A word of appreciation and a peek at next year

When I started this newsletter in June, I did it because I was becoming increasingly worried that the information we were being given by international organisations, national governments and various “experts” about the world’s energy needs and our civilisation’s priorities in protecting the Earth was getting further and further from reality.

I started Irina Slav on energy because I needed an outlet for my inner discussions — and family discussions before dinner — about why emissions suddenly became the world’s biggest problem, how exactly we are going to pull off the net-zero plan with no affordable battery storage (among a lot of other things), and what the obsession is with green hydrogen.

Curiosity has been my curse and blessing for as long as I can remember and for 43 years of life it has not shown any signs of abating. I am full of questions and I will keep on asking them until I drop. Because while there are plenty of questions that anyone would gladly answer, energy-related questions and especially renewable energy-related questions don’t seem to be among them.

I remember vividly how I approached the EU’s Green New Deal team with a question on green hydrogen a while back, before the pandemic. The question was perfectly innocent and, I thought, reasonable: the EU had announced plans for 40 GW of green hydrogen capacity. I asked whether the locations for that capacity had been chosen. I never heard back from them.

To me, and to people I’ve talked with, this is the biggest problem with the global renewable energy push: activists are extremely unwilling to hear sceptics. They are also unwilling to acknowledge facts as we recently saw with the European energy crunch and the IEA’s Fatih Birol and select European bureaucrats. Refusal to acknowledge facts is a dangerous thing to do — it is dangerous for those who will be affected by it and, as a consequence, it is dangerous for the ones doing the refusal.

When I started this newsletter I had tentative hopes of reaching an audience of about 200 by the end of the year. To date, I’m close to 400 subscribers and counting. I am very happy to say I have been surprised by the number of people who are willing to ask the tougher questions about the energy transition and who don’t buy what is to all intents and purposes propaganda.

Like some of you who hail from Eastern Europe, I grew up during totalitarian times. I only witnessed the late years of the regime but I recently found a notebook from elementary school where I’d written under the teacher’s instruction that “The friendship between Bulgaria and the Soviet Union is like the air for every living creature.”

A net-zero activist would laugh, perhaps, at this, but the truth is we are being fed the same degree of ideological drivel right now, only it’s about wind and solar (and hydrogen) being our only hope in the war on emissions. What’s worse is that after the West won the Cold War thanks, in part, to its superior propaganda, it is now setting itself and everyone else for a spectacular failure and we’re footing the bill for it.

With that said, thank you for reading and I promise I’ll keep on writing. This brings me to that peek at next year. Many readers on LinkedIn ask why I don’t write about nuclear, so I’ll try to rectify that. Hydropower is also on my list of topics to cover in 2022, as is the huge issue of food security in the context of the energy transition. I also have plans for interviews with people who have the knowledge, experience, and eloquence to contribute substantially to the energy discussion. All imn all, it should be an interesting year.