Birds; Carbs; and Biden's Ministry of Truth
Michael Walsh’s editor’s column this week put a spotlight on the Biden Administration’s newly announced “Disinformation Governance Board” (an Orwellian title if ever there was one), headed by the self-claimed “Mary Poppins of Disinformation,” Nina Jankowicz.
At Last, a Hill to Die On
So now the mask has dropped and, for the first time, the American people can see the modern Left in all its hateful, unadorned, vituperative, spiteful glory. Case in point: the announcement last week that the Department of Homeland Security—one of the excrescences of the Bush administration, cobbled together in its panic over 9/11—has created the "Disinformation Governance Board" in order to combat what it has, via its hitherto little-known Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, already dubbed "mis-, dis-, and mal-information." Otherwise known as alternative points of view, but shut up, citizen.
From its Orwellian name to the repellant leftist virago of obscure origins named Nina Jankowicz who heads it (her Wikipedia entry lacks a precise date of birth, as well as her place of birth and any of the customary details about her family, ethnic and religious background; about all we know is that she's apparently married to a man named Michael Stein), this moral and political enormity cannot be allowed to stand. Especially given what we do know about Jankowicz, including her radical feminist inclinations, victim mentality, central-European/Ukrainian focus, and minimal accomplishment outside the progressive Hive Mind….
It is no coincidence that this Frankenstein monster and its screeching harpy boss have sprung to life just days after Elon Musk made his successful bid for Twitter, with a promise to end its blatant censorship of conservative points of view [including mine; I've been banned for "targeted harassment" since the summer of 2020, apparently for illustrating the shortcomings of such journalistic apparatchiks as Chuck Todd, Yamiche Alcindor, and Nick Confessore, as well as the "presidential historian" Michael Beschloss], throttling free discourse, seizing private information and holding it hostage, and blaming their NKVD tactics on an "algorithm" developed by their "trust and safety" star chamber.
It also, purely coincidentally, comes directly in the wake of "former" president Barack Hussein Obama's speech at Stanford University endorsing more public censorship. Be sure to click on the video and listen to Barry, who unlike every other former president and in defiance of presidential custom, still lives in the District of Columbia, just a short drive from the White House.
Let us now remind ourselves of the late historian and Soviet scholar Robert Conquest's third law of politics: "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies." At this point in American history, that is not only a theory but a fact. Having narrowly "won" the 2020 election by stealing it fair and square, the Left is putting pedal to the metal to accomplish as much of its anti-foundational agenda as it can before the clock runs out on its tiny congressional majorities this fall.
Matthew Vadum took a look at the toll environmental enthusiasm takes on the environment
'Green Energy' Unsafe for Birds and Other Living Things
Researchers looked at 23 endangered bird species killed at wind and solar outfits in California, according to “Vulnerability of avian populations to renewable energy production,” published March 30 in Royal Society Open Science. The study of the impact on wildlife of renewable energy, which requires more land than conventional means of energy production such as oil and natural gas drilling, was funded by the California Energy Commission, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and the University of California at Davis. Hydroelectric dams were not dealt with in the paper, but the U.S. Geological Survey reports it is known that they “create barriers to fish migration and alter upstream and downstream ecosystems.”
The paper states that of the 23 bird species, renewable energy generation appears to have made things significantly worse for eleven, or 48 percent of them. Those eleven species “were either highly or moderately vulnerable, experiencing a greater than or equal to 20% decline in the population growth rates with the addition of up to either 1,000 or 5,000 fatalities, respectively.” For five of the eleven species, “killed birds originated both locally and non-locally, yet vulnerability occurred only to the local subpopulation."
In the United States, anywhere from 140,000 to 328,000 bird fatalities take place per year at monopole turbines, but the real figure is probably much higher because, as the paper acknowledges, the estimate comes from data gathered a decade ago when installed capacity was only 57 percent of the current figure. Solar energy generation back then, when capacity was only 37 percent of the current figure, caused up to 138,600 birth deaths in the country, most of which took place in California.
California, of course, has an economic death wish – it’s betting everything on a utopian carbon-free future, the well-being of its human population be damned. In September 2020, the state’s Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, who couldn’t even be bothered to follow his own pandemic rules, decreed that no gasoline-fueled automobiles will be sold in the state by 2035, the goal being to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. At the same time, he urged that fracking be banned….
All this pressure to go renewable has to lead to more animal deaths as wind and solar generation expands. The Royal Society paper states that of California’s “23 vulnerable bird species studied (barn owls, golden eagles, road runners, yellow-billed cuckoos…), scientists have found 11 are now experiencing at least a 20% decline in their population growth rates because wind turbines and solar panels are killing them and/or destroying their limited-range habitat.”
