Tag Archive for: Climate Change

Examining the Future of Fossil Fuel

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Here’s a question for every oil and gas producer in California. It is especially directed to the five “bad guys” — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP — that were recently sued by California’s grandstanding attorney general, Rob Bonta: When are you going to quit playing defense? As Alex Epstein has tirelessly expounded both in his book, Fossil Future, and in his ubiquitous (and suppressed) musings online, energy from oil and gas powers civilization. It is the primary reason a middle class lifestyle is affordable for billions of people.

Not only are oil and gas, and even coal, cheap and nearly inexhaustible sources of affordable fuel, still powering 80 percent of ALL energy used in California (barely better than the world average of 82 percent), but because it is so cheap, it remains affordable even if included in its price are funds to eliminate from emissions any unhealthy pollutants. And there is growing evidence that fossil fuels also have a much smaller environmental footprint than all other sources of energy with the possible exception of nuclear.

Which brings us to the boogeyman of this age, CO2. Are these oil companies willing to aggressively defend themselves even if that might generate bad PR? CO2 is life. After all, without CO2, every plant on earth would die. What if the overall health of our planetary ecosystems, on balance, would be better off with more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less?

With apologies, we are obligated to share this heresy, because it is our conclusion, based on overwhelming evidence (don’t try to find it on Google), that the menace of anthropogenic CO2 is not “settled science.” If you find this horrifying and offensive, consider the possibility that you simply have not been exposed to contrarian data and analysis, except maybe in the context of biased reports discrediting it. So this week, let’s dive deep into the scary, forbidden territory of climate crisis denial.

Mark Twain famously said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” So it is with climate alarm. We are expected to accept without question not only the crisis narrative, but literally anything proposed to supposedly save us from the alleged catastrophe. But as the distinguished climatologist Dr. John Christy explained at a meeting of water executives last October in Orange County, using unfiltered data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, there is no evidence that California is experiencing rapid or dangerous climate change.

Here are four books that are must-reads for anyone willing to engage in activism — or pass legislation — on the issues of climate and energy: False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger, Unsettled by Steven Koonin, and Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. Along with providing useful summaries of the data and arguments in these books, the reviewer acknowledges Epstein’s unique contribution to the discussion over climate and energy, that extreme environmentalism has brought us to the point where “eliminating human impact, not advancing human flourishing, is the primary moral goal driving our knowledge system in the realm of energy.”

If you’re looking for nuance, which is sorely missing from mainstream policy discussions over climate, read Judith Curry’s website. Until a few years ago the Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Curry has a Ph.D in geophysical sciences, which makes her as qualified as anyone to opine on the multidisciplinary field of climate science. Curry has been dubbed a “lukewarmer” based on her acknowledgement – along with Christy and many others – that the planet is experiencing a moderate warming trend, but not an alarming one. Why isn’t Curry testifying before a legislative committee in Sacramento? When California’s state government prepares – to cite just one example of their irrational exuberance – to spend billions to subsidize hundreds of floating offshore wind turbines that are each longer (vertically) than a modern US Navy supercarrier, a dose of sanity is urgently required.

Also offering sanity is the CO2 Coalition. Behind their innocuous mission statement, “we seek to strengthen the understanding of the role of science and the scientific process in addressing complex public policy issues like climate change,” is an organization with a clear message that might be distilled to this: Atmospheric CO2 is too low, not too high, and the warming effect of each molecule of CO2 declines as its concentration increases. Those who are skeptical about these skeptics should review the group’s About page, where 132 coalition members are listed, along with their biographies. These are credentialed scientists willing to stand behind the claims made by the CO2 coalition. Earlier this year, the CO2 Coalition had its LinkedIn account cancelled for “misinformation.” Can that be justified? Read their material and make up your own mind.

While it is healthy to have contrarians among us, that doesn’t justify holding contrarian viewpoints merely for the sake of being contrary. But when a premise becomes so huge and so unquestionable that it becomes the bludgeon to enforce policies that might otherwise be considered insane and punitive, contrarian analysis is our only hope. So it is with the climate “crisis.” The most powerful and destructive perception in the world today is that using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change. This belief, marketed by every major government and corporate institution in the Western world, is the foundational premise underlying a policy agenda of stunning indifference to the aspirations of ordinary people.

The war on fossil fuel is a war on freedom, prosperity, pluralism, independence, national sovereignty, world peace, domestic tranquility, and, most ironically, the environment itself. It is a war of rich against poor, the privileged against the disadvantaged, corporate monopolies against competitive upstarts, Malthusians against optimists, regulators against innovators, and authoritarians against freedom-loving people everywhere.

But this war cannot be won unless the perception is maintained. If fossil fuel is allowed to compete against other energy alternatives for customers as a vital and growing part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, this authoritarian political agenda falls apart.

It is reasonable to question the assertion that eliminating fossil fuels will inevitably result in an impoverished society subject to punitive restrictions on individual behavior. But the numbers are compelling and can be distilled to two indisputable facts: First, as noted, fossil fuel continues to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide. Second, if every person living on planet Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to double. Recognizing these two immutable facts should make it clear that nothing is going to stop the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Nigerians, or Bangladeshis from developing every source of energy they possibly can. Just those seven nations account for half the world’s population. Will they stop developing energy until they at least achieve half the per capita energy consumption that Americans currently enjoy? Not a chance.

Regardless of what we conclude regarding climate science, an all-of-the-above energy strategy is the nonnegotiable destiny of the world. We must adapt, and set an example of clean and ultra-efficient gas and oil technologies that the world is willing to follow.

That is the message that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP should be conveying to California and the world.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Challenging the Premise of Our Destruction

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The most powerful and destructive perception in the world today is that using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change. This belief, marketed by every major government and corporate institution in the Western world, is the foundational premise underlying a policy agenda of stunning indifference to the aspirations of ordinary people.

The war on fossil fuel is a war on freedom, prosperity, pluralism, independence, national sovereignty, world peace, domestic tranquility, and, most ironically, the environment itself. It is a war of rich against poor, the privileged against the disadvantaged, corporate monopolies against competitive upstarts, Malthusians against optimists, regulators against innovators, and authoritarians against freedom-loving people everywhere.

But this war cannot be won unless the perception is maintained. If fossil fuel is allowed to compete against other energy alternatives for customers as a vital and growing part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, this authoritarian political agenda falls apart.

It is reasonable to question the assertion that eliminating fossil fuels will inevitably result in an impoverished society subject to punitive restrictions on individual behavior. But the numbers are compelling and can be distilled to two indisputable facts: First, fossil fuel continues to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide. Second, if every person living on planet Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to double.

Several inescapable conclusions derive from these two facts, if one assumes that energy is the driver of prosperity. Just in case that is not obvious, imagine Americans living with half as much energy as they use today. Where would the cuts occur? Would they drive their cars half as much? Heat their homes half as much? Operate manufacturing, farming, and mining equipment half as much? They would need to do all those things and more. The economy would collapse.

These consequences don’t escape the intelligentsia who promote “net zero” policies. These consequences explain the policies they advocate. The recent promotion of “15-minute cities” that will inform rezoning and redevelopment to put all essential services within a 15-minute walk of every residence. The rise of “congestion pricing” to charge automobiles special tolls if they drive into an expanding footprint of urban neighborhoods. “Smart growth.” “Infill.” “Urban Service Boundaries.” Bike lanes. “Smart buildings,” “smart meters,” and “smart cities.”

