When talking points are created or written, they seem to be automatically rejected by the opposition.Using the term “Deep State” will set a liberal’s hair on fire and cause them not to listen.The question is whether federal employees act in a manner of their choosing as opposed to following the wishes of the President and the presidential appointees. If there are government employees who act as though they are “above” supervision (by the person for whom you voted) you should be steamed. There are and it happens frequently.
I previously wrote about the Federal Government’s Senior Executive Service (SES).The government website states: “Members of the SES serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees. SES members are the major link between these appointees and the rest of the Federal workforce. They operate and oversee nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies.”Think Dr. Fauci. Not stated, however, is that they make a lot of money and cannot be fired.If they do not like what the presidential appointee says they can just nod their head, smile, walk away and do what they wish.
The study details how our public employees decided to do what they want.If you are a “never-Trumper” you may be celebrating this, but then you are just deluding yourself regarding how much of this goes on during Democrat administrations.Yes, most Washington federal employees are Democrats. Mostly they believe they are smarter and more knowledgeable than those of us in the big wasteland of America and we should follow their lead.
The relationship between the number of positions that an administration can control versus the overall workplace is minuscule.There are estimated 3,800 positions under presidential control out of 2.2 million federal employees.This situation is made worse by the Senate confirmation process, which regularly drags on as operated today.As of this column’s timing, President Biden has named 516 appointments with 332 confirmations out of a total of 1,200 requiring Senate approval. This is over a year into his term.
Though the report repeatedly states that many of the staff “diligently and impartially” do their jobs, there are still a substantial number of miscreants.Their tactics are outlined as follows
Withholding information.
Refusing to implement policies.
Intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities.
Deliberately underperforming.
Leaking to Congress and the media
Outright insubordination.
There are many tales in the report supporting the above points.The personnel in two areas were significantly hostile.The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the EPA are the most obstreperous.As the reports cites, career employees treated Trump Administration appointees not as their bosses, but more “like an occupying army to be resisted.”
Under the category of withholding information, the report states this is a common tactic.“Career staff have agency-specific expertise. Career employees can frustrate that agenda simply by withholding their expertise or knowledge.”During the Trump years this was done frequently. National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) career staff presented case precedents to support their own positions as opposed to presenting cases supporting the Administration’s position or cases for both sides or the argument.
As a tangent to this there are documented cases of staff misrepresenting facts causing political appointees to circumvent them and do their own research.The report cites a particularly egregious case of the FDA doing this about COVID.
Then there are staff who just will not work on projects they ideologically disagree with.The report cites a case during the Obama Administration where DOJ staff refused to work on a case looking into Ivy league schools discriminating against Asians.Some perceive their employment positions are to advance their own political ideology.
Another trick up the sleeve of employees pursuing their own agenda is to produce a report that is so deficient it is junk.As stated in the report, “Draft regulations are complex documents with many legal facets. Sophisticated career staff can draft regulations that formally comply with their directives but are unlikely to withstand judicial review.” They waste our money in multiple ways pursuing their own needs.The report cites a case where experienced staff lawyers and top-level staff spent 30 days producing a report that had to be junked resulting in political appointees having to draft their own document.
Leaking information is a frequently used technique that a compliant press eats up, then refers to the source as “government experts.”Though the report identifies many cases of this, you lived through it yourself.Whenever reporters write “experts say,” whatever follows should be perceived as suspect.
And then there is the last bastion of the disloyal employee – outright intransigence or insubordination. If you cannot be fired and you think the department is your domain to be manipulated with your own political agenda, you resort to just saying “take a leap into the ocean” to your political appointee superior.Or simply ignore them.
The best case of this is that President Trump issued a hiring freeze when he came into office.At HHS, some staff just erased hire dates and changed them to January 19, 2017, the day before Trump took office.
We can go on and on and on, but you get the point.The report is easy to read and not that long.It is essential to understand how some federal employees have taken over major swathes of our government for their own means.Major civil service reform is in order, but doubtful, because Democrats receive so much money from federal employee unions.The idea of these being “public servants” has been thrown out the window.
*****
This article was published by FlashReport and is reproduced with permission from the author.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-23 03:55:002022-04-23 03:55:00Get a Government Job, Do What You Want
Recently, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a recall for electric-vehicle batteries made by LG Energy Solution of South Korea. Fires have been caused by some of these batteries, which are used in Mercedes, Hyundai, and General Motors products, among others.
The problem is that rare manufacturing defects can cause overheating and fires. An Associated Press article describing the recall notes that recalls made voluntarily by individual manufacturers for these batteries date back to February of 2020. In November of that year, GM began recalling over 140,000 Chevrolet Bolt EVs to replace possibly defective LG batteries, and LG paid GM $2 billion in compensation.
The insurance industry obviously has a stake in this matter, and a small survey conducted by its Highway Loss Data Institute showed that the rate of fires for electric cars is about the same as it is for gasoline-burners: 0.2 per 1,000 insured vehicle years.
If the best you can say about electric car fires is that they’re no worse than fires in gas-powered ones, that’s faint praise.
Combustible
The underlying problem in electric-car battery fires is the technology. You may not be aware that the liquid or gel electrolyte in the type of lithium battery used in electric vehicles cannot be exposed to air without catching fire. This is one reason that manufacturing such a battery is so tricky.
Back when photographic film was the only way to take pictures, manufacturers figured out how to make hundreds of square yards of sensitive film every day in total darkness. But it wasn’t easy, and the fact that film never got as cheap as, say, toilet paper, had an incalculable effect on the entire industry.
Unless the electric-car business manages to break free of liquid-electrolyte batteries, it may find itself stuck in a similar rut. Except for the battery, an electric car is markedly cheaper to make than a fossil-fuel one. The electronics and the motors are much simpler than the corresponding parts of a gas-powered car.
But right now, the cheapest electrics on the market are many thousands of dollars more costly than an average gas model because of the darned battery, and so the vision of replacing most of our gas-guzzlers with electrics remains just that: a vision.
Potential alternative
On the technological horizon is a development that could change all that: the solid-state battery. Michael Faraday himself (1791-1867) discovered that solid materials such as silver sulfide could act as electrolytes, which means that ions can move about through them under the influence of electric fields. But up to now, truly solid electrolytes (as opposed to the liquid or gel-like products used in most batteries today) have resisted commercialization for a number of reasons.
A significant milestone in the development of solid-state batteries happened when John Goodenough, who was one of the original developers of current lithium-battery technology, announced in 2017 that he had made a solid-state battery with a glass electrolyte. According to some sources, solid-state batteries could have up to 2.5 times the energy density of current lithium batteries, although it is not clear whether this is a volume or mass energy density. Either way, it would mean that for the same size or weight battery, a car using a solid-state battery might have a longer driving range than a gasoline car with a typical gas tank.
No one knows yet how to make solid-state batteries cheaply. Thin-film technologies such as vacuum deposition are sometimes used, and while there is concern that such technologies may be difficult to scale, vacuum deposition in other manufacturing areas has been applied to rolls of plastic and other large-scale manufactured goods. So it’s more a question of investment and effort than fundamental technological obstacles, I suspect.
Tall order
Several automakers, notably Volkswagen and Toyota, are investing heavily in solid-state battery technology. But they have the obstacle shared by all automakers that any product engineered for automotive use has to be a lot more durable and reliable than anything used in the military or even aerospace fields.
Do you think military tank drivers go ten thousand miles without needing any service, or astronauts think they’ll be able to ride their rockets for ten thousand launches without having any problems? Yet we start a car several times a day for years and expect nothing to go wrong.
It’s that kind of standard that every electric-vehicle battery is expected to meet, and the wonder is that they have come this far. Pardon an old technologist for making a statement that is more intuitive than fact-based, but when I look at a typical EV battery that consists of several thousand individually-manufactured, hermetically sealed, and electrically insulated cells, I see a technology that is fundamentally immature.
Digital computers remained the expensive province of a few wealthy institutions until manufacturers learned to take the many thousands of largely similar components and integrate them onto a chip.
Pricey
I suspect that electric cars will also remain in the realm of the wealthy until solid-state batteries bring the core cost down to the point that people will want to buy them, not because they’re afraid of global warming or want something to match their Patek Phillipe watch, but because they’re cheaper and easier to run than gas-powered ones.
In the meantime, we’re going to have to put up with recalls like the ones for the LG batteries that catch fire on rare occasions, because it seems to be the nature of liquid-electrolyte lithium cells to do that once in a while.
The best manufacturers can do is to watch their processes and inspections rigorously and hope that a better technology will come along that will let them make batteries more like people make computer chips these days, rather than like photographic film was once made, under difficult and unique conditions that are hard to maintain for long.
Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-22 13:51:422022-04-22 13:51:42Will solid-state batteries bail out electric vehicles? Electric cars currently have rather combustible batteries!
The big corporations, including but by no means limited to Coca-Cola, believe they can partner with any Leftist, no matter how hate-filled, crazy or extreme, and there will be no consequences: no boycott, no adverse publicity. They wouldn’t dream, however, of partnering with any open American patriot, for then they know the charges of “racism” and boycotts would come from Left-fascists. This perception must change. Geico dropping Linda Sarsour was a good start, but why was she invited in the first place?
Meanwhile, events such as this one legitimize and mainstream White’s hateful views, while the fact that it would be inconceivable for Coke to partner with someone who spoke out for traditional values contributes to the marginalization of those values.
Coca-Cola Consolidated and Giant Food held an Earth Day environmental cleanup event with a Democratic Washington, D.C., councilman who has accused Jews of controlling the climate.
Ward 8 councilman Trayon White Sr., who is challenging incumbent mayor Muriel Bowser in the Democratic mayoral primary, teamed up with the Coke-bottling company and grocery chain last week to host the cleanup day for Oxon Run, a stream located in White’s ward.
White’s fraught relationship with the Jewish community dates back to at least 2018, when he claimed that wealthy Jews used “climate manipulation” to cause bad weather in D.C. and donated $500 in community funds to sponsor a conference by infamous Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan….
White drew controversy in 2018 for his statements about the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish family that has been the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for more than 200 years.
“Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation,” White said in a video he posted on Facebook in 2018. “And D.C. keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city,’ and that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”
While attending a city council breakfast, White also claimed that the Rothschilds “pretty much control the federal government” and “control the World Bank, as we all know.”
After public backlash, White apologized for the remarks and agreed to attend a tour of the Holocaust Museum. But many Jewish community leaders questioned his sincerity after he walked out of the tour halfway through….
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-22 12:51:292022-04-22 12:51:29Coca-Cola Hosts Earth Day Event with D.C. Councilman who Claimed Jews Control the Weather
The story of a resurgent polar bear population deserves to be told and applauded.
Many of us watched the viral video in horror. A starving polar bear scavenging for food on barren land, his ribs visible beneath a jaundiced white coat.
“This is what climate change looks like,” said National Geographic.
The magazine explained that because of melting sea ice, precipitated by climate change, more of these mammals are starving. They pointed to a new study in Science suggesting that polar bears require much greater caloric intake in their diet than previously believed.
The video, shot by photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier on Somerset Island, sparked outcry over the decimation of polar bears due to global warming.
The footage was viewed by 2.5 billion people, National Geographicestimated. The video remains the most viewed on National Geographic’s website—ever.
What Followed
While many remember the footage of the polar bear, fewer are aware of what followed.
