Imagine a world where your perception of what’s happening is always wrong. You think it’s hot, it’s actually cold; you think it’s dark, it’s actually light. A world where your lying eyes actually lie. Your best friend drops by and you compliment him on his blue shirt. Unfortunately for you, he says it’s orange; you buy a new car and tell everyone how much you like your new Ford. It’s really a Chevrolet.
We spend our days reading and researching our next article, and cannot imagine the world we just described. We check facts, try to insure that what we write is correct, very possibly biased because we’re biased, but composed of provable facts. Unless we actually had an uncle that was provably eaten by cannibals we’d never make or even infer that had happened, yet this type of untruth is rampant in today’s world.
Look at the top stories in the media today, and the common denominator in all the absolutely true untrue stories is the Biden administration or Joe Biden himself.
We have a what seems to be a third world legal system, even though our Constitution says otherwise. There can be no other explanation to the hundreds of people in jail because of January 6 with no charges or court dates, yet the Biden administration has the Department of Justice violate the God given rights of citizens and treats them as political prisoners. That’s in a country that supposedly does not use the justice system for political purposes.
The 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is under indictment in three jurisdictions – New York, Georgia, and Florida – for a bunch of “crimes” that aren’t crimes, for fraud that has no victim or damages, for election fraud that wasn’t election fraud, and for violation of an act that is supposed to protect classified documents where the government was responsible for packing, storing, and shipping documents to Trump, and then accuse him of violating security.
It’s being called lawfare by the media, we call it banana republic politics. You would think there is no rule of law in place to protect Trump or the J6 protesters. The charges in all cases are patently false, either inflated from trespass to insurrection or just plain invented in the three Trump venues.
Some will ask why? We aren’t doing anything more than documenting our opinion here, but in our mind the reason for what is happening is the continued movement to the left by the progressive wing – all that’s really left – of the Democrat party. As they move farther to the left, they become more like their heroes, socialists and communists, and in that world all that counts is power. Truth and justice are constructs from a time when a bunch of old white men could write a Constitution and change the world, but that document and those thoughts don’t work today according to the left.
John Kennedy – the Democrat President, not the witty Senator from Louisiana – said “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” In the modern, progressive, woke, DEI, CRT world, the exact opposite is now true. It’s a gimme society, an entitled society, and especially a short-sighted society. It seems no one on the left looks any farther down the road than lunch.
We have a government that changes the definition of a term to make the result what they want, and then brag about how (add false propaganda brag here).
The government says they’ve lowered unemployment. No they haven’t, they’ve just disregarded labor force participation. This change allows unemployment to be measured without the chronically unemployed being included.
They say inflation is down, but they don’t count the cost of food or fuel. Add in food and fuel – and we dare you to try living without each – and you find inflation is indeed up up up. Ask the government and they’ll tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about and move on.
Climate change – or heating or cooling depending on which “expert” was lying and using made-up data – is an environmental problem that doesn’t exist which spawns false solutions to to a non-existent problem. Discussing this lie will take a lot longer, so please stay with us.
Climate change does indeed exist, as it has as long as earth’s been here. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? Maybe, but CO2 is necessary to life. In the past, the planet has gotten along marvelously well with CO2 levels 10 times the current levels – that was 55,000,000 years ago and the plant life was exquisite – but man can live comfortably with CO2 levels of 1,000 parts per million (ppm). When you get to 5,000 ppm people can experience increased breathing rates, headaches, dizziness, and other symptoms of CO2 exposure. It isn’t until you get to levels over 40,000 ppm that you’re in real trouble. Exposure over 40,000 ppm can lead to serious oxygen deprivation, causing impaired brain function, coma, and potentially death if exposure is prolonged.
The CO2 in the atmosphere today is 400-450 ppm, well below half the CO2 saturation that is safe. It seems we’re spending an awful lot of money to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, or at most isn’t an emergency.
And while we’re talking about solutions to problems that don’t exist, let’s talk about renewable energy – ethanol, solar, wind, electric vehicles – and the rush to get rid of existing energy sources for what seems to be no reason except to make the climate change lie more destructive to our lives.
