GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Happy Birthday, Global Warming: Climate Change At 33

SUNDAY, JUN 27, 2021 - 09:20 AM
Authored by Rupert Darwell via RealClearEnergy.com,

This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect had been detected. “Global Warming Has Begun,” The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had.

A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West.


Four days earlier, the Toronto G7 had agreed that global climate change required “priority attention.” Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that humanity was conducting an uncontrolled experiment “whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.” In September, Margaret Thatcher gave her famous speech to the Royal Society, warning of a global heat trap. “We are told,” although she didn’t say by whom, “that a warming of one degree centigrade per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope,” an estimate that turned out to be a wild exaggeration. Observed warming since then has been closer to one-tenth of one degree centigrade per decade. Two months later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its inaugural meeting in Geneva.

The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCC’s first chair, it had been recognized that traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the “risk of major transformations of the world of future generations.” The logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as potentially catastrophic—otherwise, the cure would appear worse than the putative disease.

Although catastrophism gave climate change emotive power, the most consistent feature of climate change is the failure of predictions of catastrophe to materialize. In 1990, Martin Parry, a future cochair of an IPCC working group, produced a report claiming that the world could suffer mass starvation and soaring food prices within 40 years. Yet the prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries has been on a downward trend since the 1970s and was nearly halved, from 23.3% in 1991 to 12.9% in 2015.

Although global warming conquered the West, it failed in the East. The model for international environmental cooperation was the 1987 Montreal Protocol on protecting the ozone layer. Its negotiation and ratification was led by the Reagan administration, which recognized that the U.S. would be the biggest beneficiary from having a strong treaty. Thanks to U.S. leadership, the negotiations were conducted quickly (in a matter of months) and the protocol has teeth, containing strong incentives for countries to join and the threat of trade sanctions for those that do not.

This path was quickly blocked for climate change. At the end of 1988, the Maltese government sponsored a resolution of the UN General Assembly on the conservation of the climate as mankind’s common heritage, the subtext being that rich countries shouldn’t negotiate a climate change treaty and then impose it on the rest of the world. The advantage of going down the UN route was that it led to the creation of a permanent and growing bureaucratic infrastructure with annual meetings to keep global warming’s place in public discourse. The downside is that negotiating texts must be agreed by consensus, foreclosing the possibility of a Montreal-like negotiating process and outcome. In 1990, the General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change, which produced a final text in time for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

The most important features of the 1992 climate convention are its ground plan, carving the world in two, with the developed North listed in Annex I, and the doctrine of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (the first principle listed in the convention and arguably its governing one). The bifurcation was made concrete in 1995 at the first conference of the parties in Berlin. Presided over by Angela Merkel as Germany’s environment minister, the Berlin Mandate stipulated that Annex I parties should strengthen their commitment to decarbonize on condition that non–Annex I parties did not, preparing the way for the Kyoto Protocol two years later.

The Clinton administration hadn’t given much thought to the implications of the Berlin Mandate. The Senate did. In July 1997, by 95 votes (including those of then-senators Biden and Kerry) to zero, it adopted the Byrd-Hagel resolution: America should not sign any protocol that imposed limits on Annex I parties unless it also imposed specific, time-tabled commitments on non–Annex I countries. Although the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, the Senate had killed U.S. participation; it was left to the incoming president, George W. Bush, to garner the opprobrium for stating the obvious. Both he and Barack Obama pursued essentially the same post-Kyoto strategy of trying to get China and other major emerging economies to make treaty commitments to decarbonization, an attempt that failed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, when China, India, South Africa, and Brazil vetoed a new climate treaty.

In picking up the pieces, Todd Stern, President Obama’s climate negotiator, had the twin objectives of crafting something that China would accept but that didn’t require the Senate’s advice and consent. The outcome was the Paris climate agreement. It embodies the climate equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine of allowing individual parties to the agreement to “do it their way.”

Hailed as a game changer in the fight to save the planet, the reality of Paris was rather different. Just as Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine was an admission that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, the Paris agreement signaled that the West had given up on having a global decarbonization regime, with credible sanctions against free riding.

Although the Obama administration played an essential role in its gestation, the U.S. is the biggest loser from the Paris agreement. America is to forfeit its recently won position as the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbon energy. For what?

The story of carbon dioxide emissions is acceleration in the declining share of Western emissions. The year 1981 was the last one in which the West’s energy and cement manufacture carbon dioxide emissions were greater than the rest of the world’s (the latter includes Japan—culturally non-Western, ambivalent about climate change, and the only nation to have hosted a major climate conference presided over by a foreign national). By 1988, despite the economic expansion of the 1980s, the West’s emissions had grown by only 3.8%, while the rest of the world’s had grown by 27.0%.

After 2002, non-Western emissions grew even faster. In the 12 years before 2002, non-Western emissions grew by 21.2%; and in the subsequent 12 years, by 76.8%. By 2014, with Western emissions broadly flat over the 24-year period, Western emissions had shrunk to 26% of the total, and the share of non-Western emissions had risen to 74%. In less than a decade and a half, the increase in non-Western emissions outstripped the combined total of U.S. and E.U. emissions. In terms of affecting the physics of global warming, it doesn’t really matter what the West does any more.

William Nordhaus, the world’s preeminent climate economist, offers a brutal assessment of climate policy. “After 30 years, international policy is at a dead end,” he said in a little-noticed October 2020 presentation to the European Central Bank. “We have policies, but they have not been effective, and they’re getting us basically nowhere.” The culprit, in Nordhaus’s view? The free-rider problem. Nordhaus’s solution is to replace the current structure with a “club” whose members agree on a uniform price for carbon dioxide (he suggests $50 per ton of CO2) plus a straight 3% penalty tariff on imports from non-club members. What Nordhaus proposes, in essence, is the Montreal Protocol structure adapted for climate change.

Joe Biden campaigned to restore U.S. climate leadership and rejoin the Paris agreement. The two are contradictory. Following the Europeans down the dead end of a three-decade-old UN process hardly constitutes leadership.

Heeding Nordhaus’s advice and abandoning the UN process is something that only an American president can do. But that would be to assume that the purpose of the UN is to moderate global warming.

Days before the Paris conference, Maurice Strong died. A committed environmentalist, no person did more to put environmentalism on the international agenda, leading the 1972 Stockholm UN conference on the environment and the Rio Earth summit 20 years later. A small gathering was held at the Paris conference to share reminiscences about Strong and his achievements. One of his aides at the Stockholm conference recalled asking him what the policy of the conference should be. “The process is the policy,” Strong replied.

Strong’s genius was to understand that a self-perpetuating UN process would continuously accrete money, influence, and, above all, power. Environmentalism would not have become the dominant ideology in the West without the deployment of the UN’s climate apparatus: the annual cycle of climate conferences spliced periodically with ones that are going to save the planet (Kyoto in 1997; Bali in 2007; Copenhagen in 2009; Paris in 2015; and Glasgow in 2021). Then there’s the IPCC, set up by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, and its five—soon to be six—generations of assessment reports.

Part 1 of 2

 

[marsh]

Part 2 of 2

“Embedded in the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C is the opportunity for intentional societal transformation,” the IPCC says in its scientific assessment of the 1.5°C target. All ideologies seek power. Seen in this light, global warming gave environmentalism the means for it to conquer the West and become the dominant ideology of our age. Environmentalism’s attitude toward nuclear power provides a test for this proposition. If the paramount concern of environmentalists had been to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and slow down climate change, they would campaign to keep existing nuclear power stations and build new ones. Yet viable nuclear power stations are being prematurely closed in California, New York, Germany, and Belgium. Why?

Nuclear power is a Promethean crime of humanity stealing the deepest secrets of nature to release unlimited quantities of energy, in the eyes of environmentalists—a crime far worse than global warming. Instead, humanity must live within the rhythms and constraints decreed by nature; hence environmentalists’ belief that power stations should be replaced by inefficient, weather-dependent wind and solar farms.

The growth of wind and solar generation is not a market-driven phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an obsolete one. It’s what happens when governments heavily subsidize zero-marginal cost output, flooding wholesale markets with unwanted electricity when there’s too much sun and wind and risking power failures when there’s too little. The ubiquity of wind and solar symbolizes environmentalism reversing the logic of the Industrial Revolution in transforming predominantly agrarian societies at the mercy of climate to weather-resistant ones and helps explain the contrasting fortunes of environmentalism and Marxism. Environmentalism succeeded in the West and has become part of the political mainstream, to the extent that it defines politically acceptable opinion. Marxism lost in the West but thrived in preindustrial societies, because the political priority remains economic development. In practical terms, this is synonymous with industrialization and carbonizing their economies.

The outcome has been to shift the balance of climate power from the West to the rest of the world and the major emerging economies, in particular. Yet the lopsided arithmetic of the West versus the rest’s emissions has not softened the effectiveness of global warming as an ideological weapon because it is not based on any rational calculus but derives from its threat of planetary catastrophe. The future, as it had been in Marxism, again becomes “the great category of blackmail,” as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes in “The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.”

Climate change does represent an existential threat to Western civilization, although not in the way environmentalists say. Net-zero climate policies threaten to undermine the internal cohesiveness of Western societies and drain them of economic vitality. Externally, they will accelerate the redistribution of power away from the West to those nations that decide not to decarbonize, especially to China. Decarbonization will see the progressive elimination of high-paying, high-productivity blue-collar employment such as coal mining, oil and gas, steelmaking, and energy-intensive manufacturing. The aristocracy of labor will become an extinct social class; instead, as social mobility stagnates and class stratifications solidify, social geographer Joel Kotkin foresees the coming of neo-feudalism.

Accompanying these regressive social developments is the atrophying of democratic politics. Net-zero climate policies require reorganizing society around the principle of decarbonization—not through a couple of election cycles but over the next three decades. Net-zero must therefore be put beyond the reach of democratic politics so that voters cannot reverse a decision that was taken for them. This provides a better fit for a post-democratic polity such as the European Union. Britain has a statutory climate change committee to hold the government to account for meeting decarbonization targets.

Although the Biden administration has adopted a target of net-zero by 2050 and of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, Congress has not passed—and is unlikely to pass—climate legislation mandating these targets. Nonetheless, American corporations in droves are pledging their own net-zero targets. Wall Street and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing and climate disclosures, which the SEC intends to mandate, have opened an alternative route on the basis of what gets measured gets managed.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, candidly admits that forcing companies to disclose their emissions isn’t transparency for transparency’s sake: “disclosure should be a means to achieving a more sustainable and inclusive capitalism.” This collusion between the administrative state and climate activists to bypass Congress has been condemned by Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. “Activists with no fiduciary duty to the company or its shareholders are trying to impose their progressive political views on publicly traded companies, and the country at large, having failed to enact change via the elected government,” Senator Toomey and his colleagues wrote in a letter to SEC chair Gary Gensler earlier this month.

In addition to this usurpation of the political prerogatives of democratic government, forcing business to take on governmental functions to address societal problems will see them, over time, acquire the modes and culture of government bureaucracies. This subtracts from the core economic function of the business corporation in a capitalist economy. “The capitalist economy,” in the words of the growth economist William Baumol, “can usefully be viewed as a machine whose primary product is economic growth.” What distinguishes it most sharply from all other economic systems are free-market pressures that force firms to engage in a continuous, competitive process of innovation. “This does not happen fortuitously,” writes Baumol, “but occurs when the structure of payoffs in an economy is such as to make unproductive activities such as rent-seeking (or worse) more profitable than activities that are productive.”

If CEO remuneration is aligned with ESG objectives and decarbonization targets and if directors risk being voted off boards for not having them, businesses will increasingly focus their efforts on meeting these non-business objectives. As this incurs costs and impairs business performance, businesses will turn to politicians to seek protection from their antisocial competitors that refrain from doing the government’s work. Capitalism’s legitimacy rests on its record of raising living standards through its prodigious capacity to generate productive wealth. Should that slow down to a trickle, capitalism becomes hard to justify, even though the explanation is that the system is no longer a capitalistic, free-market one.

Global warming flourished during a period when the world had taken a holiday from geopolitics. It had entered the world as geopolitical tensions were easing. Six months earlier, in December 1987, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF treaty, eliminating intermediate nuclear missiles. By the time of the Rio Earth Summit, the Soviet Union was gone. Geopolitics is now back. There is a broad consensus in Washington that President Xi’s China is a strategic rival to the U.S. Yet the new strategic realism ceases when it comes to climate change.

According to the IPCC, net-zero requires “transformative systemic change” that involves “unprecedented policy and geopolitical challenges.” The International Energy Agency calls decarbonizing the energy sector “perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has faced.” The West embarking on this process when China does not is akin to signing a strategic arms-control treaty binding on only one side: it can only be to China’s strategic advantage. So far, the grip of environmentalism on Western policymakers lulls them into the belief that global warming operates in a strategic vacuum, insulated from the factors that constitute geopolitical weight and ambition. It is in that sense that climate change constitutes an existential threat to the West.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Blackouts Loom In California As Electricity Prices Are "Absolutely Exploding"

SATURDAY, JUN 26, 2021 - 07:45 PM
Authored by Robert Bryce via RealClearEnergy.com,

Two inexorable energy trends are underway in California: soaring electricity prices and ever-worsening reliability – and both trends bode ill for the state’s low- and middle-income consumers.



Last week, the state’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator, issued a “flex alert” that asked the state’s consumers to reduce their power use “to reduce stress on the grid and avoid power outages.”

CAISO’s warning of impending electricity shortages heralds another blackout-riddled summer at the same time California’s electricity prices are skyrocketing.
In 2020, California’s electricity prices jumped by 7.5%, making it the biggest price increase of any state in the country last year and nearly seven times the increase that was seen in the United States as a whole. According to data from the Energy Information Administration, the all-sector price of electricity in California last year jumped to 18.15 cents per kilowatt-hour, which means that Californians are now paying about 70% more for their electricity than the U.S. average all-sector rate of 10.66 cents per kWh. Even more worrisome: California’s electricity rates are expected to soar over the next decade. (More on that in a moment.)

The surging cost of electricity will increase the energy burden being borne by low- and middle-income Californians. High energy costs have a particularly regressive effect in California, which has the highest poverty rate – and some of the highest electricity prices – in the country. In 2020, California’s all-sector electricity prices were the third-highest in the continental U.S., behind only Rhode Island (18.55 cents per kWh) and Connecticut (19.19 cents per kWh.)

Before going further, let me state the obvious: California policymakers are providing a case study in how not to manage an electric grid. Furthermore, that case study shows what could happen if policymakers at the state and federal levels decide to follow California’s radical decarbonization mandates, which include a requirement for 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045 and an economy-wide goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.

Even though the state’s tattered electric grid can barely meet existing demand – and more rolling blackouts are almost certain this summer – California continues to pile bad policy on top of bad policy. The state has banned the future sale of cars powered by internal combustion engines which will result in dramatic increases in electricity demand and will require, according to a recent report by the California Energy Commission, the installation of 1.2 million new EV charging stations by 2030. Bans on natural gas will further increase electricity demand.

Cheered on by the Sierra Club, which is getting tens of millions of dollars from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, about 46 California communities have banned the use of natural gas in homes and businesses. Making the whole thing even more absurd, is that California is pledging to achieve these goals while closing the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which by itself produces nearly 10% of all the juice consumed in California.

The state’s surging energy costs demonstrate the regressive nature of decarbonization policies and how renewable-energy mandates drive up the price of power. California’s electricity prices are “absolutely exploding,” says Mark Nelson, an energy analyst and the managing director of the Radiant Energy Fund, who used that phrase on a recent episode of the Power Hungry Podcast.

He added that the electricity price hikes are happening before the state’s utilities have incurred all of the costs of the deadly wildfires that swept the state, trimming millions of trees to prevent future wildfires, and adding all the mandated renewable-energy capacity, transmission lines, and new battery storage that the state will need to meet its climate goals. Further, the costs do not include all of the costs that will be incurred after the proposed shuttering of Diablo Canyon in 2025.

