Paul Driessen

Null and void? If President Biden didn’t comprehend what he was doing, are his laws, orders and regs valid?

Null and void?

If President Biden didn’t comprehend what he was doing, are his laws, orders and regs valid?

Paul Driessen

Laws in every state govern wills and the transfer of estates and property upon a testator’s death. For example, Virginia statutes provide that “any individual may make a will,” except testators who are unemancipated minors or “of unsound mind.”

Unsound mind generally means not having mastery of one’s mental faculties, which could include being enfeebled enough that the testator is easily subject to improper influence by others, especially someone who would benefit from provisions of the will.

Virginia law considers someone to be of unsound mind if his or her cognitive capacity is totally impaired, meaning the person is incapable of acting rationally or understanding conversations, instructions or decisions. In other jurisdictions, impairment may not have to be “total.” Wills executed by such persons are rendered invalid, null and void.

How might these guidelines apply in other circumstances – decisions by President Biden, for instance?

Joe Biden’s declining mental and physical capabilities were apparent to many even before his election and inauguration. His Delaware basement campaign, to avoid awkward encounters with reporters and citizens, raised many questions. During his presidency, family, White House staff, legacy media, Democrats in Congress and others worked hard to hide, obfuscate, defend and excuse his infirmities, even as they became harder to deny.

Millions wondered just when President Biden became cognitively incapable of leading the United States and Free World. His inability became so obvious during the June 2024 Biden-Trump debate that Democrat Party leaders pushed the 46th president out of the race. But what about before that?

An article published shortly before President Trump’s 2025 inauguration revealed that House Speaker Mike Johnson knew Mr. Biden was no longer “in charge” of the White House, presidency or country long before his cognitive incapacities were finally acknowledged by those whose jobs, prestige or political agendas depended on him being “the best Biden ever.”

During a January 2024 Oval Office meeting with President Biden, the Speaker particularly wanted to discuss a Biden Executive Order that blocked liquefied natural gas exports to Europe. Russia’s war with Ukraine, the likelihood of renewed European dependence on Russian gas if US LNG exports were terminated, and the extent that would enrich Putin’s war machine made this a serious national security issue. Johnson wanted to know WHY Biden had signed the EO just weeks earlier.

“I didn’t do that,” Biden insisted. But in fact, he had.

Johnson suggested that Biden’s staff print the EO, so that the two of them could read it together. Biden finally, but vaguely, acknowledged signing the order. But as PJ Media columnist Matt Margolis noted, it soon “became evident that the President had no grasp” of actually having signed the EO, or of the implications of having done so.

“I thought, we’re in serious trouble. Who is running the country?” Margolis quoted Johnson. “I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know,” either, Johnson added.

“This exchange underscores a chilling reality,” Margolis wrote. We had a president who not only was “struggling to remember critical decisions” but was also “unable to engage fully in high-stakes discussions with national security implications.” Biden was clearly “not fully in charge.”

When did that incapacity actually set in? And what does that imply for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of executive actions, regulatory sign-offs and presidential signatures enacting legislation into law?

Are they still valid? Or have some (or many) been rendered null and void, because President Biden was no longer in control of his mental faculties? Or because he was enfeebled enough that he was subject to improper influence by staffers who were pursuing agendas even more radical than the president would have agreed to, had he actually been “in charge,” including staffers who might benefit from certain presidential decisions?

Executive Orders can be reversed by EOs signed by a successor president. President Trump did that with a flurry of signatures during his first week in office. Formal rulemakings must go through a more lengthy  and thorough process but can still be undone or rewritten by another administration.

That will certainly be the case with the Obama EPA’s “Endangerment Finding,” declaring that plant-fertilizing, planetary-life-giving carbon dioxide “endangers human health and welfare.”

\However, the Biden Administration promulgated 3,248 final rules and regulations – a record 107,262 Federal Register pages. They reflect President Biden’s determination to exert federal control over nearly every aspect of climate change, “equity and social justice,” economic and environmental issues, and our daily lives – including “efficiency” rules for cars, stoves, dishwashers, furnaces and water heaters.

Many of these rulemakings will undoubtedly be examined and reversed under the Congressional Review Act. Others will fall outside its purview and require more than Trump Executive Orders.

And what about Biden’s pardons, many of them murderers and hardened criminals; others convicted offenders like his son; still others people who haven’t yet been charged or convicted of crimes but were given preemptive pardons, in case prosecutors later decide no one should be above the law?

Still more complicated will be legislation, such as the multi-trillion-dollar, pork-laden, Green-New-Deal-subsidizing Inflation Reduction Act, the $1-trillion infrastructure law, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and many others signed by Mr. Biden.

If they merit revision or recission, must Congress and President Trump go through an entire legislative process – and overcome almost certain Democrat “resistance” – to change or cancel them?

