Harris-Walz: Joy and Freedom – or misery and tyranny?
Will their radical left administration undo damage inflicted by Biden-Harris? Or make it worse?
Kamala Harris desperately wants to be “unburdened by what has been” – the Biden-Harris policies she helped develop and implement. She wants voters to focus on the “joy” and “freedom” she insists would be America’s future if voters elect her, Tim Walz and their Biden-Harris-Obama “advisors.”
However, she was the “last person in the room” with President Biden for major decisions and is super-glued to what she says are “still my values” about energy, climate, immigration, rioters and police.
She cannot run away from the horrendous Biden-Harris record on energy and food price inflation; letting illegal immigrants, criminals, spies, terrorists, and child, sex and drug traffickers stream into our country; weaponizing federal agencies against political opponents and private citizens; and the Afghanistan departure debacle that killed thirteen US service members and left 90% of our Afghan allies behind.
As a 2019 presidential candidate she supported taxpayer-funded “gender-transitions” for illegal migrants. In 2020, Senator Harris was ranked to the left of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Vice President Harris proudly cast the deciding “yea” vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, the massive $4-trillion spending spree on “Green New Deal” wind, solar and battery projects. The list goes on and on.
Major accomplishments? Senator Elizabeth Warren said Harris was the first VP to visit an abortion clinic.
That’s why she’s dodging interviews and presenting platitudes instead of policies. All with the happy collusion of legacy and social media and ABC debate moderators. All while anonymous campaign staffers assert that she no longer plans to ban fracking, offshore drilling, gasoline cars, gas stoves, plastic straws – or free speech by anyone who might question or criticize her policies.
Perhaps her nameless staffers are correct. Harris-Walz might not ban fossil fuel production and use. They might not ban misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation” from experts and citizens who disagree with administration assertions and policies.
But Harris-Walz and its Deep State bureaucrats don’t have to outright ban anything. They could just tax, regulate, delay, denounce, disincentivize, coerce, threaten and penalize our energy, freedoms and living standards into oblivion.
They could continue the Biden-Harris practice of using the FBI, IRS and Justice Department to harass, intimidate, prosecute and jail political opponents. They could continue colluding with the media and Big Tech to amplify Democrat viewpoints and marginalize opposing views.
Ms. Harris insists that her “values” and “concerns” haven’t changed. But even her official website says nothing about what her policies would be. It says only that she would create an “opportunity economy,” provide a pathway to the middle class, end price gouging (she called it “price gauging”), champion other progressive causes, and ensure Israel’s right and ability to “defend itself” (but “it matters how” Israel does so, and she will dictate those terms), while helping the Palestinian people “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”
Nowhere does her website or recent debate performance explain how she would make any of this happen.
Ms. Harris’s proclamations about lowering energy costs and tackling the climate crisis are equally vacuous and specifics-free. We learn only that Harris-Walz would build on the “historic work” and “international climate leadership” launched by Biden-Harris, to “unite Americans” in tackling the global climate crisis, lower skyrocketing Biden-Harris-era energy costs, “advance environmental justice,” hold polluters accountable, create millions of new jobs, and increase resilience to climate disasters.
How she would actually convert that pablum into her promised utopia remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a word salad. Equally unclear is why the sitting Vice President has made little or no effort to change the Administration’s disastrous energy, economic, immigration and foreign policies. There’s still time for policy reversals and executive orders; Ms. Harris simply has no interest in seeking them.
What is clear is that she doesn’t want to talk about what she would actually do as president – and that much of the mush on her website was copied and pasted from the Biden-for-President 2024 website. However, the posts suggest Harris-Walz would inflict more economic, domestic and global chaos.
President Trump should have driven all these points home during the debate. He failed to do so. Now his interviews, campaign ads, rally speeches, and JD Vance speeches and interviews must do so – and show how they will fix our energy, economic, immigration, and Middle East, Russia and China problems.
A closer look at the Harris climate and energy record provides valuable information for voters.
