![Electric-Utopia A hand holding a tablet with virtual Smart City on it, night scene. The city is equipped with smart service and all kinds of online activity icons.](https://static-asset.amac.us/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/07105404/Electric-Utopia.jpg)
Electricity and water do not mix, or put differently, fatal outcomes occur when they do. This reality is age-old, but apparently only now sweeping all-electric advocates, the Electric Utopians. What comes next? Bankruptcy as they push electric everything, China chopping America’s power, electric bathtubs?
In recent months, the vast, federally subsidized flood of enthusiasm for converting everything to electric power, pushing fossil fuels to extinction and literally forcing Americans to drive electric vehicles by 2030 or 2035, is hitting not just roadblocks, but brick walls.
Increasingly, red, purple, and even blue states – that is, all political parties – are rethinking this headlong rush to centralize the nation’s energy use on the three aging (almost at life’s end), stressed, and vulnerable power grids (east, west, and Texas).
What even progressives, who see the world entering a climactic black hole, understand is this: There is no infrastructure – nor any affordable, near-term way to create it, to realistically support their utopian vision, an “all-electric, all the time” world for vehicles, heat, cooling, cooking, and everything else.
The cost of such a sci-fi system, like the cost of covering the whole country with solar cells and wind turbines, would be tens of times our nation’s gross national product (GDP), at a time when the national debt is already 253 percent of our annual GDP, sitting at 34 trillion dollars, now accruing a trillion dollars in interest annually.
These are not made-up numbers, they are real. The notion of coast-to-coast, north-to-south, reliable, ready, fast electric energy, like the notion of our nation’s power grids being more than 20 percent solar and wind, is pure fantasy, a staircase to the moon, breathing water, flapping your wings to work each day, anti-gravity, cold fusion, Puff the Magic Dragon.
The second big realization hitting the Electric Utopians: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors, terrorists, anarchists, and advocates of lawlessness everywhere are drooling to see America concentrate all homes, cars, and life on a vulnerable power grid, one easily hit, taken down, not to mention stripping citizens of the individual decisions they have always had on cars, heat, gas, life.
Undiscussed by most national commentators is what really happened in late February and early March, the shutdown of cell service, and access to various life needs, from communication to pharmaceuticals. What really happened? Likely…more than meets the eye.
A reasonable guess is that, with most of the power grid tied to switching done by cell towers, some “bad guy” – China, Russia, Iran, or a terror group – decided to do a “beta test,” to see if they could shut down communications, imperil something as fundamental as medicine access, to set up and future hit.
If this is worrisome, think about the wider impact: If we put all things on the power grid, given that access to the grid depends on cell service, we open the door to a nationwide blackout, loss of power for everything. What does that look like at below zero, mid-hot summer, after a natural disaster?
We need to think harder about the second, third, and fourth-order effects of “electric everything,” all this Utopian enthusiasm for something that could end life as we know it, and invite chaos, overnight. This too is real stuff, and you will find it – in the open domain – if you look hard, think, and work to understand it.
Last, the entire notion of giving up energy diversity and self-sufficiency, plus the established supply chains for gas and oil, in favor of one centralized system is nonsense. When is not diversifying your stocks, savings, and life support options smarter than all eggs in one (flawed) basket? Never.
Other issues that are now creeping, or perhaps reverse flooding, the discussion include the reality that the power grid will always be fossil-driven (at least 80 percent of it), the grid (down to transformers and wires) is too old to carry all the extra load, and the safety of electric power is also a growing concern.
This last flaw, often understated, is getting real. Many electric vehicles are now being questioned, safety questioned, recalled, and returned to manufacturers for reasons tied to safety, including school busses –in places like Maine – that leak, making electrocution a risk for school kids.
Remember, water and electricity are not friends, not when electrocution is a possibility, and not when the issue seems recurrent. So far, we have been told that our cars, trucks, trains, stoves, mowers, household appliances, and everything we power with gas, oil, and coal must be abandoned, in favor of electrifying all things, full throttle, worry not about the consequences.
That psychology seems at last to be shifting, states and feds, even the Biden administration, starting to back away from the headlong rush to embrace fantasy, and call it fact, or mandate it no matter what.
All this seems a bit odd, an eleventh-hour epiphany. One wonders if this is not just a head fake, change for the 2024 election – after which a second Biden crowd would welcome the Electric Utopians back, and keep pushing their fantasy. If so, just watch out for electric bathtubs, a different sort of shock and awe.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
RBC,
I’ve been watching the left’s strategy of pushing electrification of everything, via the so-called Climate Change hysteria that has been used to justify the massive transfer of private wealth into the hands of a small group of individuals and leftist governments since the 1970s. This is the most brilliant and yet completely obvious financial fraud scheme ever perpetuated on a global scale. Just look at how the various major players involved have profited financially in just the last 35 years. All based essentially off of a combination of fear mongering, outright lies, distorting or simply falsifying the scientific data to justify their claims and the outright suppression of large swaths of the scientific community that have tried to demonstrate how so-called Climate Change is based on erroneous data and bad assumptions.
Using a completely scientifically disproved narrative of so-called man-made climate change, via the idea that man-made CO2 emissions are driving the planet into near-term oblivion (although the target date for the end of the world keeps being moved outward every few years for the last 100+ years as those dates of doom approach), to push for a series of government mandated changes, like electrification of everything no matter how impractical it might be technologically, to facilitate what will end up being hundreds of trillions of dollars of global private wealth being transferred to individuals and government hostile to the West and any form of market-based capitalism. All to end up with 99.999 percent of the global population living a far lower standard of living, at higher real-world adjusted costs, than we do today.
As for your summation, you are essentially correct that this so-called epiphany is an illusion. Just something to get them past the elections, where they hope enough “useful idiots” will be willing to give the left another chance out of a combination of wishful thinking and being a little bit too naive for their own good. If the left does manage to hang onto power, by whatever means at their disposal, come 2025 it will be full speed ahead with not only the current electrification mandates, but a whole additional set of new mandates on top of them.
By the way, I got a kick out of your electric bathtubs idea. That was amusing. No doubt that is what the left would really like to mandate for anyone who doesn’t buy into the BS they are selling. Just create another new regulation out of thin air like they did with stoves, except for bathtubs and justify it with some junk science in the same way. Then outlaw the use of water-based showers and bathtubs and instead mandate that everyone, except them of course, have to use these new and improved electric bathtubs. That way the left can get rid of anyone who doesn’t buy into their BS after one single use.
Upside down, inside out, lunchbox joes America. I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
Considering the fact Democrats think everyone “not them” are Neanderthals, its no wonder they’re setting us all up to rely on campires for heat and light.
Reality matters not in the least to liberals. They love and adore fantasy land.
This is NOT and will never be a utopia.
Sea breezes, sun beams and unicorn farts.
Nothing beats Freedom and capitalism. The Swamp (globalists)need to try electric tubs ASAP.
The only reason our Totalitarian Communist Democrat Party comrade’s
Some videos of the arctic show images of dirty ice and snow. Black soot raining down onto the arctic from Russia and China is causing the melting not CO2.
electric vehicles aren’t anymore dangerous then that giant truck you drive around in that keeps getting recalled every five months because the terracotta airbag is messing up lol