GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

marsh

On TB every waking moment

print-icon

Playing Fast And Loose With Numbers

FRIDAY, APR 23, 2021 - 07:00 PM
Authored by Joakim Book via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Journalism is hard. To portray the world accurately to a layman audience without delving into the complexities and nuances of the universe we inhabit, writers must always simplify, explain, and make difficult content relatable for their readers. You can do this well and comprehensively, and you can do it poorly.

Often, writers simplify and give concrete examples with the best of intentions, even though I don’t put it past some of the activist writers out there to fudge what they portray and fidget with the details. But what really strikes a nerve with me is when writers end up misleading so grossly that their readers walk away with a completely twisted view of the world. The late Hans Rosling was a master at pricking the bubbles that these mistakes had created in our heads.

I have summarized his perhaps most valuable advice to Always Be Comparing Thy Number; never let numbers stand alone; always have readily available comparisons that let you answer the crucial questions: is that a lot? What was it last year? Ten years ago? Do informed researchers think it’s a lot?

Most of us don’t walk around with easily comparable frameworks for what’s a large and small number in areas we know nothing about – how many people normally die in car accidents or from medical errors, how long the Amazon River is or how much ice there is in the world. Implicitly or explicitly, we rely on fact-checking journalists to tell us in the process of covering the crucial topic they’re writing about.

Too often, they don’t. And not only do they neglect their professional role, they tend to make our misunderstandings worse when they actually engage in contrived comparisons. In any story that includes climate change this tendency seems to have gone completely haywire (maybe the covidocracy can give it a run for its money).

Far from being settled, climate science is tricky: we don’t know well what happens to global temperatures when atmospheric CO2 doubles (“climate sensitivity”); we can’t properly model clouds and cloud formation, crucial for how much of the sun’s incoming heat will be reflected away; the range for best-guesses as to what the global temperature rise over the coming century will be is vast (maybe 1° Celsius – maybe 5° Celsius) – so vast, in fact, that it hardly warrants a quantification.

Yet, the science is “settled,” we hear, and we must “listen to the scientists.”



The Sea Level Rise, the Olympic Swimming Pools, and the Football Fields
But the worst crime are the subtle throwaway lines that journalists tuck onto their coverage of impending doom that give a completely mistaken impression about the future of the world.

Let’s start with the Amazon.
The Amazon forest is huge. So huge, in fact, that few of us can even fathom how mind-bogglingly huge it is: numbers just won’t do it justice – does anyone have a reference point for what 5.5 million square meters look like? The main Amazon River, not considering its countless tributaries, is some 6,400 km long: traveling at a comfortable 20 km/h (12.5 mph), it would take you a good two weeks of traveling day and night – probably more because of weather, currents, and debris. The area of the forest itself is the size of all U.S. states west of the Mississippi (minus Alaska): from the Gulf to the Canadian border, the Pacific to the Mississippi, all covered in forest.

In addition to that, we have the Cerrado, an area south and east of the Amazon the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, that’s technically tropical savannah but few of us would hesitate calling it forested.

When the scientific journal Nature has a headline that reads “deforestation rate in 2020 is the greatest of the decade,” they’re not lying. The BBC even trumped them a little by slapping “deforestation ‘surges to 12-year high’” on unsuspecting readers. So, we get the impression that Brazilian deforestation is really bad:


Source: INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research

Here I overlaid a simple trendline and a ten-year moving average for illustration. The 11,000 km2 deforested last year was indeed the highest since 2008, but is dwarfed by what routinely came before it. More importantly, we must ask: is it a lot? If your target rate of deforestation – in the poorest areas of a relatively poor country, mind you – is zero (which it shouldn’t be), it looks like things are not just terrible but going the wrong way. A longer, and wider, perspective tells you otherwise.

It didn’t take long before BBC’s science editor, David Shukman, brought up the familiar “football field-per minute” metric. The area deforested last year was around 1,552,320 standard British football fields, or over 4,000 of them each day, for just under 3 football fields a minute. While Shukman and countless others have tried to make the topic visually understandable for a layperson – we can imagine the size of three adjacent football fields – our imagination is quickly swamped by a “massively large area that I can’t even grapple with.” Quickly, when we scale those minutes to hours and days, we get the impression that huge areas of this important forest is melting away faster than ice cream on a hot summer’s day.

But we already know that the Amazon forest alone is some 5,500,000 m2 large, the portion within Brazil’s borders some 4,000,000 m2. What was deforested last year, then, was less than 0.3% of the Brazilian forest left standing. Now, does it still sound like an incredibly vast amount? If we estimate that farmers and loggers deforest a similar amount in the next few years, and we ignore potential runaway feedback processes for a minute, Brazilians have enough forest for 360 years. We know enough about economic development and Kuznets curves to know that Brazilians won’t mindlessly deforest the Amazon for that long.

Yet, the picture the reader carries with them is one of runaway deforestation rather than a mild return to longer-term trend.

The world of ice isn’t much better.
Here we don’t employ the unhelpful and unscientific metric of football fields per minute, but Olympic swimming pools to gauge the amount of meltwater – or sea meter equivalents to compare amounts of ice (mostly in Antarctica and the Greenland Ice Sheet, or ‘GIS’).

The Guardian, always ready to deliver alarmism, reported that the GIS lost a record 530 billion metric tons of ice in 2019. Again, we’re faced with a number we can’t relate to. Is that a lot? The journalist kindly calculated that it’s about 1 million tons of ice per minute, but that still doesn’t quite cut it – where can I store a million tons of ice? Enter the swimming pools. Think seven of them, in some gigantic swimming facility, filled to the brim with Greenland ice. OK, I can somewhat picture that amount of ice. But then we add seven more pools the next second; and seven more, the next. Quickly we run into the same problem we did with the football fields: this is just a massive amount of ice that’s melting. The images flash before our eyes: an ice-free world, the extra water in the oceans sweeping over our cities and drowning us all, Day After Tomorrow-style.

For some unfathomable reason, the journalists forgot to report how incredibly large the GIS is – not to mention Antarctica at something like 10x its volume. The ice sheet that covers 80% of Greenland is a dome of permanent ice, 1.7 million m2 and some 2-3 km thick at its peak. Comparing it in size to U.S. states, it’s something like the area of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana combined, covered in kilometers of ice. Estimates put it at 2.85 million cubic kilometers of ice, from which we last year lost about 530 km3. That’s 0.02% of the ice sheet. Unless I displaced a few zeros somewhere – which wouldn’t even change my argument – the GIS has enough ice left to fill more Olympic swimming pools than the dollar values of all the assets in the world (where each dollar’s value represents one Olympic swimming pool of ice). It’s, um, a lot.

A listener to British statistician and economist Tim Harford’s show More or Less wondered about a figure he had heard in the media of 70 meters of sea level rise if all of Antarctica melted. Bethan Davies at University of London helps explain that if all the ice in the West Antarctica, East Antarctica, and Antarctic Peninsula ice sheets were to melt, we’d be looking at something like 58 meters rise in global sea levels. In her defense, Davies quickly dispelled any notions of that happening: zero, nada, zilch. Antarctica’s vast ice sheets probably will contribute to sea level rises over the next century, but nothing like the 50+ meters that scary hypothetical calculations like those conjure up – with walls of ocean water suddenly battering down our coastal lands.

Still, journalists keep talking about a future without ice, about ice-free summers in the Arctic, and casually throwing in “sea level rise if x were to melt completely” as if x was in any danger of melting away entirely over anything but geological time frames. This places the completely wrong ideas in their readers’ heads and gravely misinforms the public about the world.



Doctors abide by the “First, do no harm” promise. Maybe journalists should too.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden's Global Climate Summit Kicks Off Full-Tilt Wealth Redistribution

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

Yesterday (Thursday April 22) was Earth Day. To mark the occasion, President Biden hosted something called a virtual Leaders’ Climate Summit.




The leaders of major carbon emitting nations joined virtually and pledged to decarbonize the global economy. Biden even said he’d launch an international climate finance plan to underwrite it.

The virtual summit was a bullet point in Biden’s January 27, 2021, climate crisis executive order. The stated intent of the order is:
“…to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad while creating good-paying union jobs and equitable clean energy future, building modern and sustainable infrastructure, restoring scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking across the federal government, and re-establishing the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.”
The virtual summit, as far as we could tell, was a grand exercise in flattery and flagellation. It was also a smoke and mirrors cover for something entirely different.

Here at the Economic Prism we find the term ‘climate crisis’ to be disingenuous. Weather is weather. Sometimes there are fires and floods and hurricanes and blizzards and heatwaves. There always has been. Always will.

The fact that weather is now somehow a climate crisis is big government seizing an opportunity to remold the world nearer to the heart’s desire.

You see, the supposed climate crisis has nothing to do with saving the whales. Like all good central plans, it has everything to do with wealth redistribution. A key feature involves cancelling certain industries while propping up others, like solar and wind power generators. It also involves capturing and redirecting massive amounts of capital.

What to make of it…

Arsonists
Cheap, abundant, clean energy is a commendable goal. We’re all for it. And if it creates new jobs and industries, all the better.

But like all of mankind’s top achievements, private inventers – through ingenuity, experimentation, and repetition – stand the best chance at really attaining it. Curious individuals will triumph through relentless trial, observation, testing, refinement, and ultimate discovery. We have it on good authority of new breakthroughs occurring in this realm each and every day.

Team Biden-Harris, and their army of planners, won’t get us anywhere close to cheap, abundant, clean energy. That’s not their goal either. Their goal is massive wealth redistribution. And to help bring this to fruition they’re putting arsonists in charge of fighting fires.

For example, last month the Federal Reserve, the central bank to the U.S. government, created a Financial Stability Climate Committee and a Supervision Climate Committee. According to Fed Governor Lael Brainard:
“Climate change and the transition to a sustainable economy also pose risks to the stability of the broader financial system. So a second core pillar of our framework seeks to address the macrofinancial risks of climate change.”
Treasury Secretary, and former Fed Chair, Janet Yellen, is also hip to the climate crisis. This week the Treasury Department announced its plans to fight climate change through fiscal policy.

The Treasury is even creating something called a “Climate Hub” to save us from the weather. John E. Morton, an Obama administration retread, and climate finance buff, will be the new hub’s leader.

It’s an important new position at the Treasury Department, if you ask Yellen.

Because Yellen considers climate change an existential threat. She even offered the following insights:
“The steep consequences of our actions demand that the Treasury Department make climate change a top priority. Finance and financial incentives will play a crucial role in addressing the climate crisis at home and abroad and in providing capital for opportunities to transform the economy.”
You can see where this is going, right?

Biden’s Global Climate Summit Kicks Off Full-Tilt Wealth Redistribution
The central planners are setting the stage for epic, government directed renewable energy boondoggles. A full-tilt raid on the public purse that will make everyone rich – except you. Printing press money will be distributed to mega solar and wind generation programs as a matter of monetary and fiscal policy.

What’s lost in all this is central bankers, more than anyone else, are responsible for polluting the earth and filling it with carbon emissions. As a group, the finger prints of central bankers can be found all over the degradation of the environment and emissions of greenhouse gases. Yet now, it’s as if these arsonists are being put in charge of fighting fires.

The connection between central bankers and carbon emissions may seem a bit abstract at first. But it’s really not. Central bankers, including the Federal Reserve, provide credit. Moreover, through their policies of unrelenting credit expansion they provide excess credit.

The flipside of credit, remember, is debt. And debt comes with borrowing money. And borrowing money pulls production and consumption from the future into the present.

Thus, if you take a chart of global CO2 emissions over the last 80 years and compare it with a chart of U.S. Debt and Rest of the World Debt, the trajectories bear an uncanny resemblance. Correlation does not imply causation, and we haven’t done a regression analysis to confirm it…

But we have a hunch that without the explosion of central bank created credit over the last 100 years, and the relentless production and consumption binge it has fostered, greenhouse gas emissions would be far less.

Printing press money and unlimited debt, courtesy of central bankers, has resulted in trillions in wasteful spending…not to mention financing of endless wars. These actions, no doubt, step down with a weighty carbon footprint.

Indeed, there’s something remarkably insincere about the Federal Reserve and the Treasury lining up behind the supposed climate crisis. They’re the grossest polluters of all!

And Team Biden-Harris, under the guise of climate crisis, have established a coordinated attack with the Fed and Treasury to redistribute wealth and muck with the lives of millions unconditionally.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden’s Climate Requirements: Cut 90% of Red Meat From Diet; Americans Can Only Eat One Burger Per Month

By Cristina Laila
Published April 23, 2021 at 9:15pm
IMG_0374.jpg

Joe Biden on Friday pledged to cut the US’s carbon emissions at least 50% by 2030
.
Some of the climate requirements are going to mean big changes for Americans.

Biden’s ambitious plan could mean Americans will be forced to cut 90% of red meat from their diets which equates to about one average-sized hamburger per month.

Americans may also be forced to purchase a $55,000 electric vehicle under Biden’s Marxist climate plan.

The Daily Mail reported:
Americans may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent and cut their consumption of other animal based foods in half.

Gradually making those changes by 2030 could see diet-related greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 50 percent, according to a study by Michigan University’s Center for Sustainable Systems.
To do that, it would require Americans to only consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or 0.18 ounces per day.
It equates to consuming roughly one average sized burger per month.
More than half of new cars bought in the United States would need to be electric within the next decade, studies show.
The University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy estimated that cleaning up transportation would count towards about a quarter of Biden’s goal.

It would mean more than 65 percent of new cars and SUV sales and 10 percent of new truck sales would need to be electric.
Currently, electric cars make up about 2 percent of new passenger vehicle sales.

The average cost of a new electric vehicle is about $55,000.
I’m sorry but what? pic.twitter.com/vz5asGkjTW
— Katie Daviscourt (@KatieDaviscourt) April 23, 2021
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

“Let My Wife Come Home!” – Joe Biden Has Super Awkward Exchange with Navajo Nation During Climate Summit (VIDEO)

By Cristina Laila
Published April 23, 2021 at 9:56pm
1619293526319.png
What the hell did we just watch?

Joe Biden mumbled through remarks during a climate summit on Friday.

Things got super awkward after Dementia Joe veered off script.

At one point Joe Biden pointed at the leader of the Navajo Nation and demanded they give his wife back.

Jill Biden visited the Navajo Nation on Friday and Joe Biden pointed at their delegation and demanded they let Jill come home.

“Let my wife come home! She likes the Navajo Nation too much! She keeps being out there! She’s been out there for two days. She was out there before – I don’t know! You know what I mean?!” Biden said.

Instead of stopping while he was ahead, Joe Biden continued to ramble on about Jill Biden being far away from him.

He continued, “I called her, I said ‘where are you?’ She said ‘I’m staying another day’ – so you know, let her come home, oaky? I don’t want her, you know – that’s too far for me to commute — I, I shouldn’t be so, but anyway, look…”

WATCH:
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1385638901260316676
2:20 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Save Earth... Get Rich...

SATURDAY, APR 24, 2021 - 12:40 PM
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth,

I sometimes can’t believe I think I must revisit this theme time and again, but here we are. Joe Biden is chairing a virtual climate plan/summit/whatever, and absolutely nothing has changed since the last time I tried to explain why it is nonsense, or all the other times before that. But this is the biggest boondoggle/cheat/trick ever played on mankind, so what choice do I have?

It’s still a bunch of politicians all over the world who are beholden to a bunch of extremely rich people for their cushy positions and claim they intend to save the world hand in hand with these rich people. In other words, our resident sociopaths and psychopaths are the only ones who can save us. But you’re going to have to pay up, or they won’t do it.

It’s all an intensely moronic piece of theater (no, I won’t insult Kabuki!), but since all the media is in on it, who would know that? It’s the biggest show on earth! Your carrots are jobs, profit, and a saved planet for your children. What’s not to like?

Biden’s billionaire political sponsors promise to save you, but of course they do need to make a profit off it. One that is preferably larger than the profits they have been making over the past decades off of the very things they now pretend to condemn, and are still invested in, fossil fuels.

Of course they know that will never happen, but they also know that you do not. So here goes. This intro from the Guardian, written before Ol’ Joe opened Day Two, tries some critical notes, but that’s just to lift the party mode even higher.

Joe Biden To Stress Green Jobs As Key To Tackling Crisis At Climate Summit
Joe Biden will take the podium in the east room at the White House very shortly. The title of his address is: “The Economic Opportunities of Climate Action.” The White House is bringing out the billionaires, the CEOs and the union executives Friday to help sell Joe Biden’s climate-friendly transformation of the US economy at his virtual summit of world leaders.

The closing day of the two-day summit on the climate crisis is to feature Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg, steelworker and electrical union leaders and executives for solar and other renewable energy. Biden vows to slash US emissions by half to meet ‘existential crisis of our time’.
It’s all in service of an argument US officials say will make or break the president’s climate agenda: pouring trillions of dollars into clean-energy technology, research and infrastructure will jet-pack a competitive US economy into the future and create jobs, while saving the planet.