Last week’s power conservation requests are likely the first of many to come. On May 27, CAISO CEO Elliot Mainzer warned that if the state is hit with another hot summer like the one that required rolling blackouts that left more than 800,000 homes and businesses without power over two days last August, “our numbers tell us the grid will be stressed again." That warning followed a May 12 CAISO press release which warned that “reliability risks remain” and the state will likely need “voluntary” electricity conservation this summer to avoid a repeat of last year’s blackouts.

The specter of more blackouts is yet more bad news for California’s beleaguered consumers. Between 2010 and 2020, the state’s electricity prices jumped by 39.5%, which was, the biggest increase of any state in the U.S. Even more worrisome: California’s electricity rates will soar over the next decade.

In a report issued in February, the California Public Utility Commission warned that the state’s energy costs are growing far faster than the rate of inflation, and that “energy bills will become less affordable over time.”

What’s driving up prices? The report says that “electrification goals and wildlife mitigation plans are among the near-term needs...that place upward pressure on rates and bills.” The report projected that residents living in hotter regions (that is, those who can’t afford to live close to the coast) who get their electricity from San Diego Gas & Electric could see their monthly power bills increase by 47% between now and 2030. When future gasoline-price increases are included, overall energy costs for that same consumer are projected to increase by 60%. Furthermore, the CPUC expects residential ratepayers in SDG&E’s service territory will be paying close to 45 cents per kilowatt-hour by 2030. For reference, that is more than three times the current average price of residential electricity.

Meanwhile, the state’s renewable plans are being thwarted by rural Californians who don’t want wind and solar projects in their neighborhoods. California has added essentially no new wind capacity since 2013. The latest rejection of Big Wind happened on Tuesday when the Shasta County Planning Commission unanimously rejected a permit for Fountain Wind, a project that proposed to put 216 megawatts of wind capacity (and about 71 turbines) in a mountainous area west of the town of Burney. The project met fierce resistance. According to David Benda, a reporter for the Redding Record Searchlight, “The 5-0 vote capped a marathon meeting that went nearly 10 hours and ended just before 11 p.m. The unanimous vote was met with cheers.”

As I have previously reported, the backlash against Big Wind goes far beyond California. It can be seen throughout Europe and from Maine to Hawaii. Since 2015, more than 300 communities in the U.S, have rejected or restricted wind projects.

In addition to the raging land-use conflicts, California policymakers are facing a growing backlash from California’s Latino population, which is the largest in the country. As I reported last year, the state’s Latino leaders have sued the state over its housing, energy, and climate regulations. Jennifer Hernandez, the lead lawyer for The Two Hundred, a coalition of Latino leaders, told me those regulations are “incredibly regressive” and are bringing “Appalachia economics” to California’s “non-coastal elites.”

Robert Apodaca, the founder of United Latinos Vote, a non-profit group, told me recently that the ongoing electricity price hikes in the state “will be crippling for low- and middle- income Californians, particularly for those who live in the Central Valley and the Inland Empire. They are going to really feel the heat, in more ways than one.”

The punchline here is clear: the blackouts and high electricity prices that are plaguing California provide a neon-lit warning sign about the electric reliability and energy affordability crises that loom if policymakers attempt to decarbonize our economy too quickly.

 

[von Koehler]

One has to wonder exactly what Green/Leftist programs are buried in a 6 trillion dollar bill?

Bet it's going to be a 1,000 plus pages long.

 

[marsh]

Hunter Biden Invested In A Pandemic Firm Collaborating With Daszak's EcoHealth and The Wuhan Lab. - The National Pulse+

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners – an investment firm led by Hunter Biden – was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has partnered with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners...

thenationalpulse.com

Hunter Biden Invested In A Pandemic Firm Collaborating With Daszak’s EcoHealth And The Wuhan Lab

June 28, 2021
Natalie Winters

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners – an investment firm led by Hunter Biden – was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has partnered with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) was an offshoot of Rosemont Capital, an investment fund founded by Biden and John Kerry’s stepson in 2009, that counted Biden as a Managing Director.

Among the companies listed on archived versions of the firm’s portfolio is Metabiota, a San Francisco-based company that purports to detect, track, and analyze emerging infectious diseases, The National Pulse can reveal.

RSTP INVESTMENTS.

Financial reports reveal that RSTP led the company’s first round of funding, which amounted to $30 million. Former Managing Director and co-founder of RSTP Neil Callahan – a name that appears many times on Hunter Biden’s hard drive – also sits on Metabiota’s Board of Advisors.

RSTP’S INVESTMENTS IN METABIOTA.

Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”

As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat infectious diseases in China. “Sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,” the paper notes.

The proximity between Hunter Biden and COVID-19’s origins are almost too convenient.

Among the researchers listed on the aforementioned 2014 paper are “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, the Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Lab. The disgraced Peter Daszak – recently recused from the Lancet COVID-19 commission due to several conflicts of interest as a “longtime collaborator” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – is also listed as an author.

Daszak is also a figure central to the potential origins of COVID-19. His EcoHealth Alliance funneled taxpayer dollars from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan.

2014 STUDY.

Researchers from EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota have also collaborated on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies linking emerging infectious disease outbreaks to wildlife trade facilities including “wet markets.”

“Wildlife trade can facilitate zoonotic disease transmission and represents a threat to human health and economies in Asia, highlighted by the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak, where a Chinese wildlife market facilitated pathogen transmission,” the 2016 paper notes.

END SLIDE OF PRESENTATION.

Researchers from Metabiota have also been listed alongside EcoHealth Alliance personnel on a 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, 2015 study focusing on herpes, and 2015 study on viral diversity.

Beyond the ties to EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota has also been embroiled in controversy for “bungling” America’s response to Ebola.

“An American company that bills itself as a pioneer in tracking emerging epidemics made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that swept across West Africa — with employees feuding with fellow responders, contributing to misdiagnosed Ebola cases and repeatedly misreading the trajectory of the virus,” an Associated Press (AP) investigation into the company found.

The company reportedly made the “already chaotic situation worse,” prompting World Health Organization officials to criticize the company:

Emails obtained by AP and interviews with aid workers on the ground show that some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.

WHO outbreak expert Dr. Eric Bertherat wrote to colleagues in a July 17, 2014, email about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the Sierra Leone government lab Metabiota shared with Tulane University in the city of Kenema. He said there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.”

“This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” he wrote.

In April 2021, Joe Biden’s USAID announced a new initiative spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance to track emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential. Also collaborating on the taxpayer-funded venture is Metabiota, whose researchers have been listed as authors on papers from June 2021 relating to coronavirus surveillance in Africa.

 

[marsh]

The Cruel Progressive Creed Undoing Civilization › American Greatness

Debt is suffocating us. Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized. Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both.

amgreatness.com

The Cruel Progressive Creed Undoing Civilization
The Left’s progressive wasteland is an acceptable price to pay for the terrifying visions of its anointed.

By Victor Davis Hanson

June 27, 2021

Debt is suffocating us. Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized.

Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both. The law is optional, and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology. The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.

The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military.

There is no U.S. border; it is an abstract construct that millions will illegally cross in the next few years, ostensibly because they will become future soldiers in the progressive wars for America to come. The idea of merit that built America is a dirty word, replaced by medieval tribalism of hiring and promotion by superficial appearance.

In just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

Progressivism is billed as many things. But its foundational brand is devotion to supposedly “scientific” principles to improve the human condition. That Enlightenment project demands greater social welfare expenditure and therapeutic education to “improve” human nature itself. And all this can sometimes require necessary force.

Such utopian dreams of mandated equity attract all sorts to the cause. There are the naïve who feel socialist redistribution, if at last done right just this once, can really, really create social equity and inclusion. Many of the sympathetic rich assume they will be exempt from the tough medicine that follows from their own guilt or sense of civic duty. Some are opportunistic and parasitical careerists piggy-backing on the chaos. Others are social and psychological zealots who find meaning and relevance as wannabe soldiers marching to utopia.

But inherent in such 20th-century hubris is the concession that there will be lots of collateral damage in reordering society. When imposing abstract, but uncompromising theories onto the otherwise unenlightened people, eggs will have to be broken to bake the new omelet. And from what we have seen in the last few months, the progressive toll is becoming every bit as excruciating as our woke custodians are indifferent to it.

As a general rule, anytime anyone anywhere announces that he has a master plan to reorder society and “fundamentally transform” or “reset” it by creating larger government, more rules, and an elite hierarchy to oversee compliance for the recalcitrant, then run. You can rest assured ultimately the architect will change the language, demonize and marginalize new opponents, given the omelette always needs more eggs. They will subvert institutions, and, if need be, resort to violence to ensure change.

The Progressive Scorecard
Take the border. Human nature over the eons has assumed the world functions according to deterrence. People make choices, good and bad, based on their own cost-to-benefit analyses. In other words, they balance incentives against disincentives about whether to enter the United States illegally or stay home.
Perhaps nearly 2 million illegal aliens will cross the border over this calendar year.

Most would never have attempted to do so last summer.

Why? Because after January 20, 2021, they believed the border was open. Now, meeting a border security guard ensures no detention, much less deportation.

Now arrivals assume a fast track to permanent residence as “political refugees” and a future of government subsidy and alleviation of the miseries of life south of the border.

So they rightly believe the risks of illegal entry are far fewer than the rewards of being not just American residents, but protected by a new progressive paternalism that finds advantage in illegal immigration.

Progressives believe, at least in theory, that breaking federal law to usher in millions of poor into the United States reveals to us their own morally superior commitment to improving the lot of mankind. Cynics counter that progressives wish to import not so much people as constituents and voters, to turn more red counties and states blue.

Who worries much about the ensuing collateral damage: squalid conditions in border halfway stations, cartel predation on the vulnerable, the overtaxing of social welfare services at the expense of American poor, greater rates of crime and gang violence, the diminution in entry-level wages, and less integration and assimilation of newcomers who come en masse?

The crude ideology applies to current spiraling crime—the direct result of progressive rhetoric, policies, and political agendas. It is not that the Left wants violence in the streets, only that it is a small price to pay to implement never-let-a-crisis-go-to waste ideas that normally would have no support.

Progressives obsess over stop-and-frisk, supposedly inordinate incarceration and racially asymmetrical arrests, but they have little concern for keeping the streets safe for the young, the elderly, the weak, the inner-city poor and the vulnerable from the attacks of history’s archetypical predator, the unbound young male between 15 and 40.

So naturally crime spikes throughout the country, given deterrence is lost. Criminals prove far better students of human nature than do the professors, lawyers, and politicians. Who would have thought the criminally minded would interpret state laxity as the timidity of a bankrupt establishment to be exploited rather than reciprocated?

Given that progressivism is the cachet of the rich, the secure, and the influential, rarely does the damage of implementing progressivism law enforcement befall its exempt architects.

Translated in the real world, the progressive mind fixates on the lone suspect shot in a police confrontation, the rare white on black crime, and almost any anomaly that “proves” the deductive idea of the perennially victimized. It cannot tolerate news or video accounts of the violence in Chicago, now-routine theft in San Francisco, or the street executions in New York. So such norms are simply cut out of the narrative.

Last week in Portland, Antifa and Black Lives Matter were poised to protest and riot over the police shooting of a supposed “victim” of color—only to dissipate when the victim was announced to be white and the shooter a black officer. The media covers a white policeman shooting an unarmed black suspect as a teachable moment of systemic racism, but smothers the story of an officer of “unknown” race who shot and killed unarmed Ashli Babbitt attempting to climb through a window inside the Capitol Building—and shows its own racist proclivities. Again, the correct revolutionary narrative matters, not the facts or details, in the manner humanity must be saved even if the truth—and some humans—are sacrificed.

Transgendered sports are another example of the callousness of progressivism in all its glory. It believes “science” has rendered passé biological sexual differences between male and female.

The Left then trumpets its liberation of the transgendered by popularizing a new third sex, as mothers become “birthing people” and men need not have male genitalia. But in the concrete, progressivism cares little that transgenderism is utterly destroying women’s sports. Those born biologically male compete with innately physical advantages over biological females in size, stature, and strength.

But then who cares about women athletes anyway? Why are not women transitioning to males not also competing successfully, if at all, with men? Again, the aspirations of millions of young female athletes is a tiny charge to pay for the larger transformation, liberation, and equitization of sexuality itself.

Racism can be defined as the ancient and eternal pathology of assessing and stereotyping humans in all manner of human life as inferior. The entire pathology fixates on superficial collective appearances rather than unique individual character, talent and achievement. By that definition, the new wokeism is again racist to the core. The BLM brain trust rails about innately pernicious “whiteness,” and the pathologies that all “whites” share, and the universal need for all “whites” to become “reprogrammed” and “reeducated.”

Yet racism and igniting tribal wars are small progressive prices to pay for achieving an equity society characterized by an engineered equality of result in all spheres of life and insured by the government. Why worry about individual lives ruined by racial preferences and institutionalized prejudices?

We know that those with COVID-19 antibodies usually have nearly as much or the same immunity as those vaccinated. We know also that those previously infected may run somewhat greater risk of side effects from vaccinations than those uninfected. And we know that those under 15 may run even more risks from vaccinations than they would coming down with a case of COVID-19 infection.

Yet progressive science will tell us all that is not true or at least of no interest given the need to vaccinate all 330 million American—or else and until the progressive narrative changes for the greater good as it did with Dr. Fauci and his changing “science” of masks.

Once progressive science decides what constitutes herd immunity—defined by one of Dr. Fauci’s noble lies of 60, 70, 80, or 90 percent protection with antibodies—then whatever means necessary to achieve the collective good are justified. That can entail everything from vaccinating the very young and the previously infected to misleading the public that white deplorables rank as the most dangerous to us all by their disproportionate resistance to vaccination, or ignoring quarantine violations by large numbers of the right sort of protestors.

Meanwhile, progressivism’s noble lies assure us that most minorities, who on average actually have fewer vaccinations per capita than do whites and Asians, are not as culpable as working-class whites who are demonized for resisting vaccination. Instead, minorities have no free will and are “underserved” and “marginalized” as they understandably balk at vaccination due to “historic and legitimate suspicions” or “fear of deportation—and the prior 2020 castigations of the vaccinations by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, as well as “experts” warning that being vaxxed still means masks and quarantines, will not really go away.

We know that defunding the police erodes deterrence, encouraging criminals to believe in a cost-to-benefit gamble that the chances of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration are small and the rewards or delights in criminality are ample. But we do not care because it is far more important to advance the narrative that particular groups are victims, and others deductive victimizers. And only the government can apply the power and morality to punish and reward accordingly. If it is a choice between reducing the some 700 shooting deaths of blacks in Chicago by increasing the police presence to protect inner-city residents, and thereby losing the progressive narrative of an epidemic of out-of-control racist rogue cops, then inner-city violence is a tolerable price.

Our Progressive Guardians
Progressivism is also at its basic level elitist. Sweeping reengineering of society, micromanagement of millions of lives, and elimination of individual pathologies require exemptions. For example, crusaders such as John Kerry and Al Gore have offered a valuable window into the progressive heart and mind.

Kerry reminded us that he often leaves a huge carbon footprint from his wife’s private jet. Indeed, he jets to get a climate change award since such gas-guzzling travel was “the only choice for someone like me” who had to travel the world quickly and in comfort “to win the battle.” This was the progressive bookend argument to his earlier advocacy for higher taxes, as he moved his luxury yacht from its Massachusetts dock to one in low-tax Rhode Island to save nearly $500,000.

Al Gore once trumped even Kerry’s progressive exemptions in a twofer of rushing to sell his failed cable TV company to carbon-rich, oil-exporting Qatar’s Al Jazeera—in hopes of avoiding projected rises in capital gains taxes. As Platonic Guardians, progressives must have the time, the resources, and the multifarious exemptions to plan and care for the rest of us.

Think for a minute. In the cases above, if illegal aliens now crossing the Rio Grande proved to be more right-wing than Cubans, the border would be closed tomorrow. If criminals focused their efforts on Presidio Heights, Malibu, Martha’s Vineyard, or Newport, Rhode Island, there would be progressive outcries to fund more police. If transgendering muscular “female” teenage athletes demanded the use of women’s gym showers and restrooms in the nation’s top prep schools, progressives would likely recalibrate their new theories of trisexuality.

