GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden Advisers Link Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants With ‘Environmental Justice’

Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / May 21, 2021
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President Joe Biden has made it clear that "environmental justice is a top priority," Council on Environmental Quality Chairwoman Brenda Mallory says. Pictured: Mallory, then chairwoman-designate, prepares to speak Dec. 19 at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Delaware. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)

An advisory panel to President Joe Biden is trying to marry the issue of amnesty for illegal immigrants with what it calls “environmental justice,” the federal effort to confront climate change.

The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council last week released a report with about 90 pages of recommendations, including adopting the language of the left’s Green New Deal and opposing nuclear energy.

But the panel also made recommendations that seem to have at best a tenuous relationship to the environment, tying policies already supported by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to environmental protection.

“Lack of immigration status fundamentally limits the ability of immigrants to enforce their rights and have access to programs and services that would promote their food, housing, economic security, and improved environmental quality,” the White House environmental justice report states, citing the situation as a “challenge.”

The report goes on to make two recommendations to meet this challenge.

The first: “The [Biden] administration should leverage its discretion and resources to ensure that undocumented individuals and families are not left out or ineligible to benefit from EJ40 investments.”

EJ40 is a reference to the Environmental Justice 40 initiative outlined in Biden’s January executive order creating the Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which called for 40% of environmental spending to benefit “disadvantaged communities.”

The second immigration recommendation states:
Where limitations in servicing undocumented individuals require statutory changes, the administration, at the highest levels, should work aggressively with Congress to secure a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, as well as other improvements to prevent the exclusion of the undocumented from [Environmental] Justice 40 investments, given that they are predominantly BIPOC.
BIPOC is an acronym for black, Indigenous, and people of color.

Biden already has backed an immigration bill to grant legal status to up to 20 million illegal immigrants.

The recommendations in the report are similar to the Green New Deal proposal in Congress, amounting to a grab bag of left-wing proposals, said Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research.

“These proposals do a disservice to the very communities they claim to help,” Pyle told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “I don’t see how communities in this country are going to benefit from amnesty for illegal immigrants.”

The White House did not respond to an inquiry Thursday for this report with respect to immigration.

But previously, White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairwoman Brenda Mallory issued a public statement on the report. Mallory said:
President [Joe] Biden and Vice President [Kamala] Harris have made it clear from their first day in office that environmental justice is a top priority, and that the voices of historically disadvantaged communities will be heard in the White House and throughout their administration.
The Biden administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2022 includes $1.4 billion for “environmental justice” initiatives.

Mallory also said:
I am immensely grateful to the volunteer members of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council for their tireless and swift work to provide the recommendations they are submitting today. I look forward to reviewing these recommendations and to working with my colleagues across the federal government and with Congress to follow through on the president’s commitments to address long-standing environmental injustices, ensure no community gets left behind, and build back better.
Biden administration officials, among them Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy, already have indicated they aren’t likely to consider all of the energy-related suggestions from the report.

The push against nuclear power will be a problem for New Mexico’s economy, said Paul Gessing, president of the Rio Grande Foundation, a free market think tank in New Mexico.

“I would point to the title of the panel, ‘Environmental Justice.’ When you convene something with the word ‘justice’ in it, that becomes the ultimate focus,” Gessing told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “Justice means different things to different people. But once a panel goes down a ‘justice’ rabbit hole, it can create a lot of policies that have nothing to do with the [modifier], in this case environmental.”

As The Daily Signal previously reported, many of the members of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council have radical activist backgrounds and have compared energy development with racism and slavery.

On another front that seemed tenuously related to environmental issues, the council called for expanding Medicaid to more “birthing people” and expanding Medicare for “lifetime access” for “frontline communities.”

“Expand Medicare/Medicaid for lifetime access for individuals from frontline communities directly impacted by environmental racism and injustice (e.g., the Flint Water Crisis),” the report urges.

The other related recommendation says: “Extend Medicaid coverage for a year for ALL mothers and child-birthing people with inclusion of body burden & risk factors associated with climate issues: extreme heat, air pollution, lead-poisoned water, and other environmentally induced health conditions.”

Packaging unrelated matters together is not unusual for Democratic lawmakers, said Pyle, of the Institute for Energy Research.

“It’s not odd if that’s how you govern, through community organizing and trying to enlist groups to direct money to constituencies they think will help them get elected,” Pyle said, adding: “The Green New Deal is just putting a green coat of paint on progressive policies.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden's first 100 days: President kept promises to liberals with aggressive climate actions

by Josh Siegel, Energy and Environment Reporter |
| May 22, 2021 11:55 AM


President Joe Biden has largely delivered on his campaign promise to make curbing climate change a top priority, delighting liberals but irking Republicans who expected a more centrist course given the deal-making profile he cast as a senator.

“Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been about promises made, promises kept. If I am an environmentalist, you have to give him high grades,” said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group and former oil official in the George W. Bush administration.

On his first day in office, Biden started the process of reinserting the United States into the Paris Agreement, undoing a signature move of former President Donald Trump, who exited the global climate pact.

Biden underscored the U.S. return to international climate diplomacy by hosting a global summit event last month in which he unveiled a strengthened pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, a target that, if fulfilled, would require fundamentally transforming the country’s fossil fuel-based economy.

The liberal climate advocacy group Evergreen Action has charted that Biden has already taken “meaningful action” on nearly three-quarters of 46 campaign climate commitments using executive authorities. That includes starting the process of imposing direct regulation of a potent greenhouse gas, methane, from oil and gas operations, pushing major banks and asset managers to invest in clean energy, and boosting procurement of zero-emissions vehicles for the federal government fleet.

“What they have done so far is lay a great foundation, but more work has to be done,” said Becca Ellison, Evergreen’s deputy policy director.

For Biden to achieve his emission targets, experts and advocates say he must pass his $2.3 trillion infrastructure spending package, a legislative proposal that includes massive spending to deploy clean energy, subsidize electric vehicle purchases, and mandate utilities use 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035.

“The American Jobs Plan is essential,” said Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of environmental politics at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Biden’s policy approach so far embraces a new breed of climate industrial policy favored by liberals that links public investment and regulations to job creation, using the federal government as the primary engine to steer the development of new industries, as opposed to market-based mechanisms such as carbon pricing.

He is vowing not just to rebuild roads and bridges but also to spur development of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, energy-efficient homes and buildings, and power grid transmission lines while creating a domestic manufacturing supply chain of components to build them.

“There is a lot of trust buildup that the Biden administration is taking the climate crisis seriously and really sees clean energy as path to job creation and economic recovery,” Stokes said.

But Biden will be challenged to appease the sometimes competing demands of unions and environmentalists, two key political constituencies, as his big ideas get turned into legislation.

Clean energy industry lobby groups worry a greater emphasis on domestic manufacturing and a related focus on unionizing jobs could make renewables more expensive, given a lot of key technologies are imported cheaply from places such as China.

Abigail Hopper, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s president and CEO, recently told the Washington Examiner it isn’t a “binary choice” that a job “either has to be union or it’s bad.” She noted that the solar industry offers “good-paying, family-supporting jobs” even if they aren’t unionized.

Biden also faces hard choices to maintain the support of pro-fossil fuel Democrats such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a key swing voter in the split Senate.

Biden’s infrastructure proposal includes measures to assist fossil fuel-dependent regions vulnerable to Biden's clean energy push, in an appeal to unions irked by the president's early moves to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline and ban the issuance of new oil and gas leases on public lands.

But he risks underdelivering on his vow to create millions of high-paying union jobs in clean energy across the country while providing financial assistance and benefits to support fossil fuel-dependent regions.

“There is an intrinsic conflict between union fossil fuel jobs of today and green jobs of tomorrow,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy, a research group, adding that the wage gap between those industries is not “trivial.”

