Energy Needs in a Historic Time

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Submitted by Steven Kaszab
France’s Minister of State and international partnerships Chrysoula Xacharoupoulou (l) Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley (r)

Due to circumstances beyond their control many nations are reversing or re-imagining their energy policies. France has pasted a bill on the acceleration of procedures relating to their new nuclear facility, dismissing their entire public sessions in the Senate and simply removing their past objective of reducing to 50% the share of nuclear power in electricity production against the more than 75% used today. The reduction target to 50% was Frances flagship measure for the energy transition law of 2015, a building block of Frances 5 year energy plan. The plan to reach 50% by 2025 had already been postponed to 2035 and beyond. President Macron wishes to keep the framework of the plan while dealing with his nations energy needs.

Accusing Macron of lacking political vision, the opposition viewed his decision as moving backwards at a time when needed political courage and futuristic decision making was required. President Macron needed to flush his nations energy generation which France was to share with many other EU Nations lacking the needed power to heat their homes. The Russo-Ukrainian War’s influence upon the EU is sound and significant. Russia supplies a majority of the EU’s energy requirements, and has weaponized their ability to supply energy to energy poor nations. Germany, Brussels, Scandinavia, France and the Southern portion of the EU Alliance depend on Russian energy. 

Energy is being portioned to individual customers, allowing governmental approve portions and no more. The cost of fuel and carbon based energy has sky rockets through out the EU. European Politicians are attempting to decarbonise energy, but economic, political and military needs are manipulating these attempts, hopefully for a limited time. European Nations that can provide coal for energy have returned to the harvesting of this dirty material. Beggars must flow with the tides of history.

History tells us that the use of all available energy options are on the table, driving backward Europe’s de-carbonation policy’s at ;least 3-5 years. Coal from Canada, America and the UK are flowing into Europe along with natural gas supplies.  While this is going on, nuclear power plants that were to be rehabilitated or closed are not only open, but running at full power generation. 

Weather announcements proclaim a sever winter will hit Europe, the Ukraine and Russia. What ever energy source is available, its cost and availability will be scarce and very high indeed. The Middle Eastern energy glut will also come to Europe’s assistance with exceedingly high prices. The EU’s political criticisms of the Saudi’s-Kuwait-Iranian abuses domestically,  political assassinations and human rights abuses of the past have influenced Middle Eastern responses in kind. Never piss off a supplier of future needed products right? America has no real influence on the obviously preferred supplier of energy to the EU, the Middle Kingdoms. 

The EU in Brussels needs to consolidate their overall needs, factor in future climatic events during this winter, and move towards a united energy front. All sources of energy in Europe will be allowed this winter. Winter conditions in the southern regions of Europe will be bleak, with usual temperatures dropping significantly. A good time to visit relatives in North America or the Caribbean Islands.

An obvious political move within the EU is coming. Far to many problems have arisen, leaving little time to legislatively carry out businesses. Authoritarianism within the EU Alliance has already appeared, and this influence will move to the very heart of the alliance in Brussels. Whether right – left wing, the EU will face a time where democratic ideals will face off against more assertive authoritarian movements and beliefs. Depending upon how difficult the EU’s suffering will be this winter, the authoritarian wing of the EU’s Legislator may make know its significant presence.  Wish for a end to the wasteful Russo-Ukrainian conflict. It is the root block that can bring fascism back into vogue.

25 thoughts on “Energy Needs in a Historic Time”


  1. I’ve often wondered about how governments, especially after a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake, will arrange for the safe disposal of all the damaged or non functioning solar panels that could be left in its wake. In Barbados I suspect that the usual approach of “pitch it in the gully and lef it” will play a significant role in the aftermath.

    ‘Very dirty secret’ behind government’s clean energy revolution
    https://youtu.be/bW7JnheL4GE

    Reply ↓

    • We continue to struggle in 2022 with converting waste to energy. We operate with a mindset that waste is waste and not a precious raw material.


  2. The world is flat is another Conspiracy Theory that will blow your GreenMonkey mind.
    The 2023 Spiritual Almanac has got the white race shitting themselves.

    Reply ↓

  3. I remember at my Grandfather’s house all garbage was placed in an empty 50 gallon drum and burnt below the kitchen garden under the breadfruit tree by the pig pen.

    That effectively removed most of the garbage and reduced the need for disposal.

    The principal issue surrounding garbage is its disposal.

    Fire works to address this problem but it also has a real benefit, it unlocks the stored energy as heat.

    We should be using incineration not only to reduce the problem of disposal but also to produce energy.