The new progressivism is not the old Democratic Party, or even 1960s’ liberalism. It is a cruel creed, a faith-based ideology that allows no apostasies. Progressivism envisions humanity as a marbleized abstraction, not incarnate humans. If need be, it will alter language, change names, cancel people, erase events, and destroy elements of existing civilization. It stereotypes both adherents and opponents as either useful or disposable. And the carnage it wreaks on the masses is always acceptable damage for these terrifying visions of the anointed.

 

[marsh]

Psaki Mocked After Announcing Biden's Plan To Place 500,000 Tesla Charging Stations In 'Disadvantaged Communities'

Biden also hopes to buy "35,000 electric schoolbuses"

nationalfile.com

Psaki Mocked After Announcing Biden’s Plan To Place 500,000 Tesla Charging Stations In ‘Disadvantaged Communities’
Biden also hopes to buy "35,000 electric schoolbuses"

by GABRIEL KEANE

June 28, 2021



White House spokesperson Jen Psaki announced Monday that the Biden administration is drafting plans to place half a million electric vehicle charging stations in “rural and disadvantaged communities,” and also apparently hopes to run fleets of tens of thousands of “electric school buses” in inner cities. The announcement has been met with incredulity and a fair of mockery online.

“People across the country, people who care deeply about addressing our climate crisis, know the components of what are in this package, which the President considers a down payment, not the end, a down payment,” Psaki said, adding, “So, five hundred thousand electric vehicle charging stations nationwide, that’s what this would help support, with a focus on our highways and on rural and disadvantaged communities.” Psaki also claimed the Biden administration wants to buy “thirty-five thousand electric schoolbuses.”

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1409561524960702475

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1409561524960702475
.23 min

Critics were quick to point out that while electric vehicle charging stations already do exist in many “disadvantaged communities,” they have not been particularly well-received.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1409561524960702475

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1409561524960702475
.23 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1409590957087936512

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1409590957087936512
.09 min

Psaki did not specify whose vehicles would be charged at the charging stations located in disadvantaged communities. The average consumer cost for a new electric vehicle, or EV, remains high, well above the average yearly income of many poor jurisdictions.

Car And Driver magazine reported in 2020 that the average cost for an EV remained over $19,000 more than its gasoline counterpart, at $55,600.

 

[marsh]

Biden to 'Destroy' Suburbs with Reconciliation Bill, Proving Trump Correct

Biden is attempting to "destroy" American suburbs with the reconciliation infrastructure package, proving former Trump's prediction correct.

www.breitbart.com

Joe Biden Attempting to ‘Destroy’ Suburbs with Infrastructure Package, Proving Trump’s Prediction Correct
2,539

Getty Images/4nadia
WENDELL HUSEBØ29 Jun 2021856

President Joe Biden is attempting to “destroy” American suburbs with the reconciliation infrastructure package, proving former President Donald Trump’s prediction correct.

Trump said during a 2020 campaign rally that Biden wants “to put low-cost housing in the suburbs, and that would mean abolishing, ruining the suburbs. It has already begun. It’s been going on for years.”

Biden refuted the claim at the time by saying Trump is “trying to scare because an awful lot of suburbanites are now deciding they’re going to vote for me, at least the data suggests, as opposed to him.”

But Democrats are, indeed, planning to federalize local zoning laws within the infrastructure reconciliation package to displace single family homes with high-rise, low-income apartments to impact the already purple suburbs.

The reconciliation package plans to begin the destruction of the suburbs via a measure within the package called the “HOMES Act,” which intends to put the federal government in charge of local zoning laws to change local demographics, impacting the already purple voting districts.

According to the measure, any local government which does not comply with the federal zoning guidelines, meaning “ordinances that ban apartment buildings from certain residential areas or set a minimum lot size for a single family home,” the Department of House and Urban Development (HUD) will cut off funding to that city which the city uses to maintain the its current low-income housing.

More consequences for cities keeping their local zoning laws in place, bucking federal the government’s overreach, would be to punish states by blocking them from “receiving taxpayer funded transportation grants of any kind if they refuse to allow highrise apartments throughout their high density zoning in their suburbs.”

States rely on federal transportation funding to fix local streets and highways.

The establishment media seems very much for the radical-left plan. USA Today wrote the following:

A house with a white picket fence and a big backyard for a Fourth of July barbecue may be a staple of the American dream, but experts and local politicians say multifamily zoning is key to combating climate change, racial injustice and the nation’s growing affordable housing crisis.

The infrastructure package is now being negotiated among members of congress which moderate and far-left Democrats and President Joe Biden want to pass via reconciliation, a tactic which is immune to Republican filibuster.

The reconciliation package is rumored to be anywhere from $4 trillion to $10 trillion, nearly three times more than the United States’ projected 2021 revenues, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

 

[marsh]

Democrats to Federalize Local Zoning Laws, Displace Single-Family Homes

Democrats plan to federalize local zoning laws within the infrastructure package to displace single family homes with highrise apartments.

www.breitbart.com

Democrat Reconciliation Package to Federalize Local Zoning Laws, Displace Single-Family Homes in Suburbs
200

fstopphotography
WENDELL HUSEBØ29 Jun 2021297

Democrats plan to federalize local zoning laws within the infrastructure reconciliation package to displace single-family homes with high-rise, low-income apartments to impact the already purple suburbs.

The reconciliation package plans to implement the destruction of the suburbs via a measure within the package called the “HOMES Act,” which attempts put the federal government in charge of local zoning laws to change local demographics, impacting the already purple voting districts.

According to the measure within the transportation package, any local government that does not comply with the federal zoning guidelines, meaning “ordinances that ban apartment buildings from certain residential areas or set a minimum lot size for a single family home,” the Department of House and Urban Development (HUD) will cut off funding to that city – funding any city needs to maintain their current low-income housing.

Additional consequences for cities keeping their local zoning laws in place would be to punish states by prohibiting them from “receiving taxpayer funded transportation grants of any kind if they refuse to allow high-rise apartments throughout their high density zoning in their suburbs.”

States rely on federal transportation money to fix local streets and highways.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge told USA Today in April, “The result of this sort of investment will be critical to increasing housing options for low- and moderate-income families.”

The establishment media seems very much for the radical-left plan, articulating the destruction of local rule as follows:

A house with a white picket fence and a big backyard for a Fourth of July barbecue may be a staple of the American dream, but experts and local politicians say multifamily zoning is key to combating climate change, racial injustice and the nation’s growing affordable housing crisis.

The infrastructure package is now being negotiated among members of Congress that Democrats and President Joe Biden want to pass via reconciliation, a tactic which does not need to surpass a Republican filibuster.

The package is rumored to be anywhere from $4 trillion to $10 trillion, nearly three times more than the United States’ projected 2021 revenues, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

 

[raven]

Democrats to Federalize Local Zoning Laws, Displace Single-Family Homes

Democrats plan to federalize local zoning laws within the infrastructure package to displace single family homes with highrise apartments.

www.breitbart.com

Democrat Reconciliation Package to Federalize Local Zoning Laws, Displace Single-Family Homes in Suburbs
200

fstopphotography
WENDELL HUSEBØ29 Jun 2021297

Democrats plan to federalize local zoning laws within the infrastructure reconciliation package to displace single-family homes with high-rise, low-income apartments to impact the already purple suburbs.

The reconciliation package plans to implement the destruction of the suburbs via a measure within the package called the “HOMES Act,” which attempts put the federal government in charge of local zoning laws to change local demographics, impacting the already purple voting districts.

According to the measure within the transportation package, any local government that does not comply with the federal zoning guidelines, meaning “ordinances that ban apartment buildings from certain residential areas or set a minimum lot size for a single family home,” the Department of House and Urban Development (HUD) will cut off funding to that city – funding any city needs to maintain their current low-income housing.

Additional consequences for cities keeping their local zoning laws in place would be to punish states by prohibiting them from “receiving taxpayer funded transportation grants of any kind if they refuse to allow high-rise apartments throughout their high density zoning in their suburbs.”

States rely on federal transportation money to fix local streets and highways.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge told USA Today in April, “The result of this sort of investment will be critical to increasing housing options for low- and moderate-income families.”

The establishment media seems very much for the radical-left plan, articulating the destruction of local rule as follows:

The infrastructure package is now being negotiated among members of Congress that Democrats and President Joe Biden want to pass via reconciliation, a tactic which does not need to surpass a Republican filibuster.

The package is rumored to be anywhere from $4 trillion to $10 trillion, nearly three times more than the United States’ projected 2021 revenues, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

collapse of a condo in Florida would give the federal government an excuse to regulate local multi-family housing.
nah. just a coincidence.

 

[marsh]

CLUELESS: Rep. Kevin McCarthy Creates Republican Climate Change Task Force to Regain House Majority - Big League Politics

This is why Republicans always lose.

bigleaguepolitics.com

CLUELESS: Rep. Kevin McCarthy Creates Republican Climate Change Task Force to Regain House Majority
Jun 29, 2021

House Minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has announced the formation of a climate change task force as the Republican Party gets ready to capitulate to the liberals on yet another issue.

Perhaps after a session with his butt-buddy and roomie Frank Luntz, McCarthy decided to make climate change a primary focus for the Republican Party moving forward. He made climate change the focus of one of his seven task forces, which are overwhelmingly packed with RINOs.

“These task forces will be critical in building consensus around ideas to continue to build on our Commitment to America and ensure that the next century is an American one,” McCarthy said.

Having done such a legendary poor job of youth outreach, the Republican establishment is getting ready to capitulate on climate change like they have on pretty much every other issue. Since actually fighting to change minds on the issue would take hard work, they would rather take the path of least resistance, surrender to the Left, and cash donor checks instead.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1384141487391199232

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1384141487391199232
1:06 min

Big League Politics has reported on how RINOs are now pushing the climate change hoax after getting the message from the globalists that it is time for Republicans to capitulate once more to the Left:

“Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) recently came out of the closet, outing himself as a so-called “rational environmentalist” in a Facebook video repeating leftist talking points about the evil of carbon emissions.

“I’m an environmentalist. And I know climate change is real,” Crenshaw said to open his video.

“I’m also rational – and I know that wasting your tax dollars on crazy Green New Deals will put millions out of work and drastically increase your electric bill and your taxes,” he added.

Crenshaw is trying to stake out a middle ground in which he cedes some ground to the Left in order to get in the so-called “national discussion” on environmental policy. This is a rehash of the weak brand of compassionate Republicanism that resulted in eight years of Barack Hussein Obama in the White House.

He claims that his plan is to “make America the world leader in clean energy” by reducing carbon emissions.

“I’m Dan Crenshaw, and I approve this message because if we come together, we can put America on the path to a new energy frontier,” he said to conclude his video…

Earlier this year, Crenshaw betrayed the free market and demanded federal action to coerce American businesses into reducing their carbon emissions.”

McCarthy’s leadership shows why the Republicans are frequently called the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters. He has no business being the House Minority Leader in a Trump era GOP that puts America first.

 

[marsh]

AOC Is Shoving A $70 Billion ‘Civilian Climate Corps’ Bill Through Congress | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

AOC Is Shoving A $70 Billion ‘Civilian Climate Corps’ Bill Through Congress

By Ben Zeisloft
•Jun 29, 2021 DailyWire.com•

Alex Wong/Getty Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) are attempting to push their $70 billion “Civilian Climate Corps” bill through Congress’ budget reconciliation process.

“We’re working to win a Civilian Climate Corps in the reconciliation package,” announced Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. “The last time the US did this, we employed 2M people and had record success in wildfire suppression — one the most rapid peacetime mobilizations in US history. We can revive it to fight climate change.”

According to a joint press release, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s “Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act” would hire a “diverse and equitable” group of 1.5 million young Americans to “complete federally-funded projects that help communities respond to climate change and transition to a clean economy.”

“The CCC would put 1.5 million young people to work strengthening our communities and preserving our lands — doing everything from remediating blight and maintaining trails to creating entirely new green spaces,” remarked Ocasio-Cortez. “The program also provides the support needed to turn this work into a career path — including childcare, eldercare and tax-free educational grants to be used for student loan debt payments or higher education.”

“To combat the interlocking crises of the moment — climate change, racial injustice, a global pandemic, and income inequality — our government has an opportunity to equitably reimagine an idea from the past and tailor it to meet the present and the future,” Markey said. “The Civilian Climate Corps will provide an opportunity for millions of Americans from every walk of life to earn a good wage while serving their communities and training to transform our economy.”

The bill would guarantee salaries between $25,000 and $50,000 for “corpsmembers.” The lawmakers request a total of $70 billion from 2021 through 2025.

To ensure that the Civilian Climate Corps is “just and equitable,” the program would also employ “explicit antiracist language,” prioritize “labor groups,” and enact “tribal sovereignty protections.”

We’re working to win a Civilian Climate Corps in the reconciliation package.
The last time the US did this, we employed 2M people and had record success in wildfire suppression – one the most rapid peacetime mobilizations in US history.
We can revive it to fight climate change. https://t.co/OgFNFwu2HU
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 25, 2021

Reconciliation is a method by which Congress can pass budget bills with a simple majority in the Senate instead of a sixty-vote, filibuster-proof coalition. Democratic leaders in Congress are seeking to pass much of President Biden’s agenda through the reconciliation process due to the divided nature of the Senate.

 

[vestige]

AOC Is Shoving A $70 Billion ‘Civilian Climate Corps’ Bill Through Congress | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

AOC Is Shoving A $70 Billion ‘Civilian Climate Corps’ Bill Through Congress

By Ben Zeisloft
•Jun 29, 2021 DailyWire.com•

Alex Wong/Getty Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) are attempting to push their $70 billion “Civilian Climate Corps” bill through Congress’ budget reconciliation process.

“We’re working to win a Civilian Climate Corps in the reconciliation package,” announced Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. “The last time the US did this, we employed 2M people and had record success in wildfire suppression — one the most rapid peacetime mobilizations in US history. We can revive it to fight climate change.”

According to a joint press release, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s “Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act” would hire a “diverse and equitable” group of 1.5 million young Americans to “complete federally-funded projects that help communities respond to climate change and transition to a clean economy.”

“The CCC would put 1.5 million young people to work strengthening our communities and preserving our lands — doing everything from remediating blight and maintaining trails to creating entirely new green spaces,” remarked Ocasio-Cortez. “The program also provides the support needed to turn this work into a career path — including childcare, eldercare and tax-free educational grants to be used for student loan debt payments or higher education.”

“To combat the interlocking crises of the moment — climate change, racial injustice, a global pandemic, and income inequality — our government has an opportunity to equitably reimagine an idea from the past and tailor it to meet the present and the future,” Markey said. “The Civilian Climate Corps will provide an opportunity for millions of Americans from every walk of life to earn a good wage while serving their communities and training to transform our economy.”

The bill would guarantee salaries between $25,000 and $50,000 for “corpsmembers.” The lawmakers request a total of $70 billion from 2021 through 2025.

To ensure that the Civilian Climate Corps is “just and equitable,” the program would also employ “explicit antiracist language,” prioritize “labor groups,” and enact “tribal sovereignty protections.”


Reconciliation is a method by which Congress can pass budget bills with a simple majority in the Senate instead of a sixty-vote, filibuster-proof coalition. Democratic leaders in Congress are seeking to pass much of President Biden’s agenda through the reconciliation process due to the divided nature of the Senate.

Bullshit

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

By 2030 You'll Own Nothing And You'll Be Happy

TUESDAY, JUN 29, 2021 - 10:45 PM
Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

The title of this article projects an ominous future where the masses are controlled by a few. Over the years I have written several articles covering the elite gathering in Davos. The global elites see the World Economic Forum (WEF) as an opportunity to promote their views and various causes.

These people often fail to see that many of us have come to view Davos, as a notorious rendezvous for the world's elite that grant us the honor of paying for their schemes in some way or form.



Such gatherings are not for our sake but more for the benefit of plutocrats like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The Global Reset they are pushing often reeks of their desire to "break the world" with their ruthless corporate agendas that continue to move political power into the hands of the globalist elite. To counter this attitude reassuring words are cast out over the airwaves to us, the minions of the world, to encourage faith in their wisdom. Oh, what a tangled web those in charge of our fate have woven for us as they rush to sell and bargain away our freedom for power and wealth.