Biden’s aggressive approach to addressing climate change has prompted the oil and gas industry to shift some of its positions, including endorsing carbon pricing and regulation of methane, in order to have a seat at the table in shaping legislation and regulations.

McNally said businesses are watching whether Biden gravitates to a bipartisan approach as his infrastructure bill moves through Congress or whether he continues to appease liberals pushing him to use a potentially narrow window of power before the 2022 midterm elections to go big on green policies.

“Industry has no choice but to engage with the powers of the day, but on the other hand, folks look at Joe Biden and see a moderate,” McNally said. “The question they are asking themselves is, 'Has he been completely captured by the progressive wing?'”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Progressives lament: Where's the beef in Biden's climate-change plan?

ED MORRISSEY May 24, 2021 3:01 PM ET

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Last month, conservatives were left with egg on their faces after spinning tales of meat restrictions in Joe Biden’s climate-change plan. Four weeks later, Politico reports on complaints from progressives over Biden’s refusal to implement them. Like Clara Peller, they’re demanding to know — where’s the beef?
The Agriculture Department’s newly published “climate-smart agriculture and forestry” outline says almost nothing about how Biden aims to curb methane emissions from livestock operations. But environmentalists argue that any effort to shrink the farm industry’s climate footprint is half-baked if it relies on voluntary efforts and doesn’t address America’s system of meat production.
“USDA is setting itself up to fail on its climate and environmental justice goals,” says Chloe Waterman, senior program manager at Friends of the Earth U.S., a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.
The administration’s embrace of climate-change activism has heightened expectations of much more interventionist policies. Biden’s footsie-playing with the Green New Deal during the presidential campaign added to the anticipation. Thus far, however, the White House and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have done little to nothing on meat production or consumption. Vilsack is promoting additives that reduce methane output from cattle — cow farts and belches — and new methods of recycling feces for energy production.

That’s a lot of bun and no patty, gripes one environmental activist:

Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmental group, argues that such methods only have marginal benefits for the environment.
“There’s simply too much meat and dairy being produced right now for any of those small tweaks to get the emissions reductions that we need,” she said. “There are so many policies, from dietary guidelines to what school meals are reimbursed, to agricultural loans and government purchases, that are currently promoting overproduction of meat — and all of that needs to change.”
Even Biden’s climate-chang czar seems very reluctant to tell people to eat less meat. In an interview last week with the BBC, John Kerry explicitly rejected that idea, which didn’t endear him to climate-change allies. The New Republic claimed that “John Kerry doesn’t know how cows work”:
“Isn’t the simple, slightly brutal truth that you’re going to have to tell Americans to eat less meat?” asked Marr.

“Not necessarily,” replied Kerry, “because there’s a lot of research being done now that will change … the way meat is produced. Cattle are herded and fed. There’s research being done that actually reduces the amount of methane.”
What exactly Kerry was referring to remains unclear, since he quickly pivoted to other talking points and meat didn’t come up again. It should have. Climate policy does need to address meat production and its outsize ecological hoofprint. And insofar as Kerry was trying to talk about solutions like so-called regenerative agriculture or adjusting livestock feed, it’s important for people to understand just how dubious these so-called solutions currently are.
This isn’t just about climate activism; it’s also about class warfare and social engineering.

Despite the claim that these are “dubious,” TNR later in the report notes that the feed additives show an 80% reduction in methane emissions. The rest of these solutions probably need more time and study, but they’re hardly “dubious.” The real problem for these advocates is that meat consumption offends them, as this passage makes clear (emphasis mine):

View: https://youtu.be/U80ebi4AKgs
.34 min
To return to Marr’s question, the brutal truth is that Americans do need to eat far less meat. How much less is an open question: EAT-Lancet recommendations of limiting beef to 14 grams a day and cutting down on other meats could be a starting point, or you could argue for cutting 99 percent of current consumption (since upward of 99 percent of meat in America is factory-farmed) and getting the remaining 1 percent exclusively from regenerative sources, or you could consider ethical claims about animals’ rights and cut out meat entirely.
In any case, it’s a conversation we need to have, and it’s time for the climate movement to talk about this honestly and grapple with the implications.
I have friends and family members who choose not to eat meat for ethical and/or religious reasons, and I completely respect that. I would not force them to eat meat, but they would also not force me to stop eating meat. This is just another form of top-down elitist tyranny posing as environmentalism. Even a politician as elitist and absurd as John “Private Jetting To Curb Emissions” Kerry understands how this looks and sounds to ordinary Americans.

For those who don’t get the cultural reference, here’s the original Wendy’s commercial starring Clara Peller. And get off my damn lawn, you whippersnappers.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden’s Top Energy Regulator Lobbied for Company Behind Admin-Approved Wind Farm

FERC chair Richard Glick now working to aid Biden's green energy push
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Getty ImagesCollin Anderson and Joseph Simonson• May 24, 2021 5:00 am
https://twitter.com/share?url=https...d+for+Company+Behind+Admin-Approved+Wind+Farm

President Joe Biden's pick to lead a major federal energy agency spent years lobbying for the renewable power giant behind an offshore wind farm backed by the administration, a Washington Free Beacon review of disclosure forms found.

Shortly after his inauguration, Biden tapped Richard Glick to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. From 2001 to 2016, Glick served as head lobbyist for Avangrid Renewables, the U.S. subsidiary of Spanish electric conglomerate Iberdrola. The company holds a 50 percent stake in Vineyard Wind, which is set to become the country's first large-scale offshore wind farm after the Biden administration approved the project on May 11.

Glick's elevation to chairman comes as a boon to Avangrid and other renewable power companies. The role grants Glick the authority to prioritize environmental projects that bolster the White House's green energy push and potentially enrich his former clients. The commission is also responsible for approving natural gas pipeline permits—a common target of environmentalists. Just weeks into his chairmanship, Glick announced the creation of a senior-level "environmental justice" position to determine if pipeline projects "unfairly impact historically marginalized communities."

The "environmental justice" metric has generated backlash from Congress amid rising gas prices. A bipartisan group of 25 senators in April called on Glick to ignore any "newly contemplated considerations" and "take timely action" on the 14 pipeline projects pending before the commission.

"These projects represent substantial private sector investment in our nation's economy and our workforce," the letter reads. "Delaying and moving the regulatory goalposts on projects filed in good faith is contrary to the otherwise equitable application of the Policy Statement that all stakeholders expect."

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission did not return a request for comment.

Glick is not the only top environmental official with ties to a green energy company championed by the Biden administration. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm holds up to a $5 million stake in Proterra, an electric bus manufacturer that Biden has promoted on multiple occasions. A slew of Biden's top donors also have sizable investments in the company, and Proterra recently turned to a pair of Obama administration alums to lobby the White House for funding.

In addition to Glick, deputy interior secretary nominee Tommy Beaudreau represented Vineyard Wind as a corporate attorney. Under federal ethics rules, Beaudreau is barred from participating in any "particular matter" involving his former clients for two years. The Biden appointee can, however, assert himself into deliberations pertaining to the wind industry as a whole.

Beaudreau's financial disclosure forms reveal long ties to the industry. Over the course of his time in the private sector, Beaudreau represented 10 of the 14 companies with active wind farm proposals before the department.

Avangrid spent about $6 million on its lobbying operation under Glick's direction, disclosures show. Glick transitioned back to the public sector in 2017, following a brief stint working for the Senate where he advised Democrats on renewable energy.

As a commission member, Glick in 2019 admonished his Republican colleagues for declining to act on an emergency waiver requested by Vineyard Wind. The waiver would have helped the offshore wind farm—located 15 miles south of Martha's Vineyard—enter New England's multibillion-dollar electricity market. The commission later approved an agreement between Vineyard Wind and the region's grid operator in October.

