“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie
I tried farming rabbits, but I found it a hare-raising experience. All memes this post, as found.
Perhaps the single biggest concern I have is that we’re spending our time as a species worried about trivial stuff. What “trivial stuff”? How about Ukraine? I think that’s what Kamala and Brandon would want us to focus on, but they’re stuck on vodka and sniffing children.
Ukraine? I don’t have a side in that conflict, and steadfastly refuse to have one. Both governments are at about the same level of totalitarianism (this isn’t me talking, this is from those organizations who measure this stuff). I’m not going to get into it, but I can back my ambivalence up that, yeah, both sides are crap. If Trump had a second term? This conflict wouldn’t exist. We still wouldn’t have a wall, but this conflict wouldn’t exist.
But Ukraine is trivial compared to the subjects everyone is avoiding:
Food, and Energy. I originally had a third, Immigration to add to this list, but the post got too long on just the first two. Of course, I’ll get to immigration. Sometime. Just like the US Border Patrol.
Let’s start with Food.
The Earth does have a finite food supply – I can prove this because sometimes the shake machine doesn’t work at McDonald’s®. There is only so much food that can be created. It’s large – world hunger is a solved problem at the current population level of the Earth. We have more people than ever, and we have food to feed absolutely everyone on Earth as long as everyone doesn’t want the Stuffed Crust® pizza. Sure, not everyone is getting filet mignon at every meal, but we have, on an absolute basis, enough calories to make sure that no one on Earth right now needs to starve.
Amy Schumer is proof of that, though I’ve heard she’s happy there’s a ban on harpooning whales.
That’s a big deal. This is the first era in the history of life on the planet that we can say that no person on Earth needs to be hungry. The biggest basketcase has generally been Africa, primarily because they tend to kill each other by the bucketload because it’s Tuesday and don’t have mountains and winter.
What?
Yeah, mountains and winter. I can’t stop Tuesday from showing up.
Mountains catch snow, and snow, melting as the summer hits, keeps the rivers flowing. The reservoirs across the United States are, in effect, artificial mountains that keep the rivers flowing when the snow isn’t there. This also keeps a minimum amount of water flowing when the rivers would otherwise run dry so I can skip stones.
While this increases the transport opportunities available due to rivers that makes transportation cheap, it also has the most important benefit of making agriculture predictable. This makes sure that although there are good years and bad years, those are the exceptions everywhere but Africa. In Africa, the lack of mountains makes a good year and a bad year a random and unpredictable event. In a world without Western Civilization this is a famine event. In a world with the evil Western Colonialists, it means that there’s food available and nobody has to die, unless the UN has a voice.
When you average it out over the globe, however, there’s more than enough food in 2023 and the problem for most farmers in the West is that food is too cheap and too plentiful. The only thing that stops distribution is kleptocracy – I read that European farmers can make milk, turn it to powder, and ship that powdered milk to Africa cheaper than Africans can produce milk. This never gives the locals the ability to create a viable farm industry. Except if Bill Gates gets involved:
In 2023, the problem isn’t too little food, it’s too much.
Yet the impulse from the Left is to:
- Destroy Western farming because of muh climate change,
- Implant the idea that we must eat bugs because (rolls dice) communism and muh climate change, and
- Make all of this subject to the most stringent regulation, because that makes the Left sexually stimulated.
Even rice isn’t immune from the rage of the Left.
Just letting everyone know, she’s over 18, so perhaps someone can throw themselves on this grenade and wife her up, which might shut her up.
What people seem to miss is that this oasis in time where everything is going well. We have
- the technology to maximize crop yields,
- the oil to power the machines to plant the crops,
- the natural gas to create the fertilizer to nourish the crops, and
- the land with the topsoil to produce the crops.
It’s clear that, despite The Mrs. being able to make a few strawberries a week from a flower pot, we can’t feed the world from one. There is a finite limit to the production of food, and it’s very tight.
And, like every other thing on the list, we’re not serious about it. California had a plan in the 1970s to create a series of reservoirs to give them water in amounts required to avoid droughts. They ignored it, and now California is like a teenager, “It’s too wet. It’s too dry. I want to live in a mall.” They weren’t serious about it.
And food? One side, the Left, wants to reconfigure man and have them live in pods and eat bugs. The other side, the Right, wants people to be free and many of them eat steak. I’m not having trouble picking a side here, though the Leftist mind control has convinced the Zoomers that they can live via osmosis, or something:
The point is, no adults are looking at this problem, and the deluded Leftists that are looking at it fall to the same sad solution they have for every problem: Live in the Pods, Eat the Bugs. People are bad, so we need more communism and control.
Energy is not much better.
Just like reservoirs are artificial mountains, huge piles of lithium and batteries and infrastructure and expensive cars that sometimes let all of their electrical energy turn kinetic after a fender bender isn’t the answer. It’s because the Leftists aren’t serious.
Let’s take a big picture look:
Oil is awesome. It powers everything from jet fighter planes to rockets to that mysterious fire that burned down . . . oh, I’ve said too much. It has been the primary fuel of the Western world since 1930 or so.
And it’s cool, mainly because oil is just concentrated solar power, and all of the work in making it is based on solar power. I mean, solar in the sense that the Sun shined millions of years ago, and we’re using concentrated Sunlight from when the dinosaurs were making frozen gelato and rubbing sunscreen on their nipples in their spare time.
(Yes, I know that dinosaurs didn’t have nipples, but I rarely use nipples, and want to be known as the man who popularized dinosaur nipples. Sue me.)
Oil is a gift. But, like the ability of Aerosmith® to make good songs, it’s limited. Oh, sure, it can produce billions of gallons of gasoline, but eventually it’s going to give you a Janie’s Got a Gun and then everyone will be disappointed and then everyone will notice that Stephen Tyler looks like their lesbian aunt.
I love oil. But it is finite, and by the time this century ends, it will be the fuel of the past. Sadly, we don’t have a replacement in sight at this point other than nuclear power or Leftism’s failures.
One way to produce nuclear power.
Windmills won’t work because the wind is fickle and electricity hard to store. The Sun is perfect, if we have millions of years to store its wonderful energy in sweet, sweet hydrocarbons, but solar panels installed in 2000 are already starting to fill up California’s landfills. We could count on Kamala’s stupidity, but eventually the vodka will run out and potatoes run on solar power.
All of my research shows that the “science” of “climate change” means the same solution is the same as food: People are bad, so we need more communism and control.
No. We need the free market. But we also need a plan. Sure, I hate government plans, but the signals of the market are silly – if the price of oil rises, there will be more.
No. We cannot conjure oil out of a free market if it isn’t there. We do have to plan for a future after oil, not for the sake of climate, but for the sake of humanity. And, though I am certain of few things, I am certain that Kamala and Brandon are not up for this task.
The solution to this problem is different than most, since it must take place before the problems that will doom billions. Or it won’t. And billions will be doomed, and mankind’s dream of going to the stars will be turned into mankind’s dream of dinner at Taco Bell®.
Pretty sure this is a parody. But in 2023, who can tell?