The new urgency comes as scientists say that the climate crisis caused by coal plants, car engines and other fossil fuel use is worsening droughts, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters and that humans are running out of time to stave off catastrophic extremes of global warming.
The event has featured the world’s major powers – and major polluters – pledging to cooperate on cutting petroleum and coal emissions that are rapidly warming the planet. Yesterday, Biden called upon the world to confront the climate crisis and “overcome the existential crisis of our time”, as he unveiled an ambitious new pledge to slash US planet-heating emissions in half by the end of the decade.
Addressing the opening of a gathering of more than 40 world leaders in an Earth Day climate summit, Biden warned that “time is short” to address dangerous global heating and urged other countries to do more.
Shortly before the start of the summit, the White House said the US will aim to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by between 50% and 52% by 2030, based on 2005 levels. Biden said the new US goal will set it on the path to net zero emissions by 2050 and that other countries now needed to also raise their ambition.
By 2050, Joe Biden would have lived longer than Noah, Methusalem and Abraham put together. Same goes for Gates and Bloomberg and all the other “leaders”. These people greatly prefer power today over a saved planet, whatever that may mean, when they are dead -or, alternatively, can no longer remember where or who they are.

By 2030, whoever remains will shift the blame onto Biden et al, who will then have departed either politics or the planet. And then you will be told that the trillions from the 2021 Biden plan were not nearly enough to save the planet, so we MUST play double or nothing. Or your children will burn, not in hell, but right where they were born.

The biggest carrot of all is that we can shift from fossil fuels to some other energy source -which wind and solar are not, but who understands that?- and keep on motoring. It’s like the myth -or is it?- that lemmings all jump off cliffs together, but then you find Disney, for a movie, built a large treadmill that only made it look that way.

Yes, you are the lemming, and Gates and Bloomberg, and all of Wall Street, are Disney. Joe Biden is the treadmill, along with Merkel and Macron and the rest of the “well-meaning” gang. It makes no difference if a story like that is true, it’s a good metaphor.


Look, I covered this topic so many times, just read back, will you please? On December 16 2016, I wrote Heal the Planet for Profit and on February 15 2021 Heal the Planet for Profit – Redux . It’s all there. And I wish people would stop paying attention to the sociopath-laden events like COP 21 through 26, and these Biden-chaired summits.

They spell nothing good for you or your children. The only thing that could, is using less energy, not some other kind, let alone source, of energy. That’s for people who don’t understand thermodynamics, or physics in general. And I know: that’s most people and that’s the biggest tragedy of all.

But still, why would anyone think some of the richest people in the world, after having made fortunes reminiscent only of entire empires of yore, using fossil fuels, now be serious about salvaging Joe Blow? No matter how the media sell and push and propagandize that notion, how can anyone fall for it?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Bill Gates on climate: 'Using just today's technologies won't allow us to meet our ambitious goals'

About 45% of the carbon emissions reductions needed will come from technology that hasn't been developed yet, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo says.

By Nicholas Ballasy
Updated: April 23, 2021 - 11:00pm

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the U.S. government cannot rely solely on existing technology to reach net zero emissions.

An expert featured at the White House and State Department's climate change summit made a similar statement, saying that about half of the emissions reductions needed will come from technology that hasn't been developed yet.

"Climate change is an incredibly complex issue, and using just today's technologies won't allow us to meet our ambitious goals," Gates said at the Leaders Summit on Climate organized by the White House and the State Department Friday. "The reason is that almost all of our zero-carbon technologies are more expensive than their fossil fuel counterparts.

"To provide all the benefits of the modern lifestyle to people around the world, we need new zero-carbon products that are just as affordable, that have what I call a green premium of zero. Now, it will be hard to create those products, but we could do it if we invest in innovation and build the infrastructure for the transition to a clean economy."

Gates said that "doing three things at once" will be required to reach net zero emissions.

"First, we need to develop and deploy breakthrough technologies that allows to eliminate emissions throughout the physical economy," he said. "Second, we need to tap the power markets to fund and deploy these innovations, for example, by finding creative ways to finance technologies, and by leveling the playing field, so they can compete with fossil fuels.

"Third, governments and corporations need to adopt policies that will make it faster and cheaper to make the transition, and leaders will need to reward those who take difficult steps. To accomplish these three things, international cooperation will be essential."

Gates said he's working on a new program called breakthrough energy catalyst.
"It will raise money from governments, philanthropy and companies to make the large capital investments needed to bring down the cost of emerging technologies," he explained. "By taking steps like this to create the financing structures that will allow green products to succeed, we can build new industries and companies that support communities around the world with good jobs, while making the transition to the clean economy."

Gates concluded that "if we take all these steps together, I believe we can avoid a climate disaster."

Dr. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, outlined some figures from studies his organization has conducted.

"About half the reductions to get to net zero emissions in 2050 will need to come from technologies that are not yet ready for market today," he said at the summit. "This calls for massive leaps of innovation — innovation across batteries, hydrogen, synthetic fuels, carbon capture and many other technologies."

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo agreed with Birol's figures.

"You remind us all of the urgency with which we must do this work," she said. "And it is a stunning statistic, really, to think that 45% of the emissions reductions we need must come from technologies that aren't fully developed today, so it's really a call to action for all of us and the innovators in our country to continue to push as it relates to new technology and innovation."

President Biden's $2 trillion American Jobs Plan seeks to spend more than $600 billion on renewable energy initiatives, including research and development, retrofitting public schools and federal buildings, as well as developing electric school buses.

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained about $90 billion that was directed toward green energy development. Former President Obama put then-Vice President Biden in charge of implementing the Recovery Act. Among the funds distributed, there was $535 million that went to the solar company Solyndra, which later went bankrupt.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Kamala Harris Vows to Fight Climate Change as ‘Root Cause’ of Migration Crisis
7,264
US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks before a meeting about the Northern Triangle migration crisis in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus April 22, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty
CHARLIE SPIERING23 Apr 20214,890

Vice President Kamala Harris used a meeting Thursday to argue climate change is a root cause of migration from Central American countries.

“We are looking at extensive storm damage because of extreme climate, we’re looking at drought,” Harris said.

Harris met with foundation leaders on the ongoing migrant crisis as people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala flood the Southern border through Mexico.

Because of the changing climate, Harris argued, people in the region faced a struggling agriculture industry, food scarcity, food insecurity, and extreme poverty.

“Again, we’re looking at the issue of climate resiliency, and then the concern about the lack of economic opportunity,” she said.

The Biden administration posits damage from Hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020 devastated the region, a climate event that continues pushing climate migrants to the United States. In February, Biden signed an executive order for the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs to draft a report on the impact of climate change on mass migration.

Harris repeated the challenges in the region were daunting, but she expressed her intention of offering people hope.

“We have to give people a sense of hope, a sense of hope that help is on the way, a sense of hope that if they stay, things will get better,” she said.

Harris cautioned the problem was “not going to be accomplished overnight.”
“If it was easy, it would have been solved a long time ago,” she said.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Climate is the new CovidThe “public health policies” allegedly in place to fight Covid19 are being rebranded as “saving the planet”.

Kit Knightly

Yesterday was Earth Day. The traditional day environmental hashtags temporarily trend across all social media sites. This year was no different, with the exception of the stronger than usual whiff of agenda.

The narrative of the “deadly viral pandemic” is slowly losing momentum. Whether this is through the public having “post viral fatigue”(as it were), or a deliberate shift in media talking points is unclear. But there’s certainly less energy in the story than at this time last year.

That said, it’s also perfectly clear that governments around the world are in no mood to give up their newly acquired “emergency powers”, and that alleged “anti-covid measures” are not going away anytime soon.

Especially lockdowns, which are being freshly marketed as “good for the planet”.
The narrative that locking down the public was “helping the Earth heal” actually dates back to last March, when it was reported all across the world news that only a few weeks of lockdown had cleared up the water in Venician canals so much there were dolphins swimming through the city.

This story later proved to be completely untrue, but that didn’t stop dozens of outlets from picking up the story and running with it.

At various times in the intervening year, Covid has been sold as a having an environmental silver-lining. Including potentially “saving the planet”.
Just last month, the Guardian published a story with the headline:
Global lockdown every two years needed to meet Paris CO2 goals – study”
That this is all about marketing and opinion control is only further evidenced by the fact that, with a few hours, they edited the headline to remove mention of lockdowns, the new one reading:
Equivalent of Covid emissions drop needed every two years – study
At around the same time, they had another article, warning that emissions will increase to “pre-pandemic levels” once lockdowns are ended. Another saying lockdown has taught us to “love nature”. And another claiming the UK’s “star count” had increased thanks to lockdown.

All this kicked into another gear on Earth Day, the theme of which is Restore Our EarthTM (yes, it really is a registered trademark).

Yesterday morning I woke up to a news alert on my phone, claiming this Earth Day we should “celebrate how much the planet has healed during lockdown“.
Later, I saw an advert for a new documentary titled “The Year the Earth Changed”, chronicling the ways nature has rebounded during lockdown, and how much the “Earth has healed”.

To quote one review [emphasis added]:
…lockdown offers scientists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe the extent of human impact on animal behaviour, by simply taking us out of the picture.
We can use what we learn to re-evaluate and modify our habits, they argue, instead of mindlessly returning to how things once were in a pre-pandemic world.
It says, before concluding:
It offers an affirmative slant – less ‘we are the virus’; more, the suffering of these last 12 or so months hasn’t been all in vain – as well as a way out of the environmental disaster that we’re unquestionably still facing.
An article in Forbes urges people to “embrace the lessons of the pandemic”:
the planet has had a giant pause during the pandemic and had a chance to repair and reclaim itself. The planet is not the problem, we are, so how do we now continue some of the good efforts that we adopted under sudden social distancing and the threat of Covid-19?
The Evening Standard claims the pandemic produced a “70% drop in vehicle emissions” in the city of London.

A press release from the Washington State Department of Health says “tele-working could save the world”.

Sky News reports the UK’s carbon footprint is down 17% as the “pandemic forces people to adopt eco-friendly lifestyles”.

It goes on and on and on.

Essentially, “lockdowns” – which, we remind you, are not shown to have any impact on the transmission of the “virus” – are now being rebranded, not just as “good for public health”, but also good for the planet.

Before getting to the why of all this, let’s deal with the claim itself: Has the lockdown been good for the environment?

The answer to that is either “probably no” or “certainly not”, depending on your priorities.

For starters there are plastic-fibre disposable masks – which, we remind you, do absolutely nothing to prevent the spread of viruses – hundreds of thousands of which are now busily washing up on beaches, entangling wildlife and clogging sewers all over the world.

“What about emissions?” I hear you say, “won’t they be reduced?”. Well, maybe. But if they are, it’s not by much.

The “lockdowns” have been sold in the press like a total halt to all human activity but, in reality, it’s mostly small businesses being closed down, and a lot of important-sounding but largely unproductive people having zoom meetings.

The militaries of the world still travel, the navies are still at sea. Public transport is still running, even if it is lessened in some places. Emergency vehicles keep chugging along. Rubbish and recycling are still collected. Container ships, cargo planes, long-haul trucks and freight trains are still taking goods to every part of the world.

The big retailers – WalMart, Tesco, CostCo, Amazon etc. – they are all still open, and their supply lines flow all over the world.

The idea that all human activity just stopped dead is a convenient lie, sold to the sort of people who still buy newspapers and believe that absolutely everyone (or at least, everyone who matters) works a job that a) involves commuting into a city, b) can be done just as easily at home.

This is of course untrue, and most of the real, vital work of keeping society moving still happens.

Mines, mills, and plants still exist. Power stations, dams and sewage processors are still ticking over. Even the service economy is still running, just with different people moving in the opposite direction. Deliveroo, Uber and JustEat drive cars, and any decrease in people going to restaurants will be counterbalanced by increased take-away deliveries.

Factories in China are still making all the things that are being shipped around the world and then delivered to our doors, rather than shipped around the world and having us going to get them. Is that really much of a change in emissions?

Whether you drive to Waitrose, or Waitrose drives to you, the same amount of fuel is being used. Ordering hand sanitiser, an exercise bike or some spare batteries online is not, in any way, more environmentally friendly than walking into town to buy them in person.

And that doesn’t even account for the increased use of electricity/gas caused by (some) people staying home more. Or the fact that many countries never locked down at all.

Even the study being cited in the Guardian admits the lower CO2 emissions for 2020 are merely “projections”.

In short, no, there is no publicly available evidence that “lockdown” was good for the environment at all.

And, indeed, the idea that it was doesn’t really make much sense when you think about it.

The interesting thing is there’s a whole bunch of articles out there which readily admit this. Such as this one in National Geographic, or this one from the BBC. And a handful of others too.

All arguing that the Covid19 lockdown won’t help stop climate change, or will have only a small impact on emissions, or might even make it worse in the long run.

Why? Because they are the other side of the propaganda. The proverbial stick to the “planet is healing” carrot. Telling people this lockdown won’t heal the planet because it’s not strict enough, or because when it stops we’ll go back to normal.
Scary, doomsaying headlines which leave an ellipsis they expect their readers to mentally fill in: “well, I guess we shouldn’t stop lockdowns then.”

This is not the only example of “anti-pandemic” or “public health” policies being turned to include climate change.

Last summer I wrote about an academic article that suggested “moral enhancement” for “coronavirus defectors”. It argued for putting chemicals in the water supply in order to make people more obedient to mask and/or vaccine mandates, and went on to suggest the same technique could be used to combat the “suffering associated with climate change”.

Even when not directly analogous there are plenty of headlines, interviews and articles which clearly seek to associate “Covid” and “climate change” in the public mind.

“Covid19 and climate crisis are part of the same battle”, headlined The Guardian in December. As well as “Covid gives us a chance to act on Climate”.

In an interview originally aired on Earth Day, Prince William urged the world to apply the same “spirit of invention” to climate change that they have done to Covid19 “vaccines”.

This ties in with the Royal’s “Give Earth a Shot” program…which was launched in December 2019, BEFORE the pandemic (or vaccines) ever became a talking point.
A timely reminder that a lot of the solutions proposed to fight the “pandemic”, were being suggested to fight other things before the pandemic even existed. A cashless society, decreased air travel, population control, mass surveillance, decreased meat production and others have all been on the agenda since long before Covid was close to becoming a thing…and have all been mooted as ways to fight this pandemic (or “future pandemics”).

Even the so-called Great Reset actually pre-dates the pandemic.

After all, what is the much talked about “green new deal”, if not a prototype of the WEF’s Great Reset plan?

Mark Carney – former governor of the Bank of England – called for an economic reset and “brand new financial system” in order to “fight climate change”, in a December 2019 article for the International Monetary Fund website…which was, again, weeks BEFORE the “pandemic” materialised.

That’s the takeaway message here, really: The agenda revealed by the past year of pandemic propaganda has always been there, it was just never quite so brazen. It was the before Covid, and will still be there if and/or when they stop talking about Covid altogether.

The “Great Reset” and the “New Normal” are policy goals that pre-date Covid, and are far more important than any of the tools used to pursue them. The created “pandemic” is nothing but a means to an end. They might discard or sideline the narrative of the virus, they might switch storylines for a few months, or stop using certain phrases altogether for a while. But that doesn’t mean their greater agenda has changed at all.

They’ve shown us their hand. They’ve told us – upfront and out loud – what they want to achieve.

Total economic control, marked depreciation of living standards, removal of national sovereignty and radical erosion of individual liberties.

That’s the endgame here. They said so.

It’s our responsibility to hold on to that knowledge and use it. To withhold any belief and see everything with a sceptical eye. Everything. Every story in the press. Every news item on the television. Any government pronouncement or piece of legislation.

Viruses or vaccines. Poverty or prosperity. Discrimination or diversity. War or world peace. The agenda doesn’t change.

Whoever is talking. Whatever they are talking about. Whatever they claim to want. The agenda doesn’t change.

Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Red or Blue. The agenda doesn’t change.

The colour doesn’t matter. Not even when it’s green.

Happy Earth Day.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

CITIZEN FREE PRESS
The dystopian climate diet…
Posted by Kane on April 24, 2021 12:18 am
1619298853524.png
Ian Miles Cheong — You ain’t gonna stop shit. You’re gonna eat protein burgers made from crushed cockroaches and you’re gonna love it. You will own nothing and you will be happy.

1619298918370.png
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

John Kerry Seems to Promote the Extinction of Humanity in Latest Rant

By Bonchie | Apr 23, 2021 1:00 PM ET

19cdd457-56b9-4d15-9b13-2b28e3e832cb-730x487.jpg
U.S. State Department/Flickr
John Kerry is back on the international stage, and I’m not sure that’s a thing anyone asked for. The former failed Secretary of State that oversaw the rise of ISIS and the disastrous Iran deal is back in his element. That mostly consists of ranting about the imminent dangers of global warming.

