There appear to be two camps among critics of Western energy policy: those who believe politicians are utterly stupid and incompetent, and those who believe it's deliberate. I am for now in the former camp, since hard evidence points towards stupidity, but as history teaches us, you never know.Your turn.
My ha’pennyworth: on energy it is willful blindness and, if you will, stupidity. On the causes behind the current problems, there is too much evidence of coordinated policy and corruption for me to apply Hanlon’s Razor.
I think USA politicians are motivated first by ideology whatever its level of coherency and second by their estimate of the behavior needed to get elected so they can implement their ideology. I think the most brilliant American president in the last 100 years was Herbert Hoover. He graduated top in his class from Stanford with an engineering degree and successfully managed large engineering projects around the world. In the early days of WWI he ran an NGO that kept Belgium from starving and after WWI kept parts of Germany and Eastern Europe from starving. He leaned against American involvement in world wars. He is why Hoover Dam has its name.
Imagine two voters. One follows energy experts on Substack, sites like oilprice.com and reads Vaclav Smil's books. The other gets their energy news from CNN and Fox and doesn't read non-fiction.
Definitely stupid and incompetent because they are predominately in a constant state of narcissus. They do what they do in their blinkered opinion as to what is needed to keep them elected. Nothing to do with what is best for the country. Part of the problem, society in general is getting dumber. Lazy stupid people survive these days. 100 years ago, they died.
Steven Hawking said it well. "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge".
Well-meaning politicians and energy policy administrators may be stupid, incompetent, or simply ill-informed (or not), but Big money moves are planned long in advance by people who are neither stupid, nor incompetent. When it comes to the Petrodollar (the global reserve currency) and the system that supports it, don't underestimate the people, the timeframes, or the preparedness of those behind the scenes. They may not succeed at everything they try but they have better data and more means & resources at their disposal than we do. We consumers what they produce, including the programs and media they want us to listen too. Thankfully, there is you, and those like you, who speak truth when you can find it. Keep searching and keep writing.
We have to understand how we have arrived at the 'Net Zero' policy. Firstly the eco-mentalist NGOs have created anxiety in the general populace with exaggeration and misinformation. Then the scientific community jump on the band wagon as a means of securing research grants. Naturally, they don't conclude that things are OK as that would extinguish funding. Politicians then formulate policy based on the voters' fears, and are lobbied by the same NGOs. The policy is converted into strategic plans by consulting the big players in the energy industry who of course have to make a buck. None of the politicians and their civil servants have a clue about what they are told and basically are looking for the advice which confirms they are on the right track. At no point do the politicians consult independent experts to consider downside risks. That's how we got here.
They are both stupid and evil. Stupid, because they believe their own propaganda. Evil, because deep down they consider even the worst case scenarios of an energy drought and all the human catastrophe that goes along with it as a worthwhile trade off to "save the planet".
It can be and IS both. This deliberate plan has been in the making since at least 1973, when as a freshman engineering student I was forced to study “Limits to Growth” by Club of Rome. It’s been baking for decades and now being tyrannically executed on us, so there is “intelligent design”. That being said, those managing this and their allies are also ignorant and incompetent, technically.
Politicians exhibit a certain level of stupidity and ignorance with some self-interest evil thrown in, but are merely puppets in the hands of those hidden, powerful men who control the world's finances. The Fed has the mistaken idea they can control the price of energy by continuing to raise interest rates until they break the economy, in which they have a proven track record. We will be left with 10% interest rates, high energy prices and shortages of food and other commodities. Let's not forget that some large oil company CEO's and activist shareholders come from a generation that buy into the ESG mentality that has limited investments in energy. What we are seeing now is years in the making.
It is inconceivable to me that the vast number of people globally in public policy, academia, regulatory scientific etc. bureaucracies do not understand the very probable and material decline in humanity's living standards without hydrocarbons. At best the degree of indifference and lack of transparency on costs and benefits is prima facie evidence of ill intent.
The elites have their own religion and global warming is one of the elements. The others are just as nasty. The ultimate goal is a world where they have complete knowledge and control over every human on earth and ownership of every drop of water, blade of grass and morsel of food. Obey or die.
It seems doubtful to me that Western energy policy can meaningfully be understood by focusing only on politicians and limiting the descriptive categories to utterly stupid / incompetent vs. evil. Energy has long been a central focus of geopolitics . This is illustrated by the quote attributed to Henry Kissinger: "“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” Although elected politicians play a role in geopolitics, historically other parties have played more significant roles, including intelligence, military and business interests. An examination of incentive structures almost always provides meaningful insight into the motivations underlying individual and entity decisionmaking and actions -- and helps to clarify the divergence between ideals and interests. We do ourselves a disservice by viewing and discussing Issues related to energy using overly simplistic generalizations.
