Editor,
A few weeks back I saw a bumper sticker on the way to a beer festival that read, “FOSSIL FUELS ARE SO LAST CENTURY” and had to stifle a laugh. Aside from the riotous irony that the owner of that KIA had to fill up at the pump, same as me, to get to that same festival, there’s also the pesky little detail (obvious to those of us still living in the land of sanity) of how a glut of cheap and available fossil fuels is what’s literally been keeping us all affordably warm and our tummies full for over a century now, by orders of magnitude. Both in terms of the tremendous reduction of time required to create these ideal conditions, but more importantly, the amount of physical energy needed to be spent, quantified in the daily number of calories burned by a person in order to achieve the standard of living we all enjoy today.
Don’t believe me? Look at Germany. Their people are fixing to freeze next winter, now that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline’s effectively been turned to Swiss cheese. A grievous wound, not only to their ability to stay warm, but a deathblow to their industry and service sectors and therefore, their economy, which again, subsequently helped send their food prices skyrocketing to the moon by nearly 22% as of February. So much for that solar and wind technology the Deutchlanders were so heavily invested in. Bit hard to produce enough power when it’s cold, cloudy, calm, or nighttime, turns out. Much to the chagrin of the Green New Deal movement.
Anything to rescue us from those icky archaic fossil fuels, though. Can’t have cheap food and utility bills. No no no no no. How ‘bout you just take cold showers and wear an extra sweater from now on. That’s, no joke, what the German government told their citizens to do…with a straight face. Needless to say many of them are now fleeing to the woods for firewood.
To all the liberals breathlessly clutching their pearls at this, you might wanna reacquaint yourselves with the Haber-Bosch process. It’s going to have quite a bit to do with how much you’ll be paying in the near future to keep the lights on, stay warm, and most importantly, fed. Developed in the early 20th century, it was a new innovation in fertilizer manufacturing on an industrial scale, curtailing the growing problem of soil depletion and meeting the growing demands of a growing world population. It’s a hydrocarbon based process that combines nitrogen from the air and hydrogen to produce ammonia, the pillar ingredient in fertilizers, and is crucial for feeding half the world’s population today. It can ONLY be done using natural gas. And with Russia and Ukraine alone producing nearly 30% of the stuff, currently at war, combined with the Biden Regime cutting off our own natural gas supply, a massive dearth is gonna be a grim certainty in the coming years, I’m afraid.
Christopher Phares
Thomas, WV