Of course, this is the same guy whose past predictions on that topic have all fallen flat (remember him saying the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013?), but the grift keeps on going even as he flies around in private jets, owns a yacht, and likely puts out more carbon emissions in a week than most do in a year.

Yesterday, while speaking at a “climate summit,” Kerry seemingly stumped for the extinction of humanity (and all life for that matter). Behold, your intellectual betters.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1385276993319677953
.31 min

Yes, let’s “get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere” despite the fact that life on earth could not exist without it. Of course, we could assume he just meant “some” carbon dioxide, though, he doesn’t say that and I’m under no obligation to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even then, do you really trust scientists to tinker with something as fundamental as the makeup of the atmosphere by which all life is dependent?

Further, let’s assume you are a true believer in all things global warming, i.e. that it’s wholly man-made and not just mostly a result of natural climate cycles we’ve seen on earth since the beginning of time. Still, there seem to be far better ways for human’s to adapt to a relatively small temperature rise over the next 100 years (and a rise of around 3-4 degrees is the worst case according to projections) than trying to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, possibly causing all kinds of unintended consequences, including some that could be catastrophic.

Regardless, I don’t think too many people are even paying attention to this stuff. Putting aside how accurate the science is or isn’t on global warming, the hysteria surrounds it seems to be a purely beltway phenomenon.

1619303245333.png

There were only 200 viewers watching while Kerry was talking. Most of those people probably work for him in some capacity. In short, he can rant and say silly things, showing a complete disregard for science in the process, but no one is paying attention. He’s a vanity item in the current administration and just a way for Joe Biden to claim he covered this specific base so the left-wing doesn’t go after him.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

https://www.thesun.co.uk/87ab93fb-5c39-4973-81da-d2f435b82044 1:57 min

PRESIDENT Joe Biden's climate plan to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030 could come with significant changes to Americans' daily routines.

Biden announced his ambitious plan at the start of a two-day climate summit that started on Earth Day on Thursday.
1619304641081.png1619304784478.png
In it, Biden promised to slash emissions by over half in a little less than a decade when compared to 2005 numbers, vowing to set the US forward to become a zero-emissions economy by 2050.

Although this plan calls for creating jobs as the country switches to greener energy, the plan might all affect how Americans eat, work, and heat their homes.
"The signs are unmistakable. The science is undeniable. The cost of inaction is mounting," Biden said on Thursday. "This is a moral imperative, an economic imperative."

"Time is short, but I believe we can do this," he continued. "And I believe that we will do. Thank you for being part of the summit."
1619304839743.png1619304917811.png
Biden has yet to release a detailed plan of how he plans to reach the number, but the announcement was still enough for Republicans to criticize it as being unsustainable long-term and causing increased taxes for Americans.

"This is quite the one-two punch," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "Toothless requests of our foreign adversaries... and maximum pain for American citizens."

The Center for Sustainable Systems at Michigan University said cutting small diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by half could help reach those numbers by the 2030 target date.

To reach those numbers, the DailyMail speculated Americans will have to cut their red meat consumption by 90 percent, and cut other animals out by half.

Americans should only consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or about 0.18 ounces daily, which is about a burger a month.

Keeping at the current car culture in the United States, the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy put forth over half of all new car purchases must be electric.

Although EVs only make about two percent of current sales, it would require close to 65 percent of new car and SUV sales, and 10 percent of new trucks, to be electric, to reach the 2030 date.

Electric vehicles cost an average of $55,000 to purchase.

Other ways Americans could be asked to adapt to save the earth include using electric heat sources instead of gas or oil, while other naysayers have pointed to a potential of increased taxes to pay for the goal.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
[COMMENT: The reduction in red meat will likely create a dull, lethargic passive population.]

How The Lack of Protein Affects Your Brain and Overall Health [excerpted]

Effects of Lack of Protein on the Brain and Overall Health

Protein and the Brain
The brain is composed of mostly water and fatty acids. It relies on a steady stream of glucose for energy, burning through a large amount of this simple sugar each day.

The brain is a finicky eater, liking mainly glucose or nothing. It can sometimes lean on short fat compounds though when glucose supplies dwindle for any reason.

There’s relatively little protein within the brain, but none of this means that proteins aren’t important to how your gray matter functions.

In fact, the neurons in the brain communicate with each other through proteins. Amino acid neurotransmitters help the brain complete its job in keeping the body working properly and smoothly.

This means brain health and the rest of the body’s functions become greatly affected when there’s protein deficiency. Here are the different effects of lack of protein on the brain and one’s health:

1. Promotes Brain Growth in Babies During Early Development
Young mother and her toddler girl playing together with finger toys | How The Lack of Protein Affects Your Brain and Overall Health

Protein is a vital part of brain growth during early development.

Neurons may be mostly fat and fueled by glucose, but they use proteins to communicate with one another and control what happens throughout the body.
The enzymes, neurotransmitters, and hormones that carry signals and help accomplish the tasks the brain dictates are made from protein.

According to a study, protein is an important nutrient for fetal and postnatal brain development of babies. Malnutrition of protein results in smaller brains with fewer neurons, lesser RNA and DNA content, and fewer neurotransmitter concentrations.

2. Affects the Mood, Appetite, and Energy Levels
What you eat does affect the brain, alter mood, and change emotions. Protein deficiencies slow down development and lower cognitive function.

A lack of proteins depletes the chemicals in the brain that control mood, appetite, and energy levels. Protein deficiencies have also been linked to depression, anxiety, ADHD, epilepsy, and a certain type of autism.

3. Produces a Neurotransmitter That Makes the Body Feel Tired
Neurons brain connections | How The Lack of Protein Affects Your Brain and Overall Health

A dense meal of carbohydrates can leave you feeling sluggish and tired as it increases the levels of tryptophan in the brain.

The amino acid tryptophan encourages the production of serotonin, a calming neurotransmitter associated with appetite, blood pressure, learning, and sleep patterns.

On the other hand, a protein-rich meal can leave you feeling alert and energetic as levels of the amino acid tyrosine rise. Tyrosine promotes the creation of norepinephrine and dopamine, two neurotransmitters that boost activity, alertness, and energy.

Eating too much protein, though, can lead to an imbalance which causes other problems in the body. Your brain may stay alert with protein, but it also needs carbohydrates for energy.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the RDA (recommended daily intake) for adult men and women is 0.8 grams of protein for every 2 pounds of body weight.

Also, consuming too much alcohol, processed sugar, and caffeine may affect the activities of neurotransmitters.
[excerpted]
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Joe Biden's Climate Denialism
David Harsanyi
David Harsanyi

|Posted: Apr 23, 2021 12:01 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Joe Biden's Climate Denialism

Source: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

In anticipation of the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, a two-day global gathering of more than 40 world leaders, President Joe Biden declared that the United States had a "moral imperative" to adopt an "ambitious" goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

Such an effort, if we were serious about it, would entail massive destruction of wealth, a surrender of our international trade advantages, the creation of a hugely intrusive state-run bureaucracy at home, the inhibition of free markets that have helped make the world a cleaner place and a precipitous drop in the living standards of most citizens -- especially the poor.

Of course, it should be said that those who oppose the expansion of fracking and nuclear energy -- most elected Democrats, it seems -- aren't even remotely serious about "tackling" carbon emissions, anyway. Around 80% of American energy is generated by fossil fuels and nuclear right now. Around 20% is generated by "renewables" -- predominantly wind and hydropower (which is unavailable in most places). Only around 2% of our portfolio consists of inefficient and unreliable solar power -- this, even after decades of subsidies and mandates.

It's always funny to hear people speak about solar panels as if they were some sort of cutting-edge technology. The discovery of the photovoltaic effect goes back to 1888. President Jimmy Carter declared a national "Sun Day" in 1978 and put 30 solar panels atop the White House. One of those panels is now on display at the Science and Technology Museum in China -- not only the top producer of solar panels and carbon emissions but also the nation that would most benefit from the United States' unilateral economic capitulation.

To reach Biden's goal, the United States would need to envelop most of the nation in panels and windmills and then rely on enormous Gaian prayer circles -- may she grant us sunshine and gale-force winds. We would be compelled to eliminate most air travel and cars -- making new ones produces lots of carbon emissions -- and retrofit every home, factory, warehouse and building in America to utilize this type of energy. We would need to dramatically cut back on our meat and dairy intake as well.

"The signs are unmistakable, the science undeniable," Biden claimed. "Cost of inaction keeps mounting." Now, I realize that people repeat these contentions with religious zeal, but the evidence is extraordinarily weak. For one thing, there is action. Market innovations keep creating efficiencies all the time. For another, we live in the healthiest, most equitable, most prosperous, most safe and most peaceful era in human existence. Affordable fossil fuels have done more to eliminate poverty than all the redistributionist programs ever concocted. By nearly every quantifiable measure, the environment is also in better shape now than it was 20, 30 or even 50 years ago. A lot of that is grounded by an economy that relies on affordable energy. Also, though every weather-related event is framed in a cataclysmic way, not that long ago, being killed by the climate was serious concern for most people. Today, it is incredibly rare.

Progressives, however, regularly maintain that we are facing an existential crisis. One might point out that science's predictive abilities on climate have been atrocious. But really, these days, "science" is nothing but a cudgel to push leftist policy prescriptions with little consideration for tradeoffs, reality, or morality.

The Malthusian fanaticism that's been normalized in our political rhetoric is also denialism. "Science," as the media and political class now practice it, has become little more than a means of generating apprehension and fear about progress. It is the denial of the modern technology and competitive markets which continue to allow human beings to adapt to organic and anthropogenic changes in the environment. Even people who mimic doomsday rhetoric seem to understand this intuitively. The average American says they are willing to spend up to $177 a year to avoid climate change, not the approximately $177,000,000 per person it would cost to set arbitrary dates to get rid of a carbon-energy economy.

The choice we're given now pits a thriving open economy against an economy weighed down by centralized (and unratified) worldwide climate-change treaties such as the Paris climate agreement that put little burden on growing economies such as China and India, and all of it on you.

What does that burden look like? After shutting down a large chunk of its economy in 2020, and spending trillions to keep those affected afloat and avert a depression, the United States emissions only fell by 13%. Imagine what 50% might entail. When confronted with these nagging specifics, we often hear how these are aspirational goals. Why would we aspire to make life worse for billions of people?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Loopy Biden Admin Invites Young Mexican Communist to Crap All Over US and Push Marxism at their Online Climate Conference — Takedown Via Sky News

By Jim Hoft
Published April 25, 2021 at 7:20am
xiye-bastida-crackpot.jpg

On Friday the Biden administration gave an international stage to crackpot activist, Xiye Bastida, an 18-year-old Mexican-Indigenous climate justice activist and avowed Communist who now resides in New York City.

This was such an international embarrassment that it made the news in Australia.

Xiye was given a glowing introduction by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a real idiot, who praised the young Mexican for surviving a drought year and then rain and a flood in Mexico. WTH?

Then Xiye Bastida proceeded to pop off a Marxist screed against the US, capitalism, the West, colonialism, and more. She was put on the panel by the Biden administration!

Xiye Bastida: The common crisis is a result of those perpetuating a system of the harmful effects of colonialism, oppression, capitalism and market oriented green rush solutions… We demand that you stop any new fossil fuel infrastructure and existing fossil fuel extraction including pipelines. We demand comprehensive, non-Eurocentric, intersectional climate education including literacy on climate justice, environmental racism and, ancestral and indigenous wisdom.
Of course, this young Marxist propped up by Joe Biden is not addressing any of her comments to China and India.

It would be interesting to learn who’s paying this clown’s bills?

This is such complete bullsh*t they are peddling. What an embarrassing time for the United States.

The SKY News reporter calls this nonsense part of the post-truth world led by the loopy-left Joe Biden administration.


View: https://youtu.be/v2ng4v-YAvI
6:54 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Scientist who served in Obama admin pushes back against prevailing climate change narrative
"Most of the disconnect comes from the long game of telephone that starts with the research literature and runs through the assessment reports to the summaries of the assessment reports and on to the media coverage," Koonin wrote.

By Alex Nitzberg
Updated: April 25, 2021 - 6:10pm

Dr. Steven E. Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy during part of the Obama administration, is pushing back against the widespread alarmist narrative about climate change.

"Yes, it's true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that — to paraphrase the classic movie 'The Princess Bride' — 'I do not think 'The Science' says what you think it says,'" Koonin wrote in an opinion piece published by the New York Post, which the outlet noted was an adapted excerpt from Koonin's forthcoming book titled "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn't, and Why It Matters."

"For example, both research literature and government reports state clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years," he wrote.

Koonin noted that Greenland's ice sheet is not decreasing any faster now than it was eight decades ago.

He said that most individuals receive information that has already passed through several layers of filtering.

"Most of the disconnect comes from the long game of telephone that starts with the research literature and runs through the assessment reports to the summaries of the assessment reports and on to the media coverage. There are abundant opportunities to get things wrong — both accidentally and on purpose — as the information goes through filter after filter to be packaged for various audiences," Koonin wrote. He said that "most people don't get the whole story."

Koonin noted that in 2013 he "was asked by the American Physical Society to lead an update of its public statement on climate. As part of that effort, in January 2014 I convened a workshop with a specific objective: to 'stress test' the state of climate science," he explained. "I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed."

He said that he learned that: "Humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The results from many different climate models disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations. In short, the science is insufficient to make useful predictions about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it."
 

TammyinWI

Talk is cheap

Biden’s Climate Requirements: Cut 90% of Red Meat From Diet; Americans Can Only Eat One Burger Per Month

By Cristina Laila
Published April 23, 2021 at 9:15pm
IMG_0374.jpg

Joe Biden on Friday pledged to cut the US’s carbon emissions at least 50% by 2030
.
Some of the climate requirements are going to mean big changes for Americans.

Biden’s ambitious plan could mean Americans will be forced to cut 90% of red meat from their diets which equates to about one average-sized hamburger per month.

Americans may also be forced to purchase a $55,000 electric vehicle under Biden’s Marxist climate plan.

The Daily Mail reported:

Go take a long walk off a short dock, Biden and commie czars and comrades, you are all delusional and living in a fairy tale.
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
The Leftists are using both the claims of global warming and covid-19 as a way to scare the public into accepting their dystopian global control.
 

Troke

On TB every waking moment

Biden’s Climate Requirements: Cut 90% of Red Meat From Diet; Americans Can Only Eat One Burger Per Month

By Cristina Laila
Published April 23, 2021 at 9:15pm
IMG_0374.jpg

Joe Biden on Friday pledged to cut the US’s carbon emissions at least 50% by 2030
.
Some of the climate requirements are going to mean big changes for Americans.

Biden’s ambitious plan could mean Americans will be forced to cut 90% of red meat from their diets which equates to about one average-sized hamburger per month.

Americans may also be forced to purchase a $55,000 electric vehicle under Biden’s Marxist climate plan.

The Daily Mail reported:
As I have ranted for over 20 yrs, in a properly regulated society, the Lesser Classes do not eat red meat. My peasant ancestors didn't and there is no reason why my descendants should.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOjYXqrNciE
14:20 min

The Great Reset TAKES HOLD in Europe: Businesses may be forced to comply SOON

•Apr 26, 2021


Glenn Beck


The World Economic Forum isn’t trying to hide their plans for The Great Reset — details to 'reset' the global economy have been published on their own website! But still, despite that AND the warning signs, many are still quick to refute this masterplan as a ‘conspiracy theory’ or as something that will never actually take hold. But it IS happening NOW in Europe. Glenn explains a huge new development for the Great Reset that MAJORLY could effect not only European businesses — but American ones as well. Businesses — and citizens — may be forced to comply earlier than you think...
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
As I have ranted for over 20 yrs, in a properly regulated society, the Lesser Classes do not eat red meat. My peasant ancestors didn't and there is no reason why my descendants should.
Perhaps the fact that there was so much native game and domesticated sources of red meat protein available in historic America, contributed to the development of a robust entrepreneurial middle class.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Dr. Mercola reveals how Bill Gates is using the coming COVID Commission to advance The Great Reset

Dr. Mercola has been accused of being a "conspiracy theorist" among physicians. The label is meant as a pejorative, but in reality his theories have proven to be 100% true time and time again.

by Dr. Joseph Mercola
April 27, 2021

Dr. Mercola reveals how Bill Gates is using the coming COVID Commission to advance The Great Reset

Editor’s Note: There was a time not too long ago when I thought most conspiracy theories were just the “fringe” having fun with speculation. I had a mild interest in some of them, mostly for entertainment value but also because there were the occasional gems that seemed based in reality. For the last couple of years, I’ve come to realize that there were a lot more credible theories out there than I originally believed and, through diligent research and the discernment of a natural skeptic, have developed a good nose for the theories that deserve stronger consideration.

