“Engineers have always played a leading role in the development of powerful adaptation technology. Engineering education should therefore stay far away from ideology-driven computer models. These models steer them in the wrong direction. That is my message to the Academies of Engineering and the Universities of Technology.”
I’ll take the undeniable power, safety and consistency of technical-based decisions made through reason, data and the scientific method (engineering) over politics, ideology, UN climate models and fact-free emotions any day.
Professor Guus Berkhout has published a challenge to the engineering community, to step up and make the Western energy transition work. He emphasizes that reliable and affordable energy is the key to future prosperity and well-being. So, if the transition fails then the Western world will fall back into poor economies without any power and authority. His opening call is pointed and clear:
“Experienced Engineers must take the lead in the Energy Transition. Green politicians made a big mess of the energy transition and climate scientists encouraged them with their computer models. Putin and Xi JinPing must have watched the self-destruction of the Western World with utter amazement and gratitude. Experienced engineers must pick up the pieces soonest.”
Berkhout says there are actually three distinct challenges, all engineering intensive. One is developing the technology needed for adaptation to climate change, whatever the cause of…
Like the entire #UkraineRussiaWar (real-energy War) isn’t a result of the indolent West’s capitulation to UNreliable ‘green’ energy ideology and it’s, subsequent, TOTAL dependence on Russian fossil-fuels!
Cognitive dissonance on steroids.
Though, completely unsurprising. And, completely by design.
Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com] More doom-laden propaganda, pretending climate theories are facts and so on.
– – –
The UN Secretary General says the rush to use fossil fuels because of the war in Ukraine is “madness” and threatens global climate targets.
The invasion of Ukraine has seen rapid rises in the prices of coal, oil and gas as countries scramble to replace Russian sources, says BBC News.
But Antonio Guterres warns that these short-term measures might “close the window” on the Paris climate goals.
Sea ice optional [image credit: BBC] Not an indicator of supposedly dire global warming this season then? Groans from climate obsessives perhaps. Nothingburgers all round.
– – –
Arctic sea ice appeared to have hit its annual maximum extent on Feb. 25 after growing through the fall and winter, says NASA (via Phys.org).
This year’s wintertime extent is the 10th-lowest in the satellite record maintained by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, one of NASA’s Distributed Active Archive Centers.
“Switching one’s energy dependence from oil supplies to China-controlled electrical energy equipment is foolish, bordering on insane, in strategic terms. Where are the senior security analysts in the US Department of Defense willing to point this out?”
Where are they? They are purposefully and actively weakening America, by design, by authority.
“Build Back Better” isn’t merely a slogan. They mean it.
The problem is, what does “better” actually mean? They haven’t told us yet, just as Marx (to his credit) warned that he had no idea what his theory of Marxism would portend for the future.
We all (now) know how Marxist doctrine has played out since — misery and death for all.
The United States Army has just published its climate strategy. In the foreword, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, holder of a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Williams College and a former civilian employee of the Department of Defense, proudly stated that:
“The army must adapt across our entire enterprise and purposefully pursue greenhouse gas mitigation strategies to reduce climate risks. If we do not take action now, across our installations, acquisition and logistics, and training, our options to mitigate these risks will become more constrained with each passing year.”
One might wonder why, as Russian troops invade the Ukraine and China ceaselessly builds up its air, surface and naval forces, the United States Army is turning its mighty attention to the goal of defeating carbon dioxide emissions. The Army’s former recruiting slogan, “Be…
For those who didn’t panic and remained curious throughout the long two years of the (ongoing) ‘pandemic’, take a bow and enjoy this quality reflection by Author Gabrielle Bauer. Nothing in her story is dissimilar to how sceptics of climate alarm are smeared, vilified, othered, and cancelled. Exact same tactics employed.
•
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.” – H.L. Mencken
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” – C. S. Lewis
“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” — Bertrand Russell
“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” — Bertrand Russell
For the first 62 years of my life, I don’t recall anyone calling me a selfish idiot, much less a sociopath or a mouth-breathing Trumptard. All that changed when Covid rolled in and I expressed, ever so gingerly, a few concerns about the lockdown policies. Here’s a sampling of what the keyboard warriors threw back at me:
Enjoy your sociopathy.
