Michigan is on the rise once again.
When we think manufacturing, we think Michigan. As one of America’s leading manufacturing states, it stands in the top third for economic outlook among all the United States, and it’s leading America’s industrial renaissance.
Unfortunately, some Michigan lawmakers are pursuing a series of so-called green legislative efforts that will stop the state’s progress square in its tracks.
The leading culprit is House Bill 4739, which will subject Michigan families and businesses to “a carbon-free energy portfolio of 100%” by 2035, with some minor exclusions. To put it lightly, this would devastate the Michigan economy and provide no environmental benefits.
Let’s first look at the economics.
Michigan gets about 63% of its energy from conventional sources like coal and natural gas (33.4% and 29.4%, respectively). 26% comes from nuclear, while wind and solar provide only around 8%.
This means that two-thirds of Michigan’s most affordable electricity will need to be replaced by more expensive and less reliable renewables.
In other words, higher prices and lower reliability for Michigan residential consumers and businesses.
While the pro-renewable community tries to handwave these problems away, there is enough real-world evidence that shows how harmful a forced transition to renewables actually is—especially to manufacturing-heavy economies.
Take Germany, for instance, where the political class is forcing a transition from conventional fuels to less dense energy sources such as wind and solar. Because of that, industry in the country faces a 40% increase in energy prices.
Many will blame this increase on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but that’s not the real story.
As an initial matter, the residential retail price for electricity in Germany was already triple that of the U.S. average in 2021. Germany’s reliance on Russia was a result of its push towards renewables (and its shift away from nuclear energy), which left it unable to generate the power it needed to fuel its modern industrial economy. It relied instead on Russian hydrocarbons, and that is what created the vulnerability.
And it’s being felt by German businesses.
The Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry recently reported that industry pessimism about the economy is as severe now as it was during the 2008 financial crisis and the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. Seventy-eight percent of businesses surveyed identified rising energy and raw material prices as two of the biggest risks they face, contributing to expectations that their businesses will deteriorate.
Another survey found that nearly 25% of Germany’s small- and medium-sized businesses are considering or actually relocating parts of their operations to other countries. One prominent example is German company BASF’s decision to invest in China rather than Germany (or Michigan).
The great irony of the entire episode is that Putin’s gas and oil, which was backfilling for the deficiency of renewables, is now being backfilled by coal.
There are examples closer to home as well.
Like the Michigan proposal, California has a zero-carbon energy goal, which it plans to reach by 2045. Like Germany, California imports energy to make up for its own policy deficiencies—indeed, California is America’s leading electricity importer. Also, like Germany, electricity prices in California are significantly higher than the U.S. average.
The result is that businesses and industry can’t leave California fast enough.
Why would anyone in Michigan want to replicate what’s happening in California or Germany? And who is going to backfill Michigan’s energy shortfalls?
From the fur trade to lumber to auto manufacturing, Michigan has seen its fair share of booms and busts.
Yet somehow, manufacturing always fights back.
Between 1979, when there were around 1.2 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, and 1983, the state lost over 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Eventually, manufacturing largely stabilized at between 800,000 and 900,000 jobs during the 1990s and then steadily dropped during the 2000s before bottoming out at 431,000 jobs during the 2009 financial crisis. It then fought its way back to over 600,000 manufacturing jobs when COVID-19 struck (or more accurately, governments struck down our economy with their COVID-19 policies).
Michigan needs to succeed, and removing energy options is the way to failure, not success. If Michigan’s politicians believe so much in renewables, they should prohibit electricity from being imported from neighboring states that use coal or natural gas to produce it.
Perhaps most importantly, how is Michigan’s manufacturing and industrial renaissance going to survive such a policy?
Some might argue that while the costs could be severe, it’s a price worth paying to save the planet. So, let’s now look at the environmental impact.
The Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician, Kevin Dayaratna, has investigated exactly this impact using the same models used by government agencies. He found that eliminating all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would reduce temperatures by no more than 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news and commentary site of The Heritage Foundation.)
If Michigan were to eliminate all of its conventional fuel-based emissions, it would result in the infinitesimal temperature reduction of 0.0042 degrees Celsius by 2100. Michigan needs to ask itself, after all that its industry has been through over the past century, after all the fighting back, as it sits at the precipice of a manufacturing renaissance, is it worth throwing all of that away for 0.0042 degrees over a lifetime?
The answer is no.
Article cross-posted from Daily Signal. Image by swskeptic from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
