Author: Captain Obvious

Wikipedia describes the Essenes as a mystic Jewish sect that flourished from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. The Jewish historian Josephus records that Essenes existed in large numbers but fewer in number than the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the other two major sects at the time.

The Essenes lived in various cities but congregated in communal life dedicated to voluntary poverty, daily immersion, and asceticism (their priestly class practiced celibacy). The most famous one you probably know was John the Baptist who reportedly ate locusts and wild honey.  We don’t know what else he ate.  I would doubt this is all he ate, but he was known for being different by eating these.

It is interesting to me that we seem poised to consider doing the same these days.  First of all, it is now a well-known fact that honey is an amazingly powerful food.  And bees are essential for our plants’ survival due to their role as pollinators.  Of course, insects are a key part of the diet in many parts of the world, in some cases even a delicacy. But here in the West, most cringe at the thought.

We seem to think we have risen to a higher standard of living because we can eat beef, lamb, lobster, etc.  The idea of a cricket appetizer is just not likely to appear on any American restaurant menu.

Yet, the health benefits are undeniable.  The ecological impacts are all beneficial.  And, think of the devastation locusts produce if we don’t keep their populations under control.  Plus, you simple dry them before consumption to store them and you can keep them for years without refrigeration.

No one I know eats ants or termites, but our ancestors probably did.  Genetics tells us we and primates have common ancestors if you go back far enough and primates do consider ants and termites a delightful snack.  Some animals consider ants as their primary food source.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I am not about to go buy cricket flower but you can and it gets great reviews:  Cricket Protein Powder

But, if we are serious about a sustainable planet, why are we so afraid of new ideas that can wean us off our predisposition to eat the way we do now?  Think of all the damage locusts do if we don’t harvest them?  Plus, you do know that termites are a significant source of methane pollution … much higher than all those belching cows.  You detect termites in the walls using a methane sniffer!

Yes, I am playing with you to some extent, but not completely.  What are we afraid of?

By the way, people who do think about this and have lots of money are betting on this: Emerging Tech Research Food Tech Review 

So, what is our problem?  You do remember the prison revolt in Maine … at the time no one believed you could eat lobsters. When there was a food shortage at the prison, they served lobster resulting in a riot.  The prisoners thought they were trying to kill them.  When I grew up nobody ate mussels. Maybe with the passage of time, appetites will evolve to more sustainable food sources.

Hi Captain Obvious,

Thanks as always for your thoughtful commentaries and challenges to the status quo and “politically correct” thinking out there.

You ask for another lens to look through so let me provide that.

Do you remember the commercial “binoculars” that you could put in a quarter atop a mountain or the Empire State Building?  I see Captain Obvious looking through one of those on the North side of the building, and maybe the Southside as well.  And what you are seeing–the grifting, the hypocrisy, the funny math–is all accurate as you look North to Cambridge, and maybe even South to Washington DC and the policy makers in the US Senate and current White House.

For me, as I look West, out my lens I see things a little different.

I don’t drink Climate Kool Aid nor do I believe that humans can or will save the planet from its final destiny predicted in the last chapter of the Bible.  My lens also includes a filter about power grid efficiency, about practicality, about lower auto expenses, and personal choice.  Having had six electric vehicles personally, I know the good, bad and ugly about these cars.  I don’t expect them to do everything and have never preached that they are the solution to climate change.  It is possible for a person to like and promote something for reasons altogether different from another person who has a completely different mindset, motive–and lens.

I see electric vehicles as yet another powertrain choice for consumers, including commercial entities. We saw Oldsmobile and Chevy introduce diesel powertrains in the mid-70s when the only place to buy diesel fuel was at a truck stop.  Some people, including members of my family, bought these vehicles and were proud to drive the latest technology, despite the inconvenience.  We had a Red, White and Blue 1976 Chevy Patriotic Truck to prove it–and it ran on that Diesel. The Arab oil embargo brought America to its knees and people wanted to do something. And that is their choice.

