Upcoming series: Understanding the energy crisis

YOU—MY READER—are one of a self-selecting group of free thinking spirits who are just as able as I am, if not more, to see through the farrago of nonsense on stilts with which malevolent forces are attempting to rewire the foundations of our living arrangements, towards outcomes that we are now beginning dimly to understand.

You therefore don’t require my assistance to notice that the wheels are flying off the clown cars of their many narratives.

On “Covid”, for example, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to conceal the terrifying rise in unexplained deaths in those countries (only) that coercively injected their citizens to the eyeballs with untested, experimental gene therapies designed to disregulate their immune systems in unknown ways in response to a respiratory infection that, for the vast majority of us, produced symptoms no worse than moderate to bad flu.

Similarly with their eccentric hypothesis that the effect of our energy system on a trace gas comprising 0.04% of our atmosphere is producing some sort of climate catastophe. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to reconcile it with its observable lack of any explanatory or predictive power, and with the growing number of eminent Nobel Laureate scientists patiently explaining a mountain of counterfactual scientific and observational evidence.

Finally, the outrage of school “teachers” conspiring to conceal chaps dressed as sex workers indoctrinatating our school children into a state of anxiety about the contents of their own underpants, and peddling experimental medical procedures to render that anxiety surgically and hormonally permanent is rapidly penetrating the awareness of a once too-trusting populace.

These and more are receiving very welcome attention, even in mainstream media. You will notice that the “blob” (whatever it is) is responding to that attention with increasingly panicked and undisguised attempts to suppress our discussion of its failing narratives. Or what it calls “hatred” and “misinformation”.

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But one crisis that I think is not receiving the attention it needs is, ironically, the one that really is going to kill many of us before our time if we don’t take very great care to prevent it—the unfolding energy crisis, finding expression in various flavours of “Net Zero” ideology.

If you’ve arrived at my newsletter via my writings on Covid, climate, or authoritarianism, you may not know that my professional skills lie in energy where, for many years, I have been a senior operations manager and energy economist in the international upstream oil and gas industry.

You might suppose from this that I am therefore some sort of shill for entrenched oil and gas interests. On the contrary, it is my understanding of the dynamics and trajectory of our oil and gas system—the system that is responsible for keeping us from dying today from some combination of cold, hunger, disease, and poverty—that led me to build Edinburgh’s first “Passive House”—a house which maintains a minimum internal temperature of 18 degrees year round at the 60th parallel in Scotland with no heating system and around 20% of the energy of a house built to current code.

Those dynamics and that trajectory are increasingly dominated by a long predicted malfunction in the global oil system that began to manifest around 2006, produced the (still diverging) 2008 Great Financial Crash, and today is the cause of the United States (for example) having to print $1 trillion dollars of hallucinated debt every hundred days to maintain the illusion that its financial system is solvent.

If that predicament was our only one, avoiding the contingent crash of our economic and financial system would be difficult enough. But to it, with a hubris exceeding even Ovid’s Icarus, we add another: the deliberate contraction of our energy system to satisfy conclusions drawn from pseudo-scientific notions about our climate so divorced from physical reality that they fail even to meet the minimum criteria against which correctness can be determined i.e. that are “not even wrong”.

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There are many books on energy. A few are useful. But I’ve yet to find one that is short enough to read in a sitting, that doesn’t treat you like a dummy or assumes you have a calculus degree, and that clearly distinguishes the important from the very important. So I’m going to write it. And, in the course of writing it, I’m going to publish an essay on here periodically summarising its main points.

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Energy isn’t particularly difficult to understand. At its most basic, it’s simple ecology. Increase the amount of energy in a frog pond; frog population increases. Reduce the amount of energy in a frog pond; frog population decreases.

“Net Zero” is the policy of deliberately decreasing the supply of energy in our global frog pond. So you can already predict one of its outcomes. Its advocates rather suppose that they aren’t one of the surplus frogs. They tend to be a little evasive on the subject of your fate under their scheme.

But although relatively straighforward, energy doesn’t lend itself well to guesswork. That’s why so many politicians have been led so far astray by so many charlatans.

Over the course of the essays, we’ll see that there is far more energy in an olympic sized swimming pool than there is in an egg pan of boiling water. After four minutes, useful chemical reactions have taken place in the egg pan. After a whole day in the swimming pool, you’ve still got a cold, raw egg. This is “thermodynamics”. Armed with a little thermodynamics, we’ll understand why claiming that “we’ll keep building wind turbines until we can shut down oil”—which sounds plausible enough—is indistinguishable, physically speaking, from the claim that “we’ll increase the size of our swimming pool until our egg boils.”

We’ll see how throwing away half of the output of an uneconomic wind farm in hydrogen conversion energy loss makes the wind farm twice as uneconomic. (Of all of my degrees, economics was by far the easiest).

We’ll learn that neoclassical economic resource theory—the flavour that drives capitalism, and is the basis of its claim that we can substitute millions of years of solar energy stored in oil and gas with sunbeams and summer breezes in real time—was devised by social “scientists” with no formal training in physical science (or common sense).

We’ll ask ourselves some hard questions: if every energy transition to date has powered itself by using a surplus of the prevailing energy source to move to an even higher density one, what evidence is there that we can power an energy transition moving from a deficit of the prevailing energy source to a lower density one? And if “technology” is the application of a surplus of energy to solve problems, how can it solve the problem of an energy deficit?

The least intuitive property of energy for most is also its most important: that money is energy. Specifically, that all debt is an advance on some future supply of energy. The corollary of this is another consequence of Net Zero: under it, your pension (and more) ceases to exist. After reading my essays, you’ll understand why printing money to fund systems that contract our energy supply is financial suicide (which is to say, civilisational suicide).

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to interrogate wind turbine multi-millionaires about their eccentic schemes to power our hospital intensive care units, food production, water distribution, sewage disposal, and nuclear waste cooling systems on a source of energy that, for a number of weeks each year, and over regionally extensive areas, produces absolutely nothing.

Then we’ll look at solutions. A short and difficult chapter. But an important one.

I hope this will be of interest to you. I hope that we will engage through the comments in lively debate—these will help me gauge the material and undoubtedly will improve the book. And I hope that you will share your knowledge with as many people as possible so that we can, together, put an end to the staggeringly dangerous ideology that is “Net Zero” and get on with the difficult job of solving our energy crisis.

See you soon.

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New York