These innovations, all in progress, only begin to describe what is coming. By restricting new development and systematically reducing the use of fossil fuels, the global middle class will shrink instead of grow. The wealthiest elites will buy their way out of the smart slums. Everyone else will be locked down. This is how energy poverty will play out in the modern era. It cannot be emphasized enough: If energy production is restricted, this will happen. It’s algebra. It is objective fact.

Hardly less speculative is the reaction outside the Western world. What are our elites thinking? Do they intend to start World War III? Perhaps they do. Because nothing short of war is going to stop the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Nigerians, or Bangladeshis from developing every source of energy they possibly can. Just those seven nations account for half the world’s population. That’s 4 billion people. Will they stop developing energy until they at least achieve half the per capita energy consumption that Americans currently enjoy? Not a chance. Will they get there by relying exclusively on wind and solar? Dream on.

Sadly, the seductive pitch America’s climate crisis lobby lobs at the elites running the aspiring nations of the world may find the strike zone. It goes like this: Let us help you keep your people in poverty and misery because we will make sure you stay rich while our military helps you stamp out insurrections. And as we prevent your nations from achieving food and energy security, we will drown you in debt to pay for imported food aid and “renewables” projects. But as one of us, you will not suffer with your people. You will have a Swiss bank account and a mansion in Malibu, where you will be feted by stars who honor you for helping prevent a climate catastrophe.

Fossil Fuel Will Not Cause a Climate Catastrophe

If you only believe half of the preceding arguments, you must realize that Americans have been backed into a corner. If anyone calls for abundant energy—or abundant anything, since energy, and fossil fuel in particular, is the prerequisite for virtually all goods and services—they are shouted down as “climate deniers.” And the way to upset the entire edifice is not to merely argue that fossil fuel is essential to the survival of civilization. Because the counterargument is that eliminating fossil fuel is essential to the survival of the planet.

That is an unwinnable argument. It is not possible to reason with an opponent of fossil fuel if you concede their fundamental premise: that burning fossil fuel will cause catastrophic climate change. You either become a “denier,” or you submit to energy poverty.

This is the tough decision facing Americans. And it’s accurate to also say it is a decision facing Republicans since literally every prominent, mainstream, housebroken, accommodating establishment Republican will not challenge the assertion that we’re experiencing a “climate crisis,” even though most of them know better. But this should be a bipartisan issue. For Republicans, this is an opportunity to show some backbone by rejecting the most destructive and fraudulent premise of our time. In so doing, they would unify their party, attract independent voters, and realign the nation.

Claiming that climate change is not catastrophic and unprecedented, or that fossil fuel is necessary to power civilization, remains today the territory of outliers. Tagged as contrarians at best, more often as eccentrics, lunatics, fanatics, shills, dupes, and morons, the “denier” community remains on the fringes. Joining this community risks losing personal credibility and the ability to work with every self-styled moderate, serious activist that just wants to recognize the political and commercial reality in America and get along.

And then there’s Donald Trump.

Alone among major politicians in America, Trump openly proclaims that anthropogenic carbon dioxide causing a climate catastrophe is a poorly supported theory, not a fact that is supposedly beyond debate. He’s right, but he’s given the climate crisis crowd another label with which to stigmatize deniers with guilt by association. Now they’re MAGA Nazis, part of the terrifying plot to engineer a fascist coup and plunge America into a dark age.

The irony is stupefying. Without fossil fuel, America will enter dark age, and the only way to control a restive population that’s seen its standard of living plummet will be through the establishment of a technology-driven police state. They are the fascists. The so-called climate deniers are fighting for prosperity and freedom.

Matching the irony here in its shocking, stupefying absurdity is the arrogance and certainty of the climate alarmists. From the brainwashed ignoramuses pouring out of public education year after year, to pseudointellectuals marinated for decades in NPR newspeak, to brilliant scientists who spend their entire careerist careers bouncing around in a brilliant echo chamber without ever considering opposing scientific viewpoints, listening to these minions recite the approved narrative is reminiscent of a cult. The climate cult. The useful, smothering, sanctimonious, intolerant, indignant, self-righteous, energized, pacified, out-of-control but controlled and manipulated, Kool-Aid guzzling climate cult, driving humanity off the cliff.

If you want to save civilization, be a denier. Say it loud and without reservations, and say it every chance you get. Demand that politicians publicly refute climate alarmism. It isn’t necessary to claim that the powers behind the climate cult want to enslave the world. We don’t know what motivates them. Some just want to get rich on renewables. Some want to use climate change to advance American global hegemony. But all of them rely on a fundamental moral justification: By eliminating fossil fuel, we are saving the planet from certain destruction. Focusing on the possible ulterior motives of climate alarmist leaders without first challenging their core moral argument is a fool’s errand.

The scientific body of evidence against climate alarmism is robust, but you won’t find much if you search Google. You have to dig it up piece by piece. One good denier database can be found here. Organizations and individuals posting useful climate contrarian material and links on Twitter include Climate Dispatch, Patrick Moore, Climate Realist, Steve Milloy, and Pierre Gosselin, and many, many more. Like all movements, the climate contrarian movement has its share of hacks and hyperbole. So be careful and diligent, but be resolute. Examine the data. Check and recheck sources. Make up your own mind. And make yourself heard.

There are plenty of environmental challenges. Being an environmentalist is a good thing. But there has to be balance, and there has to be debate. Claiming that anthropogenic CO2 will not cause catastrophic climate change is a credible, necessary point of view, backed up by scientific evidence. If more people make that claim, the climate cult can be broken, and civilization can be rescued from oblivion.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How Climate Alarm Killed Real Environmentalism

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The environmentalist movement is a political weapon. It unites the most powerful special interests in the world behind an agenda that will further centralize power and wealth, eliminate any hope of financial independence for the vast majority of people, and transition previously free and independent nations into managed, sham democracies that have lost their sovereign agency.

The overwhelming theme of environmentalism today, designed to obscure its true agenda, is the alleged “climate crisis.”

Americans may or may not eventually muster the impertinence to successfully challenge the political power grab masquerading as environmentalism today. But either way, its centerpiece, the “climate crisis,” is responsible for devastating harm both to what was once a legitimate environmentalist movement, as well as to the environment itself.

Policies ostensibly designed to manage the planet’s climate are taking attention and resources away from genuine environmental threats. At the same time, a growing percentage of people are recognizing the fraudulent essence of the “climate crisis” agenda and, as a result, are becoming indifferent to legitimate environmental concerns.

This is a tragedy. While crooked billionaires bleat incessantly about how “the planet has a fever” and grasp additional billions for their cronies in the businesses of renewable energy and “carbon credits,” we fail to address truly important environmental problems. Compared to “overheating oceans” and “burning continents,” however, these problems lack sex appeal.

Here are just a few of the environmental disasters in progress that nobody talks about either because they’re making too much money pushing the climate change scam, or because they’re thoroughly disgusted with the climate change scam and disregard all environmentalist concerns.

1) Loss of Insect Population: By some estimates, and for reasons we don’t yet adequately understand, the total insect mass on Earth is dropping by an estimated 2.5 percent per year, faster than any other endangered species. This is an existential threat. Insects pollinate many vital food crops. They play a critical role in consuming decomposing animals and plants. They are an essential link in the food chain, the glue that connects microorganisms to smaller predators. Wind turbine blades are a mass killer of insects. Whatever else is killing insects, it won’t stop because we banned fossil fuels.