It is a reality that nearly ALL people lack a grasp of 'SCALE'.
The average person cannot appreciate a million, much less a trillion.
The political elite understand this and reduce the propaganda to ONE entity- CO2.
CO2 rises and falls with temperature. For propaganda purposes, it is convenient to say CO2 CAUSES a temperature rise, even though the data do not show this. The data DO show that the planet is greening due to rising CO2, and that land is NOT being lost to sea level rise, and so forth, AND, more than half the CO2 from combustion disappears EVERY year. It is easy to show, from exponential decay, CO2 will return to pre-industrial values in about 100 years after we run out of fossil fuels.
So why can there be a hurry to abandon fossil fuels? They will not last beyond 100 years, during which time we MUST find new energy resources or return to 1750 standards of living and population. The new energy resource exists. There is no lack of energy now.
But, humanity as a whole is systematically being CUT-OFF from abundant energy. Why--- what is the logical conclusion?
The logical conclusion is that SOMEONE hates a high standard of living for nearly everyone, except for themselves. That someone hates the large fraction of free humanity and wants to be the top elite in a feudal society. That someone is willing to destroy most of humanity to reach an energy status that is coming anyway, but to bring it 50 years earlier (during their lifetime) via deprivation, suffering, and death for the great bulk of humanity.
That someone is pernicious, hateful, and divisive.
Hanlon's razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (Thanks Wikipedia!)
The globalist lizard people conspiracy theories are certainly good fun, but one has to stay out of the fever swamps as there is truly no bottom to the crazy. Same goes for the “Big Oil” conspiracies- people need to put down their Chomsky books. (Funny that nobody ever complains about “Little Oil” which represents a huge portion of US production?)
I think the people who are making all of these terrible decisions truly believe they are “enlightened” and they think they are trying to help people. The problem is essentially Hayek’s knowledge problem- they are not capable of understanding the degree to which they are causing damage because the system is complicated and chaotic. They have whipped themselves into a frenzy on climate and they can’t rationally evaluate their framework at all. Doubling down on narratives until the end!
Vaclav Smil's How The World Really Works should be required reading for politician's staffs. It's accessible to anyone with a high school degree. The reader does have to have an appreciation of arithmetic. It's excellent at illustrating how totally dependent on fossil fuels is the world economy and civilization itself. It should make people realize that we need a reliable substitute for CO2-emitting fuels BEFORE cutting them off. [He also swipes at Modern Monetary Theory.]
Both. I have no doubt that some people in power are sociopaths or have a strong number of psychopathic traits (e.g. Chrystia Freeland). [See works by Robert Hare and Kevin Dutton] One Wall Street Corporation had deliberately hired people with psychopathic traits.
MASS FORMATION - Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, Mattias Desmet lays out what "mass formation" is, how it develops, how it leads to totalitarianism, and what we must do to change the conditions that makes these mass formation events possible. We certainly see Mass Formation with the CO2 Climate Change narrative. One hour interview https://www.corbettreport.com/desmet-massformation/
Dealing with a narcissistic human or group or a nation state - "To be an enemy is dangerous but to be a friend is fatal" - remember the words of the man Henry Kissinger. You cannot win with narcissists - yes they are stupid and equally evil....if you are in a relationship with one....remember to run like Forest Gump! It will be a historical lesson for EU citizens and all the other vassal states and its subjects if they do not rise.
Wilful blindness. I like that term. The old story about the lie repeated often enough becoming the truth also has some basis here. But I think that the great unwashed should take part of the blame. Those that we elect to parliament, Congress or whatever you call it, come from among us, but we expect them to be be above the melee and think clearly and do everything right (as we perceive it). Has that ever happened? They get accosted by the party machinery and advised by political and social scientists who have no idea about the laws of physics or how to use data. Those ideas, like “renewables” (whatever that means), repeated often enough become ideology and of course, our ideology is better than the other mob’s isn’t it?
Wilful blindness, dumbass refusal to adjust the course in the face of 'alternative facts’. I’m leaning toward stupidity on the most part. But influence from the rich and famous should not be discounted. Like proposals in Australia for tens of billions to export liquid ‘green’ hydrogen, or power to Singapore by undersea cables from PV panels covering thousands of square kilometres of land. Once mesmerised by the almighty dollar, these proposals become a mantra that are hard to resist. So, I’m with Irina. Stupidity for now, but teetering on the edge of corruption.
