Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Hydrocarbon Deliverance
Imagine an alternative present. The details are in the next paragraph, but let me warn you up front it won’t be entirely self-consistent or believable. I’m trying to explain a liberal pathology here; you’re going to have to ride with it.
Imagine a world similar to ours today, except that they never discovered petrochemicals. No oil, coal, or gas. Instead, they (somehow) developed collectors to harvest wind and sunlight (it’s ok to leave this part vague.) They store the energy as compressed hydrogen and in electrochemical batteries. In this alternative present, battery tech is very good, because they’ve spent exorbitantly on research. Most of their batteries are about twice as efficient as a Duracell, and they have a million times more of them than we do.
And that’s all the baseline imagining we need to do. Let all that gel for a second, and pretend that it’s truth.
This is the kind of exercise the liberal mind does all the time, so much that the products of imagination become their paradigms. The difference is that you’ll know it’s an intellectual exercise, where the liberal believes it’s evidence of his intellect.
You all set with our hydro-solar-wind world? Then with our beliefs to stand firm on, we’ll now reason like competent humans. I told you this wouldn’t be consistent.
What is it like in here? Well, our cities are ringed by solar panels, not by forests and farms. In the heartland, agriculture takes a back seat to wind generators, and most of our metal is strung across the country on towers.
Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, and will leak past any unsophisticated barrier. Hydrogen will leak in the laboratory if the gear is not well maintained. It actually erodes and cracks steel. Death and injury from hydrogen fires in the green world are an everyday occurrence.
A third of our economy is devoted to battery production. One positive thing is that recycling is finally an economic necessity.
We are poor. We do not travel, nor do we consume luxuries. There is not enough productivity to offset what we have to expend to keep the lights on. We live in the most economically stratified society since Roman times.
Gosh, it’s a dystopia in there, with just renewable energy. Now, you and I know that nothing like a modern society could ever evolve without abundant energy, so that vision could never really materialize. But it’s a useful thought experiment, in the vein of something like Earth After People.
Now let’s pretend one more thing. Some farmer up in the Pennsylvania mountains was shooting his next-to-last twice-reloaded shotgun shell at some grub, and what do you know – bubbling up from the ground, smelly black oil. Sure seems to burn well. Wonder what they can do with it.
Those people are going to stumble all over themselves to use that stuff. Down comes all that hateful wire and windmills. They are going to be rich.
Published in Energy
Magnificent post!
Without plastic from petroleum what else would they lack?
I love the point that if Planet Renewable suddenly struck oil, they would Drill Baby Drill for dear life.
Good post. See my related article at Quillette: Slavery and Steam.
I wonder what lubricant is used for the wind mills?
I have wondered about the growing of food. As we are seeing, in many parts of the U.S.A. solar panel farms use a lot of land that would otherwise be used for growing crops (either for humans to eat directly, or to be fed to animals that produce food that humans eat). But today in real America we may be able to afford that because petrochemical fuel and fertilizer allow very efficient agricultural land use. How does agriculture work in a world without petrochemicals?
Perfect.
The cut-out living guts of their enemies, no doubt.
I was going to say graphite.
You say tomato, I say antifa.
I was going to say sustainable whale oil.
Hydrocarbon. Would have made good foreshadowing.
These days, apparently money.😛
I read an interview of John D. Rockefeller oh, so many years ago.
Interviewer: What’s Yer secret to success?
JDR: I have 3 undeniable rules I always follow:
No coal means no cheap and plentiful steel. Steel making in anything more than small quantities needs coke (which comes from coal). Your world is a cast iron and wrought iron world and a major concern will be having enough trees in order to have all the wood that is necessary for producing iron from charcoal and iron ore.
Nice post.
A gallon of gas is a portable, (relatively) cheap, energy dense, plentiful marvel. It can take you and your family and their luggage 25 comfortable miles miles in less time than it takes to walk 2 miles.
The short sightedness of our green overlords is just astonishing. If this shutdown of domestic energy and the ridiculous outlawing of internal combustion energy began at the beginning of Obama’s first term instead of Biden’s we’d have a hopelessly overwhelmed grid, personal transportation as we know it would no longer exist because fuel would all be imported, and gasoline would be seen as the kind of luxury that needs to be taxed much harder. The transition from single family dwellings (due to huge utility costs) would be well underway. Our standard of living will diminish before our eyes. According to the plan.
How do we stop it?
I think foreshadowing was covered the following year. Engineers just had to take two semesters.
And anyway, I caught mono, right after the quiz on alliteration and
onna motta poenomaterpeiirony.Whale oil beef hooked.
Whale oil, naturally.
I don’t have to imagine energy dystopia. I stare it in the face every time I drive through the plains of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. You know. Where all the deplorable Republican voters live and don’t mind their land and view being destroyed by WTMs (wind turbine monstrosities). ‘Cause the greenie elites sure as hell aren’t building windfarms within site of their homes!
It’s Hunger Games on the way.
Two items related to our energy future…the new Miss America is involved: Nuclear News.
There are former blueberry barrens, hillsides, fields and farms that have now, effectively, been paved with solar panels. They’re hideous.
What happens to the wildlife? How do these things affect the way water moves through and runs off these lands? What plant, insect and animal life can dwell safely beneath them? In what sense are these things “nature-friendly?”
Why didn’t we begin by covering the roofs of big box stores and government buildings with solar panels? Public schools? Why not build them over parking lots? Why are they metastasizing over what was open, beautiful and fruitful land, and why aren’t environmentalists concerned about that?
I think I can answer that last question. Because the green movement isn’t really about protecting nature. It’s about acquiring *power* over people.
Yes, bacon fried in a little bit of whale oil is so good.
Takes just like penguin.
How many “greens” will be left in the EU by Spring?
Depends on the wheat shipments. Soylent Green is people, after all. Now we know which ones.