There is a concerted effort underway by global warming campaigners to infiltrate the conservative and libertarian movements.
These alarmists in freedom’s clothing operate like the so-called “Lincoln Project.” They shamelessly parrot the Left and advance its agenda.
CFACT and the Heartland Institute took on two of them, the American Conservation Coalition (ACC) and C3, in a debate at FreedomFest in South Dakota.
CFACT’s Marc Morano floored ACC President Benji Backer when he said, “we have to go to the heart of this, and the heart of this is what Benji said, ‘there’s no debate of this among young people.’
Well, gee, what should we do then? I guess we’ll just agree and come up with our own ‘conservative’ solutions? No! There’s a reason young people are so indoctrinated into climate fear. It’s because the old people for 30 years have never shown concern for the climate. All of a sudden, the climate activists got real and said ‘let’s go after the young people, they’re more gullible.’ And that’s how they were able to convince a whole generation of young people that climate is a problem… My biggest concern is Benji sat beside Greta Thunberg at a Congressional hearing in 2019. He turned to Greta and thanked her for raising awareness of the climate issue for young people across the world. To me that was horrific. Greta Thunberg has done more to instill alarm in young people with scientific nonsense than any person in the world.”
You can hear the cheer this brought forth from the audience on the video we posted at YouTube.
Phony conservative / libertarian climate groups like ACC and C3 abandon sound science and pitch the Left’s propaganda, for instance falsely attributing natural, historically normal weather events to global warming.
Don’t be fooled by ACC, C3, or anyone else who tries to tell you the Left’s climate agenda is scientifically sound, or compatible with American values of individual freedom and limited government.
“The willingness of the administration to make decisions of this magnitude without consulting the countries most exposed will not be lost on other parts of the world. Jerusalem and Riyadh, for example, are no doubt already strategizing around the potential of facing a surprise similar to the one that Washington just delivered to Warsaw and Kyiv.” — Kiron Skinner and Russell Berman, Foreign Policy, July 26, 2021.
“The lesson learned by Germany is that it can pursue its own inclinations of doing business with dictators regardless of principles and with no consequences from Washington. More dangerously, the lesson for Moscow and Beijing is that sanctions for international aggression will never be sustained for very long. The Biden administration has made the fragile international order even less secure.” — Kiron Skinner and Russell Berman, Foreign Policy, July 26, 2021.
“The project creates conditions for Russia’s escalation of military aggression against Ukraine, as well as the continuation of a hybrid war against the EU and NATO…. This Russian pipeline threatens the national security not only of Ukraine, but also of all of Europe.” — Ukrainian Parliament, July 21, 2021.
“The U.S.-German deal is embarrassingly weak. It relies on a vague assurance that after Putin ramps up the blackmail enabled by the deal, Germany will take unspecified actions in response…. Overall, Biden handed Putin the biggest gift he’s received in years. He also signaled to Putin that when push comes to shove, the American president is weak and will bow to political pressure.” — U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Washington Examiner, July 22, 2021.
“Remarkably, Washington agreed to end its opposition to the project without any recognizable benefit in exchange: Merkel has neither promised increased engagement for NATO nor more clarity about China. The compromise between Biden and Merkel is not a compromise at all, but an American capitulation.” — Robin Alexander, Die Welt, July 21, 2021.
The Biden administration has reached an agreement with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that allows for the completion of a controversial natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.
The July 21 deal to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would double shipments of Russian natural gas to Germany by transporting the gas under the Baltic Sea, has angered the leaders of many countries in Eastern and Western Europe; they argue that it will effectively give Moscow a stranglehold over European gas supplies and open the continent to Russian blackmail.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations steadfastly opposed the pipeline on the grounds that, once completed, it would strengthen Russian President Vladimir Putin’s economic and political influence over Europe.
The Trump administration was especially critical of the pipeline because it will funnel billions of dollars to Russia at a time that Germany is free-riding on the U.S. defense umbrella that protects Germany from that same Russia.
The Biden administration’s abrupt reversal of long-standing bipartisan policy consensus has baffled observers from across the political aisle. Just one day before the Biden-Merkel deal was announced, State Department Spokesman Ned Price criticized the pipeline as a “Kremlin geopolitical project that is intended to expand Russia’s influence over Europe’s energy resources and to circumvent Ukraine.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki previously asserted that the Biden administration “continues to believe that Nord Stream 2 is a bad deal for Europe.”
The Biden administration has not explained why or how completion of the pipeline will promote American or European strategic interests. Geopolitical analysts on both sides of the Atlantic say that the pipeline deal will: 1) weaken American and strengthen Russian influence in Europe; 2) heighten divisions between the Eastern and Western European members of the European Union; 3) push some of the EU’s eastern periphery closer to China; 4) deprive Ukraine of the transit fees it now collects on gas pumped through an existing pipeline and thereby undermine Kiev’s struggle against Russian aggression; and 5) allow President Putin to strong-arm Germany and the European Union by turning off deliveries of natural gas whenever he wants.
The Biden-Merkel agreement will avert the resumption of sanctions that the U.S. Congress has mandated against Nord Stream 2 AG and its chief executive, Matthias Warnig, an ally of Putin. President Joe Biden waived those sanctions in May because, he said, they were “counter-productive” to U.S.-German relations. In exchange, Merkel, whose final term in office ends in September, offered only vague promises to protect Europe from potential Russian threats.
U.S. sanctions delayed completion of the 1,230-km (764-mile) pipeline by more than a year and added at least $1 billion to its cost. The €9.5 billion ($11.5 billion) project, which is 90% complete, was initially slated to become operational at the end of 2019, but was delayed after several key participants were threatened with U.S. sanctions and bailed out. As a result of the Biden-Merkel deal, Nord Stream 2 is now expected to be completed by the end of August 2021.
REACTIONS TO THE BIDEN-MERKEL DEAL
In an essay published by Foreign Policy, policy analysts Kiron Skinner and Russell Berman, wrote that by “surrendering” to Merkel on Nord Stream 2, Biden abandoned a bipartisan consensus, got nothing in return, and made the world less secure:
“Bipartisan opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was a cornerstone of the foreign policies of both the Obama and Trump administrations, an unambiguous response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s record of using gas deliveries as a weapon of coercion in Eastern Europe. The recent decision by the Biden administration to reverse the policy of its predecessors and to refrain from sanctioning participants in the pipeline project is nothing but a capitulation to pressure from Germany and a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The damage to American national interest will be profound….
“The willingness of the administration to make decisions of this magnitude without consulting the countries most exposed will not be lost on other parts of the world. Jerusalem and Riyadh, for example, are no doubt already strategizing around the potential of facing a surprise similar to the one that Washington just delivered to Warsaw and Kyiv….
“The lesson learned by Germany is that it can pursue its own inclinations of doing business with dictators regardless of principles and with no consequences from Washington. More dangerously, the lesson for Moscow and Beijing is that sanctions for international aggression will never be sustained for very long. The Biden administration has made the fragile international order even less secure.”
In a joint statement, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau said that the Biden-Merkel deal “has created political, military and energy threats for Ukraine and Central Europe, while increasing Russia’s potential to destabilize the security situation in Europe, perpetuating divisions among NATO and European Union member states.”
The Ukrainian Parliament, in a two-page statement, said:
“Nord Stream 2 is a purely geopolitical project aimed at making Europe dependent on the Russian gas monopoly. Moscow is implementing this project with a view to exacerbating and strengthening discordances within the democratic and European communities. The Nord Stream 2 project is also a tool for projecting the military force of the Russian Federation against NATO countries in Russia’s priority, the Baltic Sea….
“The project creates conditions for Russia’s escalation of military aggression against Ukraine, as well as the continuation of a hybrid war against the EU and NATO. The commissioning of the pipeline will remove Ukraine’s important lever to contain Russia, making it vulnerable to the Kremlin’s anti-democratic and anti-reformist vision of Ukraine. This Russian pipeline threatens the national security not only of Ukraine, but also of all of Europe.”
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a fierce opponent of the pipeline, described the Biden-Merkel deal as “catastrophic” for U.S. strategic interests. In an opinion article published by the Washington Examiner, Cruz wrote:
“This decision is a total surrender to Putin. It is a multibillion-dollar gift that will keep on giving in perpetuity at the expense of the United States and our allies. It is a generational geopolitical mistake. Russian dictators, decades from now, will be reaping billions of dollars every year from President Joe Biden’s gift….
“The U.S.-German deal is embarrassingly weak. It relies on a vague assurance that after Putin ramps up the blackmail enabled by the deal, Germany will take unspecified actions in response. When asked for details of what such actions might be, the White House says it doesn’t want to specify because doing so would benefit Putin. Again, embarrassing.
“Overall, Biden handed Putin the biggest gift he’s received in years. He also signaled to Putin that when push comes to shove, the American president is weak and will bow to political pressure.”
European affairs columnist Wolfgang Münchau noted that the political cost of the U.S.-German deal on Nord Stream 2 will vastly exceed its commercial benefits:
“The Baltic States and Poland, as well as Ukraine, see the pipeline as a massive violation of their own security interests. The first consequence will be a strategic alliance between Poland and China. That has already started. China is the only security option left for Poland, as Russia and Germany are building a political axis that leaves Poland in the lurch — now with US support. As a sheer by-product, any attempt by the EU to forge a closer and common foreign security policy is doomed now….
“Biden and his foreign policy team believe, wrongly in my view, that they can co-opt Germany into their China strategy. They will discover that the candidate most likely to succeed Angela Merkel is even more of a mercantilist than she is. Armin Laschet stands in the tradition of German corporatism.”
Robin Alexander, columnist for the German newspaper Die Welt, noted:
“Remarkably, Washington agreed to end its opposition to the project without any recognizable benefit in exchange: Merkel has neither promised increased engagement for NATO nor more clarity about China. The compromise between Biden and Merkel is not a compromise at all, but an American capitulation.”
Veteran geopolitical analyst Andrew Michta warned that America’s capitulation on Nord Stream 2 will “redefine” Europe for years to come:
“The strategic myopia of the NS2 decision is disheartening, for it shows our inability to learn from Europe’s evolution over the past three decades. The stunning transformation of post-communist Europe after 1990 was possible not only because of the powerful appeal of democracy and markets, but above all because Russia was literally expelled from the region. It was that factor above all others that allowed for NATO and then EU enlargement to the East, thereby creating the conditions that transformed Central Europe from a hyperinflation-ridden economic basket case into the most rapidly growing part of the European Union. National security and state sovereignty were the sine qua non of the successful transformation of post-communist Central Europe. Furthermore, the emergence of Belarus and Ukraine alongside the Russian Federation offered the greatest opportunity to date for Russia itself to break out of the imperial cycle. So long as the sovereignty of Belarus and Ukraine were preserved, there would be no back-to-empire pathway for Moscow, with the Russian Federation having at least a shot at becoming a ‘normal’ nation-state….
