12 thoughts on “The Woke”

  1. I don’t have a “reputable source” for this, but the number 30% sticks in my mind as the fraction of wind and solar power that can be placed on the grid in the absence of significant advances in grid-scale energy storage. More recently I heard a talk by someone working on renewable energy with the Federal Government, someone enthusiastic about renewables, who laid out the challenge that it is not enough to store power or shift demand on a daily basis, it has to be done on a seasonal basis too.

    No one really knows how much renewable power you can hang on the grid before it all comes crashing down, and this is a topic of serious engineering research right now, but 30 percent seems to be an aspirational goal regarding Obama Era renewable electric power mandates. My local power company’s slogan was “30 by 2030”, that is until they got Woke and now it is “Net zero by 2050.”

    There is a kind of smug cheerleading, “Germany was 100 percent renewable powered in the 1st quarter of 2020”, and “the cost of wind is below that of coal.”

    Even if renewables were free, there is only so much you can put on the grid before it all comes down. Regions that have reported high degrees of reliance on renewables (cough, California, cough, Germany) are grid connected with places that supply a backstop (cough, Nevada, cough, Washington State, cough France, cough Poland).

    This whole Green New Deal approach is predicated that one can reach 100% renewables on the grid (they don’t like nukes, either) and demand management or some automagical advances in storage will make up the difference.

    Apparently Candidate Joe Biden has bought into this. President Donald Trumps magic sauce for getting the economy roaring along, that is, until this virus thing happened, was pulling out the stops for fossil energy development. He didn’t give general speeches about this, but there was a speech online about his talk before an industry group for “fracking” (recovering oil and gas from tight formations, which was once a Federally funded research topic in a simpler time when the Federal government could fund something like that and people would just nod their heads, “That’s nice!”)

    Well, I guess economic prosperity had its day. It’s no mystery how you get there, but it is more along the lines of the original New Deal, you know, the old-fashioned style of Socialism of massive hydroelectric, coal and nuclear power plants of the TVA rather than the feelz of the Green New Deal.

    1. Paul,

      You do have to admit that Trump’s efforts to revive the coal industry were and are an absolute failure. Natural Gas is another story but even on the part of nat gas it is more complex. Obama definitely took a laissez faire approach to nat gas compared to some other politicians but didn’t advertise it to his base. So Trump can’t say either he is/was totally responsible for a boom in natural gas production that started before his presidency.

      1. Obama did not take a laissez faire approach to gas. He prevented fracking on federal lands. If he could have found a way to stop in on private lands, he would have.

          1. Because the alternative was the burning of excess natural gas, and a disparity in the oil market which would have destroyed Venezuela even faster. And Obama loved what they were doing in Venezuela. It definitely wasn’t laissez faire.

          2. So your saying that if the US continued to ban crude oil exports thereby increasing the world market price then Venezuela a crude oil exporters would have collapsed faster. This is a nonsensical position. It is fine to dislike Obama and think he did a bad job but please make criticisms that actually make sense.

            **The hard left of the Democratic party i.e. AOC etc did NOT want crude exports instead they were outvoted by the middle and right of the Democratic party.

          3. Obama is the hard left of the party. Go watch his YouTube channel and compare the things he and his employees say and compare it with what the BLM and Antifa branches of the DNC say in the streets.

            The Republican House passed legislation allowing the sale of oil internationally. It was part of a package spending bill.

            “…some Democrats were upset it included the provision to lift the crude export ban and didn’t allow Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy… The $1.1 trillion omnibus budget got President Obama’s signature late afternoon Friday, even though he threatened to threatened to veto legislation lifting the ban.”

            The article says the Democrats were swayed by tax credits to solar and wind special interests. Democrats did everything they could to stop the flow of oil and prevent fracking. Are we supposed to forget all the pipeline “protests” and decades of lawfare?

            Increasing the global supply of oil doesn’t necessarily lead to price increases. It does allow for the price to fluctuate based on supply and demand, which means the price could/will go up and down.

  2. “In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. ”

    Yes, they subvert our system and take advantage of our freedoms to advocate and implement a system that will not allow those freedoms to exist when they are in power.

    “And because the ultimate goal of critical theory is social justice, anything which gets in the way needs to be dispensed with,”

    When is social justice achieved and what does that look like? And what then? How many decades or centuries must scapegoats be made to suffer for the Progressive Marxists to consider that justice has been applied?

    This is when the concept of Permanent Revolution comes into play. Social Justice can never be achieved. The struggle to achieve it is what allows the ideology to exist. You can see this in how they embrace various original sins that certain groups of people are born with. Also, being in a constant state of Revolution allows those in power to justify totalitarian governance and excuse any number of abuses directed at the scapegoats.

    1. I’ve never seen Social Justice explained in terms of an end goal. Just a continuing struggle to achieve the undefined and undefinable. Because of this I’ve rejected the concept out of hand. Faith is fine for a religion, horrid as a practice in governance.

      1. Faith is fine for a religion, horrid as a practice in government.

        Actually after some more though I should rephrase this in terms of the precepts of SJ:

        Sin is fine for a religion, horrid as a principle of government.

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