The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) was recently held in Egypt, attracting many global elites and more than 400 private jets. All attendees recognize that climate change is occurring, as it has for 4 billion years—but it seems most lack basic energy literacy, which starts with the knowledge that renewable energy is only intermittent electricity generated from unreliable breezes and sunshine and can’t replace fossil fuels.
The indisputable, unpleasant fact is that renewables, like wind turbines and solar panels, can’t be manufactured into any of the oil derivatives that are the basis of thousands of products that make up the foundation of societies and economies around the world.
More than 50,000 merchant ships are moving products throughout the world and more than 50,000 aircraft are being used by commercial airlines, private usage, and the military.
The World Economic Forum, the U.N., the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and banks that promote Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) are creating an extremely dangerous precedent, as the world population never voted to give governments or other entities this sort of control over basic products demanded by the people.
COP27 attendees wishing to achieve zero emissions at virtually any cost will face major supply chain issues of exotic materials such as lithium, cobalt, copper, zinc, and silicon, as well as the challenge of affordability—in addition to the availability and efficiency of electricity from wind and solar and the ethical challenges from mining these materials in poorer countries, just for elites to drive an electric vehicle (EV).
The supply of lithium for current EV batteries is already extremely limited in the world, and initiatives around the world to open lithium strip mines and ore processing plants have caused public uproar as environmentalists and the local population are fearful about the impact on nature and people’s livelihoods.
Before the U.N. jumps out of an airplane without a tested parachute, officials need to have a plan to support the demands of the 8 billion on this globe for all the products and infrastructures that exist today, which didn’t exist a few hundred years ago. Where is the U.N.’s plan to keep the planet’s population alive and well without the products now being manufactured from crude oil?
Efforts to cease the use of oil, without a planned replacement, could be the greatest threat to modern civilization—not climate change—and lead the world to an era of guaranteed extreme shortages of fossil fuel products. This is exactly what we had in the decarbonized world of the 1800s, and its return may result in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths.
It’s perfect nonsense that functional civil societies can live without coal, oil, and gas. Today’s efforts to end the use of fossil fuels are symptomatic of an uneducated cohort who haven’t the faintest idea about what makes their safe and privileged lives possible.
Electricity from wind and solar can charge your iPhone but can’t make your iPhone; it can operate a defibrillator but can’t make the defibrillator; and it can operate your TV but can’t make the TV.
Electricity from wind and solar can’t make tires for billions of vehicles, asphalt for millions of miles of roadways, medications and medical equipment, water filtration systems, sanitation systems, fertilizers that come from natural gas to help feed billions, or pesticides to control locusts and other pests.
Getting down to the basics, even all the components of wind turbines and solar panels are made with products from fossil fuels. Thus, eliminating fossil fuels would eliminate all the components of wind turbines, solar panels, vehicles, merchant ships, jets, and more. Again, where is the U.N.’s plan to keep the planet’s 8 billion alive and well without the products now being manufactured from crude oil?