When the WEF revealed its Davos 2021 Agenda, it confirmed the event this year would be digital and herald the public unveiling of its Great Reset Initiative.

Angel Gurría and Klaus Schwab have outlined how governments and businesses can shape a new labor market that supports workers to thrive in the future. This underlines how the covid-19 pandemic has accelerated systemic changes that were apparent before its inception.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been used as confirmation that no institution or individual alone can address the economic, environmental, social, and technological challenges of our complex, interdependent world. It is also being touted as a reason to support the "The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development." One hundred and ninety-three UN member states adopted this 15-year global framework and its ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015.

With 169 targets and over 230 indicators, the 2030 Agenda envisions a secure world free of poverty and hunger, with full and productive employment, access to quality education, and universal health coverage. Thrown into the mix is the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, and an end to environmental degradation.

The 2030 Agenda is a global framework of action for people, the planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership. It integrates social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, as well as peace, governance, and justice elements. It makes clear that developing and developed countries alike will implement the Agenda. This is important in ensuring that no one is left behind in the achievement of the SDGs.



A great deal of attention has been given to some of the ideas and vision the WEF has floated. A powerful one became visible when WEF public relations released a video entitled: “8 Predictions for the World in 2030. Its 2030 agenda offers a telling glimpse into what the technocratic elite has in store for the rest of us. It promotes the idea that by 2030 "You will own nothing. And you'll be happy. The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a comprehensive plan that outlines how we can abolish poverty and transform the world into a peaceful, sustainable environment for all.

When persuasive speakers cloak an agenda in flowery rhetoric, it is often difficult to determine what is noble or separate something altruistic from a sinister plot. Nor, can we be certain that events will unfold more favorably if simply left to develop on their own rather than being manipulated. Still, the ideas flowing out of the World Economic Forum and those seeking a reset and a New One World Order reek of self-serving bias.

Not all of what the world economic forum predicts will happen but events are being shaped to unfold in that way. Examining what is being called for, sheds a bit of light on how we might expect our future to look. The ideas and predictions of the WEF do not seem so farfetched when you consider,

• Many people are already comfortable and busy renting things like cars, tools, apartments, so this has become a normal way to live. It is easy to argue that shared commodities save resources.
• Many people think the US will be unable to keep its position as the world leader. In fact, in many ways, the US has already abdicated this role.
• When it comes to things such as organ printing we tend to jump the gun in predicting it is just around the corner but research is continuing and huge progress is being made.
• The argument you simply can’t feed 10 billion people with meat and move these people into heavy consumer-based lifestyles has merit. At some point, the population must stop expanding or we will create a nightmare of food shortages and cause more damage to the planet.
• Down the road, billions of people will be displaced, especially at the shore, because of rising sea levels. Others because of droughts. This means we will have to learn how to deal better with migration or we will have huge cultural wars.
• Western values are already being tested because of globalization and migration. The fact that change and the future might scare us does not mean we can simply deny reality and call everything we don’t like or understand a conspiracy. Life is impermanent and nothing stays the way it is. We all die eventually and history shows even big civilizations vanish.

The agenda to change the world includes things such as controlling people through things such as social credit scores. Expect these to be linked to those you associate with including family members you seldom agree with. Sadly, the people that drew up this plan forgot that what they are proposing is the abolition of private property or communism a theory that has failed to ever bring prosperity to any country.

Another key part of this plan focuses on controlling the masses, this is also problematic and reeks of totalitarianism. While many people view big tech as the great enabler, a very dark side of it exists, surrendering to its allure gives big tech and those in charge of it the power to enslave the human race. When mankind turns its future over to technology and no longer takes responsibility for learning the most basic lessons that have brought us so far it gives up its soul. The idea we will move in the direction of creating a benevolent form of artificial intelligence that will protect and watch over us is far-fetched. It is frightening to entrust that in the future machines will value the contributions humans make to the overall scheme of things.

Intertwined and masked within the WEF plan are a lot of factors that will negatively impact people. These include a total lack of privacy, the loss of control to move about freely, or the ability to purchase anything you want with your money and controlling how that property is used. Of course, this is all for the greater good, but is it? History shows that in a society where private ownership is banned or not encouraged people lack skin in the game. This tends to result in people failing to shoulder responsibility for much of what happens.

In the past, each year as the highfalutin Davos extravaganza unfolded I seem to get a pain in my stomach that some might consider envy, but having attended my share of events I consider it more of a sickening feeling related to the over the top self-importance of many attending. Much of my angst is directed at the politicians and such that have their travel expenses picked up by governments.
How ironic that we pay the same clowns that create so many of our problems to gather in luxury to discuss how they might further their deeds.

I find it so interesting that someone flying across the globe on a private aircraft can sit down and discuss their environmental concerns and how each of us must do more to save the planet. In some ways, a person might even go so far as to describe such a gathering as downright evil.

In his writings, George Orwell pointed out that when society has a problem rather than rely on education, the natural impulse of totalitarians is to limit the choices or speech of others. The instinct to compel rather than to persuade is evident in many politicians across the world. As big businesses and big tech have grown to where the rival or control governments, it is not surprising to see their leaders adopt this attitude. While growing inequality makes the prediction you will own nothing more likely, it does little to guarantee we will be happy.

 

[1-12020]

AOC Is Shoving A $70 Billion ‘Civilian Climate Corps’ Bill Through Congress | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

AOC Is Shoving A $70 Billion ‘Civilian Climate Corps’ Bill Through Congress

By Ben Zeisloft
•Jun 29, 2021 DailyWire.com•

Alex Wong/Getty Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) are attempting to push their $70 billion “Civilian Climate Corps” bill through Congress’ budget reconciliation process.

“We’re working to win a Civilian Climate Corps in the reconciliation package,” announced Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. “The last time the US did this, we employed 2M people and had record success in wildfire suppression — one the most rapid peacetime mobilizations in US history. We can revive it to fight climate change.”

According to a joint press release, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s “Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act” would hire a “diverse and equitable” group of 1.5 million young Americans to “complete federally-funded projects that help communities respond to climate change and transition to a clean economy.”

“The CCC would put 1.5 million young people to work strengthening our communities and preserving our lands — doing everything from remediating blight and maintaining trails to creating entirely new green spaces,” remarked Ocasio-Cortez. “The program also provides the support needed to turn this work into a career path — including childcare, eldercare and tax-free educational grants to be used for student loan debt payments or higher education.”

“To combat the interlocking crises of the moment — climate change, racial injustice, a global pandemic, and income inequality — our government has an opportunity to equitably reimagine an idea from the past and tailor it to meet the present and the future,” Markey said. “The Civilian Climate Corps will provide an opportunity for millions of Americans from every walk of life to earn a good wage while serving their communities and training to transform our economy.”

The bill would guarantee salaries between $25,000 and $50,000 for “corpsmembers.” The lawmakers request a total of $70 billion from 2021 through 2025.

To ensure that the Civilian Climate Corps is “just and equitable,” the program would also employ “explicit antiracist language,” prioritize “labor groups,” and enact “tribal sovereignty protections.”


Reconciliation is a method by which Congress can pass budget bills with a simple majority in the Senate instead of a sixty-vote, filibuster-proof coalition. Democratic leaders in Congress are seeking to pass much of President Biden’s agenda through the reconciliation process due to the divided nature of the Senate.

WILL IT ALSO HAVE SECURITY ARMED GROUPS? YOU KNOW WHERE THAT COULD GO.

 

[Tristan]

Don't know if this has been posted.

Does a good job of outlining declining home ownership and how that will potentially lead to less wealth among the regular folks; contains a pitch to Bitcoin and their trading training, so take it with a grain of salt; but I think it did a good job of identifying and discussing the issue.

RT 10:05. I ran it at 1.25x speed and it was quite understandable...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJdpd5PC59A

 

[marsh]

Pete Buttigieg: 'Every' Transportation Decision is About 'Justice'

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday his department views everything through an "equity" lens. | Politics

www.breitbart.com

Pete Buttigieg: ‘Every’ Transportation Decision is About ‘Justice’

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
KYLE OLSON30 Jun 2021125

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday his department views everything through an “equity” lens and “every” transportation decision is about “justice.”

Buttigieg was in Syracuse, New York, to tout an infrastructure package at I-81, where planners intend to “replace the I-81 viaduct with a grid of ground-level streets and reroute high-speed traffic to I-481.”

“Jobs, safety, prosperity, racial justice cannot be separated from transportation,” Buttigieg said during a news conference, according to NNY360. “That’s part of why we’re here. Every decision about transportation is necessarily a decision about justice.”

Buttigieg asserted racism was behind where the road was routed when it was built in the late 1950s.

“The planners behind it also made choices that often routed highways through black and brown neighborhoods, doing lasting damage,” he told Newschannel 34.

But others in the community did not seem pleased to hear Buttigieg’s rhetoric:

Leaders outside of the city worry the damage will shift to their suburban communities. They’ve constantly complained about not having their opinion heard.

[The town of] DeWitt worries about more traffic on I-481 through its neighborhoods and exiting traffic onto local streets. Salina fears its businesses, built along I-81, will fail without customer traffic. People in Skaneateles worry about more truck traffic.

When asked how the federal government could help whichever neighborhoods negatively impacted by the redesign, Buttigieg said, “Often, there are resources to make sure if there is an impact, it can be cushioned in a different way. Those are conversations we’re happy to have.”

Buttigieg drew applause from press conference attendees when he said he wanted locals to work on the infrastructure projects.

“We’re making sure that the people who actually live in the communities where these projects are located get the opportunity to work on them,” he said.
But Buttigieg was evasive on the practical reality of that or what would go in the place of where the interstate once stood.

“That’s not my job, from Washington, to decide,” the secretary said. “I am looking forward to creative community ideas and hopefully a way to make sure the benefit to everyone in the area is maximized.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) backed the idea of tearing down the interstate and creating a “community grid” of highly trafficked streets.

 

[marsh]

Buttigieg: 'There's No Time to Argue' if Climate Change Is Real -- 'It’s Happening and It’s Incredibly Dangerous'

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday on ABC’s "The View" that the debate over whether climate change is real needs to stop because it was "happening" and "incredibly dangerous." | Clips

www.breitbart.com

Buttigieg: ‘There’s No Time to Argue’ if Climate Change Is Real — ‘It’s Happening and It’s Incredibly Dangerous’

PAM KEY30 Jun 2021542

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that the debate over whether climate change is real needs to stop because it was “happening” and “incredibly dangerous.”

Co-host Joy Behar said, “I’m going to throw my question out and ask you, what about climate change? What are we doing about this? This is, to me, the most urgent question of the decade, of the century maybe. Look at these people in the northwest of this country, 115 degrees in part of Canada. I mean, what is going on with that? Are you guys going to fix that or at least contribute to fixing it?”

Buttigieg said, “I used to think of climate change as a future issue, doing right by future generations and what’s it going to be like in 2050. I still think about it, but this story is one more example of what is going on right now in 2021. There’s no time to argue about whether it’s real. It’s happening, and it’s incredibly dangerous.”

He continued, “The East Coast and the West Coast, these temperatures in the Pacific Northwest are unheard of. By the way, transportation infrastructure is starting to fail. There are highways buckling, transit systems unavailable, cables melting. It’s not supposed to be this hot in the Pacific Northwest ever, and yet here we are.”

Buttigieg added, “We’ve got to do two things. One, we’ve got to make our infrastructure more resilient because this is going to keep happening. So we got to make sure that our roads and our bridges are designed for rising sea levels and more heatwaves. But the second thing we got to do — we got to stop it from getting any worse. That’s why it’s important that we help Americans afford and drive electric vehicles. It’s why we have to make sure we have alternatives like transit and make sure it’s easier for people to get around without having to bring a vehicle sometimes, depending on where you’re going. We have to do both of these things at once. Lives are depending on it.”

 

[marsh]

American Families Plan Would Put 21 Million More People On Welfare: Analysts | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

American Families Plan Would Put 21 Million More People On Welfare: Analysts

By Ben Zeisloft
•Jun 30, 2021 DailyWire.com•

Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Analysts predict that President Biden’s American Families Plan would add 21 million Americans to federal benefit programs.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Hoover Institution fellows John F. Cogan and Daniel Heil unpacked their recent analysis, which discovered that the Biden administration’s $1.8 trillion omnibus bill would drastically expand the welfare state.

The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger… For the first time in U.S. history — except possibly for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, for which we don’t yet have data — more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form.

The academics note that families earning six figures would be eligible for generous handouts. Indeed, “most” of President Biden’s spending would benefit middle-income and upper-income households.

Two-parent households with two preschool-age children and incomes up to $130,000 would qualify for federal cash assistance for daycare. Single parents with two preschoolers and incomes up to $113,000 would qualify. And some families with incomes over $200,000 would be eligible for health-insurance subsidies. Other parts of the plan, such as paid leave and free community college, have no income limits at all.

Under the American Families Plan, 57% of all married-couple children would receive handouts, while over 80% of single-parent households would enter the entitlement rolls. Noting that the legislation has a number of “gimmicks” that hide the extent of its revenue proposals, the report forecasts that President Biden’s proposal would add $1 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade.

Other economists have expressed similar concerns with the American Families Plan. Analysts from the Penn Wharton Budget Model — a nonpartisan think tank at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School that examines the impacts of major legislation — concluded that the American Families Plan would slow long-term economic growth.

By increasing income taxes for wealthier Americans, introducing $2.3 trillion in federal expenditures, and spending with borrowed money, the legislation would slash output by 0.4% within the next three decades. The bill would also decrease the capital stock — the total amount of machinery, buildings, and other productive equipment in the American economy — by 1.2% over the same period.

In essence, long-term economic growth would be hindered by greater demand for federal debt financing, which would cause investors to direct money into loans for the government rather than ventures in the private sector. Such a phenomenon would restrict innovation and productivity, inhibiting American economic vitality for decades to come.

 

[raven]

Buttigieg: 'There's No Time to Argue' if Climate Change Is Real -- 'It’s Happening and It’s Incredibly Dangerous'

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday on ABC’s "The View" that the debate over whether climate change is real needs to stop because it was "happening" and "incredibly dangerous." | Clips

www.breitbart.com

Buttigieg: ‘There’s No Time to Argue’ if Climate Change Is Real — ‘It’s Happening and It’s Incredibly Dangerous’

PAM KEY30 Jun 2021542

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that the debate over whether climate change is real needs to stop because it was “happening” and “incredibly dangerous.”

Co-host Joy Behar said, “I’m going to throw my question out and ask you, what about climate change? What are we doing about this? This is, to me, the most urgent question of the decade, of the century maybe. Look at these people in the northwest of this country, 115 degrees in part of Canada. I mean, what is going on with that? Are you guys going to fix that or at least contribute to fixing it?”

Buttigieg said, “I used to think of climate change as a future issue, doing right by future generations and what’s it going to be like in 2050. I still think about it, but this story is one more example of what is going on right now in 2021. There’s no time to argue about whether it’s real. It’s happening, and it’s incredibly dangerous.”

He continued, “The East Coast and the West Coast, these temperatures in the Pacific Northwest are unheard of. By the way, transportation infrastructure is starting to fail. There are highways buckling, transit systems unavailable, cables melting. It’s not supposed to be this hot in the Pacific Northwest ever, and yet here we are.”

Buttigieg added, “We’ve got to do two things. One, we’ve got to make our infrastructure more resilient because this is going to keep happening. So we got to make sure that our roads and our bridges are designed for rising sea levels and more heatwaves. But the second thing we got to do — we got to stop it from getting any worse. That’s why it’s important that we help Americans afford and drive electric vehicles. It’s why we have to make sure we have alternatives like transit and make sure it’s easier for people to get around without having to bring a vehicle sometimes, depending on where you’re going. We have to do both of these things at once. Lives are depending on it.”

If climate change is real, it is not the problem.
It is the solution.

