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Are the lights going out all over Europe? Trump warned them — 37 Comments

1. The Greens have had too much power in Germany for years. They scared Germans about nuclear post Fukushima, after years of protesting nuclear. They never want further studies about energy. now it is all about windmills and solar. They are ignorant virtue signalers.And the media go along with it all.

2. AGW is junk science. It is also a racket and religion. In 1988 Senator Tim Worth, who had James Hansen, the godfather of CO2 catastrophe, testify at the kick off hearing for AGW, said that he didn’t care if it were true, he just wanted it as a tool to get rid of capitalism and install socialism. The IPCC has said the same thing.

3. The worst of this is that America won’t pay attention to the energy crisis the Europeans brought on themselves. Electricity is 3x the US average.

   An OPPD director had a FB live event this week. I could see the zealotry in his eyes and hear it in his voice when he pledged his undying loyalty to net zero carbon.

   Cornhead has a plan to stop this!

4. Greens are watermellons, red on the inside.

5. NATO is stuck to a tar baby called Ukraine.

6. One would think that the OPEC embargo of 1973 would have given us a lesson we would never forget. At the time we had only conservation measures to fight back with. Remember odd/even gas days, national 55 mph speed limits, new building codes requiring more insulation, a year of daylight-saving time (1974/75), and President Carter’s admonition to turn down the thermostat?

   People got interested in wind and solar as alternatives that might save us. Passive solar homes designed for sunny climates became a thing. (We actually owned a passive solar designed home from 1978 to 1986. It actually worked quite well.) Billions have now been spent trying to make wind and solar b work at the scale needed to power cities. It has not worked and probably will never work. Storing energy for periods of no sun or wind is the insoluble problem.

   We spent many years and a lot of money trying to produce the oil shale found in western Colorado – all to
   no avail. But the oil and gas explorers came up with a new ability to do radical directional drilling. They can now drill horizontally in a target, oil-bearing formation and use hydraulic fracturing to produce heretofore unproducible oil and gas. Voila, we went from “Peak Oil” to vast untapped new oil-bearing resources. We’re now the Saudi Arabia of the world, if our companies are allowed to produce and sell the oil.

   Unfortunately, the oil embargo also gave birth to more radical environmentalism. The idea of global cooling was “discovered” in the 1970s.That morphed into global warming by the mid 1980s, but climate scientists were “certain,” whether it was cooling or warming, it was caused by humans’ use of fossil fuels. And the campaign against fossil fuels began.

   Progressives learned nothing from the 1973 oil embargo, just as they learned nothing from the constant failures of socialism in its various forms during the 20th Century. AGW is a scheme to establish socialism here in the USA. They must be stopped. Hopefully at the ballot box. If not, then the cartridge box it is.

7. My husband actually spent significant time during his career in the electric power industry trying to persuade people that the “green” energy craze was just that. They didn’t listen.

8. There’s a fellow with a YouTube channel called “Joe Blogs” who has been doing daily reports for a while now. The series is called “Russia” to distinguish it from other topics he occasionally talks about and the Russia episodes are about the effects of the US sanctions.
   Some of the side effects hurt Russia.
   Some hurt poor and neutral countries.
   Some, of course, hurt the EU nations.

   I’m finding the coverage of Germany fascinating. Apparently wood-fired stoves are flying off the shelves in retail stores. At the utility company level coal mines are being reopened.

9. This has got to be the biggest humiliation of Western science and engineering ever.

   I’ll still defend the basic idea of fossil-fuel based climate change. That goes back to Arrhenius in the 19th century.

   But this notion humanity could transition from carbon to “renewables” without nuclear was always a fantasy. Even Google’s best and brightest couldn’t make it work.

   But most of our scientists, engineers and administrators just panted, “Yes, boss. Whatever you say, boss. We’ll say it too. But the funding must flow.”

   Just pathetic. I am so disappointed and feeling betrayed.

10. I found it useful to watch the five-minute video of Trump (mildly) confronting some unidentified Europeans. Trump spoke clearly and intelligently. He made the same point several times — more than I would guess are necessary, but there was nothing buffoonish about it.

