Against 'Climate Change,' the Conclusion; & Happy Fourth of July!

Good morning, and Happy Fourth of July! This week’s newsletter includes the final few posts from our Against Climate Change project, which was originally supposed to last for two weeks but ended up going for the entire month of June. It also includes the first few posts of July, including our editor Michael Walsh’s article on one of our most underappreciated American heroes:

Grant, the Indispensable Man

With his victories at Shiloh in 1862, which put the Tennessee River in Union hands, and at Vicksburg, Grant had twice bisected the Confederacy. It was the "Anaconda" strategy of the retired General of the Army, Winfield Scott, made flesh. Then, in November, Grant marched east and broke the stalemate at Chattanooga, leaving Georgia wide open for invasion and, ultimately, Sherman's march to the sea. Despite General George Meade's repulse of Lee at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln's choice for a new commander of all the Union forces was clear: in March of 1864, Lincoln summoned Grant to Washington and named him general-in-chief of the Union forces. The moment had met its man.

That Grant was the greatest American of all time is indisputable. Short (5'7" on tiptoes), quiet, unassuming (he generally wore a private's blouse in the field), well-read (he loved novels and enjoyed an evening in the theater although he begged off Lincon's fatal visit to Ford's Theater just days after Appomattox), a master horseman (as he showed in action during the Mexican War), he won the War Between the States for the Union and in so doing effectively freed the slaves. As a two-term president (1869-77) following the disastrous Andrew Johnson administration, he oversaw Reconstruction, re-organized the military, established the first National Park (Yellowstone), and destroyed the original incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. During his post-presidency, he toured the globe as the most famous man alive. But his wartime habit of chain-smoking cigars caught up with him and, suffering greatly from inoperable mouth and throat cancer, he died on July 23, 1885, just days after finishing his memoirs. 

In my 2020 bestseller, Last Stands, I wrote about his victory at Shiloh, early in the war, and made this assessment: 

Events can make the man, and Grant is perhaps the best example. What would have been his fate had the war not occurred when and where it did? He had resigned from the Army in semi-disgrace, dogged by accusations of alcoholism. He made a hash of his business affairs (and would continue to do so throughout this life, especially in his post-presidency), and came to rely on the kindness of a grateful nation to keep the wolf from the door. (Presidents did not get pensions in those days.) He might even have sold off his memoirs piecemeal as works-for-hire journalism had not his friend Mark Twain made him an exceptionally attractive publishing offer, including a 70 percent royalty, that kept Grant’s widow, Julia, in style for the rest of her life. It also resulted in the finest wartime memoir since Caesar’s Commentaries, rivaled later only by Winston Churchill’s six-volume series, The Second World War.

A poor judge of character in his private life, Grant was a superb commander at both the tactical level (as Shiloh showed) and, more important, at the strategic level. Indeed, his partnership with Lincoln was a textbook example of the proper relationship between the president as commander in chief of the armed forces (a legacy of George Washington) and the general of the armies. For Lincoln’s objectives were simple and direct: preserve the Union by any means necessary, and offer mercy to the defeated South only after the rebellion had been thoroughly crushed. Grant accomplished both.

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Here’s one from Peter Smith:

Becalmed, Powerless, Unsightly

Let’s talk about that contradiction in terms “wind power.” Fuelling conspiracy theories isn’t my shtick; but, heck, here goes anyway. Wind won’t work. Strictly speaking, it won’t work in the world as we know it. Of that fact, sinister forces are well aware. And like H. G. Wells’ Martians, slowly and surely they drew their plans against us. Their aim? Nationalisation of power generation and enforced rationing; eventually applied selectively to control “dissidents.” Sinister forces? Think of the World Economic Forum, the E.U., the U.N., increasingly woke corporations, authoritarian governments, the mainstream media, the intelligentsia, useful idiots, Justin Trudeau. Sinister enough for you?

If you don’t like my conspiracy theory, I have no others. So, in that case, please disregard everything after “wind won’t work.” That is certainly beyond dispute. An article published by electrical engineer Paul Miskelly in Sage Journals (“Wind Farms in Eastern Australia - Some Lessons”) convincingly makes the case. It is as relevant and telling today as it was when published in December 2012.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO’s) 2022 Integrated System Plan points to the need for nine times the current build of wind and solar power plus at least 10,000 kilometres of new transmission lines. It’s pie-in-the-sky. But even if it were built, it wouldn’t provide baseload power. How many times has it to be said? Reprised, Mr Micawber would put it this way: "Annual electricity requirement continuous. Annual wind and sun power intermittent. Batteries deficient. Result energy misery."

