By John F. Di Leo –
Europe is not burning.
When writers discuss economics and politics, we sometimes use figures of speech to attract the reader, in the hopes that a powerful visual will help carry the reader through the boredom of statistics and political analysis.
So, when activists riot, when protesters mob and chant, we may say “the city is burning.” It catches your attention. It gets the reader to keep reading.
Sometimes, unfortunately, these words move beyond figures of speech, and become literal. In 2020, the Antifa riots that took over dozens of American downtowns did in fact include arson and fire bombing. Population centers were literally set ablaze, from Kenosha to Portland. Writers didn’t have to exaggerate, when the storm troopers of the modern Democratic Party were empowered by laissez-faire Democrat city governments.
But that was unusual. Normally, when we say “a city is burning,” we just mean that there is trouble on the horizon.… that political battles are coming to a head. We mean that a choke point is approaching that may result in a wave election, a mass exodus from city to suburbs, or even a mass migration from state to state.
When energy policy enters the discussion, however, this marriage of literal and figurative usage is at its peak. Power is all about burning wood or coal, controlling the energy created by petroleum combustion, and so forth.
And in this arena, the whole world is suffering from decades of suicidal choices, following a generation of corrupted education and unprecedented political deceit.
The first major warning that big changes are on their way, sooner than most expected, was some months ago, when the people of Sri Lanka stormed their capital, in fury at the way that green policies had so suddenly and so unnecessarily impoverished their nation and devastated their food supply.
Some of us expected onlookers to learn, and to quickly react. Instead, the world chose to look away, shutting their eyes to the undeniable truth that what happened to Sri Lanka is scheduled to happen worldwide, any day now.
Look at the continent of Europe. There is no reason on earth for Europe and Great Britain to have any kind of energy supply shortages. A quarter of Europe’s power is produced by nuclear plants, the greatest and most efficient of large scale power sources. Europe has generations of its own petroleum reserves in the North Sea alone, and plenty of its own natural gas as well.
They may like buying these products from other countries with even larger reserves, and that’s fine, but they could easily make do on their own reserves for a generation or more – if they wanted to.
They don’t want to.
Instead, what have they chosen to do?
Europe and Great Britain have been inspired by the ridiculous claims of unhinged doomsayers and a carbon dioxide hating climate cult to adopt the most radical of energy policies imaginable:
Against all common sense, Europe and Great Britain are shutting down their production of dependable, efficient energy sources, and rushing headfirst into dependence on undependable, inefficient sources – wind and solar power – sources that are fine for powering a pocket calculator, or running a small medieval grain mill, or serving as emergency backup in case of a real energy blackout, but which are thoroughly insufficient to power a technologically modern nation.
As a result, Europe and the United Kingdom are bankrupting themselves, paying whatever Vladimir Putin wants to charge, for the very same kinds of energy they have themselves so foolishly stopped producing.
Europeans and the Brits are now facing tenfold increases in energy rates, or worse, as a cold winter approaches.
They’ve done it to themselves, both by shutting down their own production and by choosing to become entirely dependent on a source country with which they are currently involved in an ever-escalating proxy war.
No fiction writer would dare conceive of such an illogical plot.
To realize how severe this is, we must consider: What do we need power for? Is this a limited commodity, one that we easily can do without?
Hardly. We need energy to power everything – from heating and air conditioning to transportation and machinery. We need it to power our homes and our places of business, our entertainment and our sources of production.
Europe and Britain now face the reality that, this very winter, there will be thousands of stores and restaurants that cannot afford to stay open, because they cannot afford to power their furnaces and their kitchens.
There will be manufacturing plants that go out of business, because they can’t afford the power to operate their machinery.
There will be millions who cannot get to work because they can’t afford to power their vehicles. There will be hospitals where people die because of blackouts that shut off the power to cancer wards and operating rooms.
Such results have been caused by natural disasters before. Earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons – these have always caused such destruction, throughout human history.
But this will be a first. In 2022, this disastrous scenario is being intentionally caused – not by nature, but by government, and by the education lobby and the pop culture. It is being caused by the conscious choices of elected officials, their minds polluted by a climate cult and empowered by powerful puppeteers with a malicious global agenda.
There is still time for Europe and Britain to survive. Immediate action could at least put them on track for a return to sanity in 2023 and 2024. But it’s too late for them to avoid a disastrous, impoverishing, and largely lethal winter as 2022 comes to an end.
Here in the United States, we are still early enough along this path that we can avoid the pain entirely, if we only have the sense to open our eyes and learn from these foreign calamities.
The Biden-Harris regime, with the full support of the Democrat majorities in Congress, have rammed through these same fatal choices in executive orders, congressional actions, and bureaucratic regulations for a year and a half, but all this can be reversed in time if we elect overwhelming Republican majorities this fall (not to say Republican politicians are perfect either, but at least they will apply the necessary brakes to the Democrats’ suicidal plans).
Here in the United States, we have an election, one in which every congressman and a third of the senate are on the ballot. If our eyes are open and our minds are functioning, there is no question about what to do:
We must act – now – to eject every politician from office, from local to state to federal, who subscribes to the climate cult that drives so many awful policies, from department to department, from company to company, from coast to coast.
The Democratic Party has allowed itself to be enslaved by the utterly irrational fear of carbon dioxide; it’s an all-out assault on the modern age and on humanity itself.
If we don’t remove their hands from the controls, as fast as possible, then the lessons of Sri Lanka and Europe will be nothing compared to America‘s coming collapse.
Here in America, we depend on the free flow of abundant energy as much as anyone, and more importantly, our economy is the engine of the world. The bigger they are, remember, the harder they fall. Shutting off America’s energy will be infinitely worse than shutting off theirs has been.
Is Europe burning?
No. Europeans and Britons are rightly seething with anger and recoiling in fear, but the problem is that they aren’t burning… They aren’t burning their own oil, they aren’t burning their own natural gas… They’ve shut off their own supplies, and now, Russia is shutting off their imports.
But they will be burning this winter. Thanks to their proudly-green politicians, Europeans and Brits will be huddled by the fireplace, burning their trees, their furniture, their books, whatever they can find that’s flammable, just to avoid freezing to death.
Copyright 2022 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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