As Michele Moses recently explained in The New Yorker, scientists accused National Geographic of “being loose with the facts.” There was no evidence, many pointed out, that the bear’s condition was the result of climate change. The bear simply could have been old, ill, or suffering from a degenerative disease.
Mittermeier admitted as much a year later.
“I can’t say that this bear was starving because of climate change,” she wrote in National Geographic.
Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story—that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear.
The Polar Bear as a Symbol
Mittermeier was looking for visual evidence of the future she imagined, one ravaged by climate change. And she found it that day in a starving bear.
As Moses of The New Yorker points out, polar bears have become an “indisputable image of climate change.”
“The story of climate change has been told, in part, through pictures of polar bears,” Moses writes. “And no wonder: in their glittering icy habitat, they reflect the otherworldly beauty that rising temperatures threaten to destroy.”
That picture of a single starving bear arguably did more to advance the issue of climate change than any white paper or IPCC report could have. Unfortunately, the footage tells us relatively little about the actual state of the polar bear population.
What the Numbers Say
While you’ll find no shortage of headlines declaring that polar bears face extinction, the numbers tell a different story.
Data from conservation groups and the government show that the polar bear population is roughly five times what it was in the 1950s and three or four times what it was in the 1970s when polar bears became protected under international treaty.
In fact, though polar bears were placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act in 2008 over concerns that its Arctic hunting grounds were being reduced by a warming climate, the polar bear population has been stable for the last three decades.
In 1984, the polar bear population was estimated at 25,000. In 2008, when polar bears were designated a protected species, The New York Timesnoted that number remained unchanged: “There are more than 25,000 bears in the Arctic, 15,500 of which roam within Canada’s territory.”
New estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature show a mid-point estimate of 26,500 (range: 22,000 to 31,000) in 2015. In The State of the Polar Report 2018, zoologist Susan J. Crockford says updates to IUCN data put the new global mid-point estimate at more than 30,000.
Even accepting the lower figure, the estimate is the highest since the polar bear became internationally protected in 1973.
The health of the polar bear population runs counter to predictions from scholars who have said two-thirds of polar bears will disappear in coming decades because of warming temperatures and melting sea ice in the Arctic.
The good news that polar bears are thriving is unlikely to draw as much attention as images of a starving polar bear scrounging for food on Somerset Island. Nevertheless, the story of a resurgent polar bear population deserves to be told and applauded.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-22 11:52:152022-04-22 11:52:15The Myth That the Polar Bear Population Is Declining
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of articles and books on energy, environmental and human rights issues.
TOPIC: Don’t Look Up! by Paul Driessen
GREGORY WRIGHTSTONE
Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition in Arlington, Virginia and an expert reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.. He is the best-selling author of Inconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know. Gregory is a geologist with more than 35 years spent investigating the Earth and its processes. He earned an undergraduate degree from Waynesburg University and a masters degree in geology from West Virginia University.
TOPIC: Blood on the blades: are thousands of dead bald eagles too high a price to pay for “clean” energy!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 12:51:352022-04-21 12:51:35PODCAST: Blood on the blades! Are thousands of dead bald eagles too high a price to pay for ‘clean’ energy!
Since Russia attacked Ukraine two months ago, Western governments have been learning the hard way about the critical importance of energy to their national security. Germany’s 20-year, trillion-dollar “Energiewende” (Energy Transformation) has made its economy totally dependent on supplies of Russian natural gas and paralyzed its response to Russian aggression. French president Emmanuel Macron faces a tougher re-election fight this month thanks to soaring energy prices and failure to replace the nation’s aging fleet of nuclear power stations. The Biden administration is tapping America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to tamp down energy costs as inflation heads toward double digits.
As the West grapples with the energy implications of a hostile Sino-Russian alliance, the steering group of the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, whose members manage over $10.4 trillion of assets, issued a statement urging Western governments not to sacrifice climate goals for energy security. “The world is still heading for an excess of fossil fuel-based energy use that will vastly exceed the carbon budget needed to meet the 1.5° Celsius Paris agreement goal. This trend must be halted,” the United Nations-backed alliance said in its April 8 statement, arguing that “the national security argument for accelerating the net-zero transition has strengthened considerably.”
What, one might ask, is the standing of asset managers to opine on national security matters? They have no expertise in this domain. It turns out that their understanding of the economics of energy policy is defective, too.
The Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance claims that development of new oil and gas reserves will lock in fossil fuel subsidies, exacerbating market distortions. In fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2021 net-zero report states that under its net-zero pathway, tax revenues from oil and gas retail sales fall by about 40% over the next twenty years. “Managing this decline will require long-term fiscal planning and budget reforms,” the IEA warns. Similarly, Britain’s Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that net zero policies will result in the loss of tax receipts representing 1.6% of GDP. So much for the fossil fuel subsidy myth. If fossil fuels were heavily subsidized, eliminating them would mean fossil fuel subsidies disappear. Instead, it’s tax revenues that would melt away to zero.
The net-zero investors cite figures for the decline in solar and wind energy costs. These numbers are based on so-called levelized cost of energy (LCOE), a metric that aims to measure a plant’s lifetime costs. Wind and solar power are intermittent, but LCOE metrics exclude the costs of intermittency, which increase the more wind and solar are put on the grid. Because wind and solar output responds to weather and not to demand, the value of this output declines the more installed wind and solar capacity is available. It was for these reasons that MIT professor of economics Paul Joskow concluded in a foundational 2011 paper that using LCOE metrics to compare intermittent and dispatchable generating technologies, such as coal and natural gas, is a “meaningless exercise.”
Wind and solar investors don’t need to understand the economics of the grid to make money – they are shielded from the intermittency costs their investments inflict on the rest of the grid, which is one reason why their views on energy policy can be taken with a pinch of salt. Their economic illiteracy does, however, make it easy for them to subscribe to the green fairy tale of 100% renewables. They’re not responsible for keeping the lights on – that depends on traditional power plants staying fueled up and ready to spin, which is what Germany can’t do without Russian gas. Adopt the net-zero alliance’s call for no new fossil-fuel investment, and the cost of energy is bound to spiral. And if the lights go out, politicians – not woke investors – get the blame.
Investors’ opinions on energy and national security would matter less if they didn’t have political power. Bloomberg opinion writer Matt Levine argues that asset managers of giant funds form a parallel system of government that exercises overlapping legislative powers with those of governments. These government-by-asset-managers, as Levine calls them, tell companies to do things they think are good for society as a whole, “making big collective decisions about how society should be run, not just business decisions but also decisions about the environment and workers’ rights and racial inequality and other controversial political topics.”
Foremost among these areas is climate policy. Although the Biden administration has set a net-zero goal, Congress has not legislated it, and it lacks the force of law. The absence of legislation passed by democratically accountable legislators, however, presents no barrier to government-by-asset-managers legislating climate policy for the companies in which they invest. “Investors are making net zero commitments for themselves and demanding that companies issue greenhouse gas reduction targets and transition plans for meeting those targets,” says the Reverend Kirsten Snow Spalding of the not-for-profit Ceres Investor Network on Climate Risk and Sustainability.
Neither Spalding nor the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance make a case that forcing net-zero targets on companies will boost investor returns, demonstrating that this is not about investors’ traditional concerns – making money – but about pursuing politics by other means. In this, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is working hand in glove with woke climate investors. Commenting on the SEC’s newly proposed rule on climate-risk disclosure, Spalding says that for investors who have committed zero emissions by 2050, “this draft rule is absolutely critical.”
It’s no coincidence that SEC chair Gary Gensler chose Ceres to make his first appearance to talk about the SEC’s proposed rule. Of course, Gensler didn’t justify it in the same terms as Spalding. To have done so would have heightened the risk of the courts striking down the rule in subsequent litigation. Instead, Gensler attempted to justify the rule as bringing “some standardization to the conversation” and putting material climate information – the SEC issued guidance in 2010 on how companies should disclose such risks – in one place, saving investors the bother of piecing together the information from different sources. Gensler’s explanation, to put it politely, is an implausible one for imposing on corporate America what amounts to a parallel climate-reporting regime to the established framework of financial reporting. Whatever Gensler might say in public, the effect of the SEC rule – if implemented – would be to empower investors to impose net-zero targets on companies, to monitor progress in meeting them, and to hold company boards to account for them.
Unlike elected politicians, woke climate investors are not accountable for the effects of their climate policies: They exercise power without responsibility. This arrangement weakens America’s ability to respond to the geopolitical challenges of a revanchist Russia and an expansionist China. “We are on a war footing – an emergency,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared at the CERA energy conference in Houston last month. “We have to responsibly increase short-term supply where we can right now to stabilize the market and to minimize harm to American families.” Addressing oil executives in the audience, Granholm told them: “I hope your investors are saying these words to you as well: In this moment of crisis, we need more supply . . . right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”
As Granholm suggested, woke investors have been trying to do the opposite. Despite the war in Ukraine, there has been no let-up in investor pressure on oil and gas companies to scale down their operations. Whatever criticisms might be made of the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Ukraine, it is responsible for taking the awesome decisions that war involves. Investors, by contrast, have no responsibility for the nation’s security and America’s ability to lead the West. By helping investors impose their desired energy policies on American oil and gas companies, the SEC is undermining the national security prerogatives of the Biden administration and eroding America’s ability to meet the challenges of a dangerous world. The SEC is playing in a domain that it has no business being in.
EV buyers should be aware that they may be contributing to the pursuit of “blood minerals” to achieve their efforts to go green.
The worldwide movement toward the electrification of everything, from more electric vehicles (EVs) to more intermittent electricity by wind turbines and solar panels, the political actions are supportive of jumping onto the green train, most likely not knowing there is a darker side to green technology, associated with environmental degradation, humanity atrocities, and other embedded costs for materials.
It should concern everyone that those toxic components come from mining for the exotic minerals and metals that are required to manufacture EV batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. This mining is occurring mostly in less-developed countries with yellow, brown, and black-skinned people with a lack of transparency about the human rights abuses and environmental degradation in those locations.
In an attempt to make the embedded costs of going “green” transparent to the world, the Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy highlights how Asians and Africans, many of them children from the poorer and less healthy countries, are being enslaved and are dying in mines and factories to obtain the exotic minerals and metals required for the green energy technologies for the construction of EV batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and utility-scale storage batteries.
The Tesla EV has a one-thousand-pound battery that contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside the Tesla battery are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells
The environmental impact of battery production is significant. The production of lithium is either carbon dioxide polluting or wasteful of water — up to 500,000 gallons per ton of the mineral. Cobalt mining produces radioactive contaminants, including uranium. About 80 percent of the weight of a Tesla battery –requires mined materials. In practice, that means mining about 50 tons of raw ore per vehicle. If 10 million U.S.-based electric cars are sold in 2030 (about half of sales), that would translate to 500 million tons of new mining with all the accompanying emissions from mining equipment and the accompanying pollution.
All those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just – one – Tesla EV battery.
There was already a huge challenge in just making enough EV batteries. As physicist Mark Mills pointed out in the Wall Street Journal: “The International Energy Agency (IEA) finds that with a globalenergy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200 percent, 2,500 percent, 1,900 percent and 700 percent, respectively, by 2040”.
Amnesty International has documented children and adults mining cobalt in narrow man-made tunnels, and the exposure to the dangerous gases emitted during the procurement of these rare minerals, not to mention the destruction of the local ecosystems when the wastewater and other unusable ores are let loose onto the environments they have no choice but to live in because their wages are so infinitesimally small, it should cause us to take a step back and examine our moral obligations to humanity.