    Then his interlocutor spoke, emitting nothing but bloviations and fatuities — equivalent to BOMFOG (Brotherhood Of Man under the Fatherhood Of God). Merkel’s follow-up, too, was so much fatuous blather.

11. France generates 70% of its electricity from nuclear power. Several other European countries are looking seriously at nuclear. There is a new generation of nuclear reactors in which a higher % of the work is done in factories rather than on-site.

    Germany may find itself in a uniquely bad position owing to the dominance of the Greens.

    See my post Nuclear Power: Has the time finally come?

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/67612.html

12. Generally true…except that:
    “Corrosion Problem Shutters Half of France’s Nuclear Reactors”—
    https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-shutters-half-of-frances-nuclear-reactors/

    I guess the questions are:
    – how widespread are such problems? (One might assume they are widespread.)
    – how long does it take to repair (i.e., comprehensively repair)?

13. France is also going to be constructing *new* reactors:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-build-up-to-14-new-nuclear-reactors-by-2050-says-macron

    …I suspect the corrosion problems will get fixed, the ideologues don’t seem to have as much control over that country’s energy as they do in many other places.

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15. Another thing the Trump era has highlighted is the distinction between intelligence and intellectualism. You can be very intelligent without being terribly intellectual and you can be very intellectual without being terribly intelligent.

    Or perhaps it is more accurate to say it’s very easy for dumb people to ape the forms of intellectualism.

    Mike

16. I’ve become skeptical about quotes like Grey’s. There are two famous quotes of things that Woodrow Wilson said before and after he told Congress to declare war on Germany. Historians doubt that either quote was actually said by Wilson. Both were made up, either to make Wilson look more troubled by the terrible cost of war, or to show that he had a premonition that things would turn out badly for civil liberties and progressive reform. If Grey did make the lamps quote it could be an indication that we was too poetic and contemplative to do his job well — too interested in getting the words, rather than the real world outcomes, right.

17. The Germans in Augsburg should enjoy the quiet darkness while it lasts. I’ll bet that they discover soon what the light was keeping at bay. Light is a great deterrence to criminal activity. How long before the rapists, muggers, and thieves come visiting?

18. Edward Grey’s job, as he saw it, was to engage in actions that would preclude the kaiser intervening, a whole host of events from 1904 to the second balkan war, had done so, in part, ironically in so far as anyone was at fault, it was the Russians who funded the Black Hand through Colonel Asp, that led to the maelstrom,

19. You can be very intelligent without being terribly intellectual and you can be very intellectual without being terribly intelligent.

    –MBunge

    Obviously true.

    However, I tend to hear it from conservatives whose real argument is that liberals/leftists may be intellectuals but are not truly intelligent. Which is a hop, skip and a jump from “people who disagree with me must be stupid.”

    IMO there is a large “excluded middle” to this approach. As disappointing as conservatives may find it, there are many liberals/leftists who are quite intelligent. They may well have high IQs, high GPAs, and high career achievements.

    They may be politically mistaken, but that doesn’t make them unintelligent.

20. 39c is 102f. So, while it’s certainly hot, I am betting it’s not exceptionally hot for summer, even in Europe. Not for nothing have parts of Italy and Spain been used for “spaghetti Westerns”.

    Yup. “Based on weather reports collected during 1985–2015.”
    The high for the Seville area was 98 in July, and 97 in August. Above the norm but not astoundingly.

21. }}} However, I tend to hear it from conservatives whose real argument is that liberals/leftists may be intellectuals but are not truly intelligent. Which is a hop, skip and a jump from “people who disagree with me must be stupid.”

    I will repeat my own assertion that the real meaning of “stupid” in this context is “Fool”, not “idiot”. Many don’t grasp the distinction directly even though they grasp, and mean it, implicitly without speaking.

    The “opposition” are often intellectuals and intelligent, but they are not wise.

    And that is a far cry from being idiots. There are many many liberals who are clearly highly intelligent. They’re just utter fools. The poster boy for this is Noam Chomsky, an avowed Marxist.

    And this plays into a prime poster boy example of “fool”: How many times must Marxism lead to disaster, lead to ruination, lead to totalitarianism, for such fools to finally, once and for all, learn that it inherently does so?

    CAN THEY DO SO PRIOR TO DEATH OF OLD AGE?

