What Happened to the U.S. Supply of Energy?

Energy shortages throughout vast stretches of the U.S. are not due to weather, which can be expected to be cold in the winter. They are because of poor planning and recklessly implemented ideology. Michael Shellenberger explains:

No individual person has been more influential than New Yorker author Bill McKibben and 350.org. McKibben and 350.org activists have generated large amounts of news media publicity for their pro-scarcity agenda by blocking natural gas from being piped from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and other states to power plants that could keep people across the United States warm this Christmas.

It’s not just 350.org but also groups like Sierra Club and Earthjustice that have used the court system to block natural gas pipelines.

In July 2020, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy announced that they had canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have piped natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia and North Carolina.

Dominion and Duke blamed a decision by a U.S. District Court judge in Montana for overturning a federal pipeline permiting process that had been used for decades to allow oil and gas pipelines to cross wetlands and bodies of water

Climate activists also blocked a proposed, $7 billion, 300-mile long Mountain Valley Pipeline to bring natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had fought for the pipeline but despite his remarkable power in Congress, as a swing vote, he was unable to overcome resistance by other Democrats. The pipeline is 94 percent complete.

The power of the climate movement in shutting down reliable sources of energy, and natural gas pipelines, comes from its success in persuading a large share of Americans that climate change represents an existential threat.

Continue ReadingWhat Happened to the U.S. Supply of Energy?

Biden’s Incoherent Energy Policy

Biden ran on a loud promise that America would stop using fossil fuels. He also claims to be a big proponent of protecting human rights. Now this:

Biden yesterday lifted oil sanctions on Venezuela, which the U.S. State Department says is a dictatorship that uses the military and violent gangs to engage in “extrajudicial killings,” “forced disappearances,” and “torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” Biden publicly begged the Saudi government to produce more oil during the summer and two weeks ago granted immunity to the prime minister, a son of the king, and a man who US and foreign intelligence services say killed a Washington Post reporter. And, in early June, Biden issued an emergency order for the U.S. to continue importing Chinese solar panels and products from Xinjiang province, where the U.S. State Department says the government is committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims.

Continue ReadingBiden’s Incoherent Energy Policy

Michael Shellenberger’s Concern with Nihilism

Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Michael Shellenberger. The first third of the interview has been released. I highly recommend watching/listening/reading it. Shellenberger once identified as a liberal, but now he declares himself an independent, taking good ideas wherever he finds them and rejecting bad ideas. I agree with much of what he has to say in this part of the interview. Here is an excerpt from the interview where Shellenberger argues that a big part of our problem is nihilism:

Michael: I'm really interested in defending the pillars of civilization and the pillars of civilization are, as I see it, cheap, abundant energy, law and order, and meritocracy. My first book, Apocalypse Never, addresses the attack on abundant and cheap energy. San Fransicko describes the attack on law and order and meritocracy. You start attacking those pillars of civilization and you just don't have a civilization left anymore

Tucker: Can you repeat those?

Michael: Cheap energy, law and order, and meritocracy. All three are under attack in a really systematic way. This is why I find myself as somebody that's traditionally been on the left and is now independent. I see what conservatives are doing and the role of conservatives as important. They have the role of defending civilization. The role of the left has always been to demand change and push for change. And in some cases, I support that. But, right now, you see that the left has gone so far that even more moderate liberals have been radicalized and are undermining the bases of our civilization.

Tucker: But the alternative to civilization — and I've seen glimpses of it a couple of times — is so horrifying. It’s the total domination of the week by the strong. A 15-year-old with an automatic rifle can rape, can do whatever he wants, and you have no power. We spent millennia trying to build an alternative to that and we now have it. Why would you ever want to revert to the 15-year-old with the automatic weapon being in charge?

Michael: That's maybe the most important question of our time. And it's not an academic question.

Tucker: It’s a very practical question! And there are parts of the world where there's no civilization. I have personally seen them so I know. You can just buy a plane ticket and go there if you're interested. Why would anybody want that?

Michael: That is a huge question. I think one question is, “Do the people who are undermining civilization really want that? Do they know what they want?” To some extent, I think they do. But where all of my work has led me, and this is where my third book is going, is that what we're dealing with — and it's a bit of jargon, but I can't figure out how else to say it — a crisis of nihilism, meaning that as people stop believing in traditional religion, as people stop believing in God, they start to adopt new religions.

Nihilism has two meanings that are related. The first is that life has no purpose or value. We're just like animals. We're born, we reproduce, and we die. There's no point to any of it. And so it doesn't really matter what you do. You're not going to be judged at the end of your life to determine whether you go to heaven or hell. So that's the first nihilism. But then this turns people toward a kind of will-to-power. It turns into a desire to feel powerful, which itself is just a kind of hedonism when you get right down to it.... And it’s not just from the radical activists. We see it among elite media basically saying, “Unless we go back to pre-industrial energy sources, we're going to end up in a climate apocalypse.” They've constructed a new apocalyptic religion out of nihilism. I think that is what's driving this crisis of civilization. It’s a crisis of nihilism that arguably began a couple of hundred years ago....

Continue ReadingMichael Shellenberger’s Concern with Nihilism

About the Nord Stream Pipeline

Matt Taibbi comments on the Nord Stream Pipelines:

The massive dual Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany were struck by highly suspicious twin underwater explosions, causing a giant environmental disaster and deepening an already devastating European energy crisis. Reactions from Russian, European, and especially American political protagonists ranged from merely unbelievable to abjectly comic. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tsk-tsked that some unknown not-American actor must have committed a “deliberate act.” Not since Shaggy came out with the one-hit-wonder It Wasn’t Me in 1999, or O.J. launched his hunt for the real killers, has American popular culture seen a less convincing cover story. U.S. officials were long ago on record promising to cut off the pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine, with Joe Biden saying in February, “We will bring an end to it.” When asked how, Biden coyly said, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” The operation, no joke, came in the same week NATO tweeted that ongoing exercises presented “opportunities to test new unmanned systems at sea” (see TWEET HISTORY MAY REMEMBER). A rapid-fire tweet by former Polish Foreign Minister saying, “Thank you, USA” was mysteriously taken down later in the week, inspiring trolls to tease that his hardcore interventionist wife Anne Applebaum made him do it. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits in the U.S. and the U.K. in impressive deadpan argued that Russia had sabotaged its own pipeline, its best and perhaps only source of leverage internationally. The U.K. Spectator for instance suggested Russia did it to “up the ante on the West.” Throughout, three boiling patches of methane, one a kilometer across, poured toxic gases into the atmosphere in an “unprecedented” climate disaster. Fortunately this worries almost no one, since we’re now currently preoccupied with an even bigger fear, of nuclear war.
From Aaron Mate:

Continue ReadingAbout the Nord Stream Pipeline

The Good Intentions of Innumerate Environmentalists

Well-intended innumerate people should not be in charge of government. Michael Schellenberger employs some down-to-earth math to show how pie-in-the-sky and how dangerous some well-meaning environmentalists are. Follow the full thread down to see how a lot of save-the-earth rhetoric is detached from reality because it is detached from the need for more nuclear power.

Continue ReadingThe Good Intentions of Innumerate Environmentalists