I think they just want to get re-elected to retain their wealth,power and privilege and the green posturing is a vote getter. Not that they know anything about physics or even care much about reducing carbon or keeping the lights on. Politicians care only about power .
I have to say I think they are all of the above, stupid, just enough to be incompetent (or think they are doing the right thing), and just enough to be easily manipulated, and very deliberate on their own survival and gains. I once did an analogy of NextEra and their entourage of experts seeking tax abatements. They are like the shark and the remora fish. The politicians being the latter. They don't hang around the host too long, if they are smart, because choosing the wrong shark can be fatal, but they are after a free meal and the shark may give it to them.
Both camps are in operation, it now seems to me. Incompetence is in full display, so little dispute on the existence of that camp. The existence of the deliberate camp is becoming easier to believe and begs three questions: 1) Why do some government policies seem to have little to do with lowering CO2 emissions? California, a leader in climate change policies, is a good example where the majority of the petroleum used is imported rather than allowing more in-state oil production, plus the state's failed forest-fire management practices and the allowance of over-building in fire prone areas have resulted in huge volumes of CO2 being released from wildland fires over the last couple of decades. 2) And if deliberate is this really about climate change or something else? This is a key question and really gets to the evil judgement which I am leaning more towards. 3) But if evil then why? Joel Kotkin has a plausible answer, it's about destroying the political opposition in California, what little remains (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvxg-oZ-QHc). If Kotkin is correct then Californians are paying big, whether they realize it or not, for a covert and deceitful political operation that will have little impact on climate change and divert the state from solving more pressing problems.
I don’t think it’s an accident that those a-holes at the Davos conferences regularly bring up human overpopulation as a concern, then switch to ways of rapidly decreasing our supplies of food and energy shrouded in environmentalism. These include plans to block critical infrastructure in nuclear and desalination plants as well as any oil & gas production & pipelines, a shift to wind and solar which produce much less power than advertised and clearly can’t reliably take 100% of the energy load, and push a shift from edible crops to biofuels.
Politicians in general are dumber than the average person, so I’m sure a good number actually believe the bs, but there is a core of sociopathic super-wealthy elites pulling their strings.
100% intentional. This is not the first time the government has done bad things intentionally
All the way back to 1873 the U.S. government killed 1.5 million buffalo in one year to starve out the native Americans so they would be come dependent on the government and thus controlled.
In the U.S. there are 96 food processing plants that have had "accidents in the last 6 months. (I will be glad to send a list for verification) - If they have done it in the past do you think they would not try it again?
Just look at tearing apart the United States oil and gas industry and then asking Saudi Arabia to pump more oil. Wow.
Strong believer in the first possibility. We are talking about politicians, not energy system experts or economists. So the baseline is always that they don't have a clue and need a briefing (many-many briefings) to be able to say something that isn't utterly ridiculous.
The 2nd problem is that they swallowed their fairytale about the green transition hook, line and sinker. They've been sold a painless, low-price and zero-carbon future based renewables, without ever being able to put any sensible questions about storage, balancing, market marginal pricing etc. Again, because they are politicians - it's easier to parrot a nice tale than face reality.
And the final straw are the knee-jerk reactions, the fancy-sounding initiatives and the frantic activity that follows. Believe me when I say this: from close up, it looks like a bunch of headless chicken running around and utterly incapable of coherent thought, much less strategy.
I'm not yet in the place where I think they are evil. Our Western governments have become such large complex organisations that they are unmanageable. Energy policy and management is but one example. Playing to the crowd is easy when 'the sun is shining' in the hope of winning votes. The sheer complexity of the monsters theyve created becomes apparent when 'the storm clouds gather' (even if the storm is of their making) and their policy and management begins to unravel in front of their very eyes. They are incompetent.
I think I embrace the second point because politicians may all have the best intentions in trying to do the right thing. But as Putin once said, it not that easy because you have certain forces- men in black-as he called them, wearing black suits with some wearing blue ties and some black, that come and say, "this is the way things are done." Could he be right?
My ha’pennyworth: on energy it is willful blindness and, if you will, stupidity. On the causes behind the current problems, there is too much evidence of coordinated policy and corruption for me to apply Hanlon’s Razor.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and madness is the result when mixed with the catalyst of hysteria. Who’s invention is net zero?