Senator Harris co-sponsored the 2019 Green New Deal legislation, which would have “fundamentally transformed” America’s entire economy, in the name of fighting “dangerous climate change.” During her 2020 presidential run, she advocated a total transition to electric vehicles (personal, commercial and transport) by 2035. She supports mandating electric stoves and home and water heating.
Her all-electric economy would require tripling electricity generation – while her plans to replace coal and gas power plants with massive wind and solar installations would cause reliable, affordable electricity to plummet. Soaring prices for unpredictable, weather-dependent home, hospital, business and factory electricity would be paired with repeated blackouts, chaos, and heatwave and frigid-weather deaths.
Eliminating coal and gas power plants would also mean replacing their reliable, affordable baseload and backup electricity with enormous grid-backup battery installations costing tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars – and posing constant risks of chemical-fueled infernos.
Ms. Harris remains enthralled by “climate equity” and “environmental justice” – to address the disparate impacts the “climate crisis” allegedly has on women and people of color.
She would ban plastic straws but is committed to wind and solar technologies that create millions of times more plastic and fiberglass-epoxy trash that cannot be recycled and ends up in enormous landfills.
A single 350-feet-long offshore wind turbine blade weighs 140,000 pounds. The Biden-Harris green energy plan calls for 30,000 megawatts of offshore turbines – 2,500 turbines with 7,500 blades. The US Department of Energy says generating 20% of America’s electricity from wind would require 54,000 MW of offshore turbines; that’s 4,500 turbines with 13,500 blades weighing a combined 1.9 billion pounds!
Has she calculated how many plastic straws (or plastic bags) the United States and world would have to banish to equal that offshore wind trash – much less the entirety of Green New Deal trash?
VP candidate Tim Walz is equally radical on these and other issues. He opposes fracking, supports banning gasoline vehicles, and signed a law requiring that Minnesota generate only “carbon-free” electricity by 2040. Even without including the exorbitant price of grid-backup batteries for windless-sunless periods, that law will likely cost his state nearly $350 billion.”
The Harris-Walz “New Way Forward” on energy, climate and the economy has no connection to reality. It is devoid of any financial, engineering or ecological analysis. It is a disaster waiting for ill-informed voters to inaugurate next January.
Joy and Freedom? Harris-Walz is a highway to Misery and Tyranny.
The Trump-Vance campaign team, candidates for other political offices and each of us individually must do all we can to ensure America’s legal (and illegal) voters learn the truth before they cast their ballots.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
Who is directing the war on agriculture and nutrition
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Climate and energy fantasy and tyranny
Models, myths and misinformation on climate drive models, myths and misinformation on energy
It’s mystifying and terrifying that our lives, livelihoods and living standards are increasingly dictated by activist, political, bureaucratic, academic and media ruling elites, who disseminate theoretical nonsense, calculated myths and outright disinformation.
Not only on pronouns, gender and immigration – but on climate change … and energy, the foundation of modern civilization and life spans.
We’re constantly told the world will plunge into an existential climate cataclysm if average planetary temperatures rise another few tenths of a degree, due to using fossil fuels for reliable, affordable energy, raw materials for over 6,000 vital products, and lifting billions out of poverty, disease and early death.
Climate alarmism implicitly assumes Earth’s climate was stable until coal, oil and gas emissions knocked it off kilter … and would be stable again if people stopped using fossil fuels.
In the real world, climate has changed numerous times, often dramatically, sometimes catastrophically, and always naturally. Multiple ice ages and interglacial periods, Roman and Medieval warm periods, a Little Ice Age, major floods, droughts and dust bowls all actually happened – long before fossil fuels.
Data for tornados, hurricanes and other extreme weather events prove they are not getting more frequent or intense. You might argue that Harvey and Irma marked a sudden increase in major hurricanes in 2017 – but that’s only because after Wilma there’d been a record twelve years of zero Category 3-5 hurricanes.
