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As I was beating some egg whites to make a lemon pudding cake last Saturday, I thought of Ilargi and Yves Smith of Naked capitalism fame. I simply didn't have time to do my usual by-hand whipping of the helpless albumen of the separated ova, so resorted to pulling out the electric mixer (It had belonged to the landlady in my Cambridge apartment who died while we were there (that's why it's "the" electric beater instead of "my" electric beater) ... that was in 1972; it still works perfectly well), and as I beat the helpless fluid into a froth, it occurred to me that generations' worth of both electro-mechanical and gear-propelled products had been needlessly wiped out when the world decided that nuclear, and therefore, electricity so cheap it wouldn't need to be metered, became the rage after WW2. (Yes, you younguns, that's what they were telling grown adults, who readily believed it, when I was a child). I once owned a rotary beater, you simply turned a crank (and I don't mean to be self-reflective) and it spun the beaters. Had I had one on Saturday, it would have beaten those whites just as efficiently as the electric mixer .. oh , wait a minute, if redesigning a jet engine so that it will get better mileage, even at the cost of radically increasing the risk of that engine propelling the jet along with its human cargo, at an accelerating rate into the ground, then I think that it's not an exaggeration to claim that the mechanical devise, since it uses not a jot of juice, and therefore releases only my self-generated CO2 into the troposphere, is in fact the far more efficient method.
Last week I had been wanting to drill a hole, but the electric drill was in the basement put away in its black case, so I was trying to start the hole with a screwdriver and a boring screw (by which I don't mean a tediously garrulous prison guard). Likewise, I remembered when I was a kid how handy it was to just pull the hand drill, operated in the same manner as the above-mentioned rotary beater, off its nail on the pegged backboard, and rapidly drill my hole (somehow that sounds obscene). All that technology, and these are only two examples, has been jettisoned as we've tied ourselves to the mast of everything electric ... and the new push to do exactly the same, even more so, continues today in the face of, whether you "believe" in peak oil or not, constrained, and increasingly expensive, oil. Now, why did this make me think of Yves? Because she's one of the few, out of reams and reams of "Green" energy claims, to have found the only solution that I agree with:
"The only way to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions is radical conservation. No other approach could make enough of a difference quickly enough. Ilargi makes a more radical version of the argument that reduced energy use is ultimately the only remedy".
Now is that so hard to grasp?
Ilargi begins his argument with the radical statement that "those among us who tout renewable energy should pay more attention to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics", leaving me asking myself, "Pay more attention to it!? Do you really think 98% of those touting Green energy even know that the law exists, or, more to the point, have ever heard the word 'Thermodynamics'?". Just who, do you suppose, he has conversations with? Entropy, to anyone who gives me anything more than a quizzical look when I use the word, is to most people how the Tree shepherds in Tolkien's trilogy water their charges. But what it really means, he lets Shrodinger explain:
“Erwin Schrodinger (1945) has described life as a system in steady-state thermodynamic disequilibrium that maintains its constant distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy from its environment – that is, by exchanging high-entropy outputs for low-entropy inputs. The same statement would hold verbatim as a physical description of our economic process. A corollary of this statement is that an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste products.”
In our case, it's not just the organism that's creating the waste product, but every other organism on
the globe that has nothing to do with producing that waste ... in fact, as we're seeing, if we cared to
pay attention, is that those the least responsible for the untrammeled venting of CO2 into the only air we have available to breathe, are those we unthinkingly put the most in peril. Thousands of species have gone extinct while mankind has been in charge of the husbandry of the planet. And the 6'th extinction has already begun, yet we continue to insist that mankind is completely capable of living in the atmospheric soup that becomes progressively more saturated with our own waste products.
And renewables, at least in the way they've come to be defined and implemented in any of the OECD nations, only add to that waste stream, none more than the much-touted EVs that will, if anything, prove to be even more disastrous than the billion or so Internal Explosion Engines plying the world's byways that they're meant to "replace". If the burgeoning of alternative power generation has made anything clear during this century, it's that none of these technologies are being implemented with any intention of replacing the incineration of fossil fuels: augmenting them, exactly how ethanol does in the US, at the cost of wreaking great environmental damage, these heavily subsidized programs are being surreptitiously funded by the oil industry itself through covert funding of so-called Green political candidates and NGO's.
In order to smokescreen the constrained availability of hydrocarbons, and to siphon political steam from Clean Energy stalwarts, it is to OPEC's advantage, for example, to see that as much green tech gets installed as possible. That explains two phenomena: the largest windfarms in the country are installed in Texas (even as it flares enough natural gas to supply its entire domestic electric demand), and the lock-step growth of Renewable electric generation with fossilized: Every joule of electricity provided by green energy brings an increase in the number of bpd's of oil (and tonnage of coal, and cubic feet of natural gas, the overproduction of which has caused its price to collapse and that is why the world is awash in plastic: it's so cheap its wasteful and careless use is all but encouraged, as it would be with anything so massively over-produced) the world incinerates on a daily basis. And the same is no less true for EV's: they will never replace the diesel/gas-powered fleet (they were never meant to, that's just a fairy tale we like telling ourselves), they will only make it that much larger ... already have, in fact, and thereby make the ravaging of every untouched location on earth far more inevitable as the rare earth elements they require aren't exactly buried in the backyard.