Willful ignorance and complete credulity to anything considered green. A little curiosity would go a long way.
Socialists don’t understand cause and effect so in the business world that would be incompetent and lead to bankruptcy
In the U.S. it is ignorance. And on both sides of the aisle.
Both. Stupid *and* evil.
deliberate , as the marxist wing of the democratic party wants to re-make the America they hate
I think USA politicians are motivated first by ideology whatever its level of coherency and second by their estimate of the behavior needed to get elected so they can implement their ideology. I think the most brilliant American president in the last 100 years was Herbert Hoover. He graduated top in his class from Stanford with an engineering degree and successfully managed large engineering projects around the world. In the early days of WWI he ran an NGO that kept Belgium from starving and after WWI kept parts of Germany and Eastern Europe from starving. He leaned against American involvement in world wars. He is why Hoover Dam has its name.
Imagine two voters. One follows energy experts on Substack, sites like oilprice.com and reads Vaclav Smil's books. The other gets their energy news from CNN and Fox and doesn't read non-fiction.
Both. I think it is fully evil, but also stupidity because I don't believe they realize the utter destruction they will cause.
Definitely stupid and incompetent because they are predominately in a constant state of narcissus. They do what they do in their blinkered opinion as to what is needed to keep them elected. Nothing to do with what is best for the country. Part of the problem, society in general is getting dumber. Lazy stupid people survive these days. 100 years ago, they died.
Steven Hawking said it well. "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge".
The biggest problem, you cannot fix stupid.
Well-meaning politicians and energy policy administrators may be stupid, incompetent, or simply ill-informed (or not), but Big money moves are planned long in advance by people who are neither stupid, nor incompetent. When it comes to the Petrodollar (the global reserve currency) and the system that supports it, don't underestimate the people, the timeframes, or the preparedness of those behind the scenes. They may not succeed at everything they try but they have better data and more means & resources at their disposal than we do. We consumers what they produce, including the programs and media they want us to listen too. Thankfully, there is you, and those like you, who speak truth when you can find it. Keep searching and keep writing.
We have to understand how we have arrived at the 'Net Zero' policy. Firstly the eco-mentalist NGOs have created anxiety in the general populace with exaggeration and misinformation. Then the scientific community jump on the band wagon as a means of securing research grants. Naturally, they don't conclude that things are OK as that would extinguish funding. Politicians then formulate policy based on the voters' fears, and are lobbied by the same NGOs. The policy is converted into strategic plans by consulting the big players in the energy industry who of course have to make a buck. None of the politicians and their civil servants have a clue about what they are told and basically are looking for the advice which confirms they are on the right track. At no point do the politicians consult independent experts to consider downside risks. That's how we got here.
They are both stupid and evil. Stupid, because they believe their own propaganda. Evil, because deep down they consider even the worst case scenarios of an energy drought and all the human catastrophe that goes along with it as a worthwhile trade off to "save the planet".
It can be and IS both. This deliberate plan has been in the making since at least 1973, when as a freshman engineering student I was forced to study “Limits to Growth” by Club of Rome. It’s been baking for decades and now being tyrannically executed on us, so there is “intelligent design”. That being said, those managing this and their allies are also ignorant and incompetent, technically.
Politicians exhibit a certain level of stupidity and ignorance with some self-interest evil thrown in, but are merely puppets in the hands of those hidden, powerful men who control the world's finances. The Fed has the mistaken idea they can control the price of energy by continuing to raise interest rates until they break the economy, in which they have a proven track record. We will be left with 10% interest rates, high energy prices and shortages of food and other commodities. Let's not forget that some large oil company CEO's and activist shareholders come from a generation that buy into the ESG mentality that has limited investments in energy. What we are seeing now is years in the making.
Collection of narcissists at the power centers! Yes, narcissists are stupid and also evil.
It is inconceivable to me that the vast number of people globally in public policy, academia, regulatory scientific etc. bureaucracies do not understand the very probable and material decline in humanity's living standards without hydrocarbons. At best the degree of indifference and lack of transparency on costs and benefits is prima facie evidence of ill intent.
The elites have their own religion and global warming is one of the elements. The others are just as nasty. The ultimate goal is a world where they have complete knowledge and control over every human on earth and ownership of every drop of water, blade of grass and morsel of food. Obey or die.