Go lick a pole and catch the virus.
Have fun choking on your own fluids in the ICU.
Name three loved ones that you’re ready to sacrifice to Covid. Do it now, coward.
You went to Harvard? Yeah, right, and I’m God. Last I checked, Harvard doesn’t accept troglodytes.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, something deep inside me—in my soul, if you will—recoiled from the political and public response to the virus. Nothing about it felt right or strong or true. This was not just an epidemiological crisis, but a societal one, so why were we listening exclusively to some select epidemiologists? Where were the mental health experts? The child development specialists? The historians? The economists? And why were our political leaders encouraging fear rather than calm?
The questions that troubled me the most had less to do with epidemiology than with ethics: Was it fair to require the greatest sacrifice from the youngest members of society, who stood to suffer the most from the restrictions? Should civil liberties simply disappear during a pandemic, or did we need to balance public safety with human rights? Unschooled in the ways of online warriors, I assumed the Internet would allow me to engage in “productive discussions” about these issues. So I hopped online, and the rest was hysteria.
Village idiot, flat earther, inbred trash, negative IQ… Let’s just say that my thin skin got the test of a lifetime.
And it wasn’t just me: anyone who questioned the orthodoxy, whether expert or ordinary citizen, got a similar skinburn. In the words of one community physician, who for obvious reasons shall remain anonymous: “Many doctors including myself, along with virologists, epidemiologists and other scientists, advocated a targeted approach and a focus on the most vulnerable cohorts of patients, only to be dismissed as anti-science, tin foil hat kooks, conspiracy theorists, antivax and other equally colorful disparaging labels.”
Early in the game I decided I wouldn’t respond to such insults with more insults—not because I’m especially high-minded, but because mudslinging contests just leave me angry and it’s not fun to walk around angry all day. Instead, I took the shaming on the chin (and still walked around angry).
The Shame Game
The shaming impulse asserted itself right from the start of the pandemic. On Twitter, #covidiot began trending on the evening of March 22, 2020, and by the time the night was over, 3,000 tweets had coopted the hashtag to denounce poor public health practices. When CBS News posted a video of spring breakers partying in Miami, outraged citizens shared the students’ names in their social media networks, accompanied by such missives as “do not give these selfish dumbfucks beds and/or respirators.”
In the early days of the pandemic, when panic and confusion reigned, such indignation could perhaps be forgiven. But the shaming gained momentum and wove itself into the zeitgeist. Also: it didn’t work.
As noted by Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Julia Marcus, “shaming and blaming people is not the best way to get them to change their behavior and actually can be counterproductive because it makes people want to hide their behavior.” Along similar lines, Jan Balkus, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, maintains that shaming can make it harder for people to “acknowledge situations where they may have encountered risk.”
If shaming “covidiots” for their behavior doesn’t accomplish much, you can be sure that shaming people for Wrongthink won’t change any minds. Instead, we heretics simply stop telling the shamers what we’re thinking. We nod and smile. We give them the match point and continue the debate in our own heads.
Gloves Off
For two years I’ve been that person. I’ve smiled politely while dodging insults. To put my interlocutors at ease, I’ve prefaced my heterodox opinions with disclaimers like “I dislike Trump as much as you do” or “For the record, I’m triple-vaxxed myself.”
Just today, I’ll allow myself to drop the pandering and call it as I see it.
To everyone who dumped on me for questioning the shutdown of civilization and calling out the damage it inflicted on the young and the poor: you can take your shaming, your scientific posturing, your insufferable moralizing, and stuff it. Every day, new research knocks more air out of your smug pronouncements.
You told me that without lockdowns, Covid would have wiped out a third of the world, much as the Black Death decimated Europe in the 14th century. Instead, a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the US reduced Covid-19 mortality by an average of 0.2%.
What’s more, long before this study we had good evidence that anything less than a China-style door-welding lockdown wouldn’t do much good. In a 2006 paper, the WHO Writing Group affirmed that “mandatory case reporting and isolating patients during the influenza pandemic of 1918 did not stop virus transmission and were impractical.”
