We Are Living in the Dumbest Timeline Donald Trump just posted a photo of a wind turbine next to birds and captioned it “Killing birds by the millions!” He posted this without irony. For every single bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel plants kill 2,118 birds. Coal alone kills roughly 7.9 million birds a year in the United States. Wind turbines? Between 140,000 and 328,000. That is not a defence of wind turbines. We are living in genuinely, historically stupid times. Only rivalled, frankly, by the medieval peasants who blamed the Black Death on cats and promptly killed all the cats, which meant the rats multiplied, which meant more plague. At least the peasants had the excuse of having no access to information whatsoever. Trump has the internet. He chose this.

I’m typically a proud member of the American Soybean Association However, if this is the official stance, I cannot in good conscience support an organization that does not support the expansion of renewable energy simply because it comes from another crop. And I love soybeans!

A law written for energy independence is now the mechanism for food dependence. The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates that 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol be blended into American transportation fuel annually. That volume consumes approximately 43 percent of the US corn crop. The mandate was established by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and expanded by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. It was designed for a world where corn was abundant and America wanted to reduce reliance on foreign oil. That world no longer exists. Corn acres are falling to 94 million from 98.8 million because urea at $610 makes the nitrogen economics impossible. The RFS takes its 15 billion gallons from a shrinking harvest. The percentage of remaining corn available for feed, food, and export compresses with every acre that switches to soybeans. The mandate does not flex. The biology does. Waiving the RFS requires the EPA Administrator to make a formal determination that implementation would cause severe economic or environmental harm. The process involves a public comment period, regulatory review, and potential legal challenges from the ethanol industry. The EPA proposed 2026 and 2027 RFS volume requirements in June 2025 and has been targeting Q1 2026 for the final rule. The rulemaking machinery was designed for normal agricultural cycles. It was not designed for a war that closed the world’s most important fertiliser transit route during planting season. Even if the EPA Administrator initiated a waiver today, the timeline from announcement to implementation stretches weeks to months. The corn planting window closes in three to four weeks. The legal process cannot outrun the biological calendar. By the time a waiver could take effect, the acreage decisions it was meant to influence would already be irreversible. The RFS is the transmission belt that converts a fertiliser crisis into a food crisis. Without the mandate, a shrinking corn crop would still produce less total output, but the available supply could be allocated flexibly between feed, food, and fuel based on market signals. With the mandate, 43 percent of whatever corn exists is legally spoken for before a single hen eats a kernel or a single tortilla is pressed. The flexibility that markets provide is overridden by the rigidity that law imposes. The cattle herd is at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low. Poultry operations rebuilt from the 2025 avian flu but face rising feed costs. Dairy herds are contracting. Every animal that eats corn competes with a fuel pump that has legal priority. The protein cascade, from corn to feed to meat to eggs to dairy to the grocery shelf, begins at the point where the RFS takes its cut. Corn Belt legislators who championed the RFS to support their farming constituents now face a perverse outcome: the law they wrote to help farmers is the law that prevents the market from adjusting to a crisis their farmers are living through. The ethanol industry will resist any waiver. The livestock industry will demand one. The consumer will pay the difference. And the EPA rulemaking process was designed for annual adjustments, not emergency response during a 21-day-old war. Fifteen billion gallons. Written into statute. Consuming 43 percent of a crop that just lost 4.8 million acres to a fertiliser price that originates in a strait the law never contemplated. open.substack.com/pub/shanak…

There is a reason why the US actually has negative nat gas prices. 1. We produce a shit ton of gas (technical term) 2. Our shale wells are getting gassier as tier one acreage has been burned through 3. Yes, we are building out LNG export facilities but its not enough to absorb the excess we are producing. Be happy we have the lowest electricity prices in the WORLD in areas the are powered with nat gas.