note 1: the US has the world's largest coal reserves with 491 billion short tons accounting for 27% of the world's total (Curious that this energy source has been demonized.)
note 2: the US is reliant on foreign imports for 100% of its needs for the following strategic resources: Arsenic, Cesium, Fluorspar, Gallium, Graphite, Indium, Manganese, Niobium, Rare Earths, Rubidium, Scandium, Tantalum, Yttrium; see Appendix H: Strategic Materials for further details https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/strategic-materials/
Here's a relevant entry from Appendix H:
Uranium (U/92)
Description: Uranium is a common metal found in rocks all over the world. Uranium (see attached image) occurs in combination with small amounts of other elements. Uranium ranks 48th among the most abundant elements found in natural crustal rocks. It is 1.67 times more dense than lead.
Uses: Uranium is the fuel most widely used by nuclear power plants for nuclear fission. In nuclear fission, energy is released when atoms are split apart to form smaller atoms. Nuclear power plants use the heat from nuclear fission to produce electricity.
World Resources: Economically recoverable uranium deposits have been discovered primarily in the western US, Australia, Canada, Central Asia, Africa, and South America. About 5.3% of the uranium delivered to US reactors in 2021 was produced in the US and ****> 94.7% came from other countries. <****
Substitutes: None
Note(s): Nuclear power plants use a certain type of uranium, U-235, as fuel because its atoms are easily split apart. Although uranium is about 100 times more common than silver, U-235 is relatively rare. After uranium is mined, the U-235 must be extracted and processed before it can be used as a fuel. Mined uranium ore typically yields 0.5 to 2 kg (1 to 4 pounds) of uranium oxide concentrate (U3O8 or yellowcake) per ton, or 0.05% to 0.20% yellowcake.
I tend to agree. Over here in Oz I sometimes hear of another environmental law suit being brought against say a coal company to prevent its expansion. Coal company has spent 10 years getting through all the red tape , only to have another spanner thrown in the works at the last minute by some “friends of the koala / gum trees / etc group” .... court cases aren’t cheap and how some of these associations get funded makes we wonder if the CCP is behind it.
In the U.S. we have a phenomenon called "sue and settle". For example, an environmental NGO will sue a utility under an air emissions rule to install scrubbers or other control technology. The utility doesn't give up a fight and rather than incur the cap exp on an older plant just gets the ENGO to drop the suit if the retire the coal plant. I simplify but you get the point. That how it works over there?
This article oscillates between novel/interesting observations and dumb takes.
As the collapse of the Soviet Union ought to have demonstrated (but clearly hasn’t) the nomenklatura in the East proved just as susceptible to Western academic brain rot as the domestic audiences it was intended for (the superiority of capitalist liberal democracies, pluralistic society, post-modernism, all that crap). It wasn’t until circa 2007 that Putin realised that the Americans were still at war with Russia.
Which makes all of these suggestions of a Russian or Chinese psy-op seem really a stretch. The Chinese and Russians were almost certainly not immune from all the climate-change discourse of the 90s–2000s. Just as in the 80s Soviet officials weren’t immune from all of the Western scientists and academics confidently stating that nuclear winter would end all life on the planet.
What was different was that neither China nor Russia had the EuroDollar, and were consequently much more constrained in their ability to fritter-away capital on expensive vanity projects. To the extent they had sectors of their economy that produced real value and could obtain dollars from international trade, they couldn’t just junk those sectors. To the extent that the Chinese and Russians were adapting their economies to European and American green policies they were simply responding to price signals, doing the work that was unpopular in “the West” but still had to be done by someone.
That’s it. There’s no grand conspiracy, as much as it’s nice to have someone else to blame, the truth is that the American and European capitalists (both financial and industrial) did this to themselves.
Thanks for the critique. Psyops and conspiracies are nowhere in the piece.
In the Social Preview we note this is a Green Cold War "of the Wests' own making". No conspiracy necessary needed when one brings it on themselves by their own lack of understanding of physics or economics.
The main point we're trying to make is that by the West mandating more wind/solar (for CO2 emissions reduction from electricity), China did see the price signals and the long-term commitments to wind/solar and acted accordingly, with their resource and labor advantages. We disagree in that the Chinese did use printed govt. money to build the solar supply chain to react to the Wests orders for solar. Same with wind. Central planners do that.
Russia clearly adapted as well, increased nat gas pipeline capacity, substantially increased European reliance on nat gas.
