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THIS IS EPIC AND SO WELL ARTICULATED I JUST HAD TO POST IT ( IN THE COMMENTS)
Parsing why certain factions are pushing us towards world war
means having to fall back on first principles as to why wars are
fought. Past wars have openly been about energy and
resources. Today’s war is no different.
But to sell that war means convincing people satisfied with the
life created by oil and gas that this will destroy the planet and
empowers evil men. When the real evil is in lying to us about
how we get from where we are to where we should go.
This is their justification for why we should suffer a world war that is wholly
avoidable.
That lie is sold not for our benefit but for theirs to keep the continuity of power at the
top while tightening their control over us. This issue is focused on exposing those
plans and why it’s an imperative that they do not become reality.
Technology is supposed to free us from drudgery. We
apply our time and ingenuity to coming up with needed
innovations to make our lives a little easier. With each new
thing shaving a few minutes here or an hour there, we get
precious time back to spend on other things.
Today, we’ve reclaimed so much future time we take basic tools
for granted. Last year when shopping for a hatchet I was
amazed at the variations in them. I’d never given hatchets a
second thought. Now I had to. Head size and shape, handle
curvature and length, etc., were all now under serious
consideration.
When you really look at a thing you realize that there’s been an
awful lot of human thought inherent in its design. Each
variation was created to perform the basic task of chopping
wood better depending on the wood being chopped.
This isn’t some silly abstract German board game where all
wood is just wood. Real life is messier, more nuanced, and
diverse. When we all were lumberjacks in some way, when
chopping and splitting wood was as basic a skill to survival as
driving a car is today, a man knew the difference between
hatchets.
The right hatchet may have improved his daily productivity
twenty or even thirty per cent over the wrong one. That’s a lot
of time when most of your day is spent on procuring the
necessities of life.
So that time clawed back is precious. It always is. It’s what
profit is, banked time. You now have a little more freedom to
do the things you’d like to do rather than the things you must.
Those things could be leisurely, watching a hockey game or
vitally important, helping our children with their schooling.
The technology is there to assist us bank time and plan more
rationally for our future.
In freeing us from the time needed to perform basic functions
like procuring food, building and maintaining shelter, and
stockpiling for lean times, technology is a force for selfsufficiency and decentralization.
The self-sufficiency part is obvious. The decentralization part,
however, may not be on first blush.
By driving up the free time we have we can set ourselves on
nobler pursuits. This first creates the demand for some new
thing or service. If it’s a sustainable demand it will drive real
profit, banked time. If there’s real profit it means someone else
can sustain their life through providing it.
Broadly, the shift from stone axes to iron ones not only yields
better cutting tools of all shapes and sizes, but it also creates a
whole new industry, blacksmithing. It formalizes and
streamlines the process of wood chopping tools and opens
opportunities for other uses of the blacksmith’s time. It’s
revolutionary in terms of saved time across an entire
civilization which yields new opportunities for an individual’s
specific advantages to flourish.
The Rise of Geopolitics
There is no technology that is more liberating of human time
than energy. Harnessing pools of stored energy of greater
density is the ultimate tool of human liberation from not only
the tyranny of nature but also other humans.
Those in power, both official and unofficial, understand this
completely. They know that unfettered access to cheap,
abundant energy is a path to a world where we don’t need their
guidance or interference.
It’s why they work so hard to control the flow of energy around
the world and for what price? It’s why geopolitics – the
intersection of energy and politics – is the most important
aspect of all economic analysis.
So, while technology is supposed to free us from the tyranny of
our limited productive time it is also a tool for enslavement if
we don’t control the development of it through the application
of private capital.
When I look at the Davos Crowd’s stated goals I see the path of
how they accomplish them through the application of energy
policy. There is only one path to their end game as outlined by
them, continued centralized control over all energy production.
In the wood economy, we had to bring our productivity to
where the fuel was, the forest. But we could all go in whatever
direction we wanted to get the wood we needed. It was
decentralized at the personal level.
It was also the limiting factor of our economic growth. Trees
only have so much energy and they only grow so fast.
Replenishing them takes time. There’s an upper limit to the
number of people a wood-based economy can support.