“In light of the NS2 deal and what it signifies in geostrategic terms, Ukraine’s continued independence has been put further in question, while Belarus is no longer in a position to charter an even quasi-independent course of Russia, making a regional solution to the security equation in the region that favors NATO all but unattainable. And if Putin completes the process of re-assembling the Russian imperial core, his armor and missile installations will be right at NATO’s Eastern border.
“As one surveys Europe’s recent history, there are only a few policy decisions that in hindsight deserve to be called transformative, for they set in motion developments that would shape power relationships between states for years to come. We have not yet seen the full impact of the NS2 deal, but arguably the consequences of the US-German agreement will reverberate across Europe for years to come.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF NORD STREAM 2
Nord Stream 2 is led by Russia’s Gazprom, with half of the funding provided by Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall, the Anglo-Dutch company Shell, Austria’s OMV and France’s Engie.
Despite the multinational participation, the pipeline is essentially a German-Russian project promoted from its inception by Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which, even during the Cold War, viewed closer economic ties with Russia to defuse East-West tensions.
Germany’s former SPD chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, a confidant of President Putin, has been Europe’s leading proponent of the pipeline. Schröder, who led Germany between 1998 and 2005, has been the Chairman of Shareholders’ Committee of Nord Stream since 2006. He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer. He has used his connections in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to lobby for both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2.
In 2017, when Nord Stream was suffering from several serious setbacks, the former SPD leader and Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel revived the project, as did his successor, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is now Germany’s president.
Germany’s current Social Democratic Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, has criticized U.S. sanctions as foreign interference: “Decisions on European energy policy are made in Europe, not the USA. We fundamentally reject foreign interventions and sanctions with extraterritorial effects.”
Europe is, in fact, deeply divided over the Nord Stream project and Germany is in the minority position. Russia is the largest supplier of natural gas to the EU, according to Eurostat. Just over 40% of EU imports of natural gas come from Russia, followed by Norway (at around 35%). Nord Stream 2, when combined with the existing Nord Stream 1, would concentrate 80% of the EU’s Russian-imported gas along that pipeline route.
Germany’s Nordic, Baltic and Eastern European neighbors have accused Berlin of ignoring their concerns that the pipeline is a threat to Europe’s energy security and that it will strengthen Gazprom’s already dominant position on the market.
In March 2016, the leaders of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, in a letter to the European Commission, warned that Nord Stream 2 would pose “risks for energy security in the region of central and eastern Europe” and generate “potentially destabilizing geopolitical consequences.”
A report by the Swedish Defense Research Agency found that Russia has threatened to cut energy supplies to Central and Eastern European more than 50 times. Even after some of those states joined the European Union, Russian threats continued.
In December 2018, the European Parliament, by a vote of 433 to 105, condemned Nord Stream 2 as “a political project that poses a threat to European energy security.” It called for the project to be cancelled.
Nord Stream 2 should have been operational at the end of 2019, but the project was delayed after applications to lay pipes under Danish waters were left pending since April 2017. Nord Stream Chairman Gerhard Schroeder blamed U.S. political pressure on Denmark as the main reason for the delay in approving the permits. “Denmark is putting Europe’s energy security at risk,” he said.
After Denmark’s Social Democratic Party won the Danish general elections in June 2019, the new government removed the last major hurdle to complete the Russian-led project. In October 2019, the Danish Energy Agency approved a permit for Nord Stream to lay pipes in a 147-km section in the Danish Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) southeast of Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea.
In August 2020, after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with novichok, a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union, Chancellor Merkel faced intense pressure to pull out of the pipeline project. Merkel said that the two issues should be “decoupled.” The Biden administration, apparently, agrees with Merkel on rewarding dictators and human rights violators with multibillion dollar business deals.
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
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https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00Pamela Gellerhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngPamela Geller2021-08-07 07:31:482021-08-07 07:31:48‘Biden’ Administration Surrenders to Germany on Russian Gas Pipeline
Is there anything the left won’t blame on its fantastical scapegoat, climate change? Don’t bet on it. Its latest dodge is blaming the border crisis, which it created, on the climate crisis, which it invented.
A Politico article is headlined, “It’s Not a Border Crisis. It’s a Climate Crisis.” That’s a convenient twofer. Never let an opportunity to blame a crisis on climate change go to waste. Well played.
But to the left, I guess the border catastrophe isn’t a crisis. How could you support open borders and think that the invasion by invitation is a crisis? How could America-resenting leftists regard the influx of millions of new Democrat voters a crisis? It would be like the Democrats being apoplectic over federal spending. Nope. Not gonna happen.
If only these migrants knew that leftist policies are on the way to turning this country into a socialist state—you know, the kind they’re escaping from.
But let’s quit playing games. This is very serious and getting more so every day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that June border apprehension numbers reached a 21-year high, with more than 188,000 arrests and more than 1.1 million this year to date.
Even more troubling: This is not a seasonal spike, as Democrats have been saying. The numbers of crossings usually rise in the spring and then recede in the summer, but the numbers are still increasing. At this rate, we’ll break the 2006 record. President Joe Biden and his faithful party continue to deny, obfuscate, and deceive, but none of their rationalizations hold water—and they know it.
This is a crisis purely of their making; reversing former President Donald Trump’s border policies, emasculating Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and rolling out the red carpet for illegal immigrants is hardly going to deter attempted crossings. Indeed, we can trace these endless crossing spikes directly to these and Biden’s other wanton policies of scrapping the “Remain in Mexico” policy, ending border wall construction, and supporting the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Not that you would expect the left to be consistent, but it sure is a fair-weather opponent of COVID-19. Just as it never objected to maskless left-wing rioters or fleeing Texas Democrat lawmakers, it seems wholly indifferent to the hazards of COVID-19-infected migrants.
No, actually, those on the left are worse than indifferent. Here, they are COVID-19 enablers, given their plan to end Title 42, the law Trump invoked to refuse entry to immigrants with the virus.
This, despite knowing and even admitting that this action will cause a new influx of migrants and possibly result in the Department of Homeland Security having to process up to 1,200 family units a day. COVID-19 infection rates in emergency shelters for migrant youth are reportedly between 15% and 20%.
You don’t have to be a cynic to know that Democrats are pushing amnesty for reasons other than human compassion. And their methods are brazen and obscene. They are trying to sneak a “pathway to citizenship” into their reckless $3.5 trillion budget plan ostensibly to support families and generate job growth.
Never mind their audacity in pretending to be pro-jobs when their endless government handouts are keeping people from seeking employment and exacerbating the plight of businesses starved for workers. Never mind that amnesty will encourage even more migrants to stampede toward our border. But to include amnesty provisions in an infrastructure bill is insultingly deceitful.
Could an unintended consequence of Biden’s border disaster be a reconciliation between the Bushes and Trumps? Don’t be silly. Let’s not get carried away. But it is noteworthy that George P. Bush, Texas land commissioner and nephew of former President George W. Bush (no immigration hawk by anyone’s estimation), has sued the Biden administration for ending border wall construction in his state.
“Farmers and ranchers are long accustomed to illegal activity, but it’s reached a point where it’s not sustainable, and we need help from the federal government,” said Bush.
Well, what do you know. Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that in opposing the wall, Democrats claimed it was cruel and ineffective. How can it be cruel if it is ineffective? Why go to the trouble of tearing it down if it wasn’t working? Oh, that’s right. It was working.
Kudos to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his initiative to build a wall, and bravo to all those cruel people who donated $400,000 to the project in the first week. I wonder if they think it will be ineffective.
As the left and Democratic elected officials continue their scorched-earth assault on reasonable and sane public policies, hopefully more states and private individuals and entities will exercise self-help to combat this lunacy.
The gloves were off at Freedom Fest in Rapid City, SD last week when CFACT and the Heartland Institute squared off against representatives of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC) and the C3 Solutions organization in a climate change debate. At issue was how libertarians and conservatives should approach the climate change issue.
CFACT and Heartland have long opposed compromising with the Left on climate change. The two organizations oppose the ideas that the “science is settled” and “America needs to move forward” to aggressively tackle the climate “crisis.” ACC and C3, in contrast, believe that climate change is indeed a serious matter (and thus concede that the UN and Greens are correct on the science), but hope to promote solutions that are less extreme than a Green New Deal.
Throughout the discussion, neither side gave an inch. You can watch an excerpt of the debate here.
The debate began with James Taylor of the Heartland Institute delivering a litany of stats and data that debunked a host of climate claims dealing with temperature records, severe weather events such as hurricanes, drought, and other things. He was followed by Benji Backer of ACC who didn’t challenge his data, but instead focused on polls showing that young people, even conservatives and libertarians, believed the climate claims of those on the Left to be true. He then urged conservatives not to challenge the science, but rather to try and move young people into embracing “market-based” solutions instead of those proposed in the Green New Deal.
This lit a fuse under CFACT’s Morano. Morano took aim at the claim that there was a legitimate scientific consensus underpinning extreme climate claims, noting that “to cite these kind of climate authorities is kind of like saying ‘well if Fauci said it, or the World Health Organization said it, so therefore you can’t disagree’…this is the exact position of Google, Facebook and all that.”
Things got even more testy when Morano took aim at Backer’s premise that libertarians and conservatives should accept the fact that young people are not misinformed on the science.
“We have to go to the heart of this, and the heart of this is what Benji said, ‘there’s no debate of this among young people.’ Well gee, what should we do then? I guess we’ll just agree and come up with our own ‘conservative’ solutions? No! There’s a reason young people are so indoctrinated into climate fear. It’s because the old people for 30 years have never shown a concern for climate. All of a sudden, the climate activists got real and said ‘let’s go after the young people, they’re more gullible.’ And that’s how they were able to convince a whole generation of young people that climate is a problem.”
He even chided Backer for his praise of Greta Thunberg during a Congressional hearing.