Not only might the planet not have the capacity to meet this demand, but many of these materials come from places that are hostile or that we do not control – such as China/Mongolia, the Congo, and Bolivia – leading to an unpredictable supply.
Most electric vehicles in use today are yet to reach the end of their cycle. The first all-electric car to be powered by lithium-ion batteries, the Tesla Roadster, made its market debut in 2008. This means the first generation of electric vehicle batteries have yet to reach the recycling stage. An estimated 11 million tons of spent lithium-ion batteries will flood our markets by 2025, without systems in place to handle them.
The actions of society are currently supportive of jumping onto the EV train, knowing that EV’s have a very dark side of environmental atrocities, and the non-existing transparency of human rights abuses occurring in other countries, both of which are directly connected to the mining for the exotic minerals and metals that are required to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries.
America could promote sustainable mining in those developing countries by restoring the land to a healthy ecosystem after the mine closes and by leaving surrounding communities with more wealth, education, health care, and infrastructure than they had before the mine went into production. Like mining in America, mining in developing countries must be the objective of corporate social responsibilities and the outcome of the successful ecological restoration of landscapes.
America’s passion for EV vehicles to reduce emissions must be ethical and should not thrive off human rights and environmental abuses in the foreign countries providing the exotic minerals and metals to support America’s green passion.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-20 04:00:002022-04-20 04:00:00Are the Environmental Impacts and Human Atrocities Worth an EV Battery?
Editor’s Note: This article is based on Mr. DeMuth’s opening address at theEuropean National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium, on March 23, 2022.
February 2020 turned out to be the last month to date of normal life in most of the world. Early in the month, a few cases of what came to be known as Covid-19 were identified in Rome, in individuals recently arrived from Wuhan, China. Soon Italian hospitals were overwhelmed and the government locked down the entire nation. Cases began popping up in other well-traveled parts of Europe and the United States, and local, state, and national authorities—with little understanding of the spread or seriousness of the disease, but terrified by the news from Italy—began locking down their populations. The global pandemic was upon us.
Two years later, in February 2022, the worst of the pandemic was receding; its wounds and disruptions were being repaired and life was springing up again. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and commenced killing its people, destroying its cities, and threatening the world with nuclear war. A natural disaster was replaced by a man-made disaster of horrifying savagery and stupidity.
The free nations of the prosperous West that have been under sustained assault constitute a great and admirable civilization. Vladimir Putin and the dictators of China and Iran are right to fear not only the allure of freedom but also its power. One of the first lessons of the Ukraine onslaught is that authoritarians are as bad at military organization as they are at economic and political organization. Our far-flung interconnectedness made the novel coronavirus an instant global killer—but was also key to the rapid invention of equally novel, miraculous vaccines that have saved millions of lives.
The Free World has also, however, fallen prey to certain soft conceits, which Putin and his ilk are right to see as weaknesses. We had imagined that the world’s troubles were amenable to rational management and apolitical expertise. We could leave them to specialized agencies somewhere up there in the cloud, or maybe in Brussels, if only politicians would “follow the science” and accede to the arc of global progressivism. That would free modern man to cultivate his individuality—his personal pleasures and grievances, his likes and dislikes. The fantasy that hard problems can be wished out of our lives has been an important source of decay in our culture, political rhetoric, and institutions of government.
But the last two years have been disenthralling. Experts claimed they could specify the path of global temperatures for a century hence within a few degrees—and it turned out they could miss the path of global disease for one month hence by an order of magnitude. Experts claimed that nation-states and borders were barbaric vestiges and that global bureaucracies could usher in peace and harmony—and it turned out we had barbarians at the gates in the here and now and that nations with borders were essential to peace and harmony. Experts claimed that global markets would bring prosperity and democracy—and it turned out they could also bring domestic division and imperial domination.
Into the breach came, willy nilly, the nation-state. It is unnecessary to argue that the United Nations and the World Health Organization proved useless in the crises at hand, for everyone could see that they mainly got in the way, or yakety-yacked while others took urgent action.
Managing a pandemic—a quintessential global emergency—fell inescapably to individual nations, with their diverse demographics, healthcare, and hospital systems, public attitudes, structures of government, and leaders accountable to actual electorates and fellow citizens. When the European Union asserted authority over vaccine procurement and distribution, it badly mishandled them—even the New York Times called it a “fiasco.” Nations that didn’t have EU insider privileges had to come up with workarounds. When the going gets tough, democracy loses patience with technocracy.
Russia’s latest war has been analyzed in terms of spheres of influence, the return of great-power competition, dictatorship versus democracy. But the heart of the matter is the integrity of the nation. An imperial power invaded a peaceful self-governing nation for conquest, aiming to seize its territory and farms and industry, to subjugate its people, and to extinguish its traditions and institutions. That is why Ukraine has become a popular cause around the world. The Ukrainians cry out, this is our land, our home, our country. President Zelensky compares his countrymen’s struggle and heroism to the historic struggles and heroes of other nations; he is even gauche enough to name names at a time when other nations are toppling their heroes. You don’t have to have taken a course in political science to understand this war. Nor to be overwhelmed by the bravery and determination of the Ukrainians and to reflect on your responsibilities for your own national home.
And the response has been a rallying of sovereign nations that few living people have seen before. In the order of nation-states, each nation defends the overall order as its own interests require or permit. Some nations have been constrained by their existential reliance on Russian energy; others have judged that they may play a useful role as diplomatic intermediaries; plus, we are going to need a delegation to inform Putin that he has lost. Close to the fray, fears that one’s own nation may be next on Putin’s hit-list, or that in desperation he may introduce nuclear or chemical weapons into the military theater, have produced a spectrum of reactions both among and within nations. But the total response has been the provision of stupendous defensive armaments and intelligence, logistical, and humanitarian support, and repudiation of Putin and isolation of the Russian economy. Most striking of all has been the many reversals of national defense, energy, and financial policies that would have been inconceivable the day before the invasion.
All of this has been spontaneous collaboration, each nation bringing its unique assets to the cause without the benefit of direction by any supernational body. The EU has been helpful as a convening body, but it has disgraced itself by imposing heavy financial penalties on Hungary and Poland, for patently partisan and ideological reasons, just as those nations were struggling to welcome and care for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. No self-respecting nation would have behaved in this manner in a time of war. Let us hope that Ukraine’s victory and EU membership will bring Brussels to a new policy of liberality towards the nations of Central Europe.
It is surely a positive development that, from terrible events, we are directing our hopes and expectations at the performance of the nation-state constrained by a renewed sense of realism.
The newly engaged nation-states came to the crises of the past two years woefully unready, following a long period of desuetude, self-indulgent politics, and, for many, mediocre leadership. Sovereignty needs to be earned continuously—through prudent finance and low public debt, diversification in energy and other requisites of national independence, and ample provision to prepare for natural disasters and military defense. Lacking these fundamentals, we have faced many tragic choices that were more painful and costly than they needed to have been. Having witnessed a display of national self-determination that will ring through history, we may be inspired to greater political seriousness in our own nations.
In the pandemic response, the diversity of national approaches, and within the United States the diversity of state approaches, yielded continuous policy competition and learning-by-doing. Among the free Western nations, the sharing of real-time data on infections, hospitalizations, and morbidity and mortality, and the rigorous criticisms of independent physicians and immunologists, contributed powerfully to policy realism. The climate-change mantra of “the science is settled” never got traction in a genuine crisis.
We are now coming to understand, better late than never, that comprehensive lockdowns and school closures were largely ineffective in controlling Covid-19 but fabulously costly to our economies and social well-being. We have gained this understanding precisely because of the knowledge generated by nation-led responses, which would have been obscured by uniform responses directed by the WHO, EU, or the federal government in the United States. For now, government restrictions are being lifted much faster than skeptics were predicting just a month ago. We will come to the next pandemic less confused and perhaps better equipped.
In the Ukraine response, it is disheartening that the German government has stuck with its plans to decommission perfectly good nuclear power plants, and that the U.S. government is still zealous to obstruct the development and use of fossil fuels. Nor has the war inspired Americans to set aside our bad habits of performative politics, personal positioning, and incessant scoring of ideological debating points. But the most striking development in the United States is that Congress has seized the initiative from the foreign policy elites, repeatedly forcing the Biden administration to revise and strengthen its assistance to Ukraine. Congress’s more representative, populist response has displayed Americans’ instinctive support for the underdog, but also a keen appreciation of the constraints and complications that attend American action.
The situation is highly dynamic, with many national elections in-store and adjustments underway in party positions and electoral strategies. Among intellectuals, the new thinking and Left-Right-Radical alignments that began with Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016 are shifting dramatically. Where government is concerned, a good rule of thumb is to Expect the Worst and Hope for the Sufficient. But it is surely a positive development that, from terrible events, we are directing our hopes and expectations at the performance of the nation-state constrained by a renewed sense of realism.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-19 03:55:002022-04-19 03:55:00The Nation is the Heart of the Matter
“This above all: to thine own self be true.” – William Shakespeare
Joe Biden, the usurper occupying, in my mind, the White House illegally, continues trying to pretend to be doing his best to get gas prices down. Remember, it’s an election year and he is about to get annihilated! Anyway. Trust me, everything he tries is just propaganda for the weak minded sheep out there who think the old man in his dotage is doing a good job!! None of it makes a real difference. It’s all charades. All a shell game where you gotta find the pea except there is no pea!
Let me explain.
First inflation and gas costs are not the sole fault of Putin or oil companies. His war is not helping but prices and inflation began their swift upward movement within hours of these leftists’ theft of our government and electoral system.
Secondly understand the gas prices we are seeing at the pumps are a direct result of this satanic administration and their energy policies on fossil fuels. They declared war on fossil fuels from the first moment they stole power. We all know, stopping drilling on federal land, no more permits, stopping construction of pipelines, putting so much red tape in front of lease holders to make it unprofitable. I could go on and on but my audience is smart and understands.
This administration sold its soul and our country to the extremists on the far left and have bought whole heartedly into the global warming lies. They say they are the party of science until science takes them in a different direction to their commie agenda. Then truthful science must be disregarded and mocked.
We see this by their choice to stop as much CLEAN production of oil here in my beloved United States of America and to buy oil from (a) our enemies and (b) from producers who will never produce oil as clean and safely as we do. Their lies and hypocrisy blow my mind as does the stupidity and ignorance of the sheep following them to the slaughter.
Let’s be honest here. If we had not made a big deal about us buying Russian fuel and therefore paying Russia’s military expansion tab in the Ukraine, we still would be. This administration is absolutely shameless. Then there is the Iranian deal they are trying to put together so as to get oil from Iran! By the way they are using China and Russia to negotiate that deal! You cannot make this stuff up.
Treason? You bet!
Oh. I forgot, they also want to buy oil from Venezuela and OPEC! All while we have enough right here for 100% of our needs plus a massive surplus we could export!
So, back to this administrations efforts to pretend they care!
That too is a lie.
They have authorized several releases of oil from our strategic reserves, oil that is there for emergencies, not to cover up terrible policy decisions in an election year. Thus they are damaging our national security – not that they care at all about that. The amounts amount to a tiny percentage of our daily use.
They have gone like the weak cowards they are on bended knees to OPEC begging them to increase production hoping that would bring the prices down. However, we were humiliated as a now weak nation multiple times as OPEC said no.