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  4. Forecast 2023 — Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand

    By James Howard Kunstler

    “More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger economy in the future. All economic expansion is based on energy. Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” — Chris Martenson

    SNIP

    There is no way we can run our society as currently outfitted on any combination of alt.energies. All the Greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course of things, foreclosing any chance of an orderly retreat to a plausibly downscaled arrangement for daily life. We are exiting the current system anyway, like it or not — the longstanding thesis of The Long Emergency.

    This gets to the heart of the conundrum we face. Ill-intentioned as the WEF and its allies may be, the world is heading toward a Great Re-set. The catch is, it won’t be the WEF’s version of it, their schematic techno-nirvana with a tiny comfortable elite lording over the bug-eating hoi-polloi. They somehow miss the glaring point that the energy required to run their precious transhuman tech won’t be there. By the way, the WEF’s core idea of central control by a coordinated world government is at odds with the core reality of the times ahead, which is that life is about to get much more local and downscaled — the exact opposite of centralized. Everything organized at the giant scale is veering into failure: empires, global corporations, hypertrophic cities, giant universities, giant farms, you name it. Their business models are broken. The activities these things represent have to get smaller, finer, and more regional. Depending on what we’re able to salvage and re-purpose from the fabricated leftovers of Modernity, we’ll be lucky to land back in life lived at the level of the early 1800s. Or else, if we really mess up, we’ll plunge haplessly into a dark age in a resource-stripped world.

    The “Green New Deal,” based on a combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice, includes the deliberate undermining of what’s left of America’s oil industry by cancelling pipelines, drilling licenses on public lands, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, and other efforts to sabotage what’s left. America still has a lot of oil in the ground, yet much of it is hard to get at and uneconomical to produce at the scale required. It’s a money-loser, and losing money consistently doesn’t pencil out for any real business.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2023-get-out-of-the-way-if-you-cant-lend-a-hand/

    J.H. Kunstler is a blogger and an author of several books examining the relationship between energy availability, pricing and the sustainability of economies base on perpetual economic growth within a finite planet:

    Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation Paperback
    by James Howard Kunstler (Author)

    James Howard Kunstler’s critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler’s shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions. Kunstler has since been profiled in the New Yorker and invited to speak at TED. In Too Much Magic, Kunstler evaluates what has changed in the last seven years and shows us that, in a post-financial-crisis world, his ideas are more relevant than ever.

    “Too Much Magic” is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems. Their visions remind him of the flying cars and robot maids that were the dominant images of the future in the 1950s. Kunstler’s image of the future is much more sober. With vision, clarity of thought, and a pragmatic worldview, Kunstler argues that the time for magical thinking and hoping for miracles is over, and the time to begin preparing for the long emergency has begun.

    amazon(DOT)com/Too-Much-Magic-Thinking-Technology/dp/0802121446/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=james+howard+kunstler&sr=8-5

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  5. “Energy stocks/sector continues to lead the way in investment portfolios. What does it say to us?”

    That you and Northern and Southern Observer are obsessed about money?

    Like greedy Americans who go crazy when they think they are running out of their last dollar or may lose their standing as #1 Economy

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  6. Message to the White Man on Planet Earth:
    There is enough for everyone’s need
    But there is never enough for everyone’s greed

    (and Whitey’s on the moon)

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  9. David
    on February 3, 2023 at 9:26 AM said:
    1 Vote

    Energy stocks/sector continues to lead the way in investment portfolios. What does it say to us?

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    The expectation is the US Government will pump real money into the alternative energy sources and people are queueing up to cash in whether the alternatives fail or not.

    Look at what is happening here with solar “farms”!!

    All the yardfowls looking to cash in on the borrowed money from over and away with no regard for the fact that the sun don’t shine at night.

    Reply ↓

    • How do you explain the high penetration of renewable energy in temperate Scandinavian countries for example? There is wind power and battery storage although problematic at this stage to be considered for backup storage and redundancy. Alternatives must be looked at to mitigate the fallout from extracting a finite resource.


  10. David
    on February 3, 2023 at 11:36 PM said:
    Rate This

    How do you explain the high penetration of renewable energy in temperate Scandinavian countries for example? There is wind power and battery storage although problematic at this stage to be considered for backup storage and redundancy. Alternatives must be looked at to mitigate the fallout from extracting a finite resource.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    “Norway has the highest renewable capacity among the three countries, and almost all its energy comes from renewable sources. Their wind power production is significantly lower than in Sweden and Denmark. Instead, hydropower is the main renewable energy source in Norway.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Sweden#/media/File:Sweden_energy_consumption.svg

    How finite is finite?

    “Our analysis suggests there are ample physical oil and liquid fuel resources for the foreseeable future. However, the rate at which new supplies can be developed and the break-even prices for those new supplies are changing.”