2) Aquatic Dead Zones: While criticism has been appropriately directed at unjustifiable attempts to shut down farms that use fertilizers derived from nitrogen and phosphorus, the problems posed by these compounds cannot be ignored. But the consequences of overloading waterways with nutrient runoff, either from flood irrigation, dairy and cattle manure, or insufficiently treated urban wastewater, have relatively little to do with “climate change.” Instead, the problem is that nutrient-rich waterways nourish overgrowth of algae, which produce deadly toxins that kill fish en masse and create massive aquatic dead zones. A rational approach to this challenge would be to stop connecting it to climate change, which is a stretch at best, and instead develop precision irrigation and fertilizing methods, as well as adaptive reuse of effluent from livestock and humans.

3) Overfishing: The overfishing of the oceans is another environmental catastrophe in the making that has nothing to do with climate change. Banning incandescent light bulbs will do nothing to stop illegal fishing trawlers from strip-mining the oceans with drift nets that can be over 30 miles long. Cramming humanity into small apartments will not prevent factory ships from clearcutting the floor of the continental shelf with weighted nets that scoop up every living organism. Anyone who thinks humanity hasn’t by now acquired the capacity to extract every scrap of living protein out of the oceans isn’t paying attention. Rational solutions are to enforce fishing quotas, and encourage industrial aquaculture onshore and in coastal waters.

4) Energy Security in Developing Nations: One of the many ironic results of the climate alarmist war on fossil fuel is the inability of equatorial African nations to achieve energy security, which is a prerequisite to prosperity, which, in turn, causes population stabilization. Instead of having energy security, these burgeoning, desperately poor populations are stripping the forests of wood for fuel and wildlife for food. The primary threat to wilderness and wildlife on Earth today is not “climate change.” It is that climate alarm has inspired the international community to do everything in its power to deny prosperity to the poverty-stricken populations living in proximity to the world’s great tropical forests.

5) The Biofuel Disaster: Which brings us to biofuel, an example not only of an environmental catastrophe that is ignored in favor of climate alarm, but an environmental catastrophe explicitly caused by climate alarm. Over 500,000 square miles are now given over to biofuel monocultures, most of them saturated in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, most of them replacing what previously were tropical rainforests. In exchange for this devastation, biofuel produces less than 2 percent of global transportation fuel.

6) Massive Oceanic Garbage Patches: In the Central Pacific Ocean, a body of water larger in area than every continent on Earth put together, there is a concentration of floating garbage spread over nearly 8 million square miles. It is the largest of several massive concentrations of plastic waste, contaminating literally every living oceanic organism from plankton to whales.

The plastic-spewing superpower these days is the Philippines. With less than 2 percent of the world’s population, this island nation produces nearly one-third of the estimated 1 million tons of plastic dumped into the ocean every year. The solution is to develop more sanitary landfills, implement new and more effective methods to reprocess plastic waste, and where possible, invent substitutes to plastic. But “climate change” has nothing to do with this problem.

7) Population Crash: The population crash currently afflicting every developed nation on earth may be good news for those environmentalists who have succumbed to misanthropic nihilism, but for the rest of us, it’s possibly the biggest catastrophe of all.

The crash is usually attributed to cultural and economic causes, but environmental factors may play a direct and indirect role. Humans today ingest increasing levels of chemical endocrine disruptors unknown a century ago, present in everything from the air, water, and food, to fabrics and cosmetics, harming health and fertility. They are not only a direct physical cause of declining birth rates through lowered fertility, they may also cause behavioral changes that indirectly lower birth rates. Endocrine disruptors should be removed from the environment and avoided in the meantime. But carbon dioxide, the climate alarmist boogeyman, has nothing to do with endocrine disruption.

These are just some of the environmental problems confronting humanity and the planet that have nothing to do with CO2 emissions and, in many cases, are worsened by misguided steps being taken to curb CO2 emissions. By now, the fraudulent reality of “renewables” that aren’t renewable is well documented, even if that fact receives scant attention in the mainstream press. But this additional fact—that the climate alarmist focus on achieving “net zero” is discrediting environmentalism at large, and taking attention away from other serious environmental threats—is perhaps the saddest chapter in the story of a movement that has lost its way.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

John Kerry, Climate Czar in Waiting

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Never mind ballots arriving by the hundreds of thousands at 4 a.m. after “counting was stopped for the night,” but only in swing states. Never mind voting machines that, apparently, any moderately talented nerd can hack and cook. Never mind “tranches” of votes, by the thousands and all for Biden, erroneously stacking the tallies because of “upload malfunctions.” Never mind same-day registration, ballot harvesting, no voter ID requirements, or missing signatures and postmarks. Never mind that Trump earned nearly 6 million votes in California, a 35 percent improvement over his 2016 performance, actually increasing his share of total votes from 31.6 to 34.3 percent, yet lost in fracking Pennsylvania.

Never mind. Prepare for a Biden presidency, and a Biden cabinet.

In other words, just rely on the “nonpartisan” experts and ignore your lying eyes. Assume Joe Biden really is speaking from the “Office of the President-Elect” and assume what he proclaims today will become policy on January 21. Consider the gang that will surround this amiable but senescent old crook. In particular, consider Biden’s incoming cabinet, undoubtedly destined to include a mandatory assortment of race-baiting blowhards, gender obsessed fanatics, gun grabbers, abortion extremists, government union overseers, ambulance chasers, corporate cronies, Chinese operatives, bankers, billionaires, and grasping bureaucrats.

And while you’re at it, consider Biden’s choice for “climate czar”—John Forbes Kerry.

The first thing to understand about Kerry is that he is an inside member of the establishment uniparty that was horrified by Trump’s impudent decision to actually take seriously his job as president of the United States. Kerry, who married into the aristocratic Heinz family, has a personal net worth estimated in excess of $250 million. Unlike Trump, Kerry is both a partner and a puppet in the American oligarchy, which means he will do whatever is in his personal best interests, as well as whatever he is told to do. Rarely if ever will those agenda items diverge.

Whether it involves prosecuting yet another endless overseas war, or, more to the point, morphing the great American COVID lockdown into phase two—the great American climate lockdown—Kerry will put the oligarchy first, and America last. Count on it.

The beating that ordinary Americans have taken over the past year understandably has diverted their attention from the coming “climate emergency.” Americans have watched helplessly as well-funded, violent mobs pulled down symbols of their heritage, while looting and vandalizing property, sometimes burning buildings to the ground, bellowing intense hatred for every cherished American institution and tradition. Americans watched as the media either ignored this orchestrated nationwide mayhem, or downplayed it, or even pretended it was caused by Trump and his supporters.

Americans have endured a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands, prompted an endless “lockdown,” and driven hundreds of thousands into bankruptcy and madness. There’s no end in sight.

So Americans can be forgiven for not putting the impending “climate emergency” front of mind. But if and when Biden takes charge, and turns John Kerry loose, that will change.

The True Motivation for the Climate Emergency

Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty who bothers to read dissenting expert viewpoints on the issue of anthropogenic climate change knows that debate still rages as to the severity, the causes, and the appropriate responses. Excellent recent books on the topic, contrarian but scrupulously researched, include Apocalypse Never, by Michael Shellenberger, and False Alarm, by Bjorn Lomborg.

Shellenberger, a lifelong progressive who was once honored as a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” argues, using the IPCC’s own data, that the projected severity of climate change is greatly overstated, and explains how much environmental damage occurs when people in the developing world are denied access to conventional energy including hydroelectric and nuclear power.

