Happy Easter!; Where's the Water?; & Real Meat for Italy
Happy Easter from The Pipeline!
Michael Walsh blogged about the storms that are gathering abroad, and which America’s leaders are both encouraging and entirely unprepared for.
How Long Must This Go On?
While everyone's fixated on the entirely predictable indictment of Donald Trump for picking his feet in Poughkeepsie, look who's back, demanding more money we don't have for a cause we should not be supporting, at the risk of starting World War III for no good reason, and look who's printing it for him:
The Department of Defense announced a massive new military aid package for Ukraine on Tuesday valued at $2.6 billion. President Joe Biden authorized $500 million worth of ammunition for U.S.-provided HIMARS, air defense interceptors, artillery rounds, anti-armor systems, small arms, heavy equipment transport vehicles, and maintenance support through his authority to take weapons from U.S. stockpiles.
In addition to the artillery and ammunition, the drawdown also includes 11 tactical vehicles to recover equipment, 61 heavy fuel tankers, 10 trucks and 10 trailers to transport heavy equipment, roughly 400 grenade launchers, and others. By allocating this aid via the president’s drawdown authority, the aid could reach Ukraine within weeks.
“This new security assistance will allow Ukraine to continue to bravely defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. “Russia alone could end its war today. Until Russia does, the United States and our allies and partners will stand united with Ukraine for as long as it takes."
"As long as it takes." Now that's reassuring.
Peter Smith asked an uncomfortable question about wind-and-solar:
If 'Green' is Cheaper, Why Are Electric Rates Soaring?
The levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) from coal was quoted at between 8 and 9 cents per kWh in 2011 by Australia’s Productivity Commission. Wind was double that at about 18 cents and solar much higher at about 45 cents. Since then electricity prices have soared and, abracadabra, the facts have shifted. Now wind and solar provide the cheapest power. I know this because Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, keeps saying so. A question springs to mind.
Why, if renewable energy is cheaper, are electricity prices across numbers of countries positively correlated with the penetration of renewables in power generation? The LCOE of alternative sources of power is supposed to bring capital costs, the useful life of assets, and the relative efficiencies of the technologies being employed, to a common basis. However, the calculations are full of art; subject to the imagination of whoever is doing the calculating. In other words, you can drive a truck through them. And this is particularly the case with technologies like wind and solar which are intermittent, intrinsically unreliable, and variously distant from the grid. How do you bring into account the need for long high-voltage transmission lines, for overbuilding, and for 100 percent backup? A short answer: you don’t.
In a deception worthy of the greatest illusionists, the costs attendant on the intermittency and unreliability of renewable energy are not sheeted home to those providing such energy. When taxpayers aren’t picking up the bill, the costs find their way into electricity prices. Hence the positive correlation between electricity prices and the penetration of renewables. It’s not hard to connect the dots.
Elizabeth Nickson contributed a piece on the nature of modern governance, with a particular focus on the bizarre way that governments manage water.
Water, Water Everywhere but Not a Drop to Use
At this juncture our governments are just nominal. We all take our orders for legislation from the U.N. that sends out sheafs of "suggested" regulation for all ministries and departments large and small. If a legislator or bureaucrat decides, "Hell, no, I’m not going to do that," he or she is immediately assaulted by several of the NGO’s that operate in whichever concerned sphere of influence, first gently, then a bit more influence is brought. If he insists, the poodle media is unleashed by a “study” that “shows” that women and minorities are hardest hit, and the legislator or bureaucrat is tamed.
Where I live – an excellent case study for the hellscape of our meticulously planned future – people get elected promising reform, and within weeks surrender. Any change he tries to muscle through will invite lawsuits as far as the eye can see. It will cost millions. Since the legislation is boilerplate, there is no room for local considerations. This is walking insanity, and has created unimaginable unnecessary pain. It has foreshortened lives, prevented economic activity, and destroyed opportunity. It is straight-up stupid and cruel.