Birds and bats are particularly susceptible to wind turbines, which nowadays are typically mounted on towers 200 feet high or higher with rotors spanning 150 to 260 feet, which means blade tips can reach higher than 400 feet above the ground. Rotors can spin at speeds from 11 to 28 rpm with blade tip speeds of between 138 and 182 mph, the U.S. Department of Energy reports.
Birds tend to be killed directly by collisions with turbines, meteorological towers, and power transmission lines, and indirectly by habitat disruption, behavioral effects, drowning in wastewater evaporation ponds, and other causes. Bats are typically killed by collisions and barotrauma, which means catastrophic damage to internal organs caused by rapid air pressure changes. Migratory bats could go extinct if wind energy production keeps growing, a May 2017 paper in Biological Conservation argues.
Peter Smith contributed a dark piece on the upcoming Australian election as a window into the madness of our civilization at the moment.
Up the Garden Path, By the Nose, Down Under
Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has called an election for May 21; which he will lose if the polls are half right. If he does lose, the country will go from where it is now, woke, green and tribal, to being even more woke, green and tribal. That’s the situation, because that’s what the majority of people want. There is no other explanation.
My Sunday newspaper selected a number of voters from a regional “battleground” electorate to interview. One, a seventy-year-old surf shop owner, reportedly said this: “The Liberals [Australia's "conservative" party] are not taking climate change seriously and need to be thrown out of government because that’s what’s affecting me and all my fifty workers.”
Based solely on his picture in the paper, this chap looked normal. At the same, we ought to be wary. He believes, without hint of embarrassment, that if the Australian government had taken "climate change" more seriously, he and his workers would be better off. More sunshine, bigger surfs? Who knows what and how he thinks? What we know is that insanity is spotted only in stark relief.
If we came across a town where everyone wears odd shoes and funny hats, we’d put it down to local fashion. The idiocy of the surf shop owner doesn’t stand out, because his views are not out of keeping with the prevailing zeitgeist. My local federal member is the very wet Trent Zimmerman. He is totally onboard with net-zero by 2050, as he is with most woke causes. Nonetheless, he is at risk from one of a cohort of thirteen well-funded so-called independents, all of whom want net-zero by 2040. All operate under the banner of Climate 200. All, not incidentally, are professional white women of comely appearance. Their patron, Simon Holmes à Court, is a very rich white man. White everywhere. Ye gads! Is the privilege real after all? Oh, do come on. The green left, as a protected species, is incapable of racism.
Trent would not be in trouble if most of those living in my well-heeled electorate were more than halfway sensible. But then a climate skeptic might get up, which is a risible proposition. Most everyone I meet these days has imbibed the climate Kool-Aid. In my personal experience, the outlandish idea that we’re not close to a climate Armageddon is entertained only by small groups of dissident conservatives meeting furtively in coffee shops, like the early Christians in Rome.
Covid’s the same. State premiers who introduced the most onerous of restrictions, Daniel Andrews (Victoria) is well up in the polls ahead of November’s state election and Mark McGowan (Western Australia) and Annastacia Palaszczuk (Queensland) were swept back into power with increased majorities.
OK, I know hope still exists in parts of America, thank God; and in Hungary I suppose. But it’s gone in most of the western world and certainly gone in Australia.
David Solway noticed the odd similarity between the faddish Keto Diet and the Climate Cult, especially as concerns their disdain for different types of “carbs,” those being Carbon and Carbohydrates.
Of Carbon, Carbs, Keto, and Canada
Canada was once a hale and hearty country, or at least, it was not in excessively terrible shape, until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided it was packing too much weight, foundering on a surfeit of carbs. The only solution was to put the country on a high-rez, environmental keto diet. The keto diet, we recall, restricts carbs to 50 grams or fewer per day to promote a state of nutritional ketosis. The body will burn fat instead of carbs, thus producing energy, muscle tone and overall natural fitness. Of course, industrial keto has nothing to do with healthful outcomes—quite the reverse—but the analogy holds.
In terms of radical enviro-thinking, the nation will eliminate or reduce its reliance on carbon and will burn solar and wind to produce energy to power our homes and industries. The nation will then grow stronger, healthier and more productive, and the economy of the body politic will correspondingly improve. The problem with this hypothesis is that environmental ketogenesis has got it wrong way round. It is both ideologically dangerous and environmentally unsound.
