It's not about the money. It's worse.

A while ago, a PR for a hedge fund focused on so-called sustainable investments sent me an interview pitch with what the fund claimed was debunking of popular anti-EV myths.

I won’t quote the statements that this fund called myths or the debunking but I will say that both the myths and the debunking were phrased in such a way as to sound perfectly convincing while pointedly ignoring the actual problems inherent in EV technology and related challenges.

Needless to say, the biggest problems, such as grid constraints, were summarily brushed off as non-existent while others were reduced to just a small part of themselves.

At first, I laughed at this poor attempt at a narrative control. Then I got angry, I don’t mind saying, because I always have better things to do than sit and wonder how on earth could investors trust a fund that has such blatant disregard for facts.

More importantly, though, I wondered how on earth does the fund expect to stay in business without doing actual due diligence on, in this case, EVs. After all, funds make money by making their clients money and common sense dictates that they’d be careful to not lose their clients money.

After an inordinate amount of time spent internally debating whether I should respond with a debunking of the debunking or not bother, reason won and I did not debunk the debunking.

Yet the interesting fact that at least one hedge fund saw no need to be thorough and instead chose to buy a factually inaccurate narrative continued to gnaw at me. Over the past few weeks an emergent perception grew and strengthened.

The transition push is not a grift. There are elements of grift but they are not the main story. The main story is one of mass psychosis that reaches high into decision-making levels. Indeed, it has reached the highest levels of the Western political, for want of a better word, elite.

Consider the latest from my transition hero, Fatih Birol. In an op-ed for the Financial Times (which I almost misspelt as “The Guardian”), Birol says, once again, that oil, gas, and coal demand is about to peak. Any time now. Oil before 2030, for sure. Thanks to EVs, including scooters and buses. Even with no change to current climate policies.

That last bit is new. It’s a change from previous Birol outbursts about the transition, in which he repeatedly called for more stringent policies to move the transition forward. Apparently, we don’t need to do that any longer. Thanks to “the spectacular growth of clean energy technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles.”

Because governments — even in China! — are doing so well with the spectacular growth of clean energy technologies, gas demand is on its deathbed, too.

“This is the result of renewables increasingly outmatching gas for producing electricity, the rise of heat pumps and Europe’s accelerated shift away from gas following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

To say that these are blatant lies would be as newsworthy as the observation that water runs downhill. But I have lately begun to question my belief that these are simply lies — a deliberate articulation of something untrue for some sort of gain.

I’ve now begun to suspect that Birol — and dozens like him — honestly believe that what they say is the truth. They also honestly believe the facts that easily expose such statements as untrue are not actually facts. They are either a temporary glitch or weapons of climate denialism.

With Birol, it’s only words. With actual governments, it’s more than that. I find it extremely hard to explain, for example, the former Dutch government’s fierce attack on the country’s agricultural sector as action seeking some sort of a gain.

That government, since deposed, wanted to basically decimate Dutch farming and pay the farmers for that. I see no conceivable material gain for the government from such a course of action. One could perhaps speculate that the government was beholden to external interests but that’s a stretch. I mean, a minister or two, maybe, but the whole cabinet? Unlikely.

Or take this fresh report from Deloitte suggesting that institutional oil and gas investors “would be open to receiving lower dividends and fewer share buybacks in favor of more spending on some energy transition projects.”

The supermajors’ so-called clean energy push has clearly done nothing about their bottom lines but hurt them and yet large institutional investors are fine with that, somehow, because profit is no longer a priority. Clean energy is.

So, if material gain is not a reasonable explanation, the second option would be a non-material gain, namely, the sense of gratification from having reduced nitrogen or carbon dioxide emissions, regardless of how steep the price. Chilling stuff.

Of course, the Dutch government is far from alone in this lunacy. Many commentators on the transition, including myself, have taken to referring to the people pushing it as religious fanatics. Too strong?

Well, consider the difference between a regular religious person who just tries to be the best version of him- or herself, and not interfere with other people’s lives, and the person who is convinced that there is only one faith and everyone who does not subscribe to it must die. History is full of examples, after all.

A look at one of those videos showing people removing Just Stop Oil/Extinction Rebellion/The Last Generation protesters from the street is enough to see that the people sitting on said street are not your garden variety religious believer.