Lomborg, a Danish economist with impeccable credentials, argues not only that climate change is a phenomenon that humanity can adapt to with relative ease, but that the policies being advocated in the name of fighting climate change yield absurd cost/benefit ratios, and explains how directing money and resources to other compelling global objectives would be far more productive.

There are plenty of other reputable climate skeptics, or climate realists, or, perhaps most transgressive of all, optimists, who still patiently argue for practical spending on cost-effective infrastructure instead of a mad, panic-stricken rush into political and economic tyranny. Listen to these voices of reason while you still can. Because the real reason for climate alarm is all about money and power. People like John Kerry have plenty of both, but they want it all, and the “climate emergency” is how they’re going to get it.

Artificial Scarcity Empowers the Oligarchy

There are obvious upsides to “climate mitigation” for several powerful special interest groups. It’s a gold mine for the public sector, which expands its ranks in order to intrude into every segment of our lives and help us “manage” our consumption. Everything we do becomes the business of government enforcers, from when and how much water or electricity we consume to where and how much we travel. Even the size of our windows or the types of outdoor landscaping we tend will come under their scrutiny.

But when it comes to coping with the “climate emergency,” industry is a willing partner to government.

Think about it. Everything has to be reinvented and replaced, because everything is suddenly obsolete, wasteful, exploitative, and immoral.

The homes we live in, our workplaces, our home appliances, our vehicles, all of it has to be rebuilt.

“Planned obsolescence,” something that leftists used to decry back in the days before they merged with corporate America, is now considered a virtuous feature.

Joining manufacturers to supply critical components is the tech sector, ready to ensure that everything we use, from our car to our coffeemaker, is wired to the internet. And to help us out, the software that is suddenly necessary to run a toaster will have to be updated periodically, requiring us to no longer own our appliances, but to lease them. Permanent revenue streams. Micromanaged consumption. The planet is saved.

But there’s a deeper motivation at work behind the public narrative of the climate alarmists. It’s connected to the financialization of the American economy. The debt binge that began in the 1980s under Reagan and which has enjoyed bipartisan continuity ever since, depends on federal deficits and trade deficits to maintain America’s economic growth. The primary beneficiaries of America’s debt binge have been government workers, very large corporations, banks and billionaires, while real wages have gone down for ordinary workers.

But to keep the debt party going, America needs more collateral to borrow against. Enter artificial scarcity. It starts with real estate, America’s biggest asset.

The Synergy of a Financialized Economy and Climate Alarm

In the name of environmental protection, and now even more urgently in the name of fighting “climate change,” and on a fraudulently thin but nonetheless unchallenged scientific basis, America’s cities are being cordoned off.

As America’s population grows by millions each year, the preponderance of new real estate development occurs within the footprint of existing cities, causing the value of housing and commercial properties to rise because demand is increasing but supply is forcibly limited. As assessments go up, additional borrowing collateral is created.

The equation is simple: When politically contrived artificial scarcity is imposed on a market, an asset bubble is formed. As long as the scarcity can be maintained, the bubble will expand. The beneficiaries of a real estate bubble are public entities, which collect higher property taxes based on higher assessments, thanks to the inflated values.

Public sector pension funds also benefit, because their real estate portfolios benefit from the asset appreciation. Needless to say, private speculators and investors also benefit from a rising housing market, but its impact on the average homeowner is a slow train wreck.

When consumers borrow, home equity is their collateral. It might seem logical that rising home values would benefit consumers. But people trying to buy homes cannot afford them, or they manage to buy them anyway, enduring punishing mortgage payments. And an often unavoidable debt trap is imposed on those people who bought their homes when they were still affordable.

If they are typical middle-class Americans, their property values have risen, as has the cost-of-living (including property taxes), while their inflation-adjusted wages have fallen. So they borrow against their rising home equity in order to pay their bills, and America’s financialized economy keeps spinning. Caught in an unavoidable spiral of debt accumulation, by the millions, Americans sink further into financial servitude.

This is the consequence of artificial scarcity, designed to sustain a financialized economy that is addicted to debt accumulation. Climate change is just the moral rationalization that enables a few more innings of this unsustainable game. And the imposition of artificial scarcity is not confined to real estate.

A similar profiteering opportunism underscores the renewables and conservation mania. Not only do high tech companies capitalize on fantastic opportunities to sell gadgets to create a panopticon of energy surveillance a la the “internet of things,” where every home appliance is wired and monitored by the utilities. At the same time the highly regulated public utilities are offered spectacular new avenues for higher profits, because while their profit percentages are fixed, and the units of energy they can generate are fixed, when they sell expensive renewable energy to the consumer instead of inexpensive natural gas or nuclear power, they can still double their revenues and profits.

The Green Enabling of Scarcity Profiteers

In the name of saving the earth, a collection of special interests share the same goal: make water, energy, transportation, and housing as scarce and expensive as possible. Increase regulations and unleash an avalanche of lawsuits so only the biggest, most resilient corporations survive and emerging competitors are crushed.

In California, and increasingly in other states, a punitively high cost of living is the result of conscious political choices, and the primary force behind these choices is not desire to protect the environment, it is greed. The people who profit by artificial, contrived scarcity don’t want anything to change. They are government employee unions, utility companies, trial lawyers, Silicon Valley “green” entrepreneurs, and billionaires who already own the artificially limited supplies of land and housing. Does that sound like the potentially incoming Biden cabinet?

And if a “climate emergency” is declared, expect this so-called “great reset” to take place without any constitutional checks to slow its implementation or its scope.

Here’s a recent quote from John Kerry:

“Climate change is a threat multiplier for pandemic diseases, and zoonotic diseases—70 percent of all human infections—are impacted by climate change and its effect on animal migration and habitats.”

Got that? Climate change will not just be a “climate emergency,” it will be a “health emergency.” Good luck falling back on the Bill of Rights when you’re up against two declared federal emergencies. Climate change mitigation is a scheme to take from the have nots, and transfer it to the haves. To accomplish this, epic, world-class creativity has been harnessed. Perhaps among all the methods by which this redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the super rich will occur, nothing tops the proposed sale of carbon credits.

If “carbon emissions auctions” trading ever takes hold nationally, it will launch the biggest skim operation in the history of the world. In this extraordinarily comprehensive system of economic control, every molecule of carbon embodied in every joule of energy will have to be reported, using a preposterously complex, eminently corruptible if not completely fraudulent new form of financial accounting. Every “carbon unit” will have to be tracked, so that rights to produce and consume them can be traded on an exchange, with Wall Street brokerages taking a cut, time after time. All of this will be implemented and operated at stupefying expense. Imagine the tens of trillions of dollars in annual transactions that will pass through this gauntlet, and you can better understand the slavering lust with which the financial community anticipates a Biden presidency.

John Kerry represents not the lunatic fringe of Biden’s budding entourage of administration insiders, but rather its larcenous core. Kerry, because of the “climate emergency” measures we may expect him to implement, is the most dangerous man in America.

There is an alternative to this madness. The government could partner with unions and private civil engineering firms in a grand bargain to construct cost-effective conventional energy infrastructure, along with upgraded water and transportation infrastructure. Instead of rationing, produce more. Instead of enforcing artificial scarcity, create abundance. Build enabling infrastructure and let the private sector compete again to profitably build homes that ordinary workers can afford. This is a virtuous, public-minded scheme that Joe Biden is old enough to remember. It worked back in the 1950s and 1960s and created a capital endowment we’re still living on. That is the “build back better” investment that could be a genuine gift to the American people.