Or do some of these Biden Era laws (and regulations and pardons) fall within the parameters of a wills and estates “unsound mind” analog? If so, at what point was President Biden too cognitively impaired to know what he was agreeing to or signing? Who makes that determination, and on what basis?

It’s definitely a case of first impression, and the outcomes are far from easy, ensured or predictable. But it’s also another way for President Trump and Republicans to reexamine extreme Biden Era decisions.

I went to law school, was licensed in two states, practiced mostly legislative and regulatory law, even wrote a couple of Supreme Court briefs. But mostly I’ve been a policy wonk – pondering, developing, promoting, opposing, and implementing or rejecting public policies.

The Biden cognitive issue reminds me of humorist Will Rogers’ answer to the threat of World War I German U-boats that were savaging Allied shipping. Rogers proposed that the US Navy “heat the Atlantic Ocean to the boiling point. Then, when the ocean gets too hot for them German subs to stay underwater, they’ll have to come to the surface” and we can “pick ‘em off one by one.”

Of course, he averred, some admirals were likely to ask how they were supposed to boil the ocean. Rogers had an answer. “I leave that to the technicians. Myself, I’m a policy man.”

Like Will Rogers, I’m just presenting policy ideas. It’s up to President Trump, Congress, courts and neuropsychologists to figure out how to implement them.

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.

Contact me: pkdriessen@gmail.com

Mine, baby, mine! Western and Alaskan mineral exploration is key to American defense, security and resurgence



President Trump is determined to make America not just energy self-sufficient, but energy dominant. The USA already produces more oil and gas than any other nation, and he intends to unleash its full potential – for energy and for petrochemical feedstocks for 6,000+ pharmaceutical, plastic, paint, fabric, cosmetic and other products. As he puts it, “Drill, baby, drill!”

Abundant, reliable, affordable energy is the lifeblood of modern industrial societies. But they also need hundreds of metals and minerals, because nothing can be manufactured or grown, and no wells can be drilled, without them. That’s why the President has also launched similar initiatives for those treasure troves in Alaska and the Lower 48.

That call to action is “Mine, baby, mine!” and before that “Explore, baby, explore!”

The Stone Age didn’t end because our ancestors ran out of stones, nor the Bronze Age because they exhausted copper supplies. They ended because societies needed weapons and goods that were better, stronger, more durable – and innovators discovered iron substitutes, iron deposits and techniques for converting ores into finished products.

Indeed, every technological transformation throughout history required finding and mining previously unknown and unneeded metal and mineral deposits that suddenly became essential for progress.

Trump-47’s Executive Orders for drilling and mining – and ending offshore wind, Green New Deal and electric vehicle mandates, subsidies and programs – will dramatically reduce the need for millions of tons of copper, steel, cobalt, lithium, rare earths and other materials. However, they won’t end that need.

But now America can simply build more coal, gas and nuclear power plants – instead of 10,000 wind turbines and 10,000,000 solar panels, backed up by fossil-fuel generators … or huge battery warehouses like the one that recently became yet another conflagration in California.

However, today’s rapidly evolving server, artificial intelligence, aerospace, military and other technologies still mean we must find and produce materials that almost no one ever mined or even heard of until recently: rare earth elements, cobalt, lithium and scores of other critical strategic minerals.

China controls 60% of global rare earths production and processes 90% of it – including ores mined in the USA and other countries. It also controls cobalt and lithium production and processing, and almost all the processed graphite used in lithium-ion batteries for cell phones, EVs and grid-scale backup batteries.

That means the United States is dependent on this adversarial nation for numerous technologies; even Navy SEAL equipment requires 20+ minerals that are at least 50% imported, many from China.

This untenable situation was underscored last December, when China severely restricted exports of antimony, gallium and germanium, especially to the United States, because they are essential for both civilian and military technologies. The Middle Kingdom could block many more such exports, using exports as a weapon of diplomacy, extortion or war.

The situation makes no geologic sense either. The plate tectonic and geologic history of Alaska and the western states in particular have blessed America with countless, often enormous deposits of metals and minerals across the periodic table of elements. Some are well-known, while others have yet to be discovered, mapped or developed to serve changing, growing and increasingly strategic needs.

Even the 1964 Wilderness Act recognized this. Section 2 permits prospecting to gather information about mineral resources and requires “planned, recurring” mineral surveys, if those activities are conducted in a manner consistent with preserving “the wilderness environment.” There is no “end” date for this work.

Section 3 permitted mining claims and mineral leasing, exploration, drilling, roads, production, mechanized equipment, and other necessary operations and facilities, until midnight December 31, 1983. The only stipulation was that disturbed areas be reclaimed and restored “as near as practicable,” once mineral extraction had ceased.

However, federal bureaucrats ignored this clear language and stalled, stymied or prohibited all requests for permits to conduct such work, including recurring government mineral surveys and assessments.

Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rupert Cutler’s comment to me in 1978 encapsulates their attitude, then and now. “I don’t think Congress should have enacted that provision,” he said. “But Congress did enact it, and you are obligated by your oath of office to follow the law the way it was written, not the way you think it should have been written,” I responded. Dr. Cutler simply walked away.

Successive generations of federal land managers – in consort with preservationists, courts, presidents and legislators – have banned or severely restricted even minimally intrusive exploration in huge wilderness, wilderness study, wildlife refuge, Antiquities Act, and even undesignated forests, deserts and grasslands –  regardless of critical national needs or clear legislative language.

National parks should be off-limits. In most cases, these other lands should not.

By 1994, when I helped prepare perhaps the last detailed analysis, mineral exploration and development had been banned in federal land areas equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. That’s 420 million acres – 19% of the USA; 66% of all federal/public lands.

It’s gotten “progressively” worse, even though processes unleashed by plate tectonics, volcanism and other forces created some of the most highly mineralized deposits in North America, and the world.

State and local legislators, regulators, judges and activists have treated non-federal lands the same way. Even world-class deposits have been deep-sixed, often on questionable grounds.

This cannot continue. These areas must be surveyed and explored by government agencies and private companies. Vital and high-quality deposits must be made available for mining, under sound environmental principles, to meet the requirements of current and future generations.

Failure to do so violates the most fundamental principles of national defense, national security, responsible government and societal need.

Alaska’s Pebble Mine prospect has an estimated 55 million tons of copper ore, 3.3 billion tons of molybdenum, plus other metals needed for wind turbines, solar panels, EVs and other technologies; yet Biden’s EPA rejected permit applications even before mining plans were submitted. Other world-class Alaskan deposits of copper, cobalt, zinc, titanium, gold, silver, zinc and other metals also sit in limbo.

PEBBLE PROSPECT — Photos from around the Pebble Prospect Alaska

taken in March 2008.


Biden officials also reversed mining permits for the world’s largest copper-nickel deposit, in Minnesota, and President Biden himself banned all mining in 225,000 acres of the state’s Iron Range.

The fate of the Kings Mountain lithium deposit (possibly 5,000,000 tons of Li) in North Carolina is likewise uncertain, as is that of many other excellent prospects, even though modern US laws and technologies would ensure far better environmental practices than elsewhere worldwide.

Some concerns are certainly valid, others exaggerated, still others reflective of a determination to block mining anywhere in the USA, or even de-develop and de-industrialize America and the West.

However, environmental and other considerations must always be balanced against needs for critical metals, minerals and energy to sustain modern societies and living standards. Making America Great Again – and responding to today’s national security threats and needs – requires changing federal and state perspectives, policies and laws to recognize this. It’s a simple matter of reality and common sense.

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. 

Contact me: pkdriessen@gmail.com

Scapegoating climate to hide callous government malfeasance Abject failures from Biden, Newsom, LAFD and others can no longer be ignored 

Wildfires near Los Angeles have left Pacific Palisades looking like Dresden after the WWII fire-bombings. Over 12,000 homes, schools and businesses have been incinerated, dozens of people have died, at least 70,000 have been left homeless, and fires still rage.

AccuWeather estimates that just two of the fires will destroy $135-150 billion in property!

It’s a doubly horrific tragedy, because most of the death and devastation could have been prevented.

California has 33,000,000 acres of federal, state and private forestland – equivalent to Wisconsin. As the state’s population expanded, forests and wildlife increasingly merged with human habitats. And yet federal and state land managers – compelled by ideology, activists, legislators and judges – have steadfastly refused to permit timber cutting, tree thinning or brush removal, or take other actions that would reduce the likelihood of conflagrations.

So many trees are so jammed together now that they’re starved for space, water, nutrients and sunlight. Many are diseased. They are skinny matchsticks, primed to erupt in flames. Some 36,000,000 trees died just in 2022, across just 8% of these forestlands. But even dead and diseased trees are rarely removed.

Rainy fall and winter months stimulate tree, brush and grass growth. Parched summers dry everything out. Extended dry periods leave all this fuel ready to ignite for more months.

Lightning, sparks from cars or power lines, campfires and arsonists set areas aflame. Dry Santa Ana winds (40-70 mph, with gusts of 120-150 mph) whip fires into infernos. Depleted, defunded fire departments often arrive long after they could extinguish fires in their infancy.

The conflagrations generate still more powerful winds that carry embers, branches, even small trees thousands of feet – often into communities that are ill-prepared to cope.

This barely begins the litany of California government failures that help cause repeated fire calamities. However, state and local politicians adroitly avoid responsibility.

Their most common excuse is manmade climate change. They even have a new fear-inducing term: hydroclimate whiplash! Fossil-fuel-driven climate change supposedly brought two exceptionally wet winters, spurring unprecedented plant growth – and then caused unprecedented arid conditions and previously unheard-of Santa Ana winds that made these infernos unpredictable but inevitable.

