BoJo's ouster; Australia is Our Future; and Douglas Murray on Build Back Better.
This past week The Pipeline published the third excerpted essay from our new book, Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order. The book will be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. It is now available now for pre-order at the links above.
PART I: THE PROBLEM
Excerpt from "China, COVID-19, Realpolitik, and the Great Reset," By Douglas Murray
It is a good rule of thumb that one should become skeptical—and perhaps also concerned—whenever everyone in a position of authority starts to say the same thing. Particularly when they also all do so at the same time.
Such a moment arrived in 2020 when nearly every Western statesman, and a few others who might aspire to that role, began to use the phrase “Build Back Better.” Boris Johnson claimed that he might have used it first. Joe Biden seemed to believe that he had. But they were hardly the only people to use it from the early days of the Covid-19 crisis onwards. Almost overnight, it seemed as though absolutely everyone was using the same words. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it down in New Zealand. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used it in Canada. Bill Clinton used it as he was campaigning for Joe Biden. And the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, used it as he was campaigning for himself. Even minor royals could be heard parroting the same alliterative pleasantry. According to Prince Harry, speaking from his self-imposed exile in California, the Covid pandemic “undoubtedly” presents “an opportunity for us to work together and build back better.”
The prince is no stranger to political cliché, as he showed there, managing to pack in two of them into just half a sentence. Yet nor did people far more self-aware than him at any stage seem to realize that the phrase sounded strange in the first place, never mind that they should all also be using it at the same time. A year and a half after the phrase was first being used, President Joe Biden was still struggling to get his Build Back Better bill through the U.S. Senate. The phrase became so ubiquitous that almost no one in a position of power stopped to ask the question that ought surely to have loomed.
Why should a global pandemic be seen as simply an opportunity? In the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus leaking out from Wuhan, China, millions of people around the world died from the effects of contracting that virus. The global economy contracted at an unprecedented rate. Government borrowing soared to rates unknown outside of wartime in order to furlough millions of people who would otherwise have been destitute. Entire economies—including a U.S. economy that was roaring in an election year—were suddenly forced to a halt. None of this looked like a source of optimism. Ordinarily, the mass laying off of the workforce, the racking up of unprecedented peacetime debt, and the ordered shuttering away of the citizenry in their houses would be a source of concern and fury before it was a cause for optimism and opportunity.
But with only a couple of notable exceptions, during the Covid era, Western politicians skipped the rage stage. Indeed, they even skipped over the blame stage. Just as the WHO and other compromised international bodies failed to get to the roots of the source of the virus, so most Western politicians spent zero time or political capital on the question of why the virus had been unleashed on the world in the first place. Instead, they jumped straight to the question of just how much could be achieved by the unprecedented opportunity that the virus had allegedly gifted us….
The obvious comparison to make at this stage is with great plagues in history. And though most were of a degree of seriousness that far outweighs the effects of Covid, it is a sobering consideration. Who, for instance, viewed the so-called “Spanish flu” of a century ago as an opportunity? Who would have dared in the early months or years after that pandemic ravaged the planet to see it as an opportunity to rebuild the global economy in a different way?
There are two things that are most visibly disturbing about the political reaction to all of this. The first is the desire to leapfrog over the most obvious stage in the post-pandemic era. Which should have been a clinical, careful and failsafe analysis of how this novel coronavirus managed to come out of Wuhan. The second disturbing thing is that the leap should have immediately moved on to a restructuring of the global economy and of free societies that seemed already to be sitting there, ready-made.
Boris Johnson was defenestrated as leader of Britain’s governing Tory Party this past week. Here’s our founding editor, John O’Sullivan, with comment:
Post-Boris, a Battle with Biden and the Blob
In the end, after a good night’s sleep and some reflection, Boris Johnson did not cling raging onto power like Donald Trump, as his critics in Parliament and the media had predicted. Instead he resigned his leadership of the Tory party, made a wry and thoughtful speech (“them’s the breaks” gave translators a hard time), appointed some ministers to fill the jobs in his caretaker government made vacant by earlier resignations, and waited for the Tory Party to elect a new leader so that he could resign as Prime Minister too.
His exit was far more dignified than were the embittered demands of his parliamentary enemies (on both sides of the House of Commons) that he be driven into the streets, made to apologize for his sins, and in general treated as a criminal released on bail but bound to end up inside before too long.