Some of it comes down to the source, and I’ve found in recent months that Dr. Joseph Mercola is quite credible. It isn’t just his expertise in the topics that he covers. It’s the way he and his team are able to dig deeper beneath the surface to reveal truths that combine to form coherent theories.

Another important component is the subject material itself. When discussing “The Great Reset,” this so-called pandemic, Bill Gates, and the cabal of forces arrayed against us right now to establish totalitarian control over the citizens of the United States and the world, things tend to fit a bit too perfectly to ignore.

His latest piece is no exception; the information in the article he penned below is nothing short of bombshells on top of bombshells that are all verifiable and that have been completely ignored or covered up by mainstream media. Read carefully and spread the truth, friends.

Coming COVID Commission is a Gates-led cover-up
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
  • A corporate-funded COVID Commission Planning Group is being set up to create and support an investigative commission like that for 9/11. This is a classic illustration of the fox guarding the henhouse
  • The planning group is led by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel
  • Zelikow is also a strategy group member of the Aspen Institute, a technocratic hub that has groomed and mentored executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization
  • The COVID Commission Planning Group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health personas and former government officials, and is backed by four charitable foundations — all of whom have histories revealing them to be part of the technocratic alliance that for years have been plotting and planning for the wealth redistribution and global power grab we’re now experiencing
  • These foundations include Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, Stand Together Foundation (Koch Network) and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which co-hosted Event 201, a pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” is also involved
Having gone as far as he can with the World Health Organization’s cover-up, Bill Gates takes another bite at the apple with his corporate-funded investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to cleverly cover up this massive conspiracy with an “official” investigation.

While the so-called COVID Commission Planning Group — set up to create and support an investigative commission like that for 9/11 — is advertised as a nonpartisan effort, you really couldn’t come up with a more dangerously biased set of participants.

In short, individuals and organizations with some of the most egregious conflicts of interest, and everything to gain by being in charge of analyzing and writing the history of this pandemic, are leading and supporting this effort. This is a classic fox guarding the henhouse scenario.

According to the Miller Center, the planning group will lay out the plans for nine separate task forces, each focused on one of the following topics, to lay “the foundation for a future commission to investigate”:1

The origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its prevention

Philip Zelikow — Chief Investigator for the Cabal
The chosen leader of this new planning group is Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission2 and a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel.3,4 While Gates may not be a physical member of this planning group, he’s certainly involved indirectly. Of that we can be virtually assured.

Zelikow, a former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, is also a current strategy group member of the Aspen Institute,5 a technocratic hub that has groomed and mentored executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization.

He also directed the Markle Foundation’s Task Force on National Security in the Information Age,6 the focus of which has been to make information relating to potential security threats discoverable and accessible to officials without breaking civil liberty laws.7 As reported by the University of Virginia:8
“The planning group hopes to prepare the way for a potential National COVID Commission set up to help America and the world learn from this pandemic and safeguard against future threats. ‘This is perhaps the greatest crisis suffered by America, if not the world, since 1945,’ said Zelikow … ‘It is vital to take stock, in a massive way, of what happened and why.
These sorts of civilizational challenges may become more common in the 21st century, and we need to learn from this crisis to strengthen our society … Scholars and journalists will do their jobs, but there is also a role for the kind of massive investigation and research effort that only a large-scale commission can provide.’”
Foundations Backing the COVID Commission
As reported by the Miller Center,9 the COVID Commission Planning Group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health personas and former government officials, and is backed by four charitable foundations — all of whom have histories revealing them to be part of the technocratic alliance that for years, in some cases decades, have been plotting and planning for the wealth redistribution and global power grab we’re now experiencing. These foundations include:
  • Schmidt Futures,10 founded by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet Inc., which owns the greatest artificial intelligence (AI) team in the world.11
  • The Skoll Foundation, founded by Jeff Skoll, a former eBay president, to “pursue his vision of a sustainable world” by catalyzing “transformational social change.”12 It acts as a support organization to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Skoll has funded pandemic preparedness and prevention since 2009 through the Skoll Global Threats Fund, and his movie production company Participant Media produced the movie “Contagion” and Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”13
  • Stand Together Foundation, which is part of the Koch Network, founded by Charles Koch. Its primary focus is criminal justice and poverty issues, and it teaches Koch’s “market based management” philosophy to community leaders.14
  • The Rockefeller Foundation, which in April 2020 released the white paper,15 “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan,” laying out a strategic framework clearly intended to become part of a permanent surveillance and social control structure that severely limits personal liberty and freedom of choice. I wrote about this in “Rockefeller Foundation’s Plan to Track Americans.”
The tracking system it calls for is eerily similar to that already being used in China, where residents are required to enroll in a health condition registry. Once enrolled, they get a personal QR code, which they must then enter in order to gain access to grocery stores and other facilities.16 The plan also demands access to other medical data.


Operation Lockstep
The Rockefellers, like Gates, built an empire around health and medicine despite having no medical expertise whatsoever. Their influence is rooted in money, which is spent in self-serving ways. While Rockefeller and Gates are both known as philanthropists, their donations grow their wealth, as the money they spend on “charity” ultimately ends up benefiting their own investments and/or business interests.

In addition to the COVID-19 Action Plan document cited above — which doesn’t even try to hide its draconian overreach and intent to permanently alter life and society as we know it — the Rockefeller Foundation also published a 2010 report17 titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which they laid out their “Lockstep” scenario — a coordinated global response to a lethal pandemic.

While the name and origin of the virus differs, the scenario laid out in this document matches many of the details of our present. A deadly viral pandemic. A deadly effect on economies. International mobility coming to a screeching halt, debilitating industries, tourism and global supply chains. “Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers,” the document reads.

“In the absence of official containment protocols,” the virus spread like wildfire. In this narrative, the U.S. administration’s failure to place strict travel restrictions on its citizens proved to be a fatal flaw, as it allowed the virus to spread past its borders. China, on the other hand, fared particularly well due to its rapid imposition of universal quarantines of all citizens, which proved effective for curbing the spread of the virus.

Many other nations where leaders “flexed their authority” and imposed severe restrictions on their citizens — “from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries of communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” — also fared well.

These and other reports spell out what the ultimate plan actually is. It’s to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people. It’s to use coordinated pandemic response as a justification for wealth redistribution and the resetting of the global financial system.

What most fail to realize is that the wealth distribution they’re talking about is not distribution from the wealthy to the poor, even though that’s what they want you to believe. It’s to centralize wealth at the top and eliminate private property rights and private business ownership from the lower and middle classes. The “equitable” living standards they’re talking about is poverty for all but themselves. It’s really crucial to begin to grasp this reality now, before it’s too late.

Part 1 of 2
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2

Pieces of a Global Puzzle
The Rockefeller Foundation is also a founding sponsor of The Mojaloop Foundation, set up to “promote digital payments for people outside the financial system, with support from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”18

Right there we have Google, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, all in one little nonprofit with a heart set on giving poor people access to digital banking using their cellphones. This is probably the three most dangerous nonprofits on the planet, as they are likely the most powerful and committed to global tyranny.

All-digital banking using a centralized digital currency is a key component of the Great Reset, so this project has little to do with honest philanthropy and everything to do with making sure everyone can be swept into the digital net, which will include round-the-clock surveillance and tracking of physical location and biological data, a digital ID, along with your health data (including but not limited to vaccination status), banking and, ultimately, a social credit system.

All of the pieces needed for the Great Reset are already in place; it’s just a matter of seeing how all the separate pieces fit together. For example, Gavi, the vaccine alliance, set up with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the ID2020 Alliance to launch a digital identity program called ID2020.19
Gates also funded the creation of EarthNow, a project involving 500 satellites equipped with machine learning technology to surveil the entire planet with real-time video.20 As one would expect, AI — a Google specialty — is also a key component of this global surveillance plot.

COVID-19 — A Launch Pad for the Great Reset
Another key player in the COVID Commission Planning Group is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. As you may recall, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security co-hosted the pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” known as Event 201, in October 2019 along with the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum.

The event eerily predicted what would happen just 10 weeks later, when COVID-19 appeared. Gates and the World Economic Forum, in turn, are both partnered21 with the United Nations which, while keeping a relatively low profile, appears to be at the heart of the globalist takeover agenda.

The World Economic Forum, while a private organization, works as the social and economic branch of the U.N. and is a key driving force behind modern technocracy and the Great Reset agenda. Its founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, publicly declared the need for a global “reset” to restore order in June 2020.22

Technocratic rule, which is what the Great Reset will bring about, hinges on the use of technology — in particular artificial intelligence, digital surveillance and Big Data collection (which is what 5G is for) — and the digitization of industry, banking and government, which in turn allows for the automation of social engineering and social rule (although that part is never expressly stated).

Beyond pandemic preparedness and response, the justification for the implementation of the Great Reset agenda in its totality will be climate change. The Great Reset, sometimes referred to as the “build back better” plan, specifically calls for all nations to implement “green” regulations and “sustainable development goals”23,24 as part of the post-COVID recovery effort.

But the end goal is far from what the typical person envisions when they hear these plans. The end goal is to turn us into serfs without rights to privacy, private ownership or anything else. In short, the pandemic is being used to destroy the local economies around the world, which will then allow the World Economic Forum to come in and “rescue” debt-ridden countries. The price for this salvation is your liberty.

The Great Reset
While the New World Order was long derided as a “conspiracy theory” that you’d have to be crazy to believe, the Great Reset, which is simply a rebranding of the same old NWO plan that has been in circulation for well over a decade, is now public fact.

Many world leaders have spoken about it in an official capacity, and in June 2020, Zia Khan, senior vice president of innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation penned the article25 “Rebuilding Toward the Great Reset: Crisis, COVID-19, and the Sustainable Development Goals,” reviewing the “social crisis” necessitating the world’s acceptance of a new world order.
The article was co-written with John McArthur, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is one of several technocratic think-tanks. Keeping in mind what I’ve just said about what the Great Reset is really all about, and the justifications used to implement the theft of wealth and freedom, read how they posit these changes as being in your best interest:
“Upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity. Outdated or unjust norms can succumb to society’s pressing need for better approaches. For example, the need for massive and urgent government intervention has drawn fresh attention to social safety nets and the possibility of dramatic policy enhancements.
Tragic consequences of racial discrimination have catapulted awareness of systemic problems and triggered prospects for much-needed social reforms. Rapid environmental improvements linked to economic shutdown have rekindled consciousness of the profound interconnections between ecosystems, economies, and societies …
Rather than passively allowing norms to evolve through inertia or randomness, we can all pursue actions for Response and, soon enough, Recovery in a manner that improve the odds of a Reset toward better long-term outcomes.
Fortunately, we already have a strong starting point for what the world’s economic, social, and environmental outcomes should be. Five years ago, in 2015, all 193 UN member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common set of priorities to be achieved in all countries by 2030.”
Another article titled “The Great Reset,” written by Jimmy Chang, CFA, for the Rockefeller Capital Management blog, reads, in part:26
“Regarding the post-pandemic reconstruction effort, progressives, led by the so-called Davos elites (of the World Economic Forum fame), are advocating an urgent ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism to ensure equality and sustainability. They also call for harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., Big Tech) to address health and social challenges.
Their vision for the future could be gleaned from a 2016 article penned by a young Danish politician with the title ‘Welcome to 2030. I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Better.’ This title was so controversial that its posting on the World Economic Forum website was changed to a bland ‘Here’s how life could change in my city by the year 2030.’
The pace of the Great Reset will in part depend on the final outcome of the U.S. election as it will determine whether Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Still, some resets will be unavoidable since COVID-19 has exacerbated some longstanding issues such as the world’s debt dependency and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There will be elevated levels of bankruptcy and debt restructuring. Governments may further increase their leverage to bail out the economy and placate electorates that demand more generous social contracts.
Riccardo Fraccaro, Italy’s Secretary of the Council of Ministers and a close aide of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, even floated a trial balloon on sovereign debt restructuring by suggesting that the European Central Bank consider ‘canceling sovereign bonds bought during the pandemic or perpetually extending their maturity.’
Businesses will also need to respond to lasting behavioral changes caused by the pandemic. In sum, there is no going back to the pre-COVID-19 world, and markets will need to adjust.”
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
The Great Reset is not some wild conspiracy theory but a publicly released agenda that is moving forward, whether we like it or not. I believe the only way to stop it is through our collective responses to the various pieces and parts of the plan that are being rolled out. They want you to believe that none of the things being introduced have anything to do with each other but, in fact, they are all pieces of the same puzzle.

The final image is the inside of a prison cell. It may not be a physical prison. It may be largely digital in nature. It may look like the four walls of your own home. But it’s a prison nonetheless.

I believe it would be a tragic mistake to trust Gates, Rockefeller, Google or any of the other players — including Zelikow — that are being brought before us as the saviors of the day. They’re all wolves in sheep’s clothing.

To learn more about the hidden power structure running this global reorganization toward authoritarian control, see “Bill Gates Wants to Realize Global Vision in His Lifetime,” “The Great Reset and Build Back Better,” “Technocracy and the Great Reset” and “Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?

Be Part of the Answer
The good news is, Americans now have a brand-new weapon in our fight for freedom. I recently interviewed Naomi Wolf about her new digital platform, Daily Clout, that will allow citizens to lobby bills to their legislators.

Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don’t have lawyers at their beck and call. Daily Clout has hired an attorney who is busy drafting turnkey bills that protect us against the continued erosion of freedom and reestablish rights and liberties. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that. As explained by Wolf:
“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we’ve been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’
It’s a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It’s why we founded Daily Clout, but it’s beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It’s not just for this issue.
Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”
To get involved, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign. Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.

There’s a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events.

The Great Reset is at our doorstep, and your freedom, and that of future generations, hinges on you getting involved and fighting for it. The Daily Clout platform can be a major help in this regard, as using legislation to preserve and protect our rights and freedoms is far preferable to more violent alternatives or resigning ourselves to the fate prescribed by our globalist would-be “overlords.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

James Bond Goes Green? MI6 Chief Suggests Spying On Nations To Ensure Compliance With Climate Pledges

WEDNESDAY, APR 28, 2021 - 05:45 AM

With the CIA branding itself as a woke Western intelligence agency, it was only a matter of time before the UK's MI6 tried to one-up their US counterpart; potentially spying on the world's biggest polluters. In something that sounds like it should belong on The Onion or Babylon Bee, the head of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) - commonly known as MI6 - suggested that they should engage in so-called "Green Spying" on nations which make climate change pledges in order to make sure they're keeping them.

Via Gript media
In comments to Times Radio, MI6 head Richard Moore - known as "C" - claimed that man-made climate change is "foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet," adding: "Our job is to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone and so clearly we are going to support what is the foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet, which is around the climate emergency, and of course we have a role in that space."

"Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to," he continued, which - depending on one's read of his wording - could imply this is already happening.

"As somebody used to say - 'trust, but verify'," said Moore, adding "On climate change, where you need everyone to come on board and to play fair, then occasionally just check to make sure they are."


MI6 HQ in Vauxhall, London, via BBC/PA Media

No doubt actual terrorists and enemy operatives will feel relieved that countless valuable resources will be poured into this supposed top agenda of ensuring industrialized countries will "keep climate change promises". We can imagine they're having a good laugh in the halls of Beijing's intelligence bureaus...

To some degree the Brits appear to be following the lead of the United States. The Biden administration was the first to elevate climate change to the level of a "national security" matter after he made John Kerry his 'Climate Envoy' - with a seat on the National Security Council. Last week, Biden announced at a climate summit that the United States would cut emissions in half by 2030 after having rejoined the Paris Climate agreement shortly after taking office.

Perhaps it's only a matter of time before the CIA or NSA launches their own "green spying" operations - if they haven't already.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Global Deep State: A New World Order Brought To You By COVID-19

WEDNESDAY, APR 28, 2021 - 12:00 AM
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power.”
- Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world.


It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.

Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it has become increasingly obvious that we have entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations.

This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which has seen governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, has shifted this transformation into high gear.

Fascism has become a global menace.
It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, the pharmaceutical industry and, most recently, by the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins.

The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care

Global Disease
The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled us into a whole new global frontier.

Those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes will find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

We are about to find our ability to access, engage and move about in the world dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who have not.
“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times.
“The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”
This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

Global Surveillance
Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice.
Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:
“The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”
Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

Global War Profiteering
War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Global Policing
Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations.

There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, you can bet that the government and its global partners have already struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished.

In its place is a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

Given the trajectory and dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

It’s taken less than a generation for our freedoms to be eroded and the Global Deep State’s structure to be erected, expanded and entrenched.

Mark my words: the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State.

Now there are those who will tell you that any mention of a New World Order government—a power elite conspiring to rule the world—is the stuff of conspiracy theories.

I am not one of those skeptics.

I wholeheartedly believe that one should always mistrust those in power, take alarm at the first encroachment on one’s liberties, and establish powerful constitutional checks against government mischief and abuse.