We need to ignore the fear-mongering, look at actual historic records, and recognize that more dangerous, unprecedented calamities upward trends simply aren’t there. We need to insist that alarmists distinguish and quantify human influences versus natural forces for recent temperature, climate and weather events – and show when, where and how human activities replaced natural forces. They haven’t done so.
The only place manmade temperature and climate catastrophes exist is in Michael Mann and other GIGO computer models. These climate models are worthless for policymaking because they aren’t verified by actual measurements, don’t account for urban heat island effects, and cannot incorporate the vast scale and complexity of atmospheric, planetary and galactic forces that determine Earth’s climate.
In reality, people and planet are threatened far more by global cooling than warming. Even a couple degrees drop in average global temperatures would drastically reduce growing seasons, arable land, plant growth, wildlife habitats and agricultural output – especially if it’s accompanied by reductions in plant-fertilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Plants, animals and people would face starvation.
We’re also told ruling elites could prevent this imagined crisis by switching us to wind, solar and battery power. (They also want to eliminate cows and modern agriculture, over misplaced concerns about methane and fertilizer, but that’s an udder discussion.)
Build a coal, gas or nuclear power plant – and unless governments shut it down or cut off fuel supplies, the plant provides plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity nearly 24/7/365 for decades. Build a massive sprawling wind or solar installation, and you have to back up every kilowatt with coal, gas or nuclear power – or with millions of huge batteries – for every windless, sunless period.
The economic and ecological effects would be ruinous.
Coal, gas and nuclear plants can be built close to electricity-intensive urban centers. Tens of thousands of wind turbines and billions of solar panels must go where there’s good wind and sunshine, far from urban areas, connected by high voltage transmission lines. In fact, for Net Zero, says the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world would need 50,000,000 miles of new and upgraded transmission lines by 2040!
All those “clean, green, renewable, sustainable, affordable” wind, solar and battery systems, backup generators, transmission lines and electric vehicles would require millions of tons of iron, copper, aluminum, manganese, cobalt, lithium, concrete, plastics and numerous other metals and minerals.
Onshore wind turbines require nine times more materials per megawatt – and offshore turbines need fourteen times more – than a combined-cycle natural gas power plant, the IEA calculates. Solar panels and EVs have the same problem.
To get these materials, billions of tons of overlying rock must be removed to reach billions of tons of ores – which then must be processed in huge industrial facilities that use mercury and toxic chemicals … emit vast quantities of greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants … and are powered by coal or natural gas. Many components for these “green” technologies are derived from oil and natural gas.
US and other Western facilities control and recycle these pollutants. Chinese and Russian facilities pay little attention to air and water pollution, workplace safety, or fossil fuel use, efficiency and emissions – yet they supply over 80% of “renewable” energy raw materials, because the West increasingly bans mining and processing and makes energy prohibitively expensive to operate mines and factories.
Pseudo-renewable energy worldwide would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars, would have to be subsidized by trillions of taxpayer dollars, and would dramatically increase electricity rates.
Electric vehicle, appliance and heating mandates would double or triple all these infrastructure, materials, mining and land use requirements, ecological impacts and costs.
American residential electricity prices in 2023 ranged from 10.4¢ per kilowatt-hour (Idaho) to 28.4¢ per kWh (California). British families paid 47¢ per kWh! UK factories and businesses paid up to three times what their US counterparts did. German families, factories and businesses are in the same capsizing boat.
But EU industrial leaders say energy prices must continue rising, to cover the soaring costs of the “energy transition.” If they don’t, factories, jobs and emissions will move overseas. But if they do, families will freeze jobless in the dark.
What many call the Climate Industrial Complex has a monumental stake in perpetuating this situation. Collectively, its members have incredible power, control much of government and education, hold enormous financial stakes in green tech subsidies, and often censor contrarian viewpoints.
Just as ominous, if it becomes clear that the Brave New World of Net Zero Energy cannot provide sufficient affordable electricity and other necessities for modern industries, healthcare and living standards, two-thirds of America’s ruling elites favor food and energy rationing to combat climate change and retain their anti-capitalism, anti-growth agenda. It’s likely the same in Europe and Canada.