That wouldn’t have happened under Trump – in fact nothing we have seen the last 14 months or so would have happened under President Trump.
So. A brief resume of events so far before I come to their latest stupidity and lies. We have so much oil we can cleanly produce here that we cannot now obtain. We buy oil from our enemies that is produced without too much care about global warming and the pollution. We bought from Russia until the scandal came out. Now we want to buy oil from Iran, the worlds largest international sponsor of terrorism. Plus give them countless billions of dollars on top of that so they can become a nuclear armed state! Israel – look out, we are stabbing you in the back. Then we want to buy oil from Venezuela, a terrible socialist dictatorship that hates America. They will use those American Petro dollars to further keep their citizens down. Forcibly.
Everyone happy with those choices? I know I am not.
The latest scam is to allow ethanol fuel year round. This is fuel with a percentage of ethanol and sells for about 10c a gallon less. It is highly subsidized with tax payer money to the farmers.
Here is the kicker!
You get a little more performance BUT you do not get as many MPG out of it! Chicanery? Yep! Like a card shark.
Now they have just reversed course again and will begin offering for sale oil leases on federal land – again.
Hmmmmm ….. again, why? They are not reducing the red tape, cost and the years oil companies would need to start production, they are not allowing pipelines to be finished or started to move the oil cheaply once produced. These new announcements will produce more barriers and hoops for oil companies to jump through.
Most of the more significant areas of land with potentially the most easily and cheaply obtainable oil are not being included in the sales. The increased costs that will come with these leases will not encourage drilling as the oil cannot most likely be produced economically or for years. They are offering 173 parcels of land on 144000 acres which is an 80% reduction from the acreage originally stated. So not a big deal. By the way oil companies have to pay these leases monthly regardless to if they are actually drilling.
U.S. Oil and Gas Association President Tim Stewart said the following on Neil Cavuto’s show the other day after this latest Biden scam was proudly heralded by Biden’s Secretary of the Interior, that the oil crisis will be further compounded by this latest stupidity.
In his words from the Cavuto Show on Fox he said the following,
“I realize that the Secretary of Interior is very much on message with the rest of the Biden administration…which is we all pay 50% more for 80% less…she was very clear that’s what she was going to do for those oil and gas operators who were interested in doing work on federal lands, that we should be prepared to pay about 50% more in royalties and other fees that we already pay. At the same time, we’re only going to have access to about 20% of the current acreage that we have put forward to the secretary as potential oil and gas opportunities for us. It goes to this fundamental question of when we’re in a crisis like this, is this policy, will it do anything to increase production? And the answer is no…actually it will compound the problem. We have a short-term production shortfall right now. The Secretary’s actions that she announced yesterday will push this problem out three, five, seven, 10 years.”
You guys beginning to see it now? The lies. The propaganda? The chicanery?
The MSM will as always attempt to show Biden in a good light, showing how his wiseness and kindness plus his real concern for we, the people is coming out with these latest Team Biden solutions!!
DO NOT BUY INTO THAT.
TRUST ME.
THE ONLY THING THIS ADMINISTRATION CARES ABOUT IS THE TOTAL ANNIHILATION OF THIS CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-18 21:51:232022-04-18 21:51:23Bidens’ Stupidity on Gas Continues!
A foolish end to a foolish target – limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. That is the warming from 150 years ago, just 0.5 degrees or less from today forward. Of course, this is all according to the worthless computer models, but let’s go with the flow.
The massive new IPCC report makes it clear. You can’t get there from here (not that we wanted to). Not by any even reasonably possible means, so the target will be missed (according to the models). What will the alarmists do without their beloved target?
It is all about something called the “carbon budget”. Unlike the climate and the climate models for that matter, the carbon budget is very simple. It is how much CO2 the human race is allowed to emit in order to stay below the target warming.
Not how much this year, or this decade, or even this century. This is the limit forever. So enjoy it while you can because time is very short, or so says the IPCC report. In fact, time is up, over and past.
First, here is the budget: The IPCC says “…the current central estimate of the remaining carbon budget from 2020 onwards for limiting warming to 1.5°C with a probability of 50% has been assessed as 500 Gt CO2…”
500 Gigatons is a suspiciously round number but never mind. Just how big is it? The IPCC explains it nicely: “….cumulative net CO2 emissions between 2010-2019 compare to about four-fifths of the size of the remaining carbon budget from 2020 onwards for a 50% probability of limiting global warming to 1.5°C…”
So our forever budget, starting in 2020, is just a bit bigger than our emissions in the last decade! That is it, for all eternity. Note that even then we are just buying a 50% chance of staying under the dread 1.5 degree target. Not a good way to bet on the global economy.
But our emissions are not going down, in fact, they are still going up.Nor can they possibly come down enough to make any difference. We do not have time to open all the mines and build all the factories (after getting all the permits!) then make, install and operate all the stuff we would need to meet that budget (after getting all the permits). In fact building, all this stuff might well double our emissions for the next ten years. Oh wait, we have less than 8 years.
The conclusion is obvious. We are going to burn the carbon budget and keep on emitting many hundreds of gigatons of CO2 after that. There is no feasible way not to.
So how are the alarmists going to handle this failure? They have foolishly hyped their way into a corner.
The standard way the 1.5-degree target is explained in the green media is “to avoid the worst effects of climate change” but that has always been nonsense. The worst effects would occur at 6 degrees or more, not as we pass 1.5 degrees.
There is nothing in the science about a 1.5-degree threshold. No tipping point, no catastrophe, no emergency. Nothing at all, so it is a made-up number. The models get a little bit worse with every temperature increase, but just a tiny bit, and passing 1.5 degrees is no different than passing any other level. When it comes to being the threshold to catastrophe, there is no there there.
In this very real sense, the reported 1.5-degree threshold to catastrophe is a hoax. Except the people pushing it do not know that, so it is more of a colossal blunder. Except the IPCC does know it and has never corrected the activists and governments that are calling the meeting of this harmless target an emergency. This makes it a hoax by omission.
I have no idea what the alarmists will do as they finally admit that the 1.5-degree target cannot be met. But it should be fun to watch.
*****
This article was published by CFACT, Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-18 04:00:002022-04-18 04:00:00The Dread 1.5 Degree Target Is Dead
Government-driven litter can quickly become pollution.
The mask mandate for all airplanes and public transit in the US was set to expire on April 18. But on Wednesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended it for 15 days, citing an uptick in cases, especially of the “BA.2 omicron subvariant.”
“In order to assess the potential impact the rise of cases has on severe disease, including hospitalizations and deaths, and health care system capacity, the CDC order will remain in place at this time,” the agency announced in a statement.
The government wants another 15 days to assess the spread. Sounds familiar.
The expiration of the order would have been a milestone in the protracted winding down of the government-driven mask culture that has reigned supreme throughout the world since early in the pandemic. The reign of the mask has had mixed results at best, most of which were unintended adverse consequences.
Of Masks and Muck
The most visible of these consequences has been mask litter, which sharply increased during the pandemic, according to a research study published December 2021 in the journal Nature Sustainability.
“The proportion of masks in litter increased by >80-fold as a result of COVID-19 legislation, from <0.01% to >0.8%,” the study found.
We’ve all seen it: the baby blue masks on the sidewalk and in the gutter, sometimes soaked with rainwater and caked with muck. It’s a disgusting eyesore: “visual pollution” is the technical term.
And it’s not only mask litter. The study also discussed gloves and wipes. And Singapore is dealing with another visual pollutant resulting from COVID mandates: sticker litter.
In August 2021, The Straits Timesreported that, to comply with government rules prohibiting unvaccinated people from dining in, food courts were checking vaccination status at the entrance and marking the vaxxed with little stickers.
This method spread throughout the island nation. But now Singapore is dealing with an unintended consequence of its vaccine rules, as The Wall Street Journalreported Wednesday:
“Outside, scores of discarded badges ended up stuck to railings, walls, signs, traffic-light posts—practically any surface within arm’s reach, even plants. Some of the rules were eased recently, but the unwanted pandemic souvenirs remain.
Beyond the visual blight, the stickers leave behind a gummy, hard-to-clean residue.”
As the Journal hinted, it is ironic that Singapore is dealing with gummy gunk in public spaces resulting from a draconian order, given that decades ago it famously issued another draconian order banning chewing gum… to prevent gummy gunk in public spaces.
Not Just an Eyesore
Some may dismiss litter as a mere annoyance. But its visual pollution injects ugliness and chaos into our lives, mars the beauty and order humans naturally strive to create, and degrades our quality of life.
And litter can escalate into pollution that more directly impacts health. This is especially true for litter that accumulates on a massive scale due to sweeping government policies that impact human behavior en masse.
As the Nature Sustainability study warned:
“Littered items can be transported by weather conditions into drains and sewerage systems, creating potential blockages where they entangle with other solids (for example, leaf litter).”
Like I said, mask litter can be disgusting. And our natural disgust response is often a warning sign for unhygienic threats to our health. So it is no surprise that the study warned that litter can become “vectors for other pathogens and pollutants.”
The study lists several other negative environmental impacts, rounding out the list with microplastics:
“Chemical, physical and biological weathering will break the littered items down from macro-plastics (>5 mm) into micro-plastics (<0.5 mm) and nano-plastics (<100 nm) that have the potential to enter the lower food chain and have toxicological effects including the leaching of metals.”
Every soiled mask on the sidewalk should be a reminder that all government dictates have unintended consequences. Like debris, the adverse impacts of the COVID regime have accumulated, adding up to a mind-bogglingly immense total cost for society: in material security and prosperity, health (both physical and mental), and quality of life. It is long past time to clean up.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-17 19:51:252022-04-17 19:51:25How Mask Mandates Make a Mess of Things—Literally
From Greta Thunberg to children put on puberty blockers, the victims of the war on childhood are everywhere. They show up at environmental or gun control rallies holding up giant signs in their little hands, they’re indoctrinated at school to enlist as child soldiers for the latest cause.
Adults tell them that unless they save the world, they won’t even live long enough to grow up.
At the heart of the exchange of political buzzwords of the culture war is a simple question about whether childhood should exist. Leftists believe that no one may evade political commitments, and that therefore the idea that childhood should be a space apart from adult causes and concerns is a privilege that it is the job of teachers and popular culture to shatter into pieces.
And that is the war on childhood that we see all around us waged from Disney to kindergarten.
What this is really about is the leftist conviction that children cannot be allowed to be children, occupying a separate world of imagination and wonder, but must be indoctrinated into the fight as soon as possible with The Anti-Racist Baby Book and Baby Loves Green Energy. The only way to save the world is by politicizing childhood and turning children into little adults worrying about microaggressions, experimenting with sexuality, and fearing that the world will end.
Utopia, the fantasy land of progressive adults who act like children, has no room for children.
It is the job of adults to save the planet, assuming it needs saving, to debate political causes, to explore whatever sexuality needs exploring, and to build or wreck their lives how they please.
And it is their primary job to protect children from living in that threatening adult world.
Play is the business of childhood. From the Victorian era onward, civilized societies worked to create safe spaces for children to grow and learn before that became a term for whiny adults. Reformers and muckrakers took children out of factories. Growing prosperity enabled the rise of a children’s culture in which a multitude of toys and books meant for children filled shops.
Adults protected children, preserving their innocence while they developed into unique people.
