GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEQcyIGH_vQ
10:34 min

You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy!? - The Great Reset

•Feb 13, 2021


AwakenWithJP

By 2030 you’ll owe nothing and be happy about it! These are the words of Klaus Schwab, head of the world economic forum. It’s part of his plan for the great reset. In this video you’ll learn why you’ll be so happy only nothing. And also why they’ll be even happier because they own everything.

 

[raven]

less than 10 years

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Rickards Warns 'Green New Deal' Is Already Underway

SUNDAY, FEB 14, 2021 - 18:40
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

By now, you’ve heard of the Green New Deal, an ambitious agenda to decarbonize the economy. The overall Green New Deal calls for ending the use of oil and natural gas, moving to electric vehicles, solar, wind and geothermal power, imposing carbon taxes to reduce C02 emissions and providing government subsidies to non-carbon-based energy technologies.

The U.S. would also seek to embed these policies and priorities in new trade treaties and multilateral agreements. President Biden has already begun this process by rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, which actually doesn’t mean much; it’s mostly for show.

The Paris Accord is also a platform for pursuing the Green New Deal.

But it’s difficult to conceive of any other program that would do more harm to the U.S. economy and give more of a boost to the Chinese, Russians and Iranians.

Biden has temporarily halted all new oil and gas drilling leases and permits on federal lands. He’s moving quickly to make the ban permanent. This ban will kill the fracking industry and help to destroy what’s left of the coal industry. Because of reduced supply, it will raise energy prices globally. New carbon emission taxes will raise prices even further.

Why Kill the Keystone XL Pipeline?

Very significantly, Biden has also canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. This is a pipeline that brings oil from Alberta, in Canada, to the central United States. The pipeline would then go to Nebraska, where there would be a hub and a distribution center.

Killing the pipeline would cost tens of thousands of jobs. And when you count suppliers and subcontractors, it could be at least 100,000 high-paying lost jobs, mostly union jobs with benefits.

But the fact is, the oil is still coming anyway. That oil from Canada is still coming to the United States, except it comes by truck and train. That’s the reason you build a pipeline. It’s faster and cheaper to move the oil by pipeline than it is to move it by truck and train. What we have now is just a pipeline on wheels with one difference…

They release much greater CO2 emissions. All these trucks and all these trains are putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than a pipeline would. Again, that’s why you build a pipeline.

So if you’re doing this for economic reasons, it makes no sense because you destroyed maybe 100,000 high-paying jobs. If you’re doing it for environmental reasons, it makes no sense because you will have more CO2 emissions from the trains and trucks than you would from the pipeline. But they’ve done it anyway.

This is a good example of what I call the triumph of ideology over common sense. Common sense will say, build a pipeline for the reasons I just mentioned. But that doesn’t fit the ideology or their worldview. They’re immune to the facts. They just say pipelines are bad, so get rid of them.

A Propaganda Cover for the Real Objectives

Biden justifies the Green New Deal based on fear of climate change. I don’t want to dive into the climate change debate today. But there’s good science that says CO2 is more or less a harmless trace gas, not the existential threat that many environmentalists would have you believe.

Climate science provides almost no evidence that slight observable temperature changes have anything to do with C02 emissions. It is far more likely that any temperature changes are the result of solar flare cycles and volcanic eruptions. Some data strongly suggests that the earth is slowly cooling, not warming.

Scare tactics about the “costs” of hurricanes have more to do with expensive homes built on exposed barrier islands (subsidized by federal insurance programs) than the intensity of storms, which were actually greater and more frequent in the 1940s.

Climate change is a propaganda cover for the real goals of higher taxes, more regulation, slower growth and favors for tech entrepreneurs. It’s a globalist’s dream.

What About Congress?

When you add it all up, Biden’s proposals will destroy high-paying jobs with benefits in the energy sector, raise energy costs for consumers and help flat-line economic growth.

Still, given the ideological momentum behind the Green New Deal and the imperatives of getting policies enacted quickly, it seems likely that some of these misguided provisions will become law at great cost to consumers and the economy as a whole.

But the prospects of the most radical parts of the Green New Deal becoming law are problematic. The projected adverse economic and geopolitical results will possibly derail the program in Congress. But, there can be no assurance of that. This will be one of the legislative priorities that Biden puts on a fast track because a Republican takeover of the House in 2022 would stop it indefinitely.

But the climate change agenda is seeping into all aspects of policy, including monetary policy. The original role of central banks was to provide a sound currency, which, in turn, facilitated government borrowing.

By the late 19th century, a new mission was added, which was to be a lender of last resort to banks themselves in a financial crisis. It held that in a crisis, the central bank should lend freely to solvent banks against sound collateral at a high rate of interest. That’s been flipped on its head.

Today’s version is to lend freely to anyone without collateral at a zero rate of interest.

From Lender of Last Resort To Climate Savior

After 1934, the Federal Reserve and other central banks were given broad regulatory powers over the banks in their jurisdictions. Finally, in 1978 the Humphrey-Hawkins Act gave the Federal Reserve a dual mandate, which included price stability and job creation.

With the job creation mandate in its portfolio, the Fed was empowered to interfere with almost every aspect of the real economy, including jobs, inflation, interest rates, liquidity and financial regulation.

As if that weren’t enough, economist Barry Eichengreen now calls on central banks, especially the Fed, to use their regulatory powers to control climate change! Part of the agenda would address racial inequality, income inequality and credit access for underprivileged groups.

These may be laudable goals, but it’s a long way from the Fed’s role as lender of last resort.

What’s frightening about this push to expand the Fed’s mandate is not that it can’t work, but that it could. A central bank could require commercial banks to lend money to solar and wind generating companies and deny credit to oil companies.

A central bank could require more loans to disadvantaged neighborhoods and require that no credit be made available to gun manufacturers or gun dealers.

There is no aspect of the economy and business activity that could not be affected positively by mandatory credit or destroyed by the lack of credit and access to the payments system. This is already being done to some extent by cabals of commercial banks. It would be even more powerful if required by central banks.

This is exactly the outcome that has been warned about for centuries by philosophers and political scientists. It is exactly the reason Americans abolished two U.S. central banks in the 19th century.

Any party that controls money can control the world. One solution is to abolish the Fed. Another solution is to abandon the money and move to something the Fed cannot control — gold.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Bill Gates Goes Full Captain Planet, Wants To Change 'Every Aspect Of Economy' While We Dine On Fake Meat

MONDAY, FEB 15, 2021 - 13:00
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is pushing drastic and 'fundamental' changes to the economy in order to immediately halt the release of greenhouse gasses - primarily carbon dioxide - and 'go to zero' in order to save the planet from long-prognosticated (and consistently wrong) environmental disaster.

Changes we'll need to make in order to realize Gates' vision include:

• Allocating $35 billion per year on climate and clean energy research.
• Electric everything.
• Widespread consumption of fake meat, since cows account for '4% of all greenhouse gases.'
• Retooling the steel and cement industries, which Gates says account for 16% of all carbon dioxide emissions, to inject up to 30% of captured C02 into concrete, and create a different type of steel.
• Widespread adoption of next generation nuclear energy to supplement wind and solar.

And since producing plants to make fake meat emits gases as well, Gates has backed a company which uses fungus to make sausage and yogurt, which the billionaire calls "pretty amazing."

"When you say fungi, do you mean like mushroom or a microbe?" asked Anderson Cooper in a recent "60 Minutes" interview to promote Gates' new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster."

"It's a microbe," replied Gates, adding "The microbe was discovered in the ground in a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Without soil or fertilizer it can be grown to produce this nutritional protein -- that can then be turned into a variety of foods with a small carbon footprint."

(Speaking of which, it appears that we're already rounding the corner on C02 emissions)


More via CBS News:

Gates isn't just looking to cut future carbon emissions, he is also investing in direct air capture, an experimental process to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere. Some companies are now using these giant fans to capture CO2 directly out of the air, Gates has become one of the world's largest funders of this kind of technology.

But of all his green investments, Gates has spent the most time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear energy -- arguing it's key to a zero carbon future.

He says he's a big believer in wind and solar and thinks it can one day provide up to 80% of the country's electricity, but Gates insists unless we discover an effective way to store and ship wind and solar energy, nuclear power will likely have to do the rest. Energy from nuclear plants can be stored so it's available when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

Gates also admits he's a hypocrite - telling Cooper "I probably have one of the highest greenhouse gas footprints of anyone on the planet," adding "my personal flying alone is gigantic."

He's atoning for his climate sins by purchasing plant-based aviation fuel, switching to an electric car, using solar panels, and buying carbon credits to the tune of $7 million per year.

Gates' climate pivot is getting a full-court media press. As Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News writes:

Bill Gates has been lauded as the man to “save the world” and help the planet reach zero carbon emissions in a new report by Wired Magazine, despite such standards not being reflected in the billionaire philanthropist’s own lifestyle.

The article investigates how Gates plans to achieve a “zero carbon” world and promotes his new book which argues “it’s time we make real societal, economic and logistic changes to our way of life to avoid disaster.”

According to Gates, the planet needs to reach zero carbon emissions in order to “avoid catastrophe.”

Gates’ efforts to reduce CO2 emissions may have an environmentalist sheen, but that goal also risks reducing living standards in the west, something that Gates isn’t likely to embrace for himself.

As we previously highlighted, while Americans are being told that the dream of owning private property is over under a future ‘Great Reset’, Gates and other billionaires have been buying up huge amounts of farmland.

Gates is now the biggest owner of farmland in America, according to a Forbes report.
While the mainstream media continues to champion Gates’ influence, he has received harsh criticism elsewhere.

As we highlighted last week, Lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, wrote a comprehensive report accusing Gates of engaging in neo-feudalism.

Kennedy warns that, “To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.”

He also accused Gates of attempting to monopolise and dominate global food production, labeling it “a dark form of philanthrocapitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”
Kennedy was subsequently banned by Instagram after his report was published.

As we highlighted earlier, pro-Gates messaging has also found its way into children’s television programming.

* * *
Does Gates have a plan to force the rest of the world to adopt his vision?

 

[marsh]

Bill Gates Pushes Biden To Spend BILLIONS More On Climate Change, And Taxpayers Will Foot The Bill

Billionaire Bill Gates may have been one of former President Donald J. Trump’s biggest critics, but he is completely on board with Joe Biden’s radical environmental policies. The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist praised Biden’s efforts to destroy the domestic fossil fuels industry in...

trendingpolitics.com

Bill Gates Pushes Biden To Spend BILLIONS More On Climate Change, And Taxpayers Will Foot The Bill
by Chris Donaldsonabout 5 hours agoupdated about 4 hours ago

Billionaire Bill Gates may have been one of former President Donald J. Trump’s biggest critics, but he is completely on board with Joe Biden’s radical environmental policies.

The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist praised Biden’s efforts to destroy the domestic fossil fuels industry in order to replace it with alternatives under the guise of an eco-friendly “sustainability” during an appearance on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

During his chat with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Gates touted what he calls a “zero carbon future” that over text 30 years will require a “global cooperation on a scale the world has never seen”.

This is music to the ears of those who are rushing to dismantle Trump’s America first agenda.

The Biden regime’s commitment to tearing down America in order to “build back better” has already resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs due to the cancelation of the Keystone XL pipeline, bans on oil and gas drilling leases, and the possible termination of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Gates has been on a Fauci-like media blitz to promote his new book How To Avoid A Climate Disaster and clearly plans to exercise great influence on Biden and his climate change crusaders.

He is now calling Biden to increase climate climate change research to a staggering $35 billion a year. The worst part? We The People would be footing the bill.

Watch below:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1361109602931195909

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1361109602931195909
1:18 min

Via CBS:

“In a new book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” Gates outlines all the solutions he believes we need.

He says the U.S. has to lead the world getting to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. He supports President Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, but is asking the administration to massively increase the budget for climate and clean energy research to $35 billion a year.

Anderson Cooper: You’ve said that governments need to do the hard stuff, but not just go after the low-hanging fruit. What– what’s low-hanging fruit?

Bill Gates: Passenger cars, part of the electric generation with renewables. The things everybody knows about, that’s getting almost all the money, not the hard parts, which is the industrial piece including the steel and cement. Those pieces we’ve hardly started to work on.

No one thinks much about cement and steel, but making it accounts for 16% of all carbon dioxide emissions. And the demand is only growing. The world will add an estimated two and a half trillion square feet of buildings by 2060 — that’s the equivalent of putting up another New York City every month for the next 40 years.”

Gates also rolled out some of his big ideas, one of them designed to end the planetary menace of flatulent cows by convincing people to eat foods created out of fungus. (yes, really)

Watch below:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1361110618938482690

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1361110618938482690
1:12 min

More from CBS:

“Because cows account for around 4% of all greenhouse gases, Gates has invested in two companies making plant based meat substitutes, impossible foods and beyond meat. But farming the vegetables used to make many meat alternatives emits gases as well, so Gates is also backing a company that’s created an entirely new food source.

“This company, Nature’s Fynd, is using fungis. And then they turn them into sausage and yogurt. Pretty amazing,” Gates said.

Some of Gates’ other ideas that didn’t make it into “60 Minutes” include his miraculous machine that turns human waste into drinking water.


Who will end up paying for Gates’ proposals?

The American taxpayer, who is already being shaken down to underwrite Biden’s far-left agenda.

 

[marsh]

Bill Gates: How the world can avoid a climate disaster

"Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won't even come close," Gates says. Anderson Cooper reports for 60 Minutes.

www.cbsnews.com

Bill Gates: How the world can avoid a climate disaster
"Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won't even come close," Gates says. Anderson Cooper reports for 60 Minutes.

• 2021Feb 15
• 
  
• Bill Gates helped usher in the digital revolution at Microsoft, and has spent the decades since exploring - and investing in - innovative solutions to some of the world's toughest problems - global poverty, disease, and the coronavirus pandemic, which he's spent nearly $2 billion on.

[There are several video clips on the website]

Now he is focusing on climate change, agreeing with the overwhelming majority of scientists who warn of a looming climate disaster. The good news is Gates believes it's possible to prevent a catastrophic rise in temperatures. The bad news? He says in the next 30 years we need scientific breakthroughs, technological innovations and global cooperation on a scale the world has never seen.

Anderson Cooper: You believe this is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced?

Bill Gates: Absolutely. The amount of change, new ideas. It's way greater than the pandemic. And it needs a level of cooperation that would be unprecedented.

Anderson Cooper: That doesn't sound feasible--

Bill Gates: No, it's not easy. But hey, we have 30 years--

Anderson Cooper: It sounds impossible.

Bill Gates: We have more educated people than ever. We have a generation that's speaking out on this topic. And, you know, I got to participate in the miracle of the personal computer and the internet. And so, yes, I have a bias to believe innovation can do these things.

Bill Gates
He is talking about innovations in every aspect of modern life - manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, because nearly everything we now do releases earth warming greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. He took us to his favorite burger joint in Seattle to explain.

Anderson Cooper: You're talking about changing everything in the economy, I mean, every aspect of it--

Bill Gates: In the phy-- yeah, the physical--

Anderson Cooper: So--

Bill Gates: --economy--

Anderson Cooper: Of what we can see right now, of us sitting around here, what specifically would be impacted?

Bill Gates: Well, this cement would be made in a different way. The steel in the building would be different. You know, the meat in the burgers a big deal. These-- you know, all this plastic and paper--potatoes.