I can also attest to the fact that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I have studied enough of this country’s history—and world history—to know that governments (the U.S. government being no exception) are at times indistinguishable from the evil they claim to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

And I have lived long enough to see many so-called conspiracy theories turn into cold, hard fact.

Remember, people used to scoff at the notion of a Deep State (a.k.a. Shadow Government). They used to doubt that fascism could ever take hold in America, and sneer at any suggestion that the United States was starting to resemble Nazi Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.

As I detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re beginning to know better, aren’t we?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomats Fighting Political Warfare Against the West

April 27, 2021 16:33, Last Updated: April 28, 2021 11:36
By Frank Fang and Cathy He

News Analysis

From France to Venezuela to the United States, the Chinese communist regime’s diplomats have been busy this past year blustering, threatening, and denigrating their host countries as part of an all-out effort to advance Beijing’s agenda on the world stage.

This aggressive style, dubbed “wolf warrior” diplomacy, was on full display in March during the first face-to-face meeting between Biden administration officials and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) diplomats in Alaska. In a widely publicized blow-up, Chinese diplomats responded to U.S. criticism of the CCP’s aggressions domestically and abroad by launching into an extended tirade accusing the United States of similar infractions.

Yang Jiechi, the top CCP official in charge of foreign affairs, broke protocol by taking up more than 15 minutes for opening remarks (the agreed-upon time was two minutes), during which he lambasted the United States over what he described as its struggling democracy, poor human rights record, and unfair foreign and trade policies.

After both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan responded in defense of the United States, Yang retorted: “Well, it was my bad. When I entered this room, I should have reminded the U.S. side of paying attention to its tone in our respective opening remarks, but I didn’t.”

He then accused the U.S. side of speaking in a “condescending way,” and breaking diplomatic protocols. “So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength,” Yang added.

Chinese state media made hay of the clash, spinning the event as a win for the Chinese diplomats, who exuded “confident body language” in contrast with the “closed off” gestures of their U.S. counterparts.

But the display was not only for domestic consumption. Emboldened by the regime’s purported success in weathering the pandemic compared to other nations, the CCP has recently been pushing the narrative of “the East is rising while the West is declining”—and its diplomats’ behavior is embodying that message on the international stage.

“The wolf warriors personify the desire to present the PRC [People’s Republic of China] as a powerful country that can set the rules for world order,” June Teufel Dreyer, professor of political science at the University of Miami told The Epoch Times in an email.

Dreyer described the confrontational approach as an intensification of a trend that could be observed as early as 2010, when Yang had a similar outburst at an ASEAN regional security meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam. Fuming at 12 countries who raised their concerns over Beijing’s growing assertiveness in the disputed South China Sea, Yang fired back, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact,” while staring at the foreign minister of tiny Singapore.

Rise of the ‘Wolf Warrior’

The CCP’s wolf warrior diplomacy came into full force during the pandemic last year, as Beijing moved to aggressively fend off international criticism of its cover-up of the CCP virus outbreak. Since then, foreign criticism of the CCP’s actions, from its human rights abuses in Xinjiang to its military aggression in the South China Sea, has routinely drawn fiery responses from officials on Twitter and other forums.

The descriptor is named after two hit jingoistic Chinese movies of the “Wolf Warrior” franchise, released in 2015 and 2017. The movies centered around a Chinese special forces soldier fighting foreign mercenaries at China’s southern border and Africa.

Examples of the regime’s wolf warrior diplomacy abound.

In a now-infamous tweet, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian last March accused the U.S. Army of bringing the virus to Wuhan when participating in a military sports event in October 2019, prompting a firestorm of criticism from the United States and Western democracies. The baseless accusation marked the start of Beijing’s ongoing campaign to spread virus origin disinformation to deflect attention away from its mishandling of the outbreak and shun scrutiny on the possibility that it leaked from a Wuhan lab.

Also in March, the Chinese Embassy in Caracas slammed unnamed Venezuelan officials for calling the virus the “China” or “Wuhan” virus by telling them to “put on masks and shut up.”

Zhao struck again in November, drawing fury from Australia for tweeting a photoshopped image of an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to the throat of a young child. The image was a reference to a report that found some Australian special forces soldiers unlawfully killed civilians in Afghanistan during a mission there. The tweet came amid heightened tensions between the two countries after Australia called for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus. Beijing responded with economic coercion—by slapping import restrictions on a range of Australian goods including beef, coal, barley, and wine.

The brawly style is a direction set straight from CCP leader Xi Jinping, Anders Corr, publisher of the Journal of Political Risk and founder of Corr Analytics, told The Epoch Times.

“[Xi] wants an aggressive diplomacy to try and scare the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and their allies into territorial and trade concessions,” Corr said in an email. “He believes that might makes right, and therefore a strong China should be duly accommodated.”

When countries push back against Beijing’s assertiveness, Xi doubles down by “direct[ing] his diplomats to increase the volume, intensity, and even anger of their diplomacy,” Corr said.

‘Wolf Nature’ as ‘Party Nature

It was unclear when the term “wolf warrior” was first used to describe CCP diplomats or diplomatic tactics, but two Taiwanese media used it around October 2018 to describe the regime’s diplomatic responses after Chinese tourists were removed from a hotel in Sweden by local police and a subsequent satirical talk show in the country criticized Chinese tourists in general.

In response to these incidents, the Chinese Embassy in Sweden issued a statement claiming that Sweden was not safe for Chinese tourists to travel to. Diba Central Army, a popular Chinese social media platform known for allegiance to the CCP, also called on its users to “bombard the Facebook pages of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs” and the talk show’s host, according to China’s hawkish state-run outlet Global Times.

Following the 2018 incident, BBC Chinese used the term to describe a July 2019 heated Twitter exchange between Chinese foreign ministry’s spokesperson Zhao Lijian and former U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice, in which Zhao made racist comments about black and white populations in Washington. The term was later picked up by the Global Times and gained traction during the pandemic as a way to describe the CCP’s bare-knuckled responses to rising global criticism over a range of issues.

The concept underlying “wolf warrior,” however, finds its roots in Maoist thought, going to the heart of the CCP’s ideology. Then-CCP leader Mao Zedong, Chinese media reported, told the regime’s first diplomats, “Diplomatic work is a political struggle. You don’t fight using weapons, you fight with your pen and mouth,” in a statement chiming with the Party’s expansive doctrine of political warfare. The strategy calls for using all tactics short of full-on military assaults to defeat an enemy.

Having “wolf nature” is equivalent to having a “Party nature,” that is, the quality possessed by people who have absolute loyalty to the CCP, the municipal government in Nantong, a city in coastal China’s Jiangsu Province, said on its website, reposting a 2020 article from a local newspaper.

Outside of people, the concept has also been used to describe institutional cultures. A 2006 social science paper analyzed how corporate “wolf culture” existed at China’s telecom giant Huawei and computer maker Lenovo. Former employees at Huawei previously told The Epoch Times that the company zealously promoted “wolf culture,” a philosophy advocated by founder Ren Zhengfei, who drew from his background with the Chinese military.

Official Endorsement

CCP officials have publicly endorsed this style. Last May, Liu Xiaoming, who was the Chinese ambassador to the UK at the time, told China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV that Chinese diplomats should act like “wolf warriors.”

“Some people say that there are many ‘wolf warriors’ in China. I believe there are ‘wolf warriors’ because there are ‘wolves’ in this world. Thus comes the necessity of ‘wolf warriors’ to fight these ‘wolves,’” Liu said.

“So I encourage diplomats at all levels of the [Chinese] embassies to take on the fight proactively” whenever they see a “wolf.”

Months later, in a daily briefing in December, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said she didn’t “see any problem in living with that ‘wolf-warrior’ title.”

Hua also quoted Mao, who said, “We will not attack unless we are attacked. If we are attacked, we will certainly counterattack.”

Beijing also claims it has the support of the people to engage in such a form of diplomacy. In December, Global Times reported that 71.2 percent said Beijing should adopt “wolf warrior” diplomacy, in a recent survey of 1,945 people in 16 Chinese cities.

Ultimately, however, the CCP’s methods have been backfiring, according to Corr.
Other countries quickly recognize it for what it is, are repulsed by its crudeness, and respond through closer economic and military coordination and alliance-building,” he said.

For Dreyer, the United States and other countries should send a clear message that the regime’s behavior is not acceptable.

“Countries must counter Chinese aggression by refusing to accept its territorial claims, by being vigilant against its united front tactics, by calling out its soft power and sharp power tactics,” she said.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Next On The List Of American Catastrophes? A Western Megadrought

THURSDAY, APR 29, 2021 - 05:10 PM
Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

I’ve written many articles for The Organic Prepper about the coming food shortages. Not just in the United States but all across the world. Food isn’t the only thing that is soon going to be in short supply.

Fresh, clean water appears to be one of the prime shortages facing humanity today. And this problem is only going to get worse in the future. The American West is facing a water crisis not seen since the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl days. Ironic, since we’re also seeing a lot of similarities to the Great Depression, too.



This past year saw drought in the American West deepen
According to research published in the Journal Science, portions of the United States entered the beginning stages of megadrought.

From the Columbia University site:
All told, the researchers say that rising temperatures are responsible for about half the pace and severity of the current drought. If this overall warming were subtracted from the equation, the current drought would rank as the 11th worst detected — bad, but nowhere near what it has developed into.

“It doesn’t matter if this is exactly the worst drought ever,” said coauthor Benjamin Cook, who is affiliated with Lamont and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “What matters is that it has been made much worse than it would have been because of climate change.” Since temperatures are projected to keep rising, it is likely the drought will continue for the foreseeable future; or fade briefly only to return, say the researchers.

“Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts,” said Williams. “We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while. But going forward, we’ll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought.” Williams said it is conceivable the region could stay arid for centuries. “That’s not my prediction right now, but it’s possible,” he said.
If not climate change, what caused the drought in the American West?

MSM, anti-human and anti-progress left are howling that climate change caused the drought. Then again, when are they ever howling any other culprit besides climate change, racism, or COVID?

There are numerous causes for the drought in the American West, some human-made and some natural. Drought may be due solely to, or found in combination with, weather conditions; economic or political actions; or population and farming.

The fact is it is happening. Drought is here. Those of us in the know need to be prepared to deal with it.

The Colorado River is experiencing drought like never before

The Colorado River itself is experiencing a drought that will affect several states and Mexico. It will also affect the food supply, economic production, and land topography throughout the American West.

The biggest reservoir on the river, Lake Mead, has dramatically declined over the past twenty years. It is now standing at only 40% of its full capacity. This summer, Lake Mead is projected to fall to the lowest levels since filled in the 1930s, after the construction of Hoover Dam.


The reservoir near Las Vegas is fast approaching a point that will result in the first-ever shortage declaration by the federal government. That declaration will lead to dramatic cuts in water deliveries to Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.
Arizona is in line for the most significant reductions under a 2019 agreement aimed at preventing Lake Mead from falling to critical lows.

Colorado River streams are shrinking due to the drought

Streams that feed the river in its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains have shrunk considerably in the past year. The arid soil in its watershed is soaking up the melting snow. The amount of water projected to fall into Lake Powell at the Arizona-Utah state line over the next four months is among the lowest totals in years. (About 45% of the long term average.)

This drought has dramatically worsened in the last year, not only for the Colorado River but across the West. One year ago, about 4% of the West was in severe drought. Now, that number is about 58%. That’s 58% that is in severe, extreme, or exceptional drought.

Wildfires, dying crops, shrinking water supply all potential results of drought

This means that grazing lands are parched, leading some ranchers to sell off cattle and reduce their herds. Some indigenous farmers who rely on rains have seen their crops wither.

In Arizona, officials are warning for the potential for especially severe wildfires as a result. In the Salt and Verde rivers, which supply Phoenix with water, the snowpack was far below average, reducing runoff and shrinking the amount of water flowing into the reservoirs.

Some say there is nothing we can do about the drought
But the Malthusians are hard at work, suggesting Climate Change is killing us all and there is nothing to be done but to live with less.

Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, stated:
We might have to learn to live permanently with less than 2.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water. “the challenge is going to be to find a path forward in which we continue to protect Lake Mead, continue to look at doing what we can do to make the Colorado River more sustainable for lots of different purposes, and to find a plan that is as simple as possible.

“It’s important for people to understand that we’re dealing with not only a limited system but a shrinking system and that that has real implications for water use throughout the Colorado River Basin,” said Anne Castle, Senior Fellow at the University of Colorado Law Schools’ Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources.
A couple of years back, California restricted water usage intensely. Although Politifact and Snopes tried to label Daisy’s article about this as fiction, it turned out that her article was indeed true. This came to the attention of a reader from South Africa who shared the restrictions of water usage for average citizens there which made California’s restrictions look downright generous.

Drought and other factors likely to lead to citizens begging for water

Whatever the cause or the proposed solution, the fact is the United States will soon be facing a water crisis. The crop shortages and migrations that will come from this shortage are likely to eclipse anything seen in American history.

Additionally, privatizing water resources and the fight over control of water independence could have Americans find themselves as actual peasants. Will we be begging for access to clean, drinkable water from private companies and the government?

In 2021, water is just one more casualty of the Great Reset.

[COMMENT: Part of this issue is instream flows for fish. CA is on the southern edge of the salmon habitat region. That poses natural problems in drought years when the federal government fails to decrease flow demands from a normal year. In the Sacramento Delta, the Delta smelt commands flows - even though annual net counting has yielded none of the species in the past several years. Also, there is the absolute insane drive by environmentalists to tear down dams as barriers to fish and block the construction of new ones. A lot of this issue is mismanagement of water by the state and federal government and under Biden, it will only get worse. Also, you don't build massive housing developments in southern CA and expect water to come from elsewhere.]
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Red States Are Fighting Back Against The Reset – What Does This Mean For The Future?

THURSDAY, APR 29, 2021 - 11:50 PM
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

The past year I have been writing extensively about what I call the “great conservative migration”; a shift in US demographics not seen since the Great Depression. Approximately 8.9 million Americans have relocated since the beginning of the covid lockdowns according to the US Postal service, and a large portion of these people are leaving left-leaning blue states for conservative red states in the west and the south. States like California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey were at the top of the list of states people wanted to escape.



The response from leftist states has been amusing. California, for instance, has tried to obscure the data on population loss and has dismissed the existence of the migration. They claim that the state population is actually rising, but fail to mention that most of California’s population “gains” have been from babies born along with an increase in illegal immigration. This has not offset the 267,000 individuals and families that left the state in the last three months 2020 alone.

That’s an entire city of people, gone in 90 days.

And where are these people going? Places like Idaho, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, etc. ALL red states that are fighting back against draconian covid mandates and other unconstitutional measures. The only outlier seems to be Oregon, which also has seen a population spike, and this indeed appears to be a migration of Californians to the north.

This leads some conservative groups to believe there is an “invasion” going on of liberals into red states. After looking at the data and meeting many people moving to my own area in Montana, I find the “liberal invasion” narrative to be fraudulent.

Leftists don’t relocate to red states, at least not very often. They do not run away from their safe spaces. Rather, they relocate an hour or two from the cities they are addicted to. This is what the data from San Francisco shows. With over 80% of people moving from the city staying within California. In other words, some leftists want to get out of the cities, but they don’t want to move far from their beloved progressive Utopias and they certainly don’t plan on embedding in conservative strongholds and trying to “take over”.

Why this theory persists is beyond me as it has no basis in reality.

No, the people moving across state lines today are mostly conservatives, they are congregating en masse in red states, and the effects have been rather dramatic.

Home prices have skyrocketed due to extreme demand. In Montana, people are buying real estate sight unseen, a lot of it raw land that they are trying to build on. Lumber prices have tripled, and anyone in the construction business is booked a year and a half out. There are new residents actually scouring the message boards looking for ANYONE that can do work for them. There is nobody available. No one I know has seen anything like it in their lifetime.

Luckily, a lot of these people seem to be on the same page in terms of principles.

Those I have met are all conservative and the majority of them are preppers.

They moved here because they know what is coming and they want to be surrounded by like minded neighbors when the manure hits the fan. Specifically, they do not want to be caught isolated in a blue state where vaccine passports, masks and lockdowns become a regular part of life for them and their children. They want to remain free.

On the other hand, I am also hearing rumors that the relatively small number of leftists that live in my county want to leave. Some have expressed the need to “get out” and vacation in places like Portland, Oregon, where they “feel safe” because “everyone wears masks”. And I say, good for them. Hopefully they will stay there. These types of people are miserable excuses for human beings and they make everyone else around them miserable by constantly whining about how “no one follows the rules”.

As a point of reference, there have been only 17 deaths from covid in my county in well over a year. The death rate is non-existent, and the virus already swept through the area with almost everyone either infected or asymptomatic. No one in Montana is afraid of this virus except a handful of weak minded progressives.

