The question is how to maintain and even increase our current food production levels, without compromising quality and variety. To make a long story short, that requires GOP leadership at the national level; and like so many other questions, the answer revolves around energy policy.

Our Food Production Depends On Fossil Fuels

Our productivity is nearly 100% dependent on the availability of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) to power everything from diesel trucks and tractors, to grain-drying machinery, to canning plants, to refrigeration. Intensely efficient storage and delivery of foods — fresh, frozen, canned and refrigerated — is also dependent on fossil fuels.

In fact, food production, shipping and refrigeration account for more energy consumption than pretty much anything else in America.

The lunatic left-wing fringe (LLWF) wants us to transition away from fossil fuels entirely, because they think carbon dioxide (CO2) is a bad, bad thing. LLWF governments in Canada and Europe are taxing the production of CO2, because it allegedly causes global warming. People like Al Gore want us to do it here as well.

Many more governments, including America under Obama (and a POC/LGBTQ committee that was operating Biden like a Muppet), spend billions on solar farms, wind farms and battery farms, with components built in China.

And some of the best farmland in the world has been forfeited for these renewable energy farms. The concrete foundation for one wind turbine, for example, consumes one third of an acre.

But China, India and the Third World don’t even care about CO2. China and India build massive renewable energy farms for other reasons: they’re the largest nations on earth, and have very little oil or natural gas to drill. China’s status as “world’s biggest producer of renewable energy” is often touted by China and LLWFs in the West, but it’s not done out of altruism.

Since Chinese factories build 90% of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines and high-capacity ion batteries, and since they control every price and can operate at a loss for decades, China can charge itself whatever’s convenient for these components. (It’s much the same for military hardware: China charges itself $25.00 for an AK-47 that can be sold in the U.S. for almost $2,000.)

But as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, between what they’re building in their provinces and in the Third World, the Chinese bring one new coal-fired power plant online roughly once every 48 hours. And India is doing much the same. 

For America, it would be altruism. We’re the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. Even Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia together can’t rival our fossil fuel production, because they have very little coal. Petroleum, in addition to providing diesel fuel, lubricants and hydraulic fluid, is also essential in producing most fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.

I’ve heard we can buy electric tractors now; but they’re hideously expensive, underpowered, and have an extremely short range before hours of recharging. That would be financial suicide for any corn farmer during a typical harvest. Giving up fossil fuels would either require trillions of dollars we don’t have, or an immediate return to Little House On the Prairie, otherwise known as Amish technology.

And Amish technology would require a reduction in U.S. population to roughly 60-90 million. Horse-drawn plows and horse-drawn grain wagons can only feed so many people. 

Almost all of those 60-90 million would be producing food, or building those plows and wagons, so forget about building cars. Desk jobs would have to be reserved for the elderly and disabled; if you can walk more than a mile, you can do it weeding a farmer's field. We'd be the most prosperous country in the Third World.

This would directly oppose other LLWF imperatives: a mostly information and services economy, open borders and unlimited immigration. Internal inconsistency is the hobgoblin of small left-wing minds. Imperative “A” always contradicts Imperative “B,” and both contradict Imperatives “C” and “D.”

In fact, we’d have to shut off immigration completely and adopt the unthinkable policy China has imposed for roughly 80 years: one child per family, with any additional pregnancies aborted, and a constitutional amendment to match. 

The alternative — import enough food for the other 250 million, plus any new illegal immigrants, every year until the sun burns out — is equally unthinkable, politically and economically.

“Green Energy”: A Lunatic Left-Wing Fringe Solution

Regional issues can also arise, primarily due to left-wing politics in some of our most productive agricultural regions. Until around 1970, California and Oregon produced more food than any four of the other states combined.

But left-wing political leaders in California demolished dams and cut off irrigation water to save a tiny species of fish. Construction of new coal-fired and nuclear power plants hasn’t been approved by their state EPA in roughly half a century. Plants powered by natural gas have been slow-walked, and apparently will be cast aside as well.