You told me that social interaction is a want, not a need. Well, yes. So is good food. In truth, social isolation kills. As reported in a September 2020 review article published in Cell, loneliness “may be the most potent threat to survival and longevity.” The article explains how social isolation lowers cognitive development, weakens the immune system, and puts people at risk of substance use disorders. And it’s not like we didn’t know this before Covid: in 2017, research by Brigham Young University professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad determined that social isolation accelerates mortality as much as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Her findings splashed the pages of news outlets around the world.
You told me we need not worry about the effects of Covid restrictions on children because kids are resilient—and besides, they had it much worse in the great wars. Meanwhile, the UK saw a 77% increasein pediatric referrals for such issues as self-harm and suicidal thoughts during a 6-month period in 2021, in relation to a similar stretch in 2019. And if that doesn’t shake you up, a World Bank analysis estimated that, in low-income countries, the economic contraction ensuing from lockdown policies led 1.76 children to lose their lives for every Covid fatality averted.
You told me that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, taking your cue from CDC director Rachel Walensky’s proclamation in early 2021, and we all know how well that aged.
You told me I had no business questioning what infectious disease experts were telling us to do. (I’m paraphrasing here. What you actually said was: “How about staying in your lane and shutting the eff up?”) I got my vindication from Dr. Stefanos Kales, another from Harvard Medical School, who warned of the “dangers of turning over public policy and public health recommendations to people who have had their careers exclusively focused on infectious disease” in a recent CNBC interview. “Public health is a balance,” he said. Indeed it is. In a 2001 book called Public Health Law: Power, Duty and Restraint, Lawrence Gostin argued for more systematic assessments of the risks and benefits of public health interventions and more robust protection of civil liberties.
So yeah. I’m upset and your finger-wagging posse left me alienated enough that I had to go looking for new tribes, and in this quest I’ve been rather successful. I have found more kindred spirits than I could ever have imagined, in my city of Toronto and all over the world: doctors, nurses, scientists, farmers, musicians, and homemakers who share my distaste for your grandstanding. Epidemiologists, too. These fine folks have kept me from losing my mind.
So thank you. And get off my lawn.
Author
Gabrielle Bauer Gabrielle divides her time between writing books, articles, and clinical materials for health professionals. She has received six national awards for her health journalism. She has written two books—Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Prize, and Waltzing The Tango, finalist in the Edna Staebler creative nonfiction award—and is working on two more.READ MORE
While we banned plastic straws, Russia drilled and doubled nuclear energy production.
How has Vladimir Putin—a man ruling a country with an economy smaller than that of Texas, with an average life expectancy 10 years lower than that of France—managed to launch an unprovoked full-scale assault on Ukraine?
There is a deep psychological, political and almost civilizational answer to that question: He wants Ukraine to be part of Russia more than the West wants it to be free. He is willing to risk tremendous loss of life and treasure to get it. There are serious limits to how much the U.S. and Europe are willing to do militarily. And Putin knows it.
Missing from that explanation, though, is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe.
Putin knows that Europe produces 3.6 million barrels of oil a day but uses 15 million barrels of oil a day. Putin knows that Europe produces 230 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year but uses 560 billion cubic meters. He knows that Europe uses 950 million tons of coal a year but produces half that.
The former KGB agent knows Russia produces 11 million barrels of oil per day but only uses 3.4 million. He knows Russia now produces over 700 billion cubic meters of gas a year but only uses around 400 billion. Russia mines 800 million tons of coal each year but uses 300.
That’s how Russia ends up supplying about 20 percent of Europe’s oil, 40 percent of its gas, and 20 percent of its coal.
The math is simple. A child could do it.
The reason Europe didn’t have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression—and in fact prevented the U.S. from getting allies to do more—is that it needs Putin’s oil and gas.
The question is why.
How is it possible that European countries, Germany especially, allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War?
Here’s how: These countries are in the grips of a delusional ideology that makes them incapable of understanding the hard realities of energy production. Green ideology insists we don’t need nuclear and that we don’t need fracking. It insists that it’s just a matter of will and money to switch to all-renewables—and fast. It insists that we need“degrowth” of the economy, and that we face looming human “extinction.” (I would know. I myself was once a true believer.)