My suspicion is that when all is said and done by the end of 2021 the US will essentially be split into two distinct nations: A leftist Marxist nation that continues to degrade into tyranny, and a conservative nation that people want to escape to so they can keep their liberties. Leftists won’t want to live near us, and we certainly will not want to live near them. Hypothetically, it should be a win-win situation, but there are other factors to consider.

We must also take into account red counties. For example, the blue state of Virginia is actually only blue in a handful of counties. The majority are conservative and have stood in defiance of attempts by gun grabbing governor Ralph Northam, saying they will ignore any new gun laws Northam and the state legislature passes. County governments and county sheriffs are in agreement; Northam has no power in these places.

In Eastern Oregon and Northern California, there is a push by multiple counties to actually join Idaho and become a part of the conservative state. The majority of voters in these counties supported the transition. The idea being that this is not a secession, and so the move will be far easier to accomplish with less legal obstacles. The decision will be voted on by county residents in May, and of course there will be attempts by congress to obstruct if the outcome is favorable.

Even if the movement is not successful, the fact that voters in red counties are unified in their goal to get away from leftist political control should be taken very seriously. This is not just about states defying federal dictates, it’s also about counties defying state governments that do not represent their values.

The bottom line is this – The leftist ideology is collectivist and totalitarian in nature. It is completely incompatible with the conservative principles of liberty, self determination, meritocracy, limited government and free market economics.

The social justice cult has gone so far into extremism that reason and logic are actually vilified by them. They openly support mass censorship, mass violence against innocent people, mob intimidation against the citizenry, they argue in favor of economic lockdowns and unconstitutional covid mandates, they support draconian vaccine passports, and they are partners with Big Tech corporations as well as globalists institutions like the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. They are diametrically opposed to everything that conservatives and lovers of liberty hold dear.

Honestly, it is unlikely that we will be able to share the same land mass, let alone the same cities and states, but I’ll get to that in a moment…

At the state level, there has been a dramatic push-back against constitutional trespasses by the federal government under Biden, and these include measures which are aggressively promoted by the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions in the name of the “Great Reset”. Multiple red states have passed laws or executive orders making it illegal to require proof of vaccination (vaccine passports). Some blue states have also “claimed” they will not require vaccinations, but the devil is in the details when dealing with the political left.

In Montana, the governor and the state legislature will not allow government enforcement of vaccine passports, AND, they also will not allow corporations to demand vaccine passports either. In blue states like Illinois, the government might keep its word on passports, it might not, but they don’t really need to enforce vaccinations; all they have to do is allow major corporations to do it for them.

With colleges (public institutions posing as private), airlines, hotels, hospitals, and major retail chains requiring a vaccine passport for employment or to make purchases, the effect of medical tyranny will be the same.

Without state legal protections in place to limit social engineering by corporate behemoths the establishment still has all the tools it needs to assert covid controls.

These companies do not represent private business or free markets anymore. Instead, they are appendages of establishment power that receive billions in taxpayer dollars to finance their operations. They should no longer be treated as if they have the same rights as normal businesses.

Another interesting development is the number of red states that are passing laws which prevent the enforcement of any new federal gun controls. In Montana, Greg Gianforte just signed a bill nullifying federal gun bans. Federal rules do not apply here and state law enforcement agencies are prohibited from helping federal agencies enforce such laws. Similar legislation has been passed or is being considered in other red states like Utah and Arizona.

It is unclear what would happen if the ATF or FBI tried to make arrests within Montana based on federal gun restrictions. I suspect that without extra protection from local law enforcement these agencies would be much more vulnerable in their operations. If they met with stiff resistance, they would be on their own. I also would not be surprised if sheriffs in most Montana counties stood in their way.

The mainstream media has been almost completely silent on these developments. They barely even acknowledge the conservative migration. I doubt they will speak of the separation at all until the latest census data and postal data is more thoroughly examined. However, the changes to our nation are going to have far reaching consequences, and the consequences will be obvious in the near term.

The “Great Reset” is meant to be a global project; meaning, no one is allowed to opt out. Leftists and globalists are notoriously plantation-minded; they believe that society is involuntary, and their rules for society should apply to all people. Those who wish to leave are actually seen as traitors, because the very act of leaving suggests that the system is flawed, and doubt creates questions, and questions create demands, and demands lead to defiance, and defiance leads to rebellion.

The progressive/globalist plantation becomes an exercise in antagonistic self affirmation – You cannot leave the system, because everything is fine, and if you left people might think something is wrong and then everything would not be fine, so why would you want to upset the balance and ruin what is already perfect?

In my last article I noted that red states in the US are the ONLY places in the world where freedom from the Reset is ingrained and people have the means to fight back. I still stand by that assertion. Some conservatives assume countries like Russia are going to fight the Reset, yet Putin and the Russian government enforced extensive covid restrictions recommended by the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization, just like every other government. The head of the Russian Parliament’s committee on public health, Dmitri Morozov, stated that vaccine passports were “very important and needed in Russia”.

Let’s face it, no major government is coming to save us; these delusional fantasies of Russia or any other foreign nation fighting against the Reset need to stop. The bottom line is this: The American red states are probably the only regions in the world that are resisting the reset agenda while also having the arms to back their resolve. If a rebellion is going to start against the globalists, it will start here.

What does this mean for the future? It means we are going to be targeted. This is how I see the situation playing out…

I have no doubt that the first step by the federal government under Biden will be to start cutting off federal funds to red states while flooding blue states with stimulus money. The strategy being that blue states will have unlimited free goodies while red states languish in poverty. Biden will be betting that red state citizens reliant on government checks will become despondent or angry. Of course, these taxpayer backed funds belong to all the states, but that won’t matter to Biden or to leftists; they will claim we are getting what we deserve.

The logical response by red states will be to stop paying taxes, and to take over federal lands and the resources within their borders. Red states and red counties could also negate all EPA and BLM restrictions on resource usage and launch an epic revitalization of industry. In my area, I believe the logging industry which has been stifled by the federal government will return in full force. With lumber prices nearing hyperinflationary levels, it makes perfect sense. This will enrage the feds.

The next step would be to make travel to and from certain red states difficult in order to isolate them. The feds may shut down airline flights while proclaiming that red states are “havens for covid infection”. This will not go over well with conservatives, and we will start demolishing any checkpoints that are meant to keep us in. Leftist controlled states and counties will start checking license plates and ID and harassing or arresting anyone from a conservative area.

Travel will stagnate as people will not know which places are safe and which are dangerous.

There will also be attempts to use federal agencies to insert into conservative areas to make arrests based on federal laws that have already been nullified. The goal will be to make examples out of some people, and send a message that conservatives “are not safe”, even in their own states. Eventually, the shooting will start and federal agents will die. Biden will demand a martial law response.

If everything develops as described, the question arises, how many people in the military are actually willing to die for Biden? My guess is not that many, but with the right excuses and rationalizations who knows? Conservatives have been demonized for many years now, there may be a large enough chunk of the military that believes the propaganda, but I am doubtful.

It could take two full terms of Biden for these events to happen. It could take far less time. I would not hold my breath for a 2022 or 2024 election to defuse matters. I think most conservatives learned their lesson on the futility of politics the last four years. The best possible outcome right now is that conservatives congregate, unify and organize from the local level to the state level to the point that we act as a deterrent to future tyranny.

We all know one day the establishment is going to come for us, and if so then we’ll greet them with a long range love letter (if you get my meaning). But at least we will know where we stand. At least we will be living among kindred spirits, and at least there will be a glimmer of hope for the world.

Sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is to offer people an alternative, a place where the rules of tyrants hold no weight. Conservative states and counties are doing this today, and it is a beautiful thing.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Totalitarian Elites Want To Extend COVID-19 Lockdowns Forever For ‘Climate Change’

Power-hungry government officials' eyes have been opened to how far they can stretch their 'emergency powers,' and climate change is their next frontier.

Connor Tomlinson

By Connor Tomlinson
APRIL 30, 2021

Sir David Attenborough’s upcoming documentary, “The Year Earth Changed,” romanticizes the global lockdowns in 2020 for proving how “the natural world” would “do much better if we weren’t there at all.” Similar attitudes have circulated on social media since last March: from the “nature is healing” meme to Extinction Rebellion stickers calling humanity a “disease” and COVID the “cure” plastered across the East Midlands.

An increasing number of liberal democratic governments are flirting with utilitarian approaches to policymaking, and removing any limiting principles on the scope of their overreach. With herd immunity on the horizon, COVID is expiring as a palatable justification to a paranoid public for intrusive nanny-statism. The next pretext they’re likely to use for controlling lives and livelihoods? Climate change.

COVID-19 lockdowns produced a 2.4 billion ton (7 percent) decrease in CO2 emissions in 2020. This has informed a belief that lockdowns are a viable method of cutting carbon emissions by 2050. World Economic Forum, European Commission, and U.N. advisor Mariana Muzzucato has, therefore, hypothesized lockdowns may be enforced again to prevent climate change.

Move Goalposts, Stay Locked Down
Measures such as banning private transport, a moratorium on meat consumption, and ending fossil-fuel production would be mandated by governments worldwide. The World Economic Forum has since published other articles like Muzzucato’s, suggesting lockdowns are a “crucial dress-rehearsal” for addressing climate change by reducing consumerism and providing homeostasis for low-emission living.

Other voices promoted this policy in political spheres. Germany’s Social Democratic Party Member of Parliament Karl Lauterbach authored an op-ed urging environmental policies analogous to “the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic.” The U.K.’S Green Party praised lockdowns for providing a vision of how “a different world might be possible.”

When debating the role of the market in environmentalism at Durham Union, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Claire Farrell pushed for replicating COVID-19 lockdowns to instigate revolutionary economic redistribution and reduce Britain’s carbon emissions.

Of 180 nations, the U.K. has imposed the sixth most stringent COVID-19 lockdowns on its subjects. Recently, the prime minister stated it was his lockdown policies — not Britain’s exemplary vaccine rollout program — that reduced COVID-19 cases and related deaths. Neither the facts nor the principles behind the prime minister’s “data not dates” approach have been presented to the British public. Instead, the prime minister seems to be hard-selling lockdowns as a policy worth repeating.

Parliament appears to have bought this line of argument. A bipartisan majority of members voted to extend “draconian” “Emergency Powers” until October. This is despite six of England’s nine regions reporting no deaths with COVID-19 that week, and the World Health Organisation condemning the use of lockdowns as a “primary control method” for pandemics. With the government repeatedly moving goal-posts — from “Protect the NHS. Save lives” to a crusade to immunize Brits from death itself — there’s no longer any set criteria on which reopening the country is contingent.

Negative externalities produced by the U.K.’s three successive lockdowns have inflicted irreversible damage on society. Taxpayer money funded a “covert,” “unevaluated psychological experiment” run on the British public, with sage advising the government “use media to increase the sense of personal threat.”

Lockdowns’ combination of prohibited commercial operations and the furlough scheme is costing Britain £1.5 billion daily. Banning small businesses caused income disparity to increase; and wealth and influence monopolistically consolidate in international companies like Amazon, which accrued record profits due to stay-at-home orders.

It’s financially unsustainable and morally untenable to involuntarily confine anybody — let alone healthy people — to their homes, and deprive them of opportunities to interact or earn a living. However, when halting what Greta Thunberg called “the fairy-tale of eternal economic growth” is the goal, lockdowns become an enticing tool for ending both capitalism and climate emissions.

Climate Change as Eugenics
Climate lockdowns also aid in reinforcing Malthusian anti-natalist narratives. A “Lifeboat Ethicist” attitude is percolating throughout collectivist environmentalism.

British professor Patricia McCormack’s “Ahuman Manifesto” urges gradual depopulation according to intersectional feminism. Echoing Simone De Beauvoir’s metaphors of a feminine Earth violated by masculine instruments of industrialization. Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed abortion as a method of lowering carbon emissions through population control. Some women have taken to surgical sterilization, believing “going child-free [is] the answer to our climate crisis.”

Lockdowns aid in suppressing population growth. Despite initial predictions of a quarantine “baby boom” — when we have, as Dostoyevsky said, nothing to do but “sleep, eat cakes and busy [ourselves] with [the] continuation of the species” — the West is heading for a “baby-bust”. Increases in self-reported anxiety and suicidality have depreciated libido.

A 2020 survey of European couples’ fertility plans demonstrated dire economic straits have influenced 50 percent of couples to postpone having children, even indefinitely. Both economic and individual depression produced by lockdowns will depreciate birth rates for a generation.

Where did these lockdown policies come from? As Professor Neil Ferguson, whose erroneous epidemiological models for Swine Flu caused thousands of unnecessary livestock deaths, explains, his advice to the U.K. government was based on actions taken by “a communist one-party state”: China. Ferguson cited China’s totalitarian lockdowns where families were welded into their homes as the precondition for Britain realizing “We [could] get away with it.”

If China is the standard for morally legitimate policies, what is the limiting principle on governments’ intervention into lives and livelihoods the pretext of other “existential threats”?

Emulating the European Union, the prime minister has proposed ransoming normality back to us with oxymoronic “Freedom Passports”: promoting pub chains to tie pulling pints to their customer’s vaccine status. This program has been critically compared to China’s Social Credit System: a surveillance software that consolidates citizens’ medical history, biometric data, and social media so the government can blacklist dissidents from purchasing property, using transport, and accessing vital goods and services. (This was satirized by “Black Mirror.”)

Tying one’s ability to own and exchange property and engage with civil society to one private medical history is an inexcusable intrusion on inviolable rights. And what’s to stop penalties being tied to a digital carbon footprint down the line?

The World Locks Down and China Races Ahead
The biting irony of lockdowns is that China lifted restrictions as early as March 2020. China has accelerated its timeline of global dominance by five years in 2020, due to a combination of using slave labor and the economic damage lockdowns inflicted on competitors. It would be ludicrous for climate lockdown advocates to assume China — the leading global producer of carbon emissions and ocean plastic pollution — would adopt lockdown policies at the expense of their economic growth and role as top dog of the global hegemon.

Fortunately, non-authoritarian measures are both more moral and more effective at addressing climate concerns. Environmental Kuznets curves demonstrate the wealthier a nation is, the more environmentally conscious decisions are made over time. Prior resource scarcity prophecies from the likes of Paul Ehrlich were also predicated on embarrassing underestimations of human ingenuity.

Markets and families, not depopulation and ending innovation, are the best mechanisms for combating climate change. There’s no imperative to improve or conserve the Earth without a generation to inherit it. Both ethics and efficacy expose lockdowns as unsustainable, inefficient, and immoral, regardless of pretext.

Whether for planet or pandemic, lockdowns, health passports, and sterilization narratives should be opposed as long as they remain voluntary and resisted if ever made mandatory.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Is Biden Accidentally Giving the Green Light to Mega-Mergers?

The Federal Trade Commission let a $39B pharmaceutical merger through without any scrutiny, and the Antitrust Division let Michael Milken roll up the salt market. Where's the change?
Matt Stoller18 hr ago2718

Hi,
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Today I’m going to write about the Biden administration’s first major antitrust move, a clearance of a giant pharmaceutical merger which signaled to Wall Street that Biden hasn’t made antitrust a priority. It’s not the worst news, but it’s not good news.

Before that, a little house-keeping. First, Brian Barrett at Wired wrote a good piece on how Logitech’s Harmony monopoly killed the universal remote control industry, going into more detail than I did a few weeks ago on the same subject.

Second, last year I wrote up a board game monopoly roll-up by a firm called Asmodee, which owns Settlers of Catan. Paul Tullis at Bloomberg did a more thorough job last week on how they’ve done through the pandemic.
And now…


Mega-Merger Mania
A number of sources have told me that the merger space is the busiest they’ve ever seen, which is probably a result of being able to borrow a lot of money cheaply (courtesy of the Federal Reserve). Wall Street knows it. “It’s the busiest I’ve ever known it,” Farah O’Brien, a private equity and M&A partner at Latham & Watkins told the Financial Times. “There’s a ton of capital that is desperately trying to find a home. I wouldn’t say there’s caution in the market at all.”

It’s happening in every sector, from lithium mining to electric utilities to semiconductors to pharmaceuticals. Mergers tend to lead to layoffs, higher prices, less innovation and research, and a more brittle supply chain, and they amplify the control monopolies have over our society. There are even weird new ways of self-dealing via mergers, like the trend of private equity funds selling their own portfolio companies to themselves, and the new cheating special of 2021, the special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPAC. The details of how are not particularly important, suffice to say that what is happening is a massive transfer of wealth and power to a small group, far beyond the inequality we’ve known.

Last year, before the GOP got interested in the problem of monopoly power, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and David Cicilline proposed a merger ban to stop the consolidation fueled by the CARES Act and the actions of the Federal Reserve. It went nowhere, and Trump’s antitrust division wasn’t interested in doing much to stop the merger boom.