 

[raven]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

By 2030 You'll Own Nothing And You'll Be Happy

TUESDAY, JUN 29, 2021 - 10:45 PM
Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

The title of this article projects an ominous future where the masses are controlled by a few. Over the years I have written several articles covering the elite gathering in Davos. The global elites see the World Economic Forum (WEF) as an opportunity to promote their views and various causes.

These people often fail to see that many of us have come to view Davos, as a notorious rendezvous for the world's elite that grant us the honor of paying for their schemes in some way or form.



Such gatherings are not for our sake but more for the benefit of plutocrats like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The Global Reset they are pushing often reeks of their desire to "break the world" with their ruthless corporate agendas that continue to move political power into the hands of the globalist elite. To counter this attitude reassuring words are cast out over the airwaves to us, the minions of the world, to encourage faith in their wisdom. Oh, what a tangled web those in charge of our fate have woven for us as they rush to sell and bargain away our freedom for power and wealth.

When the WEF revealed its Davos 2021 Agenda, it confirmed the event this year would be digital and herald the public unveiling of its Great Reset Initiative.

Angel Gurría and Klaus Schwab have outlined how governments and businesses can shape a new labor market that supports workers to thrive in the future. This underlines how the covid-19 pandemic has accelerated systemic changes that were apparent before its inception.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been used as confirmation that no institution or individual alone can address the economic, environmental, social, and technological challenges of our complex, interdependent world. It is also being touted as a reason to support the "The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development." One hundred and ninety-three UN member states adopted this 15-year global framework and its ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015.

With 169 targets and over 230 indicators, the 2030 Agenda envisions a secure world free of poverty and hunger, with full and productive employment, access to quality education, and universal health coverage. Thrown into the mix is the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, and an end to environmental degradation.

The 2030 Agenda is a global framework of action for people, the planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership. It integrates social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, as well as peace, governance, and justice elements. It makes clear that developing and developed countries alike will implement the Agenda. This is important in ensuring that no one is left behind in the achievement of the SDGs.



A great deal of attention has been given to some of the ideas and vision the WEF has floated. A powerful one became visible when WEF public relations released a video entitled: “8 Predictions for the World in 2030. Its 2030 agenda offers a telling glimpse into what the technocratic elite has in store for the rest of us. It promotes the idea that by 2030 "You will own nothing. And you'll be happy. The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a comprehensive plan that outlines how we can abolish poverty and transform the world into a peaceful, sustainable environment for all.

When persuasive speakers cloak an agenda in flowery rhetoric, it is often difficult to determine what is noble or separate something altruistic from a sinister plot. Nor, can we be certain that events will unfold more favorably if simply left to develop on their own rather than being manipulated. Still, the ideas flowing out of the World Economic Forum and those seeking a reset and a New One World Order reek of self-serving bias.

Not all of what the world economic forum predicts will happen but events are being shaped to unfold in that way. Examining what is being called for, sheds a bit of light on how we might expect our future to look. The ideas and predictions of the WEF do not seem so farfetched when you consider,

• Many people are already comfortable and busy renting things like cars, tools, apartments, so this has become a normal way to live. It is easy to argue that shared commodities save resources.
• Many people think the US will be unable to keep its position as the world leader. In fact, in many ways, the US has already abdicated this role.
• When it comes to things such as organ printing we tend to jump the gun in predicting it is just around the corner but research is continuing and huge progress is being made.
• The argument you simply can’t feed 10 billion people with meat and move these people into heavy consumer-based lifestyles has merit. At some point, the population must stop expanding or we will create a nightmare of food shortages and cause more damage to the planet.
• Down the road, billions of people will be displaced, especially at the shore, because of rising sea levels. Others because of droughts. This means we will have to learn how to deal better with migration or we will have huge cultural wars.
• Western values are already being tested because of globalization and migration. The fact that change and the future might scare us does not mean we can simply deny reality and call everything we don’t like or understand a conspiracy. Life is impermanent and nothing stays the way it is. We all die eventually and history shows even big civilizations vanish.

The agenda to change the world includes things such as controlling people through things such as social credit scores. Expect these to be linked to those you associate with including family members you seldom agree with. Sadly, the people that drew up this plan forgot that what they are proposing is the abolition of private property or communism a theory that has failed to ever bring prosperity to any country.

Another key part of this plan focuses on controlling the masses, this is also problematic and reeks of totalitarianism. While many people view big tech as the great enabler, a very dark side of it exists, surrendering to its allure gives big tech and those in charge of it the power to enslave the human race. When mankind turns its future over to technology and no longer takes responsibility for learning the most basic lessons that have brought us so far it gives up its soul. The idea we will move in the direction of creating a benevolent form of artificial intelligence that will protect and watch over us is far-fetched. It is frightening to entrust that in the future machines will value the contributions humans make to the overall scheme of things.

Intertwined and masked within the WEF plan are a lot of factors that will negatively impact people. These include a total lack of privacy, the loss of control to move about freely, or the ability to purchase anything you want with your money and controlling how that property is used. Of course, this is all for the greater good, but is it? History shows that in a society where private ownership is banned or not encouraged people lack skin in the game. This tends to result in people failing to shoulder responsibility for much of what happens.

In the past, each year as the highfalutin Davos extravaganza unfolded I seem to get a pain in my stomach that some might consider envy, but having attended my share of events I consider it more of a sickening feeling related to the over the top self-importance of many attending. Much of my angst is directed at the politicians and such that have their travel expenses picked up by governments.
How ironic that we pay the same clowns that create so many of our problems to gather in luxury to discuss how they might further their deeds.

I find it so interesting that someone flying across the globe on a private aircraft can sit down and discuss their environmental concerns and how each of us must do more to save the planet. In some ways, a person might even go so far as to describe such a gathering as downright evil.

In his writings, George Orwell pointed out that when society has a problem rather than rely on education, the natural impulse of totalitarians is to limit the choices or speech of others. The instinct to compel rather than to persuade is evident in many politicians across the world. As big businesses and big tech have grown to where the rival or control governments, it is not surprising to see their leaders adopt this attitude. While growing inequality makes the prediction you will own nothing more likely, it does little to guarantee we will be happy.

This is one of those subjects that I am conflicted over.
They say that by 2030, you will own nothing and be happy.
Truthfully, it is 2021 and most people "own nothing" already.
They think they own their home but there is a mortgage on it which means the bank owns it. And if there is a mortgage then you must pay for homeowners insurance and property taxes. And even if you have paid your mortgage, property taxes must be paid and insurance is needed because no one can afford the loss.
Same goes for cars.
And you would be surprised a the number of people that rent to own or buy on credit with 2 years no interest.

The reality is . . . most people are already in the position of "owning nothing" and they seem pretty happy.

If they spin this the right way and get everyone on board, it won't matter if they start screwing you over in 2 years,
you won't even remember what it was like to actually own something and wonder where that quaint idea came from.

 

[marsh]

The World Economic Forum plot to control what people see online

A Big Tech-government coalition to control what people see online.

reclaimthenet.org

World Economic Forum makes censorship pledge to “tackle harmful content and conduct online”

A Big Tech-government coalition to control what people see online.

• By Tom Parker
• Posted 4:00 pm
• 
  
• 

The World Economic Forum, an international group that works to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” has formed a new “Global Coalition for Digital Safety” that’s made up of Big Tech executives and government officials and intends to come up with new “innovations” to police “harmful content and conduct online.”

The scope of so-called “harmful” content that will be targeted by this Global Coalition for Digital Safety is far-reaching and encompasses both legal content (such as “health misinformation” and “anti-vaccine content”) and illegal content (such as child exploitation and abuse and violent extremism).

Big Tech companies already censor millions of posts under their far-reaching rules that prohibit harmful content and misinformation. They also publish detailed quarterly reports about this censorship.

But according to the World Economic Forum, Big Tech’s current metrics, recommendation systems, and complaints systems are “deficient” which is why “more deliberate coordination between the public and private sector is needed.”

The World Economic Forum intends to deliver this “more deliberate coordination” through its Global Coalition for Digital Safety which will work to tackle what it deems to be harmful content through a series of measures.

These measures include exchanging “best practices for new online safety regulations,” taking “coordinated action to reduce the risk of online harm,” and creating global definitions of harmful content “to enable standardized enforcement, reporting, and measurement across regions.”

The members of this Global Coalition for Digital Safety include officials from the governments or government regulators in Australia, the UK, Indonesia, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Singapore, an executive from the tech giant Microsoft, and the founder of the artificial intelligence (AI) powered content moderation and profanity filter platform Two Hat Security.

“Global online safety is a collective goal that must be addressed by working across borders as well as by individual nations,” Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Daws said. “We look forward to collaborating with international Coalition members to reduce the risk of online harms and build a safer life online for everyone.”

Microsoft’s Chief Digital Safety Officer, Courtney Gregoire, added: “The World Economic Forum is uniquely positioned to accelerate the public-private collaboration needed to advance digital safety globally, Microsoft is eager to participate and help build whole-of-society solutions to this whole-of-society problem.”

The formation of this global coalition is reflective of tech companies’ increased willingness to collaborate with global governments to censor legal content that they deem to be harmful and to push these governments to introduce more expansive speech regulations.

Just a few months before this coalition was announced, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki called for global coalitions to address content that’s “legal but could be harmful” at the World Economic Forum Global Technology Governance Summit 2021.

And last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pushed for “more guidance and regulation” from world leaders on what people are allowed to say online.

Similar global coalitions that have attempted to create global censorship standards, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), have resulted in the automated censorship of satire, media reports, and other types of legal content.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

EVs Must Drive Tens Of Thousands Of Miles Before Doing Less Environmental Harm Than Gas-Powered Vehicles

THURSDAY, JUL 01, 2021 - 01:03 PM

Most people don't know it, but EVs are not as clean as gasoline cars right off the bat. In fact, due to the impact of mining many materials used in EV batteries, it takes quite a bit of driving before you are doing less harm to the environment than gas cars.

This was the topic of a new Reuters analysis piece by Paul Lienert, which sought to point out exactly how long you have to own and drive an EV in order to reach parity with a gas vehicle. The analysis was performed using "data from a model that calculates the lifetime emissions of vehicles" developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

The necessity for the analysis is obvious, because "...making EVs generates more carbon than combustion engine cars, mainly due to the extraction and processing of minerals in EV batteries and production of the power cells," said Jarod Cory Kelly, principal energy systems analyst at Argonne.

The time it takes for how long EVs need to be driven to make up for that gap varies. It varies on factors "such as the size of the EV's battery, the fuel economy of a gasoline car and how the power used to charge an EV is generated," the analysis notes.

In a Tesla Model 3, for example, the article points out you'd need to drive 13,500 miles before you're doing less harm to the environment than a gas powered car.



Reuters used the model, which took into account how power was generated in different countries to reach its conclusions:

Reuters plugged a series of variables into the Argonne model, which had more than 43,000 users as of 2021, to come up with some answers.
The Tesla 3 scenario above was for driving in the United States, where 23% of electricity comes from coal-fired plants, with a 54 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery and a cathode made of nickel, cobalt and aluminum, among other variables.

It was up against a gasoline-fueled Toyota Corolla weighing 2,955 pounds with a fuel efficiency of 33 miles per gallon. It was assumed both vehicles would travel 173,151 miles during their lifetimes.

But if the same Tesla was being driven in Norway, which generates almost all its electricity from renewable hydropower, the break-even point would come after just 8,400 miles.

If the electricity to recharge the EV comes entirely from coal, which generates the majority of the power in countries such as China and Poland, you would have to drive 78,700 miles to reach carbon parity with the Corolla, according to the Reuters analysis of data generated by Argonne's model.

EVs "generally" emit far less carbon than ICE vehicles over a 12 year life span, according to Michael Wang, senior scientist and director of the Systems Assessment Center at Argonne's Energy Systems division.

The question then becomes - especially for vehicles like Teslas, which are notorious for quality control issues - can your EV make it to 12 years?


Analysis performed by Reuters using Argonne's GREET model concluded that the "typical break-even point in carbon emissions for EVs was about 15,000 to 20,000 miles" depending on which country the vehicle is in. Other past analyses have been less optimistic. For example, University of Liege researcher Damien Ernst had said in 2019 that the "typical EV would have to travel nearly 700,000 km before it emitted less CO2 than a comparable gasoline vehicle," before eventually revising his estimates lower.

The analysis follows last month when we published an article reporting that EVs may offer a negligible difference from ICE vehicles in CO2 emissions. It was the topic of a blog post by natural resource investors Goehring & Rozencwajg (G&R), a "fundamental research firm focused exclusively on contrarian natural resource investments with a team with over 30 years of dedicated resource experience."

The firm, established in 2015, posted a blog entry entitled "Exploring Lithium-ion Electric Vehicles’ Carbon Footprint", where they called into question a former ICE vs. EV comparison performed by the Wall Street Journal and, while citing work performed by Jefferies, argue that there could literally be "no reduction in CO2 output" in some EV vs. ICE comparisons.

Their analysis "details the tremendous amount of energy (and by extension CO2) needed to manufacture a lithium-ion battery." Because a typical EV is on average 50% heavier than a similar internal combustion engine, the analysis notes that the “embedded carbon” in an EV (i.e., when it rolls off the lot) is therefore 20–50% more than an internal combustion engine.

 

[marsh]

Marjorie Taylor Greene: The Democrats' "Infrastructure" Bill Will 'Enslave Us' to Communist China - The Liberty Daily

If you love the news, check out The Liberty Daily's homepage. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, in an interview with Real America’s Voice host Jenna Ellis, described the so-called Biden “infrastructure” bill as a “catastrophe for our country”. Greene contends that it “basically passes the...

thelibertydaily.com

Marjorie Taylor Greene: The Democrats’ “Infrastructure” Bill Will ‘Enslave Us’ to Communist China

By Matthew Burke • Jul. 1, 2021

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, in an interview with Real America’s Voice host Jenna Ellis, described the so-called Biden “infrastructure” bill as a “catastrophe for our country”.

Greene contends that it “basically passes the Green New Deal” because a whopping 50% of the spending in the proposal are planks of the far-left communist takeover of the American economy that has been pushed by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an anti-American Marxist and other far-left extremist Democrats.

“I can’t ring the alarm bells loud enough,” Congresswoman Greene told Ellis, explaining that the leftist wish list will “enslave us to China”.

MTG reveals that the Democrat-sponsored bill will give $4 billion taxpayer dollars to Communist China for the “electrification” of automobiles.

“Here’s the problem,” Greene explained. “China dominates the battery market” meaning Americans will be forced to buy electric cars that will benefit Communist China, an enemy of America and individual freedom.

WATCH BELOW:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1410432168363446277

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1410432168363446277
2:20 min

MTG noted that the so-called “infrastructure” bill, which is over 1,500 pages long, does not pay for “one single new road”.

 

[raven]

Still one of the most important threads.
Thank you

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

California Begs For More Electricity As Shift To Renewable Power Leaves State In The Dark

THURSDAY, JUL 01, 2021 - 10:57 PM

Maybe it's time to admit that the whole "green" energy push is one big farce
Six months after a historic failure in the Texas power grid which collapsed when various "renewable" sources of electricity failed concurrently and dragged down the entire network, California - that liberal utopia powered by renewable power and/or unicorn flatulence - realizes it is about to get Enroned, and has made an urgent request for additional power supplies to avoid blackouts this summer, an extraordinary step after suffering from rolling outages less than a year ago.

State energy officials asked the California Independent System Operator, which runs most of the grid, to contract for additional power capacity for July and August on concern it won’t be able to meet demand during the evening when solar production fades, according to a joint statement Thursday from grid, utility and energy agencies. They didn’t say how much more power is needed but one can guess it will be a lot.

Of course, there was a convenient scapegoat on which to blame the collective lack of competence: global warming.

“California is using all available tools to increase electricity reliability this summer,” the heads of the California Energy Commission, California Public Utilities Commission, and grid operator said citing “unprecedented climate change-driven heat events, which are occurring throughout the West in combination with drought conditions that reduce hydroelectric capacity.”

Right, it's always someone else's fault that you could not properly budget even a few months in advance after keeping millions of people in the dark last year when California again blamed... global warming. But if you know there is global warming, and you suffer one nightmare summer in the dark because of it, can't you extrapolate at least a year into the future?

