Utopia, you are standing in it!

Daniel Yergin writes at Project Syndicate The Energy Transition Confronts Reality.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Given the scale and complexity of the transition away from hydrocarbons, some worry that economic analysis has been given short shrift in the policy planning process. A clear-eyed assessment of the transition’s prospects requires a deeper understanding of at least four major challenges.

Overview

The “energy transition” from hydrocarbons to renewables and electrification is at the forefront of policy debates nowadays. But the last 18 months have shown this undertaking to be more challenging and complex than one would think just from studying the graphs that appear in many scenarios. Even in the United States and Europe, which have adopted massive initiatives (such as the Inflation Reduction Act and RePowerEU) to move things along, the development, deployment, and scaling up of the new technologies on which the transition ultimately depends…

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]
Sounds vaguely sinister — where does education end and indoctrination start? No prizes for guessing which climate theories would get to be ‘taught’.
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Academics from Durham University are urging that climate change education should be made compulsory across the core law curriculum, says Eurekalert.

The researchers evaluated students’ engagement and their broader views concerning climate change education by integrating climate change and environmental law into the core curriculum at the University of Exeter, a Russell Group University.

The results showed that law students want to study climate law and the climate context of law as part of their core curriculum.

Students also said that climate change education should be compulsory and taught across the programme.

In the last few years, the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) has lost some of its credibility, but during World War II, it was a vital source of information for resistance groups in the Netherlands and other occupied countries.

The caption of the picture above said “January 4, 1944. Jammers and betrayal make listening to the B.B.C. not easy. We listen at night, 11:45 p.m., B.B.C.”

An employee of an illegal newspaper listening to the BBC.

The founders of the first illegal newspapers came to their initiative out of indignation about the German invasion and annoyance about what the equalized newspapers wrote. There was also a need to warn the population against National Socialism and to call for united opposition to the German measures. In 1940 there were about 62 underground magazines and within a year this number rose to 120. Some magazines had succeeded in finding printers and were, therefore…

Giant Tesla battery at Jamestown South Australia.

Rent-seekers would have us believe that battery storage will soon cure wind and solar’s hopeless intermittency, notionally smoothing out the highs and filling in the lows (aka sunset and calm weather).

The only thing wrong with that narrative is the fact that it is an outright lie.

Lithium-ion battery technology is probably as good as it will ever get; the natural limits on storing releasing electricity over time are best explained by the laws of physics, starting with thermodynamics.

However, it’s the law of economics that David Wojick deals with in his piece below.

Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”
CFACT
David Wojick
15 December 2022

The amount of storage needed to make renewables reliable is so huge that even if the cost dropped fantastically we still could not afford it.

We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid…

The climate realists at Creative Society have put together a short video with pithy statements skewering the CO2 theory of climate change.  Above is the video and below a transcript with exhibits and the speakers’ identities.

Dr. Harold Burnett
Over time the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have radically fluctuated throughout the earth’s geologic history. They have been in the past as much as 5000 parts per million. Currently they are about 420 parts per million. So over long periods of time they have fluctuated, but in general they have fallen.

Gregory Wrightstone
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation whatsoever with increasing CO2 and temperature. And in fact one of the things we’re being asked to believe is that our modern temperatures are unusual and unprecedented, as thought we’ve never seen temperatures like this in thousands of years. That’s just not the case.

Prof. Ole Ellestad
We have a…

A group of congressmen are (again) opposing raising the US debt ceiling, which (again) threatens to put the US government into default on a portion of the US debt. There is some uncertainty about the magnitude of the consequences of a US default, varying between very bad and globally catastrophic. Phrases like “taking hostage” and “political extortion” are thrown around too casually in the discourse when opportunities for politically leverage are taken advantage of, but in this case I think the scale of consequences makes it completely appropriate. A threat to force a US debt default through the mechanics of a mistake made when legislating bond issuance rules during World War I is an act of political extortion that holds the global economy hostage.

The obvious solution is to eliminate the debt ceiling, but we have failed to do so because of the same political incentives underpinning our problems today…

At the end of World War II, members of the film unit of the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA — were put to work hunting down every scrap of film footage they could gather about Nazi Germany, the rise of the Third Reich, and the atrocities committed by officials who were to be put on trial at Nuremburg.

The officer that OSS film unit chief John Ford — yes THAT John Ford — assigned the job to was Budd Schulberg, son of pioneering screenwriter, film producer and studio executive B.P. Schulberg. Schulberg and his brother Stuart were sent to the ruins of Nazi Germany to find the filmed “proof” of who and what the Nazis were, film that would be used in court.

The idea, American prosecutor Judge Robert H. Jackson said, was “to convict” those charged “by using their very own words,”…