Then Joe Biden won the Presidency, and Biden, it seemed, had an interest in the one tool that could arrest this merger boom: antitrust. It started off quite well; Biden has picked Tim Wu to be in the White House to oversee competition policy. There are two antitrust enforcement agencies, the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission. And Biden nominated antitrust expert Lina Khan to be a commissioner at the FTC, who fired a warning shot at big tech. There’s still a lot of momentum. Today, the House Antitrust Subcommittee held a hearing with lots of testimony on problems with big mergers in the pharmaceutical space.

But then we get to the temporary leadership of the antitrust agencies, who have been in charge for a few months, which is enough time to judge some actual results. The person Biden appointed to be acting chair of the FTC is Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. There were reasons to think she might be an aggressive enforcer.

While in the minority, Slaughter had a mixed, if reasonable, record. While she cleared an unnecessary giant industrial gas merger, she also wrote several dissents opposing giant pharmaceutical mergers, asserting the way the FTC looked at these mergers was too permissive. These dissents were a big deal, because the FTC has pretty much allowed big pharma to get away with whatever it wants, which is one reason medical prices keep skyrocketing.

Upon being appointed acting Chair, Slaughter made the right noises. She stopped giving early termination to mergers. She announced a workshop on ‘dark patterns,’ which are deceptive user interface practices used by tech platforms and video game firms. Last week, the commission issued a statement on ethics in big data sets, saying it would deploy its tools to address algorithms that violate anti-discrimination laws. Most importantly, last month, she made an announcement that she would be forming an international working group to ‘rethink pharma,’ collaborating with enforcers from all over the world to research new ways of bringing cases against pharmaceutical mergers. The signaling was aggressive, with the headline in WSJ being “FTC Prepares to Take Tougher Stance on Pharmaceutical Mergers.”

Still, all of these choices were just procedural, they did not actually address the main problem with the FTC. And that is, the commission lacks credibility because no one on Wall Street or in the corporate world takes the FTC seriously as a law enforcement body. The FTC whiffed badly on Facebook and Google, but years before that, it did nothing during the run-up to the financial crisis, despite its authority over consumer protection in the financial space. The situation is so bad that Slaughter’s fellow commissioner Rohit Chopra told the Senate Commerce committee today that “it's become a right of passage for Silicon Valley companies to get an FTC consent decree," and then violate it.

I wanted Chopra to be the Chair of the commission, but Biden moved him to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he will address Wall Street problems. So then the open question became, what happens when acting Chair Slaughter actually confronts a questionable but difficult merger? And unfortunately, now we know.

Last week, the FTC allowed the $39B merger of Astrazeneca-Alexion without any significant probing, much earlier than investors expected. Now, I haven’t looked into this merger in-depth. The problem is that the FTC didn’t seem to look at it in-depth either. The FTC cleared it without asking for information on the tie-up, which means that the two firms effectively got special permission to merge faster. I get why it’s risky to challenge mega-mergers, but the Biden FTC went out of its way to move this one along faster. And that’s not the only pharma merger Slaughter has waived through; as the Capitol Forum reported, Jazz Pharmaceutical’s $7 billion purchase of GW Pharmaceutical, and Horizon’s $3 billion buy-out of Viela were also cleared extra fast, meaning the commission didn’t bother to ask much about how these mergers might affect the market.

Investors are already taking these clearances as a signal that it’s business as usual in the merger world. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, Charley Grant cited the clearance of this specific deal as evidence more mergers are on the way. Any intervention by enforcers in the merger boom, he told Wall Street, “seems unlikely in the near term, as the administration has focused on other priorities.”

Other priorities. Wow.
A few headlines also make the point.
Ouch.

[Read the rest on the website Is Biden Accidentally Giving the Green Light to Mega-Mergers? ]
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

As beef takes beating from environmentalists, data suggest cows can actually fight climate change

Pastured livestock may contribute to "carbon sink" effect on grasslands.
Image
A cow

A cow
(picture alliance/Getty)

By Daniel Payne
Updated: May 1, 2021 - 10:04pm

Criticism of the beef industry this past week was thrust to the forefront of the U.S. political stage when the cooking brand Epicurious announced that it would no longer publish new beef-based recipes as part of "an effort to encourage more sustainable cooking."

Long a target of environmentalists due to its purported negative effects on the global environment, cattle farming has lately been pilloried by eco-activists for its alleged hastening of warming across the planet due to the high levels of greenhouse gasses that the industry produces every year.

Yet a relatively small but growing body of research suggests that certain types of cattle farming— namely, those in which cows are raised on pastures for their whole lives as opposed to in feedlots — may actually have a carbon-negative effect on the environment by helping to sequester greenhouse grasses under well-managed grasslands.

The vast majority of beef produced in the U.S. is sourced in feedlots in which cattle are fed primarily corn and grains, a diet which hastens their fattening and prepares them for slaughter much earlier than traditional methods.

Environmentalists have criticized those systems as ecologically ruinous due to their heavy carbon footprints, citing in part their dependence on chemically fertilized cattle feed and the copious amounts of methane that cows emit in the form of burps and flatulence.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, claimed recently that "science says beef should be on the chopping block" due to beef's "significant role in greenhouse gas emissions." And the Atlantic deemed beef the "main, mooing offender" driving livestock greenhouse gas emissions, with writer Annie Lowrey declaring that "trading your rib eyes and cheesesteaks for lentils and tofu is one of the best things you can do as a consumer for the environment."

Pastured livestock has different environmental profile
Yet other activists have pointed to a much smaller segment of the beef market as a possible answer to the conundrum of beef's carbon footprint: Pasture-raised beef, in which cattle are raised on grasslands from birth to slaughter.

Grass-fed beef still commands a very small fraction of the overall beef market. One 2017 estimate put it at just 4% of total U.S. beef sales. The relative scarcity of pastured beef, as well as its considerably heftier price tag, has kept it from gaining much of a foothold in the mammoth American meat economy, which in 2019 saw $111 billion in beef production.

Still, growing interest in pastured beef — spurred on by an explosive growth in farmers markets around the country over the past decade — has led to a steady rise in the product's visibility, with major corporations and even fast food chains such as Arby's seeking to capitalize on the niche market.

Alongside that growth has come a still-small but steady series of investigations looking into the environmental outcomes of pastured cattle operations. In many cases scientists have found that grass-fed beef farms can actually have a net-carbon-negative effect on environmental emissions.

One 2018 study by researchers in Michigan and Washington, D.C. applied "life cycle analysis" to "two different beef finishing systems in the Upper Midwest," one grass-fed and one feedlot-finished. The scientists found that intensive, rotational grazing "has the potential to offset [greenhouse gas] emissions through soil [carbon] sequestration, and therefore the finishing phase could be a net [carbon] sink."

Grasses, the researchers noted, can be highly efficient carbon sequesters. That sequestration "is a critical ecosystem service of grasslands," they write, a natural phenomenon "which can be maximized using best management practices for livestock grazing."

Another study, published last December, reviewed a "multispecies pasture rotation" in the southeastern United States that incorporated multiple species of livestock including cattle. The authors of that study note that feedlot beef are more efficient at "gaining more weight in less time," thus producing less total greenhouse gas emissions over their lifespan; however, the sequestration effects of the multispecies pastured rotation ultimately "reduced the [greenhouse gas] footprint of the [pastured] system by 80% ... ultimately finishing at 66% lower than comparative [feedlot] production."

Both studies noted a pointed downside to pastured systems: Pastured farms require considerably more land to produce beef compared to the more compact feedlot systems.

Other researchers have come to different conclusions regarding the environmental feasibility of pastured beef. A 2017 study by the Food Climate Research Network argued that the potential offsets of worldwide grazing systems would only effect between 0.6-1.6% of yearly greenhouse gas emissions, “to which of course livestock also substantially contribute," the network noted.

Still other advocates have expressed considerably ambitious goals for pastured farming. The Savory Institute, an ecological advocacy group that promotes what it calls Holistic Planned Grazing, says that that grazing method has "the potential to remove the excess atmospheric carbon that has been the result of both anthropogenic soil loss over the past 10,000 years and industrial-era greenhouse gas emissions."

"This sequestration potential, when applied to up to 5 billion hectares of degraded grassland soils, could return 10 or more gigatons of excess atmospheric carbon to the terrestrial sink annually thereby lowering greenhouse gas concentrations to pre-industrial levels in a matter of decades," the institute claims.

Regardless of the potential environmental benefits or downsides, one thing that may pose an insurmountable deterrent for many consumers is pastured beef's price: Average ground beef prices in U.S. cities in March were about $4 per pound, while grass-fed ground beef often runs twice as much as that or more.

Beef prices across the industry spiked last year due in part to the effects of coronavirus restrictions and processing woes amid the pandemic.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

1 in 5 Electric Vehicle Owners in California Switched Back to Gas-Powered Cars Because Charging Their EV is a Hassle

By Cristina Laila
Published May 2, 2021 at 8:57pm
IMG_0695.jpg

One in five electric vehicle owners in California switched back to gas-powered because of the inconvenience of charging.

It only takes a few minutes to fill up a gas tank, yet some electric vehicles need several hours of charging to drive 35 miles.

Charging electric vehicles is a total “hassle” say 20% of EV owners surveyed between 2012 and 2018 so they’re going back to gas, researchers found.
The Biden Admin and the Marxists in California are trying to force electric vehicles onto American citizens through “infrastructure” plans and executive orders.

Electric vehicles cost between $50,0000 to $300,000 and they take HOURS to fully charge the battery.

Biden also vowed to build 500,000 EV charging stations (4 times the number of gas stations) but most Americans prefer to drive gas-powered vehicles.

“It should not be assumed that once a consumer purchases a PEV they will continue owning one,” researchers Scott Hardman and Gil Tal wrote. “What is clear is that this could slow PEV market growth and make reaching 100% PEV sales more difficult.”

Business Insider reported:
Roughly one in five plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) owners switched back to owning gas-powered cars, in large part because charging the batteries was a pain in the… trunk, the researchers found.
Of those who switched, over 70% lacked access to Level 2 charging at home, and slightly fewer than that lacked Level 2 connections at their workplace.
“If you don’t have a Level 2, it’s almost impossible,” said Tynan, who has tested a wide range of makes and models of PEVs over the years for his research.
Even with the faster charging, a Chevy Volt he tested still needed nearly six hours to top its range back up to 300 miles from nearly empty — something that takes him just minutes at the pump with his family SUV.
Public charging stations may look like the electric version of the gas station, but nearly two-thirds of PEV drivers in the survey said they didn’t use them. Exactly why they didn’t use the public stalls was not specified.
Fixing the charging issue will require more participation from automakers, who have yet to find a profitable way of producing electric cars. Even Tesla, easily the leader in the category, was only able to eke out a first-quarter profit by selling energy credits and bitcoin.
Wait until the liberals find out that coal (gasp) is used to charge electric vehicles.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

More Democrat Insanity: Green New Deal Mastermind Claims Saving the Planet Requires Eliminating Police and Changing Power Relationships

By Jim Hoft
Published May 3, 2021 at 3:44pm
Rhiana-Gunn-Wright.jpg

Green New Deal mastermind Rhiana Gunn-Wright, director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute, says a clean environment includes a police-free environment.

This is the type of BS coming from the American left today.

And Joe Biden is basing US policy on this idiocy.

Rhianna Gunn-Wright argues that the Green New Deal “is about changing power relationships.”

That’s batsh*t crazy.

Who voted for this garbage? Who?

View: https://youtu.be/ZctytHVY52s
23:30 min

Natural News reported:
The true purpose behind the so-called “Green New Deal” is finally being revealed, and it has nothing to do with saving the planet and its ecosystems.

Green New Deal mastermind Rhiana Gunn-Wright, director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute, says that a big part of achieving “environmental justice” involves dealing with “police brutality,” which she says is an “environmental justice issue.”

“It’s not just about how close or far you are from a fossil fuel facility,” Gunn-Wright admits. “It’s also about what makes up your physical environment, including policing, public safety, education, clean water. All of that is part of a person’s physical environment.”

Gunn-Wright is not actually concerned about simply reforming corrupt police departments, though. Her Green New Deal agenda admittedly aims to abolish all police and institute a system of “community” policing where people basically police themselves.

This will ensure that “black” and “brown” children can not only grow up breathing “toxic air from steel smoke stacks spewing polluted particulates,” to quote a recent Frontline report about the agenda, but also grow up in “a future without police,” which would result in “less crime and more safety.”
 

et2

Has No Life - Lives on TB

Kamala Harris Vows to Fight Climate Change as ‘Root Cause’ of Migration Crisis
7,264
US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks before a meeting about the Northern Triangle migration crisis in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus April 22, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty
CHARLIE SPIERING23 Apr 20214,890

Vice President Kamala Harris used a meeting Thursday to argue climate change is a root cause of migration from Central American countries.

“We are looking at extensive storm damage because of extreme climate, we’re looking at drought,” Harris said.

Harris met with foundation leaders on the ongoing migrant crisis as people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala flood the Southern border through Mexico.

Because of the changing climate, Harris argued, people in the region faced a struggling agriculture industry, food scarcity, food insecurity, and extreme poverty.

“Again, we’re looking at the issue of climate resiliency, and then the concern about the lack of economic opportunity,” she said.

The Biden administration posits damage from Hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020 devastated the region, a climate event that continues pushing climate migrants to the United States. In February, Biden signed an executive order for the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs to draft a report on the impact of climate change on mass migration.

Harris repeated the challenges in the region were daunting, but she expressed her intention of offering people hope.

“We have to give people a sense of hope, a sense of hope that help is on the way, a sense of hope that if they stay, things will get better,” she said.

Harris cautioned the problem was “not going to be accomplished overnight.”
“If it was easy, it would have been solved a long time ago,” she said.

Yeah POS commie leaders had zero to do with it.

Frigging muffin head. Dumb as a box of rocks
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

What spending $66 billion on wind and solar power got Texas
1 thing 'clear' after blackout that hit Lone Star State
WND News Services
By WND News Services
Published May 2, 2021 at 4:04pm
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sha...ons&display=popup&ref=plugin&src=share_button
windmill-windfarm-sky-moon-green-energy-turbine-electricity-pixabay.jpg

(Image by Peter Dargatz from Pixabay)
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Energy.]

By Robert Bryce
Real Clear Energy

In the aftermath of the Texas blackouts, one thing became clear: Big Wind and Big Solar have nearly every media outlet in the country on speed dial. Indeed, in the days after the blackouts, numerous media outlets carried stories proclaiming that the near-disastrous failure of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid should not be blamed on wind or solar energy. To cite just one example, The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman declared that pointing the finger at renewables after the storm and blackouts that left nearly 200 people dead was “another indicator of the moral and intellectual collapse of American conservatism.”

But the effort to absolve renewables ignores the oldest maxim in politics: follow the money. Doing so shows that wind and solar aren’t as blameless as you’ve been told.

Indeed, about $66 billion was spent building wind and solar infrastructure in Texas in the years before the blackouts, yet all that spending was worth next to nothing when the grid was teetering on the edge of collapse during the early morning hours of February 15. For several hours, there was no solar production, and of the 31,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed in ERCOT, only about 5,400 megawatts, or roughly 17% of that capacity, was available when the grid operator was shedding load to prevent the state’s grid from going dark.

That $66 billion figure is based on numbers published by the Solar Energy Industries Association and the American Wind Energy Association, which recently changed its name to the American Clean Power Association.

A website, PoweringTexas.com, which appears to be funded by the American Clean Power Association, says “With $53.1 billion invested through 2019 across Texas . . . the direct financial impact of the Texas wind industry is impossible to overlook.” I emailed both PoweringTexas.com and the American Clean Power Association multiple times asking for a breakdown of that $53.1 billion figure and for projections through 2020. The groups did not respond to my requests.

Despite the refusal of the wind industry’s main lobby group (2018 budget: $22.9 million) to provide further information, it’s reasonable to assume that another $3.1 billion was spent on wind-energy infrastructure in Texas in 2020. That $3.1 billion estimate is based on these facts: in 2020, about 2,197 megawatts of wind capacity was added to the Texas grid. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average cost of new onshore wind capacity is about $1.4 million per megawatt. Simple multiplication shows that the 2020 wind-energy additions likely totaled about $3.1 billion.

Now let’s look at solar. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, solar spending in Texas totaled $9.7 billion through the end of 2020. Therefore, if we add all those sums – $53.1 billion, $3.1 billion, and $9.7 billion – we find that $65.9 billion was spent on wind and solar in Texas in the years before Winter Storm Uri blasted the state.

What was the result of all that spending? When combined with the shutdown of several gigawatts of coal-fired capacity, it’s apparent that the $66 billion spent on renewables before the blackouts didn’t make the Texas grid more robust – it made it more fragile.

