A little bit ago there was a fight between some younger folks in the Huntsman family and what appeared to be the establishment here in Utah. One of the crux issues was the fact that the investment in Wall Street and having money in places outside of Utah was making it so that Utah had to be beholden to people that maybe didn’t hold Utah values. Or maybe weren’t people who lived here and understood the state and its best interests.
Flash forward to now and here we are sitting on a bunch of natural resources that we’re not going to use and putting forth ideas that foster that same group of people who own the oil and gas industry that everyone is so heavily invested in, and their plan is for us to put nuclear reactors along the rivers of the Intermountain West for the sake of maintaining their electrical prices.
Meanwhile the local press is acting as stenographers for the interests of the extractors. KSL in particular is basically an advertising arm of the extraction industry, but the rotten ideas are promoted by all corporate media.
The extractors produce electricity with inefficient means like coal burning natural gas and oil and then ship it over wires to locations sometimes hundreds of miles away. We lose about 80% of produced electricity in transmission losses.
So instead of being able to utilize the massive success that solar has seen and leverage the market share that it represents with clean efficient energy that is produced on people’s homes and businesses, we’re all expected to subsidize an archaic, inefficient long-distance investment of people who don’t even live in the state of Utah.
It has gotten so now we have emergency powers being used to grant gas and oil leases in our national parks. Once again, the business leaders of our nation are doing whatever they can to circumvent the laws that people and their representatives have enacted. Just like globalization moved manufacturing out of our country to avoid environmental and workers’ rights laws so on and so forth. We are now to the point where we are using fake emergency powers to grant oil and gas leases for these same groups of people.
Meanwhile Chinese workers have a better deal than American workers and they have control of their destiny because they weren’t lied to by a bunch of greedy soulless people.
So everybody who has built their wonderful mansion here with gigantic amounts of money and loves how great the state of Utah is, is about to be under the threat of nuclear contamination if something goes wrong with one of those plants.
Not to mention you will be subsidizing the massive amounts of energy that AI uses, and the Ponzi scheme crypto mining, which uses huge amounts of energy to essentially run a gigantic, rigged slot machine. We’re going to subsidize other people’s bad idea so that the good idea that we have going doesn’t influence their profits anymore.
The Biden administration was looking to make the rollout of storage something that was good for everyone and could start to change the face of the grid so that we could get away from the oil and the bad actors in the coal and the filth and the fighting and the wars and the manipulation and the lies, decades of lies that we’ve all been forced to hear our children have been forced to hear bad information from bad actors who are only doing these things to protect profits.
Imagine being so soulless that that is your main motivation in life, if you’re reading this right now and you think your portfolio is more important than building jobs and a sustainable grid that is something that we can all participate in instead of just the Wall Street money people, then you also have a soul issue.
China has 30 some universities specializing in extractive metallurgy and 40 more in mineral processing. In the U.S., that number is zero. We have 700 people in the nation who are studying those things. So instead of thousands of new businesses and millions of new jobs across the country, we are supposed to watch as our infected investment system takes our resources out of the ground and makes profit by selling to the folks who are doing what we should have been doing here.
Not leadership, but subservience and stupidity.
In the past 30 years, the Chinese have completely taken over materials and rare earth mineral processing around the globe so that not only do we have to ship the stuff that’s here in Utah to them to get processed, we can’t even get the stuff out of the ground and we won’t be able to catch up through these people because we haven’t been investing in the technologies that do it they have processes that are 30 years ahead of us.
It’s just because of poor leadership. It’s not because we couldn’t have done this. It’s not because you couldn’t have built out the best storage system on the planet Earth. We just didn’t do it because we’re protecting oil and gas profits people who are lying to us in our own country.
These industries have done nothing but manipulate and lie for over 60 years now about what we face. So now we’re in a position where we can’t even recover in a time frame that is representative of a lifespan. These people have started and shaped wars that friends and family went to and died in.
You could argue that our country was taken over by the oil and gas industry when we went into Iraq, ruined a bunch of young lives, killed a bunch of innocent people who had nothing to do with the extraction of oil and gas, then allowed the oil and gas people to take that incomprehensible amount of wealth and turn against the rest of the planet.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not OK with the Saudis owning our golf tournaments and coming after the NBA. That’s not OK with me. And if you think that that’s not what is on their agenda with their wealth, you need to wake the up.
Allowing these oil and gas people to take over what happens and what you hear and what you read means you’re not paying any attention to what’s going on right now and you have no business being a leader.
The poor leadership and the weak spirit of the people who have been guiding Utah along is exactly why we’re in the position we’re in right now and if you want a bunch of nuclear power plants around the rivers in Idaho and Utah and the Intermountain West, then you go ahead and do what you do, but right now we have an answer to the problem.
Solar has been wildly successful. We now have cheap abundant energy that we can share with each other if we roll out a rational storage plan.
We have lithium and the rare earth minerals that we need in our own deserts. The problem has been we have not invested in any of the technology that it takes to get this done.
People around the world are just beating us with hard work and effort, which to me always was the hallmark of Utah. We’re beholden to people with money who don’t have our best interests at heart ,and it’s time for change. It’s time to make Utah the best most energy-efficient grid the world has seen, shut off the coal and the natural gas extraction, leave the woods be what they are, leave the rivers be what they are, leave all these wonderful beautiful things that we all love alone. so that we can get down to the business of building out a grid that’s good for everybody. Good for the future of our children and grandchildren.
My appeal is specifically to the grandmothers and grandfathers of the state. If you don’t look at your grandchildren and see the future and see a better way forward for them by being educated on how to do things better and learn new things and develop an economy that works for everybody and not just Wall Street people and Saudi Arabians and people who don’t live in our state and absolutely don’t have our best interest at heart, then there’s something wrong with you.
You need to check yourself and you need to understand that going forward means going forward, it doesn’t mean sitting back and letting bad things happen for your portfolio to grow. Do something about it.
Joseph William Raycraft
Oakley