Oregon, Washington, and every other state that’s so Blue it’s ultraviolet did much the same. All these states prefer wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric and tidal energy. So they're vulnerable to rolling blackouts and brownouts, even in the best of times.

Michael Shellenberger, an award-winning somewhat left-wing environmentalist, has fully explained why the LLWF solution is pure folly, in chemical terms. Ion batteries, solar panels and wind turbines contain heavy metals: cadmium, antimony and lead. 

Like any other cheap, Made-in-China electric appliance, solar panels and wind turbines have a service life of 20 years or less. Ion batteries are even worse: 4-5 years. At some point, either on the way to a landfill or after they get there, they get crushed. Rainwater would seep into them and leach out the heavy metals into the groundwater. 

Here we see LLWF Imperative “A” contradicting Imperative “B” again. Do we want zero carbon emissions, or clean water for ourselves, our livestock and our crops? The latter is non-negotiable.

They have to be recycled, which currently costs more than buying them in the first place. Originally, solar panel designs included a lot of silver; they were expensive, but recovering silver offset the cost of recycling.

They were redesigned to be much cheaper, eliminating almost all the silver, because LLWFs wanted everybody to be able to afford them. So now nobody can afford to recycle them. They're mostly toxic waste. 

Smart policy would have forced the installer to deposit the cost of recycling when they were first purchased. But the LLWFs thought that installing millions of them, as quickly as possible, was far more important than planning (and preparing financially) for what we’ll do with them 20 years from now, when they burn out.

Internal inconsistency ... again. 

As Shellenberger observed, within 20-30 years we’re going to be facing a disposal crisis with all these burned-out “green energy” components. 

Most homeowners who have solar panels just wanted free energy. Being “green” about it is usually just virtue signaling; like the Chinese, they’re more cheapskate than “green.” 

The cheapskate factor will surface whenever Shellenberger’s disposal crisis arises. Rather than pay for recycling, cheapskate homeowners will be dumping burned-out solar panels in ditches, along country roads in the middle of the night, by the millions. 

Landowners along those country roads will be stuck with the recycling costs, unless they dump them along some other country road.

A Sensible Republican Solution

In this case, an ounce of prevention is worth 10,000 tons of cure. A GOP president, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, can impose an annual fee on every solar panel, wind turbine and ion battery in America, whether it’s installed or in a warehouse. 

It has to pro-rate the projected cost of recycling against the projected remaining service life. This money must be deposited into a separate national trust fund, much like Social Security, to be doled out whenever owners who paid fees into the fund are removing their burned-out units. 

The money gets doled out directly to the recycler. Then the owners are free to install new units and pay fees again, or switch back to traditional, non-renewable energy.

Just like every other sensible Republican initiative, Democrats will fight it tooth and nail — and their propaganda bureaus, formerly known as “news media,” will be screaming bloody murder. 

We’ll see focus stories every night on MSNBC and CNN, showing some working-class family that was barely able to afford installing solar panels 19 years ago, with some (left-wing) government subsidy, and is now forced to pay again in advance to recycle them, with no subsidy.

But it has to be done, in the next four years. And we need to achieve energy independence again through fossil fuel production, as we did during Trump’s first term, but lost during the POC/LGBTQ Muppeteer committee’s term.

Otherwise we face Shellenberger’s disposal crisis, or one of the other unthinkable choices outlined in the first half of this essay. My refinement of Jeffrey Folk's observations is that food security requires sensible energy policy, which in turn requires GOP leadership in Washington. 

So as I’ve said in other essays here at AT, if you ever vote for a Democrat again, you need your head examined.  

Jim Davis is an IT specialist and paralegal, with degrees in political science and statistical analysis: the underpinning of all science. His work has appeared in Newsmax and Daily Caller. You can find him as RealProfessor219 on Rumble.

Image: AI image created by Jim Davis with Hailuo AI