A CNN story on Vineyard Wind published Sunday described the project as critical to Biden's pledge of achieving a carbon-free power sector by 2035.

"The Biden administration has convened an all-of-government approach to offshore wind, which we've never seen before," Avangrid told the outlet.

Only two offshore wind farms exist in the United States—both of which stand substantially smaller than the Vineyard Wind project. Waterfront property owners and local fishermen bitterly opposed the proposal before the Trump administration canceled its permitting process. Those groups appear ready for future litigation.

Although Biden sold his prioritization of offshore wind by promising "good-paying, union jobs," much of its manufacturing takes place in Europe. That dynamic is reflected by Vineyard Wind's corporate backers. In addition to Iberdrola's Bilbao, Spain, headquarters, Denmark-based investment firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is helping finance the project.

The Biden administration has pledged to offer billions in federal loan guarantees to drive similar projects. Multiple states on the East Coast—including Massachusetts—plan on purchasing tens of thousands of megawatts of offshore wind power in the next 15 years.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Pope Francis Calls for ‘Green Economics,’ ‘Green Education,’ ‘Green Spirituality’
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Pope Francis leaves after a visit to Radio Vaticana offices in Rome Monday, May 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino
THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.25 May 20214,284

ROME — Pope Francis issued a dire report on the state of the planet Tuesday, insisting the earth is suffering the worst environmental crisis of its history.

For a long time, the earth “has suffered from the wounds that we cause due to a predatory attitude, which makes us feel like owners of the planet and its resources and authorizes us to irresponsibly use the goods that God has given us,” the pope declared in a video message for the launch of the Laudato Si platform, a seven-year ecological project.

“Today, these wounds are dramatically manifested in an unprecedented ecological crisis that affects the soil, air, water and, in general, the ecosystem in which human beings live,” he warned in his Spanish-language address.

“The current pandemic has also brought to light even more acutely the cry of nature and that of the poor, who are the ones who suffer the most,” he added.

The pontiff went on to call for “a new ecological approach” to transform “the way humans inhabit the world, our lifestyles, our relationship with the earth’s resources and, in general, our way of seeing human beings and living life.”

As he has done on other occasions, the pope urged the adoption of an “integral human ecology,” which entails “environmental issues but also man in his totality and becomes capable of listening to the cry of the poor and of being a leaven for a new society.”

Francis also warned that “our selfishness, our indifference, and our irresponsibility” threaten the future of the generations to come.

“I therefore renew my appeal,” he said, “let us take care of our Mother Earth, let us overcome the temptation of selfishness that makes us predators of resources, let us cultivate respect for the gifts of the Earth and creation, let us finally inaugurate an eco-sustainable lifestyle and society.”

“From the hands of God we have received a garden; we cannot leave our children a desert,” he declared.

The pope went on to praise the work of the Laudato Si project, adding that the pursuit of integral ecology entails “responding to the cry of the Earth, responding to the cry of the poor, green economics, adopting a simple lifestyle, green education, green spirituality, and community engagement.”

“There is hope,” he concluded. “We can all collaborate, each with their own culture and experience, each with their own initiatives and capacities, so that our mother Earth recovers her original beauty and creation can shine again according to God’s plan.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden Lied to Miners: "Made in America" Electric Car Metals Will Be Imported

Tue May 25, 2021
Daniel Greenfield

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Biden's infrastructure scam was spending $115 billion on repairing roads, bridges, and tunnels, and $174 billion on electric cars for the rich. That includes electric car chargers that cost as much as $260,000 each.

But Biden was going around the country billing this as a "Future Made in America" because it was all going to be done in the United States.

Unsurprisingly, he lied.

The first step of the process is getting the raw materials and those are not coming from America.
Biden will rely on ally countries to supply the bulk of the metals needed to build electric vehicles and focus on processing them domestically into battery parts, part of a strategy designed to placate environmentalists, two administration officials with direct knowledge told Reuters.
Environmentalists (funded by China) First, American Workers Last.

The plans will be a blow to U.S. miners who had hoped Biden would rely primarily on domestically sourced metals, as his campaign had signaled last autumn, to help fulfill his ambitions for a less carbon-intensive economy.

The United Mine Workers, in yet another futile effort to get workers to vote for Biden, touted his "climate" plan that would end coal, but create exciting new green jobs.

Except, as usual, those jobs won't be coming. Not to America anyway.

Biden "privately" lied to the unions.
Joe Biden’s campaign has privately told U.S. miners it would support boosting domestic production of metals used to make electric vehicles, solar panels and other products crucial to his climate plan, according to three sources familiar with the matter, in a boon for the mining industry.
The Obama administration enacted rigorous environmental regulations that slowed U.S. mining sector growth during its time in office. Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president and is well-regarded in conservation circles, has been expected to continue in that vein.

The U.S. Democratic presidential candidate also supports bipartisan efforts to foster a domestic supply chain for lithium, copper, rare earths, nickel and other strategic materials that the United States imports from China and other countries, the sources said.

“Building back better involves miners,” said Rich Nolan, head of the National Mining Association, an industry trade group. “The Biden campaign understands the need for domestic supply chains.”
Nah.

Biden lied. The American economy died.
Rather than focus on permitting more U.S. mines, Biden's team is more focused on creating jobs that process minerals domestically into electric vehicle (EV) battery parts, according to the people.
And then it'll turn out that it's just simpler to have China do it. And, in the usual Obama fashion, the plan to build a domestic subsidized 'green economy' will mean sending billions of dollars to China... to compete with China by buying Chinese systems.
While U.S. projects from small and large miners alike will feel the impact, the pain from any blocked projects will fall disproportionately on smaller, U.S.-focused companies. Many large miners also have global projects that could benefit from the administration's plan.

“Let’s let Americans extract these minerals from the earth,” said Aaron Butler of United Association Local 469 union, which does work for Rio Tinto Ltd’s (RIO.AX) proposed Resolution copper mine project in Arizona and endorsed Biden in the elections. “These are good-paying jobs.”
Biden doesn't want good-paying jobs. He wants to wreck the American economy for the profit of Big Green. That means shutting down mines and moving more of the US economy to China.
Biden's White House is now quietly working to enlist labor support as it tries to build a case that its green policies are creating jobs, ahead of the 2022 midterm elections that could determine whether the strategy wins congressional backing, according to two organized labor sources familiar with the campaign
Biden's thievery from American taxpayers is creating inflation. The only jobs it's creating are in D.C. and San Francisco.

The metals will be outsourced to Australia and Brazil. And then eventually to China.
Remember who's at the wheel of Biden's green subsidy machine.
In 2011, Jigar Shah, as head of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, had fought efforts to stop Chinese solar dumping as part of the regime’s longstanding trade war on America.

Generate and BYD’s alliance to finance the leasing of Chinese buses in American cities hit a snag when President Trump banned using taxpayer money to pay for the buses. BYD then made headlines with its bizarre $1 billion deal for masks with Governor Newsom in California.

BYD buses were already problematic with a Los Angeles Times investigation finding that the buses had to be pulled after they were found to be unreliable after 100 miles. The buses failed in multiple cities, but money kept flowing to the Chinese company because of Democrat ties.

As the LA Times noted, BYD's "business model involves hiring lobbyists and grant writers to secure no-bid purchases by public agencies, and it has invited public officials on foreign junkets and employed their close associates."

The story came out in May 2018. Generate Capital announced its deal with BYD in July 2018.

