No bottom

Note: At the end of this post you will be invited to consider buying a book I wrote. In the spirit of honesty that I’ve found quite useful as a guide along the journey we call life, I feel obliged to issue this warning ahead of the invitation. In the spirit of freedom that we all here cherish, you can disregard the invitation without fear of sanctions or carbon taxes. Now, on to business.

“A person sometimes believes she's seen all the way to the bottom of the well of human stupidity, and a reminder that that well apparently has no bottom is sometimes useful.”

The quote above comes from “The Tommyknockers”, a somewhat neglected work by Stephen King from what I like to call his golden, if drug-fuelled, period. The reason this quote is pertinent to our current energy situation is, of course, the fact that we are being led into the abyss of scarcity by the real-life equivalent of King’s tommyknockers — a bunch of people taken over by alien invader ghosts (yes, I know how it sounds but it’s not ridiculous in the book) and turned into genius inventors who power every single one of their inventions with batteries.

You probably don’t know this and why should you but about ten years ago I thought batteries were pretty cool as an alternative to internal combustion engines. Wind and solar also sounded cool. My early reports on the transition were rather optimistic — until I remembered “The Tommyknockers”.

Things did not end well for the alien-invaded inventors. They did not end well at all and they only had one tiny town to power with those batteries. Could things ever end well for the real-life battery pushers, I wondered. And that’s how my own personal great awakening began. I’m sure you really wanted to know that.

The year that is currently drawing to a torturous close has featured an abundance of proof that what windosolar fans and activists call an energy transition does not, will not, and cannot work. This, of course, has not stopped any of these fans and activists from repeatedly claiming it was, in fact, working, and it was about to start working even better in the future. We just needed to spend a little more money on it to make it work because if we didn’t, we’d have to spend a lot more money on dealing with the consequences of not spending that former money.

Naturally, smart and knowledgeable people successfully challenged the “If we don’t cough up trillions now, we’d have to cough up more trillions then” claim. Naturally, their challenge was pointedly ignored because there are trillions on the line and there are lots of people to whom these trillions would be quite useful in securing a cosy lifestyle and the continued ability to afford consistently higher energy bills. The rest of us are on our own, to deal with the effects of the transition as well as we can afford to. And this last bit was the crusaders’ big mistake.

This mistake — and others — became a lot more visible than before in 2024. This year was not a good one for the energy transition. I would even go as far as to say that 2024 was the year the cracks in the narrative really widened, making it impossible to slap some “Researchers Have Said” plaster over them and hide them from view. In a sense, and it is a hopeful sense, 2024 is the year the energy transition died. It would just take some time for the stink to make it all official.

Part of the reason for this development is the fact that the credibility of so-called climate science, which I understand is some sort of an umbrella term for several scientific disciplines, took a deep dive this year as was bound to happen when a lot of unethical people with university degrees don’t have a sense of moderation and instead believe the louder they cry “Wolf!” the more people would believe them.

They also assumed that the longer they’d keep believing despite the absence of even a single wolf hair, not to mention a mauled sheep, in the vicinity of the village. These people lied through their teeth, going as far as making up data from non-existent weather stations to keep the catastrophism story going. That and attributing earthquakes to climate change.

Of course, the absence of actual proof of a climate emergency, whatever the hell that means, has not prevented alarmists from alarming. Every weather event that causes anything on a scale from mild discomfort to devastating tragedy has been amplified to a media crescendo, with even perfectly normal weather being painted as “extreme”. The Brits even began to name their storms to make them sound scarier. A few more years of that and the younger generations would have become convinced that heat in the summer and snow in the winter are abnormal weather. Only they won’t. Because people are getting really fed up with the fearmongering.

It takes a quick browsing over the latest X posts by people such as the EC’s Ursula von der Leyen and the UN’s Antonio Guterres to see just how fed up people have become with the incessant droning about climate change, confirming my often stated suspicion that overplaying a hand, especially if it is a weak hand, is not the smartest course of action, even if you really, truly, very much want to establish totalitarian control over as much as of the world as possible.

