Hail, Caesar; Britain's New Climate Criminals; & Farewell to California.
Hail, Caesar; Britain's New Climate Criminals; & Farewell to California.
Enemies of the People: Pope Francis
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh looked at the recent surge in mass migration in the U.S. and Europe from the perspective of history.
Invasion of the Nation-Snatchers
Gradually, the bits and pieces of the Empire began to assume their roughly current forms, although the process took centuries. Roman Britain disappeared back into Celtic Britain, which in turn was replaced by Anglo-Saxon England, and conquered by the Franco-Normans in 1066; from this often bloody conflict emerged modern Britain. Similarly, Celtic and Romanized Gaul became France; the Celtiberian peninsula became Portugal and Spain. (If anyone has a beef about dispossession, it's the Celts.)
It was not until the 19th century that the German and Italian states were welded into single countries, today called Germany and Italy -- and even their borders have changed several times in the one hundred and forty or so years since their founding as political entities.
Indeed, Western European history was in part occasioned by a famous mass migration: the push westward into Gaul by the Helvetians, a Celtic tribe who occupied land in present-day Switzerland (reflected in the country's Latin name, the Confoederatio Helvetica). Under pressure from invading Germanic tribes in 58 B.C., the Helvetians wanted more desirable land to the south and west, in Roman Transalpine Gaul. They pulled up lock, stock, and barrel, burned their farms, and began the trek en masse.
Fearful of having ferocious Germans so close to their northern border, the Romans under their provincial governor, Julius Caesar, came to the aid of the Gauls and pushed the Helvetians back; as neighbors, the Romans vastly preferred the Gauls with whom they had many cultural and political ties. But this was only the pretext for an eight-year war in which Caesar conquered all of Gaul and incorporated it into what was fast becoming the Roman Empire.
Now things are changing again, as the world experiences another of its periodic mass migrations. Britain, France, Italy are undergoing fundamental transformation by untrammeled immigration, or invasion, from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, while the United States -- founded as a colonial outpost of 17th-century Britain -- is today being overrun (with the tacit permission and sub rosa encouragement of the Biden administration via its de facto annulment of the southern border) by the peoples of central and South America, and from many other countries around the world as well.
Notice I said "countries." The term is used loosely, since "countries" are in many cases artificial designations imposed by Europeans and Americans on places hitherto considered tribal territories, regions, or enclaves. One need only look at a post-Sykes-Picot map of Mesopotamia to see the suspiciously straight lines drawn to mark the relatively new state of Iraq from its western neighbors. The idea of the nation-state is primarily a Western invention, imposed by fiat all over the world, even in such places as China, which was long a nation but seldom a state.
Our Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan, contributed a piece about some concerning news coming out of the parliament of his homeland.
Turning Respectable People into Criminals
I hope for the sake of the taxi-driver’s blood pressure that he hasn’t read the recent report in the Daily Telegraph which revealed that under the government’s proposed Energy Bill, Ministers and officials will enjoy broad umbrella powers to create new criminal offenses and impose severe penalties, including imprisonment, for various forms of non-compliance with new “energy performance regulations” such as obstructing an enforcement authority.
The first (and maybe the only) point to make about the bill is that it’s an expansion of delegated legislation: that is, Parliament or Congress passes a general bill aiming at all kinds of improvements in—on this occasion—energy regulation, but leaves officials in government agencies to fill in the details later about, for instance, how much energy should a home use, how great an excess constitutes a crime of non-compliance, how heavy should the punishment be, and so on.
For more than a century, legal experts have been uneasy about delegated legislation because agencies and bureaucrats decide these questions rather than elected representatives. Its democratic legitimacy is thus very weak. In Britain, they have added safeguards with an eye towards remedying this flaw, such as requiring MPs to pass a statutory instrument confirming any important new rules issued under its rubric. But these safeguards have themselves become weak over time. Most are subjected to only a very brief parliamentary debate, and they are almost always passed without amendment—even those involving major social and economic changes or criminal sentences.
Yet, despite the unease of strict constitutionalists, delegated legislation has spread inexorably across the democratic world because politicians love legislating—it pleases their supporters, voters, and pressure groups—and bureaucrats love regulating. Governments in particular like devices such as statutory Instruments because they help them to push through unpopular legislation without too much public controversy.
That’s all too clear from the most dramatic misuse of statutory instruments in recent years: namely, Theresa May’s decision to commit Britain to the irresponsible and unachievable target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 as a mere amendment to the Climate Change Act after ninety minutes of debate. Mrs. May legitimately owns that extraordinary act of financial and political folly now wreaking havoc on the U.K. economy. Not all the regulations that emerge from the bureaucrats’ offices, however, are a good reflection of the legislator’s intentions. Sometimes they are even the reverse of Congress or Parliament’s intentions.
Last year in the U.S., for instance, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil, issued two new regulations that had the effect not of regulating energy transmission but of reducing it by increasing the obstacles to building natural gas infrastructure. If these regulations didn’t implement the intentions of legislators, then, whose intentions did they implement? In the case of the progressive Biden administration, its intention was the Deep Green cause of blocking energy transmission. As I wrote in this space over a year ago:
All these devices are tactics in the political game of multiplying obstacles to the development of pipelines and other projects until potential investors and business in general depart in frustration and look for profit in a less hostile environment.
