The Morning Rant: The Worsening Crisis of Europe’s Climate Follies

With Russia throttling natural gas supplies to Germany – which foolishly dismantled its own energy producing capabilities in deference to the climate religion – the impact of Germany’s self-imposed crisis is starting to loom large.

Russian Gas Supply Cuts Threaten World's Largest Chemicals Hub [WSJ – 6/29/2022]

Last Thursday, Berlin triggered the second of a three-step emergency gas plan that, in its last step, could cut off gas supplies to some companies.

Industrial giant BASF employs almost 40,000 Germans, and because of the natural gas shortage, it may have to shut down its Ludwigshafen plant, which employees about 1/3 of its employees.

Company executives are doing what was unthinkable just a few months ago: considering how to potentially shut down the complex if gas supplies fall further.

Sure, 13,000 people losing their jobs is bad, but how big a deal is this?

Because BASF and other chemicals companies sit at the beginning of most industrial supply chains, their disruption would reverberate well beyond the sector, threatening Europe's economy at a time of high inflation and slowing growth.

A throttling of BASF's ammonia output, a key ingredient in fertilizers, could exacerbate the world's growing food crisis, analysts say.

More unemployment, supply chain interruptions, and food shortages…that should play well with the proletariat.

In a post of mine last week about the Dutch farmers protest and the Davos elite, I saw this brilliant response: “So we’ve reached the ‘Some of you may have to die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make!’ stage of elite decadence.”

There are so many foreboding headlines like this one these days.

Germany is rationing hot water and turning off the lights to reduce natural gas consumption [Fortune – 7/08/2022]

“The situation is more than dramatic,” Axel Gedaschko, a German politician and president of GdW, the federal association of German housing, told the FT.

It isn’t just hot water that’s being rationed. In addition to shorter shower times, officials are asking city councils nationwide to turn off traffic lights at night, stop illuminating historic buildings, and go easy on using air conditioners in a bid to conserve electricity, according to the FT.

German winters are very cold and very dark. Politicians convinced German voters that they could dismantle Germany’s old energy network and replace it with energy produced by the flapping of fairy wings. They were successful in dismantling Germany’s ability to produce energy, but they never replaced it with anything but Russian imports. Those politicians have cause for apprehension as a potentially lethal winter approaches.

I once had a co-worker whose doctor had temporarily imposed on him a meatless diet due to some medical condition. When I saw him eating a chicken sandwich one day I asked if he was done with the vegetarian diet. He responded, “No, I’ve just decided that chicken is a vegetable.”

Eurocrats are about to use that same logic in redefining “sustainable” energy.

As Europe’s ruling class realizes just how catastrophic their green energy policies are, but still wanting to stay obedient to the Sustainable Organic Church of the Carbon Apocalypse, they are now trying to re-classify traditional energy sources as being compliant with environmental sharia.

EU lawmakers back natural gas, nuclear energy as sustainable [AP – 7/06/2022]

The green labeling system from the European Commission defines what qualifies as an investment in sustainable energy. Under certain conditions, gas and nuclear energy will now be part of the mix, making it easier for private investors to inject money into both.

The pampered princelings in Brussels seem to be assessing their self-imposed energy crisis, and starting to realize that millions of cold, starving commoners are much more of a threat to their reign than are a handful of environmentalists throwing a public tantrum.

(buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com)

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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