As President in 1949, plain speaking Harry Truman famously said, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” He wasn’t referring to global warming. However, were he President today, he would have little choice but to acknowledge the Earth is on fire and there is nowhere to get out to, unless he took the line of the ecocidal Trump administration, claimed climate change is a hoax and did everything possible to undermine science, destroy environmental regulation and open our precious and irreplaceable national parks to irreversible, devastating exploitation.
Symbolic proof of this administration’s environmental ignorance and soulless disregard for life of any kind is perfectly illustrated by the foul smelling algae infestation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, killing ducks.
Truman was far from perfect (his bio is fascinating, BTW), but he evolved as many of us do if we’re fortunate and led America out of WWII after FDR’s death. I believe he would have tried to be on the right side of climate change and environmental policy. Whether he would have been misled by so-called green “renewable” energy advocates that led pre-Trump policy is a question which will never be answered.
Criticizing renewable energy brings controversy, but I hope newer readers (welcome and thank you) will hear me out. The conditioning to believe solar and wind are going to save us has been pervasive for many years and created jobs. However, there are fundamental problems beyond the anti-renewable Trump regime that consigns this energy deceptively labeled green to a generation or two, no more. The core issue is shrinking natural resources.
Fundamental to that problem is economic return on investment (EROI), sometimes referred to as economic return on energy investment (ERoEI). As resources shrink, costs rise.
Every last product or service we take for granted is dependent on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are rapidly approaching the end of EROI. This can be seen in oil majors turning to ever more expensive extraction projects ranging from fracking in the Permian Basin to deep water offshore drilling. If higher profit margin oil was available, that’s where the projects would be. Don’t take my word for it. Professional investment analysts Goehring & Rozencwajg, purely concerned with investor profit NOT the health of the planet see this as well, articles here and here.
From the second article:
Admittedly, the incoming administration features several well-informed and capable figures in the energy sphere, including Chris Wright and Scott Bessent. Their leadership will undoubtedly foster a favorable climate for drilling activity. Yet, even with their expertise and the administration’s likely zeal for energy development, we remain convinced that these efforts will struggle to offset the entrenched declines now gripping the shale sector. The geology of the shale patch has spoken, and its verdict seems increasingly final.
Art Berman is an oil geologist with over four decades of industry experience. Berman is also aware of diminishing returns on investment. He points out, America is not energy-independent. The light, sweet crude we produce and export is not the heavy crude necessary to make diesel fuel required to harvest the materials necessary for “renewables.”
This also explains our incursion in Venezuela, my analysis, not his. Strategically, from a narrow, traditional, destructive sort of thinking, we need the heavy crude.
As Berman writes in America Has Plenty of Oil—Just Not the Right Kind, currently the US imports heavier crude mainly from Canada out of structural necessity.
In Telling the Truth About Our Future, he points out renewables are a diffuse form of energy and produce power only about one-third of the time. This is the Achilles heel of renewables, necessitating battery storage.
This storage, vast systems of battery backup can only be achieved by mining which is dependent on diesel fuel. Without diesel, growth or even maintenance of the capitalist Western world collapses.
The problems go deeper though.
Renewables resources are just as finite as the oil required to harvest them. It’s not just lithium (which may be falling out of favor as vying battery technologies compete). Shortages of formerly prosaic materials such as copper, steel and aluminum pose serious problems, too. Even sand for concrete is a challenged resource with glass and concrete essential for solar and wind power. Slabs to anchor wind turbines can weigh over a thousand tons, never mind the CO2 generated. Like oil, the easiest to access deposits of all these materials have been extracted.
The linchpin is diesel for mining and transport. Without heavy diesel-powered equipment ranging from bulldozers, excavators and hauling trucks to semis dragging wind turbine components up mountain tops blasted flat, “green” energy and backup battery grids can’t happen. With the lifespan of solar and wind installations being about 25 years before needing replacement one or two generations of this technology can be built at most as viable oil deposits dwindle.
Additionally, Jevons Paradox holds true. As misnomered “clean” energy has been added, it’s not been used to ramp down fossil fuel burning, but to add to the energy mix. TotalEnergies has used offshore wind turbines and bogus carbon offsets to claim it makes their oil greener. Shell, BP and ten other oil companies, too.
BTW, wind turbines are entirely dependent on oil.
