Show us the prototype
JUL 31
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PAID
Imagine you’re an investor looking for a new opportunity. Well, many of you won’t have to imagine it because you live it but that’s even better. So, you’re looking for an opportunity and along comes a charming guy, or a charming lady, who tells you they’ve made a thought-reading device.
Now, a thought-reading device sounds fantastical but who knows, what all these software engineers can do these days, what with all those leaps and bounds in AI, and machine learning, maybe it is possible.
As a sensible, intelligent investor, you would first research the company of the charming guy or lady, and you will then research thought-reading technology. Then, as the sensible, intelligent investor that you are, you’d ask to see a prototype.
“Oh, there isn’t a prototype but we can get one by 2030, for sure,” the charmer tells you. Then they go on to recite forecasts from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest of them about how huge the market for thought-reading devices is going to be in less than a decade and how if you don’t get in the game now you’ll only have yourself to blame.
What do you do?
In the past few weeks, feeling nostalgic, I’ve been rewatching “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” and I’ll thank you for not chuckling because it happens to be a very good show of the sort that no one dares make any more. We thought it was just TV back then but now it’s a jewel of character complexities. Anyway.
There’s an episode on “Dr. Quinn” where the town banker is offered a huge investment opportunity in refrigerators. The charming seller has the diagrams, the commitments from other investors and, notably, he has a prototype.
The banker takes the bait and buys shares in the refrigerator company. So does the rest of the town. The prototype arrives two days later on the train and all the new shareholders gather around it. By the time it is unpacked and revealed to be nothing but an empty wooden box, the conman is on his merry way on the train. You already know where I’m going, don’t you?
It was a few months ago, I think, when, during one of our Energy Transition podcasts, Tammy Nemeth wondered aloud where the case study was for 100% renewables. Why isn’t there a town, even a small town, that’s powered only by wind, solar, and hydro, she asked. Of course, she’s not the only one.
Energy commentator Ralph Schoellhammer recently posed the very same question on Twitter in response to some climate cultist’s claims that 100% renewables totally work and how dare anyone doubt that. He then went on to shatter an attempt at giving examples of successful 100% renewables. It’s hilarious.
Luckily for all of us, someone had done the research and that someone was Cowboy State Daily’s Kevin Killough. He details attempts at 100% renewables and their unequivocal failure here, along with why that failure is a hard certainty for any future attempts. It’s another must-read from him.
So, a prototype of a 100%-renewable energy system is not forthcoming because it cannot be forthcoming. And yet the push for 100% renewables continues, begging the question whether the goal of all that net-zero effort is rather different from the stated one. Yes, again.
Some of you have argued that the goal is depopulation and centralised control of remaining populations. Given the open public statements made by some transition advocates about depopulation, it is a valid argument.
However, I remain unconvinced it is the ultimate goal for a simple reason. Fewer people mean less consumption of everything, including “clean” energy, and less consumption of everything means less profit for the suppliers of everything, including “clean” energy.
On the other hand, there is a strong case to be made for a combination of centralised control over (purposefully reduced) populations and forced consumption of select products and services, such as “clean” energy.
You get fewer people but these fewer people have more purchasing power, as it were. And you limit their spending choices so only your preferred suppliers get to profit from these limited choices.
The end, therefore, is profit, and depopulation is one of the means to that end, along with the increased centralisation of political power. Climate activism has been a very useful tool for accelerating the process as has identity politics — it’s always easier to encourage voluntary depopulation than spend time, money, and energy on forced depopulation that carries certain riot risks with it.
Morally corrupt scientists are also doing an excellent job in that respect as are morally corrupt media writers whom I refuse to call journalists. In fact, I’d argue the latter are particularly effective because they have an insidious way of conveying certain messages while masking them as news reporting or analysis.
Here’s a recent example from the LA Times. Ostensibly, the author lays out facts and scientific evidence that 100% renewables are totally possible, carefully avoiding the question of why, if it is possible, not even a single town in the great transitionist state of California is 100% renewable. He then goes on to conclude that blackouts are not a good idea while implying that maybe we need to change our attitude to said blackouts to save the planet.
This one report is quite illustrative, I think, of the latest trends in corporate media reporting — a shift from basic alarmism and fear-mongering to more subtle messaging seeking to change attitudes to things we take for granted, such as reliable electricity.
Who needs electricity 24/7 when you can have this solar-powered, battery-equipped thought-reading device for just $99.99? And to make sure you can buy it, the government will guarantee a universal basic income to any and all who need it because, for instance, their jobs have been eliminated by automation.
To make this income absolutely secure, the government will distribute it as central bank digital currency, which is also more environmentally friendly than dirty cash. Well, it will be absolutely secure from things like private bank failures and unethical employers but the government will have the power to say what you can use your universal basic income for because it knows better than you what’s good for you.
In truth, private banks are just as much tools of the push as all the others, already being proactive about silencing inappropriate opinions and political positions whether or not the government is asking them to or not. We saw it during Canada’s trucker protests and now again with Nigel Farage’s banking saga, or rather debanking saga. And that’s spreading, too.
Banks are a trusted partner of the transition crusaders and why wouldn’t they be — banks are not just lenders, they are huge investors with a sharpened sense of where they should put their money to reap the greatest profits at the lowest risk. Few investment opportunities are lower-risk than a government-mandated energy transition. Well, at least on the face of it.
Below the face are all the problems with this seemingly low-risk, high-profit investment opportunity — the inherent physical problems of wind and solar, and the basic fact that you can’t sell energy cheaply and make a big profit from this, as Orsted’s CEO noted in his recent complaints to the UK’s government.
Electricity is not chocolate, after all, or cigarettes. It is very difficult to create the level of demand that would allow producers to keep end prices low while making a nice profit at the same time by keeping their production costs low enough, too.
Now for the fun part. The transition push is riddled with so many shortages it’s a miracle people are still talking about it. Lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earth processing capacity was just the start. Recently, it has emerged there are not enough transformers, not enough inverters, and, my personal favourite, not enough cables to build all the planned wind and solar farms.
All this sounds very much like someone who not don’t their homework and it was an important piece of homework. It sounds like the planners didn’t actually plan so much as wish things would happen the way they wanted them to. And, of course, no one ever thought to build a prototype. They didn’t even think to make a proof-of-concept before going all in on the net-zero pledges.
Because of this major omission, the transition seems to be mostly happening in the media. Sure, companies are building wind and solar installations or rather, judging from the shortage reports, starting to build them and then waiting for transformers/inverters/cables. Or selling them unfinished and even un-started.
Yet the forecasts, almost invariably coming from transition advocacies rather than any organisation with genuine research credentials, remain as rosy as they ever were, and the catastrophising narrative is getting louder.
I suspect there may have never been such a wide gap between what the media reports and what is actually happening in the world when it comes to the energy transition and especially the so-called climate emergency.
Per newsfeeds, the transition is moving forward. So, Orsted is complaining about costs, so what. So, Vattenfall has quit a massive offshore project in the UK, so what. So, there are not enough transformers to expand the U.S. grid for all that wind and solar that’s coming, so what.
On and on it goes, lulling a lot of people with money to spend into a false sense of security that an investment in the transition is guaranteed low-risk, high-return. And if you ask to see a prototype, you’ll probably get an empty wooden box after the conman has left with your money on the first train out of town. Meanwhile, the EU just approved funding for Germany’s first permanent LNG import terminal.