Calling the massive, repeated government failures “incompetence” is too generous. Deliberate, callous, destructive malfeasance is more apt. Criminal may be appropriate.

Governor Gavin Newsom wants a special session to discuss spending $25-50 million to “Trump-proof” state policies. He wants to use a new $10-billion “climate bond” to reduce farm and ranch greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, improve “equitable access to nature,” build more parks in “disadvantaged communities,” upgrade ports to handle deepwater offshore wind projects, and more.

California is still pouring billions into EV subsidies, its “clean” energy transition, and the $100-billion “bullet train to nowhere.” It’s spending more billions supporting “sanctuary” status for illegal immigrants, maintaining gender and DEI programs, and ministering to America’s largest number of homeless people – which will now include 70,000+ who’ve lost everything to the 2025 wildfires.

One wonders whether they’ll treat these now-homeless taxpayers as well as they have illegal populations.

Legislated restrictions on how companies may conduct fire-risk assessments and what rates they can charge for homeowners insurance in high-fire-risk areas have caused insurers to leave the state or stop issuing new policies. Hundreds of thousands of families are now uninsured, underinsured or dependent on the state’s FAIR Plan, which has only $385 million in reserves.

Meanwhile, California devoted only $2.6 billion to “forest and wildfire resilience” across all state-managed forestlands, including Topanga State Park, where the fires started, right next to what once was Pacific Palisades – versus $14.7 billion for EVs and “clean renewable energy.”

With memories of the horrific 2018 Paradise (Camp) fire still causing nightmares, Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.6 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department budget, fired 100 firefighters who didn’t get Covid vaccines, and was partying at an embassy reception in Ghana as the fires erupted

LA Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley (salary: $654,000) has spent millions on DEI programs and hiring more women, gays and minorities. Deputy/Diversity Chief Kristine Larson (salary: $307,000) says victims want to see emergency responders that “look like” them, and if she isn’t strong enough to carry your husband out of a fire, he “got himself in the wrong place.”

They then failed to keep extra firefighters and firetrucks on duty as winds picked up just before the first forest fires were spotted – apparently to avoid paying overtime. That meant the LAFD couldn’t get there before fires roared out of control.

Exhausted firefighters trying to save multi-million-dollar homes in Palisades ran out of water. A major reason was that LA Water and Power Department CEO Janisse Quiñones (salary: $750,000) had the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir drained to repair cracks in its base. A full reservoir would have replenished huge storage tanks that feed and pressurize local fire hydrants.

Quiñones has said her “number one” priority is equity and social justice. Does that explain why the reservoir was drained in February 2024; no contractor was hired until November 2024; and even then no workers, equipment or materials were in place for 24/7 repairs?

Just as callously incompetent, why was there no plan (or no action taken) to utilize fireboats, tugboats, barges and other vessels from Long Beach Harbor and the San Diego Navy Base? Many are equipped with water storage, pumps, hoses and nozzles. They could spray seawater directly on coastal homes or run hoses ashore to connect to fire hydrant systems.

Some salt would remain in soils and kill some plants. However, the choice should be easy. Lose some prized vegetation to lingering salts – or have prized vegetation, homes, priceless heirlooms and artworks, and everything else incinerated by raging infernos. Homeowners never got to make that choice.

The incineration of these forests and communities released far more greenhouse gases than all the state’s now-shuttered coal- and gas-fired power plants would have over many decades.

Further complicating matters, the fires sent ash and pollutants into skies and left toxic chemicals behind – from plastics, paints, batteries, solvents and other materials in homes, buildings and vehicles. They’ve contaminated waters and soils, which could result in long cleanup and rebuilding delays.

Governor Newsom says he wants to expedite rebuilding. But LA health officials say debris removal and reconstruction are prohibited until licensed officials have carefully examined sites for toxics – dangerous or barely detectable levels? New building codes for fire resistance? Or homeowner demands for them?

Citizens need to discuss all this at town hall meetings, before the next conflagration strikes – inevitably, if proper forest and water management and personnel hiring are not implemented immediately. Put simply, the woke idiots responsible for this rampant destruction and loss of life must be replaced with people who understand their Number One Job is protecting citizens from crime, fires and other natural disasters.

Mr. Newsom also wants an investigation into the loss of fire hydrant water pressure. Californians have good reason to suspect he’s merely trying to find excuses and scapegoats, so that he and his favorite legislators can save their political hides.

Golden Staters need to revamp their political, bureaucratic, policy and woke systems. They need to rely less on government – and more on themselves, the way the Getty Villa and several neighbors did in Malibu, thereby saving homes, treasures and lives. Otherwise, these needless tragedies will be repeated.

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.

