Staring down a Northern Hemisphere black winter

Friday, 21 October 2022 — Burradoo, Australia

[8 min read]

Dear Reader,

I have a feeling those who live through this winter in the Northern Hemisphere will never forget it.

Many will tough out the winter without the bare necessities for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.

People are already facing rolling blackouts, energy rationing, and petrol shortages.

It’s going to get worse soon.

Households will have to chop firewood or even burn rubbish to keep warm.

I’m not talking about Ukraine where there’s a conflict raging — it applies to places that aren’t at war such as the US, the UK, and much of Europe.

All this would be avoidable if not for our complacency, bad planning, and certain people acting in bad faith.

The Green Revolution and its threat to bring down Western civilisation

The world has been in a downward trajectory for several decades. But nothing compares to where it’s headed since late 2019.

Mounting national and household debt have crippled the global economy. Global manufacturing is concentrated in Asia, with China taking the lion’s share.

The Wuhan virus outbreak in early 2020 brought the biggest economic shutdown we’ve ever seen, saddling the world with more debt, not to mention soaring inflation.

It was this ‘catastrophe’ that inspired the Founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, to announce that it was the perfect opportunity to implement ‘The Great Reset’.

This was meant to be the Fourth Industrial Revolution to transform society into a top-down technocracy (a system where unelected experts rule over society, aided by artificial intelligence).

Most of us are familiar with how this is playing out — indefinite national emergency to allow governments to act as virtual dictators, an atmosphere of fear and control, and mandates to keep you in line.

All this has resulted in a crippled global supply chain.

Within ‘The Great Reset’ was another movement that’s now about to unleash further chaos in the world.

Remember Greta Thunberg?

This diminutive teenager from Sweden, whose father is an actor and mother an operetta, was the poster child of the movement that inspired schoolchildren worldwide to skip school and stage protests about climate change.

History will remember her for that well-choreographed act (she comes from a family of professional actors) at the UN Climate Change Action Summit in September 2019. She berated world leaders and dignitaries about not doing enough to rid the world of fossil fuels.

Up until that point, organisations worldwide, government and private, had spent hundreds of billions of dollars to develop clean energy technology. But Greta’s petulant speech pushed the green revolution to move at breakneck speeds.

Many countries closed fossil fuel power plants, heavily subsidised clean energy infrastructure, and announced a gradual phasing out of petrol-powered vehicles. The ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) framework turned against the fossil fuel industry, creating barriers to obtain mining permits and accessing funds.

In times of peace and stability, such an abrupt change would pose a danger to economic and social well-being.

When you throw in a crippled global supply chain and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we have a humanitarian disaster.

The harsh reality is that there simply isn’t enough baseload power generation from clean and renewable energy sources. In 2019, almost 85% of the world’s energy usage came from fossil fuels:

Looking back in time, the transition out of fossil fuels has been slow, as you can see in the figure below:

Therefore, the plan to phase out fossil fuels at its current pace will result in devastating consequences.

In a conversation with my fellow editors yesterday morning, someone joked (darkly, I’ll add) about how the Green Revolution is China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ gone global.

Bad science and NIMBYism

What I’m going to discuss here will upset some of you. But I believe it needs to be said.

You don’t have to agree with me, but please indulge me.

Climate change is borne out of poorly conceived science. It’s highly political with a lot of money at stake.

If you think the science behind controlling the pandemic was questionable, it pales in significance next to ‘climate science’.

Let me start with this — climate science is NOT settled science.

No science is ever settled.

This very statement reveals how disingenuous the climate change proponents are.

Not to mention there’s a vast record of them making big calls about global warming, rising sea levels, the disappearance of snow, and the increase in the frequency and ferocity of storms over the last four decades.

OK, you may say that my cited article was dated in 2018 and it’s different now.

Remember the east coast bushfires in late 2019 and reporters talking up drought and climate change? Meteorologists talked about how the drought would last longer and rain wouldn’t come in mid-May 2020.

It came three months earlier in a massive deluge. Previously burnt-out areas were flooded.