With the greater energy density provided by oil, a more vast
amount of stored energy could be brought to economic centers
for far lower relative cost and far higher real profit (banked
time). The upper limit of people this could support rose
dramatically.
In fact, it’s where we are today, cruising towards 9 billion
humans.
With it came a longer supply chain, more dependencies within
the economy. The flourishing of the division of labor is like
that. As such, points of failure within that economy multiply
exponentially. But it was still decentralized because now local
production of energy could sustain local populations. The term
local could now be measured in hundreds of miles rather than
tens.
There were centralization aspects to it as it scaled up over time.
Economies of scale took over in the downstream part of the
supply chain, e.g., refineries. But, overall, no technology
unleashed more human creativity and freedom from the
tyranny of nature than the discovery of oil.
But with all of this came greater opportunity for people to buy
political influence, corrupt the markets and all of the things
that come with the centrality of this supply. The fight and
breakup for Standard Oil over a century ago gave rise to antitrust regulation and the beginning of
the end of a free market in energy
production.
Regulatory capture, where
companies use the government to
protect them from competition, is
always a threat. It’s merging into a
seamless system of corruption is the
hallmark of late-stage representativebased political systems, regardless of
their selection mechanism, in other words, voting methods.
Davos’ Great Reset is the ultimate form of regulatory capture as
applied to the entire planet.
The politicians vote to restrict the use of the land, or set
barriers to entry through environmental legislation, etc. to
favor one producer (who greased the politician’s palm) over the
other. It’s a story as old as civilization itself.
The Fall of Oil
It’s not interesting to state that wars are fought over control of
resources. This is a foundational premise, not an insight.
Today we are in a war not just for control over the flow of the
energy, primarily oil and gas, but over the shift away from them
to a new economy.
Davos is trying to force on their schedule not ours, the shift
from the oil-based economy to the technologically superior one
based on nuclear power providing the electricity and hydrogen
as the portable fuel for our day-to-day living, and any potential
future living in space.
Today oil and its derivatives serve as both. It is both the fuel in
our cars and harvesters as well as the fuel spinning the turbines
to induce electric fields that power our homes.
It’s also a resource that the people who are at the center of
Davos’ power, Europe, can no longer produce enough of to
sustain themselves. They need a new energy architecture if
they want to retain their independence. Today’s Europe was built on the outrageous advantage of
buying Russian energy at prices which conferred equally
outrageous profit for certain European countries, namely
Germany. Credit Suisse’s Zoltan Poszar remarked recently that
roughly $2 trillion in German GDP rested on buying $20 billion
in Russian oil and gas annually, a 100-fold profit.
It was a cozy arrangement that allowed Germany the economic
power within the European Union to set policy for the entire
continent. In this way, along with the single currency
arrangement of the euro, Germany waged economic and
political war on its neighbors. The weapons weren’t tanks and
planes but rather BMWs, turbine blades, controller chips, and
chemicals.
What many people cannot seem to fathom is why Germany
would voluntarily end such an arrangement over something as
petty as an ethnic conflict between Slavic tribes in Ukraine. It
is why so many default to the US as the main culprit in driving
the escalation of the war.
Germany must be the victim who will have to buy US energy
rather than Russian. But that doesn’t track knowing that the
“Biden” administration is throttling US energy production as its
primary policy. If anything, “Biden” has been harping on the
Davos climate change agenda to wean everyone off ‘fossil fuels
by 2030′ or the world will end.
So, there’s a bigger, deeper game
being played here. Our job is to
tease out what it is.
Control over the value of the energy
in monetary terms is the central
issue because the source of power in
the world today isn’t energy itself
but the control over its price through
the application of credit money.
Germany and Davos built their economic engine on this
leverage of profit thanks to cheap Russian energy but refused to
share that wealth with everyone else. The power of Europe’s
credit markets, including City of London, helped fuel the
architecture of our monetary system today.
It is the ultimate source of what power they have and they seek
to maintain that, if not expand it.
That means they must remove Russia as their energy source
and remake Europe’s energy usage based on new technology
that is at least equal to the energy density provided by oil and
gas, namely uranium.