For one thing, environmentally speaking, carbs are good. In his various books, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It and False Alarm, Green skeptic and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center Bjorn Lomborg contends that global paroxysms over the heating of the atmosphere are utterly misplaced. The planet is not facing a climate cataclysm. As Lomborg writes, “more CO₂ in the atmosphere has acted as a fertilizer and created a profound global greening of the planet.”
Similarly, in Heaven and Earth, geologist and University of Melbourne Earth Sciences professor Ian Plimer points out that CO₂ is a vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow and to synthesize into life-giving oxygen. The vendetta against carbon can lead to no good.
Robert Zubrin’s Merchants of Despair and Michael Shellenberger’s authoritative Apocalypse Never effectively lay out the case for environmental CO2 as a crop multiplier and a benefactor of life and prosperity—a counterintuitive fact not understood by the myopic catastrophism of the global warming crowd. “Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels,” writes astrophysicist S. Fred Singer in his blockbuster Hot Talk, Cold Science, “becomes a natural resource for humanity rather than an imagined menace to global climate.” Singer’s examination of the relevant facts is convincing.
Carbon capture, carbon offsets and renewable energy subsidies amount to a fool’s errand. An environmentally-unfriendly, landscape-defiling, uglifying architecture of wind turbines and solar panels is not only largely unworkable and egregiously costly but actually futile. Neither the economy nor the backup electrical grid can sustain them for any length of time. The uncomfortable truth is that wind is capricious and sun prefers the tropics; air and light are non-dispatchable energy sources. The power-intermittency problem is crucial and baseload battery storage to solve the deficits is inordinately complicated, obscenely expensive and far from currently feasible. The aeolian fantasy persists.
These are facts that cannot be “fact-checked” or IPCC’d out of the physical record. Moreover, as Lomborg shows in The Skeptical Environmentalist, there is no dependable method of modeling an open system such as the earth, and there is no climate modeling system that can yield accurate predictions. The data insistently driving industrial keto are highly questionable. The advantages of carbs to the environment are not.
Here’s Steven Hayward pointing out the tension at the heart of the Biden Administrations governing agenda, and progressive policy ideas more generally:
Biden's Energy Schizphrenia Deepens
The Biden Administration’s poor public approval ratings ultimately derives from the fact that Biden and his team cannot escape the dilemma that sound policy and politics is at odds with the “Progressive” fundamentalism that controls the Democratic Party today. At nearly every turn, however, Progressive dogma wins out.
Two recent decisions make this problem evident. First is the decision to appeal U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s ruling striking down the federal mask mandate. By all accounts the Biden White House debated about whether to appeal the ruling, sending mixed signals that they might let the ruling stand. At length the administration decided to appeal the ruling, though it did so behind the skirts of the Centers for Disease Control, pretending that they have an obligation to uphold the legal prerogatives of the CDC….
So why did the White House not take the convenient offramp that Judge Mizelle provided? Answer: the imperatives of the Administrative State took precedence. It is crucial that the legal authority to impose mandates and other controls through the CDC be preserved, even if the White House decides that we can let the mask mandate lapse.
It could turn out worse. Cynical operatives in the White House might welcome an appeals ruling that upholds Judge Mizelle because it will allow Democrats to demand from Congress what I have been expecting from the beginning of Covid—the establishment of a new cabinet-level agency, a Department of Pandemic Planning and Prevention, with broad new regulatory powers beyond the CDC’s wildest imagination. The model here is the Department of Homeland Security, the bureaucratic mistake the Bush Administration foolishly embraced in 2002. In other words, the White House decision to appeal the ruling might not be as politically dumb as it seems.
The second significant White House decision was rolling back President Trump’s long-overdue reforms of the review process of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This is the statute that anchors the environmental review and litigation process that the Left has used for decades to slow or block development of all kinds. NEPA and similar state-level laws are a major reason infrastructure projects of all kinds in the U.S. are way more expensive to build—if they are built at all—than in any other major industrialized nation.
The surprise is that it took the Biden White House 15 months to rescind Trump’s changes. You’d have thought Biden would have done this on January 20 of last year, with the same pen he used to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. One reason for the hesitation is that smarter environmentalists (I know, that’s an oxymoron in most cases) have come to understand that while the longstanding environmental review process has been an essential tool to block domestic energy development and infrastructure, it has become an impediment to many of the infrastructure needs of their “green” energy dreams. In many cases local environmental NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activists have abused the NEPA process to block new wind and solar power projects, as well as the transmission lines necessary to make these green projects feasible at all.
And finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy spent some time at a Green Michelin Star resort while she mulled over joining a board.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Boarding
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Rich Trzupek, Tom Finnerty, and a cartoon by Roman Genn. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!