In California, the answer is no.

Their statement underscores California’s challenges in the coming months as it begins summer already parched by drought that’s leaving hydroelectric reservoirs at historic lows. The state narrowly avoided rolling power outages recently as extreme heat came early this year, and with few new generation sources on the immediate horizon supplies tighten when hot weather hits.

California has taken a number of steps including adding battery storage (which some may recall was a complete disaster last summer) to prevent blackouts such as those in August, when demand overwhelmed the grid. However, the state has grown concerned that that the increases aren’t enough, according to the letter.

Procuring additional capacity “is taken out of an abundance of caution to ensure electric reliability and preserve the public health and safety of all Californians,” the officials said. Their letter also cited delayed availability for some thermal power plants and said some resources expected to be running during the hottest months have now been delayed.

Supply challenges are mounting less than a year after a heat wave forced the state’s first rolling outages in two decades, and meeting demand is likely to be even harder this year because long-range forecasts call for above-average temperatures through September.

What is remarkable is that even Bloomberg, which has been on a crusade to crush non-green sources of power, admits that California's problem is the state’s aggressive push to cut carbon emissions by shifting to renewable energy.

Many gas-burning plants have closed, which means electricity supplies tighten at sunset as the production from solar generation fades around sundown (good thing there are no vampires or zombies in Cali, yet). What’s more, big batteries being built to store solar power during the day and resupply the grid in the evening won’t be available by August and September, the state’s hottest months.

In short, it's time to admit that California's "green" push has been a complete disaster, and is about to leave millions of people in the dark during hot, sweaty days, leading to countless deaths.

Of course, since we are talking about the socialist paradise, this will never happen, and instead locals have even more brilliant ideas like for example paying people not to use electricity.

“The short-term strategy needs to be centered around incentivizing demand reductions instead of increasing supply,” said Abe Stanway, co-founder of Amperon Holdings Inc., which provides analysis to utilities and power traders.

"The best way to reduce uncertainty around demand resources is to simply pay consumers more to use less during peak events."

Because while electricity may not grow on trees in California but at least money still does.

[COMMENT: It doesn't help that the dam reservoirs got emptied to provide normal flows for salmon and Delta smelt. The later of which has been a big population goose egg in the past few year's samplings.]

 

[marsh]

The Transportation Revolution › American Greatness

Reading California’s “Transportation Plan 2050” is a depressing journey into groupthink. Like everything coming out of the one-party bureaucracy, it is the bland product of endless meetings between…

amgreatness.com

The Transportation Revolution
Spending precious government funds on light rail that nobody wants to ride is a fool’s errand. Declaring war on the car is shortsighted cruelty. We can do so much more.

By Edward Ring
July 4, 2021

Reading California’s “Transportation Plan 2050” is a depressing journey into groupthink. Like everything coming out of the one-party bureaucracy, it is the bland product of endless meetings between “stakeholders” with the only common thread being a terror of contributing anything that might violate the pieties of climate alarm and the desperate need for “equity.” The result is a Stalinesque exercise in mediocrity, without even requiring a Stalin.

Actually, mediocre may be too light a term to describe this document, because mediocre implies something relatively inert. But the recommendations this document offers in 154 pages of mind-numbing detail, will serve to increase the momentum of policies that are guaranteed to further impoverish Californians.

California’s “Transportation Plan 2050” is consistent with a mentality that must be defeated. It is a dark vision of the future, where people will be priced out of owning and operating independent vehicles or flying, and public expenditures on transportation will be focused on modes of mass transit that are rapidly headed for obsolescence. It is a vision of the future where people of average income will be forced to live in multi-story apartment buildings and take mass transit everywhere they go, not by choice, but by economic policies and government spending choices that leave them no alternative.

As with water and energy, the conventional wisdom that governs current planning is exactly the opposite of what is coming. The conventional wisdom is that abundance—in this case in the form of inexpensive, uncongested transportation options—is impossible. But, as with water and energy, this is false. The primary reason this is false is that new technologies make the common road the future of transportation, not the past, and because there are leapfrog technologies that will render most forms of passenger rail obsolete within a few decades, while also taking additional pressure off of roads.

The other concept missing from California’s current transportation consensus is mere practicality. It is not practical to rely on bicycles to get around. The situations where it’s possible to ride a bike to work or to shop or to class or to deliver children to their activities, and so on, are miniscule compared to the practical necessities of life. Bike activists are yet another example of a vocal and influential minority that are given voice by activists who think that cars are ecologically unsustainable. That, too, is a myth. It is self-evident that bikes will not replace more than a minute fraction of California’s transportation requirements. The case for cars is more complex but nonetheless unequivocal.
California has already seen the emergence of electric vehicles with performance specifications that outperform gasoline-powered vehicles in almost every respect. They have more horsepower, more torque, and lower maintenance. Their only weakness, and it’s a big one, is that the typical electric car, even at a fast-charging station, recharges at a rate of about 10-15 miles per minute. A gasoline-powered car, to use the same comparison, recharges at a rate of about 50-100 miles per minute. For the time being, this is a flaw that will prevent universal adoption of electric vehicles.

It would be a mistake, however, to write off the potential for ongoing breakthroughs in charge-time. Lucid Motors, a Silicon Valley startup, has announced its debut vehicle will be able to charge at a rate of 20 miles per minute. At that rate, EVs begin to approach refill times comparable to gasoline engines. Five minutes at the gas pump enables a 300-mile range; 15 minutes at a fast charger does the same. According to Business Insider, a Chinese company has just announced an EV battery that can be fully recharged in five minutes.

There are other objections to EVs. The environmental footprint of the EV is arguably as big as that of the gasoline-powered car. But that, too, is changing.

Gasoline-powered cars, for example, are now almost completely recycled when scrapped. The same is increasingly possible for EVs, even including the batteries.

Opponents of EVs are correct to point out their environmental footprint, but the same may be said about gasoline cars, as well as any form of mass transit. As EVs, and their batteries, become 100 percent recyclable, the argument is moot.

Everything is going to have a footprint—another truth that is selectively recognized by California’s allegedly green clerisy.

But making a case for EVs, green, clean, and recyclable, is only one reason that roads are the future of transportation. What about the likely possibility that combustibles will become either carbon-neutral or carbon emissions-free?

Biofuel processed from algae grown in tank farms that don’t consume a lot of space—don’t laugh, it could scale up fast—would be carbon neutral, and enable internal combustion engines to remain on the road forever. Fuel cells that run on emissions-free hydrogen, which already offer superior range when used on drones, may eventually become commercially viable power plants for EVs.

These factors, some of which are likely to be realized in the near future, combined with the inevitable reality of cars that will drive themselves—freeing vehicle occupants to work, recreate, or sleep while in motion—are the reason roads are the future. Why on earth would anyone want to ride a bike to a rail station, wait for a train, marinate inside the railcars with passengers and pathogens, then walk or pedal a rent-a-bike to work, when one can simply convoy one’s individual vehicle into a smart lane and without so much as looking at the road ahead—travel from doorstep to destination?

Next-generation vehicles, in all sizes and configurations, have the potential to replace most if not all proposed mass transit solutions both for intercity and long-range travel. The maximum safe and sustainable cruising speed of a modern electric vehicle is conservatively pegged at 120 MPH. Vehicles of the future will not only be configured similarly to conventional cars and SUVs, they will also be mobile hotel rooms, entertainment lounges, offices, conference rooms, and buses of all sizes, offering countless levels of services. On properly designed and maintained roads, there is no reason these vehicular solutions cannot replace nearly all current or proposed modes of surface-based transit, certainly including California’s high-speed rail scheme but probably including most light rail as well.

This is the choice facing Californians, a choice that is completely denied by the “visionaries” that came up with the “California Transportation Plan 2050.”

There’s much more.

Nowhere in this document are other imminent transportation breakthroughs even mentioned. They mention high-speed rail, not bothering to admit that California’s tepid design is several generations behind the fastest trains being built in the rest of the world. If we’re going to build one, at least build one that’s cutting edge! But making fun of high-speed rail is easy. Instead of killing the project, an interesting twist, and something we ought to expect from leaders in a state as packed with innovators as California still is, would be to convert the miles of pylons already traversing Fresno and Kern counties into supports for a hyperloop prototype. The fastest bullet train on earth, operated by the Central Japan Railway Company, has been clocked at over 374 miles per hour.

California’s bullet train is unlikely to even go half that fast. But a hyperloop can transport people, theoretically, at speeds in excess of jet airliners, over 500 MPH.

Try that. If you’re going to fund a boondoggle, at least push the envelope.

Meanwhile, however, tunneling may be another way to relieve California’s congested urban boulevards and freeways. Elon Musk’s Boring Company is an example of a privately funded transit solution that can transport public and private vehicles point-to-point underground, moving them on and off surface streets with elevators. The Boring Company’s website makes a provocative assertion: “The construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.”

With achievements in aerospace productivity that have shocked the critics, there is no reason to doubt the revolutionary potential in Musk’s assertion. His reasons? He proposes the following innovations to lower the cost of tunneling by a factor of between 4 and 10: 1) triple the power output of the tunnel boring machine’s cutting unit, 2) continuously tunnel instead of alternating between boring and installing supporting walls, 3) automate the tunnel boring machine, eliminating most human operators, 4) go electric, and 5) engage in tunneling research and development.

The combination of practical innovations and an optimistic perspective are how Musk’s SpaceX lowered the cost of lifting a payload into earth orbit by an order of magnitude in just 10 years. Why not allow Musk’s Boring Company and other tunneling innovators to go underneath California’s cities, starting with Los Angeles, and create radical new ways for ordinary people, with or without their cars, to cross the city?

And while underground offers space to move through tunnels, above-ground offers space to move through the air. And again, nowhere in California’s transportation planning is there mention of the imminent revolution in passenger drones. And just as with self-driving cars, virtually every aerospace, automotive, and high-tech company on earth is working on passenger drones.

Perhaps ironically, most of the major players are operating in California. Uber has formed “Uber Air,” or Elevate, to develop aerial transportation systems.

Google has two companies, operating in stealth, Cora, and Kitty Hawk. Also active in California are the companies Aurora, in partnership with Boeing, and Vahana, in partnership with Airbus.

An interesting company based in Santa Cruz is Joby Aviation. With an IPO imminent, Joby Aviation appears to be a serious contender to deliver the first aerial taxi. Investors include Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, and Capricorn Investment Group.

This is fascinating stuff. Apparently most “air taxis” (or “sky cabs”) being developed are powered by electricity, and in many respects are just enlarged versions of the drones now commonly used by hobbyists and photographers.

Joby Aviation’s initial aircraft design has a range of 150 miles on a single battery charge, carrying up to four passengers. The aircraft travels at relatively low altitudes to avoid having to pressurize the cabin. They are expected to be “100 times quieter during takeoff and landing than a helicopter and near-silent during flyovers.”

No discussion of the imminent revolution in vehicle transportation is complete without considering the possibility of travel by land and by air in the same passenger module, with a separate wheeled module (the “skateboard”) for land travel, which detaches and remains on the ground when the passenger module is lifted airborne by an independent flight module. As reported in Electrek.co, Audi and Airbus are working on just such a solution.

Policymakers have a choice. They can recognize that private industry is creating new ways to travel on land, underground, and in the air. They can cooperate to develop uniform standards and updated laws to expedite this transformation.

They can revise zoning laws, redirect funding priorities, and invest in new roads and communications infrastructure. Or they can neglect road construction and instead continue to build public mass-transit systems that offer dubious prospects of ever solving growing transportation bottlenecks.

This is the enticing, bright future that is coming at California despite the pious proclamations of the political class. Where is the excitement? Where is the optimism? Instead of creating “equity” by cramming everyone into apartments and making them ride trains, why doesn’t California widen the roads, add smart lanes on the freeways for high-speed autonomous vehicles, work with the FAA to designate aerial lanes for passenger drones, unleash tunneling companies to create subterranean transportation corridors, and get out of the way. Spending precious government funds on light rail that nobody wants to ride is a fool’s errand. Declaring war on the car is shortsighted cruelty. We can do so much more.

 

[vestige]

As long as fu***** idiots keep getting put into federal, state and local government positions nothing will change (peacably).

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

EU Tries To Convince Trading Partners Its Carbon Tax Is Not A Tax

TUESDAY, JUL 06, 2021 - 03:00 PM
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

The EU wants to stop "carbon leakage". Supposedly a carbon tax will do the trick...



Meet CBAM, the EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism which looks like a tax, acts likes a tax and is indeed a tax. However, the EU says it is not a tax, but an "adjustment mechanism".

Please consider Europe Faces Global Scepticism About its Carbon Border Tax.

The EU is due on July 14 to unveil a package of legislation to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels.

As part of the plan, it will outline what it terms a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), designed to cut emissions by creating financial incentives for greener production and by discouraging “carbon leakage,” as the transfer of operations to countries with less onerous emission restrictions is known.

The bloc will want to avoid the type of fallout it incurred after a separate environmental move in 2018, when it excluded palm oil from its list of sustainable biofuels and sparked legal challenges from Indonesia and Malaysia at the World Trade Organization.

Before that, an EU attempt to charge foreign airlines for carbon emitted on flights in and out of Europe threatened a trade war after the U.S. aviation industry mustered fierce political opposition and China said it would withhold aircraft orders. The European Union was forced to announce in 2012 it would suspend the law.

Benchmark prices on the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS), the largest carbon market in the world, have this month hit records above 58 euros a tonne, partly in response to expectations of the border levy.

While the EU says it and Washington have agreed to discuss the plan, other countries have signalled concerns. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls any carbon tariffs “trade protectionism by another name”. Russia has said it may break trade rules.

Leakage Stop
The EU says it seeks to stop carbon leakage defined as shifting of greenhouse gas emitting industries outside the EU to avoid tighter standards.

The measure aims to reduce the risk of ‘carbon leakage’ (ie a process whereby production moves outside of the EU to areas with weaker climate regulation), by requiring exporters to the EU to pay a carbon price at the EU border equivalent to that faced by EU producers under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Third countries may be either directly impacted, if their exports to the EU are covered by the CBAM, or indirectly impacted, if their exports are embedded in the EU value chain of products covered by the CBAM.

The scope of sectors covered by the CBAM is therefore the key question to determine which climate vulnerable countries may be directly or indirectly impacted.

Based on the EC draft list, likely impacted countries include: Mozambique, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Cameroon (aluminium), Zimbabwe, Zambia (steel), Morocco (electricity), Algeria, Egypt, Trinidad & Tobago (fertilisers).

For aluminium, Mozambique looks set to be impacted more strongly than China, and Cameroon more strongly than India; for iron/steel, Zimbabwe looks set to be impacted at least as strongly as, if not more so than, any of the BASIC countries

CBAM is not a tariff, but an environmental measure set up at the border to adjust for internal EU regulation.

Not a Tax Nor a Tariff
Yeah. Right.

Someone is going to foot the bill and in this case it appears that EU consumers and third-world countries mentioned above will take the hit more so than China.

 

[marsh]

Looming Solar Panel Waste Tsunami Reveals Dark Side of Renewables: Expert

www.theepochtimes.com

Workers install solar panels on the roof of a home in San Francisco, Calif., on May 9, 2018. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Looming Solar Panel Waste Tsunami Reveals Dark Side of Renewables: Expert

BY TOM OZIMEK
July 6, 2021 Updated: July 6, 2021

Environmental policy expert Michael Shellenberger told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” that the economics of solar panel production, deployment, and recycling shows that the technology has a “toxic” and “dangerous” dimension while its advocacy is driven by ideological leanings, rather than sound science.

“We’ve been in a sort of hypnotic trance,” Shellenberger said, referring to what he characterized as the misguided belief that solar power is an environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional forms of power generation like nuclear.

“It’s a spiritual pursuit,” he added. “There’s the idea that … we’ll protect the natural environment by being dependent on natural energy flows like sunlight.
It’s not a scientific view. It actually is worse for the environment.”