Don’t hold your breath. You will be fighting, like Trump was, against the bureaucrats, the bankers, and the billionaires.

The privileged elites are doing just fine, feeding off the dying remains of the American middle class. They aren’t about to let a populist movement, including any practical public policies that such a movement might support, spoil their meal. And as they stigmatize their critics as “climate deniers,” they are the true deniers, ignoring a debt tsunami that is a far more imminent threat than rising oceans.

They weren’t just coming for Trump. They are coming for you.

It is terribly ironic that the militant wing of the Democratic Party, soon to militantly back whatever John Kerry proclaims as our “climate czar,” bills itself as “anti-fascist.” Because the “climate emergency,” ultimately, is itself fascist both in a political and an economic context. As political fascism, it relies on crisis, fear, scapegoating, and simple but transformative “solutions.” As economic fascism, it concentrates power in the hands of the state, with industrialists and bankers as senior partners. Remember that, if the day arrives when you have to listen to John Kerry, “climate czar,” spew forth self-righteous exhortations in the name of supposedly protecting the planet.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Mandating “Equity” and Mitigating “Climate Change” – The Twin Paths to Socialism

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Supporters of President Trump’s bid for reelection have accurately depicted his agenda as one of America’s last chances to stop, or at least slow down, the nation’s drift towards socialism. The Biden candidacy has been accurately depicted as the attempt by globalist corporations to reassert their complete control of American politics, wherein they will impose socialist redistribution schemes that devastate the middle class and working class, making them dependent on government and rendering their citizenship irrelevant. This, too, is mostly accurate, although slowly-boil-the-frog protocols shall be followed to obscure the transition.

When roughly half the electorate recently chose Biden to be America’s next president, however, they weren’t consciously endorsing corporate socialism. Biden voters, to the extent they believe in socialism, haven’t yet figured out that the socialist movement in the United States is largely controlled by corporations. What they believed, thanks to relentless propaganda and censorship of dissenting viewpoints, was that President Trump is a racist and a climate change denier. As such, President Trump was perceived as a menace, an object of hatred and fear, and anyone would be a better choice for president.

President Trump is not a racist, and President Trump cares about the environment as much as any reasonable person, but these two issues are much bigger than him. The issues of racial equity and environmental protection are marketed as the existential challenges of our time, and that the only effective answer to these challenges is socialism. To fight socialism, you can’t just convince people that socialism is an inherently flawed system. You have to destroy these two premises; that America is a racist nation, and that climate change poses an imminent threat to the survival of humanity. If you don’t, people will take their chances with socialism because they will see it as the only option.

Guaranteeing Equal Outcomes No Matter What

Anti-racism leads inevitably to socialism as soon as you move from offering equal opportunity to mandating equal outcomes. Despite pervasive propaganda to the contrary, equal opportunity has been institutionalized in America for several decades. But despite this fact, there remain significant disparities in aggregate group achievement by race. Conscientious liberal anti-racists look at these disparities and conclude they are the consequence of America’s historical legacy of racism that up until recently denied nonwhites access to jobs and housing and education. They add to that a belief that “unconscious racial bias” and ongoing “systemic racism” further hinders Black achievement, and explains the underachievement by Hispanics.

The problem with demanding racial “equity” to counter alleged ongoing racism is simple: What if the explanation for the underachievement of certain groups has little or nothing to do with racism? And what if, no matter what is done to counter alleged racism, significant gaps in group achievement persist? The only way to achieve equity, if that happens, is via socialist redistribution of wealth.

The good news, or what ought to be good news, is that America is not a racist nation. America is the least racist nation on earth. Many of the people spreading the racist narrative know this, but they are socialists (or corporate socialists) and they understand that complete racial equity can only be achieved via socialism. The end is socialism, and the means is convincing Americans they are racists and must atone. But it is a lie, for many reasons.

One of the most obvious repudiations of the racist narrative is the achievements of Asians, who outperform whites in almost every category of group achievement including educational attainment, household income, and net worth. And Asians are not the only ethnic group that outperforms whites. Indians and Nigerians also outperform whites. American Jews, who are white but who nonetheless endured past discrimination, also outperform other whites. Why is this?

Here is where a critical choice faces Americans. Do they listen to the divisive nonsense coming from politicians like Kamala Harris, and – at hideous cost – embrace socialist redistribution to level the achievements of every identifiable group in America? Or do they openly defy those who purport to speak for disadvantaged communities, and challenge them to either identify and fix those cultural differences that might also explain their academic and economic underachievement, or accept it.

Here also is where well established facts contradict the narrative of racism as the cause of group underachievement. In particular, there is a high correlation between children raised in two parent households and success later in life. Asians top the list, with 82 percent of households with children having both parents present. Whites are in second place at 73 percent. But only 33 percent of Black households with children have both parents present. The only external force, ironically, that might induce a married couple to divorce, would be if doing so led to enhanced welfare benefits. Racism, overt or unconscious, historical or present day, has nothing to do with members of the black community keeping their marriages intact.

Where there are broken homes, there is academic underachievement, there is juvenile delinquency, there is higher unemployment and lower income earnings potential, there are higher rates of arrests, convictions, and incarceration. It all starts at home.

But socialists don’t believe in traditional families. And they don’t believe in meritocracy, instead stigmatizing it as a “code word” for racism. But it isn’t racism that is responsible for Asians having the highest SAT scores in America, or Blacks having the lowest. More than anything else, it is because Asians have the highest rate of intact families, and Blacks have the lowest. SAT scores, currently under withering assault by socialists and possibly headed for oblivion, are one of the most reliable predictors of success in college and lifetime earnings.

These inconvenient truths elude the race baiting socialists, but they don’t elude Black conservatives who actually care about their communities. From elder statesmen like the venerable Thomas Sowell and the aptly named Larry Elder, to young and passionate patriots like Candace Owens, Kash Lee Kelly, and Malcolm Flex, there are Black leaders and influencers who reject socialism and champion the rights and potential of individuals.

If you work hard and with integrity, you can make it in America. There is no such thing as utopia. We do the best we can. That is the healthy way to look at this nation, and it is the healthy way to look at life. If you want your community to log higher aggregate achievements, stay married. While you’re at it, stand up to the teachers union monopoly and implement education vouchers and school choice.

Saving the Planet by Any Means Necessary

If anti-racist socialism will determine whom we can hire, promote, fire, patronize, live with, study with, work for and associate with, all done in a manner designed to take from the overachievers and give to the underachievers, saving the planet will determine where you live, what you eat, what you wear, what you drive (if anything), where you travel; it will micromanage every detail of your life on earth.

As part of the mandate to reduce the human “carbon footprint” to preindustrial levels within a few decades, the climate alarmists and their corporate backers are prepared to destroy the fossil fuel industry and invest in solar, wind and battery technologies that will become obsolescent right about the time they’re finally deployed at any significant scale. And how feasible is it for human civilization to run on “renewable” energy?

The following pie chart, below, relying on data from the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, shows the percentage that renewables contribute to global energy usage. At 5.5 percent, this includes everything, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and biofuel. Imagine this replacing everything else, bearing in mind that the climate alarmists, inexplicably, do not accept nuclear or hydroelectric as viable energy sources to expand.

