by Simon Black
There’s something pleasantly reassuring about mathematics: We shouldn’t have any doubts about the fact that 2 + 2 = 4.
Yet over the past few years, we’ve started seeing the most absurd assaults on basic science and mathematics. The most hard-core fanatics now assert, with a straight face, that it’s racist to say that 2 + 2 = 4.
This is a major part of the fanatical left’s playbook: make up the most ridiculous claims possible, then repeat them so many times that people eventually believe it.
This is how we have accumulated idiotic cultural axioms like “silence is violence”, and my personal favorite, “diversity is strength”. They make about as much sense as Big Brother’s claims from 1984; “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”
We see the same play with climate change and the false narratives about renewable energy.
Greta Thunberg, Klaus Schwab, John Kerry, and Larry Fink would have you believe that wind and solar are going to save the planet.
I’m all for a clean environment as much as anyone; I want my kids to enjoy a beautiful world just as I have been able to do.
But wind and solar are bad fictions that are being deliberately peddled by people who should know better. They tell us that renewables are the answer, and they repeat it so many times that many people believe it to be true.
But the renewable assertions are just as foolish and idiotic as the fanatical left’s other major talking points.
If Greta Thunberg had gone to school and actually learned math instead of loitering outside the Swedish legislature in her yellow rain jacket, then perhaps she’d have more sensible things to say about the climate.
(And so would the millions of people who inherited so-called “climate anxiety” from exposure to her Green Propaganda Machine.)
One of the key metrics to understand in climate and energy math is the concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI, sometimes written as EROI).
Consider that it takes energy to make energy. Mining coal, for example, requires human beings and heavy equipment, all of which consume an energy source (diesel fuel, food, etc.)
At the same time, though, the coal they mine has the ability to generate electricity – another form of energy.
So in the case of coal, EROEI measures how much gasoline, etc. it takes to mine coal relative to how much electricity that coal produces.
EROEI is expressed as a ratio. With coal, it’s around 30:1, meaning that for every 1 unit of energy required to mine coal, that same coal produces 30 units of energy.
Oil and gas also have strong EROEI levels, which makes them very efficient forms of energy.
But renewables like wind and solar? The EROEI levels are pitiful, at 5:1 or less. This means that wind and solar are expensive, inefficient forms of energy.
Regardless of the math, though, governments are pushing to power most of the world with renewable energy by 2050.
The State of California, for example, banned the sale of gasoline-powered passenger vehicles starting in 2035, which will naturally push everyone in the state to use electric vehicles.
They also passed a law that new residential housing must have solar panels installed.
So the politicians’ dream in California is that everyone will be driving electric vehicles and charging them from their solar-paneled homes.
But there’s a huge problem with their thinking; in addition to the EROEI math proving that this is a highly costly and inefficient solution, it’s also virtually impossible.
I wrote last week that the amount of natural resources – copper, lithium, cobalt, etc. – required to produce the electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, etc. it would take to fulfill this green fantasy… Would take hundreds if not thousands of years to mine, based on current production rates.
Again, this is simple math, just like 2 + 2 = 4.
But it’s the same fanatics who deny that 2 + 2 = 4 who come up with these idiotic climate ideas… like demanding costly, super-inefficient sources of energy which require so much lithium and cobalt to produce that it will take thousands of years to mine it all.
Worst of all, the obvious solution is staring them right in the face: nuclear power has one of the highest EROEIs known to man, and its carbon emissions are even lower than that of solar panels.
Sure, obviously I don’t want to live next to a nuclear power plant. I don’t want to live next to any power plant. I don’t want to live next to 1,000 industrial windmills either. That’s not really the point.
The point is that the math is irrefutable; the entire green fantasy collapses under fourth grade arithmetic.
The people making these decisions know the math. They know the real numbers. So it’s really hard to understand why they keep peddling such ridiculous fiction.
There is some good news to this story, however. Like I said, nuclear is the obvious solution. So obvious, in fact, that people as different as Elon Musk and Bill Gates are both on the same page about nuclear energy.
And seemingly every day there are more and more prominent voices talking about how nuclear is the superior choice.
There are plenty of countries (including China and India) that are racing to make their power grids nuclear, and I think it’s only a matter of time before the West catches up and surpasses them… but not without sticking it to the green fanatics first.
In the meantime, there are some seriously undervalued nuclear power investments out there…