But the harm of this official abuse goes beyond its economic impact. For crimes against government regulation are treated and punished more seriously than other crimes. The average American has a lower risk of punishment for burglary than a farmer violating some water regulation by plowing the wrong field at the wrong time.
Will the British Energy Bill now before Parliament lead to this kind of absurdly misplaced set of legal priorities which, at its worst, is a kind of political warfare against the respectable majority of people? The bill’s official defenders claim, in effect, that any powers in the bill are for emergencies only. No one will go to prison for using too much electricity. But both rebellious Tory MPs and the public are nervous because of the political atmosphere in which this debate occurs. Net-Zero is certain to be draconian, expensive, and unpopular. Everyone admits that in a general way. So there are bound to be tough regulations to reduce energy use and curb lavish lifestyles, followed first by resistance to these measures, and then by fines levied on those who resist. And what then?
Joan Sammon wrote about our bizarre government-by-ESG-score.
Catch 22: ESG Gets You Coming and Going
The Biden administration earlier this month cancelled seven oil and gas drilling leases in a part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR. This followed the Department of Interior’s decision earlier this year to approve Conoco Phillips multi-billion-dollar investment in the planned oil development known as Willow, on Alaska’s North Slope. While the two positions appear contradictory, they actually offer insight into tactical aspects of environmental movement and the scoring scheme known as ESG.
Seeking to achieve through mandates and "scores" that which could not be achieved through legislative compromise or free markets, the efforts in Alaska reveal the flexibility ESG adherents have to use any means necessary to roll back the economic, geo-political, and societal advantages of American energy independence, in exchange for a more surveilled, dystopic, and less free society.
Understood by many as the most effective weapon for defunding oil and gas projects, the genesis of ESG reaches back to 2000. Back then, the World Economic Forum (WEF), an organization that advocates for a single centralized global government, launched the scoring scheme through the non-profit entity known as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Central to the WEF plan was the re-direction of investor capital away from industries that underpin a free and vibrant economy, such as oil and gas, and toward industries and companies from which these central-planning, ESG acolytes derive personal financial and social benefit.
ESG scoring is necessarily based on an arbitrary, contrived premise about environmental degradation. Without the “looming environmental destruction” pretext, no investor would willingly direct his investment capital in industries and companies that will destroy the economy and society in which he lives. As a result, ESG remains the defining tool the Biden administration and its allies on the left are using to expedite the destruction of the oil and gas sector.
Jack Dunphy wrote about a recent trip to his long-departed hometown, which brought home to him just how far the City of Angels has fallen.
The Slow, Agonizing Death of Los Angeles
The first assault on the senses comes even before one exits the Hollywood Freeway, a main artery through Los Angeles. The embankments lining the freeway are dotted with homeless encampments, each of them featuring the things to which law-abiding citizens in Los Angeles and many other cities have become wearily familiar: the blue tarps, the makeshift living quarters, and the vast arrays of clutter, always to include many bicycles and their various components, all of them no doubt stolen but never to be reunited with their rightful owners.
After leaving the freeway we parked on Vine Street (paying $40 for the privilege, nearly the cost of a ticket to the show), then walked around the corner to the theater, passing Roy Rogers’s radio star as we did so. And as we walked, inflicted on us was the trace of an odor once confined to Skid Row and the alleyways of other, similarly seedy parts of town: the fetid, stale aroma of a place where bodily excretions are deposited wherever and whenever one might be struck by the urge. Yes, we were at Hollywood and Vine, but glamor and fine living were not what came to mind.
Moments later we saw – or rather heard, then saw – a man raving like a lunatic across the street from the theater. Perhaps he was a resident of one of the freeway encampments, or perhaps it is one of the tents lining Vine Street a few blocks to the south he calls home. No matter. He was shouting incoherently (at least to me), and as he walked westward the tourists in his path cleared the way as minnows do on a barracuda’s approach. An LAPD black-and-white passed by with the cops taking no apparent notice of the man. Why would they? Surely there were five or ten others just like him within a few blocks. Like the homeless encampments, ranting madmen have become ubiquitous in Hollywood and other parts of Los Angeles, and people unable to avoid them count themselves lucky to endure the encounter without being punched, kicked, spat upon, or stabbed.
I am old enough to remember the Hollywood of the 1960s. I grew up less than three miles from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine and I sometimes rode my bike there, an adventure unfreighted by menace save for that posed by Los Angeles traffic. If I were unfortunate enough to live in the same neighborhood today, allowing my child to ride a bike through Hollywood would be unthinkable.
I was born in Los Angeles and spent most of my life within its city limits. My father was born there, also, and by the standards of L.A., where most people’s roots are as deep as a tumbleweed’s, this is rather like tracing one’s lineage back to the Mayflower. About twelve years ago, while still employed with the Los Angeles Police Department, I made what was at the time an anguished decision to move my family to the suburbs.