Baby Boomers, a generation whose name is of an era of progeny, may have enjoyed the last golden childhood in American history. And many never grew up. The generations that followed came of age during the breaking of the American family and now the very idea of family. The indirect damage done to children is now being eclipsed by the direct assault on childhood.
The radical leftists who demand safe spaces for themselves are taking them away from children. Children are being put to work again, not in factories, which would be kinder by comparison, but in radical causes, they are being told that they are on the verge of death, that their country is evil, and the world is about to be destroyed if they don’t do something at once.
That’s where the traumatized children screaming angrily at rallies come from.
Children, especially young children, implicitly trust adults and their parents. If they’re told that the world is about to end, that they’re racists, or have to experiment with gender, they believe it.
The adults who deprive them of their innocence and their childhood are the monsters.
Instead of growing up feeling safe and protected, leftist children are traumatized at an early age by being forced to think of the world as a dangerous and evil place their parents can’t protect them from, but that they must take on the responsibility to change or else everyone will die.
The “parentification” of children began as Baby Boomer despair in the wake of the end of “Camelot”, the death of leftist culture heroes, and the collapse of the counterculture, followed by the conviction that the next generation had to take over and fix things. Adults who acted like children insisted that children had to become adults. And these days the precocious children and the immature adults are all around us. They’re also two halves of the same tarnished coin.
Adults who lacked a safe childhood assert the privileges of childhood as soon as they’re economically secure enough to supply themselves with one. They surround themselves with toys, exclusively pursue the most direct pleasures, and clamor for safe spaces and trigger warnings, for the emotional security they lacked as children. But they deny that emotional security to actual children and selfishly traumatize them for their own actualization.
Teachers on TikTok freely assert that their feelings matter more than the safety of children.
The aggressive push to embed sexual politics into elementary schools is how dysfunctional adults, including some teachers, prioritize their own sexual identity over the welfare of children.
It’s also on a par with pushing politics in general on children at the youngest possible age.
The transgender war on children is only the latest in a series of assaults on childhood by politicising everything. When African warlords enlist 8-year-olds to fight for their causes, we think that’s monstrous, but when leftists turn Greta Thunberg, an unstable teenage girl, into a heroine and encourage even preschoolers to protest over global warming, that’s activism.
Activism is how the educational war on childhood began. Now the war is not just about how children see the world, but against their bodies. Child soldiers are expected to be willing to die. The sexual identity political movement expects children to have their minds damaged and their bodies mutilated, taking away their ability to have their own children, as a political commitment.
Even African warlords would find that unfathomably barbaric.
The ancients sacrificed children to the fires of Moloch while progressives sacrifice them to their passion for wokeness. Either one is a symbolic assertion that the obsessions of the adult are more important than the safety of the child. Civilized adults don’t act this way. Barbarians, which is another way of saying children who inhabit the bodies of adults without the disciplined ethics of adulthood, do things like this because they live in a Lord of the Flies world of emotional turmoil, fearful insecurity, and angry selfishness. They see every encounter as a threat to their fragile identities, their insecurities surround them with humiliating microaggressions, and they retreat from their conviction that the world is a threatening place by escaping into fantasies.
Fantasies are supposed to be the business of children, but in the post-modern age, fantasies, supernatural, conspiratorial, political, and utopian, are all around us. And adults sacrifice children to utopian ideologies that promise that a better world is just around the corner.
All it will take is destroying childhood and then children.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
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Report urges Europe to ‘ban all business flights, private jets & internal flights…ban car use within cities…reducing heating in buildings’
Lockdown 2.0: The “Switch Off Putin” RePlanet report: “We propose bans on all business flights, private jets and internal flights within Europe to save oil, and bans also on car use within cities,” the report’s authors said. “This should be combined with free public transport.”
“In some ways, the speed of the change will resemble the Covid lockdowns,” the report noted, adding, “as, with Covid lockdowns, social pressure to abide by national restrictions will also play a big part.”
Morano:
“This ‘Switch Off Putin’ report is serving as Putin’s revenge on the West, allowing the once free West to destroy itself under the false guise of hurting — Putin.”
A new report is urging Europe to hurt Putin by imposing COVID lockdown-inspired energy bans on Europeans. The RePlanet report, being touted by the UK Guardian, is calling for a “ban all business flights, private jets & internal flights,” imposing a ban on “car use within cities” and “reducing heating in buildings,” all while “fast-tracking solar & wind” power. The RePlanet report is titled, “SWITCH OFF PUTIN: UKRAINE ENERGY SOLIDARITY PLAN – How we can stop funding Putin’s war machine.”
“We propose bans on all business flights, private jets and internal flights within Europe to save oil, and bans also on car use within cities,” the report’s authors said. “This should be combined with free public transport. While the impacts of this are not easily quantified, we believe this could double the reduction in oil use beyond that proposed by the IEA.”
The report is explicit in its enchantment with COVID lockdowns. “In some ways, the speed of the change will resemble the Covid lockdowns,” the report noted, adding, “as, with Covid lockdowns, social pressure to abide by national restrictions will also play a big part.”
The report, which calls for “energy rationing” and claims it will be “rationing via fair shares,” apes the COVID template by stating, “We may need a state of emergency declared.” The report is open about how COVID lockdowns can be the model for so much of what progressives and government leaders want to impose on society.
The first tool in the tool kit for these European academic activists writing the report is resurrecting the COVID lockdowns. The report is calling for energy lockdowns to allegedly punish Russian President Vladimir Putin, but in doing so, Europe will deploy self-inflicted punishing energy lockdowns on itself.
The report boldly demands more government intrusion in the lives of Europeans, a massive expansion of a micro-managed economy and society will be achieved by extended energy rationing, strict limits on freedom of mobility, more economic disruption, unemployment, and inflation. But according to the authors of the report, it will be so worth it because the measures will somehow “switch off Putin.” Europe will commit energy and economic suicide, but it will all be to harm Putin. Take that Putin!
The West has long targeted itself for self-destruction using the climate scare but now the Russian invasion of Ukraine is opening up more opportunities for the West to further self-flagellate itself to achieve its “climate goals.” The report is music to the ears of the global leaders, World Economic Forum, academia, and the media, who have been desperate to keep the lockdowns humming along.
A full return to a managed economy à la the 1970s is being demanded in the report, complete with energy restrictions and price caps. “Governments will need to introduce price caps and guaranteed minimum supplies at the household levels,” the report explains.
The “Switch Off Putin” report sounds an awful lot like an energy version of COVID lockdowns. Instead of opening Europe back up for domestic energy production, they are told to suffer and do with less and are prescribed the same failed lockdown-style policies they endured for COVID. It is odd how COVID ‘solutions’ also allegedly helped the climate and now the same solutions are being touted to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Let’s simplify this: The proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same — more lockdowns, hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government regulators.
This “Switch Off Putin” report is serving as Putin’s revenge on the West, allowing the once free West to destroy itself under the false guise of hurting — Putin.
Note: The authors of the “Switch Off Putin” report are Mark Lynas, Rauli Partanen, and Joris van Dorp.
Strong measures by Europe could quickly deprive Russia of oil and gas income worth billions, experts say
By Helena Horton Environment reporter
Excerpt:
Flights should be banned in continental Europe and car use banned in city centres to save energy and prevent Vladimir Putin profiting from fossil fuel sales, campaigners have said.
It would be possible for Europe to quickly end its reliance on oil and gas from Russia by taking strong measures, according to a report by the climate adviser Mark Lynas, energy analyst Rauli Partanen, and energy and sustainability installations specialist Joris van Dorp.
Policies include rationing, with everyone in Europe allowed the same minimum amount of energy to use, and limiting thermostats to 18C in winter.
The report’s authors said: “We conclude it is possible to eliminate Russian gas imports starting immediately in Europe. This will require an unprecedented level of European solidarity, a combination of a Marshall plan and a Berlin airlift to redistribute energy around the continent as needed and support the transition.”
The authors of the latest report from the RePlanet Research Institute, however, say such measures would reduce demand by 2.7m barrels a day in advanced economies, still substantially less than Russian oil exports to Europe.
The authors argue that we need to go further, and say they have worked out how to eliminate 25% of all oil use in Europe.
“We propose bans on all business flights, private jets and internal flights within Europe to save oil, and bans also on car use within cities,” they said. “This should be combined with free public transport. While the impacts of this are not easily quantified, we believe this could double the reduction in oil use beyond that proposed by the IEA.”
To replace the gas Europe buys from Russia, the authors recommend measures including stopping the nuclear phaseout in Germany, Sweden and Belgium, reducing heating in buildings by 4C, and a fast-track deployment of additional solar and wind generation.
“We know that a rapid cessation of Russian fossil fuel imports will be painful for Europe.” …
“We will need dramatic measures to reduce demand, implemented via some form of energy rationing to ensure the burden is shared fairly and does not disproportionately hurt poorer households and countries.” …
“We may need a state of emergency declared, and an explicit political recognition that European economies are now on a war footing in terms of the rapidity of the energy transition. In some ways the speed of the change will resemble the Covid lockdowns, but with a different trajectory in the longer term.”
[ … ]
“Rationing via fair shares is the only alternative: governments will need to introduce price caps and guaranteed minimum supplies at the household levels so that everyone gets a basic amount and those with less ability to pay are not simply cut off. Turning down thermostats will be difficult to mandate and enforce, but with only a certain amount of gas allowed per household the incentive to stick to it will be substantial. As with Covid lockdowns, social pressure to abide by national restrictions will also play a big part.”
#
‘Rationing’: Enviros Push Radical Lifestyle Changes Amid Energy Crisis – The authors — two of which are from the eco group RePlanet Research Institute — also argued the Ukraine crisis highlighted the need for a rapid transition to clean energy alternatives. They said large-scale solar and wind projects should be immediately green-lit and constructed.
IEA report ‘A 10-Point Plan to Cut Oil Use’ excerpts: “Reducing highway speed limits by about 6 miles per hour; more working from home; street changes to encourage walking and cycling; car-free Sundays in cities and restrictions on other days; cutting transit fares; policies that encourage more carpooling; cutting business air travel; and more.” … “Governments have all the necessary tools at their disposal to put oil demand into decline in the coming years, which would support efforts to both strengthen energy security and achieve vital climate goals.” …
Restricting private cars’ use of roads in large cities to those with even number-plates some weekdays and to those with odd-numbered plates on other weekdays
Car-free Sundays in cities: Banning the use of private cars on Sundays
‘Tax’ SUVs: “Sales of SUVs also keep increasing…policies to address the rise in sales of such vehicles – such as specific registration and road taxes – are key.” …Ban installation of new oil boilers
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-15 02:51:432022-04-15 02:51:43‘Lockdown’ Europe [again] to punish Putin!
Which is more important: human beings or exotic species?
The Batwa are a group of pygmy people who have lived in central Africa for millennia. Their homeland spreads across what is now Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shorter in stature than other Africans, they dwell in highland rainforests, where they survive by hunting small game and foraging for plants.
They are among the last Africans to adopt Western customs. Hence they are often unfairly portrayed as primitive and uncultured. Worse, in many of the countries in which they live, in each of which they are a tiny minority, they have been systematically mistreated and underserved by governments.
One wrenching example of such mistreatment is the misery of the Batwa in Uganda. In this country, the Batwa used to live in three large forests in the southwest of the country: Bwindi, Mgahinga and Echuuya.
