The Fourth Political Dimension

Go Green or go extinct

Let's play a little thought experiment. Suppose it's election day and your choice is between:

• A menagerie of nutjobs pushing Equity, Modern Monetary Theory, open borders, and drag queen story hours.

• Or, a party which openly ignores a looming disaster which will cause over a trillion dollars of direct damage here in the US, and will create 100 million Moslem refugees for the world to absorb.

Which do you choose?

You may find this to be a highly artificial scenario. But for the majority of highly educated Americans, the choice above is very real.

• And you are not going to change their minds with memes or mass political rallies.

• You are not going to change their minds by calling them midwits or NPCs.

• You are not going to change their minds by pointing out criminal actions on the part of Democrat politicians.

• You are are not going to change their minds by pointing out the hypocrisy of jet-setting global warming activists.

• You are not going to change their minds by by pointing to old Time magazine covers with ice age predictions.

• You are not going to change their minds with vapid wordplay. ("The climate is always changing!")

• And you are not going to change their minds pointing out failed short term predictions.

The highly educated voters are well aware of the hypocrisy and even criminality on the part of those politicians who have gotten in front of the global warming parade. And they are quite aware that climate activists are guilty of crying Wolf. But the educated voters remember how "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" ends.

The wolf eventually arrived.

The choice before us is thus:

1. Write off California, academia, the military officer corps, and the majority of the younger generations.

2. Come up with global warming strategy compatible with traditional American values.

I suggest Option 2. Not only is Option 2 necessary to keep this country in one piece, but it is stupidly easy. Option 2 is stupidly easy because the Democrat plans to prevent global warming are stupidly stupid. The Democrat plans will give us long lines, high costs, lost liberties, resource wars, and millions of people freezing in the cold. And they might even give us a few famines just for fun.

Not only that, the Democrat plans to fight global warming are terrible for the environment! Cutting down jungles to grow biofuels is terrible for biodiversity. Covering good farmland with solar panels here in the US isn't so great either. Genetically engineering superbugs to digest cellulose to make biofuels is incredibly reckless.¹ Mining rare minerals to make electric car batteries is far dirtier than mining Canadian tar sands.

And some of the environmentalists know this. There's even a movie. Watch Planet of the Humans. Michael Moore is the executive producer. Even some old school hard core Democrats are seeing the crazy.

Fun fact: It's easy to be Greener than Al Gore while being a full-on Reactionary. I'll go into full detail when I get to Rule 11. For now, let's take a peek at politics in the fourth dimension, the Green Dimension.

Politics in the Green Dimension

Since I don't have any 4-D graph paper handy, I'm going to crudely squunch three dimensions back into the traditional Left-Right axis, the exact meaning of which is a bit ambiguous. Pick your definitions of conservative vs. leftist, but separate out the environmental issue and you get:

Yes, it is possible to be Green and Right, or Brown and Left. Indeed, a century ago this was the norm. Think Teddy Roosevelt and the old sport hunter funded conservation organizations vs. the old Soviet Union. And as the diagram indicates, there used to be prominent Christian conservatives who believed that appreciating nature and treating animals kindly were Christian duties.²

Over time, the Left discovered the joys of environmental regulation, while the Religious Right decided that the world was going to end soon, so short term profits became more important than preserving the planet for future generations.³

Since I'm into winding clocks backwards, I suggest it's time for the Right to take back the mantle of conservationists. Tradition, inheritance, and private property all work to preserve the good of the past -- including Nature. Leaving the Left in charge of preserving the planet is unnatural. Just look at the news from the past few years to see the inherent Brownness of the extreme Left floating to the surface.

You cannot have bike friendly latte towns and a catch-and-release approach to robbers. Ditto for bums sleeping in libraries and pooping on sidewalks. A pedestrian-friendly city requires public order. Otherwise, those who can afford it will commute to work from their gated communities in their 4000 pound steel boxes.

And the mindsets of do-everything-possible and command-and-control lead to ridiculous energy solutions. Today’s watermelons advocate such nonsense as:

• Let's boost home furnace efficiency from 80% to 90%, so efficient that the smoke settles to the ground for people to breathe.

• Let's mandate fuel efficiency for cars so high that people with families have to buy a truck to have room for their kids. CAFE regulations created the SUV craze.

• Let's mandate ridiculously complicated measures, such as extra gears and hybrid tech so that cars become expensive and incredibly expensive to repair.

• Let's extend Daylight Savings Time so that kids get on school buses in the dark in an attempt to reduce the amount of time people burn light bulbs. (And LED bulbs at that!)

• Let's create an ultra fragile national electrical grid in order to load balance wind and solar energy with consumer demand.