They are the hardcore variety. I grimly expect an escalation of violence and not just from furious drivers getting blocked by self-gluing people with hormonal imbalance. These are fanatics ready to leave family and work to be activists, to sit in jail for their beliefs, or rather their expression, and to destroy. How big is the step from defacing a building and hitting someone who doesn’t share your beliefs?

All this is depressing and alarming enough but it might still be unconvincing for most people, who are certain there has to be a material motive behind it all. Not for the activists, who are just another crop of fundamentalists. For the ones leading them.

Yes, there is a material motive. For some. Not for all. In fact, I’d argue those with a material motive to push the transition are in the minority, whether they are conscious of this or not.

The proof? Calls for what is euphemistically called degrowth. The European Commission is a big fan of degrowth. So are many activists. And recently, a Reuters commentator served me a glorious summary of the degrowth push on a platter.

In a column titled “Time to target fossil fuel demand, not supply”, Hugo Dixon argues absolutely openly in favour of governments making life a lot more expensive for all of us — by taxing hydrocarbons use and taxing it heavily.

Many transition sceptics have made the point that the ultimate purpose of the transition is to make the world poorer, notably including my podcast partners David Blackmon and Tammy Nemeth. It is an important point and it is becoming increasingly obvious that, indeed, the end goal is less consumption of everything.

Because I have spend too many years devouring crime fiction and non-fiction, I could not help but ask the fundamental question in any crime investigation: Cui bono? And no, I don’t speak Latin, I only passed my exam in uni because we had a sympathetic professor but it sounds so much better in Latin.

So, who benefits? Well, not the world’s richest, that’s for sure. Because the world’s richest became this rich because other people were consuming products and services provided or associated with them in ever-growing amounts.

If you make energy expensive, you make everything else expensive. Result: less consumption of everything. Consequence: the richest get less rich. Everyone gets less rich. Many also get less alive. The only benefit of that is lower CO2 emissions. Which, incidentally, is the stated goal of the transition army.

I would admit that suggesting the stated goal of the transition is indeed its actual goal is hard to stomach. I don’t buy it entirely, either. But I do find it increasingly hard to buy the alternative explanation, that it is a massive scam aimed at materially benefitting a small minority at the expense of the majority.

Sure, that could work if the expense of the majority is manageable. With no majority to “feed off”, after all, the minority withers and dies, too. But we’re talking about expense that is hardly manageable.

When energy becomes too expensive to heat homes, people literally die. And with the suggestions voiced by Mr. Dixon and embraced by the top rank of the EC, energy will become too expensive. And people will die. With fewer people, emissions will fall. Mission accomplished.

As one final piece of evidence, consider Ursula von der Leyen’s recent State of the Union speech. In it, the EC president openly attacked China for apparently undermining EU efforts at a transition.

That’s very moral and high-groundy if you forget that the transition in the EU is literally impossible without Chinese solar panels (which are killing European panel makers!), lithium and rare earths, to mention just a couple.

Apparently, it’s China’s fault that it subsidises transition-related industries more than the EU does. Sound familiar? It should. The EU levelled the same accusations, though a lot less loudly, at the Biden administration and its IRA. It’s everyone else’s fault we’re failing. If that’s what passes for rational behaviour in Brussels these days, we’re doomed.

P.S. I have refrained from including the “It’s China/China and Russia” explanation of the transition, for two reasons. First, I don’t do cartoon villains. Second, that explanation contains so much victim-signalling I get angry very quickly. “They made us do it”? Spare me.

China or Russia can no more tell — or pay — Germany or the UK to cover their land with solar panels and wind turbines than Germany can tell China to stop building new coal plants and Russia to shut its gas wells.

It really is as simple as that. As for the oft cited evidence of Chinese/Russian meddling in Western affairs — well, the meddling goes both ways. That’s the game. Play it or quit and let someone better play it. Don’t play a victim.

P.P.S. I do have a major problem with the victim mentality, yes. I sincerely apologise if I have inadvertently offended someone who has been an actual victim of any sort of abuse. The people I’ve discussed here are categorically not victims. They are the abusers. And they are perfectly unaware of it, like all fanatics through history.

All that said, I would be extremely grateful to be challenged on the idea that we’re ruled by crazy rather than greedy people. Greed is easier to deal with. Insanity is a lot more unpredictable.