I’m sure ‘climate scientists’ can use this to back up their stance.

Yes, only if they can call it before the fact.

The other issue about the Green Revolution movement is that the leading proponents don’t practise what they preach.

Take the likes of US ‘Climate Czar’ John Kerry and Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, for starters. These two ambassadors lecture people about how fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

But how do they travel to the conferences and summits?

Private jet.

Do you know that John Kerry has flown more than 48 times since January 2021? I wonder how many trees he has to plant to offset his carbon emissions!

And don’t forget how Former President Barack Obama, Former Vice President Al Gore, and all-round ‘expert of everything’ Bill Gates, own waterfront properties.

Rising sea-levels, anyone?

So, which should I believe — the ‘settled science’ or the proponents whose actions don’t measure up?

Action speaks louder than words.

There are many who are on board with ‘climate science’ without checking who’s behind it and what’s beneath the hood. They’re often well-educated individuals who live in comfortable surroundings and may even stand to gain in this transition. There’s usually NIMBYism (Not-in-My-BackYard) at play.

Their good intentions have sowed a massive storm.

How you can avoid the coming energy crunch

It’s clear that there’ll be at least a billion people who’ll face a freezing winter in the coming months. Their governments are unable to supply enough fuel and electricity due to their own doing and by circumstances beyond their control.

Even as the EU is backtracking on banning gas and keeping nuclear reactors open, it isn’t enough. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipe explosion and their dogged antipathy towards Russia will cost them dearly.

I expect fossil fuel prices to rise sharply in the coming months. And it could stay high for some time unless the Russia-Ukraine conflict eases and the West lifts their sanctions on Russian oil and gas.

Make no mistake, this global energy crisis isn’t going away soon.

You don’t want to be a victim of this crisis.

Early next week you’ll hear from my colleague, Greg Canavan, who has a strategy to help you capitalise on this. Stay tuned.

God bless,

Brian Chu,
Editor, The Daily Reckoning Australia

Dear Reader,

‘Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling
‘Calling for me to come home.’

Will Lamartine Thompson

Driving down from Maryland to Florida, we stopped for breakfast in a small South Carolina town. At 8:00am, it appeared almost deserted. But we found a café in a converted Main Street shop. Its door was so covered with yellow ribbons — recalling the local people who had served in various misbegotten wars — you could barely see through the glass.

‘Hello…welcome. C’mon in’, said a portly man at a table.

‘Hi’, said another bunch at a different table.

We looked around; they were talking to us.

The café was tiny. Maybe that made everyone in it look obese. Or maybe they really were obese. But they were friendly.

‘Where are y’all comin’ from’, they wanted to know.

While we were exchanging basic information, we noticed that two of the men in the restaurant were wearing pistols. ‘Open carry’, they call it. On the walls were several Bible inscriptions and hats for sale that advertised only ‘Jeremiah 20-11’. Music played old Christian classics.

‘Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling…’

They served ‘One Nation Coffee’.

‘I’m sorry’, said the waitress, ‘but we’re all out of grits’.

Were these people the ‘Christian Nationalists’ we’ve been hearing about…the people who threaten to take over the country? Were they the ‘White Supremacists’ President Biden says are a danger to our democracy?

We don’t know. They seemed nice enough to us. But every revolution needs its enemies — its loyalists, its bourgeois elements, its counterrevolutionaries. In the campaign to reset the US into an emission-free paradise, these Trump voters will have to do!

And here…we won’t exactly change the subject, but we will come at it from a different direction.

Just and true

Ver-nac-ular is an underappreciated word. It’s usually only used to describe how people talk. They use the local ‘vernacular’, rather than an ‘official’ or ‘academic’ way of speaking. People speak differently in South Carolina, for example, than they do in New Hampshire. They have different ideas, too.

There’s also ‘vernacular architecture’ to describe the way people build their houses. They develop local styles and techniques that are suitable to the area. The Swiss chalet, for example, is adapted to heavy snowfall. The adobe houses of the southwest moderate the extreme temperatures of day and night. And the Irish cottage, with its thatched roof, stays warm through long periods of humidity and cold, but it would be miserable in the ‘low country’ near Savannah.

