Just bread and a circus
Written for the High Plains Journal.
There are so many things going on in the nation and the world that will affect the future of food production but I am going to revisit the axe I have to grind with the “news” that the Super Bowl was powered by 100% renewable energy. Yes, for the 3 rd week in a row I am going to explain the dangers of this boondoggle and the risk of going dark that it generates for all of us.
This perpetual lie about “green energy” is going to bring about the color black for Americans in the not too distant future. If, as they reported, the Allegiant Stadium had been powered exclusively from solar sources, the estimated cost would have been $2.5/kwh (kilowatt hour). The game required 10 Megawatts of electricity which would have racked up $2.5 million just to keep the lights on.
As I reported last week, the electricity for the stadium comes from Nevada Energy. Nevada Energy gets 58% of their power from natural gas, 5% from coal and 37% from renewable (of which 4% comes from hydro). Since they refuse to tell me how they segregate renewable from the rest (probably because they don’t), we know they have lied to the world by saying that the game was fully powered by solar.
Here is the new news: Nevada Energy is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and it turns out they just released their financial report for 2023. Guess what? RECORD PROFITS! How does this company, in a disastrous economy, score a game winning touchdown with $37.35 billion in operational earnings, a 21% increase from 2022? Largely thanks to you and me, the taxpayers.
The report indicates the big money earner for Berkshire Hathaway was the insurance business and the entities that really held them back financially were the railroad and energy industries. But there is even more.
The infamous Inflation Reduction Act has pumped out billions of income tax credits to folks like Buffett. In 2019, that amounted to $500 million, it doubled in 2020 to $1 billion and ballooned to $3.4 billion in 2022. In the last quarter of 2023, their tax deduction alone was 61% and that is just for the wind development side. The solar subsidy is technically an investment credit and not a production tax credit.
Not considering just Berkshire Hathaway, the IRS is reporting that the investment tax credit for solar alone will cost the government $60 billion in lost revenue. Combine that with the wind production tax credit of $52 billion and you can see how we peasants are funding the demise of our own reliable power supply. The department of energy is now bragging about wind capacity finally achieving 37% of its full potential. Meanwhile, even with all that investment of our taxpayer dollars, solar still can’t muster providing more than 8% of the US energy supply. Not to mention that it is, and always will be, just intermittent electricity.
A friend recently told me that his grandmother still tears up when she talks about getting electricity for the first time in the 1950’s. It was a life-altering event and we are “throwing it to the wind” without one good justification other than to fully control human lives.
I sincerely hope that before these elites bleed us dry someone sheds a light on what our forefathers accomplished in enabling a great lifestyle for American citizens. Let’s not fall prey to the “bread and circus” ploy of the Roman empire. But if you remember, this did start out as a conversation about the Super Bowl. Is it too late to get some chicken wings?