“My biggest concern is Benji sat beside Greta Thunberg at a Congressional hearing in 2019. He turned to Greta and thanked her for raising awareness to the climate issue for young people across the world. To me that was horrific. Greta Thunberg has done more to instill alarm in young people with scientific nonsense than any person in the world.”
The audience erupted into hearty applause.
Backer shot back, defending his praise of Thunberg by saying: “I sat next to Greta Thunberg, instead of you, because you cherry-pick the science in a way that is very harmful to the people in this audience, and the people in America, who have been misled by you and James’ cherry-picking data through sources that are not real.”
Both James Taylor and Morano frequently cite NASA, UN IPCC and NOAA data to defend their positions.
After the debate, the discussion moved to a side event hosted by the Heartland Institute where James Taylor and John Hart were joined by CFACT president Craig Rucker to delve deeper into the issues that divide the two sides. In a much more conciliatory manner, the presenters each offered brief synopses of their positions and entertained numerous questions from an engaged audience.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-07-31 07:05:352021-07-31 07:05:35CFACT Exposes Climate Quislings at Freedom Fest
Climate alarmists have a problem presenting a consistent narrative on the dangers supposed human-caused climate change poses.
Instead, they follow Lewis Carroll’s irrepressible and violent Red Queen down the climate change rabbit hole, as when in response to Alice’s statement that “one can’t believe impossible things,” she proudly proclaimed, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Replace the word “impossible” with “contradictory” and you’ll get my point. Over the past two decades, the mainstream media have regularly reported claims that human-caused climate change will bring on both the disappearance of snow and increased snowfall. In 2013, for example, The Daily Telegraph ran an article titled “Children Just Aren’t Going to Know What Snow Is” which was about a wild claim made by climate scientist Dr. David Viner in the year 2000. The blundering story has since been disappeared from The Independent, where it was originally published. In 2014, The New York Times ran an article titled “The End of Snow?” Each story claimed human-caused climate change would result in snow becoming a rare and possibly unheard-of event in the near future in places where snow has historically been common.
More recently, however, as we have documented at our Climate Realism website, climate scientists and their allies in the mainstream media have changed their story to explain multiple instances of record-setting cold and snowfall over the past decade. In the words of a Science Daily article, “Major northeastern U.S. snowstorms expected to continue with climate change.”
Climate change may contribute to making snowfall more common or less common, but it can’t do both. Importantly, hard data support neither the claim that climate change is causing a dearth of snow nor the claim it is causing extreme snowfall. Media hype to the contrary, there has been no significant trend in snowfall over the recent period of modest warming.
Moving on to other inglorious instances of oft-asserted contradictory climate change claims, in recent years the mainstream media have alternately claimed climate change will cause the water levels of the Great Lakes to rise and fall. Clearly, no contradiction there.
Looking abroad, climate alarmists promote mutually exclusive disaster scenarios in India as being driven by climate change. Heartland Institute President James Taylor recently called out the media’s inconsistent statements about monsoon rains in South Asia. Taylor noted India Today recently claimed new research shows global warming will cause stronger Indian and South Asian monsoons and rainfall, which will wreak climate havoc in future decades. But in 2020, the Hindustan Times reportedpeer reviewed research demonstrated global warming will weaken monsoons and reduce monsoon rainfall, with disastrous effects.
In response to the contradictory claims, Taylor asked a fair question: “So, which is it? Does global warming strengthen monsoons and cause more rainfall, which we are told is bad? Or does global warming weaken monsoons and cause less rainfall, which we are told is bad?” Of course, another peer reviewed study found climate change has had almost no impact on monsoons.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice of Wonderland fame exclaimed.
As award-winning meteorologist Anthony Watts pointed out recently, above- or below-average snowfall, monsoon rains, or rising or falling Great Lake levels or wind speeds may be indications of climate change, but only if a single, consistent direction of change is sustained over decades. If, instead, these patterns shift back and forth annually or every few years, that’s just normal weather.
Alarmists have to pick a unified narrative of disaster scenarios and stick with it. If data disprove the narrative, they must admit the theory of catastrophic human-caused global warming is wrong. As Watts said, “You can’t have it both ways.”
I’m weary of progressives desperately clinging to the theory of catastrophic climate change in the face of confounding data and contradictory predictions. I’m tired of their gross public displays of cognitive dissonance, twisting any unexpected weather event into further proof of climate change even when it is inconsistent with previous types of weather events they said climate change should cause or is causing.
Please, environmental socialists, move on to the next hobgoblin you will try to terrify the public within your continuing effort to expand the government’s, and by extension your own, power over peoples’ lives. I’m ready for a new mythical dragon to slay.
A little-noticed provision buried deep in President Biden’s January 27 executive order (EO), “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, Create Jobs, and Restore Scientific Integrity Across the Federal Government,” has emerged as one of the gravest threats facing ordinary Americans, at a time when such threats are legion.
The EO’s Sec. 219 sets the goal of “protecting” at least 30% of the nation’s land and water by 2030. Under “protection” means putting this land and water (mostly land) off limits to any productive use in perpetuity. To accomplish this goal, the federal government will have to buy up – through eminent domain or other pressures on landowners making them “willing sellers” of their property – millions of acres of private land.
Adding to the Federal Estate
In other words, to save the planet from what the Biden White House and the ruling class assures us is a “climate crisis,” we need to have the government gobble up more land and have it managed by bureaucrats in Washington. The federal government already owns about 27% (640 million acres) of the nation’s land, with the bulk administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and most of the rest taken up by the National Forest Service, National Park Service, and an assortment of wildlife refuges and military bases.
A short-sighted Congress – when was it never short-sighted? – replenished the Land and Water Conservation Fund in 2020, giving the feds an annual supply of cash with which it can socialize more private land. And in February, the Biden White House struck down a Trump-era rule giving local governments a say in federal land acquisitions within their jurisdictions.
Alarmed by what promises to be the biggest land grab in American history, governors from 15 states questioned whether the Biden administration has the legal authority for its 30 by 30 plan.
“[We] are not aware of any statutory or constitutional authority for the President, the U.S. Department of Interior, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or any other federal agency to set aside 30 percent of all land and water in the United States,” the governors wrote in an open letter to Biden. “Nowhere in the laws of our nation is the authority delegated to the President or executive branch agencies to unilaterally change the policies governing land use in America.” The governors represent states stretching from Alaska and Idaho to Tennessee and Alabama.
The governors’ open letter follows a March 16 letter to Biden by 64 members of the Congressional Western Caucus, which underscored the special situation of western states, where 90% of federally-owned land is located.
“Western states will be disproportionately impacted by policies set in place to achieve the 30 by 30 goal, which we fear will impact revenues derived from jobs derived and jobs that depend on multiple-use public lands,” the letter states. “Our lands and our waters must remain open to activities that support our rural economies and help us achieve our agriculture, timber, recreation, energy, and mineral needs.”
The reference to the threat the 30 by 30 plan poses to predominantly rural jobs is key to understanding what the White House scheme is all about. Ultimately, 30 X 30 is about what writer Ron Arnold calls “rural cleansing.” Put enough regulatory pressure on natural-resource industries so that many are forced out of business, and you will also destroy the livelihoods of the people who make their living in those industries. Eventually, enough will leave and decamp for urban areas in search of work. This is how rural cleansing works, and the people behind 30 by 30 know it. Depopulated rural areas are exactly what they want.
And if out-and-out land acquisitions don’t do the trick, they have other tricks up their sleeve. By adding a few more carefully selected species to the Endangered Species List, land-use restrictions can be imposed on a species’ habitat that can cripple rural economies. The Biden administration is also preparing to bring back Obama’s Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule that will impose federal zoning on millions of acres of private land.
Ripple Effects
Nebraska Gov. Pete Rickets believes the 30 X 30 plan will leave economic devastation in its wake.
“Right now, 97% of Nebraska is privately owned, and if you wanted to set aside 30% of this in conservation, you would drive up land prices [and] make it more difficult for young people to get into production agriculture,” the Republican governor told a Daily Signal podcast (July 23). “You would certainly drive-up food prices [and] you’d drive up property taxes.”
Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments. Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country. He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-07-28 07:34:292021-07-28 07:34:29Biden’s 30×30 Land Grab
Immediately end the approval of all new coal-fired power plants and oil and gas fields internationally.
Swiftly phase out all gasoline-powered vehicles.
Ban the sale of new oil and gas furnaces to heat buildings.
“That would very likely keep the average global temperature from increasing 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels — the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth faces irreversible damage,” says a recent New York Times article that discusses the IEA’s report.
And those were just a few of the extreme measures that the world’s leading energy agency said would be required to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The Biden Administration’s “2030 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Target” puts the United States in fairly close alignment with the IEA’s objectives. The White House’s target includes a carbon-pollution-free power sector by 2035 and a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050.
Our Fossil Fuel Economy
How radical is this agenda? Well, since the prices of some renewable energy sources have been falling rapidly relative to those of some fossil fuels, it is plausible that the global economy may shift somewhat away from fossil fuels on its own in the coming decades. But from the industrial revolution to the present day, fossil fuels have been absolutely central to global economic progress.
Enacting the IEA/Biden agenda would mean overturning the vast majority of our economy, roughly 84 percent of which still runs on fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, as opposed to other energy sources such as wind and solar, which are far less reliable and applicable to a much narrower range of industrial uses.
As Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative, has written for the Brookings Institution, “The world today is unrecognizable from that of the early 19th century, before fossil fuels came into wide use. Human health and welfare have improved markedly, and the global population has increased from 1 billion in 1800 to almost 8 billion today. The fossil fuel energy system is the lifeblood of the modern economy.”
But despite the central role of fossil fuels in humanity’s material wellbeing, the IEA and the Biden Administration believe that averting the most devastating effects of climate change will require public regulatory policy that shifts the economy almost entirely toward alternative energy sources.
Many experts believe that anthropogenic climate change is already responsible for intensified storms, heatwaves, droughts, and vector-borne diseases. According to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change earlier this year, it is likely that anthropogenic climate change has been responsible for about a third of human heat deaths since 1991. Such are the “catastrophic effects of climate change” expected by the IEA to worsen substantially over the next few decades, unless global civilization brings its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
But is there any way in which such colossal regulatory measures are likely to backfire? And how bad could such unintended consequences be? Could they be so bad as to exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the most catastrophic effects of climate change on human wellbeing?
Climate Danger Versus Climate Resilience
Reducing fossil fuel use may reduce the intensity of climate change, possibly including dangers such as intensified storms, droughts, and heat waves. But that’s not all it does. Using fewer fossil fuels also impacts how people are affected by those dangers: in other words, humanity’s level of “climate resilience.”
