Combating Covid Amnesia; DeSantis vs. ESG; & New Nukes Are Good Nukes
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh took the time to remind us of something we’re in danger of pushing out of our memories — our government’s outrageous Covid response.
Never Forget, Never Forgive, Never Again
The presidency of Donald J. Trump ended on a bleak day in February 2020 when he ceded control of the United States of America to a malevolent midget with a medical degree named Anthony Fauci. A prisoner of his own poor judgment, insecurity, and horrible taste in advisers, Trump allowed himself to be stampeded into something called Operation Warp Speed, and was sandbagged in his quest for re-election when the announcement of a "vaccine" -- actually, experimental gene therapy inflicted on hundreds of millions of people with no clear idea about what would happen next -- was made immediately after he lost a "fortified" election to a dementia patient who had campaigned from a basement in Delaware.
From then on, the constitutional provisions of the First Amendment were trampled and trashed, a police state that was just itching to happen finally came out into the open, American churches capitulated to governmental demands, a sizable portion of the population voluntarily or involuntarily masked themselves like coolies, and then turned on the their fellow but non-compliant citizens in a fury born of fear to rat them out to the authorities. The booming economy promptly tanked. Trust in the electoral system evaporated. Race relations cratered. The courts, of course, did nothing. It was and remains the single most disgraceful moment in the history of this country.
Worst of all was the American media, which at last abandoned all pretense of "objectivity" (something once prized when I was a young reporter and now scorned by the red-diaper-baby mafia) and burst out of the ideological closet as fully hatched apparatchiks of the Regulatory State that has since replaced the republican democracy we once enjoyed. Brimming with unrighteous indignation, filled with scorn for flyover Americans they'd long despised (this in spite of the fact that many of them were themselves flyovers who'd trekked eastward to the imperial capitals in New York and Washington and been baptized in the new secular religion of Government), they spewed derision and hatred from their foam-flecked mouths, directed at you.
Clarice Feldman writes that the cost of the climate hoax is continuing to rise even as its foundations increasingly dissolve.
When Hoaxes Collide
There's no shortage of things that can be blamed on "climate change." Here's a howler of a list taken just from the past few days: pirate attacks (The Guardian); the Biden border crisis (Rep. Pete Aguilar D-Calif.); the ancient Wooly Mammoth virus (French Prof Jean-Michel Claverie). Meanwhile, policies meant to address "climate change" have an actual body count, but that is barely commented upon at all. One rare exception, however -- the Economist has published some damning figures which demonstrate that higher fuel costs last winter killed more Europeans than did Covid-19.
Our modelling estimates that high energy prices claimed 68,000 lives …. Countries with the highest excess deaths typically experienced the biggest increases in fuel costs. If electricity last winter had cost the same as 2020, our model expected 68,000 fewer deaths across Europe, a decline of 3.6 percent.
Finland seems to understand the high cost to its people of soaring energy, and has opted to increase energy output via a new (if "much-delayed") nuclear reactor, and reduce prices to consumers by "more than 75 percent." South Africa on the other hand has developed a super special means of getting ahead of its target for cutting emissions of greenhouse gas: thanks to its collapsing infrastructure, there's no energy at all.
South Africa is ahead of its target for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. Output of the climate-warming gases from the world’s 14th-biggest emitter is already falling even though its Nationally Determined Contribution, a target adopted by the cabinet in 2021, only forecast a decline from 2025. Power plant breakdowns are reducing industrial activity.
And that disaster is only snowballing.
South Africa is teetering on the edge of Stage 7 or 8 load shedding during the winter months, which would spell disaster for citizens’ quality of life and for the economy. But Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, the new electricity minister, has a way of suggesting that blackouts might rise to higher and even unprecedented stages (possibly Stage 7 and 8) this winter, without explicitly saying so.
It’s winter there now, and if what's been happening in Europe is a harbinger of what’s to come, the South African “success” at beating its target for cutting greenhouse gases will also lead to a significant increase in their excess deaths. (Which may be part of the point.)
Tom Finnerty contributed a piece about Ron DeSantis as a model of Republican state governance.
DeSantis v. Disney: 'The Party Is Over for Them'
Watching Ron DeSantis work is beautiful. And "work" is the operative word -- as Michael Walsh has emphasized, while other Republicans are happy to sit back and let things happen, to talk loudly and carry a small stick, you might say, DeSantis is the opposite. He's a doer with a knack for making all the right enemies. If reports are true, he's about to throw his hat into the presidential ring -- and that is a very good thing for America.