Contact me: pkdriessen@gmail.com

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

 

Government agencies, billionaires and pressure groups put world’s poor, hungry families last

Elite billionaire organizations and foundations, government agencies and activist pressure groups are funding and coordinating a global war on modern agriculture, nutrition, and Earth’s poorest, hungriest people. Instead of helping more families get nutritious food, better healthcare and higher living standards, they’re doing the opposite, and harming biodiversity in the process.

The World Economic Forum wants to reimagine, reinvent and transform the global food system, to eliminate greenhouse gases from food production. Central to its plan is alternatives to animal protein: meal worm potato chips, bug burgers instead of beef patties, and meat loaves and sausages made from lake flies, for instance. Fixing the WEF’s toxic workplace is apparently a low priority.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report advises that turning “edible insects” into “tasty” food products can create thriving local businesses and even promote “inclusion of women.”

Created to alleviate global poverty, the World Bank has decided the “manmade climate crisis” is a far greater threat to impoverished families than contaminated water, malaria and other killer diseases, hunger, or even two billion people still burning wood and dung because they don’t have reliable, affordable electricity. It has unilaterally decreed that 45% of its funds – an extra $9 billion in FY2024 – will be shifted to helping the poor “better withstand the devastation of climate change.”

(The Bank has also decided that even more of its taxpayer funding – $300-million instead of “only” $70-million – should be gifted to the Palestinian Authority, which pays terrorists to murder Israelis.)

Of course, most of the better and lesser-known environmental pressure groups are also deeply involved in food, agriculture and energy policy campaigns: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, EarthJustice, Friends of the Earth, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way), Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and countless others.

Like the rest of the “agro-ecology” movement, they deride and malign modern agriculture as a scourge inflicted by greedy mega-corporations. They oppose fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides and biotechnology. They extol “food sovereignty” and the “right to choose.” But their policies reflect top-down tyranny and bullying, with little room for poor farmers to embrace modern agricultural technologies and practices.

In addition to WEF, FAO and World Bank support, these hard-green organizations have the ideological, organizational and financial backing of the US Agency for International Development, EU agencies, and a host of progressive and far-left American, European and other foundations.

The US-based AgroEcology Fund was created by the Christensen FundNew Fields Foundation and Swift Foundation. Its funding and programs are overseen by the New Venture Fund, which helps “charitable” and “educational” organizations direct funds to programs that align with what many characterize as neo-colonialist and eco-imperialist goals.

Other major players include the Schmidt Family Foundation, Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Ben and Jerry Foundation.

This is serious money – hundreds of millions of dollars per year in food, agriculture and climate change funding. It completely overshadows the piddling $9,000 that Kenyan farmer Jusper Machogu raised via donations to his “climate realism” website – much of it given to neighbors, so they could drill water wells, buy tanks of propane or get connected to the local grid.

And yet Mr. Machogu incurred the wrath of the BBC’s “Climate Disinformation Officer.” (Yes, the Beeb actually has such a position.) The CDO attacked him for “tweeting false and misleading claims” about climate change and saying Africa should develop its oil, gas and coal reserves – instead of relying entirely on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar. Even worse, the farmer had the temerity to accept donations from non-Africans, including “individuals with links to the fossil fuel industry and groups known for promoting climate change denial.”

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is another major donor to agro-ecology outfits. It’s part of the legacy of guilt-ridden oil money from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. corporate trust – an inheritance that includes nearly 1,000 climate-related institutions, foundations and activist organizations.

As Canada’s Frontier Centre put it, “Every time you hear a ‘climate change’ scare story, [the person writing it] was PAID. He is a Rockefeller stooge. He may not know it, but his profession has been entirely corrupted.” Far worse, I would add, the writer and his (or her) organization are complicit in perpetuating global poverty, energy deprivation, hunger, disease and death – because the fearmongering drives destructive energy and food production policies.

Alone or collectively, these policy corrupters must not be underestimated in this war to preserve and expand modern energy, agriculture and global nutrition. Thankfully, there is increasing pushback. Many families simply do not want to be trapped in poverty, disease, mud-and-thatch huts, an absence of educational opportunities for their children, and a future of backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk labor in little subsistence-farming fields.

That’s especially so when films, news stories and cell phones present American and European farming equipment and practices – and the crop yields, wealth, health, homes, leisure time and opportunities that accompany those modern agricultural systems.

Poor farmers also see China, India, Indonesia and other countries rapidly industrializing and modernizing by using oil, gas and coal. They see rumblings of change in many countries that are intent on charting their own courses, with fossil fuels as the energy foundation for that growth. They’re rejecting the eco-colonialism and eco-imperialism that wealthy Westerners seek to impose on them.

They are getting the message that humanity has faced climate fluctuations and extreme weather events throughout history … and survived them, dealt with them, adapted to them, prospered. That there is no real-world evidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions – especially the trivial amounts generated by agriculture – have replaced the powerful natural forces that caused past climate changes.