The exact definition of “climate resilience” is debated, but it typically includes adaptation to changing climate conditions, absorption of climate impact, and transformation of the environment using technological or scientific means. All of these resilience strategies are made possible by economic progress, including fossil fuel-led growth. With less access to abundant and reliable energy, civilization’s climate resilience would be substantially reduced.
The widespread availability of fossil fuels directly contributes trillions of dollars to the global economy each year, and indirectly contributes incalculably more by making countless other industries possible. This economic growth is continuously granting more and more communities access to better infrastructure, medicine, education, and other precious advantages against the dangers of an ever-changing environment. Fossil fuels, by allowing civilization to cheaply and reliably power its homes, vehicles, hospitals, factories, and other engines of human wellbeing, protect people from an ever-widening range of potential climate impacts.
The climate resilience side of the equation, despite being at least as significant as the climate danger side, is often ignored in the models of future climate impact. This is because, while it is difficult to model a changing climate, it is impossible to model the future of human ingenuity, which will be composed of decisions and insights that only the people of the future can possibly know.
How We’ve Done So Far
So which edge of the climate sword is sharper? Has the damage caused by climate change so far outweighed humanity’s progress building climate resilience?
According to research from the University of Oxford economist Max Roser and the University of Edinburgh geoscientist Hannah Ritchie, absolute global deaths from natural disasters have been going down almost every year between 1901 and 2018, even while the global population has exploded from roughly 1.6 billion to roughly 7.7 billion during that period.
This overall reduction in deaths by natural disaster, which accounts for floods, extreme weather, extreme temperature, earthquakes, and droughts, is similar to the consistent reduction in deaths by disease in recent decades (COVID-19 obviously overturned these disease data in 2020, but not in a way that’s directly relevant to climate change, since it is only vector-borne diseases that are directly exacerbated by climate change).
The data—which show climate-related deaths have been falling even while fossil fuel use has intensified climate change—suggest that so far climate danger has been no match for climate resilience in the battle over human wellbeing.
The Alarmist Assumption
The IEA, the Biden Administration, and others advocating for extreme near-term reductions in global fossil fuel use have one seldom-examined assumption at the foundation of their climate alarmism. This assumption is that despite climate resilience having consistently outpaced climate danger in the past, soon the tables will turn and climate danger will gain the upper hand.
It is widely believed that dangerous tipping points likely dwell in the future of environmental change. What is rarely factored in is that continued economic growth, facilitated in large part by fossil fuels, will likely continue to produce unpredictable technological and scientific breakthroughs, creating new forms of security and wellbeing, and at new scales.
The climate alarmists would have society sacrifice one of its most precious industries, and thus radically increase the price of electricity, food, housing, and countless other critical assets without which the global poor would be at the mercy of starvation and homelessness. These economic changes might sound weatherable to those of us who can afford frequent meals out and subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max all at the same time, but to the global poor, this is a matter of life and death.
As the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman famously said, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions.” History suggests that extremist energy agendas like the IEA’s and the Biden administration’s would lead us down such a road, making millions of poor people more vulnerable to climate threats in the name of mitigating those threats.
Saul Zimet is a Hazlitt Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and a graduate student in economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2021-07-23 05:03:452021-07-23 05:03:45Top Global Energy Agency Calls for Phasing Out of All Gas-Powered Cars, Coal-Fired Plants
It turns out storing Megawatts of high-density energy in a confined space is “like a bomb”. Who could have seen that coming, apart from everyone who understands what a megawatt is?
…according to a troubling new report from leading physicists, these vast batteries amount to electrical bombs with the force of many hundreds of tons of TNT.
With the potential for huge explosions, fires, and clouds of toxic gas, they could devastate towns and villages nearby, says Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University and co-author of the report.
The batteries, designed as reservoirs of spare electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun fails to shine, are spreading around the British countryside. And this, says Prof Allison and his fellow scientists, could spell catastrophe.
It’s like a potential bomb,’ he says. ‘When batteries catch fire, you can’t just squirt water on them and put out the flames. It’s evident from our research that nothing has been done to tackle this problem.’
Given the size of the proposed plants, Prof Allison says this could, in theory, lead to an explosion several times bigger than the one that destroyed the harbour in Beirut last year.
The threat of fire is not merely theoretical. South Korea saw 23 battery farm fires in just two years.A recent battery fire in Illinois burned for three days and thousands of residents were evacuated.
Such blazes release highly toxic gases. One – hydrogen fluoride – is lethal if inhaled, and causes irreversible health effects after an hour of exposure, according to Public Health England.
00Joanne Novahttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngJoanne Nova2021-07-23 01:00:472021-07-23 01:00:47Big Batteries Could Be Bigger Bombs Than Beirut Fertilizer
“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
To the warming-Left, every natural weather event looks like “climate.”
Europe has been hit by devastating floods with the death toll reaching 188 and rising. Of course the usual suspects are exploiting this genuine, heart-rending tragedy to advance their climate agenda.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany must “be faster in the battle against climate change.”
Deadly heatwaves, floods, storms, wildfires, droughts, crop failures… This is not “the new normal.”
We’re at the very beginning of a climate and ecological emergency, and extreme weather events will only become more and more frequent.
After the catastrophic recent developments – especially in Western Europe – everyone seems to be talking about the climate emergency, and rightly so. But as soon as these tragedies are over we’ll most likely forget about it and move on like before. Unless we treat the crisis like a crisis all the time, we will not be able to halt the climate emergency.
All three of them, along with the rest of the politicians, media and pressure groups attributing Europe’s flooding to climate are shamefully wrong.
Does anyone rationally believe that Europe’s floods, or the heatwave in the western U.S. for that matter, were meaningfully worse because the temperature of the Earth warmed slightly, far less than climate models projected, almost entirely last century?
Australia’s intrepid Joanne Nova did her usual no-nonsense job of showing that Europe’s floods, devastating though they may be, are historically normal. In fact, in 1714 Europe flooded on Christmas Eve killing 14,000! “It’s as if European history doesn’t exist,” she writes (posted at CFACT.org).
Every so often Europe’s rivers will inevitably flood. The flooding will be worse when, as happened this time, pressure systems leave the weather lingering in place, rather than pushing the storm rapidly through. This is how Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas two years ago. This type of extreme weather event cannot be prevented through taxation, redistribution, carbon trading, windmills, solar panels, or electric vehicles.
We can, however, protect people and property from extreme weather through forecasting, early warning, preparedness and response.
This is where Europe’s bureaucrats devastatingly dropped the ball. This is the preventable man-made disaster.
The London Times reports that the reason for the flood’s terrible loss stems from a “monumental failure of the warning system.” Excerpts via the U.K.’s GWPF at Climate Depot:
The first signs of catastrophe were detected nine days ago by a satellite orbiting 500 miles above the tranquil hills around the Rhine river.
Over the next few days a team of scientists sent the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a macabre prophecy: the Rhineland was about to be hit by “extreme” flooding, particularly along the Erft and Ahr rivers, and in towns such as Hagen and Altena.
Yet despite at least 24 hours’ warning that predicted, almost precisely, which districts would be worst afflicted when the rains came, the flood still caught many of its victims largely unawares…
“People should have been receiving warnings; people should have understood the warnings. It’s no use having massive computer models predicting what’s going to happen if people don’t know what to do in a flood.”
Instead, the overwhelming majority of people in the path of the floods carried on with their everyday lives, oblivious to the danger, as the waters began to rise.
Western Europe had all the infrastructure it needed to protect its people. It failed to use it.
Don’t let Europe’s failed bureaucracy wiggle off the hook by shifting the blame to “climate.” Europe was going to flood whether you drove to work and used electricity or not. The weather warnings were clear, but not shared with the public. Tragic.
There are a few particularly onerous weasel words the global warming campaign uses when natural disaster strikes. Warming makes extreme weather “more likely” and “more severe,” they say. The fact that global temperature did not make the disaster meaningfully more likely or severe they leave out entirely. This is where the media fails its responsibility and declines to ask the relevant questions.
TheNew York Timesreports that team warming is planning to use “rapid attribution” of natural weather events to climate in an attempt to preempt those of us prepared to present the scientific and historical evidence that falsifies their claims.
That’s how human behavior leads to weather that kills — as it did in Europe.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-07-20 07:22:142021-07-20 07:22:14Calling Europe’s Floods ‘Climate’ is Unscientific Propaganda
“Climate change” gives the Left a “moral” code, a kind of pseudo religion, without the reasoning that animates true religion.
Arkes noted:
The Left may reject moral truth, but they want something to feel righteous about, and they do want to ring condemnation for their adversaries. “Climate change” has given them a “moral” world nicely detached from those vexing moral truths, and a kind of pseudo-religion, bereft of the weave of reasoning that runs through the religion we have come to know.
Environmentalism is a “cult” that is neither science or religion. It is a way for individuals to feel good by trying to save the planet from global cooling and/or global warming to actually trying to control the climate by controlling themselves and others.
QUESTION: How are environmentalists trying to control the climate?
ANSWER: By controlling the lives of people.
The environmentalist movement, and those elected officials who support it, do so by controlling people and their day to day lifestyle choices.
Hence we see the growth of high priced organic foods, the pushing via government incentives and regulations forcing the use of solar and wind power and, of course, the push for all electric vehicles. None of these incentives, policies or regulations have had any significant impact on the climate. In fact they are doing more harm than good, e.g. the brown outs in California and the ongoing power outages in Texas due to wind turbines freezing.
The problem is that all foods are organic, even additives are organic. Both solar and wind power are unreliable sources of energy because the wind stops blowing and the sun goes down. Finally, electric cars require energy to recharge and 90% of America’s energy comes from fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants.
The Three Absolute Truths About The Climate
A good friend of mine, John Casey, told me three absolute truths about the earth’s climate.
John L. Casey is one of a few, if not the only U.S. climate and solar researcher, to have correctly predicted the Sun’s energy output based on sun spots. John’s research led to the creation of the The Cold Truth Initiative.
Here are three absolute truths about the climate:
The climate changes.
These changes in the climate follow natural cycles.
There is nothing mankind can do to change these natural cycles.
No matter what policies are enacted the climate will not change because of them. However, the climate does and will continue to change. We have morning, noon and night. During the day the temperatures will vary. We cannot control the weather. When it rains we cannot stop the rain. When we have cyclones, hurricanes and tornadoes we cannot by anything we do change these from happening.
