The U.S. Is In Real Decline—No Kidding! Part One: Energy
https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-no-kidding-part-one-energy/
There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.
But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.
Affordable energy had been America’s strength. We are still the largest combined natural gas and oil producer in the world—but determined to forfeit that advantage on the world stage and at home damage the viability of the middle class.
We were once the premier nuclear-generated power nation as well. No longer. Joe Biden and his surrogates on the state level have systematically waged war on fossil fuels, precluding even the reasonable idea that oil, gas, and coal can serve as necessary transition fuels over the next half-century, guaranteeing the American standard of living until the advent of viable alternative and renewable energies.
The only time Biden focuses on oil and gas is before a midterm or general election, when he hurriedly will either drain more of the strategic petroleum reserve or showboat a few more new federal energy leases.
A state like California has the highest taxed and the costliest electricity in the continental United States, mostly as a result of bragging that it is self-sufficient in daytime electricity production due to massive and heavily subsidized solar and wind farms. Yet it keeps mum that after dark it must import equally large amounts of fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states.
One of the most bizarre developments during the Biden years has been the complete exemption given massive and growing Chinese coal use, coupled with the furor over domestic natural gas production and use.
Think of the logic: we coax and ignore our Chinese enemies who are hell-bent on record dirty coal use, while hectoring the mostly now green American public on their supposedly toxic use of clean-burning natural gas—as if we could persuade 1.4 billion Chinese to cease burning coal by showing them that 330 million Americans can sacrifice by not burning natural gas.
Here again is the ancient bureaucratic principle in play of focusing on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding, as a way to square the utter inability to deal with the felony of the law-breaking.
As the U.S. is pushed to embrace the massive use of electrical vehicles, the vast majority of which will be charging after commute hours and in the dark, the more it resists nuclear and fossil fuel power generation, the only sure ways of producing steady and reliable electricity when the sun goes down.
As the elite clamp down on gas-cooktops, pizza ovens, and gas hot water heaters of the middle classes, it is silent on the use of private jets, or the energy consumption in huge homes over 5,000-6,000 square feet, of the Obamas-Al Gore sort.
In California, we are far more likely to blow up a hydroelectric plant on a manmade reservoir than to create a new one—on the theory that someday we will have clean energy in abundance, but for now the middle classes must suffer for energy-consuming sins.
A final thought. The Left pushes mass transit as the cure-all for supposedly wasteful and consumptive automobile use. Yet it can offer no alternative to the car that any sane American would consider.
In California, its multibillion-dollar price tag “high-speed” rail is stagnating between Merced and Bakersfield. After a decade, not a foot of track has been laid, and no one yet can explain why anyone would wish to go over 100 mph an hour from Bakersfield to Merced.
The Bay-Area’s once state-of-the-art BART rail system is in decay. The cars are increasingly unreliable, dirty, and crime-ridden.
BART either cannot or will not ensure the safety of its passengers, in the toxic manner of all major contemporary urban mass transit systems. Why? In part, because to enforce laws against turnstile-jumping, or harassment of passengers, or various assaults in stations would be, in the Age of Post-George-Floyd, somehow inappropriate.
One does not have to be a conspiracist to see that the Left likes mass transit and hates cars for reasons other than energy-per-mile individual consumption. The more millions become captives of trains, the more unions control their very lives, the more the state alone can ensure their safety, the more the government can determine their travel and commute, and the more “equity” can be enforced.
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