Posted by Billionaire Bill Bonner warns that someday in the near future America’s entire energy system will collapse. Fuel will not get delivered. Rolling blackouts will sweep the land. Pipes will freeze. Food in the freezer will go bad. And you may shiver in the dark, as you are praying for power to come back on.
Man-Made Global Warming (MMGW), or rather the irrational belief in it, is at the bottom of almost all events and acts that are currently pushing for global governance, for changes in energy consumption and generation, in food production and in human population. We are told that we must no longer cool or warm our houses, we must no longer drive vehicles with combustion engines, we must no longer produce fertilizer from natural gas, and we must stop eating burgers because all of these activities produce CO2 and/or methane (cow farts), which cause global warming. We are told that if the atmosphere keeps warming, the oceans will rise and swallow our cities and our world will become a burning inferno. We are told that so-called renewable energies must replace our current fossil fuel energies and that we have only a few years to do it or we will all be doomed, and the world will perish.
Doomed we are indeed. However, not by global warming but by the idiotic policies of our governments. MMGW is just another Marxist socialist scare crow designed to instill fear in us and to scare us into compliance with totalitarian rule.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, Communists have come to realize that Communist rule is not sustainable if Communism must compete with free market capitalism based on individual liberty and limited government. This means that Communist rule is either global or it will not succeed at all.
In order to convince people worldwide that they need global governance they need to be brainwashed into believing that mankind is facing dire global problems that can only be solved through global governance. COVID 19 and MMGW are such global problems or more correctly, they have been styled into global problems by our government and by the Mainstream Media.
If diesel fuel is cut off, says Bonner, it would take about three days before supermarket shelves are empty. In the 72 hours following an energy cut off, almost all businesses would run out of supplies and shut down. And in a matter of weeks, civilization as we know it would come to an end. COVID lockdowns would look like a cakewalk compared to what our government is preparing for us.
Everything in the economy moves by container ship, truck, or train and almost every ship, truck, and train runs on diesel. So, when the diesel fuel stops coming, ships will stop sailing, trucks will stop rolling, goods – food, medicine, building materials, everything – will stop arriving. And when that happens, people will die.
Can’t happen?
East coast diesel inventories have plunged to the lowest seasonal level in 30 years. And diesel prices nationwide have hit record highs. The cost of diesel fuel is at a 30-year high. Too many people do not realize that diesel fuel is the workhorse of the economy. It is needed to keep trucks, tractors, ships, freight trains, and factories moving.
As we depend more and more on windmills and solar panels, the electric grid will not be able to provide the needed electric power as it used to. We are dismantling fossil energy faster than we can develop viable renewable power sources. The result will be long spells of dark and cold.
Bonner predicts that in the not-so-distant future, gas prices will go up to $50 per gallon and the cost of crude oil will hit $500 per barrel. The CEO of America’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone, predicts “social unrest” and “a new regime”.
Bonner blames our governing elite:
“America’s elite – the whole elite – Republican as well as Democrat – the people who control the government, the Fed, the media, Wall Street, and the universities – are corrupt and incompetent and have put us on this path.”
And he continues:
“What I see on the horizon could be the worst crisis ever in the U.S. A combination of two disastrous policies, which I believe could likely be followed by riots …”
But what exactly is it that the U.S. government is doing right now, along with the mainstream media, universities, and quite a few Fortune 500 companies as well? What is the policy all these folks are pushing?
It is the forced and premature transformation of our economy to end fossil fuel use at any cost, to take carbon (CO2) emissions to zero, and to establish renewable energy for all future economic activities.
Do not get me wrong. Everyone wants a sound environment and less pollution. And so do I. And someday, battery technology, wind power, and solar will probably become efficient enough to make up a meaningful portion of the electric grid – but not today. And not anytime soon – not in the next 20 or 30 years.
In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Agency says that wind and solar combined last year (2021) made up just 12% of the power grid. Even dirty coal made up almost twice as much (22%). And looking at the next few decades, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that by 2050, renewables will make up at most 38% of the U.S. power grid.
But our politicians are shutting down oil and natural gas production, while spending obscene amounts of money promoting “green energy.”
Oil wells are capped. Generators decommissioned. Storage tanks abandoned. New investment has almost completely come to a halt. Discoveries have fallen to a 75-year low. Banks will no longer lend to oil and gas companies because it’s bad for their image. Today, in America’s Northeast region, there are just seven refineries that process diesel fuel. There used to be 27.