And, zooming out a bit, Clarice Feldman looked at California’s ongoing climate lawfare. These legal battles will have ramifications for the entire country.
In California, More 'Green' Grifting
You have to hand it to the greenies. They understood if they could capture California, they could impose their nonsensical energy use restrictions countrywide.. And that’s precisely what they did and continue to do, to the detriment of the state’s citizens (Los Angeles gas prices now average over $6 a gallon, a real burden for those who must commute long distances) and the rest of the country as well.
Probably their greatest victory was leveraging California’s purchasing power to compel auto makers to comply with the state’s stringent tailpipe emissions standards for new cars. These standards exceeded those required nationwide by the Clean Air Act. California’s Advanced Clean Cars program was allowed to continue despite its departure from standards nationwide only because there was a provision in the act – the California Waiver – which permitted the state to set its own standards.
Given the huge auto market in the state, auto manufacturers adopted these expensive measures on all cars sold throughout the country, in effect, allowing the California legislature—not Congress—to set the national standard. The Trump administration rescinded the waiver but more recently President Biden directed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Highway Traffic Safety Administration to reconsider the rescission of the California waiver. Seventeen states have sued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia contesting EPA’s decision to reinstate the waiver.
Recently, the Court heard the arguments in two cases respecting the waiver. The challenge to the waiver if successful could not only end it but clip the wings of the California greenies as well:
The 17 State Petitioners ask the D.C. Circuit to invalidate EPA's Reinstatement Decision on two primary grounds. First, they ask the court to rule that the CAA waiver is unconstitutional under the equal sovereignty doctrine, because it grants California a sovereign power that is denied to all other states. The State Petitioners present both facial and as applied challenges, arguing that CAA Section 209(b) is unconstitutional on its face because it allows California to exercise a sovereign power that is denied every other state, and alternatively that even if such unequal treatment may sometimes be justified due to the unique circumstances of a state, California lacks any unique interest in combating climate change.
Second, the State Petitioners argue that the ACC program is preempted by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 ("EPCA"), which grants to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ("NHTSA") the exclusive authority to regulate fuel economy standards with no waiver or exception for California. In a separate briefing, Industry Petitioners present statutory arguments that EPA exceeded its authority under the CAA by approving a program aimed at the global issues of climate change; that California has not demonstrated that it meets the statutory requirements for eligibility for the ACC waiver; and that EPA properly exercised its reconsideration authority when it issued the Rescission Decision.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has indicated he intends to pass on a fast track two laws forcing more than 5,300 California companies to report their emissions:
SB 253 requires companies with greater than $1 billion in annual revenues to file annual reports publicly disclosing their direct, indirect, and supply chain greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, verified by an independent and experienced third-party provider.
SB 261 requires companies with $500 million in annual revenues to prepare biennial reports disclosing climate-related financial risk and measures they have adopted to reduce and adapt to that risk, with the first report due by January 1, 2026.
Imagine calculating not only the emissions in production and distribution but those of every supply chain user. Sounds like an impossibility to me, and one which is both irrelevant to the well-being of Californians and one which is certain to increase the cost of everything Californians buy.
David Cavena contributed a blog post about the strange environmentalist war on our our ability to revel in the environment.
In Praise of Freedom – and Diesel Fuel
Early this past summer, my wife and I spent two weeks traveling America by train. This is the best way to see our beautiful country. No worries about the next rest stop, meal, or hotel or camping spot. Just relaxing travel – seeing, eating, sleeping, meeting new people as the U. S. of A. passes steadily along outside. It enables you to see what you cannot from 30,000 feet: our countrymen, how and where they live, what they do. Along with, of course, the purple mountain majesty and amber waves of grain.
Trains, it must be noted, are beloved by the climate crowd, who are always bellyaching about how much better they are for Mother Earth than cars. But how do these trains run? Massive diesel generators generating electricity for the electric motors, enabling them to drive America’s diesel-electric locomotives that haul millions of tons of freight and thousands of passengers across this country every day.
And our getting to the train required taking a Greyhound bus from Phoenix to Flagstaff, and another to get home from Tucson two weeks later? More Diesel.
Later in the summer my brother and I backpacked for a week through California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, something we have done every year since high school. How did we get there? I drove more than 300 miles to Southern California, then he and I drove 350 miles to Lake Edison – one part of one of the major hydro-electric projects in California – parked the gas-powered car for a week of backpacking, and then drove 680 miles home.
Could we have done this in a E.V.? No. Even if the batteries made it up the mountains to Lake Edison, no charging station – or power to feed one – exists there. These – let’s call them what they are: toys for the elite – cannot make it up and back to the Sierras.
Thinking back on these treks on the way home, it occurred to me that if the Climate Cultists had their way, they would have been impossible. No bus, no train, no car, and thus no backpacking. These are the things they want to take from us: Our outdoors. Our freedom. And ultimately our country.
And Tom Finnerty blogged about the rarely acknowledged specter in the background of the United Auto Workers Strike, namely E.V.s.
One, Two, Three Strikes for EVs
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming pieces at The Pipeline!