To further put the potential of renewables into perspective, consider the next chart, below, which reflects the socialist dream of redistributing energy consumption equally among nations. Note the area of this pie chart; nearly twice that of the previous one. This graphically represents how much more energy would be required if every person on earth, per capita, consumed energy at half the rate of current per capita use in North America; that’s the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This illustrates a stark reality: If everyone on earth used half as much energy as North Americans use today, global energy production will have to double. Accomplishing that is impossible without fossil fuel.

Fossil fuel isn’t the only culprit, of course. Anything that results in increased greenhouse gas requires monitoring and regulation, from bovine flatulence to the size of the windows permitted in your home. Suburban “sprawl,” which is the only way to maintain an affordable equilibrium in housing, must be stopped because it leads to more “vehicle miles traveled.” Lawns, gardens, and long showers cannot be tolerated, because the collection, storage, distribution and treatment of water requires energy, and energy must be rationed in order to minimize use of fossil fuel.

The level of micromanagement headed our way if the climate alarmist lobby isn’t stopped is literally unbelievable, but these people are dead serious. “Smart growth” policies will pack people into increasingly dense urban areas, as rural areas are systematically depopulated. “Smart homes” will monitor and manage everything the inhabitants do, controlling and correcting their use of water and energy. To please gullible libertarian enablers, instead of explicitly rationing resource consumption, acceptable thresholds will be set, with punitive pricing tiers designed to “incentivize” people to restrict their behavior. Want to have a lawn? Better be a billionaire.

There’s so much wrong with these policies its difficult to know where to begin. Telling people they’re bigots if their skin is white, and victims if it is not, and training them all to believe this, is not a recipe for social cohesion. It’s a recipe for resentment and hatred. Moving beyond this divisive rhetoric to actually confiscating wealth and income and limiting opportunities to people if their skin is white, and transferring it to people whose skin is not white, will destroy the character of a population by telling them their work and their abilities are secondary to the color of their skin.

Similarly, putting a stop to fossil fuel development at precisely the moment when the entire global population is finally moving beyond poverty is not a recipe for peace and prosperity. It’s a recipe for misery, rebellion and war. Attempting to carpet the world with wind turbines and solar farms, backed up by millions of tons of batteries, when abundant natural gas and clean coal would deliver reliable energy at a fraction of the price, is epic folly. In a wealthy nation like America, it will cause economic stagnation. In emerging economies around the world, to impose such destructive policies would be a form of neo imperialism that only a delusional climate fanatic could fail to recognize.

There is an easier choice. It is the choice that President Trump offered, and its rejection by the elites is more a statement of their avarice than an indictment of his vision. And as previously noted, that vision, and the policies on offer pursuant to that vision, are much bigger than President Trump. Americans must reject the bigotry of reverse racism and without reservations they must insist on a colorblind meritocracy. Similarly, Americans must embrace the concept of resource abundance, supporting projects and policies that develop all forms of cost-effective conventional energy while at the same time encouraging innovations that will lead to leapfrog technologies that render today’s renewables obsolete.

The drawbacks of socialism ought to be obvious, and increasingly, voters are realizing this fact of history. To counter this dawning enlightenment, America’s socialists, backed by corporations that profit from central planning and mandated markets, have come up with the demons of racism and climate change. To stop socialism, Americans must stand up to the alarmists that claim bigotry and fossil fuel are existential threats. They’re not.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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It’s Not the Temperature, It’s the Tinder

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AUDIO:  Blaming “climate change” is a good way to avoid responsibility for epic mismanagement. Why we need forest thinning, more logging, and controlled burns to save our overgrown and unhealthy forests – 9 minutes on KFI Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the John and Ken Show.

Why Our Forests Are Burning

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AUDIO:  Why climate change should not be an excuse for failing to manage California’s forests – 10 minutes on KNRS Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on the Rod Arquette Show.

China, Climate Change, Unions

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AUDIO – In-depth discussion on the topics of China, climate change as it relates to energy policies and how that’s connected to population growth, with a bit of time left over to explain the difference between public and private sector unions. An always challenging one hour on the Andrew Schatkin Show.

http://schatkinshow.com/2020/05/podcast-with-edward-ring-2/

The Delusional Premises of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

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“Do we see largely that it’s the global south and communities of color that may be bearing the brunt of the initial havoc from climate change? – Without a doubt. – And in terms of that wealth, the people that are producing climate change, the folks that are responsible for the largest amount of emissions, or communities or corporations, they tend to be predominantly white, correct? – Yes, and every study backs that up.”
– Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Congressional Hearings on Climate and Race, October 2019

Welcome to yet another example of the nexus between climate change alarm and a socialist redistribution agenda that relies on fueling racial resentment. That may be old news to those of us paying attention, but thanks to birdbrained stooges like “AOC,” the blatant race baiting rhetoric is being turned up a notch.

And why not? If you’re a socialist, or a globalist, there is only upside to tagging nations of European heritage with guilt for the problems facing their “communities of color,” or the problems in the rest of the non-European world. It would be far too painful to consider the alternative explanation, which is that socialism, in all of its antecedents and derivatives, is the primary cause of the societal afflictions that plague “people of color” both in America and abroad.

Deconstructing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s convoluted logic isn’t intellectually hard, but the implications are hard indeed, at least for anyone who shares her delusional world view. Her arguments rest on three premises that build upon one another, and all of them are easily shattered by hard facts. Those premises are the following: White racism is pervasive and explains income inequality, climate change is an ongoing catastrophe that primarily harms “people of color,” and socialism is the solution.

To get the most obviously flawed premise out of the way first, examine the plight of “communities of color” both locally and globally. The immediate fact that destroys this premise is that there are examples of “communities of color” that are prosperous and thriving. Most of East Asia falls into that category. As for the “global south,” Singapore comes to mind. Sitting just one degree north of the equator, it is a sun drenched, monsoon swept city, situated in the absolute heart of the tropics.

Singapore’s success comes despite it being a multicultural nation overwhelmingly populated by “people of color, coping with a supposedly hideous legacy of colonial oppression; its territory is a steaming jungle with no natural resources. Yet it is one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.

You can look to communities within America and make the same myth busting observations. According to a 2018 study conducted by Pew Research, the richest ethnic group in the United States are Indian Americans, with a median household income just over $100,000 per year. And according to U.S. Census Bureau data, “the median income for households led by someone of Nigerian ancestry, for example, was $68,658 in 2018, compared with $61,937 for U.S. households overall.”

Why? Why do some “communities of color” thrive, outpacing whites in education and income, while others do not? Could it be that those communities that are relatively unsuccessful are not victims of racism? After all, if that were true, why in America are people of Asian, East Indian, and Nigerian descent, along with many other ” communities of color,” evidently exempt from the impact of racism?

Could it be that socialism, or its antecedents – welfare, unionized public education, affirmative action, leftist indoctrination, a victim mentality, and the pure, venal corruption that plagues big Democrat ran cities in America – have combined to all but destroy these “communities of color?” Destroyed their families. Destroyed their work ethic. Destroyed their faith in themselves, their faith in their community, their faith in America itself? There is no “racism” in any of that. Or to put it more precisely: in all these policies promoted by or associated with Democrats, there is none of the white, conservative, Republican sort of racism that seems to concern AOC.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may look at her reflection in the mirror, and believe herself to be a crusader for social justice and a “green new deal,” but in fact she is becoming part of a rich, grasping, inter-generational gang of parasites who build their careers and their bureaucratic empires by spouting racist, quasi-Marxist trash to keep down the people they claim to care about. AOC’s predecessors have not only created the poverty they claim they’re fighting, they need that poverty the way a virus needs a host.

