Behold the apocalypse

 

Neo-Con icon Bill Kristol (who is currently a de facto Democrat, since he can´t stand one Donald Trump) interviews Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute in this one-hour long YouTube clip. The Manhattan Institute is a mainline Republican and free market think tank, although Mills tries to strike a bipartisan tone in this presentation, even to the point of saying positive things about the Obama admin! Yes, he likes the fact that Obama didn´t stop the fracking revolution…

Which brings me to the topic discussed in the clip: the present energy crisis and its impact on the much vaunted “transition” to green energy (wind, solar, batteries). Mills regards it as mostly fake and impossible to carry out anyway. 84% of the world´s energy comes from fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal). 20 years ago, it was 86%. After spending trillions of dollars on wind and solar, only 3% of the world´s energy comes from these activities, while double that amount comes from burning wood! To replace hydrocarbons with wind, solar and nuclear would require a staggering 9000% increase in the infrastructure connected to these particular branches of the energy industry. By comparison, the fossil fuel industry grew by 1000% in 50 years (between 1950 and 2000), not because of government subsidies, but because the economy wanted and needed cheap energy. The green transition would have to be nine times faster in a third of the time, requiring World War II efforts for 20 years from every nation in the world – something Mills considers impossible. “Rhetoric won´t move it”. He also points out that *enormous* amounts of steel, concrete and labor would be needed for such a restructuring of the world´s entire energy infrastructure. Where would all that power come from? Why, fossil fuels of course, so the “green transition” will in the end dramatically *increase* our usage of oil, coal and gas.  

Mills also points out some other paradoxes, for instance that the world´s dependency on coal has decreased only because production and use of natural gas (another fossil fuel) has increased, but this in turn has crashed the coal prices…making coal more popular again. One reason why the use of coal has gone up in Asia (for instance China) is that it has become more profitable to sell Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe due to the Russia-related sanctions. Entire ships with LNG bound for the Asian markets have been redirected to Europe mid-journey. So the Asians naturally switch to coal. Mills also points out that subsidies to internal combustion engines, in order to make them more energy efficient, is better than subsidies to EVs, since the EV industry is really heavily dependent on fossil fuels backstage!

Mills strikes a realistic pose when it comes to the just mentioned Russia-related sanctions. It´s almost impossible to do anything about European energy dependency on Putin in the short term. Europe gets 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil from Russia. For Germany, the figures are 70% and 33%, respectively. The United States can´t replace this within months. If I understand Mills correctly, European dependency on Russian oil only went down from 40% to 36% during 2022! To replace natural gas from Russia with ditto from other sources would require the building of enormous terminals, ships and/or pipelines. According to Mills, the most optimistic perspective is a (fossil) “energy surge” that could take up to five years. However, Mills believes that if the United States makes a public commitment to such a surge in production, energy prices would go down almost immediately, since these are often based on medium-term expectations.

As already mentioned, Mills supports fracking, which he considers to be one of the biggest energy revolutions in human history, doubling American production of oil and gas, and hence putting to rest all fears about “peak oil”. He supports the Keystone Pipeline, the construction of which was stopped by the Biden administration as a concession to Green activists. Mills believes that Keystone can be completed within 12 – 18 months. Despite all this, the United States can´t decouple itself from the international energy markets. The US should therefore ally with both Saudi Arabia and Qatar against Russia. While dependency on the volatile Middle East is a bad thing, Russian domination is even worse. (Despite all the “woke” posturing, the EU really has a deal with Qatar about LNG imports.)

I can´t say I was surprised by any of this. It´s well known outside the chattering classes (and the naïve Greens and leftists) that of course you can´t just stop using fossil fuels tomorrow morning, that coal use is actually increasing rather dramatically, or that an “energy transition” would require enormous amounts of mined copper and rare earth minerals (and is ironically dependent on hydrocarbons anyway). The recent decision by the EU to reclassify nuclear power and natural gas as “renewables” is a belated recognition of this reality, as is the conversion of some leftoids and leftists to nuclear power (long regarded as the Devil incarnate by most on the left). However, the chatter is still ongoing, since everyone still thinks that somehow, in some way, we can make that Green leap into the unknown. Which we can´t. Probably not even with an international planned economy (which isn´t possible anyway). The living standards of the chattering middle classes would collapse to Third World level (or below) if fossil fuels would be discontinued. The deep ecology LARP-ing will cease the moment this reality hits home. Indeed, the fact that the climate change movement has lost traction as utility bills surge is probably a harbinger of things to come.

Which doesn´t mean that the climate crisis isn´t real. Quite the contrary. Kristol and Mills don´t have any solution to *that* problem. What we will see in the decades ahead is a chicken race between a world dependent on fossil fuels and climate change. We should stop using fossil fuels, but we simply cannot. In the end, the only solution to our predicament is to continue using oil, gas and coal…and then duck, hoping that our nation or geopolitical block won´t be the hardest hit.

This is known as karma. Or, perhaps, the apocalypse…