Let’s take a closer look at the bars of our prison. First you have U.N. treaties. Our governments have signed hundreds upon hundreds of them, committing to a new green future. The following is the PR:
With these new actions, President Biden is delivering on the most ambitious land and water conservation agenda in American history. These actions build on more than two years of the Biden-Harris Administration’s progress and historic investments to advance conservation, restoration, and stewardship nationwide. That record includes:
Protecting more lands and waters in his first year than any president since JFK
Setting the country’s first-ever national conservation goal to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030
Signing an Executive Order to better protect America’s forests
Securing the largest investment in climate, environmental justice, and conservation ever
Putting the entire U.S. Arctic Ocean off limits to new oil and gas development
Restoring and strengthening protections for cherished places, including Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments, as well as the Tongass National Forest
Designating the Camp Hale - Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado
FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Takes New Action to Conserve and Restore America’s Lands and Waters
Take a look at the list of things ‘saved’. Note that it locks away thousands of square miles of ocean from drilling or fishing. What it doesn’t say is that the Waters of the United States gives the government control of every run-off ditch and puddle. This massive taking, which will, by the end of it remove one billion acres from American use, locks up pretty much any and all natural resources, on the grounds of "scarcity." Every single order and legislative initiative hews to this one idea: humans are killing the earth and we are running out of everything except sun and wind, which is the future and you better get used to brownouts.
NGO's proffer "proof" that set-asides create prosperity, but if you examine the "proof", it is boilerplate for every set-aside, the prosperity is in 'service' jobs, which they claim are doctors and engineers, but which are really summer waitress and checkout cashiers. Real jobs, the ones that build families, decline. The only increase is tourism and that would have come anyway.
Joan Sammon contributed an article on the role that ESG has played in our ongoing banking crisis, but with an interesting twist — a look at the meaning of the behind-the-scenes push for the introduction of digital currency.
The Short, Sweet Step from Digital Currency to Dictatorship
With political ideology so central to economic unraveling, could these bank failures offer an opportunity to consolidate depositors’ funds into “too big to fail” banks that already support ESG, making it easier for politicos at Treasury and the Fed to move toward what appears to be their hidden goal: digital currency controlled by a central bank? Physical currency (Federal Reserve notes) are the only type of central bank money available to the general public today. By moving to digital, the Fed asserts, the general public could make digital payments.
What the Fed and WEF don’t explain is that this isn’t just about digitalization. It also amplifies the power government would inherit to dictate who is permitted to participate in society. Antithetical to liberty, digital currency is intended to enhance government’s ability to control everything from what one purchases, to where one can go, or even whether one can participate in society unimpeded by government overseers at all. In the name of "carbon footprints," social- credit scores and government-mandated standards of living, currency surveillance is the end of a free society. Think it's not possible? Just look at the currency surveillance common in Communist China or observe how Canadians’ bank accounts were locked by the tyrannical Trudeau regime last year when Trudeau’s political power was threatened by the peaceful protests of displeased constituents.
David Cavena blogged about the unmentioned downsides of renewables.
About That 'Sustainable' Wind and Sea Power...
Does using wind or waves to power our grid actually make sense? Is it really sustainable? The air and oceans move constantly and with a purpose. Air and sea currents move moisture and heat around the planet. Waves and ocean currents move nutrients that feed aquatic plants and animals, wash shores and bays, preventing stagnation, and move oxygen from the atmosphere into the water, providing life for sea denizens. Both air and sea currents are used as migration paths for animals.
What happens when we remove energy from wind and waves? Wind farms remove energy from the atmosphere and put that energy onto the grid as electricity. This is not “free” electricity. As with all things, it comes with a cost.
While converting the kinetic energy of wind into electricity, wind turbines modify exchanges between the ground and atmosphere, and affect the transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the air.
Downwind of wind farms, the land is no longer being cooled by evaporative cooling of the passing wind; it is being warmed. How much? About 1.5 degrees:
This warming is the result of wind turbines actively mixing the atmosphere near the ground and aloft while simultaneously extracting from the atmosphere’s motion.
Is 1.5 degrees important? Climate cultists enthusiastically answer “Yes!”
And Tom Finnerty contributed a blog post about Italy’s refusal to jump on the so-called sustainable food bandwagon.
Italy: No Crickets, Real Meat per Favore
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Clarice Feldman, Steven Hayward, and Tom Finnerty. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!