In 1991, nearly all of them were forcefully evicted, often at gunpoint by rangers from the Uganda Wildlife Authority. The three forests were designated as national parks to protect the endangered mountain gorillas who shared them with the Batwa. Never mind that the Batwa weren’t a direct threat to the gorillas or other endangered species.
Having never adopted formal systems of land ownership, the Batwa lacked title to their forests. Clearly taking advantage of this, the government of Uganda did not compensate them and abandoned them on the edges of the forests, with neither land nor the skills with which to make a living outside the forest.
In the years that followed, many of the Batwa died, threatening the survival of the tribe itself. Of those that survived, many fell into drug abuse, begging and prostitution. They soon had the highest HIV prevalence rate of any ethnic group in Uganda. This is exacerbated by limited access to healthcare and education. Only 10 percent of Batwa children in Uganda are in formal education.
Alongside these losses must be added the greater loss of contact with the home and legacy of their ancestors, which for most of the younger generation is now alien. The only legal way for a Mtwa (singular for Batwa) to enter the forest now is as a guide, on the so-called Batwa Experience at the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, in which they re-enact the ways of their ancestors for curious tourists.
The mountain gorillas of Uganda, on the other hand, have gone on to multiply. They now number over 400, accounting for nearly half of the over 1,000 now living in the wild. The species is no longer listed as critically endangered. The sacrifice of the Batwa people to the cause of great ape conservation has paid off.
The government of Uganda charges tourists up to US$700 to observe the gorillas in their habitat. Practically none of this money ends up in Batwa hands.
The Batwa of Uganda are conservation refugees, silent victims of a global movement to save biodiversity at all costs. So silent is their suffering that it rarely even makes the footnotes when the recovery of the mountain gorilla is celebrated. Betrayed by their government and activists, their only hope now rests in the pity and goodwill of their neighbours and some NGOs.
With such support, the Batwa filed a case against the government in 2011. Ten years later, in August 2021, a five-judge bench of Uganda’s constitutional court unanimously ruled that the evictions had been illegal and that the Batwa had been treated inhumanely. It ordered the government to pay the Batwa “fair and just compensation” within 12 months.
The government intends to appeal the ruling.
This was no small victory. It marked the first substantial recognition of the unjust suffering of the Batwa. However, it is not obvious what “fair and just compensation” would look like for a people evicted from their forest home more than 30 years ago. The only fair and just compensation would be to have never been evicted at all.
So many years later, many of those who were directly wronged no longer live. Even in the best of circumstances, temporal distance from the injustice would complicate any attempt at optimal redress. Further delays, including the appeal by the government, only make things worse. Justice delayed is justice denied.
What’s more, the restoration of the Batwa’s forest home seems to be out of the question. Many older Batwa seem to be reconciled to this. This is not only because of their despair at the intransigence of the government, but also because the younger generations are unlikely to adopt the ways of their ancestors. Their alienation cannot be undone.
In any case, whatever happens from here on, the suffering of the Batwa should be a lesson for the environmental movement. The solutions we propose for the preservation of biodiversity often seem neat and well-considered, but they rarely are.
Unless we realise that future generations aren’t the only ones for whom we should protect the environment, we risk grievously harming present generations in the process.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-13 12:51:422022-04-13 12:51:42VIDEO: The Batwa paid the ultimate price to save gorillas. Do environmentalists care?
Biden’s bungling of the Iranian nuclear negotiations may well go down as the most consequential error in the history of statecraft. He has granted concession after concession to coax Iran into doing what they want to anyway, which is to revive the nuclear treaty (NCPOA) under which they would eventually acquire full nuclear capability.
The foolishness of equipping Iran’s ruling mullahs with nuclear arms is nearly beyond comprehension. These are fanatically religious Muslims, not like the Iranian people or the friendly neighbors most Americans meet. Their heartfelt belief is that life’s only purpose is submission to Allah and he has already dialed in his directions.
The entire world must eventually become a Muslim caliphate. Take your time, but use any and all means necessary to achieve successful jihad, including converting or killing all those under your control, lying when needed, and actively undermining host nations. Weapons of mass destruction would be the ultimate implement.
Yet the JCPOA negotiated with Iran by the Obama administration was full of concessions and loopholes. Iran was theoretically banned from enriching uranium to weapons grade, but enforcement was lax, inspections had to be announced beforehand and sanctions for violations were ignored.
Worse, the agreement included a 10-year sunset after which all limits were off. The Obama administration was so eager to accommodate (remember the $1.9 billion cash on pallets shipped secretly to seal the deal?) that they essentially created a framework assuring Iran’s future nuclear capability.
Fortunately, the JCPOA was never ratified by the Senate, so Trump was able to cancel it, which he did. Progress in nuclear development was slowed. Tough economic sanctions were imposed for violations, crippling Iran’s economy.
By the conclusion of Trump’s tenure, the Iranian people were growing restive and were protesting. Iran’s oppression against both America and their regional neighbors was stymied for lack of funding.
But Biden and his handlers could only see the hand of Trump in the success and therefore it had to be reversed. Now Biden is frantically conceding away, preparing to sign an agreement even worse than Obama’s infamously one-sided pact.
Biden’s proposed deal would intentionally weaken the enforcement structure needed to prevent Iran’s nuclear program development. Their illegal infrastructure housing the program would be effectively ignored.
Biden would also lift the economic sanctions in place, giving Iran $100 billion sorely needed to reboot its terrorism program. Propping up Iran’s economy is a huge favor to the ruling autocrats, too.
Almost unbelievably, Biden is assuring that Russia is also a beneficiary of the deal. Yes, that Russia, the one the whole free world is trying to weaken and punish to end their brutal, unprovoked assault on Ukraine.
Biden effectively put Russia in charge of the negotiations, where they serve as go-between, since the Iranians refuse to negotiate directly with us. In turn, Russia is demanding that Russian – Iranian trade be exempted from the sanctions imposed in response to the Ukraine invasion. Russia will effectively have a “sanctions-aversion hub” so its atrocities can continue.
Further, Biden is apparently offering an “inherent guarantee”, providing that if there is a claimed breach of the agreement by future administrations, Iran can resume full-scale development of its military nuclear capability. One way or the other, Joe will ensure their nukes.
Finally, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is the agent for Iran’s long-running proxy war which has included hundreds of terrorist attacks on military bases, civilians, and ships at sea and killed hundreds of Americans. Biden‘s brainstorm is to rescind the IRGC terrorist designation, limiting the rights of victims, including the right to sue for damages.
Over 1000 American Gold star families have written Biden urging him not to further empower the terrorists who killed their family members. No response has been received.
For all these concessions, Biden has received nearly nothing. Instead, Iran keeps “moving the goalposts”, testing the limits of his gullibility. Observers are reportedly astonished at the Iranians’ improbable success.
Our leadership’s weakness, incoherence, and appeasement are leading us into an extremely dangerous position. An unhinged, fanatical regional power that chants “Death to America” will soon have nuclear capability and empowered allies.
Where is Ronald Reagan when we need him?
*****
Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-13 03:50:002022-04-13 03:50:00Biden’s Weakness With Iran Is Putting Us in a Dangerous Situation
The only people who will be hurt by this are the Europeans who have no easy way to travel. The Western intelligentsia seems bent on committing civilizational suicide. If they aren’t able to force that suicide in response to Putin, they’ll find another angle.
Flights should be banned in continental Europe and car use banned in city centres to save energy and prevent Vladimir Putin profiting from fossil fuel sales, campaigners have said.
It would be possible for Europe to quickly end its reliance on oil and gas from Russia by taking strong measures, according to a report by the climate adviser Mark Lynas, energy analyst Rauli Partanen, and energy and sustainability installations specialist Joris van Dorp.
Policies include rationing, with everyone in Europe allowed the same minimum amount of energy to use, and limiting thermostats to 18C in winter.
“The biggest problem is gas. In total last year Europe imported 155 billion cubic metres of gas from Russia,” the authors said. Critics of the EU’s oil and gas policy have pointed out that hydrocarbon sales are financing the war in Ukraine.
Even the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said recently: “We’ve given Ukraine nearly €1bn. That might seem like a lot but €1bn is what we’re paying Putin every day for the energy he provides us with. Since the start of the war, we’ve given him €35bn [£29bn], compared to the €1bn we’ve given Ukraine to arm itself.”…
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-11 12:52:062022-04-11 12:52:06Climate Campaigners Recommend Europe Ban Inter-Continental Flights and Car Use to ‘hurt Putin’
As gas and other energy prices continue to soar, Americans are desperate for relief. The question is, what does Congress plan to do about it?
Rep. Debbie Lesko, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has some answers on today’s edition of “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Lesko, R-Ariz., pledges that if the GOP regains the majority in Congress, lawmakers will act swiftly to reduce gas prices and increase America’s energy independence.
“Republicans will introduce legislation to codify into law some of the rules and regulations that the Trump administration put forward … to reduce the time for permitting of new production facilities, reduce the time of permitting for new pipelines, and help Americans increase U.S. oil and gas production,” Lesko says.
“When Republicans come into control, we want to put America first,” she says.
Lesko discusses the Biden administration’s failure to manage gas prices, and what congressional Republicans see as the solutions.
We also cover these stories:
President Joe Biden extends a freeze on repaying federal student loans until Aug. 31.
The U.S. and over 30 allied nations impose a new round of sanctions on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
Oklahoma is set to institute an almost total ban on abortion.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.
Doug Blair: My guest today is Congresswoman Debbie Lesko, who represents Arizona’s 8th Congressional District and is a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Congresswoman, welcome to the show.
Rep. Debbie Lesko: Thank you for having me.
Blair: Now, we recently had a meeting from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce titled “Gouged at the Gas Station: Big Oil and America’s Pain at the Pump.” This was a meeting that was called by Democratic representatives and is seemingly placing all of the blame for the current gas crisis and energy crisis on big business and big oil. Is that an accurate representation of where these price hikes that we’re seeing are coming from?
Lesko: Well, it’s very clear to me that [President Joe] Biden and the Democrat policies are to blame for the high gas prices. I mean, just look at this chart and it shows that as soon as Biden and the Democrats took one-party Democrat control, the gas prices started soaring, and it wasn’t until later on that the war actually broke out.
So I know that Biden and the Democrats know that this is a No. 1 polling issue throughout the nation and so they want to deflect blame. They want to deflect blame onto the oil and gas industries. They have a constant war against oil and gas industries. And this hearing today is just another reflection of their war against U.S.-produced oil and gas.
Blair: As a representative in Congress, are you seeing that the Biden administration is trying to use Congress to get this solution solved or are they ignoring you entirely?
Lesko: No, the Democrats ignore us entirely. I mean, they have one-party control. They have since January of 2021. They have control of the House, control of the Senate, control of the presidency, and they’re basically doing whatever the heck they want, whether it’s on their open-border policies or now their war against American-made energy.
It shows and people are starting to wake up. They have woken up. They’re not buying Biden in the Democrats pointing blame to the oil and gas industry or pointing blame [at] the chicken farmers for a while for the high price of chicken, if I remember right.
I mean, they just want to deflect blame from them and come up with anything. It’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall. They’re like, “OK, let’s blame this group, let’s blame this group, so that maybe one of these will stick and the American people will actually buy it.”
Well, I don’t think the American people are buying it. And that’s why it’s always fun for me to see at the gas pumps in Arizona those little stickers like this one, it’s like, “I did that.” And they keep popping up and I think the gas stations take them down because you can see all the little sticker marks, but then people keep putting them up. I don’t know where all these stickers come from but it’s great fun to watch.