The Biden Administration and other governments are already dictating the kinds of vehicles we can drive and what appliances and heating systems we can use. They’re already exploring ways to limit the kind and size of homes we can live in, how warm and cool we can keep them, how often we can travel by air, the kinds and amounts of meat we can eat, and many other aspects of our lives.
Meanwhile, China, India, Indonesia and dozens of other countries are building hundreds of coal and gas generating units – further underscoring the insanity and futility of trying to control energy sources, quantities and emissions.
This is what America’s 2024 state and national elections are about – and elections in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. The longer these elites remain in power, the more our liberties, lives and living standards will resemble life a century ago under authoritarian regimes. Vote accordingly.
Paul Driessen is a senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environmental, and human rights issues.
Dictatorial control, from Covid to climate
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If it’s not open warfare, it’s collusive lawfare Environmentalist lawsuits reach new heights of absurdity and threats to American energy
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Biden Administration environmental injustices
Federal agencies proclaim ‘climate justice’ to justify controlling every aspect of our lives
President Biden recently issued a 5,400-word executive order directing all federal agencies to emphasize “environmental justice” in every decision they make.
After ducking questions for weeks on what remediation, remuneration and environmental justice the administration is providing East Palestine, Ohio residents following a toxic railway chemical spill, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained the EO in her inimitable style:
The President has “the most ambitious climate agenda than any other president in history, and one way that you can look at this today is that he’s continuing to deliver on that ambitious agenda, and he’s not done yet. This is a continuing continuation of what he’s promised the American people.”
In plain English, the order enables each agency to implement this infinitely malleable “justice” concept to justify whatever policies and regulations it is implementing in the name of abating the “climate crisis” and “fundamentally transforming” America’s energy and economic systems. It also allows agencies to ignore any “justice” issues that might interfere with their plans.
The Environmental Protection Agency quickly issued a press release citing justice and “equity” rationales for eliminating coal and gas power plants, internal-combustion vehicles, and gas stoves, ovens, furnaces and water heaters – all of which it says contribute to global warming.
EPA claims “children are uniquely vulnerable” to climate-related impacts like rising temperatures that can cause “lifelong consequences” for their concentration, learning, academic achievement and earnings potential. Moreover, these effects “disproportionately fall on children who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color, low income, without health insurance, and/or have limited English proficiency.”
Of course, air conditioning reduces high temperatures in schools and homes, thereby avoiding these far-fetched problems. During wintertime, gas furnaces (or reliable, affordable coal or gas-generated electric heat) keep students warm when outdoor temperatures plummet to deadly lows.
However, both cooling and heating systems will become unavailable or unaffordable to these same classes of people in the wake of government decrees that coal and gas be banished, and electricity provided by expensive, weather-dependent wind and solar. That’s already happening in Europe.
The Economist reported that 68,000 people died in Europe this past winter because energy prices have rocketed so high that many families can no longer afford to heat their homes properly.
Meanwhile, EPA asserts that closing coal and gas power plants would prevent 1,300 “premature deaths” by 2042 from global warming. That’s a hypothetical 65 deaths annually.
Allowing for Europe versus US population differences, more than 30,000 Americans would die needlessly every year, if energy prices soar as high as they have in Europe. Minority and low and middle income families would be disproportionately affected and least able to afford proper winter heating. Without affordable, dependable AC, thousands more would likely die during sweltering summers. Just keeping lights on and computers running requires reliable, affordable electricity.
EPA didn’t consider these realities in its news release, regulations or “environmental justice” contortions, because the agency is pushing an agenda, not providing honest, scientific evidence. The agency and Biden EO routinely ignore inconvenient realities like the following, as well.
Eliminating coal and gas power plants will triple America’s need for electricity generation, to replace that power and provide battery backup storage. Rushing to do this before America has sufficient reliable alternative electricity supplies will destabilize power grids, causing repeated blackouts, disproportionately affecting families that cannot afford emergency backup generators (most of which require fossil fuels).