They increasingly realize that organic and subsistence farming requires vastly more land – which would otherwise be wildlife habitats – than modern mechanized farming, to get the same yields. Plowing those habitats would decimate plant and animal diversity.

That locking up fossil fuels, and relying instead on biofuels and plant-based feed stocks for thousands of essential products, would require even more acreage. So would mining for massive amounts of metals and minerals to manufacture wind, solar and battery technologies.

Most importantly, they understand that humanity today has far greater wealth, far more knowledge, far better technologies and resources than any past generations.

To suggest that we cannot adapt to climate changes, or survive and recover from extreme weather events, is simply absurd. To suggest that farmers should revert to … or remain stuck in … ancient farming practices and technologies – to save the world from computer-generated manmade climate disasters – is eco-imperialism at its most lethal.

South Africa’s electricity minister recently said his country will not be “turned into a guinea pig for a worldwide Green New Deal.” Hopefully, all developing countries will soon apply that same attitude to anarchists who would use the world’s poor as guinea pigs in global agricultural and nutrition experiments.

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.

Contact me: pkdriessen@gmail.com

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 tornadoshurricanes 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

 

Dictatorial control, from Covid to climate

Democrats accuse Trump of proclivities that they blatantly engage in, especially in Washington

I choked on my coffee when I read the headline: “Democrats raise specter of Trump dictatorship to boost Biden.” What a textbook example of “projection,” I laughed, referring to the psychology term for deflecting attention away from one’s own blatant behavior by claiming someone else is doing it.

Partisan media and politicos parroted the accusation, and the Biden campaign doubled down.

In the interest of fairness and accuracy, it’s appropriate then to revisit ways the Biden Administration, Democrats and their allies have battled wannabe dictators and defended freedom, democracy and viewpoint diversity in recent years. (Or not.) For example:

* Incessant Antifa rage, riots, rampaging and legal warfare against “Russia-colluding” President Trump, from his election and inauguration throughout and after his term in office.

* School, park and restaurant lockdowns, “social distancing” and mask “advisories,” mandates for “safe and effective” inoculations with vaccines approved with minimal study under “emergency use authorizations,” and endless misrepresentation and censorship by Biden officials, Democrat governors and “journalists” – in the name of preventing Covid.

* Opening our southern border to untold millions of “undocumented noncitizens” – mostly Latin Americans but also Chinese agents, drug smugglers, sex traffickers, terrorists and disease carriers.

* Billions in “student debt forgiveness,” forcing taxpayers to pay off huge loans to graduates who struggle to get six-figure jobs despite prestigious degrees in gender studies or community organizing.

* Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Environment Social Governance (ESG) programs, from K-12, college to law school, and into government and corporate arenas – to ensure that every component of society reflects racial, ethnic and gender proportionality, but never viewpoint or political diversity.

These and many other authoritarian actions impacted American society, freedoms, health and prosperity in countless negative ways. Far worse, many progressives and leftists hope they will pave the way for obeisance to even more dictatorial mandates promulgated in the name of saving our planet from supposed cataclysms inflicted by fossil-fuel-driven climate change.

Few will quibble that President Biden directed federal employees to take public transportation, ride bikes or rent electric vehicles for work travel, and hold virtual meetings instead of in-person gatherings.

These rules certainly won’t apply to private-jet globe-trotters like Climate Czar John Kerry, and EV’s mostly transfer emissions from tailpipes to distant countries where toxic pollution and child labor accompany the mining and processing of raw materials to make EV batteries. But at least some federal workers will now suffer the inconveniences they’re imposing on us commoners.

However, Team Biden’s endless torrent of dictatorial executive orders, regulatory mandates and twisted legal reinterpretations for electricity generation, vehicles, appliances, agriculture, housing and other matters are already impacting our industries, livelihoods, living standards and basic rights and freedoms.

These diktats are designed to force us to convert everything we now operate with coal, gasoline, diesel or natural gas to electric models. The United States will soon need 3-4 times more electricity than today – and still more to power the AI revolution.

But the same bureaucrats are shutting down coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric generators – ensuring that electricity will be in short supply, generated primarily by weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels, backed up by massive grid-scale battery systems, and thus unavailable or unaffordable during the coldest and hottest days, when electric heat or air conditioning becomes a matter of life or death.

In fact, just the batteries to back up nationwide electricity would cost up to $290 trillion (13 times US 2021 GDP)! Add that to wind, solar and transmission costs, and the juice to run your all-electric home, business, hospital, school or transportation will likely cost 30-40 cents per kilowatt-hour, instead of the 12-15 cents the average American is paying now.

It’s a prescription for repeated blackouts, economic disaster – and unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats micromanaging every aspect of our lives: what size home we can have; how warm or cool we can keep it; what cars we can drive and how far, or whether we too will be forced to walk, bike or take a bus; how many trips we can take in jetliners, in our lifetimewhat foods we can eat (hint: not beef); maybe even how many new clothing items we will be “allowed” to purchase each year!