Blair: So in that vein, do you see the American people may be responding to this claim that it’s big oil or it’s big business that is causing these gas prices? Do you think that they’re responding with, “That’s just not true”?
Lesko: Well, I think it’s up to us commonsense Republicans to point out that it’s not true. And I think that’s why I had this chart, because at first, President Biden and the Democrats were blaming it totally on the war in Ukraine.
Now, that does have some price pressures to go up because after all, prices are based on supply and demand. And when we ban the imports of Russian oil into the United States, that will decrease the supply of oil and thus the prices will go up.
I find it very sad and embarrassing, quite frankly, that Biden reached out to the Saudi Arabian prince and [is] begging them basically to produce more oil and the prince wouldn’t even take his call.
And then he goes in March, and they go to talk to the Venezuelan president, which, this guy has all kinds of atrocities that he does against his people. And so now they’re apparently in some negotiations to say, “OK, we’re going to relieve you from some of the sanctions we placed on you, Venezuela, and in exchange for you producing more oil.”
So far OPEC has said no to President Biden and said, “We’re sticking with our contract that we made with Russia, and we’re only going to produce X amount of oil and gas.” And basically said, “We don’t care what you think, Biden.”
It’s really a sad state of affairs and shows the American people how quickly policies can change. Under the Trump administration, we were really energy-independent here in the United States and he promoted America first. Let’s produce more American gas and oil. Let’s free up the regulatory burden that we’re placing on U.S. companies so they can compete fairly with the world market.
And the Biden administration, as soon as he took office, did the exact opposite. He says one thing—it really frustrates me. At the State of the Union address, President Biden says, “Let’s buy American.” But he does the opposite.
In fact, their administration has an all-out war against oil and gas. And it’s not just that he stopped leasing of federal lands for new oil and gas production, but it’s the financial pressures he’s putting on businesses that want to produce new oil and gas with all of these restrictions.
Even the [Securities and Exchange Commission] has now more burdensome restrictions on all companies reporting their emissions and their supplier’s emissions and their supplier’s emissions. It’s so much burdensome regulatory that the financial markets and the capital people are like, “Wow, we don’t want to lend new oil and gas production, capital money, because the Biden administration is so against it.”
And so it’s from all angles that the Biden administration is trying to hurt oil and gas. And Biden’s answer is so out of step with the American public, saying, “Buy an electric car.”
I mean, first of all, an electric vehicle costs quite a bit of money. Now, I think electric vehicles are becoming more and more popular, but let’s face it, electric vehicles need a lot of critical minerals that are not made or mined in the United States because the Biden administration has closed down mining permits in the United States.
So now we’re going to have to be more reliant on China for the processing of lithium. China processes most of the lithium that we use in the United States for our lithium battery backups, for utility-scale solar, and for electric vehicles.
In Arizona, the Biden administration shut down a copper mine that the Trump administration had greenlighted. And that copper mine can produce 25% of all of the demand in the U.S.
So like I said, Biden says one thing, he does another thing. And I hope the American people don’t buy it.
Blair: There does seem to be this recurring pattern of failure of the Biden administration to deal with these issues. Now, we talked a little bit about how Republicans will need to be the commonsense people in the room to make sure that these gas prices go down. If Republicans are to gain back power, and if they are able to regain a majority in the House, what is the plan to give relief to Americans struggling from these gas prices right now?
Lesko: Well, we’re going to incentivize that there is U.S. production of oil and gas and that we again become energy-independent. We’re going to reduce the regulatory burden on producing new oil and gas. We’re going to reduce the permitting time it takes for new pipelines.
I mean, that’s another thing that Biden and the Democrats are against. They’re against pipelines. This is ridiculous. Of course Biden shut down the XL Keystone pipeline on Day One, I think, that he was the president. And so this even affects what the Democrats like, their renewable clean energy.
Let’s say it’s green hydrogen. How are you going to transport the new, clean green hydrogen to the places where it’s needed because they’re against the pipelines for transporting hydrogen? It makes no sense at all, their policies, and that’s what’s causing prices to go up.
Blair: We’ve heard that the president has been very open about his desire to use the sort of weight of the federal government to push for climate-friendly/climate change initiatives, including those pipelines that you mentioned, and a lot of these other natural gases and natural resources in America. Do Republicans in Congress have any plans on how to push back against this type of legislation that makes us less energy-independent?
Lesko: Well, Republicans are going to introduce legislation when and if we are back in the Republican majority. And so I think that we will put more leverage on the Biden administration, especially if both the House and the Senate go back to Republican majority. And then Biden will have to decide if he’s going to veto our bills or not.
I certainly hope we get back to a Republican majority because Republicans want America to be first. We do not want to rely on Russian oil. We do not want to rely on Venezuelan oil. We do not want to rely on Iranian oil. We want to be energy-independent.
Recently I was at a meeting and former Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo spoke. And he talked about how just about every meeting he met with foreign countries, he negotiated using U.S. energy as a tool because other countries want U.S. energy. They need energy. And if we have enough to provide to them, that is an advantage for our economy, for our national security. But obviously, if we are now reliant on Russia for oil or Venezuela for oil, that puts us at a terrible national security risk.
Blair: We are seeing that there are massive differences between the Trump-based energy policies and the Biden-based energy policies. Where would you say that those differences are the most pronounced?
Lesko: The Biden administration has a war against oil and gas made in America. The Trump administration wanted more oil and gas to be produced in America because we want more Americans to have great jobs. We want to be energy-independent. We want to have the political power that comes along with that for national security, that we don’t have to rely on hostile adversaries for our oil and gas and energy needs.
Blair: Is there any particular Trump-era policies that you think would be particularly effective at dealing with this energy crisis right now? And does Congress have any plans, if the Republican majority is to come back, to reinstitute that legislatively?
Lesko: The Trump administration did a lot of great policies by reducing regulations on American businesses to produce oil and gas and other American businesses.
So I believe Republicans will introduce legislation to codify into law some of the rules and regulations that the Trump administration put forward when he was in office in order to reduce the time for permitting of new production facilities, reduce the time of permitting for new pipelines, and help Americans increase U.S. oil and gas production, U.S. energy production, and quite frankly, all things.
As I said, in Arizona, the Biden administration shut down a mine that could produce 25% of all of the copper consumed in the United States. Now, why they would do that is just beyond me.
Blair: Now, you did mention Arizona, and obviously, as a Western state, natural resources are something that you would rely on. How has the energy crisis impacted the citizens of Arizona?
Lesko: Wow. Arizona, and especially the Phoenix Metropolitan Area, are ranked the No. 1 inflation in the entire country. Ours is at 10.9% inflation rate, so almost 11% in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. This has a huge impact on everyday Americans.
Our gasoline prices, I think today we’re averaging $4.65 a gallon. That is higher than the national average. This affects the pocketbooks of everyone. I don’t care who you are. It affects your pocketbook and so you have less money to spend on other things.
And quite frankly, Biden and his administration and the Democrat policies have really tanked just about everything that’s going on in the United States. I mean, my husband went to the grocery store last week. He couldn’t find spaghetti on the shelves.
So first of all, the prices are higher for groceries, meat, for gasoline, for electricity prices, because we need air conditioners in Arizona in the summer months. And all of those prices have gone up.
And I have a huge constituency of senior citizens that live on fixed incomes. I have about 70,000 senior citizens that live in my district, at least 70,000, and these folks are limited on how much they can spend. And when their utility prices go up, when their gasoline prices go up, when their medicine prices go up, their health care costs go up, they often don’t know where to turn.
This is a serious impact. And quite frankly, politically, this is going to be a hard year for U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, between the inflation that’s going on in Arizona and the border crisis that’s going on in Arizona’s border and across the nation.
Blair: As we continue to see federal mismanagement of energy and of energy policy, are we seeing that your state has done anything to maybe mitigate some of the worst consequences of these gas prices?
Lesko: Well, we have a Republican governor and a Republican-led state Legislature, both in the Arizona House and the Senate. So we’re a pretty free market-type state. And so we promote free markets, less regulations. Gov. [Doug] Ducey, the Republican that on Day One that he became governor, he reduced government regulation at the state level.
So we’re doing what we can in Arizona. But when President Biden and the Democrats who are in control go against us and go against the Arizona citizens all the time, it’s hard to overcome. Their policies are ruining America.
Blair: Now, as we begin to wrap-up, is there a conservative solution that we can pursue to lower these gas prices while still being aware of the fact that we have a hostile administration who’s going to try and prevent conservative policies from being instituted?
Lesko: Yeah. If we get back the Republican majority in the House and the Senate, we’re going to introduce legislation that will incentivize new oil and gas production in America. We’ll incentivize new other energy sources in America. And we need to get control of our spending as well.
I mean, it’s one thing to help people that are in need, and it was important when government shut down businesses during the pandemic to help make sure that the workers kept their job, but now the Democrats want to spend more. They just keep on wanting to spend money. And that is going to really adversely affect not only are national debt, the amount of interest that we are paying, but our national security as well.
And so when Republicans come in control, we want to, again, put America first. Now, it depends kind of how much majority we have, and wouldn’t it be nice if we had 60 Republicans in the Senate? That would be great. But it depends on what the outcome is and what Republican majority we have. It’s going to be tough, quite frankly, with Biden in there. He’s gone so liberal. But hopefully, if Republicans control both the House and the Senate, we’ll have a bit more leverage with him.
Blair: That does occur to me as I mentioned, it will be difficult, obviously, with President Biden in the White House, who is not particularly conducive to these types of policies that we’re proposing. What are Republicans going to do if we keep seeing veto after veto after veto of these types of bills?
Lesko: Well, I think if President Biden vetoes every single bill that Republicans put forward, assuming we get back the majority in the House and the Senate, then I think it will lead to a Republican president in 2024.
Because the American people will see that we are trying to reverse some of the bad policies that Biden and the Democrats put forward, and we have to do it. We have to put forth the legislation, whether we think that President Biden is going to veto it or not, because we have to show to the American public that we are working for them and we are working for America.
And I think it would be a mistake for President Biden to thwart us repeatedly because then it will have an impact on the presidential election and I think it will help elect a Republican president.
Blair: Excellent. That was Congresswoman Debbie Lesko, who represents Arizona’s 8th Congressional District and is a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Congresswoman, thank you so much for your time.
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If there is one thing we can expect from the Green Movement is that it will do its best to mislead the public with very clever public relations. But a lie is a lie, even if cleverly told.
This has manifested itself in two ways rather recently.
First, they continue to claim that “renewables” specifically wind turbines and solar, can replace quickly the energy output of coal and natural gas. A subset of that argument is that wind and solar are less impactful to the environment than oil and gas.
Neither of these assertions is true.
We urge you to view the adjacent video by Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist who has come to see the contradictions and errors in Green policy.
Secondly, they claim that since the Russian-Ukrainian War has left especially Europe, and the rest of the world, short of energy, the only way to get energy “independence” is to double down on their Green agenda. But it was their Green policies that made the West so vulnerable and dependent on Russian oil and gas. Having succeeded in making Europe especially vulnerable, their solution is more windmills and solar panels.
The latter position explains the nonsensical response of the Biden Administration, which has done everything possible to suppress domestic oil and gas production while at the same time putting enormous funds towards wind and solar, some $555 Billion, in his so-called Build Back Better Plan.