Anderson Cooper: With potatoes you're talking about fertilizer, the irrigation system that's used.

Bill Gates: All the tractors, the transport.

Anderson Cooper: The trucks that bring them to this restaurant, all that has to change?

Bill Gates: Hey, when you're going to zero, you don't get to skip anything.
Gates says going to zero means eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions. Or else...

Anderson Cooper: If they wait 100 years to do this…

Bill Gates: It's way too late. Then the natural ecosystems will have failed. The instability, you know, the migration. You know, those things will-- will get really, really bad well before the end of the century.

Anderson Cooper: When you talk about migration, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people trying to move from North Africa to Europe every year?

Bill Gates: Exactly. The Syrian War was a 20th of what climate migration will look like. So, the deaths per year are way, ten times greater than-- than what we've experienced in the pandemic.

In a new book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." Gates outlines all the solutions he believes we need.

He says the U.S. has to lead the world getting to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. He supports President Biden's decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, but is asking the administration to massively increase the budget for climate and clean energy research to $35 billion a year.

Anderson Cooper: You've said that governments need to do the hard stuff, but not just go after the low-hanging fruit. What-- what's low-hanging fruit?

Bill Gates: Passenger cars, part of the electric generation with renewables. The things everybody knows about, that's getting almost all the money, not the hard parts, which is the industrial piece including the steel and cement. Those pieces we've hardly started to work on.

No one thinks much about cement and steel, but making it accounts for 16% of all carbon dioxide emissions. And the demand is only growing. The world will add an estimated two and a half trillion square feet of buildings by 2060 -- that's the equivalent of putting up another New York City every month for the next 40 years.

So one innovative company Gates has been pouring money into is CarbonCure. They inject captured carbon dioxide into concrete.

Bill Gates: What they do is they stick CO2 in here in the cement, and they mix them up. And so, you're able to actually get rid of some CO2 by sticking it in the cement. Right now they get rid of about 5%. But they have a next generation that can get to 30%.

Anderson Cooper: The carbon has been just injected into this so it's captured it. So, it's not gonna be released into the atmosphere.

Bill Gates: That's right.

Gates has already invested $2 billion of his own money on new green technologies, and plans to spend several billion more.

In 2016 he also recruited Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg and nearly two dozen other wealthy investors to back a billion-dollar fund called "breakthrough energy ventures," making long-term, often risky investments in promising technologies.

Gates regularly consults with the fund's team of top scientists and entrepreneurs who've so far invested in 50 companies with cutting edge ideas to reduce carbon emissions.

Anderson Cooper: What's like, the most far-flung idea you've backed?

Bill Gates: There's one that's so crazy it's even hard to describe.

Anderson Cooper: Wait a minute, it's so crazy it's hard to describe?

Bill Gates: Even f-- yeah.

Anderson Cooper: How do you pitch that--

Bill Gates: And--

Anderson Cooper: -to investors?

Bill Gates: Well, they find geological formations, and they just pump water down into them. The energy they've used to pump it in, then they can draw that energy back out. So it's-- it's a water pressure storage thing, which, you know, when I first saw it I thought, "That can't work." But--

Anderson Cooper: But you gave money to it?

Bill Gates: Yeah, lots of money.

Gates and correspondent Anderson Cooper

Because cows account for around 4% of all greenhouse gases, Gates has invested in two companies making plant based meat substitutes, impossible foods and beyond meat. But farming the vegetables used to make many meat alternatives emits gases as well, so Gates is also backing a company that's created an entirely new food source.

Bill Gates: This company, Nature's Fynd, is using fungis. And then they turn them into sausage and yogurt. Pretty amazing.

Anderson Cooper: When you say fungi, do you mean like mushroom or a microbe?
Bill Gates: It's a microbe.

The microbe was discovered in the ground in a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Without soil or fertilizer it can be grown to produce this nutritional protein -- that can then be turned into a variety of foods with a small carbon footprint.

Bill Gates: This is the yogurt.

Anderson Cooper: Oh this is good.

Bill Gates: Wow.

Anderson Cooper: I've had, like, cashew yogurt or oat yogurt. It's-- it's sort of along those lines.

Bill Gates: Yeah, with the burgers, they're, you know, like Beyond and Impossible, they're getting close to the real thing, but you can still tell. These I'm not sure I could've tell-- now I'm-- I'm more of a burger expert than I am then a yogurt expert.

Gates never planned to focus on climate change, but while working in Africa with the foundation he started with his wife, Melinda, in 2000, he came to see just how vulnerable those in developing countries are to the effects of rising temperatures.

So 15 years ago Gates started educating himself on climate change, bringing scientists and engineers to his office in Seattle for what he calls "learning sessions." He also reads voraciously, books and binders full of scientific research.

Bill Gates: Yeah, so this is the most recent one, which is about clean hydrogen.

Anderson Cooper: So you're reading thousands of pages every few days on topics?

Bill Gates: Yeah. My reading is, is key. and then asking questions when it doesn't make sense.

Gates isn't just looking to cut future carbon emissions, he is also investing in direct air capture, an experimental process to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere. Some companies are now using these giant fans to capture CO2 directly out of the air, Gates has become one of the world's largest funders of this kind of technology.

But of all his green investments, Gates has spent the most time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear energy -- arguing it's key to a zero carbon future.

He says he's a big believer in wind and solar and thinks it can one day provide up to 80% of the country's electricity, but Gates insists unless we discover an effective way to store and ship wind and solar energy, nuclear power will likely have to do the rest. Energy from nuclear plants can be stored so it's available when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

Anderson Cooper: Were you always a big proponent of nuclear?
In 2008 he founded TerraPower, a company that has re-designed a nuclear reactor.

Anderson Cooper: This is your prototype?

Bill Gates: Exactly. TerraPower's Natrium Reactor. This is a rendering, we haven't built it yet. But here's the nuclear island right here.

Anderson Cooper: This is the reactor?

Bill Gates: Exactly.

Lindsey Boles, Gates and Anderson Cooper with TerraPower's Natrium Reactor
Gates says TerraPower's reactor is less expensive to build, produces less waste and is fully automated, reducing the potential for human error. Gates and director of engineering Lindsey Boles showed us what they say is another key to its safety.

Anderson Cooper: What is it that we're looking at here?

Lindsey Boles: So these individual fuel pins are actually where the uranium fuel is. And that's what generates all the heat in our natrium reactor.

Anderson Cooper: This is what everybody is worried about?

Lindsey Boles: Yes, exactly.

Bill Gates: In a normal reactor, it's water that's flowing past and heating up. And it'll boil and-- and generate a lot of high pressure.

That high heat and pressure can cause an explosion, like in Chernobyl in 1986 when radioactive material was spread for thousands of miles.

But Gates says the TerraPower reactor won't use water to cool down the fuel rods -- they plan to use liquid sodium.

Bill Gates: The liquid sodium can absorb a lot more heat. And so we-- we don't have any high pressure inside the reactor.

In October, the Department of Energy awarded TerraPower $80 million to build one of the first advanced nuclear reactors in the U.S.

Bill Gates: Nuclear power can be done in a way that none of those failures of the past would recur, because just the physics of how it's built. I admit, convincing people of that will be almost as hard as actually building it. But since it may be necessary to avoid climate change, we shouldn't give up.

Anderson Cooper: You've been criticized for being a technocrat, saying technology is the only solution for-- for tackling climate change. There are other people that say, "Look, the solutions are already there. It's just government policy is what really needs to be focused on.

Bill Gates: I wish that was true. I wish all this funding of these companies wasn't necessary at all. Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won't even come close.

 

[Marie]

That's working out well in texas

 

[marsh]

Tucker Carlson fantastic opening statement…

‘The great Texas climate catastrophe is heading your way’ Later in the show, former Texas governor Rick Perry lost his electricity (live) during the interview. I will be posting …

citizenfreepress.com

Tucker Carlson fantastic opening statement…
Posted by Kane on February 16, 2021 9:06 am

View: https://youtu.be/lA46v_aMidQ
9:11 min

‘The great Texas climate catastrophe is heading your way’

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gvOupMjlro
10:49 min

Energy expert: Texas power blackout partly due to ‘UNRELIABLE’ wind energy
•Feb 16, 2021


Glenn Beck

Alex Epstein, President & Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, explains to Glenn why Texas is currently facing an ‘extreme’ power blackout. He says energy blackouts in the Lone Star State are NOT unprecedented — in fact, they’re happening more often to industries across the state due to an increased reliance on 'unreliable' wind and solar energy. And, while this current blackout may have additional causes, this could be a warning for what's to come if the Biden administration continues to focus on ‘unreliable’ sources of energy.

 

[marsh]

Thread by @ChuckDeVore on Thread Reader App

@ChuckDeVore: Much misinformation out there about #Texaspoweroutage, @ERCOT_ISO, wind and solar power, and thermal generators (gas and coal). Let's review what we think we know right now. @TPPF @Life_Powered_ 1/10 T...…

threadreaderapp.com

Chuck DeVore

Much misinformation out there about #Texaspoweroutage, @ERCOT_ISO, wind and solar power, and thermal generators (gas and coal). Let's review what we think we know right now. @TPPF @Life_Powered_

Two problems in #Texas, one short term and exacerbated by the long term issue, and one long term.

The short term failure came at about 1 AM Monday when #ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures and arranged for more generation.

Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.

This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.

In the last 4-5 years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today. We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar...

...which is cheap for two reasons – it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.

Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity (they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity). This subsidized (state and federal) wind and solar have pushed...

...reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market. This reduced the capacity margin – grids must have excess capacity to ensure stability.

Texas is experiencing what California has – with California affecting the entire Western Interconnection due to its policies. Blackouts are a feature of the push to have more unreliable renewables on the grid. Must pay $$ for reliable backup w/ renewables

[COMMENT: We ran into trying to compete with subsidized wind and solar when we were trying to set up biomass plants to create wood pellets from small diameter trees with a heat by-product for greenhouse use. We couldn't get a rate subsidy. It would have provided a merchantable use for small diameter trees - thinning the forest to lessen wildfire damage. Almost all the larger biomass cogeneration plants in CA had closed due to inability to compete with biomass. ]

 

[marsh]

Texas Outages Put Reliability Of Renewable Energy In The Spotlight

Everyone wants clean energy, but reliability is what really counts in a crisis.

www.forbes.com

Feb 15, 2021,03:15pm EST|81,085 views

Texas Outages Put Reliability Of Renewable Energy In The Spotlight

Sal GilbertieContributor

The current Arctic blast is stressing power grids across the US, laying bare issues that will have ... [+]
GETTY
Everyone wants clean energy, but reliability is what really counts in a crisis. As renewably sourced energy captures a larger share of the power grid, outages become inevitable.

• This story has a follow-up article that can be read here.

Renewable energy is great, but it just can’t compete with traditional sources. Texas just became the poster child for the consequences of change that happens too rapidly.

Take wind power as an example; just ten years ago wind power accounted for under ten percent of electricity production in Texas. Now its share is approaching 25 percent, which seemed like a good thing until the current record breaking arctic blast came along. Freezing rain ahead of plunging temperatures has literally frozen some wind turbines solid, meaning there isn’t enough electricity being produced at the very time when it’s needed the most. Incidental reports coming out of Texas indicate that as many as half of Texan wind turbines may have been rendered temporarily inoperable by icy weather.

This is the problem with renewable energy; it isn’t always there when the going gets tough. The ramifications of changing our current electric grid from carbon and nuclear based sources to wind, solar and other more environmentally and politically correct sources are not esoteric; they are real, consequential, and life threatening.

The Biden administration and its allies need to take notice of what’s currently happening in Texas - and elsewhere - as they bulldoze their new climate policy agenda across all levels of the economy. It’s not necessarily the new policies that promote renewable energy sources and punish traditional carbon based sources that could be dangerous - it’s the pace at which those policies are implemented that will matter most to public safety and the reliability of our energy sources.

The events happening right now in Texas illustrate the importance of a well rounded, multi sourced energy infrastructure that’s built out slowly, methodically, and intelligently with multiple redundancies in anticipation of extreme events. Wind turbines don’t always work, the sun doesn’t always shine, oil and gas production can be affected by weather extremes, and nuclear power plants can go down. Nothing is fail-safe, but more traditional sources of energy currently have a leg up on renewables because the infrastructure is “hardened” and pervasive, old school energy sources were here first, plain and simple.

Will renewable sources become as reliable as traditional sources? Of course they will, but it will take time, money and the development of new technologies (think giant battery fields and other new things) to make it so. Changes of this magnitude simply can’t be rushed.

In the meantime, the lives lost and damage done to infrastructure due to power outages right now need to be considered at the forefront - not as an aside or afterthought - of any new green energy policy put forth in Washington and elsewhere.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Don't Accept 100% Of The Climate Change Story And You Get Labeled A Racist

THURSDAY, FEB 18, 2021 - 18:40
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

If you do not accept any part of the climate change story, expect the worst.

Climate Change Parts

1. Climate is Changing
2. CO2 is the Reason
3. Politicians Have the Solution

It's Changing
Without a doubt climate is changing.
There was a move a few years back to change the discussion from "global warming" to the more politically correct meme "climate change" just so no one could reasonably deny it was happening.
Depending on one's time frame, global warming is happening too. The questions are why and for how long?

Is CO2 the Reason?
An increase in CO2 is likely part of the answer but what part? And why the slowdown vs what the models predicted?
Nature.Com discusses Making Sense of the Early 2000s Warming Slowdown.

Climate models did not (on average) reproduce the observed temperature trend over the early twenty-first century, in spite of the continued increase in anthropogenic forcing. This mismatch focused attention on a compelling science problem — a problem deserving of scientific scrutiny.

Nonetheless, let's assume the models are correct and that 1950-1970 and 2002-2014 did not happen.

Let's also assume there was no data manipulation anywhere.

How Fast is the Sea Rising?

Please consider How Fast is the Sea Rising?

Between 1900 and 2016, the globally averaged sea level rose by 16–21 cm (6.3–8.3 in). More precise data gathered from satellite radar measurements reveal an accelerating rise of 7.5 cm (3.0 in) from 1993 to 2017, which is a trend of roughly 30 cm (12 in) per century.

Let's assume 100% of the ocean's rise is due not only to CO2 but manmade CO2 and as a result the oceans will rise by a foot in the next 100 years.

Existential Threat of Our Time
On February 3, I noted Climate Change Moves to the Forefront of Biden's Legislation

“It’s long past time for the Senate to take a leading role in combating the existential threat of our time: climate,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Allegedly, the existential threat to mankind is a 1 foot rise in the ocean over the next 100 years.

Cheaper to Deal With it Now

On January 28, I noted John Kerry's Straw Man Arguments for Wasting Money on Climate Change

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1354542372785369097

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1354542372785369097
1:48 min

Kerry blamed 4 hurricanes on climate change as if throwing any amount of money at the alleged problem would have stopped the hurricanes.

Some claim I took Kerry out of context. Play it yourself to see.

Where is the CO2 Coming From?


CO2 Stats

• Please note that the US reduced its carbon footprint from 6.13 billion tons in 2007 to 5.28 billion tons in 2019.
• Meanwhile, China increased its footprint from 6.86 billion tons in 2019 to 10.17 billion tons in 2019.
• In the same timeframe, global output rose from 31.29 billion tons to 36.44 billion tons.
• In 2007, the US accounted for 19.6% of the total global carbon footprint.
• In 2019, the US accounted for only 14.5% of the total global footprint.