Earlier this month, every House Republican voted to block President Biden’s electric vehicle mandates. They were joined by just five Democrats. That means 197 Democrats say Team Biden should be able to dictate what kind of car or truck you can drive. And Donald Trump has dictatorial proclivities?

The US and global ecological impacts will be equally harmful and widespread. Here are just a few.

Wind and solar installations, transmission lines and enormous battery complexes would sprawl across millions of acres of now scenic, wildlife habitat and agricultural land. A single solar facility proposed in Virginia would involve 3,000 acres of panels on 21,000 acres (over half the land area of Washington, DC). It’s just one of dozens of Virginia solar plans – on top of onshore and offshore wind turbine projects.

The installations “will power millions of homes,” supporters insist. Perhaps – but only when the wind is blowing and sun is shining at optimal intensities … maybe 15-30% of the year in northern latitudes, considering winter snow and sunlight, clouds, nighttime, zero wind and other factors.

Many local residents and other citizens don’t want these massive installations in their backyards; the habitat and scenic vista destruction, bird and bat killings, health problems, and electricity costs and disruptions that go with them; or being turned into energy colonies for progressive urban centers. They’ve already blocked more than 500 wind and solar projects, on environmental and other grounds.

That’s why Michigan, California, New York and Illinois have already enacted laws that give state bureaucrats authority over land use – the ability to exercise eminent domain and other powers over local governments that want to slow or stop the onrush of enormous, heavily subsidized industrial wind, solar, transmission line and other “green” projects. More are likely to follow – depriving rural communities of their rights, property values and autonomy – to serve corporate interests that bankroll Democrat pols.

The federal “deep state” is likely to seek similar legislative authority – or simply assert authority – to implement President Biden’s national net-zero “renewable” energy transformation agenda.

UN and Biden “30×30” plans to “conserve” (make off limits to development) 30% of US and global lands and waters by 2030 will massively increase all these impacts and usurpations of power. Any areas not made off limits by 30×30, wilderness, park, refuge and other actions will be developed and desecrated to the hilt by wind, solar, transmission line, mining, biofuel and other “green energy” projects.

Meanwhile, international climate alarmists and bureaucrats are telling African and other impoverished nations how much they will be “permitted” to develop and improve their health and living standards – using only “sustainable, renewable” wind and solar power. It’s dictatorial colonialism at its worst.

And amid all that, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and other rapidly developing countries are burning more coal, oil and gas – and emitting more greenhouse gases – than most developed nations combined. That means US and EU economic suicide on the climate altar won’t make an iota of difference.

What we need is a president who will roll back or cancel these dictatorial decrees. Stop fast-tracking wind and solar projects. End abusive environmental justice, DEI and ESG programs. Return America to energy independence and affordable energy. Build the wall and control immigration. Stop weaponizing the Department of Justice. Above all, follow the law and Constitution.

How revolutionary, “dictatorial” … and refreshing … that would be!

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor to the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate, environmental and human rights issues.

 

Contact me: pkdriessen@gmail.com

If it’s not open warfare, it’s collusive lawfare Environmentalist lawsuits reach new heights of absurdity and threats to American energy  

If it’s not open warfare, it’s collusive lawfare

Environmentalist lawsuits reach new heights of absurdity and threats to American energy

Paul Driessen

The Biden Administration continues waging war on fossil fuels, aided by environmentalists, politicians, and corporations chasing subsidies, competitive advantages, power and profits. They want to “fundamentally transform” America’s energy and economic systems, prevent “climate cataclysms,” and ensure “environmental justice” for some (by inflicting injustices on others).

Their weapons include withdrawing huge areas from economic activities; banning leasing, drilling and pipelines; and imposing regulatory standards so costly or technologically impossible that coal-fired power plants, internal-combustion vehicles, and gas stoves, furnaces and water heaters must be abandoned.

This open warfare is augmented and amplified by more clandestine “lawfare.”

Environmentalists have long employed lawsuits to impose by court decree what they cannot achieve via ballot boxes or legislation. The litigation often redefines sloppily or deliberately vague statutory language, to impose more onerous standards that can block or bankrupt oil, gas and mining projects – and then ignored for land- and resource-intensive wind and solar projects.

An especially pernicious strategy is “sue-and-settle” lawsuits, wherein environmentalists collude with friendly federal agencies to create a “disagreement” over a policy or regulation, and sue in friendly courts. The parties then agree to a settlement that’s been negotiated behind closed doors, leaving the public and impacted third parties with no opportunity to address the case’s legal or evidentiary merits.

Now ultra-progressive states and cities are charging onto this battlefield with more destructive lawsuits.