Reducing CO2 emission’s is harms us more than helps us. For you see CO2 is plant food. Plants, and therefore a green planet depends on the CO2 we breath out and the emissions from our vehicles, power plants and yes even cow flatulating.
So What Can We Do?
What we as individuals can and must do is to be good stewards of planet earth. God gave man dominion over the earth and all of its creatures. But he tasks us to use what He has given us wisely.
We must grow our crops to feed ourselves and others. We must use our technology to improve upon how we live, work and play. We must do our best to take what we have been given and help others to reap the great and glorious bounty of our planet, and what lies beyond on other planets.
Controlling people using the ideology of environmentalism is a clear form of tyranny. History tells us that tyranny, in any form, is both dangerous and deadly.
Freeing people to do their best to use what we have been given is liberating.
I choose liberty over tyranny. I am a conservationist, not an environmentalist. I embrace the freedom to choose. My body, my choice on what I eat, drive and do.
The expected water cuts from the Colorado River as a result of the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) will likely mean higher water utility rates, according to Fitch Ratings.
The U.S. Congress passed the DCP in 2019 to protect water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead which provide water to Colorado River basin states. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and Mexico entered into the DCP, which mandates how water cuts will occur when the lakes drop to certain levels, called tiers.
The agreement was sealed because public agencies, eight major private corporations, and non-governmental organizations(NGOs) contributed tens of millions of dollars to leave water in the lake for conservation projects and to provide aid to Pinal County farmers, who would be the hardest hit by reductions.
The DCP included a new water level for extra protection, “Tier Zero.” If the water level dips below 1090 feet above sea level, reductions are made to leave water in the lake. Lake Mead has been in Tier Zero. A tier 1 shortage occurs when the lake drops to 1075 feet above sea level.
Water volume at Lake Mead, the Lower Colorado Basin’s principal reservoir serving Arizona, as well as Nevada and California, has fallen to historically low levels due to the drought throughout the west. As of April 26, Lake Powell was down to 35% full, while Lake Mead was down to 38 percent.
Fitch Ratings predicts that the drought will cause a tier 1 reduction in water allocation for 2022 when shortage levels are announced in August as part of the US Bureau of Reclamation water study. In addition, Fitch expects further water delivery reductions over the next several years, which will result in increased delivery rates to customers to counterbalance lower sales volumes.
According to the DCP, Arizona is required to take reductions of about 18% of its allocation in a tier 1 shortage. The largest cuts under the DCP will be absorbed by the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, which transports water via the Central Arizona Project (CAP) to three counties in central and southern Arizona under long-term contracts with strong purchasers.
The tier 1 shortage will reduce water to the Central Arizona Project by 320,000 acre-feet, enough water to supply 1.2 million individuals for a year. These reductions will affect farmers first because they have low priority rights for river supplies. Municipalities and tribes are considered a higher priority and are unlikely to see any early reductions to supply. However, they will still be subjected to higher prices.
The largest purchasers of CAP water include Tucson, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Gilbert, Mesa, and Peoria. CAP participants have been taking more water at lower prices and storing it in anticipation of cuts to guard against price increases.
Regional wholesale and retail purchasers of CAP water will likely rely on other supply sources, such as groundwater or stored water reserves, and/or pass on the CAP rate increases to users to eventually pressure rate flexibility.
Ted Cooke, general manager of CAP, said in a briefing led by state water leaders that the reductions would not harm most citizens and businesses.
“We have a plan. It’s called the Drought Contingency Plan, and we’re implementing that plan,” Cooke said. “This is a day we knew would come at some point and we’ve been preparing for this moment for at least a couple of decades.”
00Elizabeth Troutmanhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngElizabeth Troutman2021-07-15 01:00:462021-07-15 01:00:46Fitch: Low River Levels Likely To Increase Arizona Water Bills
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https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00John Droz, Jr.https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngJohn Droz, Jr.2021-07-13 06:49:372021-07-13 06:49:37AWED: Media Balanced Newsletter — We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.
The billionaires prolificating “green” for the world, such as Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and others are the same individuals amassing huge carbon footprints for their numerous private jets, houses, boats, and cars.
For Bloomberg alone, a Business Insider analysis found that Bloomberg’s emissions-heavy private jets took more than 1,700 trips and emitted at least 10,000 metric tons of CO2 over a four-year period from August 2016 to August 2020.
Simply put about these “green” preachers, is that if something is good for these wealthy people, it should be equally as good for other people, but these hypocrites want everyone else to take the electric bus to reduce emissions and help fight climate change.
Politicians and movie stars, having easy access to microphones, verbalize that sunshine and breezes can provide all the world’s electricity via weather-dependent solar and wind generation. As a result of the power (no pun intended) of the microphone, huge amounts of taxpayer’s monies are being committed to subsidizing weather-dependent industries for electricity.
These “green” preachers have yet to promote the need for clones to the oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products manufactured from petroleum that did not exist a few hundred years ago, that are the basis of these billionaires lifestyles and worldwide economies.
The social media giants have become the new bums only too happy to promote the same ideologies and squelch any thoughts, not in accord with the favored religion of those drinking the same Kool-Aid. The level of deceit from the administration opens pandora’s box as this kind of behavior is now accepted as normal. The biggest traitor is the press.
A complex trade-off associated with policy choices of moving too quickly into intermittent electricity from weather generation systems is that abandoning fuels and products from oil will further deprive and/or delay from providing at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than 6 billion in this world living on less than $10 a day, from enjoying the same products that benefit the wealthy and healthy countries.
The greatest threat to the environment is not affluence, it is poverty. As Germany, Australia, and California have proven, weather is the most expensive way to generate intermittent electricity as they now have among the highest costs of electricity in the world for their residents and businesses. As a means of control, Michael Bloomberg supports regressive expenses and taxes, meaning that they end up costing poor people proportionately more money than their more well-off counterparts.
We can easily observe the world’s poorest and developing countries to see what lifestyles are like without the thousands of products from oil derivatives that benefit the richer countries. In those poorer countries, there are 11 million children in the world dying every year. Those fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no, or minimal, access to those products from oil derivatives enjoyed by the wealthy and healthy countries.
In the richer and wealthier countries, the inventions of the automobile, the airplane, and the use of petroleum in the early 1900s led us into the Industrial Revolution and winning World Wars I and II. The healthier and wealthier countries of today now have more than 6,000 products manufactured from petroleum derivatives that did not exist a few hundred years ago. Those products have resulted in the increase in longevity projections and virtually eliminated weather related fatalities.
The United Nations Climate Change Conferences are yearly conferences held in the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). They serve as the formal meeting of the UNFCCC Parties (Conference of the Parties, COP) to assess progress in dealing with climate change, and beginning in the mid-1990s, to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol to establish legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Let me repeat that: “legally binding obligations for DEVELOPED countries”.
China and India, with their 2.7 billion combined populations are DEVELOPING countries, and are exempt from any financial penalties from those COP conferences for not reducing emissions.
Developing societies in Asia and Africa are reliant on fossil fuels for lifting and keeping their population out of poverty. China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Vietnam are jeopardizing global climate ambitions by investing in 80 percent of the world’s planned new coal plants as they plan to build more than 600 coal power units. African countries are planning to build more than 1,250 new coal and gas-fired power plants by 2030. Asia and Africa are focused on the most abundant, affordable, reliable energy feasible for their developing economies.
The sites chosen for the last 25 COP conferences from 1995 to 2019 have all been in the healthier and wealthier cities of the world to accommodate the elite attendees. Rather than hold the climate conferences in locations where very few of the world’s 8 billion reside, why not conduct them in the developing countries that are the major contributors of emissions and where most of the people reside in this world?
For the wealthy climate geese, the inconvenience of having the COP conferences in those developing countries is that there may not be airports for their private jets to land, nor major hotel resorts and exotic eateries to meet their social existence needs, but that’s where the “ganders” of many African, Asian, and South American children are being enslaved and dying in mines and factories to extract and process rare earth and exotic minerals required for solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and utility-scale storage systems to work to mine for those blood minerals and metals to support the construction of EV batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.
How dare we, in the healthier and wealthier countries, turn our backs on the 11 million kids dying every year in developing countries, and insist that we should limit poor country’s future access to the fuels and products from oil? Cheap, reliable, accessible power, and products from fossil fuels are lifesaving, and one of the best ways out of poverty.
00Ronald Steinhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngRonald Stein2021-07-13 01:00:592021-07-13 01:00:59What Is Good For The Climate Geese Is NOT Good For The Ganders
Totalitarian actions in the name of ‘climate change’ threaten wildlife, people and freedoms.
Environmental activism was already nasty and lethal when I wrote Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death 18 years ago. It’s gotten steadily worse since then, especially with hysteria about the “looming manmade climate apocalypse” driving ever more extreme demands that we rid the world of fossil fuels and prohibit or roll back modern living standards.
The demands have reached previously unimaginable extremes – based primarily on GIGO computer models and wild assertions about planetary temperatures, weather, icecaps and vanishing wildlife. The claims have little basis in real-world evidence, but are presented as Gospel Truth by climate alarmists.
One group of extremists wants to make what it calls “ecocide” an “international crime” – then prosecute and imprison political leaders and corporate executives who have engaged in “mass ecological destruction” that these zealots assert has now reached a magnitude “similar” to Nazi genocide.
Others are agitating for a “Great Reset” – demanding that corporations reject their traditional roles and goals, and focus instead on “saving the planet” and advancing racial and gender “equity.” This unavoidably means companies must embrace “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship,” corporate-state tyranny and “top-down authoritarianism.” But in exchange they will reap huge profits by trying to replace reliable energy, while reducing middle and working class living standards, in the name of climate stability.
The radical left routinely employs eco-hysteria and Nazi analogies to deflect attention from the horrific disease and death tolls they have inflicted on Third World “people of color,” by denying them access to reliable energy, spatial insect repellants and modern farming technologies. Slinging these epithets at fossil fuel providers, users and defenders is as wanton, wicked and baseless as claims the Nazis made to justify exterminating Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, disabled people and other “undesirables.”
Meanwhile, in the real world, the actual threats to our planet, people, wildlife and freedoms come from the green zealots who demand we replace hydrocarbon energy with electricity generated by weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels, and backed up by half-ton Tesla-style battery modules.