EPA rules dramatically reducing tailpipe emissions will force families to buy electric cars that average over $65,000 in price – and light, medium, heavy-duty and long-haul trucks that could cost twice as much as gasoline or diesel versions. Blue-collar families will be hammered hardest.
Farmers will be compelled to pay far more for electric tractors, and for natural-gas-based fertilizers and pesticides that will likewise be much more expensive. Food prices will soar still higher, forcing disadvantaged families to choose between food, heat, clothing and other needs.
Families and landlords will also be required to replace high-efficiency gas furnaces with pricey electric systems … or expensive heat pumps that don’t even work well in sub-freezing weather.
Middle class families will see their living standards plummet. Poor households will be unable to improve their lives. Rural communities will become increasingly isolated, turned into energy colonies for heavily Democrat urban voting blocs, with wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines horizon to horizon.
Federal agencies will likely just parrot the Bank of England’s callous, imperious attitude: People just “need to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power.” Ruling elites will do fine. Why would they worry about us commoners?
Soaring prices for intermittent electricity will force many factories and businesses to close. Workers will have to take low-pay jobs installing, maintaining, repairing and replacing wind turbines, solar panels and other equipment – and hauling worn out, obsolete and broken parts and dead battery modules to enormous rural landfills.
“Clean, renewable, sustainable” energy technologies require vastly more non-renewable, unsustainable metals, minerals and other raw materials than their fossil fuel counterparts. The overseas mining, processing and manufacturing operations run on fossil fuels and emit vast quantities of carbon dioxide and toxic air and water pollutants, generally under minimal or no laws governing pollution … or slave and child labor, workplace safety, health, or other environmental justice and human rights issues.
The supply chains and even finished product chains increasingly run through China, which is also taking over electric vehicle markets. Especially under a Biden Administration that opposes almost any mining or processing in the USA, China will only increase its dominance of cobalt, graphite, lithium, nickel and other critical material supplies, all but necessitating tepid responses to Chinese (and Russian) military and territorial ambitions. The injustices inflicted on Asian and African communities are serious and obvious.
Yet even doubling or tripling today’s global mining levels would not meet the soaring materials demands for the millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules, millions of heating systems and transformers, and hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission lines that an American Net-Zero economy would require. Soaring demand for insufficient supplies will send prices skyward.
A global energy transformation would likely be catastrophic for affordable energy, economies, jobs, living standards, shortened human life spans, human rights, wildlife and environmental quality.
Abundant, reliable, affordable, mostly fossil fuel energy has liberated people from back-breaking toil. The energy scarcity and de-development promoted and imposed by Biden and other Western governments is rolling living standards, health and personal freedoms backward, in the name of “climate justice.” The adverse effects will be worst for women, the poor and people of color, especially beyond US borders.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini wrote in The Doctrine of Fascism: “The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its actions felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social and educational institutions, and all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation.” [emphasis added]
That description sounds all too appropriate for the situation America and the world increasingly confront today. The gravest threat to our living standards, freedoms and true justice is not from climate change. It is from dictatorial edicts imposed in the name of controlling Earth’s perpetually fickle climate.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.
Your taxes at work: ‘eco-anxiety’ counseling Climate doomsayers and cancel culture work to justify counseling for bureaucrats’ climate grief
US Fish and Wildlife Service employees are struggling to cope with feelings of trauma and loss over the world’s changing climates and imperiled environments. Their work repeatedly confronts them with ecological changes, but even a sense of “anticipated loss” perhaps decades from now requires compassionate help. Or so the FWS and American Psychological Association tell us.
The FWS is thus offering paid leave to employees who attend “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” training. When the House Natural Resources Committee called the sessions a colossal waste of money, the agency downplayed their cost and scope. But naturally the “woke” programs don’t end there.
FWS Director Martha Williams is also pushing diversity-equity-inclusion-LBGTQ programs as the agency’s “number one priority” (or perhaps number two, after climate change). Employees can take as much paid time off as needed for DEI and “gay pride” programs and eco-anguish counseling.
