Hello, my name is Ryan Kester and welcome to my sub stack, Shooting the Oklahoma Breeze that is dedicated to stopping the green new scam from destroying our beautiful state. Today I am talking about
Another Mirage
People fighting against the mirage of manmade climate change have decided that chasing after another mirage is the solution to that non-existent problem. They claim that manmade climate change can be stopped and reversed by transitioning away from using hydrocarbons for energy to instead using electricity gained from solar, wind, and batteries or (SWB) that are heavily dependent on minerals and the weather.
They have been deceived into believing that these expensive and unreliable mineral dependent sources of electricity will replace cheap and reliable sources of energy that rely on hydrocarbons.
They have always been very clear that this is their goal, so when you hear Republicans saying that they are in favor of an “all the above approach” they are being naive. The green energy movement has always made it abundantly clear that they will never tolerate that long term, and that putting the oil and gas industries out of business must happen if SWB is ever going to save the planet.
Unfortunately, there are many politicians here in Oklahoma who have been deceived by green energy lobbyists who claim that they are in fact not trying to put oil and gas out of business here in Oklahoma and around the world. These are the politicians who say that they are in favor of an “all of the above” approach to energy.
At least you could choose to believe that our politicians here in Oklahoma have been deceived, because the only other option is to believe that they are in fact not fooled at all but know quite well what the green energy companies are attempting to do to the oil and gas industry which is a major part of our state’s economy. Decide for yourself which one you believe.
But as you are about to see the laws of physics, reality, and supply and demand dictate that it would be astronomically expensive and all but impossible for SWB to ever replace hydrocarbons, and all that will be accomplished in the effort is the destruction of any nation that tries. Anyone who does try is simply chasing another mirage.
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan institute, a physicist, and an engineer. He also served in the Reagan White House science office. In 2022 he published an article entitled The “Energy Transition” Delusion A Reality Reset.
In it he laid out a compelling case explaining why the goal of replacing hydrocarbons with SWB is a complete delusion regardless of whether a person believes in global warming or not. So, if you are reading this and you do believe in man caused climate change, you should start looking for another method of replacing hydrocarbons other than SWB, because quite frankly it’s impossible.
I want to summarize and give some commentary on a few of the points Mills makes why the current plan to replace hydrocarbons with SWB is pure foolishness and is physically and economically impossible. So let’s begin.
1. In the past 20 years there has been a worldwide cumulative Government subsidies of over $5 trillion spent on SWB and yet all three still only account for 5% of global energy. In fact, after all these years there are still more people getting their electricity from burning wood than solar panels.
2. In the past two decades, Great Brittain and Germany have pursued this energy transition much more aggressively than America has, but as a direct result of this effort they have both seen their electricity costs rise 60 to 110% and that number does not include the trillions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies that both countries spent on green energy. Australia and Canada have also had similar results.
3. Oil, natural gas, coal, wood, and even water is incredibly cheap to store whereas storing electricity is incredibly expensive. It only costs $1 a month to store a barrel of oil or natural gas and is even cheaper to store coal. Conversely even after 20 years of improvements in lithium battery technology, it still costs $30 a month to store the equivalent amount of electricity as one barrel of oil, in a lithium battery.
4. All those improvements in lithium batteries have also not enabled electric vehicles (EV) to compete with the price of a traditional vehicle. EV’s are still 50%-70% more expensive than a comparable gasoline or diesel-powered vehicle. It takes a couple minutes to fuel a traditional vehicle, conversely it takes 10 hours to charge an EV at home and 30-40 minutes at a supercharger, which itself costs twice as much to build as a regular gas pump and would require a lot more infrastructure and land to support the needed additional refueling stations required because of the much longer time it takes to refuel an EV.
5. Over the past 20 years, the cost of American electricity has cumulatively gone down due to the cheapness of natural gas and coal, but recently the costs have artificially risen due to billions of dollars being spent to create the infrastructure needed to transmit electricity from solar panels and wind turbines.
6. When you have electricity from two different sources you must maintain two different grids, which is incredibly expensive, but is an absolute necessity due to the variableness of the electricity that is provided by wind turbines and solar panels. When the inevitable shortfall of electricity that green energy provides occurs, that shortfall must be met by hydrocarbons making it a very expensive way to get electricity.
7. Because it will always be reliant on the weather SWB will always be unreliable. They will almost always be over or under producing the amount of electricity that is needed. You might have a windy and sunny day in which case they will likely be providing more electricity than is needed. Conversely there might be a day when there is no wind and overcast cloud cover and they will probably be providing too little electricity. They will forever be incapable of providing electricity on demand and providing the exact amount of electricity that is needed the way hydrocarbons can.
8. The reliability economics of SWB must become 20 times cheaper than it is now to ever match the current performance of traditional forms of energy and there is no indication anywhere that this improvement is ever going to happen, in fact the cost of batteries is going up not down.
9. To say that the path they have charted is a mineral intensive course is an understatement. The very nature of SWB makes it heavily dependent on minerals. So, to meet the goals set by the UN and the WEF the production of these minerals would have to increase by an astronomical rate. Lithium would have to increase by 4200%, graphite 2500%, nickel 1900%, and rare earths 700% respectively. This of course is physically impossible! Each of these increases in mineral supply would require at least a dozen new and extremely large mines PER MINERAL to meet that need and currently all the known deposits of these minerals on earth are nowhere close to being big enough to meet that need. Let me reiterate that point. That we are aware of there aren't enough minerals on the face of the planet to even come close to ever replacing traditional forms of energy with SWB.
10. Currently the energy sector only uses about 15% of the supply of all these minerals. If SWB begins to account for even just a few more percentage points of energy use, let alone meet the goal of totally replacing hydrocarbons, and assuming that the needed deposits of these minerals were discovered somewhere on the earth, it would require that at least 40 to 70% of these minerals now be used on energy sources which would not only make all green energy projects astronomically more expensive but everything else on the planet that runs on electricity would now have to compete with the energy sector for the exact same minerals thus causing the price of everything on the planet to skyrocket as they all would then be competing for the same minerals thus forcing the price of said minerals to skyrocket which indeed is already happening. The laws of supply and demand dictate that that is what is going to happen. For the same reason diamonds and gold have more value than rocks and dirt. The value we place on them and the scarcity of them are what make them so valuable. Well, the push for mineral dependent sources of electricity to replace hydrocarbons is already artificially raising the prices of those minerals higher and higher and it is impossible for the prices of those minerals to do anything but go up the more the demand for them increases.
There are many more reasons why the plan to replace hydrocarbons-based energy with mineral based electricity represents a severe case of self-induced madness and that it is sheer lunacy to believe that could ever happen, and yet despite all the obvious reasons why it could never happen that is exactly what many politicians in America and in Oklahoma are attempting to do. But why would they do that?
The supposed “carbon footprint” of mining that many minerals out of the ground far exceeds any amount of pollution savings that SWB is supposedly providing. And that doesn’t even include the amount of pollution that is created when nations start building the massive amounts of required infrastructure needed to support it.
The economics of trying to switch from oil, gas, and coal to weather and mineral dependent forms of electricity are astronomical and all but impossible. It makes absolutely no sense to pursue such a self-destructive course of action. So why are so many politicians here in Oklahoma and around the world doing just that? When thinking about this question a famous quote by Ben Shapiro comes to mind. He says, “Facts don't care about your feelings” and I’ll be discussing those feelings in my next article……
