"No man is an island, entire of itself" said English poet John Donne, and in today's networked, interdependent world, that has never been truer. We are heading rapidly into an unstable, unprecedented, and unpredictable future; it pays to make as much sense out of recent developments as we can.
The Ides of March are come but not yet gone, as Shakespeare's seer said to Julius Caesar. It is as significant a time for us as it was for Rome in 44 B.C., although for us it won't mark the assassination of a dictator. We don't have a dictator, only an empty suit, and those bringing disaster on America are well hidden behind the curtains. In truth, much of what is coming or already upon us is a perfect storm of unrelated trends, the product of the lethal complexity and interdependence of the modern world. This storm is being exploited by those who imagine they can control it and gain from it, but they will soon discover that they cannot. William Butler Yeats captured the spirit of the time accurately and prophetically in The Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Too many of us are either trying to read the tea leaves – for which there is not enough time in any day – or else focus narrowly on the fight that arouses our particular passions, whether that is partisan politics or "climate change" or the "pandemic" or the effrontery of a nation willing to launch a war to secure its national interests. The most active of the latter group – the "passionate intensity" crowd – are capable of shifting their passion from one cause to the next with blinding speed, in response to the spoon-fed headline of the day or their own internal calendar or their level of ADHD. Most of us lack the persistence to drill deep enough into any story to find its source, its motivation, and its implications. We can't put down our phones long enough for that.
We miss both the micro, the fine points of detail, discoverable and verifiable, that squirm about in the tidal flow that underlies the Big Story; and the macro, the connections and causal relationships across many seemingly unrelated stories. Or we fall prey to some conspiracy theory which offers the solace of explaining everything as one vast plot with one cast of villains, puppet masters pulling all the strings, which makes it all so much simpler. The first casualties – falling like Julius Caesar under the knives of the Senate – are objectivity and skepticism.
All that said, let's try to draw a few connections. First the salient facts:
- The Biden administration has crippled American energy production with its war on all fossil fuel industries and consumers. Never mind Ukraine, this started on the day Biden took office. Never mind his excuses and prevarications, the motive behind it has been made increasingly clear by recent candid statements of his supporters, handlers, and co-conspirators. The gloves are off.
As Kurt Schlichter said back in November 2021:
"The bad things happening now, like inflation and a busted supply chain and America looking weak, are not side effects or collateral damage. Rather, they are the results progressives sought. They want $7 gas, because that means you peasants will drive your wicked Chevy Tahoes less and thereby appease the angry weather goddess they worship. They want empty store shelves, because you Americans are bad people and you don't deserve prosperity or the ability to buy what you want when you want. And they want America ashamed and impotent. . ."
Even Time Magazine, which pretends to journalistic integrity and objectivity, asks (on February 9, 2022), "Can the war on oil be won?" And, "The energy giants are easy villains, and just for their past crime of suppressing climate science they deserve to be taken down." Time raises the tantalizing notion that "desperate countries disappearing under the rising sea might take matters into their own hands. Facing an existential threat, the fast-submerging nations might feel they have no option but to launch military strikes against oil pipelines, wells, platforms, and cargo ships." If you have shrugged off the climate activists as pseudo-science, cultish, deluded fools, stop it: they may be all that, but they're deadly serious, and you and our entire civilization are in their sights.
It's not just the media dreamers that talk this way. Here's a reprise (from https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/03/10/biden-officials-who-pledged-to-kill-american-fossil-fuels-n2604364) of the statements of present and former Biden (and Obama) staffers:
Saule Omarova, Biden's failed nominee to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is on the record saying that she believes oil, gas, and coal companies need "to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change." Despite trying to minimize her statement as "poor phrasing" during her confirmation hearings, Omarova withdrew herself from consideration due to her controversial record.
President Biden's Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated recently that skyrocketing fuel prices hitting Americans' wallets are part of Biden administration's desired "energy transition" and that it will "take some time to get off of oil and gas." She's also laughed out loud during interviews when asked what she and President Biden would do to lower gas prices for Americans.
Vice President Kamala Harris, when asked at a CNN event in 2019 whether she'd ban fracking, said "there's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking and starting with what we can do on day one around public lands." Then-candidate Harris was also quick to say "yes" when asked if she would ban offshore drilling. "And I've again worked on that," she said of her past work as California's AG and U.S. Senator with her classic but always ill-timed laugh.
