For Europe, that’s over now. No matter how loud you scream about rising temperatures and saving the polar bears human beings are not going to freeze to death just so the bees have a place to live when humanity dies out.
Translation: there isn’t going to be much of an energy crisis. Politicians like their jobs and will do whatever it takes to get prices down including firing up coal plants and building nuclear reactors. The bees will just have to look after themselves. Humanity won’t commit suicide to appease the Climate Gods, whatever those are.
The other thing that happened was the C19 Panicdemic. You can get scared people to believe the sky is falling but only as long as they stay scared. But even sheep only stay scared for so long. Sheep will let wolves walk among them once they get used to them. Human beings may act like sheep sometimes, but we tend to figure things out a bit quicker. And what people are figuring out is not making them trust their governments nor their expert overlords.
That means more and more people are becoming more and more skeptical of all things science. This is a good thing as science is just a methodology and never actually speaks for itself. The human beings that do make the scientific pronouncements are like all others, imperfect. They make mistakes, lie, try to please whoever’s funding them, and just plain get greedy. The curtain has been pulled back and it turns out the Wizard is an old Kansas man with a flair for the dramatic.
There will be a comeback in Act Three – there always is – but the villain is about to get his comeuppance. People aren’t going to be as willing to believe scientific consensus (which is incidentally a logical fallacy) and are going to be even less willing to have their lives disrupted by Chicken Little’s antics. Sure, it will take some time, but Global Warming will go the way of The Population Bomb, a best forgotten bit of hysteria thrown on history’s trash heap.
I know, you’re thinking that it’s just a set back. The Ukrainian War will end and everything will go back to normal. Well, yes, but the wrong normal. We’re heading back to the post-WWII normal where we have ideological and military rivals who aim to reshape the world to their liking. If Russia survives without a collapse (Russia has a collapse cycle and that’s what I suspect is about to happen here) it will lick its wounds and start trying to rebuild its forces for its comeback. If China survives its self-inflicted wounds, it too, will push toward a resurgence.
All that translates into America is done with her navel gazing. The last thirty years have been refocused inward as foreign policy took a back door to domestic with the end of the Cold War. That was fine since there weren’t any serious threats to the US or her allies. Terrorists are serious, that’s true, but a bunch of trained kooks can’t topple a nation-state, let alone a developed one.
Neither Russia nor China is legitimately a superpower – you need a blue water navy for that – but they are also much more than just trained kooks. Both have powerful militaries that are a real threat to many of our allies if not to the US herself.
Yes, I’m talking in terms of the warfare most likely to actually happen, conventional. Nuclear war gets China obliterated and Russia mostly wasted and there’s not a lot of incentive to start wars that get you destroyed. It’s not enough to hurt the US – they need to actually win. Nuclear is an automatic loss.
Personally, I don’t expect either China or Russia to survive the decade as they are now. But Russia is more likely to have a governmental collapse so whatever replaces it could turn out to be a headache. China will very likely experience a full collapse and won’t be a threat to anyone for quite a while after that. The aftermath will be nothing BUT trouble. No, no more navel gazing for us. We’re going to have work to do.
When the world has real problems to deal with, governments don’t need hysteria. That brings us back to the Green movement. As world governments go back to actually doing foreign affairs and worrying about enemies with big militaries, they will lose interest in saving the planet by attempting to suffocate all plant life. Carbon dioxide will go back to being the stuff plants breathe and that you can do really fun science experiments with rather than Public Enemy Number 1. Plants are beginning to breathe a sigh of relief.
Companies, too, start deciding that actually making your shareholders money rather than kowtowing to the crazy-of-the-week is much better for them and their bottom lines. Without the support of governments and corporations with way more cash than common sense, the Green movement is dead in the water. The public was already skeptical and will only grow more so. Without the massive PR campaign to sustain it, climate hysteria goes the way of the dodo.
Sure, governments are good at reviving zombie issues, but that’s in the distant future if it happens at all. People have already caught on that Europe’s energy crisis is self-made. They are NOT happy with their lives being disrupted and having to pay ridiculous power bills because some idiot wanted to power the world with solar and wind. They have also realized that it’s a total shell game – natural gas IS a fossil fuel, after all. Nope, this is not how you build support for your wacko plan to save the planet.
This is how good old fashioned greenbacks destroy the green movement.
Might have been easier to just take a laxative, though.
Edit: 9/12/22 This post was written and scheduled well in advance of the unfortunate passing of Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom. The title seems in poor taste as a result. No offense was intended.
As a matter of policy, Quill Sword refrains from substantive edits after publication that cannot be highlighted as such. Had it been caught in time, the title would have been changed but since the problem was not realized until after publication, the title will remain. We apologize for the poor wording under the circumstances.
Our deepest sympathies to the family.