BYD’s biggest success story was its deal with the Antelope Valley Transit Authority (AVTA) in California to replace all its real buses with electric buses. AVTA claims it’s a huge success, but AVTA’s current CEO, Macy Neshati, was also the former Senior VP of BYD Heavy Industries.
First, Biden screws miners. Then he screws factory workers. And finally he screws all Americans.
It's the Biden way.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Insidious Agenda Of The Global Elite Is Moving Forward Very Rapidly
May 25, 2021 by Michael Snyder




The global elite have an entirely different perspective on things than most of the rest of us.

Most people are not focused on “global issues” because they have enough to deal with just trying to run their own day to day lives. But the global elite have so much money that they don’t have to endlessly work long hours in order to “make a living”, and others take care of mundane daily tasks for them. So the global elite are able to pour an inordinate amount of time and energy into the issues that they consider to be important, and population issues are right at the top of the list for many of them.

There is a consensus among the global elite that climate change is the number one threat to our planet by a wide margin, and that humanity is doing far more to cause climate change than any other source. They endlessly push this narrative through the news and entertainment companies that they control, and most people have bought into their propaganda on at least some level.

The global elite would like all of us to radically alter our behavior in order to combat climate change, but they also acknowledge that this will not nearly be enough. The long-term solution, in their view, is to dramatically decrease the size of the human population until it has reached a level where climate change is no longer a major threat.

Throughout the 20th century, the population of the globe absolutely exploded. It is now over 7 billion, and the global elite needed to find a way to slow that down. So their news and entertainment companies started to encourage women to wait longer in life to have children and to have fewer children when they finally did decide to have families.

In addition, the toxic environment that has been created by the products that their corporations endlessly produce has made it more difficult for couples to have children. As I have detailed in previous articles, male sperm levels in the western world have declined catastrophically in recent decades.

Of course if a pregnancy does occur, the global elite have worked very hard to promote abortion as a “choice” all over the planet.

They aren’t doing this because they care about women. They are doing this because they want to keep the population in check.

All of these measures are really starting to work. In fact, the fertility rate in the U.S. has now been consistently below replacement level since 2007
The U.S. total fertility rate, which estimates how many babies a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have during their life based on data from a given year, remains far “below replacement” – meaning there wouldn’t be enough babies born for a generation to exactly replace itself.
“The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971 and has consistently been below replacement since 2007,” according to the agency, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And the global elite have got to be thrilled that the fertility rate in the U.S. for 2020 was lower than ever
The number of babies born in the U.S. dropped by 4% in 2020 compared with the previous year, according to a new federal report released Wednesday. The general fertility rate was 55.8 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, reaching yet another record low, according to the provisional data.
We are witnessing similar patterns throughout most of the rest of the industrialized world.
As of 2017, fertility rates were below replacement level in nations that account for nearly half of the entire global population
According to the most recent UN estimates (United Nations 2017), almost one half of the world’s population lives in countries with below replacement fertility (BRF), i.e. with a total fertility rate (TFR) below 2.1 births per woman. Of these, one-quarter have TFRs close to the replacement level, i.e. between 1.8 and 2.1; the other three-quarters have really low fertility, below 1.8 births per woman. Low-fertility countries are generally grouped into clusters. The main clusters are in East Asia, Southern Europe, the German-speaking countries of Western Europe, and all the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Table 1).
Of course there are other areas of the world (such as Africa) where the insidious population control agenda of the global elite is not working nearly as well, and this distresses them to no end.

Needless to say, the global elite will continue to try to come up with more ways to “encourage” population control, because they truly believe that time is running out for our planet.

They don’t respect life because they believe that humanity itself is a “plague”, and that has resulted in a tremendous lack of respect for life throughout our entire society.

Over the past year, millions of people have been dying during this pandemic, and this week we learned that the very first man that got a COVID vaccine has died
William Shakespeare, the first man in the world to have an approved Covid jab, has died in hospital aged 81 after suffering a stroke.

Bill, as he was known, made global headlines on so-called V-Day on December 8 when he received the Pfizer/BioNTech jab at the University Hospital Coventry.

The former Rolls Royce employee and parish councillor passed away from a stroke last Thursday, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust said, after a period of illness at the same hospital where he famously received his vaccine.
There have been so many needless tragedies that have been popping up in the news lately. When a 35-year-old mother named Anne VanGeest suddenly dropped dead recently, it made the local news
Anne VanGeest, 35, died April 19 at Mercy Health Saint Mary’s hospital in Grand Rapids.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the news of Anne’s passing Anne (Annie), who was 35, was a loving mother, wife, sister and daughter,” according to a statement from her family provided Lambert, a Grand Rapids-based public relations firm that is providing its services to the family pro bono.
Those that have passed away deserve to be remembered, but the vast majority of them will be quickly forgotten as the death toll grows.

Unfortunately, what we have witnessed so far is just the tip of the iceberg. As humanity plunges into a very apocalyptic future, the death and destruction that we will see will be off the charts.

But for now, the total population of the world is still above 7 billion, and the global elite will continue to try to find creative ways to keep that number down.

Unfortunately, most people out there still assume that the global elite are looking out for their best interests, and that is a tragic mistake.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

U.S. Miners React to Joe Biden’s Move to Ditch U.S. Development of Critical Minerals: China Wins
SYCAMORE, PA - APRIL 13: Coal miner Dale Travis, 53, of Wheeling, West Virginia, waits for the arrival of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt to visit with miners at the Harvey Mine on April 13, 2017 in Sycamore, Pennsylvania. The Harvey Mine, owned by CNX Coal Resources, is …
Justin Merriman/Getty Images
PENNY STARR26 May 20211,480

Miners in the United States who hoped President Joe Biden would support domestic production of critical minerals are reacting to his plan to ditch them and rely on other countries, including China.

The New York Post reported:
The plan under consideration would entail buying the materials from overseas markets and allow US manufacturers to assemble them into batteries or electric vehicles in an effort to create American jobs but still remain in the good graces of environmental groups, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
The Post report continued:
According to figures from the World Bank, the U.S. imports of minerals in 2018 relied mainly on Canada, China, Mexico, Brazil and South America. But labor leaders, many of whom support Democratic candidates, said they don’t want their workers left out of a lucrative job market.

“Let’s let Americans extract these minerals from the earth,” Aaron Butler of United Association Local 469 union, which does work for Rio Tinto Ltd.’s proposed copper mine project in Arizona and endorsed Biden in the election, told Reuters.
Pini Althaus, CEO Of USA Rare Earth, said in a statement:
The U.S. Government cannot make assumptions that non-U.S. rare earth and critical minerals producers will sell their materials into the U.S. supply chain and not to China. China is actively and aggressively pursuing acquisitions of rare earth projects or offtake agreements all over the world, and non-U.S. project owners will make the best commercial decisions for their own shareholders, not the idealistic and regulated approach that U.S. miners will take — prioritizing materials for the U.S. supply chain.
“And whilst this development does not directly affect our Round Top deposit as we are on State of Texas land, the United States needs several projects to come into production, and in the near term, if we are to achieve our goals around electrification of vehicles,” Althaus said.

“Given our ability to process third-party materials, USA Rare Earth would be available to take in materials from non-U.S. projects, but as a whole this policy is devastating for the sector and a setback towards the goal of establishing a secure domestic supply chain.”

“The reason the U.S. is in its current precarious position – lacking a domestic critical minerals supply chain – was due to poor decision making 30 years ago, when the same argument was made to let someone else, China, do the mining and processing,” Althaus said. “The naive thought process at that time was that those materials would come back into the U.S. supply chain, even as China made no secret back then as to its ambitions in controlling the rare earth supply chain.”

“The winner of such policy is China, again,” Althaus said in the statement.

“The U.S. took a positive step in this direction when the U.S. Dept. of Energy recently launched the Division of Minerals Sustainability,” Rich Nolan, president of the National Mining Association, said in a statement in March. “But if we want to seriously compete in the global EV market, the U.S. must give mining and the mineral supply chain the attention they deserve. We have the tools to win this race, but only if we make smart policy decisions.”