His war with Disney is the classic example. The Mouse House is Florida's biggest employer, and over the years they've gotten used to calling their own shots. Meanwhile, their far-left ideological proclivities have gotten increasingly overt, to the point that they openly brag about using their entertainment products to indoctrinate our children into sexual exoticism…
DeSantis has justified taking action against Disney by pointing out that:
Disney was enjoying unprecedented privileges and subsidies. They controlled their own government in central Florida. They were exempt from laws that virtually everybody else has to follow. That’s not free enterprise, but it’s certainly even worse, when a company takes all those privileges that have been bestowed over many, many decades and uses that to wage war on state policies regarding families and children.
….
But DeSantis has continued plugging along. Early this month he signed into law what National Review's Jeff Zymeri referred to as "one of the most extensive anti-ESG bills in the country."
The Government and Corporate Activism Act requires that various state actors, including the chief financial officer, state agencies, and the state retirement fund properly prioritize financial risk and return, or pecuniary factors, over any political considerations. It also prohibits the sale of ESG bonds. Local governments are impacted to a noteworthy degree as they too are required to stop promoting environmental and social goals through their investment decisions.... “
We want them to act as fiduciaries. We do not want them engaged on these ideological joyrides,” explained DeSantis at a speech coinciding with the signing. “They want to use economic power to impose this agenda on our society. And we think in Florida, that is not going to fly here.”
The law also prevents banks, other financial institutions, and government contractors from discriminating against individuals and organizations on account of their political views... [T]his would ban banks from applying a “social credit score” and denying services to people based on religious beliefs or views on the Second Amendment, illegal immigration, or non-renewable energy sources.
Florida thus joins Kentucky and West Virginia as the states which have comprehensively rejected ESG.
Finnerty also blogged about a recent video by the Climate Discussion Nexus.
Put Down the Green Man's Burden
It's called Eco-Colonialism: The Green Man's Burden, and it looks at the ways in which the West has been actively preventing third-world nations, especially in Africa, from utilizing coal and other inexpensive and reliable energy sources, which have contributed so much to our own economic and civilizational development.
That is, of course, because international organizations like the World Bank, which used to help finance the construction of power plants in those nations, have been entirely captured by environmentalist enthusiasts, who have enacted a de facto ban on contributing to such projects. In the World Bank's case, that has meant a transformation from an organization dedicated to reducing global poverty, to one that ensures it.
As you can guess from the title, the video seeks to draw out some of the parallels between the bad old days of colonialism, as Liberals tend to think of it -- never mind that British colonialism alone brought infrastructure to Africa (now deteriorating) and a stable political system to India, not to mention the English language -- and today. And that case is quite convincing. Because these policies are built around the argument that it doesn't matter what the actual people in these nations desire because we in the West know better, and we will give them what we decide they need, not what they want.
David Cavena blogged about the role of nuclear power in bringing down energy costs and reducing carbon emissions, a topic which makes environmentalists very uncomfortable.
Not the End of the World
If you find yourself wondering about the future of energy supplies across Europe (which will be a testing ground for the U.S.), here are a couple of eye-openers you won’t find mentioned in the America media:
And while the plant’s production is still in its early days, its launch has had a considerable effect on Finland’s energy prices, lowering the electricity spot price in the country from €245.98 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in December to €60.55 per MWh in April, a reduction of more than 75 percent.
Poland is building a network of small modular nuclear reactors. This energy is 30 percent cheaper than gas-fired plants… The energy transformation cannot be stopped. We will not stop technology. There is no way to maintain the green energy system without nuclear power.
Hungary, too, is moving forward on nuclear.
The Germans, of course, stand opposed to Poland and Hungary's nuclear ambitions, and delays are expected to occur due to their opposition. Why, you might ask, would Germany oppose its neighbors' plans for to access to inexpensive, inexhaustible, and ultra-low carbon energy supplies? One answer is that Germany's ill-considered environmentalist program, die Energiewende, has brought about sky-high electricity rates in their own country. It would be awkward for them if their citizens could just look across their eastern border and see rates that were substantially lower. And, relatedly, they're concerned about their manufacturing sector having to compete with countries who aren't paying so much for energy.
Still, since successive German governments have insisted that "saving the planet" is priority numero uno (er, that is, nummer eins), and infinitely more important than trifling economic concerns, you'd think that they would applaud the expansion of the one true green energy throughout Eastern Europe, nuclear power. Except that, as you probably know, the most notable result of die Energiewende has been the decommissioning of Germany's own nuclear reactors, which have been replaced, largely, by carbon-intensive coal.
This, coupled with the fact that the media steadfastly refuse to celebrate Poland, Hungary, and Finland's nuclear transition, clearly demonstrates that all the fuss over "climate change" this has never been about the climate.
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy, processes where E.V. batteries come from.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Mining
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Steven Hayward, Elizabeth Nickson, and Richard Fernandez. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!
Time to stop calling the rising mortality rates "excess" deaths. These are a feature, not a flaw, in the plan.