There’s no word about programs to help employees deal with widespread habitat and wildlife destruction that will result from millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, due to “net zero” policies implemented in the name of averting the “climate crisis.” Apparently no programs offer paid leave to participate in “conservative pride” campaigns or study Earth’s historic ice ages, warm periods, little ice ages and decades-long droughts.
That’s hardly surprising. The FWS and Interior Department were getting eco-centric and anti-fossil-fuel when I worked there 35 years ago. Like American and Western society in general, their culture has simply gotten more noticeably and intolerantly devoted to extreme environmentalist agendas since then.
Movies, television and news stories, constant instruction in what to think, rather than how to think, an absence of religion and ethics in many schools and homes, and incessant themes of inequality, victimhood and global doom foster widespread tension, anxiety and depression. They leave too many children, teens and adults unable to cope with life and setbacks, less respectful of authority and human life, inured to violence, and aggressively intolerant of opinions that differ from their own ideologies and agendas.
Even before they were forced to endure Covid-induced lockdowns, nearly 20% of Americans were taking antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, some linked to precipitating acts of violence; a third of high school students experienced prolonged anxiety, depression and hopelessness; and almost one in five teenagers had contemplated suicide.
Social isolation, minimal physical and outdoor activity, video games and reading self-selected online media have amplified depression and “chronic incapacitating mental illness” in America and many Western countries. Also hardly surprising, the problems are increasingly blamed on climate change.
“Climate grief is real,” self-proclaimed experts insist, and it’s spreading rapidly among young people. “The future is frightening,” 77% of 10,000 young people ages 16-25 from the USA and other countries told “climate anxiety” and “climate depression” investigators. Many children have climate nightmares.
“The climate mental health crisis” already affects people who have “lost everything in worsening climate infernos,” claims a NASA scientist and climate activist who’s certain we face “the end of life on Earth as we know it.” He’s not alone in being convinced that every extreme weather event and ecological calamity today is due to or made worse by fossil fuel and agricultural emissions.
“I don’t want to be alive anymore,” wailed a four-year-old who’s clearly been indoctrinated already. “The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when all the animals are dead.”
Parents fantasize about killing their children, over fears of a “climate-ravaged future.” Parents, teens and even children increasingly consider suicide.
At least one psychologist has based his entire practice on addressing climate psychoses. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of “climate-aware therapists,” and a “peer support network” offers grief therapy modeled on twelve-step drug addiction programs.
There’s only one real solution to this epidemic, other “experts” insist: Governments must “take action now” to “end the climate crisis,” to eliminate “the death knell of climate chaos” that threatens us. Otherwise the epidemic of anxiety, depression, pills, climate grief and suicide will steadily worsen.
This is nonsense, insanity. We don’t have a climate crisis. We have a climate fear-mongering crisis.
We don’t need to “fix” exaggerated and over-hyped climate problems. We need to end the junk science, the indoctrination dominating news stories and classroom discussions about energy and climate change, the censorship that prevents alternative, reality-based facts and voices from being heard, the massive government funding of one side of this crucial debate.
Claims of “unprecedented” temperatures and extreme weather, floods and droughts have no basis in real-world evidence. The “climate crisis” exists in greenhouse-gas-focused computer models, headlines and hype, not in reality. There is no unprecedented upward trend in the frequency of violent US tornados, or US landfalling hurricanes, for example – though the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes hitting the United States between Wilma (October 2005) and Harvey (August 2017) is an all-time record.
Unfortunately, viewpoints, evidence and experts challenging climate crisis claims are too often banished from school curricula, news and social media, and government policy discussions.