Fast forward to EVs.  Buying a toy, being a geek, getting a first-of-a-kind vehicle, showing off–there is nothing wrong with any of this.  Sure, the Kool Aid makers are passing around the glasses, and some are drinking and driving, but the reality is that cars are being manufactured, people are buying or leasing them with federal incentives, and life goes on. It is good for the economy–albeit somewhat disputed.   But so was the train and automobile.  These vehicles get people from point A to point B, albeit at a slower average rate of speed, but that is simply an adjustment people make, like getting diesel at a truck stop. And it doesn’t really matter WHY they are driving them.

There is no question that electricity made at scale has less emissions than, say a million 12-year old cars with degraded catalytic converter exhaust systems. And many of those plants are out of EPA areas of non-attainment, where the cars are still in that zone.  For example, our two big coal plants are in Bartow and Monroe County–both out of that EPA naughty zone. So adding zero-emission vehicles in congested cities with poor air quality is a net positive because the coal or gas powering those cars are relatively clean and out of the range of that lens Captain Obvious is looking through.  It is a net positive.

But what about that overnight charging that consumers and most certainly the Amazons of the world will engage in.  How much help to our electric grid is utilizing that seldom used energy in lowering prices for everyone–fractionally.  Not even the Kool Aid drinkers talk about this.  But I can see that grid from the West side of the building, and I like what these vehicles do for it.

What so many of my traditional GOP supporters react to is the loud, Kool Aid drinking messages, and it turns them off.  They go negative against EVs looking for the evil at every turn in effort to push back this supposed wave of public policy washing up on the shore.  I know the pushback all to well, and I am often mistaken for a left-leaning person–though I am anything but.  I love technology.  I love efficiency.  I love personal choice.

Captain Obvious has a great platform to speak from because he drives an EV.  He is all to aware of the car’s weaknesses.  He also knows utilities and all-things-grid.  And he knows boats too.  And when the tide is pushing the boats in a direction that is contrary to where he is going, he is like a lighthouse showing people the deeper channel with his beacon aglow.  And I respect that.  But there is another lens, and I wanted to make sure everyone walked all the way around the building so they can take a look from my evangelical, regulatory perspective.

Commissioner Tim Echols 
Vice-Chair, GA PSC
Founder, Clean Energy Roadshow
www.cleanenergyroadshow.com
Host, Energy Matters Radio

 

I have been pointing to several impending realizations about EVs for all too many years, and wondered when it would emerge and hit mainstream.  I saw it with cogeneration and then gas cooling and was the first voice of reason but was followed pretty quickly by a band of industry practitioners.  In every case, despite the economic fallout, these professionals aligned with me, and we brought reason to the situation.

Perhaps that is why I continue to write these blogs. Nobody has ever written me a response to argue with me, offering another lens to look through.  So, I have wondered when the mood was going to mature about EVs.  So with the plethora of hype articles indicating everyone was going to drive an EV shifting to an emerging recognition that it simply isn’t true, I expected the tone to be that EVs are just not for everyone.

I thought the tone would be collegiate since this is a complex subject.  Well, just like just about everything else these days, it has devolved into accusations that everyone is corrupt.  Today’s Wall Street Journal describes them as grifters, a term I simply have never heard or used.  Here is what it means:  A grifter is a person who swindles you by means of deception or fraud. synonyms: chiseler, defrauder, gouger, scammer, swindler.

This article from the Wall Street Journal offers that criticism and offers proof.

Critical thinking is hard work and requires a person to be willing to drop preconceived notions, long held traditions and beliefs.  Let’s face it, we are tired of the complexity of modern life already, and don’t want to work that hard to learn new things.  Plus, we are now so suspicious of anyone trying to convince us of anything, that we tend to turn off the inputs and drown out our confusions with our addictive modern methods of coping.

But, we also tend to forget that grifting is expensive, and we really can’t afford it.  The price tags for these seemingly noble ideas are expensive, and worse yet they don’t yield the results we thought we were going to get.

So, does calling Biden a grifter get this into focus?  Does calling Putin a thug change the world to a better place?  After all, you would think President Obama would know the impact his comment would have on negotiations between our two countries.

As I consider our collective plight managing precious resources with ever growing needs I am reminded that we all face the same plight as the child on the beach throwing starfish back into the water.  His father comes over and reminds her to look at the beach littered with starfish and says: “It won’t make any difference.”  The child remarks: “It made a difference to this one!” and throws another starfish back into the sea.