A recent Harvard Business Review study concluded that solar panels are being replaced faster than expected due to various economic incentives, warning of a rising mountain of solar panel trash “of existentially damaging proportions” unless incentives are adopted to drive down the high costs of recycling.

“Economic incentives are rapidly aligning to encourage customers to trade their existing panels for newer, cheaper, more efficient models. In an industry where circularity solutions such as recycling remain woefully inadequate, the sheer volume of discarded panels will soon pose a risk of existentially damaging proportions,” the study states.

The study cites estimates by Garvin Heath, senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who told PV Magazine that it costs $20 to $30 to recycle a panel versus $1 to $2 to send it to a landfill. Harvard Business Review concluded that the bright promise of more widespread adoption of solar energy as an environmentally friendly alternative “would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash.”

Asked about the study, Shellenberger confirmed the high recycling costs, but noted that they’re but one part of the end-of-life burden of solar. The panels contain heavy metals, like lead, which can be released as a toxic cloud if the panels shatter during disposal.

“It’s hazardous waste,” he said. “Airelized lead is not something that we’ve allowed people to be exposed to for over half a century because we know it causes brain damage. So it’s as dangerous as lead paint, it’s as dangerous as all of the lead-based materials that society has basically phased out until now.”

“Now we know that this consumer product that people thought was somehow clean, in harmony with nature, really is … actually quite toxic. And there’s just a lot of it,” Shellenberger said.

Adding to the volume of solar waste is the fact that panels degrade faster than previously thought.

“They degrade about 1 percent a year, not a half a percent a year,” Schellenberger said. “And so that means that people have an incentive to change them more quickly.”

“There was this romantic idea that you would get solar panels and you would install them once and then you would never have to do anything again. We now know that people re-install them every 10 years or so,” he said, adding that, by contrast, nuclear power plants can run for around 80 years.

“So you’re talking about a huge difference and a huge increase in the amount of materials and the amount of waste,” he said, adding that his own calculations showed that solar panels produce 200 to 300 times more hazardous waste than the high-level waste that comes out of nuclear power plants, “which is the maybe the most feared waste.”

“I think it comes from a kind of a deeply romantic and very ideological place, a very idealized imagination,” he said of the push for adoption of solar.

 

[marsh]

Tech and Media Moguls Arrive at Sun Valley for 'Billionaire Summer Camp'

An elite annual invite-only conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, organized by the investment bank Allen & Company is taking place this week, with the guest list including billionaires and powerbrokers from the Big Tech Masters of the Universe and the media such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg...

www.breitbart.com

Tech and Media Moguls Arrive at Sun Valley for ‘Billionaire Summer Camp’

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
LUCAS NOLAN7 Jul 2021720

An elite annual invite-only conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, organized by the investment bank Allen & Company is taking place this week, with the guest list including billionaires and powerbrokers from the Big Tech Masters of the Universe and the media such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Disney CEO Bob Iger, CNN host Anderson Cooper, Patriots Owner Robert Kraft, and possibly Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The estimated wealth of attendees tops $588 billion this year.

The Daily Mail reports that key tech and media industry players are arriving in Sun Valley in Idaho this week for the start of the annual “billionaire summer camp” hosted by the investment bank Allen & company. It is estimated that the wealth of attendees is in excess of $588 billion.

The five-day conference runs from July 6 to 10 and is held at the edge of Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest in a small town of 1,500 people. Guests in attendance at the event include New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg; Netflix Co-CEOs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos; CBS News’ Gayle King; CNN’s Anderson Cooper; Nike CEO John Donahoe; former Disney CEO Michael Eisner; Shari Redstone chairwoman of ViacomCBS, and Stacey Bendet CEO of fashion company Alice + Olivia.

A plane belonging to Jeff Bezos arrived at the local airport in nearby Hailey, but the Amazon co-founder who recently stepped down as company CEO is yet to make a pubic appearance at the event.

Attendees at the last conference in 2019 included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki; Rupert Murdoch’s son, Lachlan Murdoch, who is the CEO of Fox Corporation; PayPal CEO Dan Schulman; Instagram COO Marne Levine; McDonald’s chief Steve Easterbrook and billionaire media executive Shari Redstone.

Read more at the Daily Mail here.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Media and tech moguls appear on day one for exclusive Sun Valley camp

Big names in media and tech made their appearances Tuesday for Day One of the Sun Valley 'billionaire summer camp' conference, where major business deals might be struck.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Sheryl Sandberg, Gayle King, Bob Iger, Mike Bloomberg and Robert Kraft descend on Sun Valley for 'Billionaire Summer Camp' where the combined wealth of attendees is in excess of $588B - a year after the gathering was canceled amid COVID

• The elite annual invite-only conference in Sun Valley, Idaho is thrown by investment bank Allen & Company
• It brings together leaders in the worlds of film, technology, design and sports
• Already big names such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, ViacomCBS's Shari Redstone, Alice + Olivia's Stacey Bendet and Disney's Bob Iger have appeared
• Estimated wealth of those known to be in attendance, based on most recent figures, is at least $343.1 billion
• An estimate based on the latest available figures puts the total wealth of those known to be in attendance and those rumored to be attending at $588 billion
• The event was cancelled in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic
• Attendees this year will have to be vaccinated, and provide proof of a negative Covid-19 test
• At the conference, movers and shakers discuss, establish and may even unofficially close on deals
• This year rival chief executives including Discovery's David Zaslav, Amazon's Jeff Bezos along with his successor Andy Jassy and Bill Gates are said to be guests
• The conference is invite-only with no press allowed to attend

By PETER BELFIORE and JAMES GORDON FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 18:15 EDT, 6 July 2021 | UPDATED: 09:01 EDT, 7 July 2021

Big names in the film, technology, design and sports industries made their appearances at Sun Valley in rural Idaho on Tuesday for the start of the annual 'billionaire summer camp' for tech and media moguls where the estimated wealth of attendees is in excess of $588 billion.

The elite gathering, hosted by investment bank Allen & Company brings together A-listers from various industries each year, although the event was cancelled in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This year, the five-day conference running from July 6 to 10, held at the edge of Idaho's Sawtooth National Forest in a tiny town of just 1,500, is set to feature strict checks to ensure it does not become a super spreader event.

Some of this year's sessions will be held outside in an attempt to minimize risk.

Among the major figures who have appeared so far include businessman and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix Co-CEOs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, CBS News' Gayle King, CNN's Anderson Cooper, Nike CEO John Donahoe, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Shari Redstone, chairwoman of ViacomCBS and Stacey Bendet, CEO of fashion company Alice + Olivia.

Additionally, a plane belonging to Jeff Bezos arrived at the local airport in nearby Hailey, but the billionaire Amazon founder had yet to make an appearance.

An estimate based on the latest available figures puts the total wealth of those known to be in attendance and those rumored to be attending at $588 billion. The estimated net worth of those already in attendance is about $340 billion.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg arrived with television producer Tom Bernthal Tuesday on day one of the Sun Valley 'billionaire summer camp' conference in Idaho, where A-listers from across industries meet annually

Stacey Bendet, CEO of fashion company Alice + Olivia and billionaire businessman and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft arrived on Tuesday at this year's 'billionaire summer camp' at Sun Valley, where some of the biggest names in tech, design, film and sports gather each year for the five-day conference

Jeff Bezos' Gulfstream G650 could be seen arriving at Idaho's Friedman Memorial Airport Tuesday, although the billionaire Amazon founder had yet to make an appearance

CBS News' Gayle King also made her appearance at the Sun Valley conference on Tuesday

[Lots and lots of photos of attendees on this DM article]

 

[von Koehler]

The best part of this is supposedly they all took the Fauci jab; it will be interesting to see how many are left two years from now.

About 6,000 people world-wide have died so far from the "vaccine."

 

[artichoke]

The Transportation Revolution › American Greatness

Reading California’s “Transportation Plan 2050” is a depressing journey into groupthink. Like everything coming out of the one-party bureaucracy, it is the bland product of endless meetings between…

amgreatness.com

The Transportation Revolution
Spending precious government funds on light rail that nobody wants to ride is a fool’s errand. Declaring war on the car is shortsighted cruelty. We can do so much more.

By Edward Ring
July 4, 2021

Reading California’s “Transportation Plan 2050” is a depressing journey into groupthink. Like everything coming out of the one-party bureaucracy, it is the bland product of endless meetings between “stakeholders” with the only common thread being a terror of contributing anything that might violate the pieties of climate alarm and the desperate need for “equity.” The result is a Stalinesque exercise in mediocrity, without even requiring a Stalin.

Actually, mediocre may be too light a term to describe this document, because mediocre implies something relatively inert. But the recommendations this document offers in 154 pages of mind-numbing detail, will serve to increase the momentum of policies that are guaranteed to further impoverish Californians.

California’s “Transportation Plan 2050” is consistent with a mentality that must be defeated. It is a dark vision of the future, where people will be priced out of owning and operating independent vehicles or flying, and public expenditures on transportation will be focused on modes of mass transit that are rapidly headed for obsolescence. It is a vision of the future where people of average income will be forced to live in multi-story apartment buildings and take mass transit everywhere they go, not by choice, but by economic policies and government spending choices that leave them no alternative.

As with water and energy, the conventional wisdom that governs current planning is exactly the opposite of what is coming. The conventional wisdom is that abundance—in this case in the form of inexpensive, uncongested transportation options—is impossible. But, as with water and energy, this is false. The primary reason this is false is that new technologies make the common road the future of transportation, not the past, and because there are leapfrog technologies that will render most forms of passenger rail obsolete within a few decades, while also taking additional pressure off of roads.

The other concept missing from California’s current transportation consensus is mere practicality. It is not practical to rely on bicycles to get around. The situations where it’s possible to ride a bike to work or to shop or to class or to deliver children to their activities, and so on, are miniscule compared to the practical necessities of life. Bike activists are yet another example of a vocal and influential minority that are given voice by activists who think that cars are ecologically unsustainable. That, too, is a myth. It is self-evident that bikes will not replace more than a minute fraction of California’s transportation requirements. The case for cars is more complex but nonetheless unequivocal.
California has already seen the emergence of electric vehicles with performance specifications that outperform gasoline-powered vehicles in almost every respect. They have more horsepower, more torque, and lower maintenance. Their only weakness, and it’s a big one, is that the typical electric car, even at a fast-charging station, recharges at a rate of about 10-15 miles per minute. A gasoline-powered car, to use the same comparison, recharges at a rate of about 50-100 miles per minute. For the time being, this is a flaw that will prevent universal adoption of electric vehicles.

It would be a mistake, however, to write off the potential for ongoing breakthroughs in charge-time. Lucid Motors, a Silicon Valley startup, has announced its debut vehicle will be able to charge at a rate of 20 miles per minute. At that rate, EVs begin to approach refill times comparable to gasoline engines. Five minutes at the gas pump enables a 300-mile range; 15 minutes at a fast charger does the same. According to Business Insider, a Chinese company has just announced an EV battery that can be fully recharged in five minutes.

There are other objections to EVs. The environmental footprint of the EV is arguably as big as that of the gasoline-powered car. But that, too, is changing.

Gasoline-powered cars, for example, are now almost completely recycled when scrapped. The same is increasingly possible for EVs, even including the batteries.

Opponents of EVs are correct to point out their environmental footprint, but the same may be said about gasoline cars, as well as any form of mass transit. As EVs, and their batteries, become 100 percent recyclable, the argument is moot.

Everything is going to have a footprint—another truth that is selectively recognized by California’s allegedly green clerisy.

But making a case for EVs, green, clean, and recyclable, is only one reason that roads are the future of transportation. What about the likely possibility that combustibles will become either carbon-neutral or carbon emissions-free?

Biofuel processed from algae grown in tank farms that don’t consume a lot of space—don’t laugh, it could scale up fast—would be carbon neutral, and enable internal combustion engines to remain on the road forever. Fuel cells that run on emissions-free hydrogen, which already offer superior range when used on drones, may eventually become commercially viable power plants for EVs.

These factors, some of which are likely to be realized in the near future, combined with the inevitable reality of cars that will drive themselves—freeing vehicle occupants to work, recreate, or sleep while in motion—are the reason roads are the future. Why on earth would anyone want to ride a bike to a rail station, wait for a train, marinate inside the railcars with passengers and pathogens, then walk or pedal a rent-a-bike to work, when one can simply convoy one’s individual vehicle into a smart lane and without so much as looking at the road ahead—travel from doorstep to destination?

Next-generation vehicles, in all sizes and configurations, have the potential to replace most if not all proposed mass transit solutions both for intercity and long-range travel. The maximum safe and sustainable cruising speed of a modern electric vehicle is conservatively pegged at 120 MPH. Vehicles of the future will not only be configured similarly to conventional cars and SUVs, they will also be mobile hotel rooms, entertainment lounges, offices, conference rooms, and buses of all sizes, offering countless levels of services. On properly designed and maintained roads, there is no reason these vehicular solutions cannot replace nearly all current or proposed modes of surface-based transit, certainly including California’s high-speed rail scheme but probably including most light rail as well.

This is the choice facing Californians, a choice that is completely denied by the “visionaries” that came up with the “California Transportation Plan 2050.”

There’s much more.

Nowhere in this document are other imminent transportation breakthroughs even mentioned. They mention high-speed rail, not bothering to admit that California’s tepid design is several generations behind the fastest trains being built in the rest of the world. If we’re going to build one, at least build one that’s cutting edge! But making fun of high-speed rail is easy. Instead of killing the project, an interesting twist, and something we ought to expect from leaders in a state as packed with innovators as California still is, would be to convert the miles of pylons already traversing Fresno and Kern counties into supports for a hyperloop prototype. The fastest bullet train on earth, operated by the Central Japan Railway Company, has been clocked at over 374 miles per hour.

California’s bullet train is unlikely to even go half that fast. But a hyperloop can transport people, theoretically, at speeds in excess of jet airliners, over 500 MPH.

Try that. If you’re going to fund a boondoggle, at least push the envelope.

Meanwhile, however, tunneling may be another way to relieve California’s congested urban boulevards and freeways. Elon Musk’s Boring Company is an example of a privately funded transit solution that can transport public and private vehicles point-to-point underground, moving them on and off surface streets with elevators. The Boring Company’s website makes a provocative assertion: “The construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.”

With achievements in aerospace productivity that have shocked the critics, there is no reason to doubt the revolutionary potential in Musk’s assertion. His reasons? He proposes the following innovations to lower the cost of tunneling by a factor of between 4 and 10: 1) triple the power output of the tunnel boring machine’s cutting unit, 2) continuously tunnel instead of alternating between boring and installing supporting walls, 3) automate the tunnel boring machine, eliminating most human operators, 4) go electric, and 5) engage in tunneling research and development.

The combination of practical innovations and an optimistic perspective are how Musk’s SpaceX lowered the cost of lifting a payload into earth orbit by an order of magnitude in just 10 years. Why not allow Musk’s Boring Company and other tunneling innovators to go underneath California’s cities, starting with Los Angeles, and create radical new ways for ordinary people, with or without their cars, to cross the city?

And while underground offers space to move through tunnels, above-ground offers space to move through the air. And again, nowhere in California’s transportation planning is there mention of the imminent revolution in passenger drones. And just as with self-driving cars, virtually every aerospace, automotive, and high-tech company on earth is working on passenger drones.

Perhaps ironically, most of the major players are operating in California. Uber has formed “Uber Air,” or Elevate, to develop aerial transportation systems.

Google has two companies, operating in stealth, Cora, and Kitty Hawk. Also active in California are the companies Aurora, in partnership with Boeing, and Vahana, in partnership with Airbus.

An interesting company based in Santa Cruz is Joby Aviation. With an IPO imminent, Joby Aviation appears to be a serious contender to deliver the first aerial taxi. Investors include Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, and Capricorn Investment Group.

This is fascinating stuff. Apparently most “air taxis” (or “sky cabs”) being developed are powered by electricity, and in many respects are just enlarged versions of the drones now commonly used by hobbyists and photographers.

Joby Aviation’s initial aircraft design has a range of 150 miles on a single battery charge, carrying up to four passengers. The aircraft travels at relatively low altitudes to avoid having to pressurize the cabin. They are expected to be “100 times quieter during takeoff and landing than a helicopter and near-silent during flyovers.”