No psyops or conspiracy need. Chinese said, to Europe and America "hey, you're gonna try to install that much solar PV, we can make it cheaper. Russians said to Europe, "if you're going to rely on wind/solar, you're going to need a substitute for the base load electricity you got from coal and nuclear, here take our gas".
Now, it would be foolish to believe that either China or Russia did so without seeing some geopolitical strategic or economic advantage.
Yes, both were reacting to the opportunities that we handed them on a silver platter, so no "conspiracy" or 'psyop" was even needed.
As we wrote: "Taken together, the West’s obsession with climate change and the energy transition combined with China’s ability to outcompete western nations now relying on those systems gave China an advantage on which it has capitalized." No conspiracy there.
Perhaps the ‘West’ is discovering that the Maximum Power Principle (Lotka) operates at the nation/state/economic level .. not just at the biological level.
"As the war enters its third year, we have grave concerns that the same Western leaders responsible for major environmental, energy and economic policy mistakes fail to understand the gravity of the situation in Ukraine. Macron’s comments only crystallized those concerns."
Excellent! In addition to selling us out to China and Russia, our Western "leaders" have no idea how those two countries plan to enslave us. Yes, the green new deal is not green, but is existential to our freedom. Keep up the good work spreading this message.
I have been saying for years that Net Zero is a CCP psyop, just think of millions of highly trained propagandists influencing media and social media, a generation of children being indoctrinated by the CCP via Tiktok. Meanwhile, my own Australia gets fat off supplying the raw materials to the largest ever build military build-up in China while we destroy our grid and make it wholly dependent on cheap solar panels and wind turbines from China.
One of guys should throw in your hat for EPA administrator in the next administration. No joke. The Heritage Foundation is recruiting and vetting executive branch candidates at this website: https://www.project2025.org
I also nominate Robert Bryce as Secretary of Energy. Can you imagine what could be accomplished after replacing the current crew of administration nitwits with knowledgeable, capable people?
As much as I respect Robert Bryce and enjoy his work, I think that his N2N (natural gas to nuclear) ideas may be too vague and limiting. I'd really like to fill that position with someone who appreciates the truly staggering potential of nuclear, and understands that we are wasting almost all of it today. There is a better story, which could accelerate the transition by many decades, and the technology is nearly within our grasp.
I'd prefer Alex Epstein as Secretary of Energy, or perhaps Jack Devanney. Alex's EFP (https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/the-energy-freedom-platform) is exactly what we need, with liberating innovation and decriminalizing nuclear as core tenets. The Gordian Knot (https://jackdevanney.substack.com/) also provides great insight into the obstacles crippling nuclear, and offers concrete ideas on addressing them. Either way, the NRC and LNT must go. Nuclear doesn't really need any help, beyond a level playing field free of obstacles.
Somewhat more on topic: there also appears to be a concerted war on Thorium. The attempts to suppress or misrepresent the idea are too pervasive, and the US DOE is now explicitly excluding it from consideration for awards, but has also paid half a billion to obstruct it. An entire fuel cycle, and the most promising one at that, summarily dismissed.
The hostility toward thorium by those in power is truly exasperating, yet implicit acknowledgement that the idea obviously has merit, or it wouldn't be perceived as a threat deserving of such an extreme response. Strangely, I've not seen any reporting on this, but can cite a few clear examples, and have long had the impression that there is much more below the surface that is warping public sentiment.
So, we drew straws. The first team member to draw the short straw threatened to quit the team.
So, we drew again. The next member to draw the short straw threatened to harm himself.
So we threw out all the straws and thought “we would be bound by an administration, Congress and legislation/regulation. We’re better off trying to educate electorates and change things from the outside than dance with Charlaticians and bureaucrats on the inside.”
This is a lovely analysis and one which relies on a novel and cogent theory. Very compelling and I appreciate it.
Who can't be blown away by the bamboozling of supposedly knowledgeable green "scientists" who are convinced that the road to future green utopia is paved with coal generation plants in China.
While I agree TGCW is in fact taking place, I believe Russia and China are exploiting it but did not cause it. Our zero tolerance, out-of-context, and tort laden regime has driven most productive ventures out of the regulatory reach, predictably I will add. That our political class has been concerned with vote gathering and lobbyist harvesting is a fact of life but it’s our education system that produces student protesters, screaming “stop oil” while ignorant of the 600 odd irreplaceable products that make life what it is that truly fuels this war. That we turn a blind eye to the exploitation and the environmental degradation that takes place in the nations where our manufacturing has been transferred to is another sign of the rot in our public awareness
The spent fuel rods are the very fissile resource that is needed. Through a simple process, the uranium can be recovered, yielding a concentrated transuranic salt which is perfect to fuel molten salt reactors, with no enrichment required. However, the key to making it economical is thorium in MSRs.
