I think that we fossil-fuel fans can see light at the end of the tunnel as the global government green energy transition experiences a head-on collision with reality.

I wish it didn't have to be this way, but really, it's the only way to tell the climatatistas that their God is Dead. Facts and logic won't do it. Instead, the believers must experience decadence and nihilism and dead bodies floating down the Rhine and know, in their eternal recurrence, that their climate god isn't going to save them.

It's Not Funny, but the prospect of a cold winter without Russian gas in Europe seems to be the one thing that the Klausi babies and the Greta Thunbergs and the gubmint-funded scientists didn't think about in planning their glorious Great Leap Forward to the green energy transition.

Good point, young Mao, in the back row. If backyard steel plants were such a good idea, why don't we all cook up lithium batteries on the backyard barbie?

A question for you sons-of-Mao green energy geniuses. Are there not wars? Are there not rumors of wars? Or did you think that your highly elevated discussions up on WEF's Magic Mountain were above all that grubby stuff?

Some people might say that this all proves Nassim Nicholas Taleb's notion of The Black Swan. I think not. If you believe that the current green energy meltdown is a totally unpredictable Black Swan event, I got a bridge... I think it proves instead Taleb's recommendation in Antifragile, that you really want your life, your home, your nation, your WEF meeting up in Davos, Switzerland, to be able to continue despite minor glitches in the supply-chain arising out of sordid little quarrels that flare up from time to time between the inheritors of the glorious Ancient Rus.

But the rubble bouncing in the Ancient Rus is the least of the green energy problems.

See, geniuses, there is this little concept called “time preference.” It says that humans discount possible events in the future. That's because it is more important to put gas in the car right now -- or plug your climate-friendly EV into the free recharging station at the supermarket -- than to worry about what gubmint- and billionaire-funded scientists say about the climate in 80 years. And it is really not a good idea to wreck the economy with green energy subsidies and pay-to-play research grants, just because you can.

And another thing, the gubmint scientists may be wrong. Ask Trofim Lysenko, Stalin's pet scientist, about that.

I fearlessly predict that by the end of the 21st century the Big Thing will be the grandsons of Elon Musk fighting over their SpaceX inheritance to see who gets to make the next trillion by sending people to Mars on the Starship Premium Frequent Flyer Program.

And, finally, humans have thrived thus far not through fearless predictions about the future -- despite the union of seers and prognosticators insisting on rigidly defined areas of prediction and prophecy -- but from humans adapting, again and again, to new conditions.

Yes, cupcake. That's what The Science says, ever since Darwin. Species survive and thrive by adapting to changes in their lived environment, not from top-down edicts from the great and the good or from the shop stewards of the union of seers and prognosticators.

Of course, I am rather more advanced in my understanding of the world than that. I subscribe to the latest hottest science -- that for some reason has not yet become fashionable among leading hostesses on Martha's Vineyard -- that we live in The Self-Creating Universe of J.J. Clarke, and that the new things "emerge" from the various Keystone Kops pratfalls of gasses, liquids, solids, plants, animals, humans, and fossil-fueled SUVs and we don't know why.

We cannot know yet how big the butcher's bill for green energy will be. But we do know this: the sooner the moment of truth arrives the less ordinary humans will suffer. Naturally, we all hope that the liberal ladies of Martha's Vineyard won't be inconvenienced too much.

The whole green energy roadshow demonstrates why the market economy beats elite diktats every time it is tried. It is because nobody knows which of a hundred brilliant new ideas will work, or what will stave off disaster, or whether the climate will heat up or cool down. All we know is that a thousand Anybody business owners will outperform an administrative hierarchy of Somebody elitists by a couple of orders of magnitude, every time.

All the flap about green energy has helped me appreciate what an amazing boon to humanity gasoline is: with a hundred pounds of gas in the tank you can drive the kids all day across the fruited plain to grandma's house. But it takes 6,000 pounds of battery to get your EV halfway to grandma's: assuming that the charging stations have electricity, California.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: US Energy Information Administration