Mammy's Revenge; Farmers on the March; & Bugs vs. Jets
Mammy's Revenge; Farmers on the March; & Bugs vs. Jets
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh wrote about Ireland’s recent referenda, the results of which outraged and confounded the country’s political class.
In Ireland, a Very Happy Mammy's Day
Something remarkable happened in Ireland over the weekend. Just in time to celebrate International Women's Day and Irish Mother's Day (here often called "Mam's Day" or colloquially, "Mammy's Day"): the plain people of Ireland (in Flann O'Brien's memorable phrase) resoundingly rejected a freshly sprung trap against their constitution and their common sense. By roughly 70-30 percent, voters turned two thumbs down on a pair of amendments that basically would have eliminated the word "women" and their important role in the Irish home, and redefined the terms "family" and "care" to reflect more "modern" -- read: Leftist -- values. As the New York Times story whined in its subhed: "Two proposed amendments, which voters considered on Friday, were intended to reflect the more secular, liberal values of the nation’s modern era."
Thus did the progressive, radical, anti-Semitic, and Ukrainian-loving coalition government that currently controls the Republic of Ireland go down to an ignominious and fully deserved defeat. Irish politics consists of two antediluvian main parties -- Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil-- whose differences over the 1921 treaty that established the Irish Free State cost the life of revolutionary leader Michael Collins and led to the ascendancy of the American-born, half-Spanish, and very possibly illegitimate, Eamon de Valera, but are now long since lost in the boggy mists of memory. Irish history would have been better off had the roles been reversed.
But in the most recent parliamentary elections in 2020, neither party was able to win a governing majority and so Ireland is currently ruled by a nasty "progressive" Uniparty consisting of both of them plus the neo-Communist but numerically insignificant Green Party, which was handed several plum ministries as a reward for its role in cementing the Racket, including "environment," transportation, tourism, and -- in the person of the flamboyantly homosexual Roderic O'Gorman -- a Minister for children, youth, equality, disability, and integration. (You read that right.) The two top dogs, Fine Gael's openly gay half-Indian Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fáil's plodding, hapless Micheál Martin, have taken turns trading the top spot, the Taoiseach, or prime minister, with Varadkar currently occupying the office.
So much for the "more secular" values of old Ireland. Since the rise of Varadkar, a protégé of the World Economic Forum, Ireland has been pushed steadily to the Left, de-institutionalizing the Catholic Church, legalizing abortion and gay marriage, pushing for assisted suicide, and opening the borders to all comers, even those who arrive without passports or papers of any kind. It welcomes especially economic migrants (called "asylum spoofers" by ordinary citizens), and transporting and transplanting "refugees" from places that heretofore have had nothing whatsoever to with Ireland or Irish history, such as the Ukraine.
That every able-bodied Ukrainian male in the country is by definition a draft dodger and that by harboring them the government is depriving Vladimir Zelensky of much-needed manpower in his fight against Vladimir Putin -- a fight the Irish government ostentatiously supports, despite the fact that, constitutionally, Ireland is pledged to neutrality -- never seems to occur to them.
Meanwhile, the politicians continue to demonize any objections to the rapid social and demographic change as "far right" obstructionist racism and prejudice. That there is no major "far right" party does not disprove their theorem; having posited a counter-factual, they continue to act on it as if it were real, and continue to blame all opposition -- such as that, worldwide, to the fascist-adjacent "hate speech" law promulgated by the spectacularly inept justice minister, Helen McEntee law"-- on the "far right."
The fact that the mainstream Irish media is among the worst in the world -- completely subservient to the wishes of the current government when it's not actually funded by it, and determined to push the progressive Narrative at every opportunity -- enforces a propaganda regime that would do Stalin proud.
Elizabeth Nickson looked into the global farmer uprising.
Beware Farmers On the March
That this opinion written by Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times on February 23 is finally reaching through to decision-makers is a case of a little too late. The Financial Times is about six months behind the times. What is happening in Europe runs far deeper and presages far more systematic change than a temporary pulling back on taxes and regulation:
It is a testament to how far political leaders and opinion formers have lost touch with agriculture that so few seem to have seen this coming. Governments that want to tackle climate change seem not have thought through the effects on an industry that is facing rising production costs and falling global food prices.