This Green New Deal would reverse job creation, economic growth, revenue collection, and human health and welfare gains. It would also inflict ecological damage on scales unprecedented in history.
The Harris-Biden Administration wants 80% hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2030, 100% by 2035 and elimination of fossil fuels from all sectors of the U.S. economy by 2050. This would require replacing coal and natural gas for generating electricity; gasoline and diesel for powering vehicles; natural gas for smelting and manufacturing; and natural gas for heating, cooking and water heating.
Together, this would send the nation’s annual electricity requirement soaring from about 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (the fossil fuel portion of total U.S. electricity in 2018) to almost 7.5 billion MWh per year by 2050. Substantial additional generation would be required to constantly recharge backup batteries for windless, sunless days, to safeguard society against blackouts, cyberattacks and wholesale collapse.
Generating all that electricity without new nuclear and hydroelectric plants would require tens of thousands of 850-foot-tall offshore wind turbines, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of somewhat smaller onshore turbines, and billions of photovoltaic solar panels. Backing up sufficient nationwide electricity for even one week of windless, sunless days would involve well over a billion battery modules. Connecting all this and our cities would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines.
The number are sky-high because wind and sun generate electricity only 25-50% of the year in the best locations (less than 33% on average nationwide), and the more “green” electricity we need, the more we must put turbines and panels in lower quality areas, where they generate power only 15-20% of the year. Just President Biden’s plan to install 30,000 megawatts of wind power off America’s coasts by 2030 would require 2,100 14-MW turbines. Even if they operated at full capacity 24/7, they would not meet peak summer electricity needs for New York State, much less coastal states or the entire USA.
Even if wind and solar facilities avoided the most highly sensitive areas, they would still disrupt or destroy scenic areas, croplands and wildlife habitats. Turbine blades would kill millions of birds and bats. Vibration noise from offshore turbines would disrupt whale and dolphin navigation and communication.
All these turbines, panels, batteries and power lines would require tens of billions of tons of non-renewable iron, copper, aluminum, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, plastics, limestone and other materials. That would necessitate mining, crushing, processing, refining and transporting tens of billions of tons of ores – from thousands of mines and quarries, using gigantic gasoline and diesel equipment – followed by smelting and manufacturing, all with fossil fuels. None of this is clean, green or sustainable.
These energy-intensive activities often employ hazardous chemicals and release toxic pollutants. They require enormous volumes of water, often in the world’s most water-deprived regions. They cause acid mine drainage, create mountains of waste rock, and often result in vast “lakes” of toxic chemicals.
Just that initial Biden offshore wind program would require millions of tons of materials, including 110,000 tons of copper. At an average of 0.44% copper in all types of copper ore deposits today, that means just those first 2,100 offshore turbines would require mining, crushing and processing 25 million tons of copper ore, after removing some 40 million tons of overlying rock to reach the ore bodies.
Add in materials for solar panels, onshore wind turbines, backup battery systems, subsea and onshore electrical lines, electric vehicles, electric heating systems and other technologies – and the “U.S. energy transformation” would require raw materials in excess of the entire world’s current and foreseeable mining and processing capabilities. A global Green Deal would require mining half our solar system.
Environmental fanatics insist that the United States continue to stymie or ban mining, even to support their grand energy, economic and societal reset. They and Team Biden insist that we outsource all this mining, mostly to China. They couldn’t care less about compromising our national security or their supposed commitment to environmental protection, human rights and climate justice.
Chinese companies already control the mining and processing of many GND minerals mined in Africa and other countries; they manufacture a majority of USA-bound wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. They certainly don’t adhere to U.S. laws and standards for environmental protection, pollution control, mined land reclamation, workplace safety, fair wages, child and slave labor, or human rights.
Some 40,000 children as young as four already toil with their parents in Democratic Republic of Congo mines, for a few dollars a day, under constant threat of cave-ins and exposure to toxic and radioactive mud, dust and water – just to meet today’s cobalt needs, which would skyrocket under a Green New Deal. The cobalt ore is sent to China for processing in plants that have equally abominable safety and pollution conditions, and have been linked to alarming cancer, blood disease and other health problems.
An enormous toxic dump for effluents from rare earth mining and processing in Inner Mongolia has destroyed agriculture and created serious health issues for workers and residents. China uses Uighur slave labor to build solar panels for sale to the United States and Europe.
Woke climate and human rights activists become apoplectic when clothing and coffee producers and importers fail to meet their lofty “fair trade” standards. Maybe they should travel to Moscow, Kinshasa, Beijing, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, don their ski masks, and rage, burn and loot for our planet, Uighur rights and “responsible sourcing” of raw materials for the Green New World they want to foist on us
Meanwhile CFACT’s amicus curiae brief supports a multistate lawsuit against the Biden Administration over its fossil fuel eradication plans and phony “social costs of carbon” claims. It brings much-needed reality to the “climate chaos” and “renewable” energy charade, including costs to people and planet.
00Paul Driessenhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngPaul Driessen2021-07-10 01:00:052021-07-10 01:00:05REAL Threats To Planet And People
If there’s anything climate computer modelers and warming activists fear, it’s real-world hard data that corrects their exaggerations.
CFACT’s Marc Morano is expert on just that. Climate Depot puts climate claims in perspective through reliance on actual measured temperature and historical weather data. All that objective reporting gives the Left the willies.
Here’s a perfect example. The blinkered warmists at Gizmodo / Earther are besides themselves over reports that Fox News is thinking of launching a weather channel. What frightens them most? “If they bring on a denier like Marc Morano,” they write, “if he starts to get a platform there—that content is going to go on his website, it’s going to go into other right-wing media infosphere, it’s going to bounce back on Fox, it’s going to go on social media, and they’re going to push that out in moments when everybody else is saying, ‘this is climate change’–they’re going to be able to tell this right-wing media bubble, it’s not.” — Allison Fisher, the director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters.
Media Matters is part of the far left propaganda online empire founded by David Brock. Brock channels vast sums of dark money into websites designed to stifle balanced political discourse. Sites like Media Matters don’t genuinely fear misleading or false information, they fear genuine facts that debunk their own false narratives.
Marc Morano just posted a Climate Depot Special Reportwhich corrects the record on the recent heat wave that barreled through the American Northwest, which had nothing to do with “climate change.”
Here’s the warming narrative:
Model Based Study: Northwest heat wave impossible without climate change: “They logged observations of what happened and fed them into 21 computer models and ran numerous simulations. They then simulated a world without greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The difference between the two scenarios is the climate change portion.”
Global satellite temperature for June 2021 is below the 30-year average
There are plenty of record cold outbreaks happening around the globe
Unusually strong cold weather outbreaks spread from Antarctica into central South America,
South America experiencing early winter temperature records and first snowfall in decades
About 75% of the U.S. states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955
Over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940
EPA data shows that in the 1930s U.S. heatwaves were far more severe than current temperatures
In recent years global temperatures have been running slightly warmer when compared to various baselines, however, by less than one degree centigrade. This does not account for today’s weather variations even when they are sometimes extreme (as they always have sometimes been). Both the summer heat we experienced in the U.S. and the cold they are experiencing below the equator are natural. Real world temperatures consistently run cooler than the climate computer simulations that form the basis of climate policy and reporting.
Today’s weather would have occurred whether you live in a free, prosperous, energy-rich society or not.
Leftist narratives collapse when measured against objective data and history.
That’s what has the Left in a panic.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-07-09 14:49:392021-07-09 14:49:39Activists Panicked CFACT Will Correct Them On Climate
Editors’ Note: While California’s descent into mismanagement is a policy lesson for Arizona, it could well become a burden for Arizona. California will be looking to import power when power is needed for the growth of Arizona. Arizona must not follow in their footsteps with “green fantasies”. The actions and leadership of our Arizona Corporation Commission should raise voter consciousness to a high level of scrutiny. Very often wealthy, out-of-state environmental interests attempt to dictate policy for those of us that live here and pay the utility bills. Therefore, the Commission is no longer a technocratic board that voters can treat casually, but one of the most consequential offices in the state.
Two inexorable energy trends are underway in California:soaring electricity prices and ever-worsening reliability—and both trends bode ill for the state’s low- and middle-income consumers.
Last week, the state’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator, issued a “flex alert” that asked the state’s consumers to reduce their power use “to reduce stress on the grid and avoid power outages.”
The California Independent System Operator’s warning of impending electricity shortages heralds another blackout-riddled summer at the same time California’s electricity prices are skyrocketing.
In 2020, California’s electricity prices jumped by 7.5%, making it the biggest price increase of any state in the country last year and nearly seven times the increase that was seen in the United States as a whole.
According to data from the Energy Information Administration, the all-sector price of electricity in California last year jumped to 18.15 cents per kilowatt-hour, which means that Californians are now paying about 70% more for their electricity than the U.S. average all-sector rate of 10.66 cents per kWh. Even more worrisome: California’s electricity rates are expected to soar over the next decade. (More on that in a moment.)
The surging cost of electricity will increase the energy burden being borne by low- and middle-income Californians. High energy costs have a particularly regressive effect in California, which has the highest poverty rate—and some of the highest electricity prices—in the country. In 2020, California’s all-sector electricity prices were the third-highest in the continental U.S., behind only Rhode Island (18.55 cents per kWh) and Connecticut (19.19 cents per kWh.)
Before going further, let me state the obvious: California policymakers are providing a case study in how not to manage an electric grid. Furthermore, that case study shows what could happen if policymakers at the state and federal levels decide to follow California’s radical decarbonization mandates, which include a requirement for 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045 and an economy-wide goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.
Even though the state’s tattered electric grid can barely meet existing demand—and more rolling blackouts are almost certain this summer—California continues to pile bad policy on top of bad policy.
The state has banned the future sale of cars powered by internal combustion engines, which will result in dramatic increases in electricity demand and will require, according to a recent report by the California Energy Commission, the installation of 1.2 million new electric vehicle charging stations by 2030.
Making the whole thing even more absurd is that California is pledging to achieve these goals while closing the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which by itself produces nearly 10% of all the juice consumed in California.
The state’s surging energy costs demonstrate the regressive nature of decarbonization policies and how renewable energy mandates drive up the price of power. California’s electricity prices are “absolutely exploding,” says Mark Nelson, an energy analyst and the managing director of the Radiant Energy Fund, who used that phrase on a recent episode of “ThePower Hungry Podcast.”