That’s where the new competitive advantage comes in, at least
in their minds. The obvious problem with this thinking is that
Russia also controls the flow of uranium around the world,
roughly 60% of the up, mid and downstream production of
U-238-based fuel.
If you want to understand their deep hatred of Russia it is this.
They can’t win the current game nor can they win the future
one without destroying Putin who clearly understands every
single bit of this analysis since his domestic and foreign policy
has stepwise placed Russia directly in their path.
The Climate Change Hoax
This is where climate change comes in.
By emphasizing the costs of using oil and gas, by making carbon
dioxide a poison and preying on people’s good natures, Davos
has created an endlessly self-critical milieu where we blame
ourselves for defiling our home. “You don’t shit where you eat”
became global political policy.
The real worry over pollution from our industrial society turned
ugly as oil was made into the scapegoat for everything wrong
with the world. It fueled the rise of dictators like Putin in
Russia, the House of Saud, the Mullahs in Iran, and Big Oil in
the US.
Think of the polar bears!
Every oil-related problem was amplified and the real costs of
replacement technologies of lesser quality – wind and solar –
suppressed. Governments shifted the flow of capital away from
what made us prosperous to what would make us poorer while
the monetary system built on debt and finance drained us of the
profit (banked time) the oil economy provided us.
Now, the very act of being born is a sin against the environment
and Mother Earth. You
enter this world with a debt
to the planet you can never
repay. The best you can be
is ‘carbon neutral.’
In this psychological
framework, solar and wind
technologies are nothing
more than PR to shift the
political inertia of people
who are happy living their
best lives in the first world
into a fugue of self-hatred
and paranoia.
We have doomsday carbon
cults now. Assisted suicide
is a growth industry in
Scandinavia and
responsible health policy in
Canada.
And we have German
Greens willing to break the
German industrial engine
completely in a quixotic
quest to bankrupt Russia
and depose Putin for defying their anti-humanist worldview.
All of this pearl clutching over climate is fine as long as the gas
flows and the tyranny of nature adequately kept at bay. For
many people the idea of a transition to a better world sounds
good and they are willing to make small sacrifices and
adjustments but no more.
So, while Davos has installed their people to make this happen
at the policy level they are now fighting against the reality of all
politics truly being local. They’ve made their big gambit and
now we get to find out if they will be successful.
The Real Energy Policy
That’s the game board as it stands today. Europe is willingly
decoupling from Russia. The US is a captured player supporting
this through “Biden.” The inertia of Anglo antipathy towards
Russia for refusing to be colonized by the British for two
hundred years, manifesting as neoconservative foreign policy, is
the tool to start a world war. ut what is Davos’ end game?
The core of it goes back to my argument at the beginning about
technology, specifically energy technology. Oil in the West is a
captured technology. But the primary producers of it have said
no to being subordinates in the future of the world. They began
making this statement via Russia two decades ago when Putin
first came to power.
In October, by cutting oil production quotas officially by two
million barrels per day, OPEC+ made that statement
collectively.
Davos’ end game is shifting the world to a new base power
source with a new fuel but retaining control over the generation
of both, keeping humanity slaved to a financial system they
control rather than allowing that technology to further
decentralize human endeavors.
The way you do that is by replacing oil and gas with fuels that
require even more tightly controlled supply chains which are
subject to even more toll booths erected along the way.
For the electricity grid,
nuclear power is a suitable
replacement for oil in terms
of EROEI – Energy
Returned Over Energy
Invested. EROEI is not a
great metric, but for
discussion purposes it will
do. In terms of energy
density, however, uranium
and/or thorium are orders
of magnitude better than
oil.
A handful of uranium fuel
can power your entire life
versus thousands of barrels
of oil. Think of it this way.
According to the BP
Statistical Review of Global
Energy, today oil, coal and
natural gas produce 81% of
the power consumed
annually by humanity.
177,000 GWHrs of global
electricity is consumed by
7.1 billion people.
This means we each use 250,000 MWhrs of energy annually.
That number is only going up as more people enter the middle
class. Nuclear supplies just 7,000 GWHrs. Oil, gas, and coal
produce 145,000.