It seems doubtful to me that Western energy policy can meaningfully be understood by focusing only on politicians and limiting the descriptive categories to utterly stupid / incompetent vs. evil. Energy has long been a central focus of geopolitics . This is illustrated by the quote attributed to Henry Kissinger: "“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” Although elected politicians play a role in geopolitics, historically other parties have played more significant roles, including intelligence, military and business interests. An examination of incentive structures almost always provides meaningful insight into the motivations underlying individual and entity decisionmaking and actions -- and helps to clarify the divergence between ideals and interests. We do ourselves a disservice by viewing and discussing Issues related to energy using overly simplistic generalizations.
It is a reality that nearly ALL people lack a grasp of 'SCALE'.
The average person cannot appreciate a million, much less a trillion.
The political elite understand this and reduce the propaganda to ONE entity- CO2.
CO2 rises and falls with temperature. For propaganda purposes, it is convenient to say CO2 CAUSES a temperature rise, even though the data do not show this. The data DO show that the planet is greening due to rising CO2, and that land is NOT being lost to sea level rise, and so forth, AND, more than half the CO2 from combustion disappears EVERY year. It is easy to show, from exponential decay, CO2 will return to pre-industrial values in about 100 years after we run out of fossil fuels.
So why can there be a hurry to abandon fossil fuels? They will not last beyond 100 years, during which time we MUST find new energy resources or return to 1750 standards of living and population. The new energy resource exists. There is no lack of energy now.
But, humanity as a whole is systematically being CUT-OFF from abundant energy. Why--- what is the logical conclusion?
The logical conclusion is that SOMEONE hates a high standard of living for nearly everyone, except for themselves. That someone hates the large fraction of free humanity and wants to be the top elite in a feudal society. That someone is willing to destroy most of humanity to reach an energy status that is coming anyway, but to bring it 50 years earlier (during their lifetime) via deprivation, suffering, and death for the great bulk of humanity.
That someone is pernicious, hateful, and divisive.
Both.
It's supreme arrogance coupled with utter incompetence.
Add to that mix the craving for power, wealth, and control.
Hanlon's razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (Thanks Wikipedia!)
The globalist lizard people conspiracy theories are certainly good fun, but one has to stay out of the fever swamps as there is truly no bottom to the crazy. Same goes for the “Big Oil” conspiracies- people need to put down their Chomsky books. (Funny that nobody ever complains about “Little Oil” which represents a huge portion of US production?)
I think the people who are making all of these terrible decisions truly believe they are “enlightened” and they think they are trying to help people. The problem is essentially Hayek’s knowledge problem- they are not capable of understanding the degree to which they are causing damage because the system is complicated and chaotic. They have whipped themselves into a frenzy on climate and they can’t rationally evaluate their framework at all. Doubling down on narratives until the end!
Vaclav Smil's How The World Really Works should be required reading for politician's staffs. It's accessible to anyone with a high school degree. The reader does have to have an appreciation of arithmetic. It's excellent at illustrating how totally dependent on fossil fuels is the world economy and civilization itself. It should make people realize that we need a reliable substitute for CO2-emitting fuels BEFORE cutting them off. [He also swipes at Modern Monetary Theory.]
Both. I have no doubt that some people in power are sociopaths or have a strong number of psychopathic traits (e.g. Chrystia Freeland). [See works by Robert Hare and Kevin Dutton] One Wall Street Corporation had deliberately hired people with psychopathic traits.
MASS FORMATION - Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, Mattias Desmet lays out what "mass formation" is, how it develops, how it leads to totalitarianism, and what we must do to change the conditions that makes these mass formation events possible. We certainly see Mass Formation with the CO2 Climate Change narrative. One hour interview https://www.corbettreport.com/desmet-massformation/
Dealing with a narcissistic human or group or a nation state - "To be an enemy is dangerous but to be a friend is fatal" - remember the words of the man Henry Kissinger. You cannot win with narcissists - yes they are stupid and equally evil....if you are in a relationship with one....remember to run like Forest Gump! It will be a historical lesson for EU citizens and all the other vassal states and its subjects if they do not rise.
Why not stupidly deliberate?
Wilful blindness. I like that term. The old story about the lie repeated often enough becoming the truth also has some basis here. But I think that the great unwashed should take part of the blame. Those that we elect to parliament, Congress or whatever you call it, come from among us, but we expect them to be be above the melee and think clearly and do everything right (as we perceive it). Has that ever happened? They get accosted by the party machinery and advised by political and social scientists who have no idea about the laws of physics or how to use data. Those ideas, like “renewables” (whatever that means), repeated often enough become ideology and of course, our ideology is better than the other mob’s isn’t it?
