DeSantis's Unforced Error; Red China Votes Trudeau; & the Unreliable IPCC.
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh argued that Ron DeSantis has made his first real blunder in his (undeclared) campaign for the presidency.
'Not One Step Back'
Ron DeSantis has made his first unforced error in his nascent, as yet still-unannounced, campaign for the Republican presidential nomination 2024. Even worse, he showed weakness – and that, in this late-Roman Republic political climate, is an unforgiveable sin. If DeSantis is not to be bullied out of the primaries by the raging bull elephant that is Donald Trump, he needs to do better, asap
Note I said do. Not talk. Talk is Trump's realm, a world in which only words, not deeds, matter and the rest is just boob bait. The Wall, unbuilt; the Swamp, undrained. The 2020 election stolen right out from underneath him, and by perfectly legal means: they said they were going to do it, they explained how they were going to do it, and they did it. All while Trump was prancing and dancing at pointless rallies. Never mind: things will be better next time, we are told.
Up until last week, action was DeSantis's realm: taking on Disney, sacking Soros prosecutors, signing a sweeping school-choice bill, firing the board of the leftist New College in Florida and replacing it with sane conservatives not in thrall to the diktats of Wokism; the new board promptly canned its entire, useless "diversity" office. All these events were cheer moments for a GOP base long starved for victories unbesmirched by Jared, Ivanka, Jeff Sessions, or Stormy Daniels, as well as the promise of further bold, decisive steps to come.
DeSantis was also a rare voice of Republican sanity among the chorus of pro-Ukraine capons in D.C., led by Turtle McChao and Lindsey Graham when he correctly stated that the U.S. has no vital national interest in whatever happens to Vladimir Zelensky and his war-by-photo-op in the historic heart of Russia.
While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them. The Biden administration’s virtual 'blank check' funding of this conflict for 'as long as it takes,' without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges."
And that's where he should have stopped. But the media, the warmongering neocons, and Mitch's minions screamed bloody murder, buffaloing DeSantis into a near-fatal error: in an interview with British professional mediocrity Piers Morgan (someone no American political figure should ever speak with) he backtracked: and by so doing, dug himself deeper and deeper into the media Pit of No Return. Behold the peril of talking (at least as quoted by Morgan):
Writing in The New York Post about the interview, Morgan quoted the Florida governor as saying: “Well, I think it’s been mischaracterised. Obviously, Russia invaded (last year) – that was wrong. They invaded Crimea and took that in 2014 – That was wrong.” The Florida governor, who is laying the groundwork to win the Republican nomination against former president Donald Trump for the 2024 elections, faced a torrent of criticism from Republicans for his remarks.
“What I’m referring to is where the fighting is going on now which is that eastern border region Donbas, and then Crimea, and you have a situation where Russia has had that. I don’t think legitimately but they had,” Mr DeSantis clarified. “There’s a lot of ethnic Russians there. So, that’s some difficult fighting and that’s what I was referring to and so it wasn’t that I thought Russia had a right to that, and so if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it, but I think the larger point is, okay, Russia is not showing the ability to take over Ukraine, to topple the government or certainly to threaten NATO.
“That’s a good thing. I just don’t think that’s a sufficient interest for us to escalate more involvement. I would not want to see American troops involved there. But the idea that I think somehow Russia was justified (in invading) – that’s nonsense,” he said. Mr DeSantis also added that he viewed the Russian president as a “war criminal” who should be held “accountable”. “I think he is a war criminal,” he was quoted as saying.
Mamma mia! As the old political saying goes, when you're explaining, you're losing….
So what's the lesson here? In 1942, with the million-man armies of National Socialist Germany and Communist Russia locked in mortal combat deep inside Soviet territory, Stalin issued Order 227: "It is time to finish retreating. Not one step back! Such should now be our main slogan." Ron DeSantis should take this to heart and make it his battle-cry.
Steven Hayward wrote about the newest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
It is a fitting coincidence that the announcement of Greta Thunberg’s honorary doctorate in theology came the same week as a new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the world has less than a decade to stop "catastrophic climate change" by halting the use of fossil fuels. You can be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu all over again, since we have been getting “less than a decade to stop climate change” warnings for more than 30 years. Only someone who has assimilated climate catastrophism as a fanatical religion could fail to be embarrassed by this record of hysteria and goal-post shifting, which makes St. Greta of Thunberg’s theology degree ironically fitting.
Yet the new IPCC report is not a report at all. It is merely a 36-page “Summary for Policy Makers” (SPM in the climate trade) ahead of a new “synthesis report” that will merely repackage the last complete three-volume IPCC climate change assessment from 2021. The new synthesis report, which will likely run a thousand pages or more, is “coming soon,” according to the IPCC’s website.
