Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, the reason that we have a difficult time with discourse is that people believe what they want to believe. And then once they’ve become hardened in that position – and I’d like to think I’m not included in this. I am always open to information that will cause me to change my mind. I am open to that.
I’ll tell you what I believe, and then say, now if you can provide me with information to cause me to change my belief, I’m open to that. But the people who are on the Left, they have two reasons. One is, many of them deeply believe it, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, but more importantly, most of them have their hand out.
And it’s a money issue. If you pay me ridiculous amounts of money to believe something, and I’m going to put “believe” now in quotes, because I don’t really believe it. I just support it because I’m getting paid to do so. That’s where we are in this country.
And the issue in particular that I want to talk about today is energy. And there was a great article by James Freeman in The Wall Street Journal. And for those of you who subscribe to it, look it up. It’s called “Why the Energy Transition Will Fail.”
And it talks about how, it says “the government of California can issue as many proclamations and prohibitions as it wants to against gasoline-powered vehicles but it doesn’t change the fact that gasoline-powered vehicles are a necessity and will remain so for the foreseeable future.”
And here’s where he goes on. He talks about this guy named Mark Mills who will be a marked man now ,because he writes for the Manhattan Institute. Mark Mills says, “Consider the years of hypertrophy rhetoric and the trillions of dollars of spending in subsidies on a transition that has not significantly changed the energy landscape, since civilization depends on hydrocarbons for 84 percent of all of its energy, a mere two percentage points lower than two decades ago.”
As a world, we spent $5 trillion on renewable energy. We moved the needle 2 percent and at an enormous increase, by the way, in the retail price of energy in those countries that have dived into this the most.
But electric vehicles still offset less than 0.5 percent of oil demand. Now, here’s what’s interesting, and I did not know this. And so for those of you who believe that we can alternative-energy our way out of carbon, if carbon is an issue, here’s a little, here’s just some tidbits.
Digital devices and hardware require an average of 1,000 times more energy to fabricate pound for pound than the products that dominated the 20th century.
It takes nearly as much energy to make one smartphone as it does a refrigerator. Even though the refrigerator weighs 1,000 times more than the smartphone, [it] takes an equal amount of energy. But the world produces 10 times as many smartphones a year as refrigerators.
So if we really want to reduce our carbon footprint, rather than having gun control, we need to collect all the smartphones in the country and put them in a nice place and turn them all off and think how much money we would save.
Because it’s also the infrastructure that supports all those smartphones that need tremendous amounts of energy. And so those on the Left who believe deeply in climate change, they need to give up their smartphones.
Global fabrication of smartphones now uses 15 percent as much energy as does the entire automotive industry. Even though a car weighs 10,000 times more than a smartphone — it’s just fascinating stuff when you look at it. Here’s something interesting.
In America, there are nearly as many vehicles as people, while in most of the world, fewer than one in 20 people have a car. Now, think about that. We’re one for one, but in most of the world, it’s one to 20.
More than 80 percent of the world’s population has never been on an airplane. More than 80 percent. And so as we look at the future of the world, and if we truly want people to become prosperous, then part of what we have to look at is, what does it mean to be prosperous as an individual?
What are the benefits that we get as Americans that contribute to what we consider to be prosperity? Are we willing, do we think it’s appropriate, to give that up and go back to what many people would say is the Stone Age?
But what we do have is countries now that have moved dramatically faster toward trying to be net zero. And those countries have seen an increase in their energy cost to consumers go up anywhere from 100 to 200 percent, and their people are becoming impoverished as a result.
Listen to the Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