The other flawed premise, fundamental to the socialist goal of global redistribution of wealth, is “climate change,” once known as global warming. The “climate crisis” is the boogeyman that AOC hopes to ride into the White House with president-elect Biden. Heading up his “climate task force,” she has made demagogic fearmongering in the name of the planet a big part of her act. But it’s wearing thin, because unlike the far more convenient threat of imminent death from a global pandemic (however overhyped that may or may not be), anyone with an IQ north of room temperature realizes by now that the climate apocalypse deadlines have come and gone, and come and gone, and come and gone.

As an aside, how sad it has become that the corporate Left, in its odd marriage with hardcore socialists like AOC, have managed to intimidate conservatives into silence on the issue of climate change. Conservatives are so scared of being targeted as “deniers” that they’ll challenge the economics, but not the science. They stammer diffidently about the vast economic costs, the sheer impracticality of shutting down the entire fossil fuel and nuclear energy industries, fearing for their careers if they become too outspoken. They lack the enraged indignation that is appropriate and necessary when challenging these devastating lies. Don’t they understand that if their warnings go unheeded, politicians really will destroy the global economy – permanently – to save the planet. Don’t doubt that they’ll do it. They’re engaged in a dry run for that right now.

Why don’t conservatives also challenge the scientific theory that anthropogenic CO2 is causing catastrophic climate change? Because the “science is settled” and “science” is sacred? “Science” has become so sacred, in fact, it’s become like an Aztec God that must be appeased. Cut a beating human heart out on the altar of Huitzilopochtli. Or throw a human sacrifice into the cauldron of Pele. Or bash in someone’s skull and bury them in a Polynesian pit. The God of Science must never be questioned, and AOC is a high priestess.

This preposterous paradox remains more or less unexamined, that “science” has become weaponized by a gang of green theocrats. But science is no longer science when it is “settled” and is instead used to stifle scientific inquiry and debate and healthy skepticism.

Just as “racism” does not explain disparate outcomes for people of varying ethnicities, “climate change” is not conclusively demonstrated to be associated with burning of fossil fuel, and what climate change we do observe is not demonstrated to be catastrophic. In fact, the net effect of increased concentrations of CO2 may be mostly positive both for humans and ecosystems.

And climate change policies, misguided and misanthropic, have lowered the credibility of environmentalists at the same time as they have flattened the trajectory of solutions to genuine environmental challenges. Clean up the filthy air in New Delhi, for example. The unhealthy pollution has nothing to do with CO2, and everything to do high-sulfur fuel and inadequate exhaust controls. Quit incinerating rainforests to monocrop ethanol from sugar cane and diesel fuel from palm oil. Quit asphyxiating women across the global south who have to cook with wood because natural gas is not “carbon neutral.” Quit pouring finite resources into crony green corporate boondoggles.

Finally, to shatter the core premise of the Left: socialism is obviously not the cure for racism, nor is it the cure for economic inequality. AOC is invited to identify one nation or society, today or throughout history, where socialism delivered freedom, prosperity and social justice. She’ll find instead a hideous legacy of tyranny, poverty, and murder. Even those wonderful Scandinavian economies, held up as examples, do not qualify. They are mixed capitalist economies with (until recently) culturally homogeneous populations. They don’t count. They’re not socialist.

Capitalism, despite its flaws, and requiring judicious regulating, is the only system that can provide equal opportunity. But it cannot provide equal outcomes, nor should it. Because without private property, which is guaranteed in a capitalist system, nobody tries, nobody cares, competence doesn’t matter, effort and ability don’t matter, all that matters is who you know and who you bribe. Socialism, at its core, nurtures resentment, cynicism, corruption, dissipation, decay, despair, and despotism. It is a seductive illusion, promising everything in exchange for nothing. Its adherents are a perilous mixture of the evil and the naive.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is not evil. She is an ignorant, mostly unwitting demagogue, and she is a puppet. The premises that underlie the world view she promotes – racism, socialism, and climate “science” – are dangerous deceptions. They will deliver the most harm to the people they rhetorically aim to help the most. All three of these premises must be challenged without apology, without rest, without quarter.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Premises of California’s Dysfunction

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Anyone unfamiliar with what is really going on in California would have listened to Governor Newsom’s State of the State address on February 12 and gotten the impression that things have never been better. Newsom’s opening set the tone for the rest of his 4,400 word monologue:

“By every traditional measure, the state of our state is strong. We have a record-breaking surplus. We’ve added 3 million jobs since the depths of the recession. Wages are rising. We have more scientists, researchers, and engineers, more Nobel laureates, and the finest system of higher education anywhere in the world.”

Newsom, to his credit, immediately qualified his sunny opening with a disclaimer that might be the understatement of the century, saying “But along with that prosperity and progress, there are problems that have been deferred for too long and that threaten to put the California dream out of reach for too many. We face hard decisions that are coming due.”

Ain’t that the truth. And Gavin Newsom, the political party he represents, and the ideology they’ve embraced, cannot possibly solve these “problems that have been deferred for too long.” First, because Newsom and his gang created the problems, and second, because the ideology they adhere to is based on premises that are both economically unsustainable and destined to eventually deliver not solutions, but tyranny.

Here are the three core premises of California’s dysfunction:

The Climate Emergency

Every policy in California must be ran through the filter of its “climate change” impact. At some point over the past 10-20 years the required “environmental impact” reports morphed into “climate change” impact reports. It is impossible to overstate the degree to which this has stunted economic opportunities and raised the cost of living in California, and there is no end in sight.

“Climate change” impact is the pretext for countless laws and regulations, along with endless litigation, and its reach expands every year. There is no aspect of life in California, almost no category of activity, that can escape monitoring. If what you do moves electrons or involves combustion, convection, emission, discharge, motion, extraction, construction, anything – than there is justification for “carbon accounting,” and into the breech ride the carbon accountants, the consulting experts, the bureaucrats, the attorneys, the regulators and the legislators. “Climate change” is the pretext for an entire parasitic industry, and there is no theoretical limit to the scope of its authority.

The problem with this premise, beyond the fact it justifies an ongoing and inexorable creep towards micromanaged tyranny, is that it can’t be challenged. To suggest there might be other political priorities, unintended consequences, or even to just ask for a cost/benefit analysis, is to be branded a “denier,” as if someone who doesn’t think the world is about to end via “climate change,” or just thinks the proposed solutions are ludicrous in addition to being tyrannical, is the moral equivalent of a holocaust denier.

The “climate emergency” is an explicitly fascist political ideology, according to at least two conventional definitions of fascism. It requires an economic model where corporate oligopolies act in junior partnership to an authoritarian government. At the same time, it justifies itself according to a moral framework that does not tolerate dissent and relies on fomenting panic and fear to secure popular support. There is nothing that escapes the authoritarian reach of “climate change” policies.

The entire premise, that “climate change” is an emergency and that no sacrifice is too great in order to stop it, is based on exaggerations and lies, spread by people motivated by power and profit. It is not enough to oppose the myriad policies justified by the “climate emergency.” This fundamental premise, that it is an emergency eclipsing all other political priorities, must be utterly broken.

Eliminating Privilege and Oppression

This mantra, repeated across the U.S. by the American Left, is especially entrenched in California. And the laws attendant to it, like those attendant to the “climate emergency,” continue to multiply with no end in sight.

Whether it’s women, transgenders, gays and lesbians, “people of color,” or any other identifiable group where some statistical disparity in their aggregate achievements can be identified, new laws are being passed to join well established laws, all designed to enforce equal outcomes.