Miskelly analysed data produced by AEMO for the year 2010. This data consists of the electricity output from each windfarm, at five-minute intervals, across the whole of eastern Australia. Among his findings:

The output of any individual wind farm can vary enormously [and] the total wind output across the entire grid falls rapidly to zero or near zero on many occasions during the calendar year.

During the first six months of the year, Miskelly found there were 58 intervals of various durations in which the output from the whole fleet of wind farms across Eastern Australia fell below 2 percent of plated capacity; the longest for 19 hours. His conclusion: “the installed capacity of backup has to be some 80 percent of the installed wind-farm capacity.” Later he is even more categorical:

This high frequency of [wind failure], and the power requirements of wind turbines even while idle… may require levels of fossil-fuel standby capacity that approach the total installed capacity of the entire wind-farm fleet.

There we have it. One expensive system, demanding of rare earth extraction by child and slave labor, landscape and seascape despoiling, providing highly variable power, required to be backed near enough 100 percent by affordable and reliable hydrocarbon power. Makes sense in a cockeyed world.

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Elizabeth Nickson:

'Climate Change' and the Toxic De-Growth Agenda

Earlier this month in St. Petersburg, the BRICS -- that is, the nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- met to consider the application of nineteen more countries to their number, and in two months they will gather against, in Durban, South Africa, with an eye towards laying out an alternative to the U.S. dollar’s dominion over world trade. Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe, are among those applying to join BRICS. These countries are setting their face against western democracies and their death march into "climate change" degrowth and population reduction. They may save us yet.

That currency will be pegged to the natural resources possessed by each country. This critical shift will mean that financialization of each country’s resources will be unavailable to the world’s oligarchs, who today are acquiring land as fast as they can to set aside as carbon credits on the massive new taxes deemed necessary. The BRICS do not care about "climate change" or species extinction (which they know are based on a falsification of science), they care about growth and using their resources to give their people a better life. They do not want the World Economic Forum telling them what to do. When it comes to the Ukraine conflict, they are on Russia’s side.

While China plays both sides of the fence, it is Russia who is stepping up, and rejecting the no-growth policies of western democracies. With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is stating he will not bend to NATO, to the U.N., to the IPCC and the World Economic Forum. Say what you will about the autocrat Putin, unlike our leaders, he refuses to go silently into that good night.

Here, in the once-free west, we are dying. Our whole world speaks of death. Elon Musk recently invited Aaron Gunn, a young Canadian politician to upload his documentary, Canada Is Dying onto Twitter. Within 24 hours, it had received 1,000,000 views. It is a follow-on from his Vancouver Is Dying doc and could be transposed to any American city polluted by the politics of the Left. In Vancouver, when green activists shut down the extraction of our extraordinary wealth of resources, our economy shifted to crime. By 1998, Asian gangs had moved into the city and have used our real estate to launder most of the drug money of North America. We were among the first, but since the Biden immigration policy began, cartels have moved their people into place in every city in America. Vancouver is your future.

What is happening to Canada?

Skyrocketing crime. Violent attacks.

Drug-fueled chaos that's literally left tens of thousands of Canadians dead.

But how did we get here? And who's to blame?

WATCH the YouTube-censored documentary Canada Is Dying now available on Twitter. 👇 pic.twitter.com/n3k3m6BxDB

— Aaron Gunn (@AaronGunn) June 15, 2023

What future? The result has been a 30 percent across the board spike in crime in the most peaceable county in the world. Fathers murdered outside of Starbucks in front of their children, women afraid to walk the streets, killers out on bail, jurisprudence gone absolutely mad. And drugs, lots and lots of drugs. People are shooting up legally and dying on the street in front of you.

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David Cavena wrote:

Time to Go Nuclear

Director Oliver Stone has made and is exhibiting early showings of a film “Nuclear Now” (based on the book A Bright Future), about the benefits of and need for nuclear power. Stone is just one of a growing number of environmentalists who are accepting that if their desire is to transition the modern world to a clean, green, low carbon, and inexpensive baseload electrical grid, nuclear is the best option available today.

Whether or not one accepts the myth of man-caused “climate change,” we should all be in favor of increasingly clean power generation. In fact, western civilization has spent the past several decades making energy cleaner (while also keeping it relatively inexpensive) through innovation. The mass of environmentalists, who demand that we surrender our modern comforts, food security, industry, modes of transportation, etc, in order to bring about their green utopia, want to take us off of that track.

Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, an organization formed to protest nuclear weapons, agrees with Stone, as do people like Stuart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, long-time environmentalist and thinker, James Lovelock (founder of the Gaia theory), and author Jared Diamond.