My voice alone only makes a difference to a few here and there.  Join me by raising your voices as well.  Together we can fix these things.

You know how to finish this phrase… everything looks like a nail.  That is a profound observation of human nature isn’t it?

We all have points of view, perspectives, bias, and filters on what we see and hear.  We can categorize these into simplistic labels like optimist or pessimist, but that fails to understand the mechanics of how each point of view truly operates in a society.

Let me try to explain this in practical terms.  Recent news articles are showing that the idea that white Americans are racist is catching rightful flak.  CRT was being crammed down organizational throats.  The reaction was predictable: while there certainly are vestiges of racism in our society, the broader problem is the polarization driven by social and news media in their attempt to retain readership.  If it bleeds it leads.  Well now, some media outlets are realizing that this is tone deaf.  Let’s see if their model catches on this next year.

The predictions that the world’s environmental problems can be solved with simplistic ideas like solar, wind and EVs is finally showing signs of realism: we can’t mine our way out of our problems and supply chains are real.  In fact, the costs of these ideas is now rising again for these reasons and will rise very quickly if we try to force markets to produce these devices. Meanwhile the climate alarmists sense all this and are redefining their arguments.  The recent GreenBiz VERGE Net Zero conference was careful to not talk about climate change but redefined the goal as a “pathway to safety.”  This reminds me of how our military redefined the need for funding our bases in the US as strategic readiness.  Don’t get me wrong here, I do agree with that as a better way to describe what we are trying to do.

We engineers get a bad rap in life because we almost always fall back to basic logic and numbers.  When asked whether the glass was half full (the optimist) or half empty (the pessimist) the engineer quips “you appear to have about twice as much glass as you really need.”

But, the real question with the hammer and the nail analogy is exactly that.  What are we trying to hold together?  Would a screw work better?  What about glue?  What are we trying to do?  It is fascinating to me to consider these questions on the earlier questions of racism.  Are we seeing comments about racism now because we have so many people in the HR departments searching for it to keep their jobs?  I think so.

Does the climate change market now sense their dreams are just that and are desperately trying to redefine the game before they are called to account for the lack of results in anything they are doing right now?  Yep, I think so.  This next year will force many to ask and answer a very simple question: what is this fortune in funding actually doing to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere?  When the data comes in it will show all this solar, wind, EV and supposedly beneficial electrification has made the carbon dioxide levels rise more quickly!  Thus the pivot to a pathway to safety.

Yep, follow the money.  If you make hammers everything does look like a nail.

I am so tired of hearing the boardroom and political nonsense that I have redefined ESG as Environmental Silliness and Grandstanding because that is exactly what it is.  Recent news has all pointed to the flaws in grandiose promises in the near term.  This blog focusses on the key letter that has changed meaning: we have moved from governance to grandstanding.

The idea expressed in governance is so rightful sounding.  Wikipedia is once again helpful here:

A broad (meta) definition that encompasses many adopted definitions is “Corporate governance” describes the processes, structures, and mechanisms that influence the control and direction of corporations.” This meta definition accommodates both the narrow definitions used in specific contexts and the broader descriptions that are often presented as authoritative. The latter include: the structural definition from the Cadbury Report, which identifies corporate governance as “the system by which companies are directed and controlled” (Cadbury 1992, p. 15); and the relational-structural view adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of “Corporate governance involves a set of relationships between a company’s management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders. Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined.”

Doesn’t this sound disciplined and balanced?  It sure does, if and unless those involved are deluded and drank the Kool-Aid of the progressive purists and their idealistic nonsense.  Once you accept the absurd ideas that you can ban natural gas, internal combustion engines, and decide that electricity is the right choice in the near term regardless of the economic and environmental impacts, you are on your way to pure grandstanding which is defined as:  the action of behaving in a showy or ostentatious manner in an attempt to attract favorable attention from spectators or the media.

The recent cold weather here in Georgia is going to result in power outages because the grid is no longer being planned by rational principles.  If we really believe the weather variations are going to get worse we should also realize that our historical reliability constructs are no longer conservative.

Processes, structures, control, planning, and that persnickety term reliability all come into play.

My choice of the word silliness is inadequate.  In keeping with the publishing standard that replaced education with indoctrination and alarmism I should use the politically incorrect word: Stupidity.