The transuranics would fuel conversion of thorium to U-233, which would be immensely valuable for medicine and starting LFTRs, which do require a bit of fissile U-233, but then exclusively consume thorium, producing almost no waste. The U-233 will be expensive, but affordable, because it truly is a one-time cost, and very little is needed.
Incidentally, Pu-238 is the only long-term "waste" that LFTRs produce; the isotope used for RTGs powering many endeavors in space. I would welcome that sort of nuclear waste "disposal".
We should continue mining uranium and deploying existing technology where reasonable, but it is foolish not to also pursue thorium in MSRs, so that we can eventually decouple the growth of nuclear from mining.
Despite the fears of so many in the US and Europe regarding the potential re-election of Donald Trump, it seems he may be the best hope for survival if he eliminates some of that regulatory framework.
Here's some relevant factoids from the CIA Factbook regarding the United States:
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-states/
Natural resources
coal, copper, lead, molybdenum, phosphates, rare earth elements, uranium, bauxite, gold, iron, mercury, nickel, potash, silver, tungsten, zinc, petroleum, natural gas, timber, arable land;
note 1: the US has the world's largest coal reserves with 491 billion short tons accounting for 27% of the world's total (Curious that this energy source has been demonized.)
note 2: the US is reliant on foreign imports for 100% of its needs for the following strategic resources: Arsenic, Cesium, Fluorspar, Gallium, Graphite, Indium, Manganese, Niobium, Rare Earths, Rubidium, Scandium, Tantalum, Yttrium; see Appendix H: Strategic Materials for further details https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/strategic-materials/
Here's a relevant entry from Appendix H:
Uranium (U/92)
Description: Uranium is a common metal found in rocks all over the world. Uranium (see attached image) occurs in combination with small amounts of other elements. Uranium ranks 48th among the most abundant elements found in natural crustal rocks. It is 1.67 times more dense than lead.
Uses: Uranium is the fuel most widely used by nuclear power plants for nuclear fission. In nuclear fission, energy is released when atoms are split apart to form smaller atoms. Nuclear power plants use the heat from nuclear fission to produce electricity.
US Imports: 20,077 mt (2021)
Import Sources (2021): Canada, 15.6%; Kazakhstan, 37.4%; Russia, 14.3%; Australia, 15%; Namibia, 7.3%; other, 10.3%
World Resources: Economically recoverable uranium deposits have been discovered primarily in the western US, Australia, Canada, Central Asia, Africa, and South America. About 5.3% of the uranium delivered to US reactors in 2021 was produced in the US and ****> 94.7% came from other countries. <****
Substitutes: None
Note(s): Nuclear power plants use a certain type of uranium, U-235, as fuel because its atoms are easily split apart. Although uranium is about 100 times more common than silver, U-235 is relatively rare. After uranium is mined, the U-235 must be extracted and processed before it can be used as a fuel. Mined uranium ore typically yields 0.5 to 2 kg (1 to 4 pounds) of uranium oxide concentrate (U3O8 or yellowcake) per ton, or 0.05% to 0.20% yellowcake.
what a fantastic article to read on a Friday night. You fellas have been hitting home runs lately.
Very kind of you. Thanks!
Part II posts Monday morning!
I am already looking forward to Monday morning. Enjoy your weekend Mental.
you really think Zelensky is telling the truth that 31,000 troops have been killed? A gross underestimate
Not necessarily. Just reporting what he disclosed.
I tend to agree. Over here in Oz I sometimes hear of another environmental law suit being brought against say a coal company to prevent its expansion. Coal company has spent 10 years getting through all the red tape , only to have another spanner thrown in the works at the last minute by some “friends of the koala / gum trees / etc group” .... court cases aren’t cheap and how some of these associations get funded makes we wonder if the CCP is behind it.
In the U.S. we have a phenomenon called "sue and settle". For example, an environmental NGO will sue a utility under an air emissions rule to install scrubbers or other control technology. The utility doesn't give up a fight and rather than incur the cap exp on an older plant just gets the ENGO to drop the suit if the retire the coal plant. I simplify but you get the point. That how it works over there?
This article oscillates between novel/interesting observations and dumb takes.
