"The Universal Currency is Energy"

Someone (I think it was R.A. Heinlein) once said that energy is the universal currency.  All transactions between people reduce to transactions about energy.  Think about it: what's the most fundamental of your needs?  Food and shelter.  What is food other than energy to run you?  How do you build your home?  Don't you need energy to make your home livable; to separate the inside from the outside?  If you buy anything, you're trading some of your concentrated energy for someone else's.

For as much of my life as I can remember, people have been preaching that we are running out of oil and we needed alternatives.  I first remember seeing the term "peak oil" invoked in the second 1970s gas crisis, when OPEC was deliberately raising the price of their product to gouge us.  When we started making motions to develop our own resources - rather than just talking about it - the price of oil came down.  A lesson for today?  It seems every 10 or 15 years or so, someone else announces we're at peak oil and the world will soon be ending. 

Environmentalists and other idiots are always screaming how we need green energy or renewable energy; both terms are code.  What they mean is they want to return the world to some idealized pre-industrial state that never existed.  They want fewer people, and some have fantasized about killing up to 98% of humanity.  It's not just about magical unicorn farts to power everything. 

Enter Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute with a great review article "Four Dirty Secrets About Clean Energy".  This is a well thought out piece, and worth the time to read.

1. Dirty Secret #1: If “clean energy” were actually cheaper than fossil fuels, it wouldn’t need a policy.
2. Dirty Secret #2: Clean energy advocates want to force us to use solar, wind, and biofuels, even though there is no evidence these can power modern civilization.
3. Dirty Secret #3: There are promising carbon-free energy sources--hydroelectric and nuclear--but “clean energy” policies oppose them as not “green” enough.
4. Dirty Secret #4: The environmentalists behind clean energy policy are anti-energy.

Talking about the desire to see humans wiped off the planet may seem like I'm going too far, but it's real.  In 2007, when senator Obama famously said "under my cap and trade plan, energy prices would necessarily skyrocket", he didn't say that it would necessarily kill people on the lower rungs of our society --- but it's hard for me to believe he doesn't know that, if he's as smart as his peg boys say.  Earlier in the week, WSRA linked to Francis Poretto's piece Causes of Death.  If you haven't read that, please do.