A Word About Cherry Picking Data



For pointing out that the US only accounted for 14.5% of the total global footprint, not only was I accused of cherry picking the data it led to charges of me being a racist.

This comment kicked it off: "Mish, please alter the graph. You can't show that China is a major polluter or in any way shape or form, a bad actor, because that is racist."

That I believe was sarcasm but many others jumped on the boat.

Take this comment for example.

What verges on racism is believing that the billions in China, Africa, South America don't have the right to pollute at the same rate as those of us in the developed world. And what verges on willful ignorance is discounting what climate scientists say are the consequences of introducing so much CO2 into the atmosphere.

AOC's New Green Deal

Please recall AOC's Green New Deal Pricetag of $51 to $93 Trillion vs. Cost of Doing Nothing.
Here's another amusing reader comment

You keep equating the estimated cost of the green new deal with the cost of getting to net zero emissions. That is incorrect, there are a ton of expensive proposals in the green new deal which have nothing to do with carbon emissions.

OK. What portion of AOC's plan does one want to assign to carbon?
67%? 50%? 33%?

$90 Trillion Solutions

In 2015, Business Insider noted A Plan Is Floating Around Davos To Spend $90 Trillion Redesigning All The Cities So They Don't Need Cars

The $90 trillion proposal came from former US vice president Al Gore, former president of Mexico Felipe Calderon, and their colleagues on The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

A Word About Scientific Consensus

Politicians Have the Solution?!

Now we are getting to the heart of the matter.




Let's review the key point: In 2019, the US accounted for only 14.5% of the total global footprint.

Key Questions

1. How much money are we willing to spend to reduce our 14.5% and falling percentage of carbon emissions?
2. What would it cost to cut that by half in 10 years?
3. Assuming we could cut that in half in 10 years, what would it do to total carbon output?
4. By what force do we get China, India, and all the developing economies in the Mideast and Africa to reduce their carbon output?
5. Assuming we achieve number 4 peacefully by some sort of economic buyout like cap-and-trade what is the cost to the US?
6. What about inflation?
7. Sure, China is producing goods for the US and EU but do we want that to stop? When? Why? How? Cost?
8. Does not China, India, Africa, etc., have the right to improve their standards of living?
9. What do the above points imply about the US standard of living?
10. How the hell do we pay for this?

Looking ahead over the next 100 years, the US is a minor part of the carbon problem.
I have yet see AOC, John Kerry, any Mish reader, or anyone else address any of the above 10 questions in detail, and I am sure that set of questions is incomplete.

Final Questions to All Those Demanding Government Do Something

What the hell are you doing?
The #1 thing someone can proactively do eliminate their carbon footprint is to stop breathing.
Since that seems a bit impractical, the #2 thing someone can do is not have kids.
Anyone up in arms about carbon ought to not have kids, not eat meat, not drive a car, not have a TV, not listen to the radio, and in general not do much of anything.
Instead, most demand the government do something. What?

Until someone can put a realistic price on this while addressing my 10 questions, forgive me for not agreeing that a total rise in the ocean of 3 inches in the last 20 years is the existential threat of our time.

GM to Phase Out Gas-Powered Vehicles by 2035, Carbon Neutral by 2040

One day after Kerry's ridiculous rant, I noted GM to Phase Out Gas-Powered Vehicles by 2035, Carbon Neutral by 2040.

Assuming one believes CO2 is a problem, this is the way problems are solved.
GM is not doing this to save the world, it is doing this because market forces mandate a change.

Similarly, solar power will come into play as storage technology improves.
The free market, not populist ideas will solve real world problems.

Bonus Geopolitical Q&A

Q: What happened when Merkel went along with the Greens and did away with nuclear?
A: Germany imports more coal-based energy from neighboring states and is more dependent on Russia for natural gas.
Q: Is wind and solar ever going to make a serious dent in China's growing energy demands.
A: No
Q: What happened in France when Macron pushed through a gas tax to support the Green movement?
A: How quick we forget the Yellow-Vest Revolt that went on for months.

The Real Threat

The "existential threat" is politicians seeking $90 trillion solutions to hyped-up problems.

 

[marsh]

Not a Surprise - The Big Green Deal is a Scam | The Gateway Pundit | by Larry Johnson

Remember that time you thought you were digging into a bowl of chocolate ice cream and you discovered with the first bite that you were eating rancid prunes instead?

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Not a Surprise – The Big Green Deal is a Scam

By Larry Johnson
Published February 18, 2021 at 6:21pm

Remember that time you thought you were digging into a bowl of chocolate ice cream and you discovered with the first bite that you were eating rancid prunes instead? That’s the definition of unexpected. Conversely, if you are having a colonoscopy you know exactly what is happening to you. The procedure is a definition of “EXPECTED”. It is only the results that can be unexpected.

Which brings me to slow Joe Biden, Wall Street and the economy. I am thoroughly amused at the surprise among journalists that the New Green Deal and the Biden Economic plan are not turning up roses. Consider these recent headlines:

‘Massive failure’: Why are millions of people in Texas still without power?
Retail Sales Unexpectedly Crashed in December
US jobless claims unexpectedly rise to 861,000 amid chip shortage

Let’s start with the electricity debacle in Texas. You cannot blame this on Democrats. This floating turd was created with enthusiastic Republican help. Governors Rick Perry and Greg Abbot–eager to pander to the climate change crowd–presided over the closure of gas and coal fired power plants in Texas and replacing the so-called dirty energy sources with clean wind turbines that were supposed to usher in a utopia of green, pristine power.

Whoops. They forgot to consider, what happens if winter comes and the thermometer falls below 32 degrees Farenheit? None of the masterminds of this green conversion had a contingency plan for hell freezing over. And when old man winter showed up in force this week, the turbines froze solid. This left Texans scrambling to find firewood and Coleman stoves in a bid to prevent frostbite. Too bad the massive buffalo herds that once roamed the Texas plains no longer exist–I hear that flaming Buffalo chips kept the American Indians quite warm in their wigwams. Sounds like a better alternative than wind. That was unexpected.

Guess what else is unexpected, i.e. a big damn unpleasant surprise? The economy. The smart guys and gals on Wall Street are betting on a slam dunk, guaranteed payoff for helping fund the fraudulent campaign of sleepy Joe Biden. They are betting on a surge in economic activity in the second half of 2021 flowing from a rapid roll-out of vaccination programs during the first half of the year and a subsequent reopening of nearly all sectors of a shackled economy.

In theory this should unleash enormous pent-up demand from frustrated consumers who have been stuck at home for a prolonged period and are eager to go back to work and school. The so-called geniuses of Wall Street are betting that record levels of fiscal support, backed up by easy cheap money from the Federal reserve (i.e., monetary authorities) has primed the U.S. economy for a Tsunami of consumer spending later this year.

So, that is the “EXPECTATION.” Now you can begin to understand what might be unexpected. The first blow came in December:

Retail Sales Unexpectedly Crashed in December

Excluding car and gasoline sales, retail sales fell 2.1 percent in the final month of 2020, data from the Commerce Department showed Friday. The prior month’s figure was revised down to show a 1.8 percent decline from the initial estimate of 0.8 percent, which means December was a bigger decline from a lower starting point.
The size of the downturn in sales caught economists by surprise. The consensus estimate was for just a 3-tenths of a percentage point decline.

Overall retail sales also declined by more than expected. These fell 0.7 percent for the month, worse than the flat to one-tenth of a point decline forecast. The prior month was revised down from a drop of 1.1 percent to a 1.4 percent decline.

I do not know about you and your family, but me and my gang have pulled back. Joe Biden does not inspire confidence. And his immediate actions via Executive Order, such as cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline and imposing a moratorium on fracking, are killing jobs instead of creating jobs. So, if you put people out of work what should you expect? Yep, more people seeking unemployment benefits.

But our economists and reporters are not good at logic and appear to have trouble with cause-and-effect. I woke up to this headline this morning:

US jobless claims unexpectedly rise to 861,000 amid chip shortage

“UNEXPECTEDLY?” Seriously? The last month is filled with flashing warning signs of future trouble. Sleepy Joe is making good on his non-promise promise to kill off the Trump energy boom. But that stupidity of Biden’s policies is being exposed as the supposed green energy solutions go belly up (e.g., frozen wind turbines) and workers from oil pipelines start queuing up at the local unemployment office.

And what about the O’Biden vaccination rollout? That too is a disaster. If you live in Florida it is not a problem. The vaccine is getting around and people from the wintry north are flocking here to get what they cannot find in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The vaccine snafu will put a further damper on unleashing consumer demand.

When the anticipated robust recovery fails to appear we will once again be treated to headlines with the magic word, “UNEXPECTEDLY.”

Now you know what to expect. The Biden sychophants are going to be repeatedly surprised as their idiotic policies catch on fire and burn off their eyebrows and hair. Expect it.

 

[marsh]

EXCLUSIVE: Biden's Insane Executive Order on Climate Change Gave China Access to the US Grid - Suddenly There's an Energy Crisis In Texas - Any Relationship? | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft

(The following information was provided by a TGP reader.) On Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed an Executive Order (EO) that led to Texans literally freezing to death this past week. Biden claimed his actions were to protect the climate but they helped China and made America less secure.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

EXCLUSIVE: Biden’s Insane Executive Order on Climate Change Gave China Access to the US Grid – Suddenly There’s an Energy Crisis In Texas – Any Relationship?

By Joe Hoft
Published February 19, 2021 at 9:50am

(The following information was provided by a TGP reader.)
On Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed an Executive Order (EO) that led to Texans literally freezing to death this past week. Biden claimed his actions were to protect the climate but they helped China and made America less secure.

On his first day in office, Joe Biden signed a number of EOs. This was made possible by the Barr DOJ. Bill Barr was fast-tracking Biden’s EOs while he was slow-walking President Trump’s.

"He Was Really Working Against this Administration in a Lot of Ways" - Trump Administration's Peter Navarro on Deep State's AG Bill Barr | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft

Peter Navarro, President Trump’s Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the National Defense Production Act policy coordinator, spoke out today on Sunday Morning Futures about former Attorney General William Barr.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Barr enabled Biden to be able to sign his EO on climate his first day in office.

Biden’s EO on the Environment helped China

The Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis said in its first paragraph of Section 1 (emphasis added) :

Where the Federal Government has failed to meet that commitment in the past, it must advance environmental justice. In carrying out this charge, the Federal Government must be guided by the best science and be protected by processes that ensure the integrity of Federal decision-making. It is, therefore, the policy of my Administration to listen to the science; to improve public health and protect our environment; to ensure access to clean air and water; to limit exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides; to hold polluters accountable, including those who disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities; to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; to bolster resilience to the impacts of climate change; to restore and expand our national treasures and monuments; and to prioritize both environmental justice and the creation of the well-paying union jobs necessary to deliver on these goals.

Of course, this is a total sham. Best science? The integrity of Federal decision-making (code for destroying President Trump’s decisions of integrity)? Communities of color (in a climate change EO)? Environmental justice? Union jobs? Really, what the hell.

[No one voted for this garbage and Democrats stole the election to push this through.]
Hidden towards the bottom of the EO, is a clause about China. It turns out that the same day Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline, he also lifted the security on our power grid for 90 days (Trump’s EO the year prior secured our power grid by giving China no access.)

(c) Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days. The Secretary of Energy and the Director of OMB shall jointly consider whether to recommend that a replacement order be issued.

This was just a small little paragraph tucked away in one of Biden’s EO’s the first day he was in office under the umbrella of “restoring science to tackle the climate crisis”. Of course, science and climate crisis are polar opposites. Looking over the EO, there appears to be nothing that benefits the United States of America which begs the question, who wrote and approved this mess?

Biden ended President Trump’s EO protecting the US power grid from China
President Trump’s May 1, 2020, EO Securing the United States Bulk-Power System stated:

foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system, which provides the electricity that supports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastructure, economy, and way of life. The bulk-power system is a target of those seeking to commit malicious acts against the United States and its people, including malicious cyber activities, because a successful attack on our bulk-power system would present significant risks to our economy, human health and safety, and would render the United States less capable of acting in defense of itself and its allies.”

What prompted Trump’s EO was a report from the Department of Energy dated 2014 (the Obama years) that found:

Since the late 1990’s, the United States has experienced an increased demand for LPTs; however, despite the growing need, the United States has a limited domestic capacity to produce LPTs. In 2010, six power transformer manufacturing facilities existed in the United States, and together, they met approximately 15 percent of the Nation’s demand for power transformers of a capacity rating greater than or equal to 60 megavolt-amperes (MVA).

Trump said the following when he initiated his EO (emphasis added):

“[F]oreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system, which provides the electricity that supports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastructure, economy, and way of life. The bulk-power system is a target of those seeking to commit malicious acts against the United States and its people, including malicious cyber activities, because a successful attack on our bulk-power system would present significant risks to our economy, human health and safety, and would render the United States less capable of acting in defense of itself and its allies,” Trump said in explaining why he wanted to keep foreign equipment out of the nation’s power grid.

The remaining supply was provided by foreign entities, mainly China. President Trump recognized that American security and independence relied on certain products being manufactured in the US.

On January 16th President Trumps Energy Chief announced:

As of January 16, 2021, then-Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette issued a “prohibition order designed to reduce the risks that entities associated with the People’s Republic of China pose to the Nation’s BPS.”

“The order prohibits utilities that supply critical defense facilities (CDF) from procuring from the People’s Republic of China, specific BPS electric equipment that poses an undue risk to the BPS, the security or resilience of critical infrastructure, the economy, national security, or safety and security of Americans,” a press release adds.

But then four days later, Biden stopped these actions, promoting US safety and security and conservatives spoke out:



Biden and Obama don’t seem to care about made in the USA. It’s shocking that Biden would want to remove these protections from China and other countries and allow them back into the US market. But that’s what he did with his climate change EO.



Suddenly this past week we have an energy crisis in Texas. Is there any relationship between Biden’s EO and this? We’ll never know.

 

[marsh]

[COMMENT: Ushering you back into a "Green" 1900s existence as planned.]

Outages Morph Into Outrage As Texans Slapped With "Mind-Blowing" Power Bills

FRIDAY, FEB 19, 2021 - 8:35

The rolling blackouts that plunged up to 15 million Texans into darkness amid a historic cold snap are diminishing by the end of the week. About 188k customers were without power in the state on Friday morning. Days after power prices jumped from $50 per Megawatt to more than $9,000, the horror stories pour in for those who had power this week during grid chaos as they are mind-boggled how their energy bills skyrocketed.

None of these horrifying power bill stories below should be a shock as we described to readers in the piece titled "Power Bills To The Moon: Chaos, Shock As Electricity Prices Across US Explode," that this would happen.

Texans who were on a variable or indexed plans with power companies are only now reporting their bills have jumped hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars for the month.
Royce Pierce told Newsweek he owes electric company, Griddy, $8,162.73 for his electricity usage this month. He said that's a massive increase from his usual $387 bill.

"It's mind-blowing. I honestly didn't believe the price at first," Pierce said.
"It's not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just can't afford."

Pierce was one of the lucky ones who maintained power through the entire grid crisis, but it came at a steep cost.

"There is nothing we can do now. This is already an insane thing and I don't care about the money when it comes to people's health," Pierce said, adding that if the virus pandemic hadn't affected his work, "we could have taken care of this."