All of this relies on a premise that has supposedly passed almost beyond debate, that “cisgender heteronormative white males” have engaged in systemic racism since the dawn of time against everyone who is not a “cisgender heteronormative white male,” and this explains every statistical disparity between their achievement and that of everyone else.

There is so much wrong and evil about this premise it is hard to pick where to begin. First of all, it probably makes sense to remind the purveyors of this nonsense that life on earth has never been fair, but when it comes to “inclusion and equity,” no culture on earth comes anywhere close to America.

Perhaps more people should say to anyone tempted to declare themselves a victim of systemic oppression, “too bad, and grow up, because the cure you are proposing is far worse than the disease.” Perhaps anyone who thinks they’ve got it so bad in the United States, much less California, is invited to return to their nations of origin, and see if they find themselves feeling more welcome, with more access to opportunity.

The problems facing California’s residents who are not “cisgender heteronormative white males” are made far more challenging by a Leftist establishment telling them their prospects are diminished by “systemic oppression” as by any actual oppression.

Join the military and get free college tuition when you’re discharged. Learn the plumbing trade and make $175,000 per year because there’s a shortage of plumbers. Quit pretending a degree in “ethnic (or whatever) studies” is marketable in the real world, and instead train to become a nurse and make $175,000 per year because there’s a shortage of nurses. Whoever you are: you’re not a victim, despite what you’re hearing from some blowhard who’s made a career of saying so.

Claiming “privilege and oppression” are “systemic” and that laws are necessary to stop it will literally destroy America. It will fracture our culture and further paralyze our economy. It is a lie based on biased, self serving facts and studies, and just as in the case with the “climate emergency,” it is used to justify a parasitic industry. It cannot be stopped by fighting the myriad and derivative battles over budgets and legislation. The root premise must be relentlessly rejected, and everyone, regardless of their possible “protected status,” must be recruited to join in this attack.

Capitalism is Evil, Long Live Capitalism

Into this broad category can be found most of the remaining flawed but fundamental premises of California’s ruling elite. In no particular order, here are the delusions and lies that derive from this impossible, contradictory, blatantly hypocritical premise:

It is possible to make it impossible for the free market to build anything affordable in California, thanks to crippling regulations and punitive fees, yet it is possible to spend even more per unit, using taxpayer money, to build government funded “affordable housing.”

It is possible to award pension benefits to state and local government employees that average literally three times (if not more) what private sector workers may receive from Social Security, and then, while attacking capitalist profiteers at every turn, and demanding more regulations and taxes to control them and make them pay their “fair share,” simultaneously claim that pension benefits are sustained by returns on smartly invested asset portfolios, returns that are only possible via profits.

It is necessary to curb the excesses of capitalism through expansive legislation and regulations, because capitalism is inherently oppressive to “marginalized communities” and “working families,” yet the ultimate victims of these laws and regulations are always the small family owned businesses and emerging innovative potential competitors to large companies, because they lack the financial resiliency to comply. Meanwhile, the large monopolistic corporations consolidate their positions in the market.

It is economically sustainable to curb development of land, energy, water and roads, in order to protect the environment, because the resulting scarcity creates an explosion in asset values. This in turn enables a financialization of California’s economy as people borrow on the artificially inflated collateral of their home equity. The increased consumer activity, debt fueled, bolsters corporate profits and investment portfolio returns. The bubble never pops.

The Consequences of Lies

Nearly everything California’s ruling elite does wrong derives from these three premises. The first two are never challenged, and the third is a paradox, barely understood but best summarized by this: Democrats, not Republicans, are the party supported by the financial sector and the super wealthy, and they are systematically exterminating the middle class, and making things harder, not easier, for low income communities.

One of the policies central to California’s oppressive dysfunction is so-called “densification” or urban containment. Rarely discussed holistically, it is foundational to what ails California, and it is a consequence of all three premises.

The policy of densification means that new cities and towns cannot be built outside of existing urban areas. New housing subdivisions cannot extend beyond the existing urban periphery. This is justified based on protecting the environment, as if 95 percent of California’s more than 160,000 square miles of land weren’t still rural. It is justified based on stopping “climate change,” as if vehicles weren’t becoming cleaner and greener every year, and as if jobs wouldn’t follow residents into new cities.

Densification is also justified based on combating “racism,” because if jobs follow residents to new communities outside the existing urban core, then somehow this means no jobs will remain for people still living there – who may be disproportionately represented by members of “disadvantaged communities.”

The economic premise behind densification, besides the rabid and cynical certainty that artificial scarcity causes asset bubbles which reward speculative investors and predatory home equity loan sharks, is that suburbs require roads which require “subsidies.” When making this argument, California’s ruling elites find useful and very idiotic support from libertarian dogmatists, who have made a lifestyle of living with paradoxical, self contradictory beliefs. “Let’s not subsidize the car,” is what these libertarians will smugly assert, hoping for a pat on the back from the progressives with whom they’ve found common ground. No, of course not. Let’s just subsidize light rail, trolleys, buses, and every other imaginable conveyance instead.

The wicked first cousin of Densification is “Inclusive Zoning,” is a policy that as well relies on all three of California’s dysfunctional premises. This policy, which like most leftist inspired policies, sounds so virtuous – “inclusive” – that only a heartless monster would oppose it.

Inclusive zoning takes the form of long-standing mandates to include subsidized “affordable housing” in virtually every housing development, and new mandates requiring cities and counties to approve “accessory dwelling units” inside any residential backyard bigger than a postage stamp. It is based on the fatally flawed premise that “disadvantaged communities” will suddenly be uplifted if they are able to live in subsidized units of housing in affluent neighborhoods.

Inclusive zoning is by its very nature consistent with the environmentally motivated policy of densification, since these mandated “affordable” units are smaller then the housing that surrounds them, consuming backyard lawns instead of “open space.” They are, as noted, also consistent with combating “oppression,” since lower income individuals will occupy these units.

California is Waging War on Working Californians

The most pernicious way in which inclusionary zoning follows from California’s dysfunctional premises, however, is in the economic realm.

What inclusionary zoning mandates allow is an invasion of predatory real estate speculators to pour into every tranquil, shady neighborhood in California, where they will encounter homes that are worth more demolished than left standing. They will raze, randomly, homes throughout these to-date intact neighborhoods, and then, relying tax incentives to fund the construction, they will replace these homes with fourplexes that will house low income residents living on taxpayer supported rent subsidies.

Densification and inclusionary zoning epitomize how California’s ruling elite is waging war against its own citizens – and that ruling class very explicitly includes Gavin Newsom.

These policies reflect a contempt for the middle class bordering on hatred. No fair minded person objects to people who look different or have different lifestyles living in their neighborhoods. What they object to is having their neighborhoods destroyed through densification, then filled up with new residents whose residences and rent payments are largely paid through higher taxes.

If you object to this because you worked hard to live in a nice neighborhood, too bad. It wasn’t hard work that got you there, it was “privilege.” And if you object because you don’t like seeing homes randomly demolished and replaced with apartments, too bad, you must be a “denier.” And if you think the economics are unsustainable – after all, at what percentage of tax subsidized construction of “affordable housing” and subsidized monthly rent do government budgets implode – too bad, because all the smart libertarians joined with all the smart progressives to do this to you.

As for the tony enclaves of California’s wealthiest? They litigate and lobby for exemptions to the rules they make the rest of us live by, and laugh all the way to the bank.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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