As the collapse of the Soviet Union ought to have demonstrated (but clearly hasn’t) the nomenklatura in the East proved just as susceptible to Western academic brain rot as the domestic audiences it was intended for (the superiority of capitalist liberal democracies, pluralistic society, post-modernism, all that crap). It wasn’t until circa 2007 that Putin realised that the Americans were still at war with Russia.
Which makes all of these suggestions of a Russian or Chinese psy-op seem really a stretch. The Chinese and Russians were almost certainly not immune from all the climate-change discourse of the 90s–2000s. Just as in the 80s Soviet officials weren’t immune from all of the Western scientists and academics confidently stating that nuclear winter would end all life on the planet.
What was different was that neither China nor Russia had the EuroDollar, and were consequently much more constrained in their ability to fritter-away capital on expensive vanity projects. To the extent they had sectors of their economy that produced real value and could obtain dollars from international trade, they couldn’t just junk those sectors. To the extent that the Chinese and Russians were adapting their economies to European and American green policies they were simply responding to price signals, doing the work that was unpopular in “the West” but still had to be done by someone.
That’s it. There’s no grand conspiracy, as much as it’s nice to have someone else to blame, the truth is that the American and European capitalists (both financial and industrial) did this to themselves.
Thanks for the critique. Psyops and conspiracies are nowhere in the piece.
In the Social Preview we note this is a Green Cold War "of the Wests' own making". No conspiracy necessary needed when one brings it on themselves by their own lack of understanding of physics or economics.
The main point we're trying to make is that by the West mandating more wind/solar (for CO2 emissions reduction from electricity), China did see the price signals and the long-term commitments to wind/solar and acted accordingly, with their resource and labor advantages. We disagree in that the Chinese did use printed govt. money to build the solar supply chain to react to the Wests orders for solar. Same with wind. Central planners do that.
Russia clearly adapted as well, increased nat gas pipeline capacity, substantially increased European reliance on nat gas.
No psyops or conspiracy need. Chinese said, to Europe and America "hey, you're gonna try to install that much solar PV, we can make it cheaper. Russians said to Europe, "if you're going to rely on wind/solar, you're going to need a substitute for the base load electricity you got from coal and nuclear, here take our gas".
Now, it would be foolish to believe that either China or Russia did so without seeing some geopolitical strategic or economic advantage.
Yes, both were reacting to the opportunities that we handed them on a silver platter, so no "conspiracy" or 'psyop" was even needed.
As we wrote: "Taken together, the West’s obsession with climate change and the energy transition combined with China’s ability to outcompete western nations now relying on those systems gave China an advantage on which it has capitalized." No conspiracy there.
Again, thanks for the critique. Keep em coming.!
Excellent piece by Environmental!
Thanks, Isaac!
I’m not the smartest guy out there but all of this seems so easy to see. This shows how blind allegiance to ideology makes people, well….blind!
“ there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.”
Perhaps the ‘West’ is discovering that the Maximum Power Principle (Lotka) operates at the nation/state/economic level .. not just at the biological level.
Well played, sir.
"As the war enters its third year, we have grave concerns that the same Western leaders responsible for major environmental, energy and economic policy mistakes fail to understand the gravity of the situation in Ukraine. Macron’s comments only crystallized those concerns."
Excellent! In addition to selling us out to China and Russia, our Western "leaders" have no idea how those two countries plan to enslave us. Yes, the green new deal is not green, but is existential to our freedom. Keep up the good work spreading this message.
Thanks and we are very grateful for your early and consistent support!
I have been saying for years that Net Zero is a CCP psyop, just think of millions of highly trained propagandists influencing media and social media, a generation of children being indoctrinated by the CCP via Tiktok. Meanwhile, my own Australia gets fat off supplying the raw materials to the largest ever build military build-up in China while we destroy our grid and make it wholly dependent on cheap solar panels and wind turbines from China.
Many have long suspected that it is not only a CCP psyop but a Russian one as well. Hard evidence is difficult to unearth.
We have our opinions on the circumstantial evidence….
Thanks - great article.
Thank you!
One of guys should throw in your hat for EPA administrator in the next administration. No joke. The Heritage Foundation is recruiting and vetting executive branch candidates at this website: https://www.project2025.org
Their policy statement on the environment and EPA is here: https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-13.pdf
I also nominate Robert Bryce as Secretary of Energy. Can you imagine what could be accomplished after replacing the current crew of administration nitwits with knowledgeable, capable people?