Make no mistake about what’s going on. This is scapegoat politics.
Boris is having to shoulder the blame for the pandemic, the lockdown, the cancelation of most other medical treatments in order to treat Covid patients promptly, the closing of schools and universities, and the accumulating costs in billions of the shutdown of the economy to save lives. All of these now look like serious errors since the Swedish “experiment” of protecting the elderly from Covid rather than maintaining everyone at home at the taxpayers’ expense saved billions of public money and kept the Swedish economy humming along. Was Britain's lockdown—and all its attendant costs—really necessary? That looks increasingly unlikely.
And if not, was Boris responsible for these disastrous decisions? Well, he was prime minister and therefore in principle responsible for all the decisions of his government. But the political reality is that in the early stages of the pandemic, the politicians had no realistic alternative to adopting the remedies prescribed by the scientists in Whitehall and Imperial College and by the U.K. medical officers of health.
If they had rejected their advice and instead followed the Swedish example, the opposition parties, a hostile media, and influential tabloid personalities would have accused them of risking wholesale slaughter—and a frightened risk-averse public opinion would have believed them.
As it was, all these forces wanted the pandemic restrictions to be tougher and longer. For a long time Boris and his ministers were more or less ventriloquist’s dummies speaking lines written by scientific and medical officialdom in London. Boris struggled to break free and eventually ended the lockdown. But he took a lot of heat for doing so sooner than the Whitehall committee of SAGE, plus “Independent Sage,” the media, Labour, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all wanted.
Britain today and tomorrow will be paying a heavy price for their miscalculations, risk-averse science, and economic ignorance. Boris is paying it today.
In other respects he had real achievements to his credit. He got Brexit done. He sent the extreme left Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, packing in the 2019 election. He put together a broad-based national coalition of all social classes to win his 2019 landslide victory. He was personally popular--a well-known public figure who had edited the Spectator magazine, written a column in the Daily Telegraph, and appeared for years on a popular radio comedy program about current affairs: "Have I Got News for You." And he still has lots of supporters throughout the country who are indignant at his defenestration.
Why then is he Out with a capital O? The answer is his policies. More and more voters, especially those who voted Tory in 2019 for the first time ever, thought he had let them down over policy. And, sadly, they're correct. His policies were almost more socialist than Labour, hiking spending and raising taxes. He was a passionate advocate of a “Net-Zero” carbon emissions that threatened to reduce living standards, increase taxes and electricity prices, and make the energy crisis a permanent one.
Why did he embrace these policies? I believe it was for the same reason that he initially bowed down to the consensus of doctors and scientists: he believed he had no alternative. It’s vital to say that clearly now because almost exactly the same thing is likely to happen on a very different playing field, the Tory leadership election, unless we wake up.
Peter Smith wrote about how environmental extremist policies are actually playing out in Australia these days. This is the future to which the American Left aspire.
'Green' Monomaniacs in Pursuit of the Unattainable
With a nod to Jane Austen, it’s a truth which should be universally acknowledged that a country dependent on renewable energy must be in want of 100 percent backup power. No, not 50 percent nor even 95 percent. When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, we get a zero-power flow. Sadly, what should be universally acknowledged is studiously spurned by Climateers.
In my previous Pipeline post, I reported that the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), responsible for keeping the lights on, had capped the price of natural gas; it had spiked up to 800 times its former level at the end of May. In turn, this led some generators, squeezed between fuel costs and the cap, to withdraw supply. Who would have guessed? Maybe only those with an inkling of insight into the difficulties of turning a profit when costs exceed revenue. Alas, American president Joe Biden isn't one of them:
Here in Australia, politicians fiddled, AEMO temporarily suspended the market for wholesale electricity and ordered generators to supply power at a fixed price. Governments finally woke up. Without shame, federal and state governments called for more coal and gas to be brought online. The very same governments which demonise coal and assiduously prevent natural-gas projects from getting up. For example, a large coal-seam gas project in Narrabri in New South Wales is now fourteen years in the making. Still no final approval. Victoria has a complete ban on onshore drilling, whether conventional or fracking. Crazy doesn’t describe it.