Between 2006 and 2020, the amount of electricity generated from coal dropped by 19%, while the amount of juice Texans got from wind surged by 21%. Over that same period, the amount of electricity produced from solar increased 2%, nuclear generation dropped by about 3%, and natural gas-fired generation stayed flat. (In 2020, gas-fired generation provided about 46% of the state’s electricity, the same share it had in 2006.)

Following the money requires considering which industries are paying the most in taxes, says Scott Tinker, head of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas and director of the Switch Energy Alliance. When we were talking about tax revenue in Texas, Tinker challenged me to “look it up.” So I did. According to the Houston Chronicle, the oil and gas sector paid about $13.4 billion in state taxes and royalties in 2019.

How much is the wind sector paying?

A 2019 article published in Courthouse News said that wind companies in Texas “pay $237 million in state and local taxes on average each year, according to the American Wind Energy Association.” Another analysis, published by a pro-renewable group, concluded that “Over their lifetime, the current fleet of utility-scale wind and solar projects in Texas will generate between $4.7 billion and $5.7 billion in new tax revenue to local communities.” If we assume the higher number, $5.7 billion, and spread it over 20 years, that works out to about $235 million per year, which is pretty close to the AWEA number cited above.

To make the tax-related math easier, let’s round that figure up to $250 million per year. Doing so – and a bit of elementary computation – shows that the oil and gas sector’s annual tax contributions to the state of Texas are roughly 54 times as great as what is contributed by the wind and solar sectors.

Despite this enormous disparity in tax revenue – and the fact that the wind and solar industries spent $66 billion building generation capacity in Texas – we have been repeatedly told that wind and solar weren’t to blame for the blackouts. Why? Because they were “expected to make up only a fraction” of what the state needed during the winter.

These excuses merely underscore the essence of the problem: If wind and solar can provide so little power during times of peak demand – and especially during moments when the electric grid is on the verge of collapse – why are we spending so much money on it?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden’s E.V. Bill Punishes the Poor
George Landrith
George Landrith

|Posted: May 04, 2021 11:18 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Biden’s E.V. Bill Punishes the Poor

Source: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File

Throughout the 2020 presidential campaign season, then-candidate Biden continually promised that he would not raise taxes on households making less than $400,000 per year. It was a promise echoed again by the White House just over a month ago, but the so-called American Jobs infrastructure plan rolled out by the administration pulls a bait-and-switch on the American people, particularly the working poor and ethnically diverse communities.

A key component of the Biden plan is the push for a nationwide transition to electric vehicles, which takes up some $174 billion in subsidies from the package, but one of the largest problems with the proposal is its disregard for the negative downwind effects it would have on those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. As of 2019, the average cost of an electric vehicle was $55,600, far greater than the cost of other vehicles more affordable for lower income families. In fact, another recent study showed that the average income of electric car owners is at least $100,000 per year, well over even the middle-income line.

While the Biden plan throws truckloads of money at other angles of the electric vehicle issue, it does nothing to address the fact that lower income households simply cannot afford electric vehicles. To make matters worse, electric vehicles only account for 2 percent of vehicle sales in the U.S., even though they have been an option for vehicle purchasers for a significant period of time. The Biden plan is catering to a niche segment of an industry, in a show of political nepotism for a pet campaign promise while slapping the American worker in the face in the process.

An aggressive plan like Biden’s calls for significant bumps in energy and electric grids. Even currently, with a transportation budget of $1.5 billion, electric companies have almost $1 billion more in requests for expansion, and this is the case notwithstanding the drastic increase in energy grids that the Biden plan would implement. More electric grids cost the utilities more to operate, meaning large spikes in utility costs.

California provides an example of this type of policy gone wrong, as it invests the most of any state into electric vehicle infrastructure yet has increasing issues with blackouts, high utility costs, and general cost-of-living increases. For instance, as of 2010, SDG&E, the major energy provider in the San Diego and southern California region, has seen consistent rate increases. Conversely, utility disconnections due to overdue bills and payments has also steadily climbed within this time period, suggesting that ratepayers are finding it more difficult to keep up with rising costs. Even more specifically, those burdened with these rate hikes are disproportionately minority groups in disadvantaged communities, who shoulder these costs for the benefit of disproportionately affluent areas that can afford EV’s.

Additionally, American seniors are keenly affected by these rate hikes. Per an AARP testimony in 2019 in Arizona, “twenty percent of Arizonans 65 and older rely on Social Security as their sole income source. Fifty percent get a substantial portion of their income from Social Security…[which] is about $17,500/year…

Older Arizonans have much higher medical costs so many already [are forced] to choose today between, food, rent, medical care and very limited transportation…they cannot afford higher electric utility rates much less for electric vehicles.” Yet again, ratepayers are being conscripted to subsidize a service that they do not use, at the cost of their own well-being.

These specific examples are simply the tip of the iceberg. If the Biden E.V. plan is implemented, the consequences would be far more drastic than even the current rate hikes. If less fortunate groups are not benefiting from electric vehicles, why should they be forced to pay for them? Spiked electric utilities affect the poor and vulnerable more negatively than any other economic demographic. Utilities are a difficult commodity to live without, particularly within a family, and they should not be burdened with rate hikes for services they do not use. Simply put, lower income households are not driving electric vehicles, and the Biden plan not only gives them no incentive or ability to do so but punishes them for costs incurred by wealthier households, all while claiming victory because rate hikes caused by government action aren’t technically a tax. Tax or not, the cost to the American people is the same. The ploy is a cruel bait-and-switch tactic that misleads the American people and should raise red flags about the Biden administration’s friendliness to the American worker.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Atlas Is Shrugging: Forget 'The Great Reset', Here Comes 'The Great Reject'

THURSDAY, MAY 06, 2021 - 08:50 PM
Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

The Jackpot Chronicles Scenario #4: Atlas Shrugged


Never mind The Great Reset. Here comes The Great Reject.
It occurred to me that I never did finish the final instalment of last summer’s Jackpot Chronicles, wherein I posited four possible post-Covid scenarios.

For a quick refresher, The Jackpot is concept I cribbed from William Gibson. It’s a term he uses across a few of his near-future cyberpunk novels that describes a series of rolling global catastrophes that set in sometime around 2016 (his stories span multiverses, and timelines, but the common theme is that somewhere around 2016, some kind of irrevocable glitch in the matrix occurred that put a permanent end to normalcy as it has been understood up until that point).

If there was a Jackpot, whatever it was, it could arguably have happened at many points throughout the 20th century, or if we wanted to confine our speculation to the 21st century then, 9/11 or the GFC would do. Everything after that being symptomatic as opposed to causal.

And then… 2020 and COVID hit. That’s when the fabric of time cleaves us into the before times and The Jackpot.


The other post-pandemic scenarios from the rest of my Jackpot series were:
  1. Force Majeure: The wheels come off completely and the system comes unglued. Mad Max.
  2. Tin Foil Hat: It really is one Big Conspiracy and we’re into a New World Order.
  3. The Great Bifurcation: The middle class gets wiped out and we get a two-tier society
I had thought the fourth scenario would be the one themed Deglobalization, and to a certain extent it still is. In the original outline I described that Deglobalization:
“Is where multi-national corporations, so shaken from this Near Death Experience, realizing their error of betting the farm on just-in-time supply chains, labour cost arbitrage and having zero buffers, begin pulling manufacturing back home.
The smart ones start building cushions and shock absorbers into their business logic, and they begin to eschew leverage after being on the wrong side of a series of cascading liquidity implosions. In other words, businesses begin to transition themselves into what I called “Transition Companies” as posited in the inaugural posting for [this blog]”.
I also went on to say that I considered this one most desirable yet least likely. My view on this scenario has changed somewhat, and I also think that the staggering government ineptitude and duplicity at all levels in all jurisdictions (with few notable exceptions) has made our regeared “4th scenario” more likely given that it’s in progress. Mass demonstrations, mass exoduses, crypto-currencies are symptoms of a Great Reject, or as I’ve renamed this scenario “Atlas Shrugged“.

The TL,DR of the novel, Atlas Shrugged is that once the institutional sclerosis of the ruling class was understood to be both incorrigible and irreversible, the only other option was a global opt-out. There was no Great Reset in Atlas Shrugged. They got The Great Reject instead.

Under the Atlas Shrugged scenario, deglobalization is just one of numerous motivating factors, but it’s mainly an outcome of a larger dynamic where all non-ruling factions in society lose faith in the prevailing structure of Neoliberal Globalism (a.k.a “Mr. Global”). With Mr. Global’s viability in question, people begin to look for the exits.

This begins to occur on two fronts. What Vilfredo Pareto called “the non-governing elites” begin to realize that the system which used to accommodate them, even rely on their tacit support, is now becoming hostile toward them. At the very least, the ruling elites are undermining their interests. This is part of the dynamic of Peter Turchin’s “elite overpopulation” that we looked at recently.

The other front is the comparatively powerless underclass, which, in pace with Pareto’s Theory of Elite Cycles, lose their moorings and standing within the system they are expected to adhere to. The social contract no longer seems to be a matter of middle-class protections and living standards but instead becomes starkly authoritarian and one-sided. What is clear is that the existing institutions are now functioning to defend the position of the overclass, not to uphold the rights and liberties of the underclass.

The culmination of multiple super-cycles (Pareto’s Elite Cycles, Turchin’s long term dynamics of sociopolitical instability, debt, a Fourth Turning, and a Maunder Minimum for good measure) combined with an accelerated onslaught of technological innovation: Internet, crypto-currencies …biotech? Nanotech? Micro nuke? Fusion? Quantum computing? We have all the necessary components for a complete breakdown of existing institutions and the total loss of legitimacy of the current governing elite class.

So it goes in our Atlas Shrugged scenario. Various interests of many forms and myriad factions, from dissident states (like Florida), to decentralized and virtual companies, emergent DAO’s, all the way to individuals and cultural tribes all begin to experience these moments of clarity in their own way. From there they will act in their own rational self-interests and cooperate with others doing the same in order to navigate the breakdown of Mr. Global.

In spite of this, Mr. Global’s prevailing policymakers and governance structures will frantically maneuver and spin narratives of fear and fantasy in order to keep the existing system on the rails.



They walked back the second one, but not the first one.

That is what The Great Reset really is: it’s an attempt at a zeitgeist-level rationalization that doubles-down on institutional failure on the part of the entire governance structure of Mr. Global, and gives them a new lease on life to remain in charge. Reimagined by the Davos crew, amplified by the mainstream media, lubricated by Big Tech.

The antidote to all of this are crypto-currencies, smart contracts and decentralization.

That antidote also brings significant upside regardless of which one of our four possible scenarios plays out.

When I listen to people who are complete denial about crypto, I realize that there is a common thread in their objections (what made me think about all this today was listening to Michael Pento’s criticisms of Bitcoin on George Gammon’s Rebel Capitalist. Pento’s 2012 book on the inevitable bursting of the bond bubble is a must read. That book helped be form the basis on what I think is the funds flow that is actually putting a floor under crypto. I don’t begrudge Pento for not seeing it, because as I’ll explain, he’s looking at it through the wrong lens)



We could go on for hours about how most of these people haven’t really delved into the technology or what it means, how their criticisms at the defects around Bitcoin apply even more accurately to US dollars (“backed by nothing”, “infinite supply”, “uses too much energy”, et al). But what they all have in common is that they all posit that whether Bitcoin and cryptos succeed or fail is premised on whether the existing establishment will permit it.

What will the Fed do? What if the government bans it? Won’t the World Bank just create their own CBDC?

This is completely inverted. They have it backwards. It’s not up to the existing system, because the existing system is over. That’s the part they don’t get.

The existing system should be looking for its place in the new reality of network states, not pontificating how it will run the new landscape. The coming system will be multipolar in not just the geopolitical dimension, but across cyberspace and the network dimensions as well.

Instead, the incumbent system is busy banning menthol cigarettes, imposing negative interest rates and undergoing mass conversion to a peculiar new religion called Wokeness.


It won’t work, and it brings to mind a particularly vivid example I once heard about a balloon disaster that still makes me cringe when I think of it:
A group of people were embarking on a balloon ride and as they were just a foot or two off the ground, the burner erupted into flames. The balloon pilot realized immediately what this meant and he leapt from the gondola which was still only a few feet off the ground.
One or two of the passengers were quick witted enough to realize what this meant and followed him. This set off a feedback loop: as the fire expanded, its hot air forcing the balloon higher, combined with the weight reductions as the first few people bailed out, the situation very quickly escalated past a point of no return.

The balloon had accelerated very rapidly to heights from which it was no longer possible to leap safely. The unfortunates who had hesitated and were trapped in a gondola being propelled higher by a fireball, to their inevitable doom.
That’s what our entire situation feels like today. The balloon is still hanging a foot or so above the ground, the canopy is on fire, and the people who have figured out what this means are bailing out while they can and in doing so they are accelerating the ultimate burn-then-crash of the entire system.


In Rand’s book they went to a hidden valley called “Galt’s Gulch” and used their skills and their resources to restore new communities while the old systems imploded. If this scenario plays out we’d be looking for people creating a decentralized, network of gulches. Seeking each other out who are pursuing this same goals, creating open protocols to to rebuild civil societies and autonomous communities built on the ageless principles of free markets, liberty and prosperity.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Merkel pushes for carbon pricing 'worldwide' at final climate conference

Expectations were high for Angela Merkel as she spoke one last time at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue. But her speech promoting carbon pricing and "international solidarity" left climate experts disappointed.

Germany's Angela Merkel, in her last climate summit as chancellor, told representatives from some 40 countries on Thursday that a carbon pricing system would help keep global CO2 emissions in check.

"From my point of view, it would be very desirable if we also had a CO2 price worldwide, which would have to be introduced step by step," she told the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, which was held online this year. Merkel initiated the Petersberg conference in 2009, after negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) stalled.

Merkel on Thursday urged other countries to follow Germany's carbon tax example, citing the €25 ($30) per ton tax slapped on carbon dioxide emitted by the country's transport and heating sectors this January, saying, "In the interest of future generations all over the world, it is important that we act quickly and decisively to limit the dramatic consequences of global warming."

The chancellor's remarks also come a day after the German government announced plans to implement more "ambitious" climate goals to curb emissions after a landmark ruling by the country's top court declared a prior key climate protection law "insufficient."

New climate goals still fall short, say experts
Many observers in Germany found Merkel's performance at the annual summit, a preparatory meeting for this November's UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, disappointing for its lack of vision — especially considering the fact that it was Merkel who called for the first such summit 12 years ago.

Prior to the summit, Oxfam — a confederation of charitable organizations — called for, "more leadership on global climate policy, more ambitious German climate protection measures and more financial assistance for disadvantaged countries in the fight against the climate crisis."

Germany plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045
Although Merkel repeated the goals laid out by German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz on Wednesday — lowering emissions to 65% of what they were in 1990 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 rather than 2050 — observers say much more must be done if such goals are to actually be met rather than discussed.

"Germany must cut climate harming emissions by at least 70% by the year 2030. Otherwise we'll have to take action so drastic that it will gravely injure the fundamental rights of younger generations. There is simply no avoiding quickening the exit from coal power by 2030, ending registration for new internal combustion vehicles by 2025 and swiftly ending mass livestock farming," says Greenpeace climate expert Lisa Göldner.

'International solidarity,' but help falling short
Another key point of discussion at the Petersberg summit was that of assisting developing countries struggling with the financial burden of the climate crisis.
Wealthy industrialized countries have pledged to make $100 billion available to such countries each year — but that has yet to happen.

Groups such as the international church network ACT Alliance EU, have bemoaned the fact that wealthier countries have failed to live up to their promise to help, pointing out that Germany, France, and Spain, for instance, have now opted to provide loans to be paid back at current market rates while presenting those as aid.

"That is unfair because those loans have to be paid back with interest, which means lender nations are going to profit," said Sabine Minninger, an environmental policy expert for the church organization Brot für die Welt (Bread for the World).
German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends the virtual Petersberg Climate Dialogue conference
Dubbed by some as the "climate chancellor," Merkel's speech at her last climate conference left experts feeling underwhelmed

While Merkel urged for "international solidarity" to curb emissions, she spoke little of the issue of aiding developing countries — only noting that leaders would likely have to discuss new aid goals in Glasgow and urging wealthy nations to honor commitments despite the financial strains of the coronavirus pandemic: "This pandemic has torn enormous holes in the budgets [of industrialized nations]. We have invested a great deal to counter this pandemic ... and yet we must not let up in our international responsibilities. That will be a very big task."

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was more assertive when addressing the topic, saying: "We simply must meet our existing commitments on climate finance, that long overdue $100 billion dollars a year target, and then we must go further still."

Johnson said of Glasgow: "It must be a summit of agreement, of action, of deeds, not words. For that to happen, over the next six months, we must be relentless in our ambition and determination, laying the foundations on which success will be built," adding, "If all that emerges from COP26 is more hot air, then we have absolutely no chance of keeping our planet cool."
 
Top