    — International Energy Agency[59]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

    “In a 1956 scientific paper Marion King Hubbert introduced the world to the theory of peak oil where he predicted that US peak oil production would occur between 1965 and 1971 and that global peak oil would occur in the early 2000’s.”

    So much for Marion King Hubbert’s prediction once upon a time in a land far away!!

    Reply ↓

    • If the ingenuity of man was constrained by your reasoning the mode of transportation today would still be horse and buggy.


  11. Denmark energy
    The electricity sector relies mainly on renewable energy. 80% of the electricity produced in the country came from renewables: 57% from wind power, 20% from biomass and other combustible renewables, and 3% from solar power.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    Norway and Sweden have lots of hydro power and lots of water in the mountains.

    This has been the case for decades, right back to WWII and before.

    Norsk Hydro made heavy water which the Germans sought to exploit for their nuclear program. Allies had to destroy it.

    Denmark is the only one with significant wind energy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark

    Dominica is developing hydro power and geothermal energy from the volcanic activity below.

    https://www.cepal.org/en/news/dominica-caricom-forerunner-renewable-energy-use-latest-eclac-report-reveals

    Apart from hot air from our puny politicians, Barbados has no means of exploiting geothermal energy.

    Wind energy capped the milling capacity for sugar production cane at around 10,000 tons per year all through slavery.

    Steam and mechanization increased output 20 fold.

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  12. I am a
    wise google /
    fake expert too

    Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago. The first modern humans began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago.

    Most people credit Benjamin Franklin with ‘discovering’ electricity in 1752

    > “If the ingenuity of man was constrained by your reasoning the mode of transportation today would still be horse and buggy.”

    Man survived and thrived for a very long time without this newfangled electricity

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  13. Will a belief that we can support and ever increasing level of complexity prove to be modern civilization’s utlimate “achilles heel”?

    Ramping up wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles can’t solve our energy problem
    Posted on February 3, 2023 by Gail Tverberg (A U.S. based, retired insurance industry actuary)

    Many people believe that installing more wind turbines and solar panels and manufacturing more electric vehicles can solve our energy problem, but I don’t agree with them. These devices, plus the batteries, charging stations, transmission lines and many other structures necessary to make them work represent a high level of complexity.

    A relatively low level of complexity, such as the complexity embodied in a new hydroelectric dam, can sometimes be used to solve energy problems, but we cannot expect ever-higher levels of complexity to always be achievable.

    According to the anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in his well-known book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, there are diminishing returns to added complexity. In other words, the most beneficial innovations tend to be found first. Later innovations tend to be less helpful. Eventually the energy cost of added complexity becomes too high, relative to the benefit provided.

    In this post, I will discuss complexity further. I will also present evidence that the world economy may already have hit complexity limits. Furthermore, the popular measure, “Energy Return on Energy Investment” (EROEI) pertains to direct use of energy, rather than energy embodied in added complexity. As a result, EROEI indications tend to suggest that innovations such as wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are more helpful than they really are. Other measures similar to EROEI make a similar mistake.

    More:
    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2023/02/03/ramping-up-wind-turbines-solar-panels-and-electric-vehicles-cant-solve-our-energy-problem/

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  14. Energy of the mind and body..
    There is hardly a Bu thread where the word ‘slavery’ isn’t mentioned
    so I will go back to past when Africans were the heavy machinery used to dig up and flatten lands and clear rocks etc

    ✂️ cut
    In 1835, the Trevelyan family received £26,898, a huge sum at the time, in compensation from the British government for the abolition of slavery a year earlier.

    The enslaved men, women and children received nothing and were forced to work a further eight years unpaid as “apprentices”.

    A £100,000 fund, donated by the New York-based BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan, will be formally launched in Grenada on 27 February by Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, and Trevelyan family members. Caricom, or Caribbean Community, is a group of 15 countries in the region.
    ✂️ end cut
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/04/british-slave-owners-family-apologise-reparations-trevelyans

    Reply ↓

  15. African machines on February 4, 2023 at 12:39 PM said:
    Rate This

    The enslaved men, women and children received nothing and were forced to work a further eight years unpaid as “apprentices”.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    Slaves were fed, housed, clothed and given medical insurance from cradle to grave, regardless of preexisting conditions, a socialist utopia.

    After emancipation they were provided with free education and religious instruction.

    BTW, the apprenticeship period lasted only 4 years, get your facts right and don’t depend on others to lead you!!

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  16. Imagine how much you would save each month if you did not have to pay for food, housing, clothing and had no doctors’ bills.

    Do the arithmetic!!