John Kerry, the United States’ climate envoy, perfectly captured the myopia of this view when he said, in the days before the war, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “could have a profound negative impact on the climate, obviously. You have a war, and obviously you’re going to have massive emissions consequences to the war. But equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus.”
But it was the West’s focus on healing the planet with “soft energy” renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply.
As the West fell into a hypnotic trance about healing its relationship with nature, averting climate apocalypse and worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves.
While Putin expanded Russia’s oil production, expanded natural gas production, and then doubled nuclear energy production to allow more exports of its precious gas, Europe, led by Germany, shut down its nuclear power plants, closed gas fields, and refused to develop more through advanced methods like fracking.
The numbers tell the story best. In 2016, 30 percent of the natural gas consumed by the European Union came from Russia. In 2018, that figure jumped to 40 percent. By 2020, it was nearly 44 percent, and by early 2021, it was nearly 47 percent.
For all his fawning over Putin, Donald Trump, back in 2018, defied diplomatic protocol to call out Germany publicly for its dependence on Moscow. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump said. This prompted Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who had been widely praised in polite circles for being the last serious leader in the West, to say that her country “can make our own policies and make our own decisions.”
The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured.
Europeans—led by figures like Greta Thunberg and European Green Party leaders, and supported by Americans like John Kerry—believed that a healthy relationship with the Earth requires making energy scarce. By turning to renewables, they would show the world how to live without harming the planet. But this was a pipe dream. You can’t power a whole grid with solar and wind, because the sun and the wind are inconstant, and currently existing batteries aren’t even cheap enough to store large quantities of electricity overnight, much less across whole seasons.
In service to green ideology, they made the perfect the enemy of the good—and of Ukraine.
Take Germany.
Green campaigns have succeeded in destroying German energy independence—they call it Energiewende, or “energy turnaround”—by successfully selling policymakers on a peculiar version of environmentalism. It calls climate change a near-term apocalyptic threat to human survival while turning up its nose at the technologies that can help address climate change most and soonest: nuclear and natural gas.
At the turn of the millennium, Germany’s electricity was around 30 percent nuclear-powered. But Germany has been sacking its reliable, inexpensive nuclear plants. (Thunberg called nuclear power “extremely dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming” despite the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change deeming it necessary and every major scientific review deeming nuclear the safest way to make reliable power.)
By 2020, Germany had reduced its nuclear share from 30 percent to 11 percent. Then, on the last day of 2021, Germany shut down half of its remaining six nuclear reactors. The other three are slated for shutdown at the end of this year. (Compare this to nextdoor France, which fulfills 70 percent of its electricity needs with carbon-free nuclear plants.)
Germany has also spent lavishly on weather-dependent renewables—to the tune of $36 billion a year—mainly solar panels and industrial wind turbines. But those have their problems. Solar panels have to go somewhere, and a solar plant in Europe needs 400 to 800 times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants to make the same amount of power. Farmland has to be cut apart to host solar. And solar energy is getting cheaper these days mainly because Europe’s supply of solar panels is produced by slave labor in concentration camps as part of China’s genocide against Uighur Muslims.
The upshot here is that you can’t spend enough on climate initiatives to fix things if you ignore nuclear and gas. Between 2015 and 2025, Germany’s efforts to green its energy production will have cost $580 billion. Yet despite this enormous investment, German electricity still costs 50 percent more than nuclear-friendly France’s, and generating it produces eight times more carbon emissions per unit. Plus, Germany is getting over a third of its energy from Russia.
Germany has trapped itself. It could burn more coal and undermine its commitment to reducing carbon emissions. Or it could use more natural gas, which generates half the carbon emissions of coal, but at the cost of dependence on imported Russian gas. Berlin was faced with a choice between unleashing the wrath of Putin on neighboring countries or inviting the wrath of Greta Thunberg. They chose Putin.
Because of these policy choices, Vladimir Putin could turn off the gas flows to Germany, and quickly threaten Germans’ ability to cook or stay warm. He or his successor will hold this power for every foreseeable winter barring big changes. It’s as if you knew that hackers had stolen your banking details, but you won’t change your password.
