So, Joe Biden goes to the G7 where Boris Johnson pleads with him to stop ethanol production from grain in order to avoid worldwide food shortages. Biden refuses. Obviously, Biden has no concern for adequate nutrition for the globe. Let them eat CO2-depleted air. Or drink ethanol.

Given that burning CO2 produces a mere 4% less CO2 than burning gasoline per gallon, a reasonable person would ask why. And that doesn’t even include the CO2 produced by the fermentation of grains to produce the alcohol. Or the depletion of our fossil water resources on the Great Plains to produce the Ethanol. Or the CO2 required from fossil fuels to plant, grow (and the fossil fuels that provide the fertilizers), and harvest the grain. Or the CO2 production from transporting large quantities of ethanol. And etc., and etc. It seems to me that there may actually be a net disadvantage to using ethanol compared to gasoline. The situation may be different in Brazil, where sugar cane is used rather than corn or other grains.

Ah, but there is more methane and particulates from burning gasoline. But,  given that all of the biomass on the planet would have to be used to produce enough ethanol to power our transportation and supplant all of our fossil fuel use, one begins to wonder what planet the eco-activists think they live on. And that all of the planet’s forests would have to be clear-cut to provide enough land to produce all of that ethanol. One can only conclude that the eco-activists are intent on destroying the planet.

Studies from about 20 years ago indicated that the continental US is a net carbon sink, that the vegetation and other things that absorb CO2 take more CO2 out of the atmosphere than the US puts into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. And that was before the rather precipitous fall in greenhouse gas emissions in the US over the last couple of decades, no thanks to any federal or government policies. So, what exactly is the problem? Perhaps the opposite of what the eco-activists claim:  It appears that we are falling behind, and need to put more CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels to keep up.

Then they tell us that CO2 is a “greenhouse” gas, that rising levels of CO2 will warm the planet. That is argued based on the Arrhenius equation (an empirical equation, basically superseded by the Eyring Equation, but who cares about that), which shows that CO2 absorbs a lot of heat. The assumption is that that is the end of the story. But let’s do a Paul Harvey and look at the rest of the story: What happens to that CO2 molecule once it absorbs heat?  Does it just sort of stay in place, hang around, and go nowhere, warming the earth by providing, along with all of its fellow CO2 molecules, a nice heat blanket covering the planet.

That appears to be a misleading, Kiplingesque, just-so story. Years ago, Richard Lindzen, arguably the dean of climate scientists at the time, at MIT, showed, in high-altitude balloon measurements on heat radiation into space from the earth, that the higher the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, the greater the heat radiated away from the earth into space. Now why would that be?  Seems that CO2 isn’t a static molecule. When it heats up, e.g., gains more kinetic energy, it becomes more volatile. The net effect is that it rises, and conducts its heat higher into the atmosphere, to the point of conducting that heat outward from the planet. Sort of like boiling water. The water doesn’t just stay stationary in the pot as its temperature rises. It starts forming convection currents that more and more efficiently deliver heat from the burner underneath to the air above the pot. So, one might think of CO2 as a temperature damping molecule that stabilizes and modulates the temperature of the planet by aiding the conduction of heat away from the planet, or possibly aiding the retention of heat during colder epochs. An indispensable modulator of planetary temperature.

Of course, no one ever talks about what the ideal level of atmospheric CO2 should be. No one knows. And of course, despite all the models (which are about as accurate as the models of the COVID pandemic coming out of that great geyser of prognostication garbage, Imperial College London), no one knows the long (or the short) term effects of modulating CO2 levels in the atmosphere. As far as anyone really knows, we should be eager to release sequestered carbon by burning more fossil fuels. The effect of that may be an ever greener planet. With an ever more stable climate. No hockey stick in sight. Michael Mann notwithstanding.

So Joe is not worried about food shortages. Or if he is, I’m sure he blames Putin. Never mind Biden’s puerile behavior as Putin prepared and then launched his invasion of Ukraine. Or his fecklessness and impotence since the invasion, except to give Putin cause to laugh in our faces about how the sanctions on Russia are weakening the US economy. Thanks, Joe.

So to Petroleum. “Rock Oil.” (Not to be confused with Rock Auto). What has it done for us and the planet? First off out of the box, of course, it saved the whales. The whale oil industry collapsed overnight with the switch to petroleum in the middle of the 19th Century. And then, lo and behold, fossil fuel use “fueled” literally the industrial revolution, robber barons and all, during which the trajectory of economic growth went from flat for 8,000 years to almost straight up. Talk about a hockey stick!  And economic growth, human prosperity, health, and happiness have expanded almost exponentially ever since. Now of course all of that got its start, according to Dierdre McCluskey, in 1517, with a transformation in the valuation of the individual and the onset of ever-increasing human liberty. Until we have achieved such well-being and prosperity that some have seen the “End of History”.

So now such as Joe Biden are doing their level best to reverse that historical trend, trying to bend the arc of history to return us to a pre-medieval status of poverty, disease, and life that is short, nasty, and brutish. Sort of like Venezuela. Mostly by sequestering fossil fuels. Bjorn Lomberg has highlighted the utter hypocrisy of our Elites in this regard, as European countries scramble to return to burning coal. And a bevy of scientists has promulgated a letter in praise of the benefits of fossil fuel use.

To Biden, the use of fossil fuels is folly. Encomium Moriae? No. Encomium Petroleum. What to Biden is folly is, for everyone else, the epitome of prudence.

That is not to argue against nuclear power. But Biden is condemning that approach with faint funding and little enthusiasm, as more and more Greens start to realize the potential benefit of that source of energy. Only we have lost our expertise in this realm, through criminal disuse. Where’s an Admiral Rickover when such is needed?

Our elites are walking a fine line. The masses will not forever be forgiving of their incompetence and imbecility. One thinks of the French Revolution, touched off by what? A shortage of bread, due to a shortage of grain, due to a volcanic eruption in the Pacific halfway around the world that led to global cooling, that destroyed the grain crops, so the price of flour, and bread, skyrocketed, so French peasants could no longer afford their pan quotidian, those marvelous French sourdough baguettes. Certainly, a cause for revolution if there ever was one. Only this time, it will be pretty much a man-made disaster.

But I’ve gone on too long. I need to go find a gas station that has non-ethanol-added gasoline so I can fuel my Stihl hedge trimmer. The bushes are getting too bushy.