As much as I respect Robert Bryce and enjoy his work, I think that his N2N (natural gas to nuclear) ideas may be too vague and limiting. I'd really like to fill that position with someone who appreciates the truly staggering potential of nuclear, and understands that we are wasting almost all of it today. There is a better story, which could accelerate the transition by many decades, and the technology is nearly within our grasp.
I'd prefer Alex Epstein as Secretary of Energy, or perhaps Jack Devanney. Alex's EFP (https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/the-energy-freedom-platform) is exactly what we need, with liberating innovation and decriminalizing nuclear as core tenets. The Gordian Knot (https://jackdevanney.substack.com/) also provides great insight into the obstacles crippling nuclear, and offers concrete ideas on addressing them. Either way, the NRC and LNT must go. Nuclear doesn't really need any help, beyond a level playing field free of obstacles.
Somewhat more on topic: there also appears to be a concerted war on Thorium. The attempts to suppress or misrepresent the idea are too pervasive, and the US DOE is now explicitly excluding it from consideration for awards, but has also paid half a billion to obstruct it. An entire fuel cycle, and the most promising one at that, summarily dismissed.
The hostility toward thorium by those in power is truly exasperating, yet implicit acknowledgement that the idea obviously has merit, or it wouldn't be perceived as a threat deserving of such an extreme response. Strangely, I've not seen any reporting on this, but can cite a few clear examples, and have long had the impression that there is much more below the surface that is warping public sentiment.
Oh, Geez.
So, we drew straws. The first team member to draw the short straw threatened to quit the team.
So, we drew again. The next member to draw the short straw threatened to harm himself.
So we threw out all the straws and thought “we would be bound by an administration, Congress and legislation/regulation. We’re better off trying to educate electorates and change things from the outside than dance with Charlaticians and bureaucrats on the inside.”
But, we do appreciate the vote of confidence!
;)
This is a lovely analysis and one which relies on a novel and cogent theory. Very compelling and I appreciate it.
Who can't be blown away by the bamboozling of supposedly knowledgeable green "scientists" who are convinced that the road to future green utopia is paved with coal generation plants in China.
Thanks!
While I agree TGCW is in fact taking place, I believe Russia and China are exploiting it but did not cause it. Our zero tolerance, out-of-context, and tort laden regime has driven most productive ventures out of the regulatory reach, predictably I will add. That our political class has been concerned with vote gathering and lobbyist harvesting is a fact of life but it’s our education system that produces student protesters, screaming “stop oil” while ignorant of the 600 odd irreplaceable products that make life what it is that truly fuels this war. That we turn a blind eye to the exploitation and the environmental degradation that takes place in the nations where our manufacturing has been transferred to is another sign of the rot in our public awareness
As the piece’s social preview notes:
“The West wakes up to a new form of Cold War OF ITS OWN MAKING”.
That “own making” has lots of layers. The Statist dictators in Russia and China only drove through the opening we gave them.
What is sad is that the "opening" just gets bigger and bigger, with little hope of sanity restored.
Great essay, and interesting perspective. Thank you.
Grateful for the compliment. And your steady support!
Increase exploration for Fissile Materials and get Elon Musk to hurl The Spent fuel rods out with his Tesla Roadster,Yeh ! Hah !
The spent fuel rods are the very fissile resource that is needed. Through a simple process, the uranium can be recovered, yielding a concentrated transuranic salt which is perfect to fuel molten salt reactors, with no enrichment required. However, the key to making it economical is thorium in MSRs.
The transuranics would fuel conversion of thorium to U-233, which would be immensely valuable for medicine and starting LFTRs, which do require a bit of fissile U-233, but then exclusively consume thorium, producing almost no waste. The U-233 will be expensive, but affordable, because it truly is a one-time cost, and very little is needed.
Incidentally, Pu-238 is the only long-term "waste" that LFTRs produce; the isotope used for RTGs powering many endeavors in space. I would welcome that sort of nuclear waste "disposal".
We should continue mining uranium and deploying existing technology where reasonable, but it is foolish not to also pursue thorium in MSRs, so that we can eventually decouple the growth of nuclear from mining.
He’s busy right now fending off EcoLeftists in Berlin who shut his plant down with an act of ecoterrorism.
Despite the fears of so many in the US and Europe regarding the potential re-election of Donald Trump, it seems he may be the best hope for survival if he eliminates some of that regulatory framework.
It will take more than one man and one term to undo the economic damage wrought by environmentalism on energy policy.
totally agree, but you have to start somewhere.