Meanwhile, circa mid-June, the lights were on the point of going out in Australia's most populated states; in NSW, Victoria, and in Queensland. Politicians lived up to our meagre expectations. A sample to savour: the federal minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen asked people to switch off unnecessary appliances. NSW’s green-tragic treasurer Matt Keane ordered Sydney hospital staff to conserve power in non-clinical settings. He further suggested that if people must run dishwashers they should do so late at night. This is not a spoof. To constructively misquote Lincoln Steffens, we Sydneysiders have glimpsed the future and it ain’t gonna work.
But despair not, the new Labor government under Anthony Albanese has a multifaceted plan called Powering Australia. Under the plan, greenhouse gas emissions will fall by 43 percent (on 2005 levels) by 2030. And, by same year, the share of renewables generating electricity will be 82 percent; from 27 percent (including hydro) in 2020-21. To boot, electricity prices for families and small businesses will fall. Really? Yes, by $275 per annum by 2025. That’s not all. Many jobs will be created; 604,000, in fact. Lots of precision in these numbers, you’ll notice. Forget the shambles of the past month or so. A non-transcendental energy miracle of precise proportions is in store for us Aussies.
How will the miracle be performed? That’s too complex for any mere mortal, such as me, to put into a definitive account. There are many verbose and opaque documents to peruse from AEMO and the Energy Security Board (ESB). If you want more, try other authorities like the Clean Energy Regulator, the Clean Energy Financial Corporation, the Climate Change Authority, the Australian Energy Regulator, and the Australian Energy Market Commission. And that’s just on a federal level. Umpteen state bodies to choose from too. They all tend to talk of pumped hydro, green hydrogen, as yet undiscovered technologies, sucking up unused power from electric cars and home batteries, banks of commercial super batteries and, of course, many more onshore and offshore wind turbines, plus solar panels galore, all housed in numbers of “REZs” (renewable energy zones).
The federal government also intends spending $20 billion to construct 10,000 kilometres of transmission lines to connect all far-flung wind and solar farms to the grid. And to think, it used to be just cheap coal power running the whole caboodle. Be glad those primitive bad old days are behind us.
Tom Finnerty contributed two blog posts, one on Jeff Bezos’ unexpected clapback at Joe Biden.
Biden's Billionaire Donors Having Buyers' Remorse
And another about working class pushback against the environmentalist agenda from country whose citizenry are generally quite in favor of the post-national Left’s green agenda.
Are Dutch Farmers the New Canadian Truckers?
We've heard a lot about Net-Zero insanity in the U.K., Canada, and the United States, but enthusiasm for the concept is widespread among our global elite. For just the latest example, the government of the Netherlands, in order to do their part to "fight climate change" has recently enacted various pieces of environmentalist legislation. Among the most ambitious of these is a plan to slash the emission of gases like nitrogen oxide and ammonia by 50 percent by the year 2030.
Such drastic cuts necessitates radical action, and so to achieve their goal, the Dutch government is going to include increased regulations on farmers, including significant reductions in livestock -- whose flatulence is a popular target of environmentalist ire -- and for public money to be put towards buying up farmland to prevent its use in farming. Official plans have even been leaked laying out "scenarios" in which farmers could be forced to sell their land to the government.
This is shocking. The Netherlands is the world’s second-biggest agricultural exporter, after the United States, and farming is central to its economy. More than that, however, it is a major part of their national identity. The Dutch are proud of their farming prowess, and it lives on even when they've left home. The United States and Canada are home to scores of ethnically Dutch farmers whose families made their way west to escape the great wars of the 20th century, and much of modern South Africa was built by the Dutch farmers called Boers, who arrived there in the 17th century. Farming is in their blood.
Consequently, provoked by this attack on their way of life, the farmers are fighting back. Sometimes literally. More often, however, their response has taken a more organized form, including "slow rolling" highways, by pulling tractors out onto the open road such that traffic grounds to a halt; blockading supermarkets and distribution centers; and dumping their milk rather than sending it to market. Their object is to demonstrate how much the country relies on them, and what Dutch life would be like without the milk, eggs, meat, and produce that is the fruit of their labors.
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy struggles to decide whether Boris’ ouster (and that of his Greenie wife, Carrie) is a pro or a con for her beloved movement.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Double-Faulting
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Joan Sammon, David Solway, Tom Finnerty, as well as another excerpt from our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!