Other horror stories of soaring power bills flood local television stations across the Lone Star State. When food and housing insecurities are incredibly high due to pandemic job loss, many folks in Texas who were on variable power plans could be financially devastated.

WFAA Dallas spoke with one person who said:

"Mine is over $1,000…not sure how…700 square foot apt I have been keeping at 60 degrees."

One couple said:

"When your electric company tells you to switch but there has been a hold on switching for over a week now. Using as little as possible 1300 sq ft house and this is my bill. . How is this fair. I only paid $1200 for the whole 2020 year. "

A tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of their bill that now stands at $3,800 for the month.

Ty Williams told WFAA that his average electric bill is around $660 per month. He said it now stands at $17,000.

Williams wondered: "How in the world can anyone pay that? I mean you go from a couple of hundred dollars a month... there's absolutely no way...it makes no sense."

... and in case you were wondering, OilPrice.com ran the numbers of how much it would cost to charge a Tesla in Texas earlier this week. While a regular charge costs around $18 using a Level 1 or Level 2 charger at home, estimates showed that the surge in power prices would have cost $900.

So the Texas power outage has morphed into outrage for customers who had variable power rates. We don't want to speculate, but if small and medium-sized enterprises were on these plans (unhedged) - their bills could be absolutely devastating. Hopefully, larger companies hedged against the spike in power rates; if not, their energy for this month could be astronomical.

 

[marsh]

John Kerry: 'We Have Nine Years' Until Climate Crisis -- 'There's No Room for B.S. Anymore'

John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s administration's climate envoy, sounded the alarm on an upcoming climate crisis. | Clips

www.breitbart.com

John Kerry: ‘We Have Nine Years’ Until Climate Crisis — ‘There’s No Room for B.S. Anymore’

Video on website 3:55 min

TRENT BAKER19 Feb 202111,618

John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s administration’s climate envoy, sounded the alarm on an upcoming climate crisis.

Kerry told CBS “This Morning” reporter Ben Tracy in an interview which aired Friday, that the winter weather seen across the country could be the “new normal” and needs to be prevented by cutting global carbon emissions.

“It is directly related to the warming, even though your instinct is to say, wait a minute, this is the new ice age, but it’s not,” Kerry asserted. “It is coming from the global warming, and it threatens all the normal weather patterns.”

He added, “Even if we did everything that we said we were going to do when we signed up in Paris, we would see a rise in the Earth’s temperature to somewhere around 3.7 degrees or more, which is catastrophic.”

Kerry went on to say, “we have nine years left” to “avert the worst consequences” of the climate crisis. He said the decision for the United States to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord is because “there’s no room for B.S. anymore.”

“[T]he scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left,” he warned.

“There’s no room for B.S. anymore,” Kerry told Tracy. “There’s no faking it on this one.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

"Break Their Will!"

FRIDAY, FEB 19, 2021 - 17:20
Authored by Eric Peters via EricPetersAutos.com,
When a dog curls its lip and bares its teeth, you know what sort of dog you’re dealing with. One such dog curled its lip in Massachusetts recently. His name is David Ismay – possibly related to the Bruce Ismay of Titanic fame, but hold that thought.

This Ismay wants to “break the will” - his words - of people who rely on gasoline to power their cars and oil and natural gas to heat their homes, in order to “combat climate change.”


And he was in a position to do just that, being until just recently a government worker and having lots of armed government workers available to enforce whatever he decreed as the Undersecretary for Climate Change – yes, such an office exists – of the state of Massachusetts. A state nominally under the governorship of a Republican – Charlie Barker – it bears pointing out.


Of course, Massachusetts is also the state where Obamacare was born, under the governorship of another Republican . . . Mitt Romney.

But hold that thought.

“Sixty percent of our emissions come from residential heating and passenger vehicles,” Ismay told an audience gathered to hear him expostulate – using the royal “our” as collectivists reflexively do when they mean to say everyone except themselves, especially when it comes to having wills broken. He went on to say that these “emissions” – of the dread inert gas carbon dioxide that doesn’t create smog or cause breathing problems – “that need to be reduced” – the assertion is taken as established fact – “come from you, the person on your street, the senior on fixed income.”

No matter what it takes, no matter what it costs.

He described “turn(ing) the screws” . . . in order to “break (the) will” of such deplorables. That is to say, the desire of the deplorables to resist being impoverished – and frozen – by well-paid-by-those-who-are-forced-to-pay-them government workers such as himself.


Which he itches to do in the only way that government workers can do such things – using the force of government. Using armed government workers to enforce what he and those similarly empowered decree.

The “person on the street,” the senior on fixed income” (Isn’t everyone on a “fixed” income?) will be the target of punitive taxes and other measures – probably including energy rationing via the “smart” meters that have been affixed to practically every home in the country . . . all of it designed to make the objects of these measures suffer.

In order to break their will.

“I know one thing that we found in our analysis is that 60% of our emissions come from – as I have it started to say you and me, except you guys are in Vermont – 60% of our emissions come from residential heating and passenger vehicles. Let me say that again: 60% of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you, the person on your street, the senior on fixed-income. Right now there is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts, to point the finger at and turn the screws on and now break their will so they stop emitting. That’s you. We have to break your will...”

View: https://youtu.be/muxVGmgykA4
.41 min

Ismay admits at the end of the clip, “I can’t even say that publicly.”

If it sounds pretty Soviet, that’s because it is.

But at least Ismay was foolish enough to be honest – probably because he felt emboldened. Americans having been sovietized to an astonishing degree in terms of their willingness to put up with things that Americans would never have tolerated when the Soviet Union still existed.

Probably because they had the example of the Soviet Union. They could see what it was like to live in the Soviet Union for the “man in the street” and the “person on a fixed income.” This perhaps giving them the necessary motivation to not wish to see America turned into a replica of the Soviet Union, modeled on the pyramid – with almost everyone not at the apex.

But the Soviet Union has been gone for more than 30 years, long enough ago to have receded in the memory of most Americans over 40 today and unremembered by Americans under 40 today. Many of these younger Americans, having no understanding of soviet life – having never actually seen it – think it’s better than American life.

They are about to get an understanding of it, as America transforms into the Soviet Union – a place where the bourgeoisie, a Marxist term of contempt for the middle class and anyone who aspired to it – also had its “will broken” by Lenin and then by his mass-murdering heir, “Uncle Joe” Stalin – who used the exact same terminology and who themselves never worried about getting gas for their government-owned limousines nor heat for their Kremlin apartments, always kept toasty.

The post-Soviet inheritors of this tradition fly in their private jets, like the new federal Special Envoy for Climate Change, John Kerry. Who – not ironically – is often referred to as a “czar,” i.e., an autocrat who decrees and breaks wills.

As was the case in the old Soviet Union, the “emissions” of these “czars” don’t count because their work – the work of breaking our will – is of the utmost urgency.

View: https://youtu.be/t8kj3osRgNY
4:01 min

Not for the sake of the proletariat – or the “climate.”

For theirs.

Understand this – before it is too late to do anything about it.

Ismay – who made $130,000 annually as a government worker, roughly twice as much as the average American family earns – was eventually forced to resign, which is good.
It’s a start, at any rate.

But much work remains if we are to “break the will” of creatures like Ismay . . . because there are hundreds of thousands of them, still employed and still empowered. They are in a position to “break the will” of hundreds of millions. Getting rid of just one of them won’t solve the problem anymore than getting rid of a single termite will get rid of that problem.
Which is, fundamentally, the same problem.

 

[marsh]

Coming Soon | Climate Lockdowns

Visit the post for more.

citizenfreepress.com

Coming Soon | Climate Lockdowns
Posted by Kane on February 21, 2021 4:16 pm

View: https://youtu.be/-LiebtlAErM
4:15 min
Paul Joseph Watson

 

[marsh]

Facebook Says It Will Fact Check Global Warming 'Misinformation'

Tech giant Facebook recently stated it plans to start adding information labels to posts about global warming that direct people to a "climate change information hub." George Mason University, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the University of Cambridge will all contribute...

www.breitbart.com

Facebook Says It Will Fact Check Global Warming ‘Misinformation’
28,397

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
LUCAS NOLAN19 Feb 202110,683

Tech giant Facebook recently stated it plans to start adding information labels to posts about global warming that direct people to a “climate change information hub.” George Mason University, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the University of Cambridge will all contribute to Facebook’s program of fact checking.

NBC News reports that Facebook announced this week that it will begin debunking commonly mths about climate change, continuing to define what is and isn’t “misinformation,” something which the company previously claimed it would not do.

Facebook said that it is adding a section to its climate change information hub that will feature facts with information about misinformation and falsehoods relating to climate change. Some of these facts will include data about the decline of polar bear populations due to global warming as well as information about the effects of carbon dioxide on plant life.

Facebook stated that it plans to rely on professionals from George Mason University, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the University of Cambridge to fact-check climate change posts.

Facebook recently introduced information hubs and has relied on them as part of its tactic to combat what it considers misinformation across its services. This is a quick change of pace considering CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s comments in May when he defended unrestricted speech on the platform and said he did not think that “Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth.”

Facebook introduced its climate change information hub in September, shortly after the firm removed a report with false claims that Oregon wildfires were started by Antifa members.
Facebook now plans to start adding information labels to posts about climate change that direct people to its climate change information hub

This hub will also be expanded to users in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, and Taiwan. The feature is already available in the U.S., UK, France, and Germany.

 

[marsh]

Facebook Will Nudge Users to View the Facts on Climate Change

The company also plans on debunking common myths about climate change through Facebook's dedicated information hub on the topic.

www.pcmag.com

Facebook Will Nudge Users to View the Facts on Climate Change
The company also plans on debunking common myths about climate change through Facebook's dedicated information hub on the topic.

By Michael Kan
February 18, 2021
https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php...dge-users-to-view-the-facts-on-climate-change
https://www.timebomb2000.com/xf/javascript:void(0)

(Credit: Facebook)
The next time you post about the climate on Facebook, it may appear with a special label that directs readers to check out on the facts on climate change.

The upcoming labels are part of Facebook’s attempts to educate users on the topic with credible information from scientists and news organizations. The company plans on first adding the informational labels for users in the UK on certain posts.

The labels will contain a link to Facebook’s Climate Science Info Center, which is full of facts and reports from scientific organizations and media outlets on the danger of rising global temperatures due to the continued use of fossil fuels.

Credit: Facebook
Facebook hasn’t said how it’ll determine which posts receive the informational labels. But the company plans on expanding their use in “more countries soon,” it wrote in post on Thursday.

The announcement is a bit surprising; in the past, the company has tried to steer clear of weighing in on politically charged topics percolating on the social network. "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year.

But at the same time, the company has been trying to crack down on misinformation about COVID-19, in addition to pro-Trump conspiracy theories that dispute the dispute the outcome of 2020 presidential election.

Credit: Facebook
Facebook initially rolled out the Climate Science Info Center in September, when the company flat out said “climate change is real.” The Info Center is currently available for users in France, Germany, the UK, and US. But Facebook is now expanding its access to more countries, including Brazil, India, and Indonesia.

“Along with expanding the center, we’re improving it. We added a section that features facts that debunk common climate myths,” the company said. For example, the debunking will how discuss climate change is harming the polar bear population and why humans—and not natural events—are causing the rise in global temperatures.

Credit: Facebook
The Climate Science Info Center will also pop up when users search for climate-related terms on the social network.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvvv_rxLL-Y
13:24 min

The UN wants THESE 6 policies from The Great Reset executed ASAP

•Feb 19, 2021


Glenn Beck

Glenn describes a new report from the UN that details several policies they say should be executed IMMEDIATELY in order to avoid disastrous outcomes — like the extinction of species or a three degree rise in temperature. But, Glenn explains, the 6 specific policies outlined directly are in line with The Great Reset, too. Coincidence? Likely not…

 

[von Koehler]

Facebook Will Nudge Users to View the Facts on Climate Change

The company also plans on debunking common myths about climate change through Facebook's dedicated information hub on the topic.

www.pcmag.com

Facebook Will Nudge Users to View the Facts on Climate Change
The company also plans on debunking common myths about climate change through Facebook's dedicated information hub on the topic.

By Michael Kan
February 18, 2021
https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php...dge-users-to-view-the-facts-on-climate-change
Timebomb 2000

(Credit: Facebook)
The next time you post about the climate on Facebook, it may appear with a special label that directs readers to check out on the facts on climate change.

The upcoming labels are part of Facebook’s attempts to educate users on the topic with credible information from scientists and news organizations. The company plans on first adding the informational labels for users in the UK on certain posts.

The labels will contain a link to Facebook’s Climate Science Info Center, which is full of facts and reports from scientific organizations and media outlets on the danger of rising global temperatures due to the continued use of fossil fuels.

Credit: Facebook
Facebook hasn’t said how it’ll determine which posts receive the informational labels. But the company plans on expanding their use in “more countries soon,” it wrote in post on Thursday.

The announcement is a bit surprising; in the past, the company has tried to steer clear of weighing in on politically charged topics percolating on the social network. "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year.

But at the same time, the company has been trying to crack down on misinformation about COVID-19, in addition to pro-Trump conspiracy theories that dispute the dispute the outcome of 2020 presidential election.

Credit: Facebook
Facebook initially rolled out the Climate Science Info Center in September, when the company flat out said “climate change is real.” The Info Center is currently available for users in France, Germany, the UK, and US. But Facebook is now expanding its access to more countries, including Brazil, India, and Indonesia.

“Along with expanding the center, we’re improving it. We added a section that features facts that debunk common climate myths,” the company said. For example, the debunking will how discuss climate change is harming the polar bear population and why humans—and not natural events—are causing the rise in global temperatures.

Credit: Facebook
The Climate Science Info Center will also pop up when users search for climate-related terms on the social network.

This is why many are fleeing faceborg censorship as fast as they can to find a new platform.

 

[Dozdoats]

Not information - DISinformation. Lies. Propaganda. Fearmongering. Facebook ...

 

[marsh]

Bill Gates on Climate Change: 2050 the ‘Soonest Realistic Date’ for the World to Change

During an interview that aired this week on "Fox News Sunday," Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates addressed climate change on the heels of the winter storm in Texas. | Clips

www.breitbart.com

Bill Gates on Climate Change: 2050 the ‘Soonest Realistic Date’ for the World to Change

TRENT BAKER21 Feb 20212,165

During an interview that aired this week on “Fox News Sunday,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates addressed climate change on the heels of the winter storm in Texas.

According to Gates, who recently published the book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” 2050 is the “soonest realistic date for the world to change” due to climate change.

Host Chris Wallace asked Gates to make his “best case” about climate change to those who question whether it is real and how much of it is manmade.

“[T]he change in the wind patterns is allowing those cold fronts to come down from Canada more often,” Gates explained. “There’s a pattern of wind that, … as it gets warmer, that breaks down. There’s no doubt that we’re putting CO2 into the atmosphere. There’s no doubt that that increases temperatures and that affects the weather. And so, the ill effects, whether it’s, you know, farming in Texas being changed or wildfires or coral reefs dying off, there’s, you know, super hard evidence of the ocean rising. I do think it’s fair that people have different views on the tactics to deal with climate change. In fact, you know, having both parties thinking about that is going to be very important as we go forward.”

He continued, “But this is a real challenge, and it’s great to see that particularly young Republicans are joining in and saying that this is something they care about, beyond their own individual success, morally preserving these ecosystems, allowing a livable planet — they care about that.”

