Yes, there is a heatwave going on in Northern Europe this week or at least, to them it’s a heatwave. To those of us who live in Texas, it’s just a normal summer, with temperatures in the 90s and reaching three digits. Supercilious Europeans, Brits and Canadians, and lunkheaded Americans like perennial tween know-it-all Taylor Lorenz are forever chiding us about our excessive air conditioning in homes, government buildings and offices, little recking that basically, most of the United States is on the same latitude as the Mediterranean and North Africa and without efficient air conditioning, large swathes of the southern states would just plain old be unlivable and no, in the South it’s not a dry heat, but a soggy and humid exercise in physical torment. So I do feel for those suffering Europeans and Brits, I really do. My brother and sister and I spent the summer of 1976 in Britain, which turned out to have been one of the hottest on record, rather like the heatwave this year. We accustomed to So-Cal summers didn’t at first really grok how unaccustomed the British public was to this kind of summer heat, what with the grass in the parks dying for want of water.
Europe
Advanced Incompetence
The grim and cynical judgment is that advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from deliberate malice. I am certain that grimmer and more cynical commenters than me have long since concluded that the advanced and mind-boggling incompetence of the Biden Administration is indeed indistinguishable from deliberate malice, at least as far as results are concerned. The staggering increase in the price of gas at the pump is the one thing that almost everyone, save the impossibly-out-of-sight-rich are feeling. When the price leapfrogs twenty cents a gallon from one day to the next, it excites notice from ordinary people, who need to drive to the jobs that they still have. And what is the barely sentient vegetable in the White House, or the individuals who are manipulating his strings doing about all that? Essentially nothing, save lip service and pointless gestures.
They want gas prices to go sky-high. No, that’s the take-away. In their fantasy-world, having the price at the pump be equivalent to prices at European pumps will move us all gently, painlessly, and inexorably towards driving electric cars, (and living in high-rise prole cubes in big cities, and eating protein derived from bugs) never mind that the tech and infrastructure to support that kind of thing isn’t even remotely possible, now or ever.
Nope the Biden administration wants us unbiddable red-state, fly-over proles to suffer, to grind us all into the dirt. They want this, they are panting for it, orgasmically. Mostly because we don’t and won’t do what they order us to do, and so we must be punished for disobedience.
Life in a Realm of Scarce and Expensive Energy
In one of the Hornblower novels, set in the early 1800s, the protagonist is staying in a hotel. Thinking about the bill he is going to have to pay on checking out, he realizes that there is going to be a significant item for ‘light’…ie, candles. I believe this is historically accurate–candles were expensive enough that they could not just be given away free with the room.
Whereas for most of the last 100 years in America, you could just turn on the lights in your hotel room without worrying about what the added charge on your bill was going to be. And–much more significantly in terms of energy use–you could adjust the heater or air conditioner to suite your temperature preference, again without worrying about added charges.
With the unrealistic energy plans of the Biden administration and of most European governments, such luxuries may soon be a thing of the past. I doubt that you will actually have to pay extra for keeping the lights on, but it’s entirely possible that you may have to pay extra if you want it cooler than, say, 78 degrees in summer or warmer than 64 degrees in winter–perhaps with those thresholds adjusted according to the balance of total grid power demand and availability, so that an extreme air-conditioning surcharge kicks in at 88 degrees on an especially hot and windless day.
And not just in hotels. It’s likely that stores, restaurants, etc will get significantly cooler in winter and warmer in summer. And unless you can afford to not worry about your electricity bill very much, you will likely have to adjust your home temperatures to fit the current supply/demand profile on the grid–indeed, in some jurisdictions, it may be prohibited to violate the required limits no matter how much you are willing to pay. (With likely exceptions for certain ‘public servants’.)
Above and beyond the impact on individual citizens and families, you can expect that many kinds of energy-dependent businesses, especially manufacturing businesses, will become increasingly uncompetitive in the US. Again, there will likely be an exception for certain politically-well-connected businesses. But overall, expensive US energy will likely drive a new wave of offshoring.
And I haven’t even talked about transportation.
The above is not carved in stone, of course, there is still a good chance to escape it, as people begin to perceive (from experience) the realities behind all the idealistic talk, theories, and harangues. But it will be a close-run thing.
