As we’ve often noted on this show, because it’s hard not to notice, we are living in one of those moments where so much is happening all at once and information about it all is so tightly controlled that huge history changing events can occur and in fact are occurring right now and nobody seems aware of them. It’s pretty unsettling, actually. Here’s one example. Europe is descending into poverty. Did you know that? Had someone told you that?
So, the most advanced continent on the planet, the birthplace of Western civilization, our civilization, is getting much poorer very quickly. It’s moving backward at high speed. Just a year ago, Europe was a modern place. For example, the overwhelming majority of Europeans heated their homes with natural gas, as modern people do.
In Germany, the continent’s richest country, only about 6% of households, most of them rural, heated with cordwood and you’d expect that, given that, again, Germany is a modern industrialized country with central heating and indoor plumbing and all the other trappings of a society that has moved beyond the medieval period. Last year, only about 6% of Germans used wood to heat their homes, but that has changed dramatically. Demand for firewood in Germany has risen so fast that there is none left to buy. You can’t get it, so desperate Germans are now cutting their own wood, scouring the forests like their ancestors for sources of heat. Watch.
REPORTER: “Some in Germany are taking matters into their own hands, a solution that might look like a blast from the past. About 2 hours outside Berlin, residents of this small town have turned to wood chips for fuel.”
FOREST MANAGER: “We have to be innovative, said the project’s organizer. If we don’t act and just rely on the government to solve, the crisis will never succeed.”
REPORTER: “This burner will soon fuel most of this village of 60 people.”
So, they call it biomass, but it’s wood. They’re burning wood again, as they did during the feudal period. That’s Germany. In Poland, families are standing in line for days to buy coal, not in 1910, right now, tonight, cars queued up outside coal mines hoping for fuel. “This is beyond imagination,” one 57-year-old Polish man told Reuters. “People are sleeping in their cars. I remember the communist times, but it didn’t cross my mind that we could return to something even worse.”
Oh, but it’s come. Something even worse has arrived. The French government has announced energy rationing this winter. Just the other day, France had so much energy that it exported it to other countries. It was a net exporter of energy. Now, there won’t be enough heat in France for everyone in the country to stay warm. In the U.K., 70% of restaurants are preparing to close to go under. Why? Because when winter comes, they won’t be able to afford to keep the heat and lights on, etc., etc. This is happening across Europe, in every country.
So, the question is: why is it happening? And the answer is extremely simple. There is an energy shortage in Europe. Cheap energy is essential. It is the key to everything that a normal society strives for: prosperity, safety, a longer life expectancy for its citizens. Everything depends on cheap energy, but Europe no longer has it and as a result, things are falling apart very quickly.
Energy costs in Europe are expected to increase by hundreds of percent in coming months. Germany’s year ahead price of electricity, that’s the benchmark for all of Europe, it’s measured in euros per megawatt hour, that price just exceeded €1,000 for the first time in history. For perspective, just a week ago, last Monday, the cost was about €700 per megawatt hour and that was a record. In other words, the price rise is approaching 50% in a single week. In France, electricity went up 25% in one day. That was last Friday. Imagine that happening to you.
……So, it turns out if you don’t have cheap natural gas, you can’t run the continent. Now, if you’ve got a graduate degree and live in a city in the United States, you may be shocked to learn this, you may never have heard this before, you may have believed that fossil fuels were on their way out any day now. And you thought that because the Davos people and our own leaders assured us of that for decades. They told us that green energy was the future and the future is here. It’s here. As recently as last month, the World Economic Forum claimed that Europe could save “1 trillion in fossil fuel costs by switching to renewables.” But it turns out, and this may not shock you, they had no clue what they were talking about. They knew nothing about the subject, the subject they talked about endlessly.
Green energy cannot replace fossil fuels. Not now, not anytime soon. Fossil fuels remain what they have always been: the key to civilization. That is true now. That has been true since Homo Erectus started the first cooking fire in a cave nearly a million years ago. So-called green energy is not close, is nowhere near replacing gas and oil and coal. It’s measurable. We could have known this. Anyone with eighth-grade math skills could have figured out in about 10 minutes that we cannot replace fossil fuels with renewables or green energy and of course, they must have known that. When they told you otherwise, it was just posturing. It was childish and destructive fantasy talk that apparently fooled millions of their citizens and millions of hours.
The Green New Deal means what it always meant. It means poverty and the people pushing the Green New Deal must have known that all along. They don’t actually believe climate change is an imminent threat. If they actually believe climate change was an imminent threat, an existential emergency, the first thing they would have done, the very first would be to ban private jets. Oh, but no. To this day, Al Gore still flies on private jets. Barack Obama owns tens of millions of dollars of beachfront property. He knows the oceans aren’t rising. Come on. So, they’re all in on it. It’s a scam, but they don’t care because they know they personally will escape the consequences of their own policies.
……What’s changed, what’s so very interesting, is that suddenly everyone else who’s been paying attention can see that they were lying. They are frauds and the entire population of Europe now knows that. Donald Trump, to his credit, whatever you think of him, caught onto this early. Four years ago, Trump warned Europe about its energy future during a speech at the United Nations. The German delegation laughed at him. Remember this?
DONALD TRUMP: “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers. It has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe.”
Oh, they’re laughing. We have green parties here in Europe. You have no idea what you’re talking about, but they’re not laughing anymore…..
……Amazing piece in the AP just the other day announcing that, “leadership of the Federal Reserve has become its most diverse ever. There are more female black and gay officials contributing to the central bank’s interest rate decisions than at any time in its 109 year history.” OK. In other words, “Relax. We’ve got affirmative action. Everything’s fine.”
Great, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be working. The same central banks that intentionally caused inflation—and they did—those same central banks are hiking rates to destroy demand. The problem is, this isn’t a demand problem. This is a supply problem, and it stems primarily from the war in Ukraine. Because of that war, the West does not have enough energy to continue its economy or society. Europe responded to that war by imposing sanctions that they knew would inevitably cause energy shortages. They knew it when they did it.
……So, we could fix this problem. The solution to this catastrophe is very straightforward: End the war in Ukraine. Reestablish energy flows into Europe and save the global economy, including ours. Is Joe Biden doing that? And other reckless Western leaders like Boris Johnson doing that? No, they’re doing the opposite. They’re spending billions more from their dying economies to Ukrainian oligarchs and for no good reason. The UK just committed $2.8 billion to Ukraine in a country where 70% of pubs may close because they can’t afford electricity.
Liberal shitheads in America want to adopt the Euro disaster. Gavin Newsom’s disastrous “green energy” shit is bankrupting California and turning it into a third world region.
In 2019, Georgetown Texas decided to try the “green experiment“. They abandoned affordable fossil fuels and switched to more costly “renewable energy”. It didn’t work. As a matter of fact, the prices of natural gas went down and the problem with wind power is that it’s mainly made at night and very expensive to store it. During the daytime, they had to buy off the power grid. Georgetown residents lost about $30 million over four years, and the town’s citizens were receiving energy bills for an average of $600 more than neighboring towns.
The whole “green, sustainability” crap is nothing less than an abuse of power. It’s all about government control of energy resources.