We need a new energy policy
A New Energy Policy
By 2019 the US was energy independent; meaning that we produced enough energy inside the country so that we did not depend on energy imports. The new administration in 2021 radically changed that policy due to a focused effort on abandoning fossil fuels in favor of renewables. Unfortunately, renewables (wind and solar) are, in many parts of the country, unreliable and intermittent energy sources. The U.S. economy is heavily dependent on fossil fuels because these energy sources generate 24-hour per day, continuous baseline power. Unfortunately, they are also sources of pollution and will eventually exhaust themselves.
This article isn’t about politics or the sometimes hysterical debate about climate change and pollution. It’s about how much time we have left before the United States undertakes a rational energy policy.
By rational energy policy I don’t mean relying on fossil fuels exclusively, or renewables exclusively. This country (and the world) needs to find reliable sources of clean, inexhaustible energy. For that we need to undertake an energy research program utilizing frontier physics.
99% of the research the Department of Energy sponsors is in the fossil fuel area. This must change. What must also change is the almost fanatical embrace of wind and solar and the abandonment of fossil fuels to the detriment of the economy, until continuous, clean energy sources are discovered. That’s why we need a total U.S. government and private industry research partnership to investigate new energy sources.
There are two areas we can research: one is the serious investigation of energy from the quantum particle flux, or the “zero-point” energy field that exists within the fabric of space. These investigations were being undertaken by the great inventor, Nikola Tesla, over a century ago, with some success. Now it is time for a serious, all-out research effort in this area.
The other area to investigate is magnetism. Permanent magnets hold energy; they can hold their charges for hundreds of years. We all understand the push-pull effect of a permanent magnet. Hold two magnets with their similar poles facing each other and you can feel the magnets pushing each other apart. Hold the magnets with opposite poles facing each other and the magnets snap together. A magnetic field induces an electric current. By arranging permanent magnets in an array, it should be possible for the push-pull magnetic effect to turn a rotor and generate electricity. This effect would be permanent because the energy of a magnet is permanent. Some genius just needs to determine how this is done.
The fossil-fuel crowd pooh-poohs and ridicules concepts like these (“perpetual motion machines,” “pie-in-the-sky lunacy,” “that technology is 50 years down the road”). The energy industry has been saying the latter for over 50 years! In the 21st century it is time to throw away such superannuated ideas. Mostly fossil fuels are ascendant because the fossil fuel industry is a $5T industry. That’s a lot of money.
The Failure of the Western Economic System
My guess is that the new research will not come from the West. Our economies have been gutted by insane industrial policies that have shipped our manufacturing base overseas, and an equally insane fiscal and monetary policy that prints fiat money in the trillions to solve economic problems. This is like running up your credit card debt past the maximum. Eventually the whole house of cards will collapse.
I don’t care what you think of Vladimir Putin, he has got his head on straight when it comes to economic policy. In a speech given to the 25th St. Petersburg Economic Forum, he said,
Caught in the inflationary storm, developing nations have to ask themselves this question: Why bother exchanging goods for dollars and euros when they are losing value right before our eyes? Indeed the economy of imaginary wealth is being inevitably replaced by the economy of real valuables and hard assets.[emphasis mine] According to the IMF, today’s global foreign currency reserves contain 7.1 trillion dollars and 2.5 trillion euros. And this money is depreciating at an annual rate of 8%. Moreover, it can be stolen or confiscated at the whim of the US if it disapproves of something in a country’s policy. I think this has become a real threat for many countries that keep their gold and foreign exchange reserves in these currencies.”
https://twitter.com/MacroAlf/status/1566111781117775872
Uh, yeah. Asia is organizing. The BRICS countries and their allies are organizing a different economic system, and a different reserve currency, independent of the West and our Central Bank system of fiat money by decree.
Let’s summarize what the Putin Monster said here: ‘The US and Europe are inflating their fiat money currencies so they are losing their value. We should abandon these worthless currencies and devise a new system based on currencies that represent real and tangible assets that people can use in their lives.’
Every word of this is true. Let’s take a look at what the US has done since the beginning of 2021: (a) Passed the “America Recovery Act” with 1.9 trillion printed dollars the government doesn’t have; (b) passed the “Infrastructure Act’” with 1.2 trillion freshly printed dollars the US doesn’t have; (c) Passed the $1.5 trillion “Supplemental Spending” bill with 1.5 trillion newly minted dollars the US doesn’t have. This was to make up for the proposed 5.8 trillion dollar spending bill for fiscal year 2022, which has over a trillion dollar deficit built into it! (The US will collect somewhere over 4 trillion in taxes this year).
Add that all up and you have almost 5 trillion dollars of unfunded spending over the next several years. Not all of this money will be spent in fiscal year 2022, but what will happen next year? More gigantic deficits. More continuing resolutions. No real budget, but continued spending in a desperate effort to save the carcass of the once-powerful American economy. Does anyone seriously think the government will stop overspending? Not a chance.