President Biden’s “national climate advisor” worked closely with Big Tech and news organizations, to suppress facts about climate change, fossil fuels, and the acreage, raw materials and mining required for wind, solar and battery power. Meta (Facebook), YouTube, pre-Musk Twitter and other companies routinely help to deplatform, demonetize and censor anyone contesting crisis-promoting claims.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “summaries for policy makers” often misrepresent scientific findings and advance frightening but unsupported scenarios about Earth’s future climate. The IPCC also ignores studies that demonstrate how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide improves plant growth and wildlife habitats, how climate has changed repeatedly throughout Earth’s history, and that eliminating fossil fuels would result in extensive ecological damage from wind, solar, battery and transmission line mining and installations.
China, India and other countries are rapidly expanding their oil, gas and coal use, to improve their economies and lift billions out of poverty. China dominates raw material and “green tech” supply chains, making the West increasingly reliant on China for energy, economy and national defense needs – via Chinese mines, processing plants and factories that operate under minimal standards for pollution control, habitat destruction, and slave and child labor. As a result:
* Nothing the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia do will have any effect on global fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions.
* Western foreign and domestic policy options will be restricted by reliance on adversarial nations for pseudo-renewable energy materials and technologies.
* Prices for energy, goods and services will skyrocket, because every megawatt of wind and solar must be duplicated with backup batteries or generators.
* Politicians and bureaucrats – egged on by loud, often violent mobs – will increasingly dictate our energy consumption, living standards, home sizes, vacations, and what we can eat, drink, drive and buy.
These are the real existential threats to democracy, society, humanity and planet. Parents, voters, legislators and judges concerned about our future must take action now to stop this insanity.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.
Legalize Climate Grifting
Bill Gates and climatist collaborators are taking taxpayers and consumers on trillion-dollar rides
Grifters have long fascinated us. Operating outside accepted moral standards, they excel at persuading their “marks” to hand valuables over willingly. If they ever represented a “distinctly American ethos,” they’ve been supplanted by con artists seeking bank accounts for funds abandoned by Nigerian princes.
Their artful dodging is epitomized by Frank Abagnale daring the FBI to “catch me if you can,” Anna Delvey inventing Anna Sorokin, Redford and Newman masterminding their famous Sting, and dirty, rotten scoundrels like Steve Martin, Michael Caine and Glenn Headly.
However, they were all pikers compared to the billion-dollar stratagems being carried off by Climate Armageddon grifters like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Elon Musk and Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry.
Their long cons are not only unprecedented in size and complexity. They represent the greatest wealth transfer in history, from poor and middle class families to the wealthiest on Earth. Most important, the plundering has been legalized by laws, regulations, treaties and executive orders, often implemented at the behest of the schemers and their lobbyists.
(You have to wonder how Mark Twain would update his suggestion that “there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”)
They and their politician, activist, scientist, corporate and media allies profit mightily, but legally, if not unethically, from foundation grants, government payouts and subsidies, and taxpayer and consumer payments based on claims that Earth faces manmade climate cataclysms. That most of us are willingly giving money to mandated “renewable energy” schemes and other corrupt practices is questionable.
Microsoft co-founder Gates’ estimated 2022 post-divorce net worth of some $130 billion enables him to donate hundreds of millions to social, health, environmental and corporate media causes. That usually shields him from tough questions.
But BBC media editor Amol Rajan recently asked Mr. Gates to answer charges that he’s “a hypocrite,” for claiming to be “a climate change campaigner” while traveling the world on his luxurious private jets – often to confabs where global elites discuss how we commoners can enjoy simpler, fossil-fuel-free lives: what size our homes can be, how and how much we can heat them, what foods we can eat and how we can cook them, what cars we can drive, whether we can fly anywhere on vacation, what our kids will learn in school, and more.
Caught flatfooted, Gates defended his use of fuel-guzzling, carbon-spewing jetliners by claiming he purchases “carbon credits” to offset his profligate energy consumption. He also said he visits Africa and Asia to learn about farming and malaria, and spends billions on “climate innovations.”
Indeed, Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need” calls for replacing beef with synthetic meat. Cattle emit methane, a greenhouse gas (00.00019% of Earth’s atmosphere) – so people should eat fake meat processed from vegetable oil, veggies and insects.