John Dickenson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania were carried from town to town, printed again and again, read out aloud at town meetings, electrifying pre-Revolutionary America. Farmers, said Dickenson, and I paraphrase, are the basis of any culture. Anger them too much, and things change. Plus, they are not beholden to anyone, they can feed and house themselves, they are the base of independence; from their secure houses, new ideas are nurtured. It was why Stalin murdered the kulaks, too uppity, too unpredictable.
Another thinker, Henry St. John, the Viscount Bolingbroke, a Tory, founded the Country Party in opposition to the Whig ascendancy, which he called the Court Party, where advancement was doled out via preference and bribery, not the virtue of an idea or proposal. Bolingbroke (unreadable now) said that the country was from where all good things came, ingenuity, creativity, problem solving. It must be heard. Bolingbroke and his friends are credited with the invention of a Parliamentary opposition.
He was exiled for his trouble, his properties confiscated, his wife left him, and he spent the time in Paris alternating whooping it up – famous for running naked along the Champs-Élysées – and consulting for Bonnie Prince Charlie’s daddy, James Stuart, who claimed the British throne. And fighting for his rights. Bolingbroke was eventually allowed home, ran for Parliament and went on to challenge the Court party, unpacking the legislation until the special deals that bled the country were consigned to history. The subsequent economic boom produced a period of growth in Britain, leading to the Industrial Revolution. And, to the American Revolution, because Bolingbroke was much read by the American founders.
Sound familiar? Because here we are again. The World Economic Forum in partnership with the United Nations has divided up the world and said this goes here and that goes there, and "free trade" is everywhere, but we pick the winners and losers. The losers are the people of western democracies, slated to be overrun, their history and traditions and practices buried. Too uppity, too inconvenient.
Europe is, finally, on fire. In every country, farmers are rolling, joined by truckers, joined by rail workers. Sixty-nine percent of Germany, the most obedient population in the E.U., is on their side. Even little Corsica has its farmers out. This is just the beginning, because farmers can come and go, they don’t have “jobs,” they have businesses, they are independent. The last week of February, farmers started ripping up the fences outside the E.U.’s buildings with their backhoes. In France, farmers and truckers are walling government officials in their buildings. And while the specific complaint is Net-Zero and Europe's Green New Deal, everything is on the table, especially the floods of immigrants breaking small cities, towns and rural Europe’s culture, traditions and local economies.
David Cavena dared to compare the carbon emissions of jet-setting Davosie to those of regular people who just don’t want to eat bugs.
'The Weak Are Meat the Strong Do Eat'
While we have listened for years to the climate elites bloviate that their time is so valuable that they must fly private jets to and from Davos or Dubai, we’ve not really looked at the tradeoffs their demands require. Bill Gates, for example, globetrots in a Gulfstream G650, the business jet of choice amongst the elites doing their best to ensure we eat bugs and stay within our 15-minute feed lots.
Derek Zimmerman, president of Customer Support at Gulfstream, tells us that “Fleet flying hours are at all-time highs." Why? Because our ruling elites are stripping wealth from the middle class and transferring it to themselves. The Covid pandemic was the biggest wealth transfer in history, though "climate change" is giving Covid a run for its money. As Elizabeth Nickson writes, "Climate Change is a complex financial mechanism which under the guise of 'saving the planet,' is meant to save the predator class."
Because “private jets can incur more than ten times the emissions per passenger compared to commercial jets," it turns out that “one percent of the world's population is causing 50 percent of aviation emissions." As aviation contributes two percent to global energy-related CO2 emissions, the few elites with private jets contribute one percent of all global energy-related CO2 emissions.
How much? “In just one hour, a private jet can emit two [metric] tons (2,000 kg) of CO2.” Flying Bill from Seattle to Dubai for COP28 this year covered about 7,400 miles in about fifteen hours, emitting 30 tons of CO2, 60 tons for the round trip.
