More Red than Green
The following is an adapted excerpt from the contribution by Salvatore Babones to "Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order" (Bombardier Books, October 18). The book is a collection of original essays from eminent thinkers, writers, and journalists to provide the first major salvo in the intellectual resistance to the sweeping restructuring of the western world by globalist elites.
There are approximately 1.5 billion personal automobiles in the world, give or take a few hundred million. Before the pandemic, annual new auto sales were running at around seventy-five million a year. Thus it takes about twenty years for the world’s car fleet to turn over; longer, in fact, because some new sales replace relatively new vehicles while some older vehicles can remain in service for decades. And with battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) still making up less than 5 percent of total vehicle sales, gasoline will be the king of the road for a long time to come, even in the world’s most advanced economies. Like the Bob Dylan song says, “The Times, They Are a-Changin’” — but very slowly.
And that’s the way it should be, not only for the emerging autonomous-vehicle BEV technosystem, but for the energy transition as well. A rapid, government-mandated transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy would destabilize today’s synchronized grids long before tomorrow’s smart grids are in place to accommodate all the new, intermittent, nonspinning electricity sources that are coming online. Simply mandating the transition to smart grids won’t work, either: the individual components of smart grid technology do exist, but smart grids are designed to work at the local scale, not the continental scale of existing electricity grids. And in any case, today’s large-scale wind and solar farms require the creation of a concomitantly massive battery storage infrastructure. This approach is as inefficient as it is environmentally destructive.
The problem isn’t the idea of an energy transition. The problem is the rapidity with which the “Great Reset Initiative” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and other activist propaganda urge that it be pursued. Obviously, humankind is not going to burn fossil fuels for the rest of eternity. No doubt climate catastrophism is wildly overblown, but it would be incautious (to say the least) to burn all of the Earth’s buried hydrocarbons before moving on to other sources of energy. Even absent any climate considerations, the scourge of local air pollution should prompt us to move toward cleaner energy over the course of the twenty-first century. Given that we already have the technologies needed to live pollution-free, it makes sense to start the transition to a cleaner future.
But that transition should be gradual, incremental, and decentralized, not sudden, systematic, and centrally administered. Wind and solar cannot feasibly replace fossil fuels and nuclear power while retaining the twentieth-century technosystem of continental synchronized grids. The very structure of these grids requires that they be powered primarily by spinning generators, with nonspinning contributions chipping in only at the margins. A successful energy transition requires a new grid architecture, and that can be achieved only through incremental evolution. And the efficiency of the energy transition will be dramatically improved if electricity networks are allowed to coevolve with transportation networks.
If that conclusion is as obvious as it sounds, why aren’t we hearing more about it? The truth is that we are hearing about it, but mainly from independent engineers, not from governments, consulting firms, or international organizations like the WEF. As WEF founder Klaus Schwab and his organization implicitly acknowledge, centralization serves stakeholders, not citizens. Those are not quite the same thing. As the WEF explains in its Davos manifesto, stakeholders include “employees, customers, suppliers, local communities and society at large.” That sounds pretty inclusive until you consider who gets to speak for these stakeholders — or until you try to crash your way into a Davos panel discussion.
According to the WEF, the four “key” stakeholders with a responsibility for looking out for the rest of us are governments, civil society organizations, companies, and the “international community.” It’s a comprehensively patronizing approach to global economic and (lately) environmental management in which ordinary people play only a passive role. In that sense, the WEF’s version of stakeholder capitalism might more aptly be characterized as profit-driven communism, or even “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” It’s no wonder that China’s President Xi Jinping was greeted so warmly at Davos in January, 2017 — and again at virtual Davos in 2021. If one listens to Schwab lauding Xi’s calls for a “new era of global cooperation,” the correspondence of their visions is clear.
Inviting the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party to present the WEF keynote address in January, 2017, was perhaps nothing more than an ill-advised poke in the eye to the incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump. Inviting Xi back to open the forum in 2021, in the wake of all we know now about his programs of domestic repression and foreign aggression, can only be taken as a public affirmation of the WEF’s own warped values. In welcoming Xi, Schwab complimented the “many initiatives that China has undertaken in the spirit of creating a world where all actors assume a responsible and responsive role.” There was no hint of irony in his voice.
Like the Chinese Communist Party it seems to endorse, the WEF has in recent years wrapped a green mantle over its statist agenda, but it does not seek to hide that agenda. It revels in it. And if the coronavirus pandemic really did demand a Great Reset, if global warming really did constitute a climate emergency, if the need for an energy transition really did require us to put the entire world on a wartime footing to achieve it as quickly and at any cost, then ordinary citizens might reasonably be called on to cede their personal freedoms to the WEF’s stakeholder capitalists. Absent any such emergency, efficiency and autonomy demand a more gradual (co-)evolution of our energy and transportation technosystems. Central planning was a dead end then and would be a red end now.
No one can say for certain what the unplanned future will bring. It probably won’t bring back the hovertrain, but it is bound to be more efficient, more exciting, and more attractively livable than any future designed by a stakeholder committee. The twentieth-century transition to a transportation technosystem organized around personal automobile ownership occurred organically, evolving out of hundreds of millions of individual decisions. Our ongoing twenty-first-century transition will be best served by a similarly gradual and granular approach. Klaus Schwab, the WEF, and the “stakeholders” they represent will not succeed in planning the future. We just have to make sure that the technocrats don’t seize control of the unplanned future after it arrives.
Salvatore Babones is a political sociologist at the University of Sydney. His short book "The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts" was named “Best on Politics 2018” by the Wall Street Journal. Salvatore is the author or coauthor of seven other books and dozens of academic papers. His academic research focuses on globalization and world society theory, but he has also published articles on autonomous vehicle futures in Forbes, Foreign Policy, and other popular venues. Follow @sbabones