I can understand ambition, perhaps even sick ambition, but going about the realisation of that ambition by scaring people into buying it, literally, is the wrong way of doing it. For proof, look no further than the Covid lockdowns. Fear works in making people do what you tell them over the short term. It backfires badly over the longer term. Which is why this year also saw a lot more scientists speaking out against the climate crusade madness. I guess they got fed up as well.

Look at this study, from a British university no less, whose authors openly and without apparent fear of repercussions state that “Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds.”

A couple of years ago, perhaps even last year, the study would’ve been promptly buried, dismissed as oil shilling, or perhaps not accepted for publication in a scientific journal at all. But the tide is turning. Reason is making a comeback, though not at the EU, as one of you reported recently. The EU’s beyond help. Speaking of, the outgoing EC ombudsman has said the Commission was run by intelligent but non-transparent “consiglieri” to von der Leyen. Told you the cracks were widening.

When I started this blog with the purpose of ranting, venting, and pointing fingers at the people who were trying to brainwash me and millions of others into believing a lot of stupid lies, I thought the Return of Reason instalment of the climate change saga would take a few years yet. The fact that it’s happening faster than I expected gives me immense joy.

Another source of joy has been the climate alarmism camp, which, amazingly, has experienced its own reluctant awakening and is now, as David Blackmon reported, training activists to “talk like humans”. Yes, I will grill the last bit of protein out of that juicy mental steak next year. For now, suffice to say “We told you it’s not going to work but you kept trying.”

What has decidedly not been a source of joy is politicians’ stubborn insistence that alarmism can and will work, and so will the transition. Some of these politicians are, of course, simply middlemen between people who stand to make a lot of money from the transition and people whose job it is to find the money to give to the former people. Yet many, I fear, truly believe in the existence of a climate emergency that is more important than everything else. Which is where reality once again gives fiction a really good hiding.

In fiction, if you write a character in a position of power who is utterly convinced that the biggest problem facing human civilisation and the planet is the amount of a trace element in the atmosphere, you’d be labelled implausible and a bad writer — unless you give that character a mental illness. If you then, undeterred, go on to give this character the conviction that the impact of this trace element can be neutralised by expending great amounts of money and natural resources on building electricity generation installations that only work from time to time, you’d be booed out of Fiction House.

This is exactly what’s happening in our dear old reality and nobody’s booing anyone out of Reality House. First, because what’s outside this house is a mystery and second, because we’re not savage murderers. Which brings me to my book. Well, I’ve actually written seven but most of them have somehow failed to become bestsellers. They are all free over at the Basilisk Journal if you want to sample them but the book I wanted to promote to you is the latest, “Fang in Fang: The Agency.”

It’s the first of my books I feel reasonably confident may be fit for wider human consumption, hence my abuse of your gracious presence here. It’s not a serious book as you’d gather from the title, but I do believe it may well be entertaining and possibly even beneficial as a mood elevator. So, in case you have a friend or family member who likes urban fantasy, which invariably means romance with some blood, gore and justice being served in unconventional ways, do consider Fang in Fang: The Agency.

There is no climate change in this book, just the (questionable) romance, some blood, and the unconventional justice as served by supernatural beings because seeing some of the humans we have produced as a species I find it increasingly easy to see creatures like vampires and basilisks as plausible. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our climate crusaders, I’ve also been inspired to unleash the energy transition scourge on unsuspecting characters in books 2 through 4. Thank you for your attention.

With that embarrassing part out of the way, I would like to take one more moment of your precious time to thank you all, from the bottom of my pretty much bottomless heart for staying with me and my rants for another year. While I’m not as bad at expressing gratitude as I am at taking a compliment, I haven’t thanked you often enough for sticking with me while I keep trying to make sense of the whole transition affair and helping with that effort, a lot. Thank you, truly.

Our regularly scheduled ranting will resume on January 6. Merry Christmas, happy winter holidays, and an extra Happy New Year to you all.