The key word in EV's is, although it's been somehow overlooked, electric. Yet, here in California, which has mandated a certain percentage of Green Energy be included in the juice PG&E delivers to its customers, we are, at the moment, experiencing double digit increases in electric bills. The reason? The wildfires that raged throughout the state the last coupla years, the cause of which have been laid at PG&E's feet. But the base cause, which no one has seen fit to mention, is that very Mandate.
You see, because California doesn't have the so-called Green fuels in sufficient quantities to meet the State's requirements, it must import energy, despite having it in plentiful supply in-State, from other States in order to meet those State Mandates, which importation requires the stringing of miles and mile of high-transmission power lines through territory that soon enough became filled with dead trees as California's drought persisted and deepened. That's how the fires started, making the State as much to blame for it as is PG&E as it opted for the appearance of being Green, most likely to deflect criticism for being both the 2'nd largest producer of fossil fuels in the country, and the State most dependent on personal transport to enable its amoeba-like sprawl across a vast, water-challenged landscape.
The same scenario is taking place in the Wunderkind of Green Energy, Germany (where, Energiewende notwithstanding) emissions haven’t fallen and the number of private cars is rising).
The upshot of which is that the more the world attempts to replace and even surpass (lol) the energy output of fossil fuels with green fuels, the more EXPENSIVE electricity is becoming ... unpayably expensive, in many cases.
Now at the very same time that electric costs are rapidly escalating, the Greenies are insisting we all switch to electric Cars. If only ten percent of us did so (and it's more likely that even 1% would be catastrophically disruptive), the added strain to the electrickety grid that everyone complains about but no one addresses, a difficult thing to do when hurricanes, strong winds, flooding, droughts (as we've seen in California, the one weather phenomenon one would think wouldn't affect electric delivery, has turned out to be the most catastrophic) all grow more intense, the job of maintaining even the grid as it currently (no pun intended, of course) exists , we are proving incapable of doing.
In other words, in order to force people into EV's we first need to expand our electric production and that expansion will prove to be onerously expensive, pushing the rates charged to deliver it through the roof, and certainly past the point most people will be able to afford. This, together with the dubious wisdom of ensuring that if, or more accurately, given our more and more unstable weather, when, we lose electrical power, we will all be, and the economy will be, moribund.
Just as those who chose to go "all-electric" in their homes learn: when you put all your eggs in one basket, you leave yourself needlessly vulnerable to a single source of energy, and the more we substitute every single action with one that needs us to enslave electrons to do that simplest of things for us, effortlessly as it were, once the juice dries up, we can't even get into our own houses because the door is electronically locked. (Exactly what happened in the early aughts (2004, maybe) when New York City experienced a blackout and hotels couldn't accommodate their guest, as the electronically secured doors couldn't be unlocked).
... and there's another factor to consider (and I'm sure there are additional ones I'm not taking into account), which is that in all of the OECD nations, but none more so than the US whose political class has betrayed their base to an egregious extent, the amount of energy being generated is more and more being produced not to power production but to be uselessly consumed by promulgation of unwanted ads, to power Gameboy consoles, TV's the size of walls, cryptocurrency mining, constant downloading of I-phone apps and the resultant dependency that seems to mandate 24-hour phone surveillance, by which I refer not to the NSA, but to individuals mono-maniacally, at every opportunity afforded them, whipping out and aimlessly scrolling through reams of useless data. In other words, non-productive energy use long ago surpassed the productive (As a society, we're rapidly using up all the gas in the tank to take a Sunday drive to nowhere, so, come Monday, there's no way to get to work). As the Baby boomers retire, this situation will only grow more and more untenable, as a larger and larger contingent of the population will be using energy but producing nothing other than highly inflationary hospital and healthcare bills, which, being paid by Medicare, will continue to make our hi-energy and plastics-intensive healthcare something the ordinary citizen simply doesn't have access to.
The entire economy seems to be BOeING BOeING'ing along: becoming so distracted by efficiency that it fails to realize that the very steps it's taking to make it more The American Dreamliner (implementing AI and the "internet of things" wherever possible are two examples (Isn't Artificial Intelligence synonymous with Fake News?)), the more it makes its plummeting to the ground in smoking ruins, taking everyone who trusted in its high-flying claims of effortless soaring among the clouds to a fiery death, inevitable.
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