The perception of nuclear power has changed a lot over the years. In the 1960s, it was viewed with quite a lot of optimism. It was the inexpensive energy source of the future. Four events, three real and one fake, changed that perception for the worse: The real events were the nuclear disasters or near-disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. The fourth was The China Syndrome – a disaster-thriller-conspiracy movie featuring Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas which sold an apocalypse wrapped in a nuclear reactor inside Hollywood special effects, about an old-style, old-technology reactor meltdown.

Each of these events severely compromised public support for nuclear energy, while also scaring off permitting agencies and insurance companies. Between 1979 – the year of both the Three Mile Island incident and The China Syndrome – and 1988, sixty-seven nuclear reactor construction projects were canceled, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The problem with the incidents mentioned above is that all were based on outdated, first-and second-generation reactor designs. Fukushima and Chernobyl were 1960s Gen-1 designs. Three Mile Island was a Gen-2 reactor. But today’s Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, are Gen-4. New designs, such as the SMR design recently signed off on by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, have taken the failures from those incidents into account. They cannot fail as those other reactors did.

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One from Clarice Feldman:

Fink Blinks, Pizza Suffers, Whales Die

Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock has had better days ,and worse ones are just around the corner.  His  pet trick to manipulate markets, ESG  (environmental social and corporate governance), has become “weaponized” he whines:

 BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is reportedly “ashamed” by the environment, social and governance (ESG) investment criteria debate and argued the term was being “misused by the far left and far right.” “I’m ashamed of being part of this conversation,” Fink said, according to Axios.

Fink admitted during a conversation with the outlet at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Sunday that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to pull $2 billion in assets from Blackrock in 2022 hurt his firm. “When I write these [investment] letters, it was never meant to be a political statement. … They were written to identify longterm issues to our long-term investors."

In a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Sunday, Fink acknowledged that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' decision to pull $2 billion in assets hurt his firm in 2022, but made clear last year was his company's best with net flows of $200 billion from U.S. clients.

Governor DeSantis is not the only thorn in Fink’s side.

The controversy has led to some Wall Street firms backing down on ESG commitments, with insurers abandoning a United Nations-backed climate alliance becoming the latest example last month. BlackRock has itself been the target of investigations by some Republican-controlled states, and even an investment boycott in Texas.

"I don't use the word ESG any more, because it's been entirely weaponised... by the far left and weaponised by the far right," Fink said. But he said dropping references to ESG would not change BlackRock's stance. The firm would continue to talk to companies it has stakes in about decarbonization, corporate governance and social issues to be addressed, he added.

On the issue of climate change, BlackRock has sought to strike a balance, continuing to invest in fossil fuel companies while nudging them to adopt energy transition plans. It has projected that by 2030 at least three quarters of its investments will be with issuers of securities that have scientific targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions on a net basis.

He may think just avoiding the term will allow his manipulative actions to continue but the earth is moving under his heels. For one thing his corporate governance prescriptives, like those of states like California and some large corporations which mandate racial , ethnic and sex preferences, may run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings on affirmative action. Corporations and investment funds that compel affirmative action to “diversify” corporate management run the risk of being sued for violating the Constitution. The court has made it clear that it expects equal treatment, and demanding companies hire and promote any preferred class, is an invitation to a court suit.

Just as the Court refused to defer any longer to institutions of higher learning because they abused their status with "progressive" policies, so has the green movement diminished any respect courts, the public and governments may have once given them by engaging in nincompoopery of a high order.

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And Tom Finnerty:

Mother Nature Strikes Back

Try to contain your schadenfreude: a massive, multimillion dollar solar park in Nebraska has been smashed to bits by a single hailstorm.

From the No Tricks Zone:

The Scottsbluff, Nebraska 5.2 MW Community Solar project was part of the [Nebraska Public Power District]’s Sunwise program that consisted of an array has over 14,000 solar panels. It’s reported that it had been put into operation in 2019.... Now it has been just recently reported that the multimillion dollar solar energy park was literally reduced to a heap of rubble as hail literally pummeled it to a pulp in just a matter of minutes.... The disaster underscores once again just how vulnerable to the forces of nature solar energy parks are. The system’s 25-year expected lifetime was cut to down to less than 4 years, and makes you wonder if setting up such weather-vulnerable plants make any sense at all.

Give another reliability point to traditional energy sources like oil, natural gas, coal, and even nuclear. Those tend not to be utterly destroyed by entirely predictable weather events.

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Thanks for reading The Pipeline, have a wonderful Independence Day, and May God bless America!