IEA: A truly global energy crisis?

Ask why, ask who, ask when will the madness end?

Fatih Birol, Head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) yesterday said “The world is in the midst of the first truly global energy crisis”. Nothing gets past the IEA.

In 1905, Albert Einstein formulated the relationship between energy and mass theorizing that virtually unlimited energy could be released by splitting the atom. The world soon developed not only nuclear weapons but also nuclear energy reactors and the world entered the nuclear age, free from anxiety there would every be an energy shortage even when fossil fuels were exhausted.

What Einstein didn’t see was the emergence of “social justice warriors” deluded by fears of nuclear Armageddon and a specious belief that CO2 causes global warming, who organized themselves into non-Government Organizations such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and a host of other do-gooders bent on taking humanity back to living in caves and eschewing meat products in favor of insects as sources of proteins. Nor did Enstein see the emergence of a group of powerful socialists who saw the value of pretending CO2 was harmful and nuclear energy dangerous as a mechanism to rally support for another run at worldwide socialism, the first serious attempt to do so since the failure of Marxism.

In the wake of the second world war, world powers formed the United Nations (a successor to the League of Nations) as a body where countries might meet and cooperate to solve global problems. The existence of such a body was too great a temptation for the socialists who quickly saw how it could become a vehicle to promote global fears as the rallying point for a new world order. A socialist order, of course.

As leftists in Western democracies became infected with the socialist dream they became ardent promoters of climate fear, openly touting climate change as a way to bring about equality and justice, not a way to prevent catastrophic warming. Canada’s Liberal Party signed on without hesitation, as did the Green Party under former Sierra Club head Elizabeth May, and in the United States the Democrats rife with avowed socialists like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry, Al Gore and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The number of speeches, press releases, op-eds, books and public forecasts of doom emitted by this group outweighed even CO2 emissions as a source of panic. Propaganda over climate change climaxed in efforts to suppress pipeline construction, “keep oil in the ground”, build windmills and solar farms, and “transition” into what the leftists called “green energy”. Political careers were built on this foundation for Al Gore, Justin Trudeau, and more recently Joe Biden in North America and a plethora of leaders in Europe embracing the same “feel good” nonsense.

The glee with which the left wing touted their progress in advancing the climate scam was unbounded. The late Christine Stewart, former Minister of Environment in the Canadian Liberal government, could not help herself from claiming the virtue of the movement but candid enough to recognize the rhetoric might be “phony”.

Former President of the U.N. Foundation Timothy Wirth echoed similar sentiments.

The co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was explicit in his 2010 description of climate policy as a mechansim to “redistribute the world’s wealth” free from the “illusion” that it was “environmental policy”.

The efforts to suppress fossil fuels and nuclear have been a resounding success. The efforts to “transition” to “clean energy” have been a resounding failure despite trillions of dollars squandered on this aphysical experiment. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

The world consumes 100 million barrels of oil a day and has done so for quite a while, and consumes an almost equal (in terms of BTU equivalence) amount of natural gas. Despite trillions of dollars spent on wind and solar, these “renewables” barely scratch the surface of the electricity provided by fossil fuels, there are few hydroelectric sites left on earth to develop, and other sources of energy are negligible.

The chart shows capacity, not actual output. Renewables run about 30% of rated capacity just because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and occasionally it rains, snows and hails.

World energy demand is not constant, but grows with both population and the degree of development of lesser developed countries. The suppression of oil & gas development has now reached a tipping point where even the leftist IEA sees a “global crisis” upon us. Europe is struggling to keep the lights on, blaming Ukraine and Putin for their energy problems despite the reality that Russian oil & gas are still finding routes to market and are not a source of the energy shortage.

Canada and the United States have the ability to ease the global crisis but lack the will. Trudeau and Biden are so dedicated to their climate nonsense they pretend the global shortage will be solved by the recession their central banks are setting out to create to curb inflation (the inflation itself fueled by the energy shortage) and that will get them relief through the next election cycle, but the long term issue cannot be solved by crushing world economies and inflicting financial hardship on the citizens they are supposed to represent. It can only be solved by investing in expanded output of oil & gas.

Now the IEA sees the crisis looming, in many ways the canary in the coal mine. This just gets worse until voters toss Democrats and Liberals out of office, new leaders promote energy development, and common sense makes it back into the halls of Washington and Ottawa. That may take a few years so buckle up kiddies, it will be an interesting ride for history majors to write about. Even the most creative writers will have a bit of trouble squaring the circle to make impoverishing millions worldwide be recorded in the history books as “justice and equality”.