In other words, the new “synthesis report” is not new at all, but is produced to keep climate agitation at a full boil. The SPM is released ahead of main report to generate headlines, which will then be repeated, Groundhog Day-style, when the full report is released later. The new SPM did the trick: the New York Times's chief stenographer for the climate cult, Brad Plumer, produced a breathless story that can be written now by ChatGPT, declaring that “Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade.” This whole well-worn exercise is the climate cult equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
Another reason for the early release of the SPM ahead of the complete report is that there are often discrepancies or contradictions between claims made in the SPM or its accompanying press release and the more detailed scientific reports, which the media never notice or check. Who actually writes the SPMs? The new one claims 49 “core writing team members,” along with another 44 contributing writers and editors. All this for 36 pages. The working theory seems to be that the world will be bowled over by the sheer number of the authors. The SPM is often produced without review or input by the hundreds of scientists who contribute to the full reports. A few have complained publicly about how the SPMs are politicized in service of generating headlines, but they are always ignored.
While there is nothing new in this new summary of the forthcoming synthesis report, it is possible to notice some telling shifts along with some unscientific claims about energy policy the IPCC emphasizes in its press release. When the climate campaign first got rolling back in the late 1980s, the chief buzzword attached to everything was “sustainability.” That term lives on, but today official climate discourse is obsessed with “equitable” climate action and “climate justice.” (“Diversity” shows up for duty, too.)
Beyond these gestures to Wokery, the whole exercise is a giant non-sequitur. The SPM repeats a pattern that has crippled the climate campaign from the beginning—the climate cultists seem to think that if we keep announcing a parade of future horrors, that green energy must therefore be feasible and fossil fuels can be phased out quickly at the snap of a finger. That is not a climate science judgment; it is an energy systems judgment, and it precisely on the question of real world energy where the IPCC has always had its least expertise and most superficial analysis.
Tom Finnerty caught us up on the still-unfolding story of China’s reported interference in Canadian elections.
Chinese Interference in Canadian Elections? Looks That Way
For the past several months Canada has been dealing with a slow-drip story, which if true has the potential to blow that country's politics wide-open. It's claim is that the Communist Party of China has been illegally interfering in Canadian elections since at least 2015, the year Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party took control of the government. And which party were the Chi-Coms helping out? You get one guess.
The scandal began back in November, when agents from CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, began leaking intel to the Canadian media suggesting that a CCP network had "funded and infiltrated" the campaigns of nearly a dozen candidates in the 2019 federal election. Trudeau responded by claiming that he had confronted Xi Jinping about the report, but shortly thereafter a video of that exchange went viral, which showed a desperate Trudeau talking about Canada's commitment to "free and open and frank dialogue," and a dismissive Chairman Xi calling him "naïve" as he walked away.
Amazingly, after that exchange it was revealed that Trudeau shouldn't have been at all shocked by the leaked reports -- he was in fact briefed about Chinese election interference before the 2019 election even took place. Moreover, further reporting alleged that, according to The Spectator's Sam Dunning, the CCP's political network in Canada "involved more than a dozen aides, a standing provincial politician, unelected officials and donors" and that "large sums changed hands, election law was breached (though there is no police investigation), and Trudeau’s Liberal party were the beneficiaries."
From there the leaks got bigger and potentially more damaging. They contended that 2019 wasn't the only election in which the CCP put their thumbs on the scale for the Liberals, that they had done so in 2021 as well. And that the Chinese government had coerced Chinese students studying in Canada to campaign for Liberal candidates in ridings with large Chinese populations. And that they had surreptitiously recorded a Chinese consulate official saying "The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] can support." And that Liberal Party insider (and well-known critic of Hong Kong's pro-democracy protestors) Michael Chan had had regular meetings with suspected Chinese intelligence assets. And that Kenny Chiu, a Hong Kong-born former Conservative MP and CCP critic, had lost reelection after a coordinated propaganda campaign against him on the Chinese social media app WeChat targeting Chinese voters in his riding. And that a sitting Liberal MP, Han Dong, was in Dunning's words, "a knowing beneficiary of covert CCP interference."
Justin Trudeau's response, and that of the Liberal party generally, has been to cry racism -- specifically the "rise in anti-Asian racism linked to the pandemic" -- and accuse Conservatives who have brought this up of being "Trump-like" election deniers. They've also argued that the CSIS leakers themselves are the real meddlers with Canada's democracy. But the fact of the leaks underscores what is more important than the interference itself -- Trudeau and the Liberals knew about this, they were briefed on these events as they were ongoing, but chose to ignore them.