    Centralized planning — a key feature of Marxism — does not scale. The problems of solving an economy as they get larger get exponentially more complex. Central planning simply does not work, once you get above the size of a medium sized city or county… prob. about 500k pop or about 50m in revenues. This is why things get more and more out of whack, and more and more power is needed for the government to regularize and constrain people from acting far less as a team and far more for their own immediate benefits. Black markets develop, people begin to disdain the Law and the government, and there is your death spiral to either total collapse or totalitarianism.

    This is not debatable, there are more than enough examples of it happening to begin to make out the general case even as a layman, much less with the rigor demanded of an economist**.

    How these people fail to Get This, I cannot begin to comprehend, but it is quite clear and self-evident that they do, hence calling them “fools” is not an example of namecalling, but the result of a considered analysis.

    So on this, too, the notion that is has anything at all to do with “people who disagree with me must be stupid.” is defective.

    Sorry, Huxley, you are incorrect in your analysis, here. You compare apples and oranges.

    =============
    ** Great touchstone for someone being a fool: “What do you think about Marxism?”

22. OBloody:

    The leftists I know are not Marxists, but they are statists who want the federal government (as long as it’s leftist-run) to be in control of a great deal, and want to stifle the ability of the opposition to do anything. They discount the failures of Marxism as irrelevant because they aren’t Marxists, and I would bet most of them don’t even know much about Marxists tenets.

    The Marxists of whom I’m aware espouse a different Marxism than the original and think they will be able to fix its flaws.

23. well the line between social democracy and marxism is rather thin, are they opposed to the fundamental transformational protocols that esg and other elements have promulgated in the economy and culture,

24. MBunge, intelligence and intellectualism…The writer Andre Maurois asserted that people who are *intelligent*, but not at all *creative*, tend to fasten onto intellectual systems created by others and to hold to those systems even more rigidly than their originators would.

    I believe this phenomenon explains much of what we see in academia and in media. With the vast expansion of the numbers of people employed in those fields. there are a lot of people who need to look like they are creating something, but really don’t have any ideas.

    So they latch onto a pre-made way of looking at / critiquing the world…critical race theory, for example…and play the Glass Bead Game to produce new-appearing content within that system.

25. I kind of agree with OBH.

    IMO there is a large “excluded middle” to this approach. As disappointing as conservatives may find it, there are many liberals/leftists who are quite intelligent. They may well have high IQs, high GPAs, and high career achievements.

    They may be politically mistaken, but that doesn’t make them unintelligent.

    I think it is more than “mistaken.” The ones I talk to, and a couple are my children, they live in a fantasy world where things happen because you want them to happen. That may make a movie but it does not happen in the real world. 75% of the world survives by hard work. I spent 50 years as a surgeon. That may not seem like hard work to everyone but getting up at 3 AM and not getting home for 12 or 14 hours is hard work. Finishing a big case and having to rinse out my blood soaked underwear is hard work.

    My two leftist children are both lawyers. I don’t know if there is a connection there. My conservative son is a fireman.

26. Sounds like liberalism is a mental disorder.

27. “there are many liberals/leftists who are quite intelligent.”

    That’s obviously true but that’s why I said dumb people can ape the forms of intellectualism. What is intellectualism? It’s the accumulation of data and creation or utilization of complexity. Dumb people can do both of those things. It just takes a lot of work.

    And while the “foolish vs. stupid” distinction is valid, I think actual lack of intelligence is also a problem today. Consider it this way:

    Look at how much the knowledge-worker industries have expanded. That’s not just academia, media, and the arts. It also includes almost everyone in the bureaucracatic and administrative state. They’re all doing “intellectual” work and if they don’t quite see themselves as intellectuals, they certainly see themselves as akin to it.

    Has the percentage of the population with above average intelligence also increased to match the expansion of the intellectual class? I doubt it.

    Mike

28. huxley:

    I think a more common criticism of liberals is that they dismiss sources on the right (usually without reading them, and by labeling them “racist” or something equally pejorative) and uncritically believe sources on the left.

29. I will repeat my own assertion that the real meaning of “stupid” in this context is “Fool”, not “idiot”. Many don’t grasp the distinction directly even though they grasp, and mean it, implicitly without speaking.