Heuristics for Ukraine (and other places)
NB: some of the following is from a recent videoconference that included our own Trent Telenko, who is very much the man of the hour, but some of it is more publicly available, not to mention common sense. First, though, as is my wont, a quadrant diagram to organize my presentation …
I. Theater “Hardware” (physical assets/consequences)
Deliberate Disempowerment
Here’s the great French scientist Sadi Carnot, writing in 1824:
To take away England’s steam engines to-day would amount to robbing her of her iron and coal, to drying up her sources of wealth, to ruining her means of prosperity and destroying her great power. The destruction of her shipping, commonly regarded as her source of strength, would perhaps be less disastrous for her.
The wealth and power of a country are strongly related to its energy resources, whether those resources take the form of human slaves, steam engines, hydroelectric dams, oil and gas wells, or nuclear reactors. The fact that Russia possesses energy resources on which many other countries depend has been an enormous factor in that country’s ability to invade Ukraine and in Putin’s belief that the world will let him get away with it.
Wealth and power are sought, in one form or another, by most people. Showing James Boswell around the Boulton & Watt steam engine factory in 1776, Matthew Boulton summed up his business one simple phrase:
I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to havePOWER.
Yet the leaders of the West have, with few exceptions, chosen to reduce the relative power of their countries through their opposition to fossil fuel production and use combined with hostility toward further development of nuclear energy—or even the continued operation of existing nuclear plants. There has been little evidence of serious thinking about realistic limitations of intermittent power sources, even as countries have rushed to make themselves dependent on such sources…nor is there much evidence of serious thinking about the critical-mineral dependencies created by a large-scale switch to wind, solar, and batteries.
So what explains the choice of this path? Has mechanical power ceased to be an important factor in political power, in the destinies of nations? Hardly, as the Russia/Ukraine example makes clear. Or do we somehow have a generation of leaders who don’t care about political power? That, clearly, is also not the case…at least as far as the personal political power of those leaders goes.
I think there are several factors at work:
First, there is the widespread scientific and technical ignorance among political leaders and influential media people. I’ve noticed, for example, that American media coverage of energy storage projects almost always refers to kilowatts, megawatts, and gigawatts as if these terms indicate the storage capacity of a battery or other storage system. They do not. (A 100 megawatt storage system may provide 1 hour, 4 hours, or 20 hours worth of 100-megawatt electricity depending on its megawatt-hour rating. Measuring electrical storage capacity in megawatts is like measuring the capacity of your car’s gas tank in horsepower.) More generally, there is a widespread failure to comprehend just how difficult and expensive it is to store large quantities of electricity and an assumption that if we invest enough in wind and solar, the power will be available on winter nights and in the middle of prolonged snowstorms, ‘somehow’.
Second, there has been a general de-emphasis on the physical attributes of the economy under the belief that we are now in a ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’, or ‘post-industrial’ age. Enterprises and people dealing with physical things have lost political power relative to those that deal in words, images, and code. The Western leaders of 1950, or even 1970, would have been a lot more cautious about deliberately creating energy dependency on a likely-hostile power.
Third, many politiciansand many of the academics and other “experts” advising themsimply do not identify closely with their own nations and with the people and culture of those nations. This is also true of a high proportion of influential media figures. There is a strong thread of belief in the U.S. Democratic Party that America is too wealthy, too powerful, too dangerousthat it is country that is “just downright mean,” in the words of a former First Lady. The same is true of much of the Left in other Western countries. And if you think these things about a country and its people, you’re not likely to want to increaseor even sustainits power.
That’s true especially if you decouple the power of your country from your own personal power and well-being. And I think “progressive” politicians, and many members of academic and even business elites, often do see themselves as inhabiting a transnational space in which their personal well-being is not strongly coupled to that of their countries.
Fourth, in a world in which organized religion has become increasingly marginal, there are a lot of people looking for causes in which to believe. ‘Green energy’ is such a cause, and the specter of Climate Change gives it apocalyptic power. And when people believe they are facing the apocalypse—that the planet is soon going to burn—they’re not likely to look too carefully at those things advertised to avoid the burning.
Fifth, societies across the western world have become much more risk-averse. The question of why this shift has occurred, and of its positive and negative attributes, merits a separate article—but it’s pretty obvious that it has happened. And the consequences for energy development have been very significant, particularly in the case of nuclear energy.