The Detroit Bureau website also reported on the reactions to the Biden administration’s move:
During his campaign last year, Biden expressed the need to source the raw material for batteries within the U.S., giving a boost to the American mining industry. A policy that does not invest in American mines would almost certainly turn into a political football.
“These ‘not-in-my-backyard’ extremists have made clear they want to lock up our land and prevent the mining of minerals,” U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, said during a House Natural Resources Committee forum last week.
Some Democratic leaders are seeking to have the White House reverse course, worrying that the proposed mining strategy could hurt the party’s chances in advance of the critical 2022 mid-term elections.
This is another reversal of former President Donald Trump’s policies, this time on critical minerals.

“The ‘federal strategy lays out a blueprint for America to once again be a leader in the critical minerals sector,’ then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement in June 2019,” the Post reported.

“As with our energy security, the Trump Administration is dedicated to ensuring that we are never held hostage to foreign powers for the natural resources critical to our national security and economic growth,” Bernhardt said at the time. “The Department will work expeditiously to implement the President’s strategy from streamlining the permitting process to locating domestic supplies of minerals.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden Wind Energy Projects Outsourcing Jobs To Europe

Employees with Ipsun Solar install solar panels on the roof of the Peace Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Virginia on May 17, 2021. - Using donations, the church installed a 60.48 kilowatt solar instillation to bring down their carbon footprint. US President Joe Biden has called for the US energy sector to be fully decarbonized by 2035. To this end, he has asked Congress for $100 billion to invest in the national grid and shift to cleaner energy, as well as a ten-year extension of tax credits for renewable generation and storage. The tax credit for wind and solar has been quite successful in creating a large scale investment and build out, Dan Lashof, president of the World Resources Institute told AFP, welcoming the extension. (Photo by Andrew CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

Employees with Ipsun Solar install solar panels on the roof of the Peace Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Virginia on May 17, 2021. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 3:06 PM PT – Thursday, May 27, 2021

Joe Biden has promised that his push for renewable energy will create more manufacturing jobs for Americans. He was reported saying, “there is simply no reason the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing. No reason.”

Except, in reality, most of the manufacturing jobs will actually be created in Europe.

The Vineyard Wind project, off the coast of Massachusetts, is expected to produce enough electricity to power 400,000 homes in New England by 2023. The windfarm is a joint venture between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Inc. which is part of the Iberdrola group.
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According to the managing director of Iberdola Renewables Offshore, Jonathon Cole, smaller components will be manufactured locally, but the bigger parts will not.

Insiders say it could take years before developers can commit to building new American factories. To get things moving, developers would need to see a deep pipeline of approved U.S. projects, along with a clear set of regulatory incentives like federal and state tax breaks.

Christy Guthman, commercial leader of U.S. offshore at General Electric’s renewable division, also said that opening a factory would be costly and time consuming. It would require permits and large amounts of space near the coast.

Guthman’s company is set to supply Vineyard Wind with 62 turbines. However, the major parts for those turbines, which are twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, will be made in its factories in France.

Biden’s administration has unveiled a goal to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity by 2030. That is roughly the amount that already exists in Europe’s two-decade-old industry.

Experts have estimated more than 2,000 turbines will be needed to meet that target, but U.S. factories probably won’t be finished until 2024 or 2025. This would mean those jobs may not materialize until after Biden’s time in the White House is up.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Great New Lefty Policy Idea: Let's Destroy Highways

Thu May 27, 2021
Daniel Greenfield

biden_frame2.png

My way or the highway.

Biden just proposed $1.8 trillion in deficit spending. He's talking a lot about infrastructure, but only a little over $100 billion is actually going to roads, bridges, tunnels, and highways. More than that will be going as sweetheart subsidies for electric cars. Instead, Dems have begun insisting that everything is infrastructure. Like massive lies and theft. Those are now very definitely infrastructure.

There's a good reason why the Dems talk about infrastructure, but don't fund it. They want to get rid of it.

The elimination of suburbs is high on the lefty agenda of forcing everyone to cram into cities where they can be tightly controlled.

And since roads, bridges, tunnels, and highways connect people, they want to get rid of those. Think of the Left as laying siege to America and you won't be far wrong.

The New York Times debuts a Kill Highway push through its Overton Window with "Can Removing Highways Fix America's Cities?"

Can removing leftists fix American cities? There's more statistical and historic evidence for the latter than the former.

But the essay depends on the usual approach, "Highways are Racist".

The essay starts out by touting Rochester as a model without informing readers that Mayor Lovely Warren is facing her own set of charges and her husband was just busted as a drug dealer.

It notes that Rochester got rid of a highway without traffic jams, but that might be because no one voluntarily goes to Rochester. That would not work too well in areas where highways are a lifeline.
Pete Buttigieg, who heads the department, has expressed support for removing barriers that divided Black and minority communities, saying that “there is racism physically built into some of our highways.”
Gotta get rid of the highways, along with Columbus, America, Jefferson, and the Constitution.
When Dems talk about funding infrastructure, they're increasingly talking about anti-highway measures.
In a wide-reaching infrastructure plan released at the end of March, President Biden proposed spending $20 billion to help reconnect neighborhoods divided by highways. Congressional Democrats have translated the proposal into legislation that would provide funding over the next five years. And the Department of Transportation opened up separate grants that could help some cities get started.
The war on the suburbs continues.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Deep State Pushing for Globalist “Trade Promotion Authority” Renewal

by Peter Rykowski May 27, 2021

Deep State Pushing for Globalist “Trade Promotion Authority” Renewal
gopixa/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Members of Congress are seeking to renew the unconstitutional Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) that the Deep State is using to further entangle the United States into sovereignty-eroding trade agreements.

TPA, also known as “Fast Track,” is legislation that limits Congress’s ability to negotiate and review trade agreements, ceding its authority to the president. Specifically, once the president transmits the agreements to Congress, the relevant House and Senate committees have 45 days to vote on any trade agreements — and failing that, those agreements would be automatically reported out. Both chambers would then have 15 days to hold floor votes with limited debate. Under TPA, Congress is prohibited from amending or filibustering the agreements.

TPA is not new. Congress first enacted it in 1974, and it has been intermittently in force to the present, being most recently renewed in 2015. TPA is set to expire on July 1, 2021, but globalist members of Congress are pushing to renew it.

Interestingly, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected an attempt to add TPA to a major China-related bill. However, he reportedly did this to ensure TPA passes Congress later this year, along with forcing Republicans to work with the Democrats.

Unconstitutional Scheme
There are multiple reasons why TPA is dangerous and must be rejected. First, it is unconstitutional. Article I, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution declares that “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” However, TPA usurps this legislative power, transferring it to the executive branch — something the Constitution does not allow.

Additionally, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 gives Congress the authority to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” By requiring Congress to merely rubber-stamp trade agreements negotiated by the president, TPA unconstitutionally delegates Congress’s trade authority.

Furthermore, Article II, Section 2, requires all treaties to be ratified by two thirds of the Senate.

By their very nature, modern trade agreements are treaties. This is seen in the broad scope of many trade agreements that affect domestic policies, with the USMCA being a recent example. However, under TPA, only simple majorities in both houses of Congress are required for ratification. This is unconstitutional and trivializes the approval process of consequential international treaties.

Globalist Trade Agenda
Additionally, TPA is a key element of the globalist “free trade” agenda that seeks to strip the United States of its national sovereignty and independence — and by extension, the God-given freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.

The term “free trade” is a misnomer when applied to the various modern agreements. Being hundreds of pages long and creating new regulations and bureaucratic entities on the international level, they are not “free.” Furthermore, such agreements affect much more than the simple flow of goods from one country to another.