This is why Germany successfully begged the incoming Biden administration not to oppose a contentious new gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2. This cut against the priorities of green-minded governance: On day one of Biden’s presidency, one of the new administration’’s first acts was to shut down the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. in service to climate ideology. But Russia’s pipeline was too important to get the same treatment given how dependent Germany is on Russian imports. (Once Russia invaded, Germany was finally dragged into nixing Nord Stream 2, for now.)
Naturally, when American sanctions on Russia’s biggest banks were finally announced in concert with European allies last week, they specifically exempted energy productsso Russia and Europe can keep doing that dirty business. A few voices called for what would really hit Russia where it hurts: cutting off energy imports. But what actually happened was that European energy utilities jumped to buy more contracts for the Russian oil and gas that flows through Ukraine. That’s because they have no other good options right now, after green activism’s attacks on nuclear and importing fracked gas from America. There’s no current plan for powering Europe that doesn’t involve buying from Putin.
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We should take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a wake-up call. Standing up for Western civilization this time requires cheap, abundant, and reliable energy supplies produced at home or in allied nations. National security, economic growth, and sustainability requires greater reliance on nuclear and natural gas, and less on solar panels and wind turbines, which make electricity too expensive.
The first and most obvious thing that should be done is for President Biden to call on German Chancellor Scholz to restart the three nuclear reactors that Germany closed in December. A key step in the right direction came on Sunday when Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, the economy and climate minister, announced that Germany would at least consider stopping its phaseout of nuclear. If Germany turns these three on and cancels plans to turn off the three others, those six should produce enough electricity to replace 11 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year—an eighth of Germany’s current needs.
Second, we need concerted action led by Biden, Congress, and their Canadian counterparts to significantly expand oil and natural gas output from North America to ensure the energy security of our allies in Europe and Asia. North America is more energy-rich than anyone dreamed. Yes, it will be more expensive than Russian gas sent by pipeline. But it would mean Europe could address Putin’s war on Ukraine, rather than financing it.
Exporting gas by ship requires special terminals at ports to liquify (by cooling) natural gas; environmentalists oppose these terminals because of their ideological objection to any combustible fuel. So it’s a good sign that Chancellor Sholz announced plans on Sunday to build two of these terminals to receive North American gas, along with announcing major new military spending to counter Russia.
Third, the U.S. must stop shutting down nuclear plants and start building them. Every country should invest in next-generation nuclear fuel technology while recognizing that the current generation of light-water reactors are our best tool for creating energy at home, with no emissions, right now. What you’ve heard about waste is mostly pseudoscience. Storing used fuel rods is a trivial problem, already solved around the world by keeping them in steel and concrete cans. The more nuclear power we generate, the less oil and gas we have to burn. And the less the West will have to buy from Russia.
Putin’s relentless focus on energy reality has left him in a stronger position than he should ever have been allowed to find himself. It’s not too late for the rest of the West to save the world from tyrannical regimes that have been empowered by our own energy superstitions.
Michael Shellenberger
Best-selling author of “San Fransicko” (HarperCollins, 2021) “Apocalypse Never” (HarperCollins 2020) :: Time Magazine “Hero of Environment” :: Green Book Award winner :: Founder and President of Environmental Progress
By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~
Berkhout says there are actually three distinct challenges, all engineering intensive. One is developing the technology needed for adaptation to climate change, whatever the cause of…
Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com]
Sea ice optional [image credit: BBC]
By Dr. Jay Lehr and Robert Lyman~
One might wonder why, as Russian troops invade the Ukraine and China ceaselessly builds up its air, surface and naval forces, the United States Army is turning its mighty attention to the goal of defeating carbon dioxide emissions. The Army’s former recruiting slogan, “Be…
Gabrielle Bauer Gabrielle divides her time between writing books, articles, and clinical materials for health professionals. She has received six national awards for her health journalism. She has written two books—Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Prize, and Waltzing The Tango, finalist in the Edna Staebler creative nonfiction award—and is working on two more.READ MORE 
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