    OBloodyHell:

    Your assertion is not mine. You don’t get reword what I say, then claim victory.

    Perhaps my case is not common, but it does exist. I once argued to some length with a conservative, quite intelligent in my estimation, who claimed that liberal types were truly not intelligent on account of their liberal positions. That settled it as far as he was concerned.

30. I think a lot of the problem stems from basic arrogance…

    (Not sure if that’s one of the seven deadlies, but maybe it ought to be…. OTOH, it may well be a natural characteristic, one that has to be “unlearned”. But how does one “unlearn” arrogance….? “There but for the grace go I”? Across-the-board—as opposed to “selective”—empathy? Experience? One certainly has to know when one is being exposed—and influenced by—propaganda…and so read “1984” every so often? Count to ten—like anger—before making decisions? Read more books?…On the third hand, arrogance DOES have its uses…in some areas, at some times…)

31. I live near the Great Lakes region in the United States. Whenever I talk with someone who is pushing the unproven theory of “climate change,” I would ask them if they know what happened to form the Great Lakes. After they invariably give me a blank look, I tell them that thousands of years ago, the earth cooled, and great sheets of ice (glaciers) came down from the north and scooped out the Great Lakes (and lots of smaller lakes in states like Michigan and Minnesota). But then the earth warmed up again, and those glaciers melted away.

    I then ask them, why was that? Was it because factories were belching smoke into the atmosphere? Was it because ancient humans were driving around in SUVs? I then have to tell them that the earth is going to do what it wants to do regarding temperature and “climate change,” and that humans don’t have a thing to do with it. The sun, for example, can vary the amount of energy it radiates.

    I also tell them I am old enough to remember when Mt. St. Helens erupted in the Pacific northwest. That volcanic spewed enough volcanic ash into the air so that it cut down how much radiant energy from the sun reached the earth, and we had cool summers for the next couple of years after that event. I also remember how the “scientists” in the 1970s were predicting doom from the next coming “ice age” that was just around the corner!

32. The importance of the Great Lakes (the source of approximately 1/5 of the world’s fresh water) is not acknowledged by BOTH conservatives and progressives.
    And, BTW, the raw ability that IQ indicates is NOT correlated with skilled use of that potential. MANY “highly intelligent” people fail to use reason to guide their decisions. They rely, instead, on emotionally-driven input.
    It’s not whether the ABILITY is missing; it’s whether that person uses SKILLS to process information.

33. IYI was a buzzword a few years back. “Intellectual, yet idiot.” I’m inclined to think that people are so much prisoners of their beliefs and ideologies that there is always some distortion of reality in the way they see the world. That’s not really stupidity, and it’s not confined to some group of people. Imperfect knowledge and incorrect knowledge are part of the human condition. But some belief systems do let more light in than others, and enable people to assess the state of things more accurately.

    So I don’t think Paul Krugman, say, or Angela Merkel is stupid. They are just acting as if what they want to believe to be true actually is true, and their minds are working hard to maintain their belief system and the conclusions they’ve already reached. I would also agree that liberals and progressives tend to believe what sounds good, rather than investigate what actually works. That’s especially true nowadays.

34. Short version: “Not stupid, merely delusional”…?

35. I wrote about the same concern and offered the same remedy in a 2008 piece in American Thinker called ” Sticking it to Gazprom.”

    If I could see it coming why couldn’t the European bureaucracy?

36. A point is that we’re not talking about plain stupidity. It’s more being elevated beyond your intellect. After all, one of the real markers of great intelligence and learning is a level of humility because you know how much you don’t know.

    It’s not that they’re just idiots. It’s that someone who should have been the shop steward at a factory in their hometown winds up writing articles for some DC thinktank. Or someone like Krugman, who should have stayed someone only other economists recognized, being elevated to a political pundit.

    Mike

37. “If I could see it coming why couldn’t the European bureaucracy?“

    They could. They did. They do. But acknowledging the problem would require fixing it. And fixing the problem would require a lot of important people admitting they were very wrong about a great many thing.

    These people see the iceberg approaching after staking their reputation on icebergs being a thing of the past. Now they’re just hoping the iceberg is far enough away so they’ll be dead before it hits.

    Mike

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