The U.S. has entered into multiple trade agreements, including the WTO, NAFTA, and the USMCA. Globalists are also pushing the U.S. to enter the CPTPP and a proposed trade agreement with the European Union. All of these agreements have eroded — or will erode — U.S. sovereignty by ceding power to international tribunals and by economically and politically integrating with other countries, thus limiting Congress’s freedom of action.

TPA makes it significantly easier for the Deep State to ratify such agreements. In addition to circumventing the two-thirds Senate requirement for ratifying treaties, the expedited approval process allows for agreements — negotiated in secret and hundreds of pages long — to receive very little scrutiny and with no chance for revisions.

Multiple other reasons exist for opposing TPA, including increasing trade deficits, encouraging currency manipulation, and increasing migration levels. Ultimately, however, TPA is part of the globalist scheme to merge the U.S. into a one-world government through foreign entanglements. Although a Trade Promotion Authority bill has not been introduced in Congress yet in 2021, such a bill is expected to be introduced in the near future.

Congress would be wise to reject this unconstitutional and globalist TPA scheme. Instead, its members should defend U.S. national sovereignty and economic self-sufficiency.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Do We Really Want To Return To "Normal" If "Normal" Is Destroying The Planet?

SATURDAY, MAY 29, 2021 - 05:30 PM
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Change the incentives, and the outcomes change.

Ecologist Howard Odum provided a profound insight into human expansion, stagnation and collapse. He argued that humans are wired to maximize power output (i.e., consumption) rather than maximize efficiency.

In other words, humans are wired to strip the tree of every ripe fruit and throw a party, have more children and use the surplus food to feed an army of conquest. Efficient use of resources is simply not part of what I term Wetware 1.0, the set of tools that was selected and optimized over the past 200,000 years for small hunter-gatherer tribes roaming an apparently near-infinite world.

We've squandered the surpluses enabled by hydrocarbons to maximize energy output (consumption) rather than achieve efficiency.

That is finally coming around to haunt the entire "infinite growth on a finite planet" status quo.
Here's the happy story being promoted by the status quo: we can keep overconsuming / wasting resources on a vast scale by electrifying everything that is currently powered by hydrocarbons: The Electrification of Everything: What You Need to Know.

There are a great many problems with this fantasy. One is that per Odum, humanity doesn't replace hydrocarbons with wind-solar, it consumes all the alt-energy being added, too. Adding energy just increases consumption.

Another is that the quantity of scarce minerals and resources needed to replace hydrocarbons
with so-called renewable energy is so vast that it's unrealistic.

As I've noted many times, per analyst/educator Nate Hagens, "renewables" are actually 'replaceables', as solar panels and wind turbines wear out and need to be replaced every 20-25 years, if not sooner.

The scale of energy consumption is so vast and the percentage supplied by solar and wind is so insignificant. Most charts lump solar and wind with hydropower and biofuels (wood), but wind and solar provide at best 3% of global energy, after all the tens of billions of dollars that have been invested.

To provide the majority of global energy consumption, we'd need to increase solar-wind 20-fold, from 3% to 60%. The problem, as Tim Watkins explains, is the Earth doesn't have enough scarce minerals to build this monstrous global system, and then replace it every 20-25 years: Are you still buying this?
"Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050."
"Challenges of using 'green energy' to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years' worth of total global copper supply and 10 years' worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms."
"To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles, assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world's lithium production and at least half of the world's copper production during 2018."
Every kilogram of these scarce minerals must be mined, transported and processed with hydrocarbons.

The problem with wind and solar is intermittency:
modern industrial economies require steady electrical power 24/7 or they fail. Wind and solar generate power intermittently, meaning they can't generate a steady supply 24/7 nor can they generate electricity when consumers want to use it.

So the intermittency problem becomes a storage problem: how can we store surplus electricity in quantities large enough to power our vast consumption when the wind dies and the sun goes down?

There are no cheap, easy answers to storage, and ideas such as converting it all to hydrogen are not realistic due to cost and safety issues. There isn't enough lithium and other scarce minerals to build batteries for 2 billion vehicles and storage for every electrical grid on Earth. (And note that lithium batteries have very limited lifespans and need to be replaced every decade, if not sooner. Very few batteries are recycled, so recycling billions of batteries is also a fantasy.)

As Gail Tverberg observes in her recent post, How the World's Energy Problem Has Been Hidden:
"So-called renewable fuels tend to be very damaging to the environment in ways other than CO2 emissions. This point is made very well in the new book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert. It makes the point that renewable fuels are not an attempt to save the environment. Instead, they are trying to save our current industrial civilization using approaches that tend to destroy the environment. Cutting down forests, even if new trees are planted in their place, is especially detrimental. Alice Friedemann, in her new book, Life after Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Fuels, points out the high cost of these alternatives and their dependence on fossil fuel energy."
Many people I respect see thorium nuclear reactors as the answer, but like all the other proposals to replace the staggeringly large consumption fueled by hydrocarbons with some other source, it's not as easy in the real world as it is conceptually.

India has reserves of thorium and has an ambitious plan to build thorium reactors. But the thorium nuclear fuel cycle is extremely non-trivial, and despite billions of rupees invested, India has yet to complete a single large-scale thorium reactor--and neither has any other nation. There are seven research reactors scattered around the world, but no actual power plants. India's Ambitious Nuclear Power Plan--And What's Getting in Its Way:
"With the commercialization and enhanced use of renewable energy technologies, the per unit cost of electricity produced from renewables has gone down significantly. The cost of solar power in India right now is Rs 2.62 per unit, almost half of the per unit cost of electricity being produced by the recently operational Kudankulam nuclear power plant (Rs 4.10 per unit)."
The problem is we've based our entire global economy on maximizing consumption, not efficiency, so that waste = growth = maximizing profits.

Consider this chart of energy consumption, and the chart of energy efficiency, which reflects the appalling inefficiency of our consumption.




Given that we incentivize profits earned from increasing waste (i.e. "growth"), this shouldn't surprise us.

As Tim Morgan has explained, our entire financial system presumes that money-finance is the master system that controls everything in the real world, when in fact the financial system is an overlay on the energy system. In essence, the entire financial system is nothing but abstract claims on energy that unlike energy can be endlessly multiplied.

Claims (currency and debt) can be created out of thin air, but energy systems cannot be created out of thin air.

The answer isn't to attempt to replace a disastrously inefficient and wasteful system with replaceable energy sources--a delusional fantasy. The answer is to set aside our Wetware 1.0 programming to maximize energy output and consumption in favor of maximizing energy efficiency and conservation.

There are a number of ways this transition could be made.
For example, rather than tax human labor, we could tax the consumption of non-renewable resources.

UnTax--Taxing Away Climate Change:
"Yet the reason for this inertia is simple: the price we pay for fossil fuels, and most other non-renewable resources, is far too low, because we don’t pay for their creation which took hundreds of millions of years, but only for their extraction. To make matters worse, more than 90% of all taxes are paid on labor in most countries, which discourages employment and forces automation into every part of the economy.

This mix-up, a by-product of the industrial revolution, leads to pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, waste production and the unnecessary use of automation, which damages our ecosystems and at the same time deprives future generations of their right to access those scarce resources."
Do we really want to return to the "normal" of waste = growth = maximizing profit if this "normal" is destroying the planet?'

Cutting consumption is anathema in the current mindset of waste = growth = maximizing profit, but the Pareto Distribution suggests we could cut consumption by 80% and still retain 80% of the essentials for a good life such as clean water, healthy food, basic shelter, etc.
As I posted in Musings #9, consider this short film of Market Street in downtown San Francisco shot a few days before the catastrophic earthquake and fire of 1906. A trip down Market Street before the fire (Library of Congress).

