(DCNF)—“When something is unsustainable, it eventually stops,” former Vice President Al Gore said in an op/ed published by The Wall Street Journal. Given recent events, one might think Gore was referring to the ruinously costly attempts by governments of the Western world to force an energy transition via trillions of debt-funded dollars in subsidies for unreliable, intermittent energy sources like wind, solar and green hydrogen.
It has become obvious to most in the energy business now that the stick-and-carrot approach to a forced transition implemented by the Biden administration is not just unsustainable but a colossal failure. The stick of heavy-handed regulations and mandates combined with the carrot of economically ruinous government subsidies has resulted in a massive uptick in the national debt along with a playing field littered with dozens of bankruptcies by both startups and pre-existing green energy companies alike. Collectively, their waste of federal dollars makes the Obama-era Solyndra failure look like pocket change.
As critics of the Biden Green New Deal suite of policy choices repeatedly warned, the rent-seeking industries that became the chosen clients of the Democratic Party over the last four years – wind, solar, electric vehicles and green hydrogen – cannot displace fossil fuels in any scalable sense because the laws of physics don’t allow it. Too many companies in these industries also cannot be sustained for more than short periods of time without constant new injections of additional government subsidies, all of which in the U.S. have the impact of increasing the national debt.
When the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act passed on party line votes in congress in 2022, I and others warned that the Democrats in congress and the Biden White House viewed the bill as just an initial down payment on their long-term goals. A steady succession of new IRA-type debt-funded bills would be required in the coming decades to sustain the transition, and without those added tranches of trillions of dollars in additional subsidies, most startups in those non-competitive energy businesses would ultimately fail. It wasn’t hard to see this coming.
In his op/ed, Gore writes all this financial carnage off with his typical climate alarm fearmongering, saying things like “treating the transition to a sustainable economy as optional isn’t an option,” and “the cost of inaction is indefensible and unbearable.” To which the only proper response is to ask Gore to tell that to all the lower income Americans who have seen their utility bills and food prices inflate to unbearable levels as they have borne the brunt of the inevitable outcome of the policies Gore, Biden and their cronies have happily forced onto the public. It’s one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the wealthy in global history. If you want an example of unsustainability, there it is.
Most hilariously, Gore states that “in the U.S., the fossil-fuel industry, its allies and captive policymakers seek to punish companies and investors pursuing sustainability goals with frivolous lawsuits, smear campaigns and the withdrawal of state-controlled funds under management.” Holy smokes, talk about a prime example of Clintonian projection, there it is.
No industry has been subjected to a decades-long constant stream of frivolous lawsuits and smear campaigns from critics quite like the coal and oil and gas industries have sustained in modern times. Right now, today, the oil industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars defending itself against a well-organized lawfare campaign in which left-wing law firms recruit friendly, mostly-Democrat officials in cities, counties and states around the country to file frivolous lawsuits claiming billions of dollars in unsubstantiated damages related to climate change theoretically caused by emissions coming mainly from China. That is the very definition of a frivolous smear campaign and lawfare campaign rolled into one.
But it is Gore’s complaint about the effort by the Trump administration to implement a “withdrawal of state-controlled funds under management” that really takes the cake here. Apparently, this former vice president believes that elections really don’t matter at all.
But elections do matter, policies can change and billions of dollars in funds awarded to political cronies of one president can indeed be clawed back by another. Gore can rage against these winds of change all he likes, but that is American democracy in action.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