“But critics say, you know, it’s easy to talk about getting off fossil fuels, it’s easy to talk about going to a plant-based diet, but the reality is that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs — that the coal miners in West Virginia or the livestock ranchers in Nebraska will be wiped out,” Wallace stated.

“Well, it’s very important, as we solve this problem, that we not cause those community dislocations,” Gates replied. “You know, we have a 30-year transition period. The skill sets involved, whether it’s making clean hydrogen, sequestering CO2, the engineering skill sets, the things that those workers do, will be important. In fact, we’re going to have to almost triple the size of the electric grid and build all that transmission. And so, it’s not like there’s going to be a shortage of jobs overall — it’s just balancing to make sure that each community gets into the plan.”

He added, “The CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and that’s what forces the temperatures to go up. And so, it’s really the sum of all those emissions starting in the industrial age that’s causing this temperature forcing with all of its ill effects. You know, there’s no magic date that it’s all great until then, and it’s terrible once you cross that threshold. It’s pretty linear as far as we know. 2050 happens to be the soonest realistic date for the world to change all of these source emissions — which are actually quite broader than most people are aware of because it’s got things like steel and cement, not just cars and electricity.”

 

[marsh]

Stephen Moore: Biden's 'Climate Change' Policies Erase U.S. Energy Independence, Lock Down Trillions in Natural Resources

Joe Biden's "climate change" policies will end energy independence and lock away trillions worth of natural resources, said Stephen Moore.

www.breitbart.com

Stephen Moore: Biden’s ‘Climate Change’ Policies Erase U.S. Energy Independence, Lock Down Trillions in Natural Resources

MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
ROBERT KRAYCHIK21 Feb 20213,282

The Biden administration’s energy policies, ostensibly pushed to combat “climate change,” will erase American energy independence and prevent the development of multitrillion-dollar domestic resources, said Stephen Moore, economist and coauthor of Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy, on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with special guest host Matt Boyle.

President Joe Biden, Democrats, and the broader left regularly frame the planet as entrapped within a “climate crisis” due to carbon dioxide emissions yielded by fossil fuel consumption.
Moore noted that the U.S. did not import any oil from Saudi Arabia in January.

Moore remarked, “[In] Donald Trump’s last month in office, do you know how much oil we imported from Saudi Arabia? Zero. It was the first time that happened in 50 years and it’s because [of] Trump. … It’s amazing, isn’t it? It is an incredible accomplishment. We’ve waited 50 years to become energy-independent, folks. We were finally independent.”

Moore recalled the 1973 oil crisis caused by OPEC’s embargo on oil exports to the U.S.
“Saudi Arabia had a knife at our throat,” Moore stated. “You had all sorts of gas shortages. Every time they raised the price of gas, the economy would go into recession. So we waited 50 years to become energy-independent. We finally arrived at that because Trump put America first, and he said, ‘Let’s produce all the energy we’ve got.'”

LISTEN:
https://soundcloud.com/breitbart%2Fstephen-moore-february-21-2021 View: https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/stephen-moore-february-21-2021
16:28 min

Former President Donald Trump went beyond domestic energy independence and pursued global energy dominance, said Moore, recalling his tenure as an economic adviser in the Trump administration.

Moore shared, “Trump would say to me say, ‘I don’t want to be able to be energy-independent. I want to be energy dominant,’ and we can be energy dominant. We have more coal [and] more gas than any other country in the world.”

Moore noted the geopolitical implications of halting fossil fuel resource development.

“One of the biggest pipeline projects in the world is between Russia and China, to take all of that oil and gas up in Siberia and pipeline it to China,” Moore said. “Is there any sane person who actually thinks China’s going to stop using fossil fuels? Do you think the Beijing communist government cares about climate change?”

The Biden administration is squandering America’s natural resources in pursuit of its “climate change” policies, Moore observed.

“Why wouldn’t we use it?” asked Moore of U.S. coal and natural gas resources. “We’ve got this treasure chest of trillions of dollars of energy, and the left doesn’t want American to use it. … That makes no sense.”

Thousands would die and millions would be without electricity in Texas if the left’s “climate change” plans are imposed, Moore warned.

“The left wants to get rid of coal completely,” Moore said. “If we had gotten rid of coal completely, you would have had tens of millions of people without heat [and] without light during the middle of a polar vortex [in Texas]. You would have had thousands and thousands of people die.”

 

[marsh]

Beijing Wants to Sway US Policy Using Climate Change, Experts Warn

The Biden administration should not allow the Chinese regime to use climate change as a bargaining chip to extract concessions in other areas, according to China experts.The warning comes as the United...

www.theepochtimes.com

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (R) and Chinese Vice Chair Xi Jinping talk during an expanded bilateral meeting with other U.S. and Chinese officials in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington on Feb. 14, 2012. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Beijing Wants to Sway US Policy Using Climate Change, Experts Warn
BY CATHY HE

February 19, 2021 Updated: February 21, 2021

The Biden administration should not allow the Chinese regime to use climate change as a bargaining chip to extract concessions in other areas, according to China experts.

The warning comes as the United States formally rejoined the Paris agreement on Feb. 19. President Joe Biden has described climate change as an “existential threat” and vowed to do more to reduce carbon emissions. But analysts are concerned that this may lead the United States to become cozier with the Chinese regime.

While Biden officials have broadly indicated they would continue the Trump administration’s tough-on-China posture, they have also pointed to “cooperative” aspects of the U.S.-China relationship.

On the campaign trail, Biden said he’d work with the regime in areas of common interest, such as climate change and preventing nuclear proliferation.

Experts fear that U.S. cooperation on climate change could lead the administration to give ground in other key domains such as human rights, trade, and national security.

The Chinese regime has already indicated that the United States would have to accept its own terms before the two sides could work together.

“China is ready to cooperate with the United States and the international community on climate change,” Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Jan. 28.

“That said, I’d like to stress that China-U.S. cooperation in specific areas … is closely linked with bilateral relations as a whole,” Zhao continued, adding the regime has repeatedly emphasized that “no one should imagine they could ask China to understand and support them in bilateral and global affairs when they blatantly interfere in China’s domestic affairs and undermine China’s interests.”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has labeled a range of topics such as its repression of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, the crackdown in Hong Kong, and intimidation of Taiwan as part of its core interests, and not open for discussion.

Zhao’s comments were made after Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry pledged that important issues including the CCP’s theft of intellectual property (IP) and military aggression in the South China Sea “will never be traded for anything that has to do with climate.”

But Kerry added that “climate is a critical standalone issue,” noting that China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases at about 30 percent.

“So it’s urgent that we find a way to compartmentalize, to move forward,” he said.

Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” recently told The Epoch Times that it would not be possible for the United States to cooperate with the regime given the conditions it imposes.

“China’s position is that you either have good relationships with us on everything, or on nothing,” Chang said.

“If we’re given that choice, it should be nothing. Because China is trying to constrict those areas where we can have a constructive discussion.”

In any event, the United States does not need to offer anything to get the regime to take action on climate, Chang noted.

“The Chinese are on the same planet that we are,” he said. “So they’ve got the same interest in preventing climate change to the extent that it’s occurring, so we don’t need to give them anything for it.”

Any negotiations with the regime on climate change would also be a waste of time, according to Clyde Prestowitz, author of “The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and The Struggle for Global Leadership.”

Prestowitz, who was a trade negotiator for the Reagan administration, said “China is not going to negotiate any deal that would be acceptable to us.”

“You cannot rely on China to keep its word,” he added.

Former Trump security official Matthew Pottinger has similarly warned about getting stuck in “negotiation traps” set by Beijing. He said successive U.S. administrations squandered years in formal talks with China that did not yield concrete results, which allowed the regime to continue harmful actions against the United States such as IP theft.

To cut emissions, Chang suggested the United States stop buying from China and start re-shoring manufacturing back to the United States, given that the shipping industry is a heavy polluter.

“That way will do a lot for the climate, in addition to having, of course, some other very critical knock-on benefits for us,” he said.

 

[marsh]

Biden climate policy on track to punish blue-collar America, prop up Putin, experts warn

"Trump's pro-America energy policies were a disaster for Russia, and the truth is Biden is a godsend for Russia," economist Steve Moore says.

justthenews.com

Biden climate policy on track to punish blue-collar America, prop up Putin, experts warn
"Trump's pro-America energy policies were a disaster for Russia, and the truth is Biden is a godsend for Russia," economist Steve Moore says.

In former President Donald Trump's final month in office, the United States achieved something it hadn't in more than a generation: In the final week of December, America didn't import a single drop of crude oil from Saudi Arabia for the first time in 35 years.

For many, it was a testament to Trump's America-first energy policy, which prioritized reliance on domestic production and drove global crude prices down below $50 a barrel for most of 2020 and U.S. gasoline prices to an average of about $2.30 in December.

The low prices throughout 2020 also crimped Russia's energy-dependent economy, leading to greater unrest in Moscow.

Now, a month into the Biden presidency, crude has jumped to $65 a barrel and U.S. gasoline to $2.72 per gallon due to a variety of geopolitical events. Economists and energy-state lawmakers alike fear it will continue to rise as the real impact of Democratic climate change regulation begins to be felt.

On his first day in office, Biden ordered the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada shut down, which unions said would cost 11,000 jobs. He also rejoined the Paris climate accord, froze new drilling on federal lands for 60 days, and nominated for secretary of the nterior Congresswoman Deb Haaland, who has led efforts against oil and gas exploration in America, raising fears the drilling and fracking moratorium could become more permanent.

"Fracking is a danger to the air we breathe and water we drink," Haaland wrote in 2017, just before she was elected to Congress. "The auctioning off of our land for fracking and drilling serves only to drive profits to the few."

While energy prices depend on a variety of geopolitical factors — a drop in demand during the pandemic, for instance — there is growing consensus among economists that the Biden policies are likely to inhibit U.S. manufacturing growth and drive up energy prices in the long term while exciting environmentalists.

The Biden energy and climate plan "really exposed this schism between the blues and the greens in the Democratic Party," said Steve Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist who advised Trump. "The whole green agenda it turns out is anti-blue collar industrial workers."

Moore said one of the ironies is that the Biden agenda will aid Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran to the detriment of U.S. markets.

Oil- and gas-dependent economies like Russia thrive when crude is north of $70 per barrel, and they suffer when it falls below $50, experts said.

"There is no doubt in my mind that the irony of the Russia collusion nonsense was that there was no one who hurt Russia more than Trump and his America-first energy policies," Moore said. "Russia really is nothing more than a third world country, with oil and gas.

"Trump's pro-America energy policies were a disaster for Russia, and the truth is Biden is a godsend for Russia."

Former White House manufacturing policy chief Peter Navarro agreed.

"From both a foreign policy and energy policy perspective, you couldn't create a better American president for Russia than Joe Biden," Navarro said. "And it is ironic, given all the crap they threw at President Trump on Russia, Russia, Russia."

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday he fears a long-term rebalancing of energy markets away from American sources to those of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

"In the name of climate change and in cradling the progressive, far left of our country, we are doing away with domestic production of oil," Steube said. "And then we're going to be forced as a country to purchase that from countries that are not our friends and allies. It makes absolutely no sense."

Audio on website 34:04 min

Steube said most Americans aren't getting enough information on how the Biden climate policy will aid Russia and other nations unfriendly to the U.S.

"The mainstream media is not going to talk about how the Biden administration is helping out Russia, by the things that they're doing as it relates to oil and gas," he said. "They're not going to talk about it."

Whether or not the news media addresses it, the energy industry already has. The American Petroleum Institute, the leading oil and gas trade group in the United States, recently completed a study showing that a longer-term ban on new federal energy leases could:

• Increase U.S. oil imports from foreign sources by 2 million barrels a day by 2030
• Decrease annual U.S. natural gas exports by 800 billion cubic feet by 2030
• Cut U.S. GDP by a cumulative $700 billion by 2030
• Cost nearly 1 million jobs by 2022
• Increase U.S. household energy costs by $19 billion by 2030

Navarro, who helped design Trump's policy of strategic energy dominance, said the true effect of Biden's climate policies will become more pronounced when the economy begins rebounding from the pandemic.

"When we get back to a robust economy, at the margins, we're going to have fewer jobs here in the oil patch, less competitive manufacturing and higher energy prices," he said.

While pro-Trump figures have been the most vocal about the impact of the Biden climate policies, the concerns are spread across academia and the ideological spectrum. Experts said the changes aren't likely to drive down U.S. energy usage, meaning higher prices and more foreign reliance in the long term, especially if the drilling ban becomes more permanent.

"This may not have the effect of reducing consumption," Stephen Barnes, director of the Blanco Public Policy Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, told The Advocate newspaper in Baton Rouge recently. "The global oil market may respond with higher prices and more sales for the Middle East and Russia.”raced to turn to foreign petroleum in order to keep running.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

If You Believe Life Will "Return To Normal", You Have A Fundamental Misunderstanding Of The Times In Which We Live

TUESDAY, FEB 23, 2021 - 17:25
Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Despite all of the craziness that is going on out there, many pundits are trying to convince us that life will soon “return to normal” and that great days are just around the corner. They are telling us this despite the fact that the state of Texas has been in a state of collapse this week, the real economy continues to implode, the unemployment numbers are going up, civil unrest continues to rage in our streets on a nightly basis, and our entire planet continues to become even more unstable. Those that believe that happy days are here again have a fundamental misunderstanding of the times in which we live. This isn’t a period of time when America is going to “build back better”. Rather, this is a time when America is going to go even deeper into “the perfect storm”.


One of the reasons why so many on the left are feeling optimistic right now is because the COVID pandemic appears to be subsiding…

According to a CNN analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, the US is seeing a 29% decline in new Covid-19 cases compared to this time last week, the steepest one-week decline the US has seen during the pandemic.

Improvements have been made; in a White House briefing Friday, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the US continues to see a five-week decline, with the seven-day average of cases declining 69% since peaking on January 11.

We are being told that if the numbers continue to plummet like this, soon there won’t be a need for masks, social distancing and other restrictive measures any longer.

In fact, James Hamblin says that there is a possibility that “pre-pandemic life will return even before summer is upon us”…

If all of this holds true, it would mean that many aspects of pre-pandemic life will return even before summer is upon us. Because case numbers guide local policies, much of the country could soon have reason to lift many or even most restrictions on distancing, gathering, and masking. Pre-pandemic norms could return to schools, churches, and restaurants. Sports, theater, and cultural events could resume. People could travel and dance indoors and hug grandparents, their own or others’. In most of the U.S., the summer could feel … “normal.”

But is this pandemic really over, or is it just transitioning into a new chapter?

According to the Daily Mail, the number of confirmed cases of “Super COVID” in the United States is now doubling every 10 days…

There are now more than 1,600 cases of the UK’s B117 ‘super covid’ variant in the US, according to a DailyMail.com analysis. Cases are doubling approximately every 10 days, according to a recent Scripps Research Institute study.

‘Super covid’ cases have exploded in two states that took opposite approaches to the pandemic: California, which has been under some of the nation’s strictest lockdowns, and Florida which has never had a mask mandate.

Cases of the 70 percent more infectious variant have exploded to 433 in Florida, in less than one month since the first case was discovered there.

Of course many experts are far more concerned about the new COVID variants that have emerged in Brazil and South Africa. Both of those variants have now made it to the U.S., and we already know that the current vaccines don’t work very well against the South African variant.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy continues to crumble right in front of our eyes.

