Rex Murphy: This energy crisis has been 30 years in the making. Why is anyone surprised?
None of the elite bound for the grand climate shindig in Glasgow have to worry about unmeetable energy bills
The inevitable collision between 30 years of global warming hyper activism — the howling demonization of available, proven energy resources — and reality, is upon us. There is an atmosphere of semi-panic as many of the countries most committed to “getting off” oil and gas and turning their economies over to wind and sun find winter approaching and they, environmentally virtuous as they are, are wondering if they have enough oil and gas and even coal to get through it.
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Depending on your view of such things, it couldn’t happen at a better time. The 26th gathering of doomsday professionals known as COP26 is close at hand, this time in Glasgow, for another massively over-subscribed conference bent on rejecting the great gifts of nature and providence — oil and gas. COP26 will coincide with the very crisis that the previous 25 conferences, with their wild projections of the Earth collapsing if their prescriptions were not taken up, were in large part responsible for.
This time there will be as many as 25,000 delegates travelling great distances by jet during a plague and — this will shock no one — as the BBC reports “COVID rules will be relaxed … (delegates) will not require to be fully vaccinated.” Of course not. Global warmers have virtue-signalling immunity.
The world we know lives and functions on reliable sources of proven energy. Note the adjective, proven. It’s the key one. Everything from modern medicine and government to transportation, agriculture and research — the wealth of nations and thereby their security and the well-being of their citizens — depends on a secure and proven supply of energy. Which we have already. We also have dependable systems to deliver it.
But for the 30 years referenced above, what we already have in place, what actually works, has been set against by the climate-change movement, with its frenzied alarms about the approach of doomsday.
The climate frenzy has been a clamorous chorus, millenarian in intensity and vision, demanding that the West unharness its economies and well-being from the one, proven, established means of maintaining them. It is a malaise of a society that has enough resilience to enable its careless and unthinking detractors.
There was a time when societies and nations looked back at their pasts, at the work and hardships and deprivations of previous generations, and gave thanks that those generations vaulted succeeding ones into new realms of comfort, security, ease of life, and stability.
This is the first one that has fostered a political and activist force built around a philosophy of ingratitude for the privileges we enjoy, the means by which those privileges were earned, and a furious determination to bring the whole house down.
No one who attends the grand shindig in Glasgow will experience any hardship, any difficulty, any anxiety, if there are blackouts, unmeetable energy bills, or interruptions in power during the next six months. For as is it written in the Book of Climate Change: “Thou climate warriors, ye who assemble in fine hotels, and ye who squat on the highways and superglue your bottoms to the asphalt thereon, yea, all who vote Green — cold and want shall never visit ye. And much golden press coverage will be yours.”
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The story now is that Europe is in a mess, Russia — i.e. Vladimir Putin — is offering a helping hand, the U.K. is tasting the first fruits of petrol shortages, inflation, even the U.S. under the sage guidance of the super-alert Joe Biden is thinking of unlocking its emergency oil reserves, and OPEC has a stronger whip than at any time since the ’70s.
There is no question how we got here. A couple of sentences from an opinion piece by David Blackmon in Forbes carries all the insight required: “Every new regulation, no matter how noble-minded, has (had) a cost, and the ‘energy transition’ has already demanded wave after wave of new regulation on fossil fuels. Claiming these actions bear no cost or consequence is simply absurd.”
All one needs to know is that while the western world is self-flagellating, China continues to build the equivalent of more than one coal-fired power plant a week , with no mention nor any consequences from the globalist elites.
Finally let me cite the sagacious Lorrie Goldstein, who makes an undeniable point : “Carbon taxes/prices are becoming increasingly divorced from the claim their purpose is to combat climate change and correctly understood as a sin tax for using fossil fuels, raising the cost of almost all goods and services because almost all goods and services are created, grown, manufactured, or delivered using fossil fuel energy.”
Winter is coming and the grim iceberg is heading towards the great ship.
National Post
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https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-this-energy-crisis-has-been-30-years-in-the-making-why-is-anyone-surprised