Finnerty also blogged about a new study related to the IPCC report
Time to Ditch the IPCC's Models
Peter Smith looked into another environmentalist boondoggle in his native Australia.
In Oz, Another Green Scheme Perishes
Another staggeringly expensive green scheme is in its death throes in the land of drought and flooding rains. Snowy 2.0 is an Australian (government owned) pumped hydro project designed to fill in when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Politics began it; reality will end it. Ostensibly, it’s meant to deliver 2GW of power for up to 175 hours. Even if that were true, which it’s not, it hardly stacks up against the imminent closure (end of April) of the Liddell coal power station. That station can produce 2GW of power continuously all year round. But, even on its own terms, Snowy 2.0 is seriously over-hyped.
For example, the lower reservoir (“Talbingo”) from which the water is pumped is only two-thirds the size of the upper reservoir (“Tantangara”). Once the upper reservoir is drained it can only be filled two-thirds its capacity, and thus can deliver only two-thirds of the power claimed. Duh! An obvious point about which those in charge are obtusely oblivious. For other technical reasons, as an engineer explains, the actual deliverable power will be far less than that; apparently, down at times to as little as 40GWh.
When it was politically divined in 2017 by former, self-proclaimed, “nation-building” prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, it was to be completed by 2021 at a cost of two billion Australian dollars. Some optimists now say it will be finished in 2027 at a cost of $10 billion. Some realists say much later and $20 billion. It’s academic. As sure as eggs is eggs, it’ll never be finished.
Rich Trzupek contributed a piece about the Biden Administration’s war on PFASes
Much Ado About Nothing
The Biden Administration recently announced new plans to further regulate polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of chemicals generically known as PFAS. Such initiatives typically target pollutants that have been found in relatively high concentrations, especially when that pollutant is reactive. That is the case with chemicals like ethylene oxide, benzene, ozone, and a host of others. It's a bit different with PFAS. These are chemicals that are just barely detectable and are basically inert.
So why the fire drill? Are PFAS compounds a clear and present danger to the health and welfare of Americans? What is the best strategy to mitigate the PFAS threat to human health and the environment if they are? As important, how big of a threat are PFAS compounds to either?
It’s unlikely that we’ll ever get honest answers to those questions. The independent, rational, scientific traditions that encouraged critical thinking and informed disagreement is fading away in western civilization. In its place, we are increasingly subject to state-approved science formulated by armies of technocrats and administered by legions of bureaucrats. When the scientific method is eventually dead and buried, I have a suggestion for the epitaph to be engraved on its tombstone: “better safe than sorry.”
Those words concisely express the essence of the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principle, in turn, is a bane of modern existence. It’s a societal plague that breeds cowardice, inhibits progress and encourages insularity in thought and in practice. It was probably inevitable that environmental organizations would eventually target these remarkable fluorinated compounds in another fit of excess caution.
To a chemist, fluorine is one of the most remarkable elements on the periodic table. It forms incredibly strong bonds with other atoms, giving PFAS chemicals their unique characteristics and their resiliency. The last is especially troublesome to the E.P.A. and environmental groups who have dubbed PFAS “forever chemicals.” The implication being that once created they are impossible to get rid of. That’s not entirely accurate, but it must be admitted that getting rid of PFAS compounds does take a bit more work than your run of the mill waste product.
Should we not be concerned about these "forever chemicals"? There's two parts to that question. First, does having a particular chemical in your system for a long time necessarily harm your system? The answer to that depends on the chemical and the dose. It would be fair to call silicon dioxide, what we commonly call sand, a “forever chemical” every bit as much as PFAS. Absent willful and energetic processing, sand is sand and will remain sand. So do we worry if we ingest some sand into our system? If it's not much and it's in our gastrointestinal system the body recognizes it as a waste, something it has no use for, and will pass it through the GI tract and colon to be eliminated.
I am not a biologist. So I do not know if PFAS compounds bioaccumulate in the body in part or in whole. If they do they certainly don't accumulate in substantial amounts. We can say that because when people have conducted studies and found PFAS in the water, in the air, and in the soil they find it in concentrations that are in the parts per trillion or less levels.
A part per trillion is an incredibly small concentration. It is the equivalent of 1 drop of water in enough water to fill 20 Olympic sized swimming pools. Twenty or thirty years ago we didn't even have the technology that would allow us to look at these extremely low concentrations. Are concentrations that low a significant threat to human health and the environment? I cannot answer that question definitively, but I don't think anyone else can do so either.
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy, spends some time in the Eternal City.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Rome-ing
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Clarice Feldman, Peter Smith, and Joan Sammon. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!
A decade from now, and a decade after that, we will still have less than a decade to avert catastrophic climate change.