On Thursday, we learned that another 861,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

Last week’s initial jobless claims soared to 861,000, despite more states and cities lifting restrictive business measures amid a decline in the number of coronavirus cases. Economists had predicted around 773,000 first-time claims for the week ended Feb. 13. Data for the previous week was revised up to 848,000 from 793,000.

Unemployment claims have been at catastrophic levels for nearly a year, and now they are starting to surge higher once again.

We also just learned that a whopping 92 percent of all restaurants in New York City “could not afford to pay their rent in December”…

A new report from the NYC Hospitality Alliance shows the extreme financial problems restaurants in New York City are facing, as 92% of the city’s restaurants could not afford to pay their rent in December.

The number has steadily worsened throughout the pandemic, from 80% of restaurants in June 2020 not being able to pay rent.

92 percent!

That isn’t what a “recession” looks like.

The truth is that we are in an economic depression, and there is no end in sight.

At the same time, communities all over the U.S. continue to be plagued by civil unrest and crime.

In cities such as Seattle, violent protests and riots have essentially become a nightly occurrence at this point. But most of the violence that we are witnessing is old-fashioned crime. One study found that murder rates in major U.S. cities were up by an average of 30 percent last year, and the chaos has continued into 2021. If you want to see an example of the lawlessness that is prevailing in our urban areas right now, just watch this video.

On top of everything else, our entire planet continues to behave in very unusual ways.
For instance, on Friday morning there was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake in Oklahoma…

A 4.2-magnitude earthquake shook Oklahoma and Kansas Friday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reports.

The 4.3-mile deep quake hit near Manchester, Oklahoma, at 7:56 a.m. CST, according to the USGS. Manchester is in northern Oklahoma near the state’s border with Kansas.

It is not normal to see earthquakes of that size in the middle of the country, but of course we are moving into times when all of the old rules will no longer apply.

Earlier this month, I wrote an article about how volcanoes all along the Ring of Fire have been “starting to pop off like firecrackers”. I believe that we have entered a time when we will see natural disasters become increasingly frequent and increasingly powerful, and despite all of our advanced technology we are exceedingly vulnerable.

Just look at what just took place in Texas. A single wave of cold weather plunged the state into a nightmare scenario.

If cold weather can cause this much chaos in Texas, what would a much more severe long-term emergency mean for our entire nation?

The events of the past week should be a wake up call for all of us, because the road ahead is certainly not going to get any easier.

 

[marsh]

Exclusive: House Republicans held secret climate summit in Utah

House Republicans held a summit this past weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah, to discuss how to position themselves to address climate change in the new Congress, the Washington Examiner has learned.

www.washingtonexaminer.com

Exclusive: House Republicans held secret climate summit in Utah
by Josh Siegel, Energy and Environment Reporter |

| February 24, 2021 04:03 PM


House Republicans held a summit this past weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah, to discuss how to position themselves to address climate change in the new Congress, the Washington Examiner has learned.

Rep. John Curtis of Utah organized the summit attended by 25 House Republicans.

They invited outside conservative groups to speak to members, including the American Conservation Coalition, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and the Alliance for Market Solutions. Those groups held separate panel events to educate members on climate change.

The meeting is the latest in efforts by congressional Republicans to overhaul their party's climate change platform and messaging to compete with Democrats and the Biden administration. House Republicans are also responding to polls over the last few years that have shown the party is vulnerable among young and suburban voters concerned about the environment and climate change.

“This is not something Republicans should shy away from,” Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, who attended the event, told the Washington Examiner. “I have tried to really be a voice for conservation, but it’s gaining more traction in the Republican Party," added Westerman, the top Republican of the House Natural Resources Committee.

The summit was attended by House Republicans from across the ideological spectrum and held over a day-and-a-half this past weekend. Other participants included the top Republicans of various committees: Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Frank Lucas of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Jason Smith of the Budget Committee, and Glenn Thompson of the Agriculture Committee.

Also attending were Rep. Garret Graves, the top Republican on the Select Committee on Climate Crisis, and Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia, a coal state member who has previously introduced carbon reduction legislation.

But other attendees had not previously worked on climate change-related legislation, including freshmen Reps. Blake Moore of Utah and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, along with Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas.

An agenda obtained by the Washington Examiner shows the event featured presentations by officials from the Chamber of Commerce, the conservative Heritage Foundation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a centrist Republican from Florida who previously introduced carbon tax legislation, also moderated a panel.

Representatives from the National Audubon Society, an environmental group, attended as well.
There was a presentation by conservative pollsters titled, “Changes in political climate addressing climate change,” and another program was called, “Why should Republicans engage in climate solutions?”

Westerman and Curtis, the chief organizers of the event, have been among the Republicans who worked with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy last year to introduce an agenda to address climate change that was focused on promoting innovation in clean energy technologies, including carbon capture for fossil fuel plants and smaller nuclear reactors.

Westerman, a licensed forester who introduced a bill to plant trees to absorb carbon, said that had there not been a pandemic over the past year that diverted Republicans' planned agenda, the public “would have heard a lot more about our ideas.”

Republicans intend to contrast their proposals with more comprehensive policies, such as pricing carbon or mandating clean electricity use, that Democrats say are needed to avert the worst consequences of climate change.

Members did not drill down into detailed policy discussion at the climate summit, but Westerman promised future legislative action.

“This is not just something Republicans are going to give lip service to,” he said.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Rickards: The Great Reset Is Here

FRIDAY, FEB 26, 2021 - 6:30
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning, [Gold and Silver]

The Bretton Woods conference of 1944 set the global financial system that still prevails today.

The period 1969-1971 can be regarded as the First Reset, which involved the creation of Special Drawing Rights (SDR, ticker:XDR), the devaluation of the dollar and the end of the gold standard.

For years, commentators (myself included) have discussed the next global monetary realignment, which is sometimes called The Big Reset or The Great Reset.

Now, it looks like the long-expected Great Reset is finally here.

Details vary depending on the source, but the basic idea is that the current global monetary system centered around the dollar is inherently unstable and needs to be reformed.

Part of the problem is due to a process called Triffin’s Dilemma, named after economist Robert Triffin. Triffin said that the issuer of a dominant reserve currency had to run trade deficits so that the rest of the world could have enough of the currency to buy goods from the issuer and expand world trade.

But, if you ran deficits long enough, you would eventually go broke. This was said about the dollar in the early 1960s.

In 1969, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) created the SDR, possibly to serve as a source of liquidity and alternative to the dollar.

In 1971, the dollar did devalue relative to gold and other major currencies. SDRs were issued by the IMF from 1970 to 1981. None were issued after 1981 until 2009 during the global financial crisis.

“Testing the Plumbing”

The 2009 issuance was a case of the IMF “testing the plumbing” of the system to make sure it worked properly. Because zero SDRs were issued from 1981–2009, the IMF wanted to rehearse the governance, computational, and legal processes for issuing SDRs.

The purpose was partly to alleviate liquidity concerns at the time, but it was also to make sure the system works, in case a large new issuance was needed on short notice. The 2009 experiment showed the system worked fine.

Since 2009, the IMF has proceeded in slow steps to create a platform for massive new issuances of SDRs and the creation of a deep liquid pool of SDR-denominated assets.

On January 7, 2011, the IMF issued a master plan for replacing the dollar with SDRs.

This included the creation of an SDR bond market, SDR dealers, and ancillary facilities such as repos, derivatives, settlement and clearance channels, and the entire apparatus of a liquid bond market.

A liquid bond market is critical. U.S. Treasury bonds are among the world’s most liquid securities, which makes the dollar a legitimate reserve currency.

The IMF study recommended that the SDR bond market replicate the infrastructure of the U.S. Treasury market, with hedging, financing, settlement and clearance mechanisms substantially similar to those used to support trading in Treasury securities today.

China Gets a Seat at the Monetary Table

In July 2016, the IMF issued a paper calling for the creation of a private SDR bond market. These bonds are called “M-SDRs” (for market SDRs), in contrast to “O-SDRs” (for official SDRs).

In August 2016, the World Bank announced that it would issue SDR-denominated bonds to private purchasers. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the largest bank in China, will be the lead underwriter on the deal.

In September 2016, the IMF included the Chinese yuan in the SDR basket, giving China a seat at the monetary table.

So, the framework has been created to expand the SDR’s scope.

The SDR can be issued in abundance to IMF members and used in the future for a select list of the most important transactions in the world, including balance-of-payments settlements, oil pricing and the financial accounts of the world’s largest corporations, such as Exxon Mobil, Toyota and Royal Dutch Shell.

Now, the IMF is planning to issue $500 billion of new SDRs, although some Democrat senators are lobbying for an issue of $2 trillion SDRs or more.

This would be almost ten times the amount of SDRs issued in 2009 and would go a long way to increasing SDR liquidity and advancing the globalist agenda of eventually having the SDR replace the U.S. dollar as the leading reserve asset.

This proposal closely follows the global elite game plan predicted in chapter 2 of my 2016 book, The Road to Ruin.

Over the next several years, we will see the issuance of SDRs to transnational organizations, such as the U.N. and World Bank, to be spent on climate change infrastructure and other elite pet projects outside the supervision of any democratically elected bodies. I call this the New Blueprint for Worldwide Inflation.

More Than Just SDRs

But there’s more to the Great Reset than the issuance of new SDRs. Here’s another breaking news story that validates the longstanding prediction of a coming reset in the global financial system.

In 1999, the euro replaced the individual currencies of Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy and other major economies in Europe. Today, the number of countries that have joined the euro is up to 19, and more countries are awaiting admission.

The euro is the second largest reserve currency asset after the U.S. dollar. The creation of the euro can be thought of as a stepping stone from national currencies to a single world currency.
Now, the euro (along with the Chinese yuan) is moving quickly to become a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). A CBDC combines a traditional currency with the blockchain technology of a cryptocurrency.

It’s an important move in the direction of eliminating cash and forcing users into a 100% digital system using credit cards, debit cards, and smartphone apps.

Why are China and Europe so focused on eliminating cash?

Use It or Lose It

I’ve said all along that you cannot put negative interest rates on consumers until you eliminate cash. Otherwise, savers would just withdraw cash from the banks and stuff it in mattresses to avoid the negative rates. Implicitly, the European Central Bank (ECB) seems to agree.

One of the ECB Board members says that negative rates (really confiscation) will be applied as a “penalty” against “hoarding” cash. In plain English, that means they will create digital money, force you to spend it, and if you don’t spend it, they will take it away as a “negative rate.”

Now all of the pieces of the global elite plan are converging.

The IMF SDR issuance will reliquify global central banks that cannot print dollars. Then CBDCs will be used to eliminate cash.

Once the cattle (that’s us) have been herded into the digital slaughterhouse, we will be told to “use it or lose it” when it comes to our own money. In other words, either we spend the money, or the government will take it away.

Of course, the spending can be channeled into politically correct causes by excluding unpopular vendors such as gun dealers or conservative social media platforms from the payment system. This represents total domination of human behavior through world money + digital currencies + confiscation.

This is not speculation anymore; it’s happening in front of our eyes. The Great Reset is coming fast. The future is here.

The only solution is to use a non-digital, non-bank store of wealth that cannot be traced or manipulated. Given the planned dollar devaluation, it’s one more reason to own physical gold and silver.

Get it while you still can.

 

[marsh]

Great Reset: WEF Hails 'Quieter' Lockdown Cities as Businesses Collapse

The World Economic Forum deleted a post on social media which praised coronavirus lockdowns for "quietly improving cities around the world".

www.breitbart.com

Great Reset: World Economic Forum Hails ‘Quieter’ Cities as Businesses Collapse During Lockdown
149

Getty Images/Getty Images for Greentech Festival
KURT ZINDULKA27 Feb 2021186

The World Economic Forum (WEF) faced a barrage of criticism before deleting a social media video which praised coronavirus lockdowns for “quietly improving cities around the world”.

In the video, the WEF said that as a result of people using less public transport and factories closing down during the lockdown, noise and air pollution fell in cities throughout the world.

The video also celebrated the ability of scientists to discover earthquakes due to the low level of seismic noise on the planet as populations were locked in their homes.

The WEF, which the primary body pushing Klaus Schwab’s idea of a so-called ‘Great Reset’ of the global economic order, was widely ridiculed for the post, including by former Brexit Party MEP turned political commentator Martin Daubney, who was among the first to flag the video before it was taken down. Daubney later reposted the video, further exposing the WEF to criticism.

Speaking to Breitbart London, Mr Daubney said: “I’m glad they tweeted this — because it has exposed them for the out of touch crackpots that they are. The WEF sees humanity as a blight, something to be controlled and imprisoned, in order to meet arbitrary climate change targets.

“There’s just one problem, the public won’t play along with their Great Reset nonsense. All of the things the WEF want to stop: work, travel, capitalism, are the things the vast majority of humanity lives for. The WEF have exposed themselves as ridiculously out of touch with the everyday man and woman. Sheltered in their ivory towers, they treat the rest of us with absolute seething contempt.”

Mr Daubney went on to say that the WEF should be kept well away from being able to “pull the levers of power in any country around the world.”

“The WEF would rather we were imprisoned and carbon-neutral, and that is a grisly future that no sane human should want any part of,” he added.

This is the tweet the @wef deleted, saying “lockdowns are quietly improving cities”
Lockdowns have destroyed cities, lives & economies. Yet climate change zealots see them as tools of control

These unelected cranks must NEVER be allowed near policy
pic.twitter.com/NKtqQbjUXm
— Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) February 27, 2021

Following the social media backlash, the World Economic Forum deleted the video from their account, and attempted to walk back the sentiments expressed in the slickly-produced film, writing: “We’re deleting this tweet. Lockdowns aren’t ‘quietly improving cities’ around the world.

But they are an important part of the public health response to COVID-19.”

Commenting on the WEF deleting the video, Mr Daubney said that the fact that the Davos-based NGO didn’t see the backlash coming “proves how divorced from reality they are. They have no understanding of the everyday workings of the general public,” who he said “just want to work, prosper and enjoy life.”

“This moment has been a rude awakening for the WEF, having, at last, popped its head out of its echo chamber. Yesterday they were telling us to have our COVID-passports ready before we leave our bunkers. Now they are telling us we had better not pollute once we leave!”.

Brexit’s Daubney also noted how Schwab wasn’t the only dubious character given a shot in the arm by the pandemic. The reemergence of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the pandemic has seen his globalist charity, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, partnering with the WEF to develop an international vaccine passport.

“Tony Blair has gone from being a war criminal to pulling the strings behind the UK’s COVID passport rollout. He’s absolutely in bed with the WEF and we are increasingly seeing them as a cabal of out of touch millionaires who have literally no idea how ordinary people think and live,” Daubney said.

'The Great Reset' is upon us. French President Macron declared that in the wake of the Chinese coronavirus modern capitalism "can no longer work" at the Davos summit. Davos Great Reset: Macron Says Modern Capitalism ‘No Longer Works’
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 29, 2021

The World Economic Forum has long expressed its intentions to dismantle the modern capitalist system, arguing for the adoption of more socialist-style policies such as wealth taxes, onerous regulations on businesses, and taxpayer-subsidised Green New Deal-style projects.
In a 2016 video, the WEF predicted a ‘happy’ future in which individuals no longer owned property.

“Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, ‘our city’. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes,” the WEF projected.

In June of last year, Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum said that the Chinese coronavirus was an opportunity for global governments to introduce a “Great Reset of capitalism“, saying that the “world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies.”