Delaware and Rhode Island have joined Baltimore, Honolulu, New York City, San Francisco, and other jurisdictions in filing climate change lawsuits against oil and gas producers, refiners and sellers in state courts – where they believe they will face more sympathetic judges and juries than in federal courtrooms.

The arguments for transferring the cases to federal jurisdiction are compelling – and were presented persuasively by John YooC. Boyden Gray and other experts who reviewed the differing Courts of Appeals decisions, and the policy and legal questions surrounding them:

Fossil fuel “greenhouse gas” emissions alleged to cause climate change cross state lines and must therefore be governed by federal agencies. Sea level rise, flooding and other damages allegedly caused by those emissions must likewise be attributed to multiple sources in multiple states, and thus must also be the purview of federal laws and agencies.

No state, much less any city, should be permitted to set or manipulate national energy, climate or environmental policies and hold other jurisdictions to their agendas. Different legal opinions among various federal courts require Supreme Court intervention.

BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Suncor Energy and other oil company defendants made these and additional arguments in asking the US Supreme Court to reaffirm that cases addressing climate change claims are inherently governed by federal law and should be transferred from state to federal courts.

However, the Supremes inexplicably opted not to review the cases at this time. That means these and other cities and states will continue suing energy companies – perhaps securing verdicts and multi-billion-dollar damage awards.

The litigation will create a legal, constitutional, scientific and public policy nightmare for the nation, businesses, consumers, courts and states, especially after verdicts have been rendered and bills tendered to scapegoat companies for payment. An already confusing and impenetrable judicial and permitting jungle will become even more perilous.

However, these complex pollution issues are made vastly more complicated by the basic question of whether carbon dioxide (which humans and animals exhale and plants require to grow, “green” our planet and help ensure record crop yields) should ever be labeled a “dangerous pollutant.” Even more so by the impossibility of separating “greenhouse gas” emissions from a few US petroleum companies from:

* all other American oil and gas, coal, agricultural, industrial, transportation and other emissions;

* human activities worldwide, including thousands of coal-fired power plants in China, India and dozens of other countries that have no obligation or intention of reducing their fossil fuel use anytime soon, thus increasing carbon dioxide levels (deliberately and misleadingly called “carbon pollution”) in Earth’s global atmosphere for decades to come;

* greenhouse gas emissions (and toxic air pollution) from mining, minerals processing and manufacturing to make the wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, grid-scale backup batteries, transformers and transmission lines required for a “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy future; and

* climate changes caused by natural forces throughout Earth past history, now and in the future.

As litigant cities and states pursue billions in penalties and damages from these companies – supposedly to cover the costs of building levees and stormwater impoundments, raising roads and bridges, and otherwise protecting communities from “increasing sea level rise” and “more frequent and intense storms” – they will also have to address other inconvenient truths.

For example, seas have risen naturally 400 feet since the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. They are now rising at an easily manageable 7-12 inches per century – and much of the perceived sea level rise is actually due to land subsidence in coastal cities worldwide, not rising seas.

The litigants and courts will also encounter the bitter reality that the “fundamental transformation” they so earnestly seek means covering the planet with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines … and the quarries and mines to build them. America already lacks sufficient EV charging stations and step-up and step-down transformers for new homes and a functional grid. Millions more will be needed in short order to reach Net Zero – which means thousands of new mines, quarries, processing plants and factories.

Toyota Motor Corp. calculates that “more than 300 new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035.” That’s essentially just for new EVs, and getting them approved and developed would likely take decades. A US energy transformation – to say nothing of a global transformation – would require thousands of mines, and thousands of processing facilities.

The process of converting cobalt, lithium, aluminum, iron, rare earths, manganese, nickel and other ores into high-end metals is fossil-fuel-intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting and dirty. “Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest,” the Wall Street Journal notes. “Refining it … involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of.” Using little children to mine cobalt and processing rare earth elements involve legendary ecological and human rights abuses.

Worse, all this is only the beginning of the planetary desecration. We’re talking millions of onshore and offshore wind turbines, billions of solar panels, hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, billions of half-ton battery modules – and all that goes into making them. We’ll have to replace fertilizers for crops and feed stocks for thousands of products, by planting millions more acres in food and fuel crops, destroying more wildlife habitats. Turbine blades chop millions of birds and bats from the sky every year. Offshore turbines disorient whales and dolphins, causing many to beach themselves and die.

Then we’ll have to bury the broken, worn-out and obsolete panels, turbine blades and other equipment. The world has already installed some 100,000 wind turbines and 2.5 billion solar panels. In whose backyards will the landfills go for all this trash – and the massive lakes for the waste slurries?

There is nothing clean, green, renewable, sustainable or climate-friendly about any of this.

The Supreme Court – and courts, regulators and legislators everywhere – have a lot of work to do.

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.

Contact me: pkdriessen@gmail.com

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 theyre 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.   

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.

ChinaIndia 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.