Forbes calculations show that just laying the foundation for a single offshore turbine can require 18,857 barrels of marine petroleum during construction. Wind turbines require oil for proper operation, with an average turbine consuming up to 2000 gallons of oil annually. This oil consumption is divided between gearboxes and transformers, with each turbine using 800 gallons of gear oil and 1200 gallons of transformer oil yearly. Each turbine can contain up to 80 gallons of oil for lubrication, which is not vegetable oil but a PAO synthetic oil based on crude.
The air don’t care. CO2 is CO2. The oil required for renewables is not calculated in the rosy analysis of “clean” energy.
Meanwhile, the world bathes in heat as a super El Niño bears down, promising significantly worse temperatures next year. Wet-bulb temperatures are taking lives and destroying economies NOW. What oil companies own scientists predicted in the 1970s can now be counted in bodies.
India appears to be the canary in the coal mine. This is not hyperbole as according to data from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, India burns more coal than the continents of Europe and North America combined. Worse, India's coal consumption could double or more by mid-century. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a climate change denier and this scientific study indicates a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally and a five-day heatwave nearly 30,000. This is shocking, real and indicative of the heat that will creep outward from the equator taking ever more lives.
On a single day late this April, the 50 hottest cities in the world were in India. Akola, a city of 600,000 recorded the country’s highest temperature as of April 26 at 46.9°C or 116.4°F. The United Nations is concerned that the heatwaves are pushing food supply “to the brink.” Concerned? This is a certainty.
France is in the grip of its second record heatwave. The first one took place during the French Open, when some of the fittest athletes in the world struggled with and nearly passed out from heat.
Obviously, the circus must go on because the bread may not as drought-stricken wheat harvests collapse.
France is enduring a second heatwave that has exceeded 42°C (116°F) in places, and high humidity is increasing the danger.
In Paris, where there is virtually no air conditioning, but thankfully a proliferation of tin-roofed, oven-like multistory apartment buildings, the government is allowing swimming in the Seine River. Over 40 people have drowned. Posthumous interviews reveal joy that their deaths didn’t take place in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Overall, 35 million people are under a red heatwave alert. 40 million more under an orange alert, and 2000 schools are shut down.
Keeping a stiff upper lip has never been more relevant as the UK withers in record heat. Although it appears only a disappointing 15 have died so far, just annoying teenagers, there is potential for so much more. In 2022, nearly 3,000 excess heat deaths were recorded during five CO2 charged episodes. That was an exciting 253 deaths per day. Although 37.3°C (99.1°F) was achieved on June 26, India remains unimpressed.
Spain has outdone the Merry Old England by a wide margin, recording 43.7°C (110.6° F) on June 24 in Cantabria. Spain is also far ahead in heat deaths with 327 as of June 26. As an American and offspring of the British Empire, I find this to be a moral outrage. Sure, Christopher Columbus brought genocide to South America and the Spanish Inquisition was pretty cute, but until America nobody did empire better than the British. I take umbrage.
On Friday, a new German record of 41.3°C was hit near the city of Saarbruecken on the French border, according to Germany's National Meteorological Service. In taking radical, effective action, bureaucrats urged citizen’s to save water. It’s this kind of visionary leadership that will clearly save us all. Honorable mentions to, Denmark, Poland and Switzerland.
Information on Africa is always harder to find. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Morocco nearly touches Spain, and Algeria is just miles from beloved Southern Italy. The silence is no wonder — the entire country is filled with dark-skinned people after all — and her colonial rape has fueled the Western world. We don’t want to talk about that. Thanks to the gods South African emerald mine heir Elon Musk escaped. Sure, Morocco is ancient and Casablanca was the setting for the famous Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Berman movie, but I much prefer The Jerk in which Steve Martin demonstrates his ignorance of what’s valuable in dialogue with a waiter about wine:
Waiter: Would monsieur care for another bottle of the Château Latour?
Martin: Ah, yes, but no more 1966. Let’s splurge. Bring us some fresh wine. The freshest you’ve got. This year’s. No more of this old stuff.
This comedic exchange brilliantly sums up rejection of wisdom and a refusal to learn important lessons.
Morocco, Algeria and all of Africa is experiencing life ending heat and agricultural devastation. We are all connected in a world of 8.3 billion people built on the one-time dopamine hit of fossil fuels.
The deaths that Truman ordered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are destined to look like a party compared to the heat of fossil fuels.
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