Delingpole: ‘Trussst Usss! We’re Not Evil’ Claims Davos WEF Great Reset Promo Video Delingpole: 'Trussst Us! We're Not Evil' Claims Davos Great Reset Vid
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 27, 2021

 

[marsh]

World Economic Forum Deletes Latest Video After Cheering Global Lockdowns that Pushed 100 Million Humans into Extreme Poverty | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

The World Economic Forum (WEF) led by Klaus Schwab tweeted out a video on Friday celebrating global lockdowns.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

World Economic Forum Deletes Latest Video After Cheering Global Lockdowns that Pushed 100 Million Humans into Extreme Poverty

By Jim Hoft
Published February 27, 2021 at 7:30am

The World Economic Forum (WEF) led by Klaus Schwab tweeted out a video on Friday celebrating global lockdowns.

Schwab and the WEF cheered the empty streets insisting the global pandemic lockdowns were “quietly improving cities around the world.” The video highlighted deserted streets, empty factories and grounded planes. Evidently, the WEF has no concerns for the world’s poorest citizens who suffered greatly under the Fauci lockdowns for a virus that targeted 80-year-olds.
The Fauci global lockdowns will plunge 100 million into extreme poverty.

Klaus Schwab also made clear lockdowns are a wonderful option for fighting global warming. Look for the globalists to push lockdowns in the future for their nefarious agenda.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1365630031427428352

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1365630031427428352
.56 min

 

[marsh]

INSANITY: Crazy Biden Green Czar Pushes for More Chinese Wind Turbines After They Freeze Up During Historic Texas Cold Snap | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

A historic winter storm and cold blast caused chaos in Texas last week.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

INSANITY: Crazy Biden Green Czar Pushes for More Chinese Wind Turbines After They Freeze Up During Historic Texas Cold Snap

By Jim Hoft
Published February 27, 2021 at 9:39am

A historic winter storm and cold blast caused chaos in Texas last week.

Power outages were initiated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas early on Monday morning and lasted for days. This meant hundreds of thousands of Texans are without electricity for short periods of time. Temperatures fell into the teens near Dallas and 20s around Houston.

According to reports nearly half of the wind energy is down in West Texas after the turbines froze.

A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossils fuels during an ice storm is awesome. pic.twitter.com/3HInc2qKb9
— Luke Legate (@lukelegate) February 15, 2021

Seven days later the data shows that wind-power was the chief cause of the massive power outage.

Via Zero Hedge:

With the worst of the Texas power crisis now behind us, the blame and fingerpointing begins, and while the jury is still out whose actions (or lack thereof) may have led to the deadly and widespread blackouts that shocked Texas this week, Cascend Strategy writes that “in case there was any doubt why the Texas grid collapsed, the data is clear”

• Wind failed as “Ice storms knocked out nearly half the wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a massive deep freeze across the state locked up wind turbine generators, creating an electricity generation crisis.”
• Natural gas made up the difference for a while
• But then everything else followed down

Oil and natural gas producer Texas could not keep up with the power needed last week because their Chinese wind turbines froze up in the cold.

So what lesson did the crazy left learn about the record freeze last week?
We need more frozen wind turbines!

Green Czar Gina McCarthy says we need more green energy.
You really can’t make this stuff up!

Gina McCarthy
Via the AP.

The deadly winter storm that caused widespread power outages in Texas and other states is a “wake-up call” for the United States to build energy systems and other infrastructure that are more reliable and resilient in the face of extreme-weather events linked to climate change, President Joe Biden’s national climate adviser says

In an interview with The Associated Press, Gina McCarthy said Friday that the storm that devastated Texas and other states “is not going to be as unusual as people had hoped. It is going to happen, and we need to be as resilient and working together as much as possible. We need systems of energy that are reliable and resilient as well.”

McCarthy said the scientific evidence is clear that more frequent and more dangerous storms are likely, “and if we really care about keeping our people working and keeping our kids healthy and giving them a future we’re proud of, then we’re not going to ignore these wake-up calls. We’re going to take action.”

McCarthy’s comments came as Biden and his wife Jill were in Texas to survey damage caused by the storm, which caused millions of homes and business to lose heat and running water. At least 40 people in the state died.

“We need to envision a future and an optimistic way of giving people hope again — that we are building back better,” she said, using Biden’s slogan for a plan costing at least $2 trillion to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and create clean-energy jobs.

“It is a catchy phrase, but it also is a kind of optimistic rallying cry and I think we ought to heed it,″ McCarthy said.

These idiots are making decisions that affect our daily lives.
It truly is frightening!

That’s why we cannot allow future elections to be stolen.

 

[vestige]

We can't allow the past election to be stolen

Those loony bastards need to go

 

[marsh]

[COMMENT: I remember watching stories about people escaping East Germany.]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhCXtjgTdAM
2:35 min
Why Is Freedom Worth Risking Your Life?
•Feb 10, 2021


The Why Minutes

If you were offered free food, free healthcare, a free apartment, and a guaranteed job, would you give up your liberty?

__________________________

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8BojR2BEt8
9:27 min
Life behind the Berlin Wall | The Economist
•Nov 6, 2009


The Economist

Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker discusses 40 years spent chronicling life in strange, sad, vicious and sometimes hilarious East Berlin. Added to www.audiovideo.economist.com in November 2009

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

"Socialism On A Global Scale": Sky News Host Demolishes Davos Elites And 'Great Reset' Scheme

SUNDAY, FEB 28, 2021 - 13:00
Sky News Australia host Cory Bernardi has just taken a flamethrower to the global elite, telling us we need to be mindful "of any organization with the term "world" in their name" in a monologue which would never see the light of day in most Western nations.



After flaying the World Health Organization (WHO) for 'giving China a free pass on the Wuhan Flu,' while banking $500 million on pandemic bonds, Bernardi demolishes the World Food Program, the World Meteorological Organization, the World Tourism Organization, and the World Trade Organization - for lies, misinformation and climate-related pretzel logic to justify policy.

"All these authorities are pushing an agenda - it's the same agenda, to decarbonize, deindustrialize, and disempower the Western world. They are part of a concerted plan to redesign capitalism in a new image," Bernardi says, adding: "That image of course is socialism."

Spearheading this effort is the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland.

"The WEF is the architect of the Great Reset, and the fourth industrial revolution. They coined the "build back better" hashtag, that is actually proving so popular with big government elites right across the globe," says Bernardi. "Under the WEF vision, the Davos attendees will own what you'll be renting. And trust me on this, it's not gonna be a philanthropic enterprise."

"By reducing you to a mere user rather than an owner, the world does actually become more equal, because it will concentrate power, authority and money in the hands of a tiny few, while the rest of us become mere economic vassals for these oligarchs."
Watch:

Full transcript below (emphasis ours):

There are certain warning signs that we all need to be mindful of. You know, it's like when someone appears in your life and says 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.' Well, another warning sign is any organization with the term "world" in their name. So let's start with a couple. Perhaps the World Health Organization to kick it off.

That's the body that gave China a free pass on the Wuhan Flu, while at the same time banking $500 million through issuing pandemic bonds. That's right, the World Health Organization was scheduled to repay investors around $500 million in early 2020, unless of course, a pandemic was declared. The investors lost all their money that became the World Health Organization's gain.

Then of course there's the World Food Program. It too is part of the United Nations and it actually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. Now all that sounds pretty impressive, until you remember that Barack Obama won it in 2008 just for having the right skin color.

And despite spending $8 billion every year on hunger and strengthening resilience against climate change, there are still 850 million undernourished people in the world, and around 780 million obese people. Clearly we need more food socialism.

Then we also have the World Meteorological Organization. It has a crew of 200 and it publishes an annual status of the world climate report, casting horror scenarios about greenhouse gasses, climate change, sea level rise, and sea ice. The 2019 report is a beauty - it essentially says that the Australian bush fires of that year were due to climate change, and makes no mention of the arsonists, or the greens' insistent on terrible land management policies. By the way, according to the WMO, climate change is also responsible for drought, floods, storms and weather-related damage. Now that made me wonder, what caused them before the Industrial Revolution, or before mankind for that matter.

But we're also fortunate enough to have the World Tourism Organization, which has "a one planet vision for responsible tourism." These include the vital buzzwords "social inclusion" and "climate action." It even has some pretty cool hashtags;
#responsiblerecover and #buildbackbetter. And it boasts that by shutting down the world economy this past year, it reduced carbon dioxide emissions by a whopping eight percent. That means there's only 92% to go before we're back to living in caves! But saving the planet while we do it.

And of course we shouldn't forget the World Trade Organization, with lofty goals espousing free trade. Its real mission seems not to be holding China to the same integrity requirements as the rest of the world when it comes to intellectual property protection, trade tariffs and barriers, etc. Thank goodness it has the goal to reduce inequality, which is socialist speak for "taking from the productive and giving to the non-productive." Someone needs to tell them about history. It shows it never works.

But, for those that are unable to sustain the rigor of the real world, there is always a refuge in the World Vegetable Center. That's right, a world vegetable center. This esteemed body devoted 20 years to researching the sweet potato before giving it away because the costs of doing that research were too high. It now focuses on "looking to the wild relatives of domesticated crops to save the human diet from climate change."

Wowee, if only we never cultivated crops the world would be better off, and the climate wouldn't be changing!

Hey but, what about those hungry people I mentioned earlier? Wouldn't they be even hungrier?

Well, all these authorities are pushing an agenda - it's the same agenda, to decarbonize, deindustrialize, and disempower the Western world. They are part of a concerted plan to redesign capitalism in a new image. That image of course is socialism. And it's spearheaded by the grand daddy organization of them all - the World Economic Forum.

The WEF is the architect of the Great Reset, and the fourth industrial revolution. They coined the "build back better" hashtag, that is actually proving so popular with big government elites right across the globe. And they even predict that by 2030, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. They call this 'servitization,' which is a term and an agenda that looks a lot like servitude to me. The WEF claim that this servitude - I'm sorry, I mean 'servitization' will save the planet, and assist the post-COVID-19 recovery.

However, servitization begs the question; if you don't actually own anything, who will own what you're renting? Well the answer lies within the WEF premiere forum - that's at Davos.

Davos is the gathering of global elites including big business CEOs, industry chiefs, government leaders, bureaucrats, and multi-billionaires with political agendas. Under the WEF vision, the Davos attendees will own what you'll be renting. And trust me on this, it's not gonna be a philanthropic enterprise. They'll all be looking to make more money than they currently do, and actually to take more control of your life under the guise of equality. By reducing you to a mere user rather than an owner, the world does actually become more equal, because it will concentrate power, authority and money in the hands of a tiny few, while the rest of us become mere economic vassals for these oligarchs.

So make no mistake - servitization is just a new name for economic slavery. It's socialism on a global scale.

 

[marsh]

Macron’s ‘direct democracy’ to be tested as citizens’ panel on climate wraps up

A citizens’ council on climate met for the last time over the weekend to finalise proposals on climate change laws aimed at rapidly transitioning to a greener economy and enshrining the fight for climate…

www.france24.com

Macron’s ‘direct democracy’ to be tested as citizens’ panel on climate wraps up

Issued on: 01/03/2021 - 08:15

French President Emmanuel Macron at a meeting of the Citizens' Convention on Climate in Paris on December, 14, 2020. © Thibault Camus, Pool/AFP

A citizens’ council on climate met for the last time over the weekend to finalise proposals on climate change laws aimed at rapidly transitioning to a greener economy and enshrining the fight for climate change in the French constitution. While some view President Emmanuel Macron’s citizens' panel as a welcome precedent and a model for more direct democracy, others say it has been fraught with disappointment and frustration.

After nine months of research and rigorous debate, some acrimonious, the Citizens’ Council on Climate (CCC) met virtually for a three-day conference starting Friday to prepare its final submission to the French government on how to cut carbon emissions.

Macron first formed the CCC to advise on climate reforms at the tail end of the “Yellow Vest” crisis in 2019 in response to demands for greater “direct democracy”. The randomly selected group of 150 French citizens, or the “150” as they came to be called, were tasked with finding ways of rapidly shifting France towards a greener economy. Its mission in a nutshell: to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent (compared to 1990 levels) by 2030.

Two of the key recommendations are a prohibition against “ecocide” and the inscribing of the fight against global warming in the French constitution. The 150 – who examined reforms across six major areas including consumption, production, work, travel, housing food and governance – had presented 149 proposals by October last year. Only three were rejected.

The measures have been included in two draft laws, the “Climate and Resilience” bill and a separate constitutional bill. Some of the citizens’ recommendations include a ban on advertising fossil fuels, restrictions on short-haul domestic plane travel if other transport is available, and bans on nitrogen and other polluting fertilisers used in farming. While the draft laws are due to be debated by MPs and government ministers in the National Assembly at the end of March, many of the citizens who met for the last of a three-day video conference on Sunday have already expressed some frustration and disappointment.

One citizen named Benoît told the regional daily Ouest France that he didn’t expect the measures put forward by the citizens’ council would ultimately carry much weight with the government.

His view is shared by environmental groups and other citizens of the council who have pointed the finger at steps taken to discard some earlier measures and water down others.

The High Council for Climate, an independent body, on February 23 criticised the recovery plan, green energy changes to buildings and other parts of the climate legislation that it said were lacking in ambition and the scope necessary to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Promises not kept?

Cyril Dion, a French film director, actor, writer and environmentalist who had originally been appointed by Macron to help oversee the citizens’ group, launched a scathing public attack against the president, accusing him of breaking his promise to accept proposals “without filtering” or amending them.

He launched an online petition late in 2019 to “save the convention” that garnered over 350,000 signatures in two weeks and wrote an open letter to French daily Le Monde to remind the president of his promises.

“For this democratic initiative to work, it is essential that you commit to taking up the proposals resulting from the citizens' deliberation ‘as is’ and submit them to the French people or to the MPs ... For years, politicians organised ‘participatory democracy’ that was a sham. Citizens are consulted and then elected officials very often do nothing. Experts are appointed, work hard ... and then their recommendations are ignored, unraveled, weakened,” he wrote.

Macron shot back in an interview with the French online media outlet Brut, saying “these are not issues on which we can say, ‘Take it or leave it’ – that’s wrong”. He added that the state should not consider the climate proposals of 150 citizens to be inviolate like "the Bible or the Koran”.

Some say Dion’s criticism was warranted. According to Hélène Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale University and author of the book “Open Democracy: Reinventing popular rule for the 21st century”, the president “promised too much when he talked about sending the proposals of the citizens ‘without filtering’" directly to a referendum or parliamentary debate.

It has also given Macron’s political rivals ample ammunition. European parliament member François-Xavier Bellamy of the right-wing Les Républicains party said the president was taking a “populist turn” with the CCC and said it lacked any legitimacy.

“Has representative democracy become so discredited that we now think that 150 randomly picked people working in a closed room are enough to produce propositions that truly resemble what the French people want?” he asked during an interview on Sud Radio in June 2019. “I don’t think so,” he added.

In embracing citizens’ panels, Macron has gone where previous presidents have feared to tread. He is arguably the first French leader to entrust French citizens with the serious business of policy-making – and on an issue as contentious and significant as climate change.

Unlike other citizen panels

Armel Le Coz – co-founder of Démocratie Ouverte, a French NGO that designed the protocols for the CCC – says the concept for the council was to “try to imagine a new form of deliberative democracy”.