He added that the electricity price hikes are happening before the state’s utilities have incurred all of the costs of the deadly wildfires that swept the state, trimming millions of trees to prevent future wildfires, and adding all the mandated renewable energy capacity, transmission lines, and new battery storage that the state will need to meet its climate goals. Further, the costs do not include all of the costs that will be incurred after the proposed shuttering of Diablo Canyon in 2025.
Last week’s power conservation requests are likely the first of many to come. On May 27, California Independent System Operator CEO Elliot Mainzer warned that if the state is hit with another hot summer like the one that required rolling blackouts that left more than 800,000 homes and businesses without power over two days last August, “our numbers tell us the grid will be stressed again.”
That warning followed a May 12 California Independent System Operator press release that warned that “reliability risks remain” and the state will likely need “voluntary” electricity conservation this summer to avoid a repeat of last year’s blackouts.
The specter of more blackouts is yet more bad news for California’s beleaguered consumers. Between 2010 and 2020, the state’s electricity prices jumped by 39.5%, which was the biggest increase of any state in the U.S. Even more worrisome: California’s electricity rates will soar over the next decade.
In a report issued in February, the California Public Utility Commission warned that the state’s energy costs are growing far faster than the rate of inflation, and that “energy bills will become less affordable over time.”
What’s driving up prices? The report says that “electrification goals and wildlife mitigation plans are among the near-term needs … that place upward pressure on rates and bills.”
The report projected that residents living in hotter regions (that is, those who can’t afford to live close to the coast) who get their electricity from San Diego Gas & Electric could see their monthly power bills increase by 47% between now and 2030. When future gasoline price increases are included, overall energy costs for that same consumer are projected to increase by 60%.
Furthermore, the California Public Utility Commission expects residential ratepayers in San Diego Gas & Electric’s service territory will be paying close to 45 cents per kilowatt-hour by 2030. For reference, that is more than three times the current average price of residential electricity.
Meanwhile, the state’s renewable plans are being thwarted by rural Californians who don’t want wind and solar projects in their neighborhoods. California has added essentially no new wind capacity since 2013.
The project met fierce resistance. According to David Benda, a reporter for the Redding Record Searchlight, “The 5-0 vote capped a marathon meeting that went nearly 10 hours and ended just before 11 p.m. The unanimous vote was met with cheers.”
As I have previously reported, the backlash against Big Wind goes far beyond California. It can be seen throughout Europe and from Maine to Hawaii. Since 2015, more than 300 communities in the U.S. have rejected or restricted wind projects.
In addition to the raging land-use conflicts, California policymakers are facing a growing backlash from California’s Latino population, which is the largest in the country.
As I reported last year, the state’s Latino leaders have sued the state over its housing, energy, and climate regulations. Jennifer Hernandez, the lead lawyer for The Two Hundred, a coalition of Latino leaders, told me those regulations are “incredibly regressive” and are bringing “Appalachia economics” to California’s “non-coastal elites.”
Robert Apodaca, the founder of United Latinos Vote, a nonprofit group, told me recently that the ongoing electricity price hikes in the state “will be crippling for low- and middle-income Californians, particularly for those who live in the Central Valley and the Inland Empire. They are going to really feel the heat, in more ways than one.”
The punchline here is clear: The blackouts and high electricity prices that are plaguing California provide a neon-lit warning sign about the electric reliability and energy affordability crises that loom if policymakers attempt to decarbonize our economy too quickly.
00Robert Brycehttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngRobert Bryce2021-07-02 01:00:512021-07-02 01:00:51Blackouts Loom in California as Electricity Prices Are ‘Absolutely Exploding’
The term “tell” is often used regarding poker playing or pulling a scam. It refers to a gesture, a look, a twitch someone has that indicates what they are thinking. For example, a person always scratches his forehead when he is bluffing in poker. I recently encountered a situation that was itself not significant. Yet it really “tells” you what the state of America is today.
Everyone knows that California has been a disaster regarding our water supply for a while. California lost allocation from the Colorado River and squandered water reservoir bond money for years. In addition, the sensible solution to the problem – desalination plants — has been denied by the elected officials, largely because of environmentalists. Then there is the agriculture industry that provides fruits and vegetables for the entire nation but uses a lot of water. Because of that most all Californians practice water savings procedures that many other Americans do not have to think about.
I signed up for an app called Nextdoor. You may be familiar with it. It allows people who live within a certain area near to one another to communicate concerns. These days a lot of it talks about the unruly homeless or increased crime due to lax enforcement in Los Angeles pushed by our new District Attorney George Gascon.
A gentleman wrote about his walk on a recent rainy day. Understand in Southern California we may get 10 days of rain a year. In a big year we might get 20 days of rain. This is not Seattle which is overcast 240 days a year. He expressed concern that neighbors had sprinklers operating on a rainy day. He suggested they solve the problem by getting a device for which the local power company (DWP) will reimburse them $200 as they did for him. There was a flood of positive responses.
There are so many things wrong with this it became immediately clear. Let us start with the fact that of all the problems in the world this is rather miniscule. We have so little rain here; why is he so concerned? I personally am very rigid about not wasting water, but on the scale of 1 to 10, I saw this as a 2. I asked the Beautiful Wife what she does when it rains. She goes outside and flips two timer switches, and the sprinklers are off. Not the biggest issue in the world. We do not need expensive devices to solve every one of our minor life challenges.
Then there is the device that this man was touting. He made clear that the device made sense not only as a convenience but in the end, it was free – FREE. This was the genius of the entire matter. It was quite clear that he thought that if the payment for the device was not coming directly out of his bank account it was – FREE. I did not waste my time responding via Nextdoor by explaining to him the basics of economics. Not only was he clueless that he was paying for the device, but he also was paying for all the staffing time to process the refunds. He did not seem to grasp that he was paying for this through inflated power bills, which are some of the highest in the nation. Amazingly, no one else seemed to understand this.
If this was such a good idea and this person was so water conscious, why did he not just go out and get the device without the prodding of the DWP reimbursement program?
There is a sickness going on in our country. People feeling the need to make public their good deeds instead of quietly doing what they know is right. Worse, these people promote their good deeds when they are either being done by others or with other people’s money (OPM).
There were a couple of interesting comments. One person suggested another device for $20, not $200. Another person suggested you send in the receipt for the device to the DWP and upon receiving reimbursement sell the device on eBay. Hard to tell whether the person who posted it was joking, but either way it tells you how reckless these programs are in the first place. I would not put it above some people to enact that scheme.
Major portions of our country have lost the concept of personal responsibility. They think they are entitled to OPM. They do not grasp doing simple tasks without others having to pay for them and they do not understand they always pay in the end. The worst part of this story is how many of my neighbors condoned this behavior.
There are many other instances where simple actions or attitudes are “tells” about the changing morals of our society. We used to be a country that took responsibility for what we did and expected that if we wanted to accomplish something, we would be the person paying. That seems to have disappeared and few people even noticed.
*****
This article was published on June 27, 2021 in FlashReport and is reproduced with the permission of the author.
00Bruce Bialoskyhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngBruce Bialosky2021-07-01 01:00:572021-07-01 01:00:57A “Tell” Upon America
Years ago it was popular for companies to sponsor a day for employees to take their kids to the office to see where mom or dad worked. My wife got stuck with organizing one of the days for her employer.
In an introductory exercise, she had the kids sit around a conference table and take turns in answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Our son answered last. The extroverted jokester said, “I want to be a Walmart greeter.”
That answer is not the reason my wife and I buy most of our groceries at Walmart and none at Whole Foods, although Whole Foods is much closer to our house.
Nor are lower prices the driving reason, especially given our comfortable station in life—although our frugality makes us appreciate that we can buy the same organic stuff at Walmart at considerably lower prices.
Incidentally, frugality is a foolish trait, in that it will result in the Biden tax plan pillaging our savings and estate after a lifetime of living below our means. Saving money to have it confiscated later is evidence of not being very bright. Some will find this commentary to be additional evidence. Being of average intelligence, I’m okay with conceding the point.
Another example of our frugality is the ten-year-old RAV-4 that we drive to Walmart, a car that would look out of place in the parking lot of Whole Foods, which abounds with late-model Range Rovers, BMWs, Mercedes, Priuses, and Teslas—many of which are driven by bleach-blonde women with expensive fingernails and toenails, dressed in expensive torn jeans or skin-tight yoga pants, which reveal in intimate detail that organic arugula doesn’t make a butt smaller.
Nor do we shop at Walmart because we like big-box stores. In fact, we dislike them as much as we dislike other behemoths, including big media, big banks, big government, big teacher unions, big federal deficits, big butts in yoga pants, and big Amazon, which owns Whole Foods. Sadly, the corner grocer, baker, butcher, drug store, and farm stand of our youth don’t exist where we now live, or, for that matter, just about anywhere else in America. Likewise, store owners no longer live in the same neighborhood as their customers, unless by chance you live in the same hoity-toity hood as Jeff Bezos.
So, why do we shop at Walmart instead of Whole Foods?
It’s a class thing. Being oddballs and contrarians, we don’t see ourselves as members of the social class that shops at Whole Foods or the opposite one that shops at Walmart. But we’re more comfortable with the latter because the Walmart class is not pretentious or phony and better reflects our working-class roots.
There used to be four social classes in America: upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, and working class. Or in Marxist terms, there were three classes: bourgeoisie (capitalists), petite bourgeoisie (shopkeepers and artisans), and proletariat (serfs and working class).
Today, for all intents and purposes, there are only two classes: knowledge workers with a college degree and everyone else.
There are sub-groups within each of these, and one of the most influential is a subspecies of the degreed class. It has the scientific name of Platycercini and the common name of broad-tailed parrot. Its natural habitat is not only Whole Foods but also Trader Joe’s, Apple stores, Starbucks, and any store, restaurant, bar, health club, neighborhood, or vacation spot considered hip, trendy, and in accord with the governing zeitgeist.
Platycercini can be as tribal and easily led as the non-degreed but doesn’t have the excuse of being uneducated. Of course, more schooling doesn’t necessarily equate to more wisdom, especially when it’s a curriculum of miseducation.
What follows will be generalizations and stereotypes, but, hey, generalizations and stereotypes are back in vogue, especially the one that says all people of color are oppressed and disadvantaged, and all whites are oppressors and privileged. (As a swarthy Italian of peasant stock, I don’t know which I am.)