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    • ‘Barbados must go for the gold’
      God works in mysterious ways: His wonders to perform.
      I was brought to this wonderful turn-of-phrase, near-intrinsic to the Barbadian ethos, upon learning of my grandfather, Ralph Moore’s, passing last week. Granddaddy Ralph Moore was a man of life and a man who lived for his family with whom he shared his passions and in whom he imparted his wisdom; often through stories, political debate and commentary upon cricket.
      Interestingly, therefore reflecting upon the wonder of God’s works takes a melancholic turn in the wake of his death as I “butt up” upon my own saying which often comes to mind when considering the first – life is like cricket, a game of glorious uncertainties. Thus, opens the batting for our continued reflection upon Barbados’ innings in this the 21st century of humanity’s current iteration as we strive to move from nightwatchman to all-rounder in this test match called life.
      The stones the builder refused
      Like many of his generation, Granddaddy Ralph Moore had a love affair with Errol Barrow. Before Barrow, he was a Grantley Adams man but free education made the difference. Free education, for him, like many Barbadians past, present and future grounded all discussions on life, politics, economics and culture. That policy single-handedly transformed ‘the stones the builder refused’ into ‘the collective cornerstone of our shared prosperity’.
      This transformation from the doldrums of the material condition to the epicentre of the golden flight did not come easily. It was won on the backs of those Barrow swore to never again be,“Hewers of wood and drawers of water” as per Joshua 9:21.
      European Colonial literature ‘for’ and ‘against’ slavery debated the merits and demerits of leaving “us” in servitude and serfdom centuries before the 1930s riots where, due to Clement Payne’s deportation, his lieutenants Israel Lovell, Ulric Grant, my twice-great uncle Darnley “Brains” Alleyne, Fitzegerald “Menzies” Chase, Mortimer Skeete, Eunice Belgrave and the Barbadian masses, like many others throughout our Caribbean, rebelliously unmade the plantocracy, forever changing the course of our history.
      While many in Ichirouganaim (Barbados’ original name) may consider the war won, students of life, history and dialectics know that ‘war’ is in perpetual motion. This reflection brings me to some good words from some of our primary ministers on our development journey.
      Barrow asked, “What kind of mirror image do you have of yourself? Do you really like yourselves? Because you can never really like anybody unless you first like yourself. There are too many people in Barbados who despise themselves and their dislike of themselves reflects itself in their dislike of other people . . . people who live next door to them, members of their family, husbands, and wives, and the ox and the ass and the stranger within the gates”. Next, Tom Adams says, “You cannot go on having an open sore. It must be dealt with as directed by the doctor”.
      By that thinking Prime Minister Adams, in one fell swoop, severed Barbadians from colonial serfdom by turning labourers into owners; thereby catalysing social mobility for generations to come through the Tenantries Freehold Purchase Act.
      Additionally, Erskine Sandiford reminded us that, “We must all work together to enrich the cultural life of our nation. We must identify cultural needs and cultural opportunities and seek to satisfy them and make use of them”.
      Similarly, Owen Arthur, launching from Obadele Thompson’s Olympic bronze medal with the general election in full swing, told us: “Barbados must not go for the bronze. Barbados must not go for the silver. Barbados must go for the gold!”.
      Thus, ironically, we come to David Thompson’s slogan that, “Barbados is more than an economy; it is a society” and Freundel Stuart’s axiomatic statement that, “Politics is not a game”.
      She handled it
      Herein, we arrive at current Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley’s reflecting upon the visit of French Minister of State Chrysoula Zacharopoulou: “In this historic moment, I was more convinced than ever that there’s a moment in every country’s life, when to stand still will only invite destruction”. I contend that moment is every day.
      Thus, I close reflecting upon the movement afoot in Barbados to better the lives of our people which I urge to increase with intensity: After the 2018 election, while debating Barbados’ present and future my grandfather, the Barrow man, recounted that since Miss Mottley wanted the job and now had it she had to, “handle it!”. Some weeks later Miss Mottley increased old-age pensions. I asked him what he thought. He replied, “She handled it!”.
      Dr William M. A. Chandler is a published political economist, legal scholar and business consultant.

      Source: Nation


  18. Here is a politician in Scotland fudging figures to promote wind energy in Scotland.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/snp-minister-uses-fake-figures-to-inflate-scotland-s-wind-energy-potential/ar-AA178yVN?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=W069&cvid=93c22edc550043e9a48bae59b0bf75eb

    The idea no doubt is that Scotland will attract loans which it will use to incentivize investment in wind turbines.

    The companies will then take Government money, build the wind turbines and then go out of business with eyesores left all over the place.

    Same principle in Barbados with solar farms, a recent craze as folks with BLP connections seek out the money!!

    Reply ↓

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