“The citizens’ convention on climate is very different to other citizens’ panels,” Le Coz explained. “Firstly, it was overseen directly by the president. Secondly, while past governments have called for citizen participation on issues such as Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), nuclear waste and vaccines, these initiatives were purely consultative and were always led by ministries or other government institutions.”

He said the CCC has demonstrated that French citizens from diverse backgrounds “are capable of articulating ambitious and realistic proposals on a complex subject with high stakes for society”. In the future, he sees citizens’ conventions becoming an everyday function of French institutions with the power to trigger referenda and legislative proposals.

And while he acknowledged some participants found fault with the process, he attributed their grievances to the fact that the CCC is chartering new political territory.

Landemore agrees that Macron took a “political risk” but says he was probably convinced of the merits of going ahead with the landmark citizens convention following the success of the country’s Great National Debate, which was launched in response to the Yellow Vest protests and included 21 citizen advisory groups.

Though the president has managed to steer the government towards an ecological course, Landemore sees challenges posed by an institutional culture with a lack of appetite for radical shifts in policy.

“The problem I see is that it’s one thing to have the discourse and ambitions, another to have the proper institutional culture to deliver. Whatever Macron’s own sincerity, there are too many people dragging their feet, rolling their eyes and pushing a different agenda."

While it is unlikely that the draft bill’s emissions reduction target will be reached, Landemore believes the CCC’s legacy “will be much wider and long-lasting than today’s disappointing mood suggests”.

“We’re in the early stages of experimentation with citizens’ assemblies," she noted. "I understand the disillusionment of some in the CCC right now but it is not a complete failure either – they fulfilled their mandate and delivered a coherent set of proposals."
The real test, she says, will be whether it succeeds in getting a referendum on adding a preamble to the constitution.

"Now that would be a symbolically important victory.”

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

The Great Reset, Part V: Woke Ideology

SUNDAY, FEB 28, 2021 - 23:25
Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,
Read Part I: Reduced Expectations And Bio-Techno-Feudalism here...
Read Part II: Corporate Socialism here...
Read Part III: Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics here...
Read Part IV: "Stakeholder Capitalism" Vs. "Noeliberalism" here...

In previous articles, I’ve discussed the Great Reset and introduced several ways of understanding the economics of it. The Great Reset can be thought of as neofeudalism, as “corporate socialism,” as “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” and in terms of “stakeholder capitalism” versus “neoliberalism.” In future installments, I intend to treat the technological (transhumanist) and monetary (centralized banking and digital currency) aspects that Klaus Schwab and others anticipate and prescribe.

But in this essay, I wish to consider the ideological aspect of the Great Reset. Just how do the planners mean to establish the reset ideologically? That is, how would a reset of the mass mind come to pass that would allow for the many elements of the Great Reset to be put into place—without mass rebellion, that is? After all, if the Great Reset is to take hold, some degree of conformity on the part of the population will be necessary—despite the enhanced, extended, and more precise control over the population that transhumanist technology and a centralized digital currency would afford.

This is the function of ideology. Ideology, as the Marxist historian of science Richard Lewontin has argued, works “by convincing people that the society in which they live is just and fair, or if not just and fair then inevitable, and that it is quite useless to resort to violence.” Ideology establishes the “social legitimation” that Lewontin sees as necessary for gaining the assent of the ruled. “The battleground is in people's heads, and if the battle is won on that ground then the peace and tranquility of society are guaranteed.” Ideology on this account is not the same as world view. It is rather the mental programming necessary for domination and control short of the use of force. Ideological indoctrination is easier, less messy, and less expensive than state and state-supported violence.

Some may argue that the ideology of the Great Reset is simply socialist-communist ideology.

After all, in many respects, socialist-communist ideology supports what the Great Reset promises to deliver. And this may work for some. There are those who would welcome, on socialist grounds, the “fairness,” “equality,” or “equity” that the Great Reset promises. Socialists might overlook or excuse the oligarchical control of society on the basis of the supposed fairness, equality, or equity among the mass of the population, and on the presumption that the oligarchy will be overthrown in the not-so-distant future. Socialism embeds a levelling predisposition that puts a premium on “equality” among the visible majority, even when that equality comes as a great loss for many otherwise “middle-class” subjects. In fact, when I briefly entertained the rantings of members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, including its leader, Bob Avakian, they admitted to me that worldwide socialism would mean reduced standards of living for much of the world, especially in the United States. They had no problem with this; in fact, they seemed to relish the prospect. No doubt, as Friedrich Nietzsche suggested, socialism is fueled, at least in part, by ressentiment—by resentment and envy for the property owner. Much could be said about socialists’ apparent approval, or at least conditional and temporary acceptance, of big monopolistic oligarchical corporatists and their preference for big business over small. Socialists see monopolization under capitalism as inevitable, as necessary for producing a more consolidated target to be overthrown, and as a sign of the imminent collapse of capitalism and the coming socialist-communist apocalypse.

Likewise, many socialists will be amenable to the Great Reset on principle—especially those who accept its rhetoric at face value. But for all its newfound popularity, socialism-communism still doesn’t represent the majority. While popular among Millennials and other millennialists, socialism-communism remains unsavory for many.

It is regarded as alien, obscure, and loosely connotes something negative.

But more importantly, for reasons that I’ll give below, socialist-communist ideology is not the ideology that best fits the goals of the Great Reset. This is where wokeness comes in.

What exactly is wokeness? As I write in Beyond Woke,

According to the social justice creed, being “woke” is the political awakening that stems from the emergence of consciousness and conscientiousness regarding social and political injustice. Wokeness is the indelible inscription of the awareness of social injustice on the conscious mind, eliciting the sting of conscience, which compels the newly woke to change their beliefs and behaviors.

This is as close to a definition of wokeness as I can manage, gleaning it as I have from the assertions of those who embrace it. Of course, the etymology of the word “woke,” and how it became an adjective describing those who are thus awakened into consciousness of social and political injustice, is another matter. I discuss the etymology in Google Archipelago:

“Woke” began in English as a past tense and past participle of “wake.” It suggested “having become awake.” But, by the 1960s, woke began to function as an adjective as well, gaining the figurative meaning in the African American community of “well-informed” or “up-to-date.” By 1972, the once modest verbal past tense began to describe an elevated political consciousness. In 2017, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) recognized the social-conscious awareness of woke and added the definition: “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.”

Yet there are as many definitions of wokeness as people who’ve heard of it, as is the case with most anything the least bit controversial. I’m sure that others can and will add to the definition or suggest that wokeness should be defined altogether differently. But the above definition and historical-semantical renderings are sufficient for our purposes. According to adherents, then, wokeness is enhanced awareness of social and political injustice and the determination to eradicate it.

But what could wokeness have to do with the Great Reset? As a corrective, wokeness is not aimed at the sufferers whose complaints, or imagined complaints, it means to redress.

Wokeness works on the majority, the supposed beneficiaries of injustice. It does so by making the majority understand that it has benefited from “privilege” and preference—based on skin color (whiteness), gender (patriarchy), sexual proclivity (heteronormativity), birthplace (colonialism, imperialism, and first worldism), gender identity (cis gender privilege), and the domination of nature (speciesism)—to name some of the major culprits. The list could go on and is emended, seemingly by the day. This majority must be rehabilitated, as it were. The masses must understand that they have gained whatever advantages they have hitherto enjoyed on the basis of the unfair treatment of others, either directly or indirectly, and this unfair treatment is predicated on the circumstances of birth. The “privilege” of the majority has come at the expense of those minorities designated as the beneficiaries of wokeness, and wokeness is the means for rectifying these many injustices.

And what are the effects of being repeatedly reprimanded as such, of being told that one has been the beneficiary of unmerited “privilege,” that one’s relative wealth and well-being have come at the expense of oppressed, marginalized, and misused Others? Shame, guilt, remorse, unworthiness. And what are the expected attitudinal and behavioral adjustments to be taken by the majority? They are to expect less. Under woke ideology, one will be expected to forfeit one’s rights, because even these rights, nay, especially these rights, have come at the expense of others.

Thus, wokeness works by habituating the majority to the reduced expectations that I introduced in my first installment on the Great Reset. It does this by instilling a belief in the unworthiness of the majority to thrive, prosper, and enjoy their lives. Wokeness indoctrinates the majority into the propertyless future (for them, at least) of the Great Reset, while gratifying the Left, its main ideological propagators, with a sense of moral superiority, even as they too are scheduled to become bereft of prospects.

One question remains. Why is wokeness more suited to the objectives of the Great Reset than socialist-communist ideology? To answer this question, we must recall the selling points of socialism-communism. Despite the levelling down that I mentioned above, socialism-communism is promissory. It promises benefits, not deficits. It does not operate by promising the majority that they will lose upon its establishment. Quite to the contrary, socialism-communism promises vastly improved conditions—yes, fairness, equality, or equity but also prosperity for the mass of humanity, prosperity that has been denied it under capitalism. The workers of the world are called to unite, not under the prospect of reduced expectations, but on the basis of great expectations—not, according to Marx, to establish utopia, but at least to destroy and replace the current dystopia with a shared cornucopia. We know, of course, how this promise is kept. But it is nevertheless still proffered and believed by all too many in our midst.

We have seen, on the other hand, the subtractive character of woke ideology. Wokeness demands the forfeiture of advantages on moral grounds. Unlike socialism-communism, it does not offer empowerment or advocate the takeover of the means of production and the state by political means. Wokeness is a form of recrimination that compels the abdication, not the acquisition, of goods.

Woke ideology, I contend, has tilled the soil and planted the seeds for the harvest that the Great Reset represents to the ruling elite. Was wokeness intentionally crafted for this purpose? I don’t think so, but it nevertheless can and is being adopted for these ends, just as other ideological formations have been used for other ends. The ruling elite appropriates the available means at its disposal to effect its plans, including available ideologies. Woke ideology was available and ready for appropriation and application. Wokeness serves the Great Reset best, and thus we see the language of wokeness in the books and other literature devoted to its establishment: fairness, inclusion, etc.

Naturally, wokeness will not work on everyone. But the demand has been made so universal that unapologetic, noncompliant dissenters are figured as regressive, reactionary, racist, white supremacist, and more, and are dismissed, if not punished, on those grounds. Wokeness has thus attained dominance. Countering it will be a major requirement for challenging the Great Reset.

 

[marsh]

Warren Introduces Wealth Tax for Biden's 'Build Back Better' Agenda

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), along with Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Brendan Boyle (D-PA), unveiled a wealth tax proposal on Monday.

www.breitbart.com

Elizabeth Warren Introduces Wealth Tax to Bolster Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Agenda

30

Drew Angerer/Getty Images
HANNAH BLEAU1 Mar 2021230

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), along with Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Brendan Boyle (D-PA), unveiled a wealth tax proposal on Monday, which imposes a two percent tax on the net value of assets for the wealthiest people in America.

The bill, dubbed the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2021,” is a continuation of the vision Warren laid out during her time on the presidential campaign trail, where she vigorously pitched a “two-cent” wealth tax as a means to achieve greater equality in the country.

Warren’s most recent proposal would impose a two percent tax on the net value of all taxable assets over $50 million after debts are subtracted. The tax is increased to three percent for net assets above $1 billion.

Assets are defined as “the value of all property of the taxpayer (other than property excluded under subsection (b)), real or personal, tangible or intangible, wherever situated, reduced by any debts (including any debts secured by property excluded under subsection (b)) owed by the taxpayer.”

The tax, Warren said, is “critical for raising revenue, and that revenue is critical for raising opportunity.”

“We build a future for all of our kids by investing in opportunity,” Warren said, contending that the “small tax” would generate “at least $3 trillion” to help promote President Biden’s agenda:




The proposal follows Congress passing the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief proposal last week in the dead of the night. No Republicans voted for it, and only two Democrats, Reps. Kurt Schrader (OR) and Jared Golden (ME), voted against it.

Several Republican lawmakers spoke to Breitbart News during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, and slammed the bill, noting the amount of waste in the measure. It allots millions for museums, climate justice, and “family planning” organizations such as Planned Parenthood.

Warren is a millionaire with a net worth of over $12 million and has received donations from at least 30 billionaires during her career.

 

[marsh]

Biden Increases the Cost of Carbon, Setting the Stage for Drastic Climate Rules

For four long years, Democrats were out of power. It must have seemed like an eternity given the frenetic activity they've been engaged in since January 20.

pjmedia.com

Biden Increases the Cost of Carbon, Setting the Stage for Drastic Climate Rules

BY RICK MORAN FEB 28, 2021 2:55 PM ET

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
For four long years, Democrats were out of power. It must have seemed like an eternity to them, given the frenetic activity they’ve been engaged in since January 20.

Like a starving man walking into a banquet room full of food, Democrats can’t seem to decide what to eat first. So, they’re trying to eat everything at once.

The next three months will see an unbelievable amount of cash getting shoveled out the door in Washington. Two trillion for pandemic relief, another 2 trillion for a massive infrastructure bill, an attempt to reinvent Obamacare, an immigration bill, student loan debt — and they’ll just be getting started.

Indeed, it’s not just the president and his Congress who will be busy. The green geeks at the Environmental Protection Agency have had 4 years to watch the planet heat up and sizzle.

That’s got to eat at them. They have so much pent-up energy, we should probably figure out a way to tap into it and run Los Angeles or New York for a couple of days.

The EPA is about to become very, very busy.

Politico:

President Joe Biden on Friday restored an Obama-era calculation on the economic cost of greenhouse gases, a step that will make it easier for his agencies to approve aggressive actions to confront climate change.

But the administration stopped short, for now, of boosting the cost figure to higher levels that economists and climate scientists say are justified by new research.

The interim figure — $51 for every ton of carbon released into the atmosphere — is well above the $8 cost used under former President Donald Trump, who declined to factor the global impacts of climate pollution into his calculation. It’s on par with a price based on analyses undertaken between 2010 and 2016 under former President Barack Obama, whose administration was first to calculate the figure known as the social cost of carbon.

People who hate capitalism are calculating how much the capitalists have to pay for “polluting” the planet with CO2? I smell a rat. A slimy, green, rat.

I confess to not having any expertise when it comes to calculations like this. I’m sure Biden’s green-eyeshade guys could trot out their charts, and graphs, and calculations showing us all exactly what they are basing their estimate of $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions on.

There is probably no silliness like factoring in racism and oppression or gender inequities into the cost of CO2. So we have to take Biden at his word that his staff really thunk this through.

The social cost of carbon is an effort to quantify the economic and societal damage from greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades. The figure will be baked into the administration’s number-crunching on the costs and benefits of a wide array of regulations.

Friday’s notice, posted on the Office of Management and Budget website, fulfills a promise Biden made on Inauguration Day when he signed an executive order on climate change that called for a recalculation of the social cost of carbon, which the Trump administration had sharply reduced.

The “social cost” of carbon? Maybe I spoke too soon about the silliness.

“This is to be celebrated for getting the social cost of carbon out from being a political football, which is what Trump did, but it’s Step One. Step Two is restore a transparent process and to return the social cost of carbon to the frontier of climate science and economics,” said Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist.

When you’re talking about other people’s money, being at the “frontier of climate science and economics” is so easy. There’s no need to be careful or even realistic in your estimates. You’re on the “frontier.” There’s no time to be cautious. The earth is in danger and only the ministrations of the high priests of climate can save us.

Using carbon as a whipping boy for our climate problems is more political than scientific. But that’s what climate change advocacy has degenerated into and it will continue to grind us down until they get their way.