A Green Old Deal
Global warming can be an excuse to be reactionary
The Democrats have gone Brown. The deep environmentalists who shop at the organic food coops are Trumpier than Trump. We can be Greener than the Green party while pushing a mix of law and order, tariffs, closed borders, property rights, Pigovian taxes, and Austrian economics. (More on the last in a future article.)
But we do have one major obstacle: most of you reading this don't believe in Global Warming. This can be a deal killer. The Left Coast and college towns are filled with people who do believe and you are not going to change their minds.
They might even be [partially] right.
Notice the graphs in this article "debunking" the Climate Consensus. The climate models are shown to consistently over predict the warming trend, but there is still a warming trend. (Maybe the models are underestimating the extra clouds that come with warming — or so I have read somewhere.)
I am not asking you to change your beliefs here. I am calling for those who live in tree-hugging Blue zones to be Machiavellian. Roll with the punch here and take out the woke anarcho-tyrannical pooluters. Remember, a politician is running to be a representative. It's not "all about meeeeeeee!" If you want to focus on "Being Myself", be a yoga teacher or life coach.
To take back America, we need to elect politicians who advance those portions of the Reactionary Agenda that play well in respective districts.
And to be an effective Green RINO, you have to bend a bit to the local political winds, and that means being willing to do something about the threat of global warming. This does not mean you need to go along with the Green New Deal or eating the bugs. On they contrary, you can attack the Green New Deal and still out Green your opponent!
An expensive, economy-destroying, program of carbon fuel reduction will not be adopted in India, China, and Africa. Ergo, you can destroy the U.S. economy and have zero long term benefit to the climate.
Indeed, if you destroy U.S. economic dominance, the world becomes dominated by China. China is not eco friendly.
If you hobble U.S. agriculture, then the remaining nature preserves of Africa will be put to the plow.
Covering good farmland with solar panels is not eco friendly.
Giant windmills are ugly. Sea based windmills kill whales.
The Corporate Average Fuel Economy law has replaced full sized sedans with colossal SUVs and crew cab pickup trucks.
Blast away at bad solutions all you want, but you still need to offer viable alternatives.
The good news is that you can fight global warming while advancing a Reactionary agenda at the same time.
Alternative Energy is Old Energy
Once upon a not so long ago, rural America was powered by biofuels, wind, and water power. It took mass quantities of eminent domain and the Rural Electrification Administration to bring central power to much of the country.
My grandfather loved telling tales of running a diesel sawmill on lard back in the 1920s. Among his papers were plans from World War II on how to run a car on charcoal: burn the charcoal in a restricted oxygen environment with a bit of steam thrown in. This produces a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen which the car can run on. This was really old tech. The first internal combustion engines ran off of such "water gas." Carburetors and liquid fuels came later.
In his old age my grandfather maintained the hydraulic ram which originally provided water to the house, and experimented with small scale hydroelectric and wind energy. His ancient tractor was truly flex fuel. It had two fuel tanks: a small starter tank which needed fuel of at least 60 octane, and a larger tank that could hold gasoline or "low cost fuel."
My grandfather was not a liberal hippie. He was an archetypical impoverished southern gentleman, complete with run down plantation, Confederate artifacts, and a large gun collection. Alternative energy is southern gentleman friendly.
It's also redneck friendly. CBS did an extensive documentary series on Georgia rednecks and biofuels.
Red America is in a far better position to go to alternative energy than Blue America. Solar requires a large roof area and room for storage. Biofuels are inefficient unless used locally.
Growing plants just to make biofuels is a waste of farmland in general, but farms produce a lot of waste. Spoiled fruits and vegetables can be fermented to make ethanol. Manure can be composted to make methane. Runoff from animal farming can be purified by running it through beds of cattails. Cattails produce a very large amount of starch per acre, starch which can be enzymatically broken into fermentable sugars, which can used to make ethanol.
To burn wood just to heat a home is wasteful. It's more efficient to run that heat through a Stirling or Ericson cycle engine first to make electricity and use the waste heat to heat home and water supply. And during the warm months you could use solar heat to drive that engine. No solar cells needed.
All of this involves quite a bit of labor, but it is satisfying labor, for those who like to live as humans instead of as insects.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.”
—Robert A. Heinlein
An alternative energy vision which includes smart metering, resale to the grid, all electric cars, and an electricity superhighway for load balancing is indeed a dystopian abomination in the making. But an alternative energy vision which brings back the integrated small family farm and repopulates rural America is delightfully Reactionary. It is a return to pioneer self-sufficiency. It appeals greatly to my inner tinker and inner survivalist.
It is possible to go alternative energy without a huge amount of battery backup. Thanks to LED lights, the main domestic uses for electricity are cooking, heating water, pumping water, and climate control. Cooking can be done with biofuels directly. Water can be pumped into pressurized or elevated tanks when power is most available. Water and homes can be heated directly with either biofuels or solar collectors. Air conditioning is the biggest challenge, but even there your peak need generally corresponds to peak sunlight, and you can store coldness as cold water or even ice.
When it comes to solar heating there is some really interesting technology in the pipeline. Translucent biogels could increase the efficiency of flat plate solar collectors enormously. Or, better yet, the new transparent aluminum, looks like a good material for making vacuum sealed solar collectors. Sunlight is about 5000 degrees kelvin. That's a lot of thermodynamic headroom for extracting mechanical energy and having heat left over to take long showers. But you need to either concentrate that light to dangerous levels or have really good insulation in order to take any advantage of that headroom. Vacuum is a great insulator.
If I had the financial slack, I'd be playing around with such technology myself just for the fun of it. Using all my creativity to move symbols around get stale after a while.
But many people prefer to outsource their tinkering, and stick to socializing and symbol manipulating. So this particular Green Old Deal has limited appeal. Indeed, it is an impossible ideal for high density cities, and if all those city slickers move out into the countryside, the Red counties may cease to be Red. So in my next post I'll present a more urban friendly Green Old Deal. Stay tuned.
Awesome article; indeed, growing corn for ethanol is a crock. Unfortunately a lot of large corn growers depend on it. All so called renewable energy is a crock really but it makes people feel good even if it’s demonstrable that (for example) there is no reduction of emissions from power generation when the so called renewables are introduced into the grid. Oftentimes the emissions increase because the backup generators have to come online quickly rather than hum along at a steady pace. It’s like gunning your car from 0 to 60 or stop and go city driving rather than driving it at a steady speed between 55-65 mph. Because of the cost I think people are going to have to question the renewable energy scams.
All of this involves quite a bit of labor, but it is satisfying labor, for those who like to live as humans instead of as insects.
I think this is key. As a pampered suburbanite who spent his whole life prior to March 2020 behind a laptop, I've found a surprising amount of joy in digging around in the garden, taking care of the chickens, and learning how to fix things around the house. I know that a lot of others have had similar experiences. We may just deinsectify this world yet!