Rodney and the Professor
With the mid-term elections less than a month away, Americans grumbling about inflation and more expensive everything, and the left-spinmeisters’ "All Is Well" bleats falling on deaf ears, Biden and his handlers naturally reacted with great outrage and high dudgeon at OPEC's announced plan to curtail production by 2 million barrels a day. The word "seething" was offered by Politico to describe the Democrats' state of agitation.
Because my brain works in mysterious ways, the movie Back to School, and in particular the scene where Rodney Dangerfield's Thorton Melon gives the business class professor, Dr. Barbay, a lesson in the hard truths of the real world, bubbled to the surface. The professor, in this case, is Biden and the rest of the greens who believe that the world operates as they decree, and Thornton Melon is everyone telling them "you're a naive fool if you think that the likes of Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, and the rest of the non-West will be swayed by example.
Who among us is shocked that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman showed Biden and Europe the back of his hand with this production cut? Who didn't imagine that OPEC would prefer to prop up oil prices than bail the Green World out of poor choices and fantasy-land decisions.
The greening of the West has been built on several assumptions. First, that governments could transition national power grids to zero-carbon by saying “make it so” - which itself assumes that wind and solar can be rapidly scaled to primary-source levels and that their intermittent nature isn't a huge and unanswered problem. Second, that the metals and other resources needed for this transition are available in massive quantities from coooperative sources. Third, and most crucially, that their "lead by example" would coax the rest of the planet into emulation. For, without the rest of the world greening as well, all the efforts and expense the West is putting forth will be for naught.
The assumptions, just as Professor Barbay's business model, ignore countless realities. The few that Rodney named include political bribes, kickbacks to the trades, and of course the vigorish that the criminal underworld will demand.
Therein lies the lesson: The world is full of, from the Greens' perspective, "bad actors" who prioritize their own interests over eco-utopia. In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder successfully turned the nation he was chosen to lead into a slave-state to Russian oil and gas (and became a very wealthy man in the process), and was succeeded by Angela Merkel, who continued to embrace that suicidal policy - because they scoffed at the notion that Putin would use it to his advantage. In America, Biden, on day one, reversed Trump-era policies that facilitated oil and gas exploration and recovery, ensuring that our brief interlude of net-energy-independence would become history in short order. Now, Biden is draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in a desperate attempt to snooker the electorate into leaving his party in power in Congress, with nary a thought given to the, well, "strategic" implications in a time of great energy insecurity and instability, with a madman threatening to use nuclear bombs to salvage his disastrous attack on Ukraine.
At the root of this unlearned lesson (and it has been 'taught' many times prior to this latest smack from MBS) is a pattern of behavior over on the Left. That pattern, witnessed in settings from academia to newsrooms to social media, centers on the certitude of one opinion and the concomitant dismissal of all others. It birthed the term "snowflake," a pejorative used for those who melt down when someone voices a different viewpoint or disagrees with theirs. It gave rise to ‘safe spaces,’ where young people can hide, suck their thumbs, and cuddle their woobies rather than be subject to words they'd rather not hear. It produced leaders who cannot fathom that the world doesn't work as they will it to, or that anyone with half a brain might find fault in their grand ideas.
It produced this energy mess in Europe and America. It produced the inflation ravaging the poor and working classes. It was at the core of the Afghanistan debacle. And so much more.
Just as Professor Barbay didn't come down off his high horse when presented with Melon's "how the world works" street wisdom, I don't expect Biden to alter course, other than via bandaids such as pumping from the SPR ahead of the election. Even if he loses one or both houses of Congress, he will continue to pursue his logic-defying green fantasy, via pen-and-phone (as his former boss taught him), and we will all be the worse for it.
If that "worse" was merely a tenth of our income and wealth (what Biden's inflation has sapped from us already), we might deem it a tithe to the Green gods, whether we believe in them or no. But, that worse is worse than that. The instability all this has created emboldens to bad actors like Putin and Xi Jinping. The ceding of economic power and energy independence to the unGreens tips geopolitical scales. Already, tens of thousands have died on both sides of the Ukraine war, and we can very well speculate that had Germany not put herself in thrall to Russian energy, Putin's war calculus might have offered a "don't invade" answer. In addition, those nations such as Sri Lanka and Ghana that were swayed into emulation and are now suffering political turmoil and massive unrest might have remained relatively tranquil.
There's a reason that William F. Buckley quipped that he'd rather be governed by a random group than by a passel of professors.
The professors, insulated by brick and ivy from the real world, often have little clue as to how it really works - or at least exhibit none. They shouldn't be dictating policy, and they shouldn't be inculcating a worldview in their students.
As for Joe B? Forty-eight years as a Senator has had an effect as deleterious to understanding reality as half a century in academia would. A high schooler could have figured out that putting one's self in a position of subordination and dependence to thugs and other immorals would be colossally dumb. Yet, here we are.
The notion that the West coercively greening itself at massive cost and disruption will entice the rest of the world to follow suit is as spectacularly stupid an idea as I can imagine.
I went deep into the pop culture dustbin for today's title's inspiration. Click HERE if you don't get it. I won't be offended - this is a tough one - but if you do recall, let me know in the comments.
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Peter.
Unfortunately, idiots keep electing these idiots.
I'll never understand people who believe in this rush to green energy. I put them into 3 categories. Either they are incredibly stupid, or so gullible as to be untrustworthy, or they willfully want to destroy the country. None of those are good. I'm all for getting to a clean but reliable energy, but it has to happen strategically and with a purpose, and not cause so much damage in the meantime. I equate it to being on a cliff and wanting to go down to the beach below. You can take the quick way and jump off the cliff, but you'll kill yourself in the process. And don't forget to pat yourself on the back on the way down.