The coming confrontation between climate politics, economic reality and the oldest human demand of all: reliable energy
Another Year, Another Dose of Guilt
Another year comes to a close. We all take a good, hard look back at our past sins. Let’s not quite do that right now. It is the now, and the immediate tomorrow, that should concern us.
New Year is the most prominent of all excuses people use for making new resolutions, for looking back at the last year and perhaps further still, with the quaint nostalgia otherwise reserved for marriages and burials. It is also high time for guilt to raise its ugly head, making new demands upon us in the hope that yet another ritual will somehow soothe the conscience.
But all those things are past-related. They may attempt to pivot towards the future—even if it is the faintest pivot we can muster—but this pivot does not do the challenges we face any justice.
Because things are quite a bit different now than they were at the beginning of this year.
People are beginning to wake up to the reality of the demands being made by the Climate Alarmist movement. And, more importantly, they are beginning to understand what the personal price of turning those utopian demands into reality would actually be.
It is no less than the end of human civilization as we know it.
And the emergence of an autocratic dictatorship.
Why Dictatorship?
Why dictatorship, you say?
People like to think that democracy and dictatorship are opposites. History is considerably less accommodating. Some of the cruelest dictatorships had democratic origins. They came riding on the back of public opinion, on the will of the majority. The Nazis are merely one of the cruellest examples. The Great Terror during the Convention regime of the French Revolution likewise emerged with majorities behind it.
Alexis de Tocqueville put it rather more elegantly in Democracy in America: the tyranny of the majority.
I would add one small qualification.
It is the tyranny of the perceived majority.
Majorities are not always what they seem. History is littered with examples of governments discarding their promises almost immediately after elections have been won. The electorate is wonderfully enthusiastic about principles right up until the bill arrives.
The vast majority of people will not accept that their quality of life should be severely reduced. Perhaps even reduced to mere subsistence. And politicians advocating such measures will not get re-elected.
This means that, eventually, only strong coercion will work.
And a very large minority—and sometimes the majority itself—are beginning to understand this.
New wind parks are becoming harder to build because people do not particularly want those giant shredders anywhere near their homes. Subsidies for renewables are straining public coffers. Politicians will have to make increasingly unpleasant choices between social spending and renewable energy. Those campaigning on Alarmist platforms are beginning to lose elections, as happened in Australia.
There will be more of the same.
Lower, or even non-existent, subsidies for electric vehicles have made sales figures tank. At the same time, the fracker country-in-chief continues to produce stellar economic growth, with plenty of jobs for everyone. Meanwhile, Canadians suffocate beneath a thick blanket of regulation.
Many look south with envy.
The Cold Arrives
Meanwhile, a new Grand Solar Minimum seems to be upon us and is beginning, slowly, to show its effects.
This one appears to be bigger and deeper than the Maunder Minimum. It represents the cold peak of the Little Ice Age, during which we saw a couple of decades of generalized freezing. Rivers all over Europe froze solid every single winter. My hometown of Vienna saw ice barrages of hitherto unseen size ravaging the Danube.
The cold produced widespread crop failures, which in turn led to famine across Europe.
To some, it looks almost like a madhouse.
But there is structure and logic in all this.
Climate Warriors can now see the writing on the wall.
They are growing nervous and must press ever harder to get their pet projects and legislation passed. They can see and feel the resistance on one side and the coming Solar Minimum on the other. And they know that once it gets much colder, their script is broken.
So it is smash and grab for as long as they can manage it.
Every single hot summer is used to maximum effect while they still can. A last remnant of panic is manufactured and squeezed for everything it is worth, in the hope of getting their favourite projects financed and legislated.
They know it will end.
So they try to squeeze the system for as much as they can before it does.
What Comes After the Madhouse
But beyond all this madness, regular people will need something that helps them get through the hard times, through the grand freeze.
Economies will need to keep growing.
Poor countries will continue trying to lift their populations out of poverty.
And now people in developed economies have tasted the fruits of the madhouse renewable economy. Most of them will want to go back to doing what works rather than what earns them social-media credit.
That will be coal.
That will be oil.
That will be nuclear.
But above all, it will be Natural Gas—or Methane, as I like to call it.
Most people in developed countries do not want to go back to coal. It is easy to use and, with the right kind of filtering, it is perfectly serviceable as a source of power. But building new coal blocks after the old ones have been taken down takes time and requires substantial investment.
Developed countries will need solutions fast.
Very fast.
Blackouts and brownouts, as well as load shedding, have a remarkable way of concentrating people’s minds on solutions that actually work. Look at how quickly Californians hit by blackouts have moved to install diesel gensets.
So the gut will call for fast solutions, and nothing beats setting up gas turbines in this regard.
They are fast to install. Their footprint is tiny. They run without producing large quantities of pollutants, which means you can put them practically in the middle of cities. They are safe, technically mature, and remarkably unexciting.
Bought.
But that’s just more of the same.
And that would be boring.
Wouldn’t it?
Methane Takes the Stage
The much more exciting stuff is going to happen when methane spreads out in earnest across all domains of energy.
Let’s take two steps back and look at energy as a whole.
What do we actually need energy for?
- To produce heat;
- To make electricity for our appliances;
- To move people and things from one place to another;
And, of course, combinations thereof.
Coal is a great provider of heat. It is energy-dense, easy to store, safe to use, and, if you apply the right technology, it can even be fairly clean.
At least if you leave the Climate Alarmist definition of “clean” out of the discussion.
But coal is hard to use for vehicles. Just look at the size of those steam locomotives and ships. It is also rather poor for distributed power and heat production. You need to drag heaps of coal around with you.
Not nice.
Nuclear is great for electricity but requires heavy shielding. It is hard to use for mobility except in the largest vehicles, such as aircraft carriers and giant submarines.
Oil is excellent for mobility because it is easy to fuel up and extremely energy-dense. You can also use it for power production and heat generation. It has acquired a rather bad reputation over the last couple of years, but much of that reputation has been undeserved.
Just like oil, Natural Gas works excellently across all three domains and at virtually any scale.
It is fast to deploy, clean like almost nothing else we know, and works in the real world—and economically so. It is also rather cheap compared with oil.
And that will be the major selling point.
Price.
The Price of Gas
I remember a discussion I once had in the Caribbean about the potential use of LNG on small islands. We were discussing small-island distribution solutions when someone stood up and said that his poor island could not afford LNG.
It was too expensive.
I asked how his island had produced power up to that point.
He said they used diesel generators.
I replied that if his island could afford diesel, it could certainly afford LNG, because LNG was cheaper.
And the current overhang of LNG plus pipeline gas will make sure that it remains that way for quite some time.
So what is driving this again?
- The availability of cheap NG/LNG for many years now;
- The urgent need to patch systems that break down because of the failure of wind and solar;
- The urgent need to bring on new, stable power-generation capacity capable of underpinning a developed economy;
- A Climate Change script that is fraying everywhere under the pressure of deep cold spells during the Solar Minimum.
Those four drivers will get plenty of entrepreneurs thinking and tinkering.
They will want to exploit this situation to their benefit.
And the well-known eternal circle of economic life is at work again. Many will try. Many will fail. But those who succeed will make this world a much better place.
Methane will be the energy spinal cord of it all.