Sarah Bloom Raskin, President Biden's nominee to a key regulatory post with the Federal Reserve, has also raised eyebrows with her statements that indicate how she would wield her power, if confirmed, against American energy. In an op-ed for The New York Times she claimed that "Climate change poses the next big threat" after COVID. In another piece she wrote that U.S. "regulators will need to leave their comfort zone and act early before the [climate change] problem worsens and becomes even more expensive to address." She's also stated that regulators need to work on "incentivizing a rapid, orderly and just transition away from high-emission assets," more or less meaning the Federal Reserve needs to pressure banks to make them limit credit given to oil and gas companies.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan is another Biden lackey who's threatened to use his power to usurp Congress if lawmakers don't do what he wants. Regan has said he's "willing to wield broad regulatory power to enact President Biden's climate agenda if Congress fails to pass meaningful climate legislation" including "a robust greenhouse gas rule for power plants, a stringent methane rule for oil and gas infrastructure, and sweeping emissions standards for new cars." Regan is on-record calling state environmental agencies "subordinate" to the EPA, Biden's EPA administrator has also moved forward with a "troubling" new rule to allow community reporting system to "detect large emissions events," something opponents say would allow climate alarmist activists to flood the system with false reports that would burden oil and gas producers.
Then of course there's Biden's Climate Czar, John Kerry, who flies around the world "pressuring banks and financial institutions to reduce their commitments to U.S. oil and gas companies and join the Net-Zero Banking Alliance," actions that continue to "hobble" American energy. Kerry has also said that there's "no need" for any new fossil fuel investments even though he "invested millions of dollars in oil stocks before being tapped by President Joe Biden as Climate Czar," as Katie reported here.
So, there's no room for doubt about what the agenda is. The same administration flounders about on the world stage, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, delaying an embargo of Russian oil until it can't take the political heat any more, begging Saudi Arabia and OPEC to increase production to cover the deficit, but standing firm on its multi-front war on American oil production and energy independence. They are foreign policy idiots, but the underlying agenda is on display in the above candid statements of its acolytes.
Where does all this leave us? So long as this administration and its policies remain in place, nothing will relieve the escalating prices and shrinking availability of oil and other fossil fuels. They are not interested in anything that would lead to that.
They are convinced that a single mom with an income of $30,000 is almost ready to catch a taxi to the dealership and sign a contract for an $80,000 electric car that she won't even be able to charge at home because her home electric service can't provide the amperage. All the further incentive she needs is to hike the gasoline prices a couple more dollars per gallon.
There's a saying, based on substantial and credible research, that hungry people don't fight, they just queue up at the government soup kitchens; but Americans who are cold in the dark and can't afford the fuel to drive to work or shop for groceries might turn out to be different. We're going to find out. There is also a law of unintended consequences.
- The second piece of today's puzzle is this. The world's agricultural production – up to 2019 anyway – was adequate to feed the 7-8 billion humans on the planet, despite Paul Ehrlich and all his fellow 20th Century doomsayers. Little issues of distribution remained to be worked out, but production was not the problem. There is a problem, though. Modern industrialized agriculture depends upon petroleum, directly in the diesel fuel that drives farm machinery and transportation of crops through the several steps of the food supply chain, and indirectly in providing the energy for processing and packaging.
- The third piece is the impact of COVID-19 on agriculture in the United States – from which we can extrapolate similar effects elsewhere around the world. There's a lot of detailed analysis and data available here but the short version is that the food supply chain was heavily disrupted by the lockdowns and shut-ins of 2020 and 2021, from which we would not have recovered until after the 2022 harvest at best… even if the Ukraine war and the Biden-Putin energy crisis had not intervened. The stage was set, and now the curtain is rising. More and more informed sources are beginning to warn about food shortages in the coming year. We would like to think that food supplies in the U.S. will not be seriously impacted, although we already see accelerating price increases and the beginning of shortages of packaged and processed foods; and the out-of-season cornucopia of fresh foods, mostly supplied out of Mexico, may be affected. The bigger impact is likely to be global, which leads us to the fourth piece (not turning, no, not fourth turning…)
- Here's the kicker. As David Archibald pointed out in 2014 in his fascinating book, Twilight of Abundance, it's not even about production so much as distribution and international political norms so long-established that they are below most everybody's radar. The Muslim "crescent" of nations from Morocco to Pakistan – what Samuel Huntington charitably characterized as a "civilization" on the border of which most of the world's ongoing conflicts occur – there is only one nation that grows enough food to feed its own people: Israel. The rest, if they are oil-rich, buy their staple grains from the surplus-producing nations, foremost of whom back in 2016 were Russia, the EU collectively, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ukraine. As a footnote, consider that about 50% of the world's fertilizer production is from Russia and Ukraine.
Now let's think about what 2022 has in store. The Western world (which includes the EU, Canada, the U.S., and Australia) is in the grips of rapidly steepening inflation, so that prices of the fundamental inputs to industrialized agriculture (fuel and fertilizer) were already climbing before the war started; now, Ukraine's fertilizer production is entirely off line, and we cannot yet predict what their spring planting of cash crops is going to look like in the midst of a war. Russia's economy is reeling, thanks to the retaliatory economic attacks it is suffering from America and the EU, and prospects for exports of fertilizer or any other goods this year are not rosy.