You may say, That’s disgusting. But Mr. Gates will profit mightily if his “recommendation” is adopted. He’s a major investor in farmland and the imitation meat company Impossible Foods, as is Mr. Gore.
How cool! Wealthy elites can save the world and get richer at the same time!
Beyond Meat’s stock may be down more than 75% from its one-time high, but investors will likely bring in lots more cash via new “climate-saving” diktats, while consumers are left holding bags of rotting bug and lab-grown burgers.
Carbon offsets? In the real world they’re part of the problem, not the solution. They don’t help Main Street; they too help rich Climate Armageddon Club members become wealthier.
Gates Foundation grants could prevent extensive African misery, brain damage and death from malaria, by spotting disease outbreaks and eradicating Anopheles mosquito infestations – today. But it’s spending millions trying to engineer plasmodium-resistant mosquitoes, which may pay off a decade from now.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. continues pocketing billions selling and trading carbon credits. In fact, between 2015 and 2020, the company received $1.3 billion from selling credits to other companies – more than twice what it earned from automotive sales. Times sure have changed since manufacturing tycoons got rich selling products, instead of hawking climate indulgences.
Musk also loves flying in private jets. Last summer, he even took a 9-minute, 55-mile flight from San Francisco to San Jose, instead of driving a Tesla. Wags might say that goes well with the way he and others have made a science of lobbying government agencies to subsidize fire-prone electric cars.
It’s all to protect the environment, of course – which is why Gore, Gates, Musk and Kerry think they’re entitled to travel by private jet and limousine. We’re also supposed to ignore how their cars and lifestyles are based on metals extracted and processed with African child labor and lakes of toxic chemicals.
Since Al Gore left the vice president’s office, he’s hauled in some $330 million railing about “rain bombs” and “boiling oceans,” and shilling for government and corporate “investments” in “green energy” that’s also reliant on supply chains running through Africa and China.
Never forget this fundamental rule: Wind and sunshine are clean, renewable and sustainable. However, harnessing these unreliable, weather-dependent energy sources to power modern economies requires millions of tons of metals and minerals extracted from billions of tons of ores, mostly using dirty, polluting processes in countries that are conveniently out of sight and mind.
In short, nothing about “renewable energy” is clean, renewable, sustainable, fair or equitable.
Moreover, the “climate crisis” is based on computer models that predict hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, sea level rise and other disasters vastly greater than the world is actually experiencing. The models also ignore five great ice ages and interglacial periods, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, the Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other inconvenient climate truths.
Topping it off, China, Russia and India are burning cheap coal to industrialize, lift people out of poverty, and leave climate-obsessed Western nations in the economic and military dust. Even if the West went totally Net Zero, it wouldn’t reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases even one part per million.
The climate change movement’s deceptions and contradictions seem to have no bounds – and know no apparent limits to how much loot they can rake in by lobbying federal, state and local governments, banks and financial institutions; waging media warfare; and engaging in political science with similarly minded legislators and regulators who control climate and energy laws, mandates, grants and subsidies.
What about ESG, financial disclosure, SVB, Credit Suisse, fiduciary responsibility, and accountability?
How can the general public be so oblivious to all of this?
FTX founder and alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried revealed the secret. He avoided media and regulator scrutiny by donating to influential media outlets, the way Bill Gates does. That garners favorable press and social media – which also ignore, cancel and deplatform critics and skeptics.
Fortunately, gutsy interrogators like Rajan are discovering and publicizing what most of the bought-and-paid-for “journalist classes” still won’t. This helps more people see behind the curtain and find the self-interest, self-dealing and pseudo-science that create the scary climate crisis monsters.
Climate Armageddon Club games are costing us trillions of dollars, in the name of saving people and planet. Hopefully, more real journalists, troves of Twitter emails (this time kudos to Mr. Musk!) and congressional investigations will save taxpayers and families from additional costly, destructive policies.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.
Childish beliefs drive lethal energy and agricultural agendas
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COP-27 Financiers and Merchants of Death
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