‘Common law’ is a vernacular system of law. It doesn’t depend on anyone to figure out what the law is…or to write out a law code. It is merely what has evolved, with the help of courts, lawyers, and juries made up of ‘12 men, good and stout’. It’s what we accept as just and true.

The full body of ‘vernacular law’ develops over time as cases are decided…and then is used by future courts to guide them to just decisions. It is a kind of ‘law’ that comes from the bottom up, rather than handed down from the top.

No committee designs ‘the vernacular’. Nobody enforces it. Nobody improves it. It’s just what happens — when it is allowed to happen.

There’s not even a good word to describe the opposite of vernacular. ‘Standard’ could be used. Or ‘accepted’ or ‘designed’.

There being no sleek word for it, we’ll invent a clumsy one: anti-vernacular.

Crime and punishment

Imagine you are sitting down with someone in a bar and letting him tell you what he’s been doing. That’s the vernacular. Anti-vernacular would be reading his resume. He will use different words in person than on his resume. Shorter words. Words with whose meaning is not obscure.

‘I’m seeking employment that will allow me to utilise my educational attainments in order to reach my full potential’, it’ll say on the resume.

‘I want a job that I can do’, he will say in private.

The vernacular is just the result of people going about their business and making their individual decisions. They develop styles, customs, and rules. They invent. They experiment. They innovate.

And they say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

Nobody requires them to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. But they do.

People don’t murder each other either. And not only because it’s against the law. Most people agree, it’s not a good thing to do. The taboo against murder is so strong that murderers are often overcome by guilt. That was the theme of Dostoevsky’s famous book, Crime and Punishment. It’s not the police that the killer comes to fear; it is himself.

But there are always some people who want to tell other people what to do. And the vernacular gets in their way. They want to put things down in black and white…to make them clear…to codify the rules…and make people obey them. They want to design things for other people as if they were doing it for themselves. What they do for themselves must be good. So why not make everyone do it?

Some people even invented a new language — Esperanto; they thought it would make the world a better place.

Anti-vernacular meddling

Like almost all public policy programs to improve the natural, vernacular world, Esperanto seemed like a good idea. Instead of many different languages — each with its own rules, words, grammar, and so forth — there would be just one. This was a way to standardise, simplify, and control.

Based on Indo-European tongues and similar in style to Portuguese or Spanish, it was meant to be easy to learn and easy to use. It was more logical than a natural language. And it could easily be adapted by those in charge to boost their political and social agenda.

For example, many people in the 21st century object to an old ‘rule’ of many Indo-European languages: masculine takes precedence. What it means is that when you use a singular, gender-neutral word as a subject, such as ‘everyone’, you follow up by referring to ‘him’ in the third person masculine singular, as in:

‘Everyone knows that HE is a fool.’

In English, the world improvers have solved the ‘problem’ by changing the HE to a nonsensical, awkward THEY, which sounds ridiculous. Some people even insist that they be referred to in the third person as ‘they’, as in, ‘They went for a walk’.

Likewise, when Jefferson wrote that ‘all men are created equal’, he didn’t need to add ‘and women too’. Because ‘men’ includes ‘women’.

In natural, vernacular languages, people say what they want…and the language evolves along with the society it serves. But in an anti-vernacular language, such as Esperanto, a small group can determine the rules for everyone. After all, it’s meant to be controlled by the authorities, whoever they are.

Every revolutionary period brings forth its language improvers. During the French Revolution, the old titles — Monsieur, Mon Pere, Monseigneur, Monsieur Le Comte — were replaced by the great leveller, Citoyen. Likewise, in the Bolshevik Revolution, ‘comrade’ was prescribed for everyone, no matter his sex, rank, or social status.

But while you can get away with a lot of anti-vernacular meddling, with little lasting damage, there are some areas where imposing a new order becomes deadly.

Economics, for example. People depend on ‘the economy’ to live. As we will see on Monday, you change the rules…and people die.

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Daily Reckoning Australia