Wilful blindness, dumbass refusal to adjust the course in the face of 'alternative facts’. I’m leaning toward stupidity on the most part. But influence from the rich and famous should not be discounted. Like proposals in Australia for tens of billions to export liquid ‘green’ hydrogen, or power to Singapore by undersea cables from PV panels covering thousands of square kilometres of land. Once mesmerised by the almighty dollar, these proposals become a mantra that are hard to resist. So, I’m with Irina. Stupidity for now, but teetering on the edge of corruption.
I think they just want to get re-elected to retain their wealth,power and privilege and the green posturing is a vote getter. Not that they know anything about physics or even care much about reducing carbon or keeping the lights on. Politicians care only about power .
I have to say I think they are all of the above, stupid, just enough to be incompetent (or think they are doing the right thing), and just enough to be easily manipulated, and very deliberate on their own survival and gains. I once did an analogy of NextEra and their entourage of experts seeking tax abatements. They are like the shark and the remora fish. The politicians being the latter. They don't hang around the host too long, if they are smart, because choosing the wrong shark can be fatal, but they are after a free meal and the shark may give it to them.
Both camps are in operation, it now seems to me. Incompetence is in full display, so little dispute on the existence of that camp. The existence of the deliberate camp is becoming easier to believe and begs three questions: 1) Why do some government policies seem to have little to do with lowering CO2 emissions? California, a leader in climate change policies, is a good example where the majority of the petroleum used is imported rather than allowing more in-state oil production, plus the state's failed forest-fire management practices and the allowance of over-building in fire prone areas have resulted in huge volumes of CO2 being released from wildland fires over the last couple of decades. 2) And if deliberate is this really about climate change or something else? This is a key question and really gets to the evil judgement which I am leaning more towards. 3) But if evil then why? Joel Kotkin has a plausible answer, it's about destroying the political opposition in California, what little remains (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvxg-oZ-QHc). If Kotkin is correct then Californians are paying big, whether they realize it or not, for a covert and deceitful political operation that will have little impact on climate change and divert the state from solving more pressing problems.
I think it’s a mix.
I don’t think it’s an accident that those a-holes at the Davos conferences regularly bring up human overpopulation as a concern, then switch to ways of rapidly decreasing our supplies of food and energy shrouded in environmentalism. These include plans to block critical infrastructure in nuclear and desalination plants as well as any oil & gas production & pipelines, a shift to wind and solar which produce much less power than advertised and clearly can’t reliably take 100% of the energy load, and push a shift from edible crops to biofuels.
Politicians in general are dumber than the average person, so I’m sure a good number actually believe the bs, but there is a core of sociopathic super-wealthy elites pulling their strings.
100% intentional. This is not the first time the government has done bad things intentionally
All the way back to 1873 the U.S. government killed 1.5 million buffalo in one year to starve out the native Americans so they would be come dependent on the government and thus controlled.
In the U.S. there are 96 food processing plants that have had "accidents in the last 6 months. (I will be glad to send a list for verification) - If they have done it in the past do you think they would not try it again?
Just look at tearing apart the United States oil and gas industry and then asking Saudi Arabia to pump more oil. Wow.
Strong believer in the first possibility. We are talking about politicians, not energy system experts or economists. So the baseline is always that they don't have a clue and need a briefing (many-many briefings) to be able to say something that isn't utterly ridiculous.
The 2nd problem is that they swallowed their fairytale about the green transition hook, line and sinker. They've been sold a painless, low-price and zero-carbon future based renewables, without ever being able to put any sensible questions about storage, balancing, market marginal pricing etc. Again, because they are politicians - it's easier to parrot a nice tale than face reality.
And the final straw are the knee-jerk reactions, the fancy-sounding initiatives and the frantic activity that follows. Believe me when I say this: from close up, it looks like a bunch of headless chicken running around and utterly incapable of coherent thought, much less strategy.
both!
I'm not yet in the place where I think they are evil. Our Western governments have become such large complex organisations that they are unmanageable. Energy policy and management is but one example. Playing to the crowd is easy when 'the sun is shining' in the hope of winning votes. The sheer complexity of the monsters theyve created becomes apparent when 'the storm clouds gather' (even if the storm is of their making) and their policy and management begins to unravel in front of their very eyes. They are incompetent.
I think I embrace the second point because politicians may all have the best intentions in trying to do the right thing. But as Putin once said, it not that easy because you have certain forces- men in black-as he called them, wearing black suits with some wearing blue ties and some black, that come and say, "this is the way things are done." Could he be right?