There are exceptions, but the Platycercini tend to dress alike, look alike, speak alike, think alike, vote alike, and parrot alike what they were taught alike in college, which is when they stopped learning. They see themselves as Green, woke, progressive, tolerant, educated, and open-minded, especially about racial diversity and social justice. Their virtue-signaling and sloganeering match their self-image.
Advertisers know them well, which is why so many commercials and ads spout hooey about the social responsibility and diversity of companies instead of the features and benefits of their products. This leads to such ridiculous messaging as the commercial that equates a Subaru to love, when in fact, Subaru made Japanese fighter planes flown by kamikazes in World War II. Equally ridiculous is a Toyota commercial touting the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, when in fact, Japan is one of the most racially homogenous nations in the world.
The lifestyle of the Platycercini doesn’t match their self-image, however. It’s not green to live in a huge house, or to heat and cool a second home, or to narcissistically put every moment of your life on the cloud (i.e., on power-hungry server farms), or to spew tons of carbon on vacations to exotic locales. It’s not tolerant to look down on the patrons of Walmart and other undesirables. It’s not woke to be unconcerned about working stiffs who toil in a factory or mine or live in a town suffering from deindustrialization and drug overdoses.
Speaking of factories and mines, few of the Platycercini have ever been in one, or, for that matter, have ever done any form of manual labor. But they tend to be opposed to mining for environmental reasons, in a display of willful ignorance about the source of the rare earth minerals in their gadgets and EVs.
Many of the Platycercini are immune from the negative consequences of voting for bigger government and a more intrusive regulatory state, because they are either uber-wealthy or work for the government or work in one of the millions of private-sector jobs that depend on the regulatory state, such as lobbyists, tax attorneys, regulatory specialists and consultants, and software coders who develop the regulatory reporting systems for businesses. A large number of these regulatory-related jobs are held by Republicans who see themselves as conservatives.
The Platycercini are for diversity and inclusion as long as it means associating with so-called minorities who are knowledge workers like themselves and in the same socioeconomic class as themselves—and as long as they are insulated from the crime, blight, bad schools, and broken families in the barrio, inner-city slums, and forsaken rural towns. Similarly, it’s easy for them to be for the mass immigration of unskilled and poorly educated migrants when the benefits of such immigration accrue to themselves and the costs are borne elsewhere by others.
They claim to care about the poor and black lives but are largely silent about one of the major causes of poverty, crime, and poor test scores: fatherless families.
Due to misguided social welfare policies and cultural rot allowed to stand by the Platycercini, the percent of such families has more than doubled over the last 60 years. Fatherless families are now the majority in some neighborhoods, communities, and ethnocultural groups. Yet in one of the most glaring double standards in human history, the broad-tailed parrots do their utmost to see that their offspring have two parents in the nest.
It used to be that higher education would bring introspection, healthy skepticism, continual questioning, a passion for free speech, and a knowledge of what one doesn’t know. Now it brings conformity of thinking, speech codes, phoniness, and hypocrisy—all evidence that the brainwashing of higher education is very effective.
Ironically, there is more diversity of class and race among the employees and customers at Walmart than at Whole Foods, ranging from poor whites with broken bodies from a lifetime of manual labor to recent immigrants of all colors, to the well-off like my wife and me, and to the African-American greeter who exudes friendliness and enthusiasm as he says hello when we enter the store and gives a hearty “Thanks for coming” when we leave the store.
Our son had the right idea when he said he wanted to be a Walmart greeter.
00Craig J. Cantonihttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngCraig J. Cantoni2021-06-30 01:00:042021-06-30 01:00:04Why We Shop at Walmart Instead of Whole Foods
On Feb. 7, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and US Sen. Ed Markey introduced legislation known as the Green New Deal.
You’ve probably heard of it. It’s a big deal, to paraphrase Joe Biden.
The History of New Deals
Wikipedia, the internet’s fountain of knowledge, describes the legislation as “a proposed stimulus package that aims to address climate change and economic inequality.”
Okay. But what is that?
If the term “new deal” sounds familiar, it should. It’s a reference to FDR’s New Deal, which was itself a play off of Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal. (Politicians don’t win extra points for originality.)
So just imagine FDR’s New Deal took the Paris Climate Agreement out for drinks, one thing led to another, and—voila—nine months later they had a baby: The Green New Deal.
So what should we make of this Green New Deal? Since climate change is bad, and inequality is bad, can we assume the Green New Deal is good?
Have an Informed Opinion
Well, that’s for you to decide. But here are 44 facts and reflections on the GND to consider:
1. The GND is necessary, we’re told, because global warming will cause “more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100.”
2. That’s a scary number. But even if we accept such a figure, it’s important to note, as Tim Worstall has, that we’re talking about .05 percent of the total US economy in 2100.
3. That $500 billion price tag, in context, is rather small, then—at least compared to what AOC’s legislation would cost. Some estimates put the price tag at $93 trillion.
4. Relax, relax. Fact-checking organizations are probably right when they say that these figures are mostly pulled out of a, ahem, hat (much like AOC’s own $500 billion figure).
5. In fact, all these big numbers make me think of this:
6. So why do we need to spend all those trillions in the first place? One reason AOC cites is “a 4-decade trend of wage stagnation.”
7. The problem? The wage narrative, as Bloomberg recently pointed out, is a myth. As in not true.
8. That’s right. Although wages flattened (briefly) in the mid-90s, they have grown steadily since, according to Federal Reserve data.
9. Uh, that’s actually good news.
10. Ditto on overall economic growth. Fact: Real GDP growth, per capita, has averaged nearly 1.7 percent per year since 1980. At that rate, the average person’s standard of living doubles every four decades or so.
11. Well, you wouldn’t know this by reading the GND. It cites grievance—“the top 1 percent of earners [accrue] 91 percent of gains”—after grievance—“a large racial wealth gap”—after grievance—“a gender earnings gap that results in women earning approximately 80 percent as much as men.”
13. The capitalism AOC decries as “irredeemable” has given us this:
14. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez can cite “life expectancy declining” as a reason to pass her GND. But take a look at the actual data on US life expectancy over the last 135 years.
15. Sure, life expectancy did briefly dip between 2014 and 2016—by three-tenths of 1 percent. However, that decline was the result of drug overdoses and suicides. The trend has nothing to do with climate change and, more importantly, it’s a trend that’s not expected to continue.
16. Okay, okay, okay, you say. But what about the climate? What good is wealth and a long life if the planet BOILS IN A LAKE OF FIRE?!
17. Because that’s what AOC said is going to happen. “We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she explained in January.
18. It gets worse. Climate scientist Politician Beto O’Rourke says 12 years is actually wishful thinking. It’s more like 10.
19. AOC might be right. Or maybe O’Rourke is. On the other hand, some scientists who have, like, Nobel Prizes, are less convinced that a global warming apocalypse is upon us.
20. Perhaps realizing that there is a small chance the world will still be here in 2031, AOC recently hedged on her assertion that the world will end in 12 years if we don’t act.
This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and “fact check” it.
Like the “world ending in 12 years” thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.
23. And yet—the GND is still on the table, and fossil fuels are still the enemy. In fact, the stated goal of the GND is to meet “100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”
24. Is this possible? The cars we drive, the homes we cool and heat, and the lights that illuminate our world all require vast amounts of energy. How much energy? Well, Americans on average use about 310 million BTU annually. That’s roughly 1.005400000E+17 nationally.
25. The lowest cost alternative to coal and natural gas is nuclear energy. The US currently has 99 nuclear reactors, each of which have a generating capacity between 582 megawatts and 3937 megawatts. Together, these 99 reactors generate 20 percent of US electricity.
26. Sixty-three percent of US electricity comes from fossil fuels, however. To switch that 63 percent to nuclear energy would require more than 200 additional nuclear reactors. At approximately $15 billion per plant, the total cost over the 10-year period would be around $3 trillion just to build the reactors.
27. Yeah, that’s a pretty penny. In fact, that’s nearly all federal revenue collected in 2017. So it’s doable but extremely expensive. However, AOC said building more nuclear plants is off-limits.
28. Graciously, however, she said she will allow nuclear plants already built to continue operating… for now. Her office said that’s because it’s unclear just how fast “we will be able to decommission every nuclear plant.”
30. In fact, the idea that we could come close to meeting our energy needs without fossil fuels, nuclear plants, or a historic breakthrough in fusion is, well…
31. Perhaps this is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came up with a pet name for the Green New Deal: “The Green Dream or Whatever.”
32. Pelosi didn’t stop there. “It’s enthusiastic, and I appreciate the enthusiasm,” said the House Speaker.
33. Ouch. Perhaps this is why AOC backed off and said maybe nuclear energy is still on the table.
34. Either way, the Green New Deal would mean big changes. But how big? And how would those changes be made? Steve Inskeep, a journalist at NPR and host of the Morning Edition program, asked AOC if her plan requires “massive government intervention.”
35. “It does. It does. Yeah. I have no problem saying that,” she responded, according to the transcript.
36. Say what you will about AOC, she deserves points for honesty. At least that morning she did. Here is what she said later in the day: “One way the right tries to mischaracterize what we’re doing as though it’s like some kind of massive government takeover… obviously, it’s not that.”
37. The Green New Deal, it’s safe to say, is rather confusing. The big question: How worried should you be?
38. Not that worried, actually. The legislation that comprises the GND, as Factcheck.org explains, is nonbinding. This means that if the bill passes, it will not “have the force of law.”
39. That’s right. Political parties and pundits have spent millions of hours(ish) talking about legislation that is essentially meaningless. The GND, one could say, is a massive PR stunt. (Consider this: if you Google “Green New Deal,” you’ll get 2.32 billion—billion—hits in .62 seconds.)
40. That’s frustrating, but keep in mind: a) politics is dumb; b) we should be thankful—exceedingly thankful—the Green New Deal will not have the power of law behind it should it actually pass.
41. Why? Because as former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore pointed out, untold numbers of people likely would die if the GND became binding law.
You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death.
42. Yeah, that’s kind of terrifying. Now, nobody is saying AOC wants millions to die. No one wants that. But it’s an overlooked fact that most of the horrors of the 20th century were committed by people attempting to use government and force to improve the world, not markets and free exchange.
43. “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to [humans] how little they really know about what they imagine they can design,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek observed in The Fatal Conceit.
44. Hayek’s statement includes everyone—even the charming young congresswoman from the Bronx New York City.
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.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2021-06-29 06:53:582021-06-29 06:53:5844 Things You Should Know about the Green New Deal
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