• Let's mandate electric vehicles for long distance travel. Who cares that you have to stop for an hour to charge the darned things every 200 miles -- assuming that the charging stations work.

And don't get me started on biofuels. Yes, there are some interesting use cases; I'll cover them in Rule 11. But on the whole, the human population has grown way too high to rely on biofuels without incredible environmental destruction. I'd rather burn Canadian tar sands than palm oil. I like orangutans, and palm oil is for popcorn, not diesel engines.

A Simple Green Old Deal

Let's travel back in time to the days of narrow ties and serious anti-communism. Let's ask the question, "What would Walt Disney do?" (The man, not his now corrupted company.)

Step 1: Build more nuclear power plants.

We have tons us potentially usable nuclear fuel sitting in large swimming pools because Jimmy Carter put an end to fuel reprocessing. We have several breeder reactor technologies available which were developed over a half century ago.

Yes, there are downsides to fission power. Bad guys can make bad bombs. And a society which devolves into Idiocracy in the name of Equity is not competent to run nuclear power plants. But this gives us a delightful excuse to crack down on the Idiocracy.

Message to real environmentalists: you get to pick two out of three:

1. Wokeness/Equity

2. Our current high population

3. Carbon neutrality

Put the choice before real environmentalists. Give the intellectual elite a moral excuse to be a true aristocratic elite instead of a bunch of grovelling virtue signalers.

Step 1 makes electricity green as pond scum. Nuclear power needs very little in the way of fossil fuels, and the ground footprint of a nuclear power plant is tiny compared to solar.

As for the safety issue, read Petr Beckmann's The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear. Or just read B.F. Randall's Mining Atoms substack.

But what about transportation? Don't we need electric cars to go carbon neutral?

Nope. For transportation, we move onto

Step 2: Use electricity to make methanol.

George W. Bush's Hydrogen Economy was silly. While it is easy to turn electricity into hydrogen, and hydrogen into useful energy, it is not easy to store hydrogen -- unless you combine it with another element, such as carbon. If memory serves, there is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of liquefied hydrogen. And gasoline can be stored at room temperature.

Turning hydrogen into gasoline is still challenging. But the ability to combine hydrogen gas with carbon dioxide to make methanol has been around for a while. See Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, by Olah, Goeppert, and Prakash. The book is expensive, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than your part of the Green New Deal.

The process for converting hydrogen into methanol is not as efficient as charging a battery. Last time I Googled around on the subject the efficiency was about 50%. And if you are going to convert the methanol into mechanical energy using an internal combustion engine, figure on about 40% efficiency, for an overall turnaround of a mere 20%. Ouch!

But look at what you get in return:

• Methanol can be stored in tanks for months or even longer.

• Methanol can be shipped via ship, rail, truck, or pipeline. Stable countries with extra nuclear energy can sell fuel to places where you don't want to place a nuclear power plant.

• That waste heat from burning methanol can be used for space or water heating. For cold weather driving, the efficiency advantage of batteries drops dramatically.

• You can fuel a car with methanol just about as fast as with gasoline.

• Storing methanol at home to run your lawn equipment is far safer than for gasoline. Methanol is less explosive.

• Methanol biodegrades when spilled. A pipeline leak is not a terrible disaster.

• The technology to use methanol is old. Indy cars were burning methanol back in the 1970s.

• You don't need exotic materials to run a methanol engine. You just need fuel lines that don't dissolve in alcohol. Cars used to use methanol for antifreeze, and they still use methanol for keeping the windshield washers from freezing.

Greener than Gore without Breaking out a Sweater

The two-step program above is not necessarily our only option. I'll explore others when I get to Rule 11. But that two plank program is enough to make you Greener than Al Gore without any lifestyle downgrades whatsoever.

And unlike the talking points used by Republicans today questioning global warming, my talking points on the ridiculous nature of the Democrat solutions are provable. (If you still believe today's Republican talking points, say so in the comments. If I get enough response, I'll provide a follow on article to hammer in my case.)

Of course, greenhouse gas emissions are not the only environmental issue. Indeed, there are many that are more immediately pressing, such as the mass poisoning of our younger generations. (See Rule 4 if you haven't already.) And I'll have a lot more to say about the potential overlap between conservation and a reactionary agenda when I get to Rule 11: Exploit the Environmentalists. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, vent your spleens in the comments section. I relish controversy.

Update: based on the comments, I am working on a follow on of extraordinary magnitude for the benefit of those wedded to today’s Republican talking points.

1. Read Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem. It’s a hoot and a half.

2. Besides C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, I’d recommend the writings of Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Jerry Pournelle, and Larry Niven as examples of Eco Conservative thought.

3. In the diagram I’m referring to James Watt, interior secretary under Reagan, not the James Watt who invented a much improved steam engine.