First the renewable sources:
Starting with ethanol, which is corn based, and as a fuel it isn’t as energy dense as gasoline. Producing ethanol also reduced the amount of corn available as food. We’ll talk about gasoline and diesel fuel as polluters in a bit, but first ethanol as a poor choice to replace gasoline, is less energy dense so it takes more to do the same work, usually 20-25% more. The current price and efficiency differences do not justify using E85, and on a 660 mile trip – Los Angeles to Las Vegas, round trip – ethanol produced 0.5% less CO2 than gasoline – 703.1 pounds versus 706.5 – which doesn’t make it more efficient, cheaper, or better enough for the environment to suffer the reduced power and increased cost that comes with it. Review this article for fact backup
Solar and wind have the same major problem, you can’t count on the sun being out or the wind blowing when you need it. Add to that the problems solar has with hail damage – ask the Texas wind farmers about their experience with hail storms. This article outlines the issues Texas wind farms had in March 2024. Aside from the damaged generating capability, there is always a possibility of pollution, as solar panels sometimes contain cadmium telluride, which is dangerous. Solar cells can be made tougher to withstand weather and other natural events, but the cost increase discourages some developers.
Wind generators can be damaged by turbulence, strong winds, lightening, dust and sandstorms, extreme temperatures, corrosive environments and other naturally occurring phenomenon. Read this article for more information. The bottom line is the wind isn’t a predictable constant, just as the sun isn’t constant either. So both wind and solar need backup.
All that’s available as an alternate to renewable energy generators in most of the world are fossil fueled generating plants, hydroelectric generating plants, and nuclear generating plants.
Fossil fueled plants are the reason we have the big lie climate change issue, so no one who is convinced that we have a climate change problem will endorse fossil fuel. That’s too bad, because with the current fossil fueled world our CO2 is not anywhere near a dangerous level. Fossil fuel is the victim of the left’s biggest lie. There are certainly polluted places in the world, some in the US. Who can forget the haze over the Olympics in China? And pollution has a way of traveling on the wind, so pollution anywhere will cause problems somewhere else. This article gives some background to agricultural and rural development note on pollution.
The problem we see is the air in the US isn’t cleaner than it’s ever been, but is much improved, while India and China continue to pollute at a high rate. Increasing clean air standards in the US will not resolve pollution by developing countries.
Particulate matter (PM2.5) levels have decreased by 70% since 1990, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Sulfur dioxide emissions have decreased by 90% since 1970, and nitrogen oxide emissions have decreased by 50% since 1980.
The Clean Air Act has led to significant reductions in air pollution, preventing hundreds of thousands of cases of serious health effects each year.
The US has made significant strides in improving air quality, with many areas meeting or exceeding federal air quality standards.
So with all the issues other countries have with pollution, we believe the fix is to get them to stop spewing particulate matter into the air. While the US is spending huge amounts to stop using fossil fuel – an action we believe is not justified by the efficacy and real performance of alternative energy sources – and China and India continue to bring new coal fired plants online every week, and those plants are not as efficient at not polluting as the same size plant built to US specifications, we see no need to continue with the climate change fraud. Instead we recommend the US uses every form of cost justifiable energy and let the rest of the world catch up.
Until everyone is on board, efforts in the US will only cost us more for energy and products while not improving the pollution situation overall.
Add into the equation the lie of the non-polluting electric vehicle (EV) – they pollute at the generating plant rather than at the place of use – and the cost and danger of the batteries they require, we don’t believe the EV is justifiable as a general transportation vehicle. Certainly for low mileage or around town use, but not to replace the gas and diesel vehicles that are on the road today.
You can see by the chart that immense progress has been made. Without participation by other nations there will be no solution. The cost per percent also increases geometrically as we remove more and more pollutants. There has to be a cross-over point where the cost of additional gains is not justified by the gain realized. We believe we are at that point now.
The only thing we can think of that would be pertinent to this conversation is the non-use of the best non-polluting option we have, and that’s nuclear. Nuclear generation is dependable, safe, inexpensive, and non-polluting. Storing used fuel rods is problematic, but is solvable.
We’re confident that, if nuclear were to regain the public confidence and the US were to start building nuclear plants again, someone somewhere would figure out how to use those spent fuel rods. The elephant in the room concerning used fuel rods is where they’re stored when they’re taken out of service. No one wants them due to the long term radiation. If a safe place were developed to store used fuel rods, nuclear would be perfect.
As it is, nuclear is still the best solution to energy generation without pollution. France has been using nuclear generation for 50 years, and you haven’t heard of a problem there. We repeat, nuclear is safe as a technology.
Installing nuclear generators as backups where needed and as primary generation wherever new generators are needed just might make wind and solar generation feasible.