By Steve MacDonald, Granite Grok
If ever there was a dead donkey to kick again, it’s this one, especially in the Northeast. Windfarms and solar installations will never keep us warm in the Winter. Absent a nuclear ramp-up with some hydro and natural gas backup, the all-electric future is not one coming soon, but Winter is!
Winter is coming!
That classic line from Game of Thrones, uttered by Ned Stark and later by almost everyone, has a new meaning for Europe. Winter 2022 is coming, and these children of the green energy summer are not prepared. They invested billions across the continent, chasing an emissions reduction fairytale that has left them naked in the face of the coming cold.
For months, European leaders have been haunted by the prospect of losing Russia’s natural gas supply, which accounts for some 40 percent of European imports and has been a crucial energy lifeline for the continent. That nightmare is now becoming a painful reality as Moscow slashes its flows in retaliation for Europe’s support for Ukraine, dramatically increasing energy prices and forcing many countries to resort to emergency plans …
“This is the most extreme energy crisis that has ever occurred in Europe,” said Alex Munton, an expert on global gas markets at Rapidan Energy Group, a consultancy. “Europe [is] looking at the very real prospect of not having sufficient gas when it’s most needed, which is during the coldest part of the year.”
Here in the Northeast, while activists were stopping new gas and electric infrastructure projects, we were sharing a few unpleasant energy truths on our pages. New England needs more natural gas infrastructure to meet basic demand. Forget new demand.
The establishment response has been no mas.
It’s a bell that has been rung for years. A peal ignored by policymakers and opposed by the climate cult, so my question is this. Will anyone here learn one damn lesson from what is happening in Europe today?
European countries are at risk of descending into “very, very strong conflict and strife because there is no energy,” Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, told the Guardian. “Putin is using all the means he has to create strife in our societies, so we have to brace ourselves for a very difficult period.”
The pain of the crisis, however, is perhaps being felt most clearly in Germany, which has been forced to turn to a number of energy-saving measures, including rationing heated water and closing swimming pools.
Blame Putin all you like, but it’s not his fault. The energy experts in Europe are to blame for a problem that a novice logistics intern could see and, if not avoid, at least prepare.
Getting yourself into a situation where your livelihood hinges on sole-source supply is never a good idea. Whether you are building widgets, smartphones, automobiles, or an energy plan, a single-source product will be a problem that the great minds of Europe are solving with government takeovers of the energy sector.
I’m just assuming that was the plan all along. They can’t all be that stupid, can they? And it fits the progressive template. Mismanage something with regulation and policy until it fails and then take it over as if the same people could fix what they broke.
And if they didn’t want to break it, how are they suddenly competent to fix it?
They are not, but trapped as they are in governments where the people still have some right to expression that can manifest a change in leadership means they need to be experts at something else—blaming others and manipulating the system to stay in power.
How many people freeze to death as part of this ancient dance (or die from the flu or its vaccine or violent crime or an overdose or starvation) is only a concern if it results in regime change where the new regime is not simply a shade of the old.
But Winter is coming.
In New England, it can get cold long enough to kill, so energy policy matters. But no one has taken it seriously in years. Even the all-electric future is FUBAR, with prices doubling, while activists’ answer to any energy question is more of the same failed policies and opposition to anything that might help.
Europe is on that path and finds itself at a precipice today. We’re on that path too. But why would we follow them when we have vast oil and gas reserves at our disposal?
New leaders, anyone?
The author is the founder of Granite Grok, a New Hampshire news and commentary website.
Categories: Commentary
Steve, the answer is not with new leadership. It is with the citizenry. There is more of us than more of them. The people control their destinies, not our leaders. Blamtifa has showed us how. Be visible and vocal. The “reset” is being sold as the future and no one knows what it means. I’ll tell you follow Vermonters……… it means using buzz words of climate change and renewable energy and gun control under the deception to keep the majority in poverty and easily punished when you don’t comply. It means transferring more and more wealth from the middle class to the ruling class. The “reset” will use inflation to deplete our resources in an effort to prevent the masses from becoming independent of government dependency. The “reset” will close banks to prevent you from withdrawing too much money at one time to prevent you from protesting as happened to the truckers in Canada. It means rationing fertilizer so farms can’t grow crops as is being done in the Netherlands right now. It means rationing diesel gas so farmers can’t harvest crops and truckers can’t deliver them to supermarkets as is happening right now in Sri Lanka. It means keeping people sick so they can’t work in our factories to deplete the supply chain that is needed to fix cars, computers, water treatment plants, nuclear power plants, air conditioning or heating systems. The “reset” is a propaganda process to blame someone like Putin while you sit and wait for your government to solve the crisis for you until it’s too late. Too late to get your money out of the bank, too late to get food at the supermarket, too late to access the internet of things, too late to keep warm during the winter and cool during the summer. Too late to feed your newborn baby. Too late to pay your rent or mortgage, or farm loans. The “reset” will force you to sell what you own for pennies on the dollar to survive. And guess who will be buying everything up when that happens as you see your future become extinguished? It’s happening now while you sit on your $ss hoping your bitcoin investment is going to save you. Only to find it’s in the dumper too. Sorry to be such a downer.
The line is “You will own nothing and be happy”.
It’s called Depopulation too, so the Elites will have a limited number of slaves to work for them. The World Economic Forum, look it up, it’s all right in front of you.
2 Chronicles 7:14
King James Version
14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.