The CEO of Chevron says there will never be another refinery built in America thanks to the state of policies around the world toward fossil fuels. Bingo. Crude oil is useless without refineries.
Government punishes and discourages producers of ‘old energy’ while rewarding and subsidizing ‘renewable’ sources. The Wall Street Journal wrote:
“Large portions of New York sit atop massive but untapped sources of natural gas. The Utica Shale… contains an estimated 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 940 million barrels of oil and 208 million barrels of natural-gas liquids…”
But New Yorkers are prohibited from touching these resources, even though natural gas is the main reason why we have been able to reduce the CO2 output for electricity in recent years, as natural gas produces only about half as much CO2 as coal.
Andrew Cuomo banned all hydraulic fracking. He shut down interstate gas pipelines and closed the Indian Point nuclear plant. So now New Yorkers must import natural gas and at much higher cost.
The same thing that is happening in New York is happening elsewhere and on the Federal level too. On his first day in office, President Biden canceled the Keystone Pipeline. A week later, he announced executive orders freezing new oil and gas leases on public lands and offshore waters, plus no CO2 emissions from electricity by 2035, and an all-electric vehicle fleet.
Almost immediately, the administration had to increase energy imports from our strategic adversary, Russia, by 24%. And while our government and the compliant media blame the energy crisis on Vladimir Putin and America’s “evil” energy companies, the truth is, it is mostly the result of our own government’s disastrous policies.
We discussed how the rushed transition to renewables is counterproductive at this point. Let us also discuss its cost. The Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, who is repeatedly named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, has analyzed this based on the example of New Zealand.
New Zealand was the first country to promise a carbon (CO2) neutral economy. In 2007, the Prime Minister said her small nation (5.2 million inhabitants in 2022) would be carbon (CO2) neutral by 2020. The elites loved it. The UN called her a “Champion of the Earth.”
However, New Zealand not only failed to achieve the vision, but also failed to reduce any emissions whatsoever. So, what did the government do next? They doubled down on this terrible idea and promised CO2 neutrality by 2050.
What is good about New Zealand’s efforts is that they are the only country we know of that has actually looked at legitimate cost estimates for going carbon (CO2) neutral. And what is the price tag?
New Zealand’s leading independent economic think tank says getting halfway to the target, i.e. cutting 50% of New Zealand’s emissions by 2050, would cost at least $19 billion annually. Lomborg says that is about what the country spends on education and health care every year.
But cutting the first half of CO2 emissions is the easy part, the low hanging fruit, so to speak. It gets a lot harder and a lot more expensive to cut the second half.
Getting all the way to zero CO2 emissions would likely cost $61 billion annually – more than New Zealand spends annually on social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defense, environment, and every other part of government – combined!
Lomborg says, gas taxes in New Zealand would need to hit $8.33 per gallon every year for the next 30 years. That would be just the taxes, not including the actual fuel cost. And Lomborg made these estimates before energy prices skyrocketed 200% in the past roughly 20 months.
But at least, if New Zealand pulled this off, it would help the world deal with climate change, would it not? The answer is: not really.
Says Lomborg: if we assume that New Zealand can actually deliver and stick to its promise for the rest of the century, the total amount of greenhouse gas reduction achieved will reduce the temperature of the global atmosphere by 0.004° F in 2100.
In other words: the country will go bankrupt and it will not make any difference for our climate.
If we take New Zealand’s cost model and apply it to the U.S., Lomborg says it implies a cost of at least $5 trillion for America in today’s money, not just once but every single year. US Federal Tax Revenue in 2021 was approximately $3.9 trillion.
Still, the U.S. government plows ahead, along with the mainstream media, the celebrities, the school system, and academia.
Need more evidence that this is a disastrous plan? Look at Germany’s “Energy Transition” (Energiewende), which started in 2010. According to Lomborg’s analysis, today, Germany’s energy costs are among the highest in the world, while fossil fuel use has declined by only 1% since the massively expensive program was started.
How bad will it get for Germany?
Well, a report just out from MarketWatch says producer prices in Germany are up a whopping 33.5% from last year. Yes, 33.5% in a single year, the highest increase on record. Electricity cost is up 87% compared to 2020 and the cost of natural gas is up 154% for the same time period.
The reality is that the par-force introduction of immature, inefficient, and unaffordable renewable energy sources will not enable us to provide the bulk of the electrical power we need to run our industries and homes, regardless of what we are willing to pay for the transition. Green energy mandates will cost trillions of dollars, and in their current form, will do almost nothing to prevent or significantly slow down global warming.