Obviously, expanding U.S. oil and gas production is an alternative answer, and a good one. We benefit economically from the expansion, our citizens find employment, and our extraction of hydrocarbons is more efficient and cleaner than other sources outside of the U.S.
But Biden and the Greens are opposed to that, even as a short-term expedient.
It wasn’t the choice of consumers or utilities, but the European government’s top-down policy to shut down coal, oil, and nuclear, and then put total reliance on renewables. And because renewables are so expensive and unreliable, they then had to get the energy they need from Russia.
So, dependence was not a natural development but a byproduct of mostly German policy. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear power and is not nearly as vulnerable as Germany.
Given the evidence that Russian money is behind many of the environmental groups, it could be said dependence was not a byproduct of policy, but in fact the purpose of the policy.
Thus, the Green movement offers this twisted proposition: Our Green policies have made you dependent when you need not be, but the further adoption of our plans is the only road to energy independence! Heads we win, tails you lose.
The hidden losing proposition they have for us is they want to substitute energy dependence on Russia or Saudi Arabia ( because they won’t let us produce our own energy) and shift to solar, wind, and electric vehicles, so we can be dependent on China, Congo, and Peru for rare earth metals. This is a false choice. At least for the US, we need not be dependent. The Green policies make us dependent. Not long ago, we were a net exporter of oil and gas. Even Europe has considerable oil and gas production they could tap into. So the trade they propose, if solar and wind actually can be brought to scale, is to substitute mineral dependence for energy dependence.
Besides mineral dependence, there also is manufacturing dependence. Overwhelmingly, solar panels and windmills are made in China.
We have just seen how Russia is squeezing Europe over energy. Why would we want to become more dependent on China for the production of energy equipment and vital minerals? That seems beyond naive and into the realm of a national security death wish.
Biden joined the European Greens by shutting down a pipeline from Israeli gas fields that would have brought gas to Europe, and felt somehow the environment would find Russian gas more wonderful that Israeli gas. This is the same sort of thing we saw domestically: Biden shuts down U.S. production and goes begging for oil from Iran and Venezuela as if their hydrocarbons are “better” than ours for the environment.
Biden and California Democrats also have joined the European Greens by inflicting German-like policies in the United States. There is no reason why clean natural gas from Pennsylvania cannot be augmented by clean natural gas from adjacent New York. The US has lots of clean-burning gas. Expensive gas is purely a political decision by Democrats.
It is also obvious that green technology, even after years of subsidies, is not ready to take over the heavy lifting of energy production. Natural gas has to back up “renewables” because they are intermittent and storage of electricity is not yet feasible. If this transition to total renewables is even technically feasible, it is likely at least 30 to 40 years out. Yet the Green Movement insists there are no technical, environmental, or economic problems. For them, it is simply a lack of political will. With political will, they believe it can all be done NOW. That is simply impossible.
One sure sign of an environmentalist that tells you they simply are not serious about their dreams, is their opposition to nuclear power.
As Shellenberger shows, nuclear power is safe, reliable, and clean, and even with all the environmentalist’s lawsuits driving up costs, it is far cheaper. It has much less impact on the land and animals. And very importantly, we are not dependent on the Chinese.
The Greens also have a very narrow view of oil and gas. They see it only in terms of energy. All they can think about is closing down production, and driving up the price of hydrocarbons, to make their pet projects look better by comparison.
What they fail to notice are the second-order side effects. Two of these have become quite evident.
Greens don’t seem to understand that thousands of products from plastic, chemicals, and fertilizer are derived from oil and natural gas. Drive up the price of natural gas, and it not only makes windmills look more viable, but it also drives up the price of fertilizer, which drives up the price of food, which will kill millions in the third world.
It also heavily contributes to “cost-push” inflation, which causes interest rates to rise, and lowers the standard of living for everyone, especially the elderly on a fixed income, which in turn could induce severe economic recession and privation in both the developed world and less developed countries.
Thus, in order to make their pet projects look better in relative terms, they in essence are willing to literally starve people to death and cause millions to lose their jobs. We are already seeing food riots in Peru and Sri Lanka, and likely food turmoil is just starting.
Inflation and recession, coupled with food shortages, are a prescription for social and political turmoil.
Such turmoil could not only destroy the standard of living for many people, but it can also create social violence and a loss of personal freedom.
Covering massive amounts of land with windmills and solar panels itself has a significant environmental impact. And, a lot of energy is consumed to make these things.
As Shellenberger notes, we may be destroying the environment to save the climate, which fluctuates by itself anyway.
What kind of a dream is this?
Add up all the first and second-order problems with the Green agenda and you realize what a high price we will all pay for their unrealistic dreams.
Their dream is our nightmare.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-11 04:00:002022-04-11 04:00:00The Green Con Job on Energy Independence: Their Dream is Our Nightmare
CEO of Germany’s multinational BASF SE, the world’s largest chemical producer, has warned that curbing or cutting off energy imports from Russia would bring into doubt the continued existence of small and medium-sized energy companies, and further would likely spiral Germany into its most “catastrophic” economic crisis going back to the end of World War 2.
Company CEO Martin Brudermuller issued the words in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper just ahead of German officials by midweek giving an “early warning” to industries and the population of possible natural gas shortages, as Russia appears ready to firmly hold to Putin’s recent declaration that “unfriendly countries” must settle energy payments in rubles, related to the Ukraine crisis and resultant Western sanctions.
According to Bloomberg he mused that while “Germany could be independent of Russia gas in four to five years” it remains that “LNG imports cannot be increased quickly enough to replace all Russian gas flows in the short term.”
But in the meantime, Brudermuller described that “It’s not enough that we all turn down the heating by 2 degrees now” given that “Russia covers 55 percent of German natural gas consumption.” He emphasized that if Russian gas disappeared overnight, “many things would collapse here” – given that “we would have high levels of unemployment, and many companies would go bankrupt. This would lead to irreversible damage.” He continued:
“To put it bluntly: This could bring the German economy into its worst crisis since the end of the Second World War and destroy our prosperity. For many small and medium-sized companies in particular, it could mean the end. We can’t risk that!”
The dire warning of coming disaster in the event Russian gas is shut off came in response being questioned over whether it’s at all possible to abandon Russian energy.
Asserting that this issue is not “black and white” – and that the German economy stands on the brink of catastrophe,the BASF CEO said that if this standoff continues to escalate it will “open the eyes of many on both sides”…
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Biden’s energy policies are even worse than gunning acceleration of a car in stop-and-go traffic … more like trying to move forward with one foot jamming the gas pedal and the other simultaneously clamping down on the brake.
What you wind up with is lots of smoke, a burned-out engine, and a vehicle destined to go nowhere.
Take, for example, Joe’s recent offer to help self-inflicted energy-starved Europe replace Russia as its main natural gas supplier as he works to put American producers out of business.
The White House posted a joint March 25 statement by President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: “We’re going to have to make sure the families in Europe can get through this winter and the next,” it said in announcing a deal to “provide 15 billion cubic meters of gas this year, though not all from the U.S.”
The statement added: “At the same time, this crisis also presents an opportunity” that will “drive the investments we need to double-down on our clean energy goals and accelerate progress toward our net-zero emissions future.”
So, according to plan, this is somehow magically to be accomplished by maintaining a regulatory environment in which U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports will only be permitted to the extent that they reduce overall greenhouse emissions — for instance, by running on “clean energy.”
Read that clean energy means their preferred intermittent wind and solar panaceas.
And by the regulatory environment, the Biden administration is referring to a very formidable army of die-hard climate crusaders who are dedicated to eliminating fossil energy in all forms.
As White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy clarified to attendees at a March American Council on Renewable Energy forum, U.S. climate policy “is not a fight about coal anymore. It is a challenge about natural gas and infrastructure investments because we don’t want to invest in things that are time-limited. Because we are time-limited.”
Herein lies one of the big obstacles to Joe Biden’s European LNG export bailout offer: a shortage of pipeline capacity due to permitting delays that discourage industry investment.
The time required to obtain federal Energy Department permitting can take four to five years for a pipeline that can be constructed in six to nine months. Since it can require decades to recoup the costs, McCarthy’s comment about “time limits” will lend no investor confidence to future such ventures.
Although the Energy Department scrambled to finally approve two LNG export permits that it had been sitting on for more than two years, Secretary Jennifer Granholm again made it clear that this was a temporary circumstance premised upon the Ukraine invasion.
Speaking on March 9 in Houston, Granholm said: “We are on a war footing — an emergency — and we have to responsibly increase short-term [oil and gas] supply where we can right now to stabilize the market and to minimize harm to American families. … And that means you producing more right now, where and if you can …”
Adding to this investment discouragement, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently voted 3-1 on a proposed rule requiring public companies to disclose climate risks attributed to greenhouse gas emissions generated both by their operations (e.g., refining oil) and from their energy consumption.
Republican SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who voted against the proposal, warned that the rules will enrich “the climate-industrial complex” while hurting investors, the economy, and the SEC.
In November, the Labor Department also proposed a new rule that scraps and reverses a Trump administration proviso within the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) requiring retirement plan fiduciaries to act “solely in the interest” of participants and based upon a “material effect on the return and risk of an investment.”
Many LNG projects are stalled due to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) pipeline constraints. Encouragingly, FERC recently voted 3-2 to revise a gas pipeline and export terminal approval policy which added greenhouse gas emissions to its permission analyses premised on climate impacts.
Meanwhile, Europe is finally waking up to the fact that its dependency on Russian natural gas and oil for about half of its energy in the wake of the current Ukraine experience presents greater threat risks than climate change.
Germany, a dominant EU economic power that now depends on Russia for over half of its natural gas and a quarter of its oil imports, has sabotaged itself to become even more dependent on that imported gas by already shutting down three nuclear plants in December, with three more to be mothballed this year.
Recognizing Russia’s opportunity to weaponize Germany’s vulnerable dependency, President Donald Trump sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 trans-Baltic gas pipeline development, a policy that President Joe Biden reversed upon taking office.
The Trump administration, which had presided over an America that was not only energy independent, but also a leading global exporter, had pressed Germany to build LNG import terminals to diversify its gas supply, as Poland, the Netherlands and Lithuania have done.
All that has changed over slightly more than a year as the Biden White House and Democrat-controlled Congress have devolved U.S. energy prosperity to conditions of an energy pauper pathetically pleading with Russia, OPEC, Venezuela, and Iran for help to reduce painful fuel price and inflation consequences of their policies here at home ahead of 2022 midterm elections.
Recall that soon after taking office, Joe Biden revoked a permit essential for the Keystone XL pipeline to deliver oil from Canada, empowered his agencies to slow-walk others, and launched an effort to overturn an oil drilling program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska.
Let’s also remember that U.S. gas prices began going up long before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine recently provoked a bipartisan ban on Russian oil, gas, and coal imports, as did most all of America’s 40-year high of 7.9% inflation.
There should be an obvious message in all of this for Europe.
If it can’t continue to rely on Russia as a reliable energy supplier, then why would it imagine that it can count on America to make up any substantial difference so long as we have an administration headed by someone who campaigned on the pledge that “I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuels.”
Meanwhile as Joe, with one foot on the gas, the other on the brake — revving the engine and belching lots of smoke — America urgently awaits what may be described as a “MAGA tow truck,” driven by our 45th commander in chief; that vehicle that can’t possibly arrive soon enough.
*****
This article was published by CFACT, Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.
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