Can we make a comparison between jets and cows? A mature, ready-for-market steer produces about four tons of CO2 per year. How many meals can each cow provide? Up to 2,500. The number of cows sacrificed to the climate gods will depend on the type and weight of the cow, and flight hours. In 2022, more than 4.6 million private jet flights took off in America, alone, emitting, per flight hour a total of 9.2 million tons of CO2, or the annual output of about 2.3 million cows that could have provided as many as 5.75 billion 3-oz meals.
Clarice Feldman wrote about new SEC regulations which trespass into areas where the agency has never — and should never — venture.
The SEC’s Full Employment for Lawyers Gambit
Two years ago the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) first indicated it was proposing "climate change" disclosure regulations and invited comments. The proposal was widely challenged and received 16,000 comments. Although the SEC has no authority in this area, the final regulations were released on March 6. They’ve been changed since they were first proposed two years ago but certainly will remain expensive and burdensome to comply with , will increase costs to consumers of everything (including food, the cost of which is already soaring), and will doubtless be the subject of numerous lawsuits that the SEC will lose.
They are, however, a testament to the Democrats’ single-minded pursuit of increased power and embracement of the fantasy that man’s dominion over the earth includes his power to control the climate if only the right hands are at the levers of power.
At the SEC’s first signaled intention that the disclosure statements, which all publicly listed U.S. companies must file, would have to include its impacts on climate, I took issue with the idea of "climate change" rules in SEC disclosure statements noting, among other things these regulations “would spawn a new industry of navel gazers” and that since the impact statements would not be attested to by certified accountants , the regulations would create a new market for feather merchants and law firms because the disclosures would cover everything from “costs caused by wildfires to the loss of a sales contract because of climate regulations.”
In sum, these disclosures would be impossible to quantify, expensive and time consuming to prepare, and will open the filers (every public listed U.S. company) to numerous lawsuits by hungry litigants and their counsel.
Peter Smith discussed his homeland’s foolish embrace of electric vehicles, just as many other nations are beginning to tap the brakes.
More EV Follies Down Under
I once sold out of a stock which had made me a little money only to find next day its price shooting up on some piece of news. I would have made a killing if I’d waited a day. Bad timing. Chris Bowen, Australia’s obsessive minister for "climate change" and energy, exhibits bad timing. The difference is that he’s playing with other people’s money not his own. Mrs. Thatcher once said something about that.
From January next year, Bowen intends to impose a fuel emissions standard on new cars in an effort to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs). Just, as it so happens, when the United States appears to be about to pare back its intended strengthening of emission standards and car manufacturers, like GM and Ford, are cutting back on their overly-ambitious EV production targets. As Buck Throckmorton recently pointed out (“The End of the All-Electric Fantasy”), the jig's up when it comes to flooding roads with EVs. However, while reality bites, Bowen’s oblivious. He’s not for turning, to egregiously misapply a dictum of the aforementioned great lady.
Incidentally, no cars are made in Australia these days. Deindustrialization has been afoot for some time. Soaring power prices are giving it a fresh kick-along. Manufacturing of plastics is now under threat, to add to aluminum smelting, nickel refining, and paper manufacturing, which I mentioned in a previous Pipeline piece.
Pretty soon Oz will be a collection of wind turbines, solar panels, gas wells, mining quarries, farmlands, cafes and personal services. We’ll become like one of those third-world backwaters: having rich enclaves of primary production and mining while trying to attract first-world tourists to keep the masses employed in a "service economy."
In the meantime, Bowen isn’t content with driving out manufacturing industry by replacing reliable cheap coal power with unreliable expensive wind and solar power. He’s insistent that Aussies drive past empty factories in EVs. Thus the impending tailgate emissions standard.
Lisa Schiffren blogged about an NYT writer’s bizarre piece on wasted food and global warming.
'Fixing' the Climate by 'Rescuing' Food
And Tom Finnerty contributed a blog post about another example of Canadian net-zero lunacy.
In Manitoba: Net-Zero 1; Reality 0
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for all of our articles over at The Pipeline!