ESG Censorship; Global Boiling?; & the Green War on Rice

Enemies of the People: Jack Smith

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Here’s Joan Sammon on the rising anxiety in the ESG world.

ESG Up Close, and Very Personal

Earlier this month the Human Rights Campaign along with other LGTBQ+$$ activist organizations penned a letter to the CEOs of social media companies, asking them to silence people with views with which the radicals of the HRC disagrees. Seeking to achieve through censorship that which they have not been able to achieve with open discourse, the group  approached Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and even Twitter, proposing a collaboration of sorts in order to achieve what these activist authors describe as “better enforcement of hate speech, harassment, misinformation, and other existing content policies aimed at protecting transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming users and all LGBTQ+ people.”

The censorship the HRC asks of the social media companies comes in the face of the Bud Light and parent company Anheuser Busch’s Dylan Mulvaney trans-gender marketing disaster that has resulted in the tanking of Bud Light’s market share, its share price and its market valuation. What makes the situation particularly interesting is that it provides a real-time example of how the environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting and scoring eco-system actually works,--- and seems to indicate that consumers are finally pushing back.

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Peter Smith wrote about how the environmentalist narrative is the only narrative allowed in media.

Beware of 'Global Boiling'

You have to give it to those who now run the climate scam. They know how to quash dissident views and without resort to the crude methods of the Inquisition. They smother them. Take them off the airwaves. Cancel the perpetrators. And they certainly don’t fall into the trap of giving dissident views exposure by debating them. Mostly those cancelled, even those of prominence, make only an ephemeral impression on public consciousness; that is, if they make any impression at all.

Nobel Prize winner John Clauser recently featured on Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia. He had just been deplatformed by the International Monetary Fund for having heretical views on “climate change.” Hence he became very briefly newsworthy. But, note, not on the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It covered him in October 2022 when, jointly with two others, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum theory. Covering his deplatforming by the IMF would entail at least mentioning why. Namely, that a scientist of renown did not believe we had a "climate crisis." That simply wouldn’t do.

The ABC, a conservative-free zone, is expert on never allowing dissenting views to be even glimpsed above the parapet. However, that is not my larger point, which is that Dr. Clauser’s climate views have already passed out of sight, even on conservative news media. We will continue to hear about Greta Thunberg every time she sits in the road blocking traffic. And about the vainglorious virtue signaling of Hollywood celebrities. Nor has the U.N. chief António Guterres nearly exhausted his hysterical headline-grabbing repertoire. You might think he will be unable to outdo his latest absurdity, “global boiling.” Think again, flights of fancy are not limited by scruples or truth. Then, of course, we have the IPCC, Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, woke corporates, renewable-energy rent seekers, and compromised governments; all endlessly spewing agitprop.

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Smith also blogged about batteries, which we’re constantly being told will transform the renewable energy industry, and what they actually cost.

The Big Lie About 'Big Batteries'

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Elizabeth Nickson contributed a piece discussing environmentalism and economic manipulation.

'Climate' and Capitalism: a Match Made in Hell

"Climate change" is now eating capitalism. It is a profit center for both government and business. In 2002 Goldman Sachs built a division that sold “climate solutions” by way of tax and carbon credits. This zero-sum game is trading in the misery of hundreds of millions. It says to plutocrats: you can build that airplane factory, and get an enormous tax break, but only if you conserve or eliminate activity in another part of the world, usually Africa, or indeed anyplace vulnerable.

It always means productive activity is shut down, whether via resource set-asides, (necessary resources) or in western democracies, human activity. There "climate mitigation" literally trades on the misery of the young, who pay increased rents, compliance fees, new requirements, engineers say; and it attaches an entire battalion of green compliance officers who cruise the region for infractions. In my area, "green-development" requirements add $1,000 to the monthly rent of a one-bedroom apartment and despite the province only being 6 percent developed, opening up land for new housing is greeted by lawfare and protests.

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And Clarice Feldman wrote about the environmentalist effort to change what we eat, and without any obvious benefit to us or the environment.

Dying to Save the Planet

The effect of cutting fossil fuels is to diminish agricultural production. Net-zero policies eliminate nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides, the consequence of which will mean half the world’s population will be deprived of sufficient foods. Malthusians always assume the pie will stay the same and the pieces we get will always have to be made smaller. Such thinking always neglects human ingenuity and technological development much as before the automobile, wise men calculated the amount of horse manure from New York city’s carriages and drays and predicted the city would be buried in it. In any agriculture policy what began as a misplaced Malthusian notion of the world running out of sufficient food, was reversed thanks to Borlaug but has now become a series of steps designed to make sure we do.

In that vein, the etymologist E.O. Wilson predicted two decades ago in a book excerpt in Scientific American that humans are about to run out of food. His solution was that we all should become vegivores. He calculated the amount of grain consumed by livestock and said if we instead gave that grain to humans, and stopped raising livestock we could feed billions more of projected population increase.

Unfortunately, he neglected a number of things. People would still need more “nuts, seafood, fruits, vegetables, cotton, root crops and all the other varieties of food and fiber.” He also missed that we eat the animals that eat the grain, so the suggestion that animals reduce the amount of food produced for human consumption overlooked something very significant, the very reason we raise them. As the song we sang as kids “Mares Eat Oats” goes, some animals do eat grains, but livestock do not exist on grain alone. They consume things humans do not—pigs dine on garbage, hens eat bugs and grass, goats eat leaves. In the United States cows eat thousands of tons of cottonseed meal every year, taking nothing away from human consumption.

In other words, they turn what humans do not eat into meat, milk, and eggs—protein, necessary for good nutrition. They also provide us with leather, hide , horn, feathers and wool, which make up no small part of clothing necessary for healthy living especially in the developing world. (Substitutes for these things such as polyester and plastic shoes require fossil fuels to produce.) The vegan solution is not sustainable, even if you were able to persuade millions of people, let alone the entire earth to support it.

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That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming articles at The Pipeline!