But our illuminati, the politicians, mainstream media, celebrities, and universities, the nearly permanent members of the ruling class, continue to tell us that we have only until 2030 to solve the problem of climate change.
Our ruling class tells us we must make this shift to “green” energy immediately, and no matter what the cost. “This is what science says!” they insist. It is not. Science does not have a uniform opinion about earth’s climate, which has always changed and keeps changing driven by cosmic drivers that are beyond human control. If there is a human contribution to climate change, it is miniscule. But fools don’t learn easily.
The government-made energy crisis is the first runaway freight train barreling toward collision.
The second runaway freight train that is barreling toward collision is government-made inflation.
America is about to experience one of the gravest inflationary periods in world history. And this inflation, which the entire world is now witnessing, will soon get much worse. It will push millions of Americans out of the middle class, out of private retirement, out of private health care, and out of a decent life based on independence and privacy into a collectivist nightmare.
Says Bonner:
“Unfortunately, this all leads not just to high prices, but potentially to starvation and perhaps even some form of revolution.”
Here’s why.
Tractors run on diesel. And at $40 a gallon, it will cost a farmer $20,000 just to fill a standard 500-gallon farm fuel tank.
Plus, farmers already face shortages of parts, fertilizers, seeds, and chemicals. Especially fertilizer. Billions of people are alive today only because we’re able to use natural gas to make ammonia by heating up nitrogen and hydrogen.
The BBC says almost half the world’s population would not be alive today without ammonia fertilizer.
So, imagine you are a farmer. You are about 60 years old (the average age for a U.S. farmer today) and getting a bit tired. You cannot hire anyone to help, because no one wants to do the hard work no matter what you are willing to pay! On top of that, you are facing $40-a-gallon fuel cost and problems getting fertilizer and chemicals. Would you not think it might be time to throw the towel?
Then, if you do, who grows the crops? And what about the trucks, the processors, packagers, distributors, retailers, which also need fuel and supplies? And what if they are not available when they are needed?
You may think that the COVID shutdowns have hurt the economy. Well, try to imagine what 50% inflation and electric blackouts combined with huge, extended, and repetitive supply chain disruptions in the energy sector will do to the economy and to the people.
No farmer, producer, or businessman would want to put his seed in the ground or invest when he has no idea what price he might get for his crop or good or service? Inflation makes minced meat of all business calculations.
Here is another fact, no politician or journalist will bother telling you:
Despite of what you perceive, i.e. prices for all our goods and services, for real estate, for oil and gas going up, they are NOT going up the way you think they are.
Prices are NOT going up – it is the value of your money that is going down.
The U.S. government has destroyed the U.S. currency beyond repair or recovery. This is not fixable.
It is what happens when you print more money over an 18-month period than we have printed in the previous 200 years of our country’s existence.
It is what happens when you print a trillion new dollars in just two days in March of 2020. I am not making this up. Time Magazine wrote about it, although you barely heard a word about it anywhere else. The Fed printed more than 5 trillion new dollars since late 2019.
And more handouts every day. Gavin Newsom for example recently proposed sending all state car owners $400 checks to offset higher gas prices.
Government checks will go to renters, folks who pay utility bills, nursing staff, parents who pay for childcare, and there will also be free public transportation for everybody!
If you think that California prices are high now, wait until Newsom’s $18.1 billion “inflation relief” package hits the streets. Our inept leaders fight the consequences of the inflation they caused through their “quantitative easing”, as excessive money printing is euphemistically called, by pumping more newly printed money into the economy in the form of government handouts. In the coming years, everything you do will be controlled more and more by the government and their handouts.
More welfare and eventually a Universal Basic Income. Medicare for all. “Free” college. More debt and more debt forgiveness for a hand-selected group of individuals and corporations. Biden’s recent student debt forgiveness package is just a taste of what is to come.
We will see “income security” handouts. Price controls. Much higher taxes. And more and more Americans not performing gainful work.
Using government handouts to fight inflation is like using fuel to fight a fire.
As we move “forward” (i.e. “downhill”), shortages for everything will only escalate. More government interference will weaken everything and push the nation and its citizens more into debt.
The two trains, a misguided and foolish energy policy and rampant inflation, are now moving rapidly toward their collision point.
Will we all just sit there as spectators to our own demise? Or will we eventually rise and act to save ourselves from this illuminated insanity?
Remember Edmund Burke’s words:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
He nailed it.