Life was pretty good in 1906 San Francisco and many other cities. Now look at the energy consumption around 1900: it was around 15 TWh compared to today's 160 TWh, roughly 10% of current consumption. And the engines and machines of 1906 were by today's standards extremely inefficient. Adjust for increases in population and efficiency and it's clear lower-consumption life is not necessarily a return to living in caves.




Do we really want to return to "normal" if "normal" is destroying the planet?
Waste is everywhere in our way of life because waste is profitable in the current arrangement.
What would happen if waste was taxed at very high rates and efficiency was the sole means of maximizing profits?

Charlie Munger (head of Berkshire Hathaway) famously said: "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." That's how humans operate: we respond to the incentives presented, even if they destroy the planet.

Change the incentives, and the outcomes change. What if efficiencies and conservation earned the biggest rewards and human labor was freed from taxation? The outcomes would improve very dramatically--and that's just the start.
 

raven

TB Fanatic
if you want to get rid of waste, you would be required to begin with governments
all of em
the only reason there is "government" is because there is a surplus that needs to be wasted
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

CBS News' Interview with Climate Scientist Exposes the Whole Ruse

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa

Posted: May 29, 2021 1:50 AM

CBS News' Interview with Climate Scientist Exposes the Whole Ruse

Source: AP Photo/Raytheon Antarctic Services, Allen Delaney, HO

These people are asking us to commit to drastic lifestyle changes. They want to ban the internal combustion engine, build wind farms, go heavy on solar, and quit eating beef. Trillions in economic activity must be sacrificed to save Mother Earth. I don’t think that’s going to fly. The so-called clean or green energy alternatives are not efficient. They can’t power our economy.

The environmental Left knows that but advocates for these garbage energy sources anyway.

It’s all about making America poorer. A less wealthy America is a healthier Earth, so they say.

So, how do they come up with the figures? How did they pinpoint what global temperature increase we have to avoid over the next couple of years.? It’s 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s what CBS News’ climate guru Jeff Berardelli said.

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View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1398253417676615681
1:45 min

When pressed on the figure and how they came up with it, Berardelli merely said it’s just the number they decided to go with right now—that’s it, dude?

Let’s go back to the 1970s. Newsweek prints a piece about how the Earth was cooling. We needed to store seeds and pack the pantries and granaries. Why? A period of re-glaciation was about to be unleashed on the North American continent. It didn’t happen. The Arctic Ice Cap was supposed to be gone by 2013. It actually grew by over 533,000 square miles. These climate cultists have been wrong before—dead wrong. They’ve predicted doomsday—and nothing happened. I’m not, nor should anyone, be willing to sacrifice trillions in economic activity to curb an already natural process. And this ‘well, we said so’ attitude doesn’t help persuade anyone. It’s a ruse, folks. Always has been, always will be. It’s the ultimate Trojan horse, and only the elite and wealthy can afford to get pinched by what this crew advocates. It's nonsense.

Now, there is nothing wrong with conservation. Hunters and those who venture outdoors regularly benefit greatly from that, but that's not what we're talking about here.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

New Study Blames on ‘Climate Racism’ for Black Americans Living in Areas with Warmer Weather
May 29, 2021

A new study is blaming “climate racism” for black Americans enduring more heat stress as a result of living in areas with warmer weather across the country.

The study, produced by social justice warriors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, is creating the basis for climate change to be addressed as part of a reparations package for black Americans.

“Our study helps to provide more quantitative evidence that climate racism, environmental racism exists,” said Dr Angel Hsu, from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who helped author the paper.

“And it’s not just an isolated incident, it’s pervasive all across the United States,” she added.

They are using this study as the basis to move low-income minorities from ghettos into suburban neighborhoods as well, which would destroy property values and bring crime and degeneracy to safe communities in the name of racial retribution.

“We can trace many of these present-day environmental, socioeconomic, and health inequities to explicit decisions and urban planning policies in the 20th century like ‘redlining’,” said Dr. Jeremy Hoffman, the chief scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia.

“While money doesn’t grow on trees, it is clearly located in the neighbourhoods under them, especially in the US,” he added.

Big League Politics has reported about the various propaganda drives to shoehorn climate change into virtually every issue as part of the globalists’ war to end private property on their path to total consolidation of power:

While COVID-19 mass hysteria may be waning, the globalists are intent on continuing the trend of locking down society and destroying economic prosperity for the peasants.

After the scamdemic comes to an end, it will be climate change used to pump the masses full of fear and get them to accept Draconian measures to cripple their own civilization.

Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at the Economics of Innovation and Public Value Center at University College London, is setting the stage for climate lockdowns if unprecedented taxation and centralized power are not exerted over the economy.

“Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling,” Mazzucato wrote in her white paper, “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown.”

She contends that the only way to stop the inevitability of climate lockdowns is to “overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently,” meaning do away with it entirely and replace it with totalitarian socialism.

“[G]overnment assistance to business must be less about subsidies, guarantees, and bailouts, and more about building partnerships. This means attaching strict conditions to any corporate bailouts to ensure that taxpayer money is put to productive use and generates long-term public value, not short-term private profits,” she wrote.

“Because markets will not lead a green revolution on their own, government policy must steer them in that direction. This will require an entrepreneurial state that innovates, takes risks, and invests alongside the private sector,” Mazzucato contended.

Her writings are already influential, according to the New York Times, among politicians who are using her scribblings as an excuse to take unprecedented power-grabs.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has incorporated Mazzucato’s writings into policy ideas such as using “federal R & D to create domestic jobs and sustainable investments in the future.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is considering Mazzucato’s ideas to strengthen her Green New Deal proposal.

Even Republican lawmakers are embracing Mazzucato’s extreme anti-capitalist doom prophecies. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) cited Mazzucato in his proposal, “American Investment in the 21st Century,” which is essentially a manifesto of surrender to the Left from the failed neoconservative 2016 presidential hopeful.

“We need to build an economy that can see past the pressure to understand value-creation in narrow and short-run financial terms,” Rubio wrote in the introduction, “and instead envision a future worth investing in for the long-term.”

Mazzucato has also influenced former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, former British prime minister Theresa May, and Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon. Mazzucato’s reach extends to other countries such as Germany and South Africa, and she is considered a charismatic rising star in the field of economics
.”

Marxists are building the intellectual basis through propaganda, similar to that they did with the insidious blood libel of “white privilege,” for a land collectivization to occur in America on a racial basis. Americans of good conscience would be wise to organize themselves to prevent this eventuality from occurring.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden climate policy will be 'kiss of death' for small banks, CEO says
15 state treasurers pen letter to Biden and John Kerry about pressuring banks on climate

By FOX Business Staff FOXBusiness

Video on website 1:30 min

Biden climate policy will be 'kiss of death' for small banks, CEO says
Florida Bankers Association CEO Alex Sanchez argues the cost to community banks will be 'astronomical' if forced to produce a climate report for Biden.

Florida Bankers Association CEO Alex Sanchez claimed Biden and climate envoy John Kerry are giving small banks the "kiss of death" by requiring them to produce expensive reports of their clients' climate impact. Sanchez said many community banks can't afford the cost of the pricey annual report on "Mornings with Maria" Wednesday.

ALEX SANCHEZ: My advice and counsel to the Biden administration is this: if you want to make changes on disclosures regarding the green energy industry and the need for it, ask fossil fuel companies for disclosures. Don't make the banks ask our customers for the carbon emissions of our customers.

The cost to our regional and community banks would be astronomical to hire experts to do these reports.

Imagine your hometown community bank having to hire an expert for small businesses, which 50% of Americans work for small businesses… It will start with our larger banks and then it will trickle down to our regional and community banks for them to do the same.