No discussion of the imminent revolution in vehicle transportation is complete without considering the possibility of travel by land and by air in the same passenger module, with a separate wheeled module (the “skateboard”) for land travel, which detaches and remains on the ground when the passenger module is lifted airborne by an independent flight module. As reported in Electrek.co, Audi and Airbus are working on just such a solution.

Policymakers have a choice. They can recognize that private industry is creating new ways to travel on land, underground, and in the air. They can cooperate to develop uniform standards and updated laws to expedite this transformation.

They can revise zoning laws, redirect funding priorities, and invest in new roads and communications infrastructure. Or they can neglect road construction and instead continue to build public mass-transit systems that offer dubious prospects of ever solving growing transportation bottlenecks.

This is the enticing, bright future that is coming at California despite the pious proclamations of the political class. Where is the excitement? Where is the optimism? Instead of creating “equity” by cramming everyone into apartments and making them ride trains, why doesn’t California widen the roads, add smart lanes on the freeways for high-speed autonomous vehicles, work with the FAA to designate aerial lanes for passenger drones, unleash tunneling companies to create subterranean transportation corridors, and get out of the way. Spending precious government funds on light rail that nobody wants to ride is a fool’s errand. Declaring war on the car is shortsighted cruelty. We can do so much more.

"Nowhere in this document are other imminent transportation breakthroughs even mentioned. They mention high-speed rail, not bothering to admit that California’s tepid design is several generations behind the fastest trains being built in the rest of the world. If we’re going to build one, at least build one that’s cutting edge! But making fun of high-speed rail is easy. Instead of killing the project, an interesting twist, and something we ought to expect from leaders in a state as packed with innovators as California still is, would be to convert the miles of pylons already traversing Fresno and Kern counties into supports for a hyperloop prototype. The fastest bullet train on earth, operated by the Central Japan Railway Company, has been clocked at over 374 miles per hour."

Who can blame them? (/sarc) When they start the planning, they plan the latest greatest thing. But 10 years later when they still are worrying about permits and governors are politically bailing on construction that won't get done (the big tunnel from the Los Angeles basin up thru the San Gabriel mountains onto the high desert) and instead starting with the easy parts first and then not even doing that ... the design is no longer current.

And to please Greta Thunberg or Gov. Getty, I mean Gov. Newsom, they've passed some new "cleaner greener" requirements that mean it will cost 3x as much to build anything as the previous already astronomical price before overruns ...

Whereas in China they'd just bring in some workers from the provinces (who are eager for the higher paid work) and just ... f'ing ... build it.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HgtVu-F_wA
10:25 min

A GREAT RESET of energy is coming. Here's the evidence.

Jul 7, 2021



Glenn Beck

The Biden administration & far-left use the threat of ‘climate change’ as permission to do WHATEVER they wish — including several ‘green’ policies they say will bring us closer to net zero emissions by 2050. But in a recent Glenn TV episode, Glenn exposed the fine print, dirty secrets, and very inconvenient truths about their green agenda to 'save the world.' A Great Reset of energy IS coming, and here’s just some the evidence…

 

[marsh]

"Nowhere in this document are other imminent transportation breakthroughs even mentioned. They mention high-speed rail, not bothering to admit that California’s tepid design is several generations behind the fastest trains being built in the rest of the world. If we’re going to build one, at least build one that’s cutting edge! But making fun of high-speed rail is easy. Instead of killing the project, an interesting twist, and something we ought to expect from leaders in a state as packed with innovators as California still is, would be to convert the miles of pylons already traversing Fresno and Kern counties into supports for a hyperloop prototype. The fastest bullet train on earth, operated by the Central Japan Railway Company, has been clocked at over 374 miles per hour."

Who can blame them? (/sarc) When they start the planning, they plan the latest greatest thing. But 10 years later when they still are worrying about permits and governors are politically bailing on construction that won't get done (the big tunnel from the Los Angeles basin up thru the San Gabriel mountains onto the high desert) and instead starting with the easy parts first and then not even doing that ... the design is no longer current.

And to please Greta Thunberg or Gov. Getty, I mean Gov. Newsom, they've passed some new "cleaner greener" requirements that mean it will cost 3x as much to build anything as the previous already astronomical price before overruns ...

Whereas in China they'd just bring in some workers from the provinces (who are eager for the higher paid work) and just ... f'ing ... build it.

It is all about pockets - there was Feinstein hubby pork involved.

 

[marsh]

World Economic Forum's 'Concept 2021' Deals with Attacks to Supply Chains - This Is Eerily Similar to Bill Gates Sponsored Pandemic Simulation in 2019 | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft

In 2019 the World Economic Forum held a simulation about reactions to a world pandemic sponsored by Bill Gates. This year ‘Concept 2021’ focuses on Internet supply chain failures. In 2019 Bill Gates and Company held an exercise known asEvent 201. It was put together only a few months before...

www.thegatewaypundit.com

World Economic Forum’s ‘Concept 2021’ Deals with Attacks to Supply Chains – This Is Eerily Similar to Bill Gates Sponsored Pandemic Simulation in 2019

By Joe Hoft
Published July 8, 2021 at 7:28am

In 2019 the World Economic Forum held a simulation about reactions to a world pandemic sponsored by Bill Gates. This year ‘Concept 2021’ focuses on Internet supply chain failures.

In 2019 Bill Gates and Company held an exercise known as Event 201. It was put together only a few months before COVID-19 hit the United States. The Event claimed the following about its exercise:

Event 201 was a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic. 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future.

The exercise consisted of pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions on specific topics. These issues were carefully designed in a compelling narrative that educated the participants and the audience.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation jointly propose these recommendations.

The Event 201 ‘exercise’ mirrored the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 the World Economic Forum conducted a simulation called “Cyber Polygon 2020” that predicted a coming global catastrophe caused by a worldwide “cyber pandemic.”



The World Economic Forum again this year is focusing on defense and responses to a cybersecurity attack. This time related to supply chains:

This year’s focus is on supply chain attacks:

A couple of the supporters for this year’s event, CONCEPT 2021, are from Russia, SBER Bank and Home Credit Bank:

Should we now be prepared for cybersecurity supply chain attacks? Are we being primed for another big crisis with the constant news of hacks in US industries since the 2020 Election?

 

[marsh]

Fifteen governors oppose Biden plan to 'conserve' 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030

Known as the “30 x 30 plan,” the directive is part of a United Nations Agenda goal.

justthenews.com

Fifteen governors oppose Biden plan to 'conserve' 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030

Known as the “30 x 30 plan,” the directive is part of a United Nations Agenda goal.

By Bethany Blankley
Updated: July 8, 2021 - 10:34pm

Governors from 15 states are sounding the alarm over an executive order issued by President Joe Biden tasking his administration to “conserve” 30% of all land and water in the U.S. by 2030.

Known as the “30 x 30 plan,” the directive is part of a United Nations Agenda 2030 land and sustainable development goal, which directs nations to conserve land and water to combat climate change.

Biden refers to the policy as part of the United State’s acceptance of rejoining the Paris Agreement, a deal former President Donald Trump pulled out of.

The United Nations goal is to globally “get to a 2° C stabilization pathway and deliver climate-change resilient landscapes” by conserving land and water usage.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification argues by conserving land and water the remaining emissions gap could be closed by up to 25% and reduce the risks posed by climate change. The best way to do this, according to the plan, is for governments to control land, not private landowners.

Biden’s executive order, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” involves a multi-federal agency approach.

Currently, the Biden administration considers roughly 12% of land and water in the U.S. to be “in conservation.” It includes wilderness lands, national parks, national wildlife refuges, state parks, national monuments, and private lands with permanent conservation easements. More than doubling this acreage to 30% is equivalent to “conserving” the geographical size of Nebraska every year for nine years, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, argues.

Ricketts leads a group of Republican governors from the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Utah in opposition to the plan.

“We are deeply concerned about any effort to enlarge the federal estate or further restrict the use of public lands in our states,” they write. Biden’s plan would not only infringe on the private property rights of their residents but also significantly harm their economies, they argue.

It’s the states’ duty and prerogative “to manage their own lands and waters for the well-being of their citizens – free from federal interference,” they write. “It is precisely because we depend on our lands to be available for future generations to enjoy and use [that], without greater input into this initiative, we must resist implementation of the 30 x 30 program.”

They argue no constitutional or statutory authority of the president or federal agencies exists to set aside and permanently conserve 30% of all land and water in the United States.

“Nowhere in the laws of our nation is the authority delegated by Congress to the President or executive agencies to unilaterally change the policies governing land use in America,” they write.

The governors asked Biden to answer 12 specific questions, to which they have not received a reply.

Ricketts signed his own executive order banning Nebraska from supporting federal conservation programs without the governor’s express authorization.
While the Biden administration has not released more details about the plan, the U.S. Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Council on Environmental Quality published a preliminary report outlining a way to implement it.

“I don’t believe that the federal government is going to try to come out and just take land, through eminent domain, for example,” Ricketts said. “I believe the way they’re going to try and cover these goals is by creating more ways that they can regulate you and take your private property rights away.”

However, he also said, “Either they’re going to fail to get to 30 percent, or they’re not telling us something else about how they’re going to get to 30 percent.”

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colorado, argues Biden’s “land grab” won’t stop with 30% of land and water in nine years because a proposal submitted by the Center for American Progress in 2019 called for “conserving” 50% of all U.S. land and water by 2050.

“The federal government already has 111 million acres locked up in wilderness status and owns more than 640 million acres, so where will it get the 681 million additional acres proponents say are necessary to lock up 30% of the country’s land and waters in the next nine years?” she asks. “The Biden administration has explicitly stated that private property is not exempt from the 30 x 30 initiative.”

Boebert added that the federal government would take private property using eminent domain as it already has in her district. More than 55% of her congressional district is federal land, and that keeps expanding, she argues. In response to Biden’s plan, Boebert introduced the “30 x 30 Termination Act” in Congress to prevent private land from being seized by the federal government.

“America was founded on private property rights, but the 30 x 30 program relies on the false assumption that private property owners don’t know how to manage their land responsibly," Boebert said. "Instead, it proposes that we be beholden to the administrative state to govern the land that’s America’s lifeblood.”

 

[marsh]

Biden's Land Grab: Dramatically Increasing Federal Land Ownership to Fight 'Climate Change'

Slow Joe is planning on having the government buy up enough land to own 30% of the country! Read about that insane plan here.

genzconservative.com

July 8, 2021
Biden’s Land Grab: Dramatically Increasing Federal Land Ownership to Fight ‘Climate Change’



Fifteen Republican governors Wednesday put the White House on notice regarding concerns over Joe Biden’s “30 X 30 Plan,” the goal of which is to place 30 percent of U.S. lands under government conservation by 2030. Right now, only 12 percent of U.S. acreage is under federal ownership and management.
The new plan would infringe on “the private property rights of our citizens and significantly harming our economies,” the governors said in a letter sent to the White House. “We encourage your Administration to focus on better management of the lands the federal government already controls and to be more proactive in working with the states.”

Biden’s January 21 Executive Order illustrates that, like so many other socioeconomic systems in the U.S. under Biden, agriculture, and with it private land ownership, is under attack.

It matters not how far agriculture has come in showcasing its ability to achieve environmental stewardship. It matters not how many times farmers, ranchers and livestock producers explain that they are feeding, clothing, and providing energy to the citizens of the world.

It doesn’t even matter how loudly they shout that they have more incentive than anyone in protecting the health and resiliency of private and federally permitted land because they can only sustain a ranch or farm by caring for the environment.

Regardless of all that, agriculture is still condemned by those with no knowledge of agriculture. It is obvious there is no one currently in the executive branch who has any working knowledge of the industry, not even in the Department of Agriculture.

Titled “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” Biden’’s plan has been largely shrouded in secrecy as to how it would be implemented.

While there are a lot of things in the Executive Order that are major causes for concern, the most alarming is the ridiculous view that the ownership and use of private property and the multiple use of federal land — in the administration’s view — is antithetical to protecting the world from climate change and preserving “biodiversity,” a totally made-up and meaningless term that supposedly defines the variety of plants and animals in a macroenvironment.

No surprisingly, under the Biden Executive Order, the solution to global climate change is for the federal government to acquire more private land, taking it out of production and eliminating all use of federal land by farmers, ranchers and livestock producers — amounting to total federal control of an additional 440 million acres of land, lakes, rivers and oceans in the U. S. by 2030.

The concept is shocking in its scope.

Breaking it down, under the Executive Order and according to documents published by the Department of the Interior, the Biden Administration believes that only 12% of the approximately 563 million acres of federal land in the United States is managed for “the preservation of biodiversity.”

In other words, current agriculture and livestock usage practices are killing the global climate. Therefore, additional uses have to be eliminated to ensure this land is managed in its “natural state.”

The Biden plan is to acquire an additional 440 million acres by 2030. That is a land area more than twice the size of Texas. It is, in fact, 17 million acres more acres than in the entire state of Alaska, which is more than 18 percent of the land area of the Lower 48.

It is the largest land grab since Genghis Kahn swept out of China all the way to southeastern Europe.

The question now is how will the federal government acquire an additional 440 million acres of private land and eliminate more uses of federal lands that already contain many restrictions?

Most likely, eminent domain is the answer. In other words, condemnation of property and “strong-arming” reluctant sellers.

The nightly news won’t tell you this, but federal agencies are already implementing the “Biden vision.”

On February 11, 2021 — just three weeks after Biden signed his Executive Order — the Acting Secretary of the Interior signed an Order eliminating the Trump Administration’s requirement for state and local government approval prior to the federal government’s acquisition of more private lands with monies from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).

Shockingly, that Order claimed that allowing local governments to have a voice in land acquisition directly impacting their counties “undermined” the program.

While LWCF funds are touted as being used to “secure public access and improve recreational opportunities,” the money, as the government loves to say, is “fungible.” It can also be used to acquire private lands for federal ownership.

The impact on local economies is going to be broad and devastating. There will no property taxes paid after land is purchased by the federal government. That will seriously damage the ability of local school districts to educate students in rural areas and the county and city governments to provide services to their population.

There will be no jobs associated with federally-owned land that will “preserve biodiversity, leaving the land natural state.” That will further reduce the tax base by taking away paychecks from hard-working families. Small businesses will be forced to close because the owners will not be able to justify staying in business when there are far fewer customers coming through their doors.

With the passage of the Great Americans Outdoor Act in 2020, Congress already will make $900 million a year available for the LWCF. The agency, though, will need billions more to achieve this radical acquisition goal.

All of rural America and anyone who believes that local control of resources and that the American farmer and rancher is the backbone of this country should be alarmed at the foolish notion that only the federal government, by removing land from private ownership, can combat climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

Once they have snapped up all the farm and ranch land they want to remove from private ownership and production, why won’t the federal government come for the small towns, for the suburbs, the park and recreation lands?

A frightening realization: There is no reason that they won’t.

 

[energy_wave]

Prof. Richard Lindzen confirms that the climate alarm is based on bogus science

RT 26:39

Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist, was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT from 1983 until his retirement in 2013. Currently he is a Distinguished Senior Fellow in Cato Institute's Center for the Study of Science. This talk is a brilliant takedown of the alarmists' bogus arguments. It is extracted from his 2018 Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2q9B...). He provides both the political and scientific reasons why the climate scare is unwarranted and that additional CO2 is to be welcomed as plant food. (The fuller talk, for those interested, also outlines the way the climate actually works.) Pseudo science and pretend pride of the fool intellectuals that they also "know" and "respect" science (he cites CP Snow's brilliant insights into this tendency, which I've edited out of the talk to keep it short) keeps this nonsensical and harmful alarm going. But as he rightly notes, the middle classes are not fooled. The middle class have universally (except possibly in India, yet) rejected climate alarm. That is the only saving grace in this evolving socialist nightmare. Our only hope is the common sense of the middle class.

 

[Jubilee on Earth]

Pinball Preparedness gives a great summary of the agenda at Cyber Polygon today. These sessions all seem to pertain to the Great Reset.

Run time 14:17