There is no replacing that in nine years. What Davos is quickly
pivoting to in Europe is an end game based on nuclear power as
the primary source of electricity, at least rhetorically. Now, even
the German Greens in power are acquiescing to nuclear being
necessary for the future.
The architecture for nuclear power is even more highly
regulated, and frankly, more dangerous than the current oilbased one from an ecological perspective. After demonizing
nuclear as unsafe for three generations, no way will the public
allow a truly private market for nuclear power. The word
nuclear gives some people hives just thinking about it.
It doesn’t matter that government is incompetent at managing
those risks. Perception is reality in this scenario.
This means a bigger role for government intervention and
potential for regulatory capture. It also means another
extension of the leverage from cheap energy to fuel new forms
of credit-based money, per the German example discussed
above.
But an economy running fully on batteries and electricity is
unworkable. The technology is too primitive and it runs into
the tyranny of nature thanks to variations in global
temperatures. Batteries are simply unreliable in extreme hot or
cold weather. While we can improve them, there’s a better last
mile solution than them.
The Last Toll Booth
That last mile solution is hydrogen. But in an oil-based
economy why waste oil to convert it to hydrogen? It’s simply
dumb to fill our tanks with it to spin an electric motor in our
cars? There is way too much loss. Just burn the oil. We’ve
made internal combustion engines amazingly thermally
efficient from a Carnot engine cycle perspective.
This is important to understanding the replacement argument.
In this nuclear scenario you can get hydrogen by splitting water
with electricity. And the sales pitch is we can do it with some of
the estimated 30% of electricity we currently waste sending it
to ground. Now the situation is more “sustainable.”
But it’s also much farther removed from the local community.
This is the model on the whiteboard folks. Large, centralized
nuclear power plants with industrial hydrogen production as
the last mile fuel to put in your cars and your tractors. As a
chemist/physicist I’m all for this in theory. But as always, the
devil is in the details and who will control those industries.
The truth is that the nuclear/hydrogen economy can just as
easily be more decentralized than the current oil-based
economy. We could cleave hydrogen from hydrocarbons to run
fuel-cells. But the waste product is the dreaded CO2. Why is
this not being promoted as the transition technology?
There are a dozen companies out there with technology to do
this. Why are we screwing around with plug-in hybrids, solar
farms defacing the landscape, and windmills killing birds when
we could have repurposed the natural gas lines to our homes
with a fuel cell producing both electricity and/or hydrogen?
With all the power that Davos has to push an energy agenda
how was this not a thing?
You know why.
I’ve looked at stocks like FuelCell Energy (NASDAQ:FCEL),
Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ:BLDP) and others for years.
They can’t get anywhere. There is no investment thesis for them
even though they have had technologies for years that could
decentralize our local power grids, make our lives less
vulnerable to natural disasters and improve our lives
tremendously.
But they’ve never been good investments because the political
barriers to local power generation, especially in the US and
Europe, preclude them making any headway in the market.
The natural investment cycle of early adopters paying for the
research and development of new technology has been shortcircuited in service of keeping control over the flow of energy
Amidst all the worry over the war in Ukraine sparking a wider
conflict, Germany is leading the world in investment into the
hydrogen economy, according to a recent 2022 report by IHS
Markit, beating out others like Japan and South Korea for how
much they are putting toward this effort.
Like I said above, with Russia controlling most of the uranium
market, this war today isn’t just a war for tomorrow but for the
next big cycle of history. Rosatom has one of the largest books
of business in the world, more than $140 billion in contracts.
That’s what is at stake in Ukraine for Davos. That’s why Europe
is just as hip deep in this conflict as the US is.
As always, the Eurocrats want to blame the gap-toothed Yanks
for ruining the world fighting their battles against people they
view as ‘the help.’
The transition to the hydrogen economy is underway. But it
will not be to our benefit as it should be. At least that is the
plan of those who feel entitled to hold onto their unearned
power to charge us rent on their planet.
Tom Luongo Gold Goats and Guns
Thanks for that effort, Fully. Luongo is intelligent and is able to write well about some of the complexities of geopolitics.
Thanks Fully, I’m a subscriber to him, however it’s nice to come here and find it. Definitely to be shared.