“Civilization’s advance can be seen as a quest for higher energy use required to produce increased food harvests, to mobilize a greater output and variety of materials, to produce more, and more diverse, goods, to enable higher mobility, and to create access to a virtually unlimited amount of information.” (Smil, Energy and Civilization, quoted below)
“Fortunately, basic numbers don’t lie, and what they convey is that, in the context of market economies, past Promethean writers proved much more right than their opponents.” (Desrochers, below)
Pierre Desrochers (Department of Geography, Geomatics and the Environment, University of Toronto Mississauga) is one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of energy and sustainable development. A generation ahead of Desrochers is Vaclav Smil, a renowned expert in energy history and technology whose profuse writings document his energy worldview–at least most of it.
…“This year’s races are the first major electoral test for the Green New Deal, which was thrust into the national spotlight following the 2018 midterm elections. And so far, few Democrats in the most competitive races think it’s a winner.”
“… Democrats in close races are denouncing both the Green New Deal and quickly banning hydraulic fracturing when they get the opportunity, and are instead laying out their own, less aggressive plans to fight climate change.” (E&E News, below)
In a ‘Campaign 2020’ essay (October 20, 2020), Timothy Cama of E&E News indirectly documents the obvious: Americans like their energy affordable convenient, and reliable. And what is true today will always be, putting the Green Agenda of energy scarcity and inconvenience on the defensive against nature and reality.
Jerry Taylor–libertarian-turned-statist (see here and here)–warned back in March 2019 when the Green New Deal emerged:
…… the strategies and tactics you are pursuing through the Green New Deal amount to political malpractice.
“First of all, I make it clear, I do not propose banning fracking.”
“My deal is a crucial framework, but not the new green deal.”
– Joe Biden. Town Hall, October 15, 2020.
Biden shifts and weaves looking for the middle ground on hydraulic fractionation, a drilling technique that has solidified the role of oil and gas in the 21st century. And he dodges the Green New Deal, or what he stated as the ‘New Green Deal’. (Joe?)
The radical Left (Andrew Dessler here) has largely given Biden/Harris a pass on the Frack Shuffle, but privately the hard Left must be fuming between the ears right now…. Politically, as economically, it’s a fossil fuel world!
For when it comes to climate, there is no political path that can arrest what is seen as global destruction, what shifty Joe himself calls “an existential threat.” And wind and solar, and EVs once removed, as savior?
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