Resource Depletion
So – it looks like the new research that can make the planet energy independent using clean and unremitting energy sources might have to come from outside the US and Europe. Our hyper-financed economies are completely divorced from the reality of the true economy, as are our crazy, unsustainable energy policies based on polluting fossil fuels and intermittent wind and solar, which presently generate 12% of total U.S. energy. BTW, California has banned internal combustion engines by 2035. Governor Newsom also announced that owners of electric vehicles shouldn’t power up their batteries at home during the current heat wave! This is an example of the stupidity of current energy policies in the US. It’s also why we need to get some sense and initiate a massive research program that can make us independent of fossil fuels and intermittent wind and solar. We can’t afford to wait for other nations like China to do this, for governments like these are authoritarian and will impose concomitant political solutions that repress individual liberty and freedom. (If you think freedom and liberty are unfair, try living in an authoritarian state.)
The argument against a research program using a frontier physics approach is that the US is blessed with huge natural gas deposits – in Pennsylvania, in Alaska, and in Texas. We have enough natural gas to last us almost a century. As of February 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, natural gas was the United States' largest source of energy production, representing over 38 percent of all energy produced in the country, a 5% increase from 2016.
Hard-headed realists will ask why we need to spend billions on new research when we could develop our natural gas reserves and become completely energy independent again?
The answer is that a little investment now will generate a huge gain for the future. The US is not the only country in the world: we need to think about the entire human race. Moreover, the world’s consumption of fossil fuels is growing every year. Over the past 50 years, the world’s energy consumption has almost tripled, with oil and gas making up over half of all the energy consumed.
The US spent trillions of dollars fighting pointless, endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How about we spend a little on an energy program that could make the entire human race energy independent, and keep our planet clean in the process? What’s the old saying? “Don’t shit where you eat.” Yeah. Don’t pollute this beautiful planet that sustains so much life upon it.
Such an energy program is do-able. We just have not made any investment in it, and have, in fact, suppressed frontier physics applications. The U.S. Patent Office is currently suppressing over 5,000 patents, many of them relating to energy.
Collectivization
There is currently a massive trend toward collectivization – authoritarian governments that promote a completely centralized approach to governance, such as the government in China. Global agencies such as the UN, the WHO, and the WEF are behind the effort to create hive-mind societies ruled from above. The current trend toward Transhumanism – augmenting human bodies – is also reflected in architecture. Huge cities like The Line are being proposed all over the world. These are cities separate from the natural environment, where collectivists can conduct social experiments and promote a Transhumanist way of life. Carlos Felipe Pardo, a senior adviser to the New Urban Mobility Alliance, says about The Line: “This solution is a little bit like wanting to live on Mars because things on Earth are very messy.” Check out the link, it’s a great NPR article.
There are many other proposed Transhumnist/Collectivist cities being proposed. Among them is Telosa, a planned city of 5 million in the southwest desert of the US, and the brainchild of billionaire Marc Lore. Telosa is based on the ideas of Henry George, a 19th century political economist and journalist, who believed that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George’s ideas were enormously popular in the US in the 19th century. He critiqued private land ownership as a source of inequality. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “Lore is particularly attracted to the strain of Georgism that involves creating a trust that holds the land in a community and uses the income it generates to fund social services.”
Whether or not these planned cities are Utopian or Dystopian, they are a dream to collectivists and Transhumanists like Yuval Hariri, who famously said, in a TED Talk,
Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population, because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering, Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these [Transhumanist] technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.”
youtube.com/watch?v=w7DohVZS5Yo
Or maybe we can stuff them into planned cities like The Line and Telosa, where our betters can keep a watch over us.
Collectivization is intimately connected to resource depletion. One of the main arguments for planned cities like The Line is that they will conserve resources. Unfortunately, planned economies (command economies) are always found in authoritarian communist and fascist states. In a fascist state, the government rules in cooperation with wealthy oligarchs (similar to the corporate fascist state currently being developed in the US with cooperation from Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Pharma). Communist states engage in state-owned capitalism, as in China, where the central government subsumes the entire economy and owns every scrap of land, school, and factory. In both of these authoritarian collectivist states, the military enforces the diktats of the ruling government and the people have no freedom or liberty to make independent social or economic decisions. Erich Fromm tells us that a certain element of the population will always turn over their personal power to a dictator, but these societies always fail because individual initiative is stifled in the interests of the State/ruling class. Such societies are dead-on-arrival, and cannot continue long.
Conclusion
Collectivization is a natural outgrowth of resource depletion, and resource depletion/scarcity comes about through an over reliance on fossil fuels and intermittent (but at least renewable) energy sources like wind and solar.
It is time to release our dependence on both of these energy resources. Let’s utilize the creativity of the great US people and launch a program that will develop clean energy from unlimited energy sources. Ultimately a zero-point solution is the ideal, but using the power of permanent magnets to build portable magnetic generators for the home, or larger ones for an entire neighborhood or factory, are also attractive.
We can do it. Such a government-sponsored research program in cooperation with private industry has never been tried before. In fact, new inventions have been suppressed in favor of technologies that aren’t up to the task.
Instead of sending $80 billion to Ukraine to fight yet another regional war, let’s invest in the future of every human being on the planet. The US is still a world leader. Our scientific base has been politicized and compromised, but it is still intact.
The US can once again be an inspirational leader to the rest of the world. These new, frontier technologies are coming. They are inevitable if we want to build a prosperous, flourishing human civilization in cooperation with our beautiful planet.