And for your hometown bank to hire a $200,000 plus expert a year to see the carbon emissions of their customers. That's the kiss of death for community banks.

And as we saw during the PPP process, Maria, community banks played a vital role, as do regional banks, as do our large banks in our economy. So remember, a large percentage of the loans to small businesses come from community banks. So we need community banks.

And imagine hiring someone who doesn't do anything to your bottom line and it just adds costs. And that's what the Biden administration has got to understand.

Look, if they want to change what the fossil fuel industries and other affected industries have to do, ask them directly, pass a law, pass legislation, pass a new regulation asking them for information.

Why do the bankers have to get this as a third party from these industries?


CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW 6:59 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfjZ62iygw0
13:18 min

Great Reset Begins: Far-Left Is DISMANTLING America As We Know It

•Jun 2, 2021


Glenn Beck



The Biden administration and far-left Democrats are dismantling America in every shape and form. Glenn explains how our leaders in DC are destroying small business owners, farmers, and inventors. What will they dismantle next? Glenn says this is just the beginning of the Great Reset, and if we continue down this road, we’ll end up like Venezuela. “Americans need to start gathering together, stand up, and peacefully say: we’re not going any further.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfjul3cyT14
3:08 min

THIS is how recent cyber attacks could further the GREAT RESET

•Jun 3, 2021


Glenn Beck


First Russia meddled in our 2016 elections. They recently hit the Colonial pipeline in a cyber attack. Then a meat processing plant this week. China tried to targeted the NYC Subways in April. And what’s the Biden administration doing to stop these attacks? Nothing. In fact, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently put the responsibility on private businesses to better defend themselves against such hacks. But Glenn says there’s MORE behind this lack of a strong response from our federal government. Rather, he says, "we’re being set up.” They want to enact The Great Reset at full force — a public/private partnership — and weak infrastructure systems may be the perfect way to do it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mfvZ0IGvK0
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Crazed Squad Member Rashida Tlaib Gets Heated After Questioning Bank Execs On ‘Environmental Racism’

By The Scoop
Published June 3, 2021 at 7:15am
1080-X-650-SINGLE-BAR-THUMBNAIL-22.jpg

Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan’s 13th congressional district, is a close political ally of socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who constantly pushes for a massive multi-trillion ‘Green New Deal.’

Tlaib’s bank questioning appears to be a precursor to introducing regulation to micromanage which companies get loans.

“Are you familiar with the term environmental racism?” Tlaib went around asking different bank executives from Chase Bank, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Well Fargo.

The Michigan representative became frustrated after she learned that most of the executives did not know what environmental racism was or very familiar with it.

“I want you all to know environmental racism showed its face in a deadly way during the pandemic in my district, where more of my black neighbors died at a higher rate from COVID than any other community in Michigan, even though our black population in Michigan is less than 15 percent. The preexisting health conditions that come from living in the backyard of corporate polluters financed by your banks,” the representative stated.

“When it comes to racial justice, I see many of you having these commitments to just diversify your executive ranks. Good. But I think the American people really, truly want to know, what about the actions that are needed to invest in our communities like mine that you all profited off of that left us with more pollution, decay, and poverty. You all should know and be familiar with the term environmental racism, because for generations, black, brown, indigenous communities have seen the fossil fuel corporations use your banks to finance and construct oil and gas refineries, petrochemical plants and pipeline projects,” Tlaib continued.

These polluting projects haven’t been built in wealthy neighborhoods. As you all know. They have been built on land and front line communities of color contaminated our air, polluting our water for generations to come,” Tlaib concluded in her first round of questioning.

For the second round of questioning, Tlaib asked the executives if they live near a refinery and demanded that they all address racial equity.

What that means is understanding environmental racism and reversing decades of it and halting the damage that you all continue to invest in. Please, I dare you all to come to my district. I offered this even to my members of Congress. Come and smell what my neighbors smell, breathe what they breathe. Tell me then whether or not you will continue financing for oil refineries, because right now it is morally unacceptable,” Tlaib stated.

“If you truly believe in racial justice, then you would make sure that you and your team understand environmental racism in our country. That has been a term used by black and brown communities since the 70s and 80s. So with that, I just ask again, Chairwoman Waters, let’s please follow up and make sure these folks have the information they need to understand this term that is critically important to communities they are directly impacting in a negative way,” Tlaib concluded.

WATCH Squad Member Gets Heated After Questioning Bank Execs below:
Rumble video on website 3:55 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden administration squeezing suburbs out of existence with zoning laws

by Barnini Chakraborty, Senior Investigations Reporter |
| June 03, 2021 07:00 AM

A house with a white picket fence and a big backyard might have been a staple of the American dream once upon a time, but if the Biden administration gets its way, the dream could soon be out of reach for millions of people.

As part of his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, the Biden administration is pushing local governments to allow apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are restricted to single-family homes. The administration claims it's a way to ease a national affordable housing shortage and combat racial injustice in the housing market.

Current zoning laws that favor single-family homes, known as exclusionary zoning, have disproportionately hurt low-income people who can't afford to move to the suburbs, the administration said. Their only choice is living in crowded apartment buildings. Biden's proposal would incentivize local governments to get rid of exclusionary zoning by awarding grants and tax credits to cities that change their zoning regulations.

While the proposal has had some bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, not everyone is on board.

Critics claim the federal government's plan would change the landscape of towns and cities across the country and torpedo the American dream.

"The Biden plan’s backers are hypocrites," former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey said. "Biden himself owns a four-acre lakefront home in upscale Greenville, Delaware, where there is absolutely no public housing, affordable housing, or rentals that accept housing vouchers.

And don’t expect any to be built next door to the Bidens."

She added that Biden "has always had a passion for stately homes and swanky addresses, even buying a 10,000-square-foot mansion that once belonged to the DuPont family, of 19th-century gunpowder wealth. Not exactly the sort of housing setup you’d associate with 'Scranton Joe.'"

Regulating land use and zoning has largely been a function of local government. Critics claim that the Biden administration is now dangling millions of dollars in front of cash-strapped local governments in order to pressure them to change.

"I live in Irving, Texas, or as the leftists in Biden's administration would call it, sprawl," Rep. Beth Van Duyne, a Texas Republican, said. "If you live in a home that dares to have a yard, trees, space between you and a neighbor, and you work hard to pay a mortgage, you are likely a target."

Van Duyne, who was the mayor of Irvine from 2011 to 2017, added that exclusionary zoning is "nothing more than a smokescreen to eliminate single-family zoning and break the burbs."

"Biden's desire to eliminate single-family zoning is for one reason, to destroy our suburban neighborhoods as we know them," Van Duyne told the Washington Examiner. "Democrats are using this Trojan horse of an infrastructure bill to 'reimagine' our communities and erase single-family homeownership and locally run schools."

Van Duyne claims that owning a home is one of the best ways to build and accumulate generational wealth but that in liberal states, "stopping the growth of single-family neighborhoods has already begun to take root."

Zoning laws were relatively rare in the United States until a 1917 Supreme Court decision struck down laws designed to block black people from buying homes and property in white neighborhoods. The decision prompted local governments to adopt various rules that set minimum lot sizes and prevented building apartment complexes in single-family neighborhoods. Some of the urban areas with the tightest restrictions in place include coastal cities such as New York and San Francisco, according to a 2017 University of Pennsylvania study.

While some states haven't budged in decades when it comes to deregulation, others are taking a proactive approach.

Earlier this year, Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker signed a $627 million omnibus bill that included a "housing choice" measure that changed zoning laws to allow local officials to approve zoning changes with a simple majority rather than a two-thirds plurality. The move is the most significant step the state has taken in five decades toward deregulating its housing market.

"That might seem like a small change, but proponents argue it can break major logjams in getting housing built," Scott Beyer, the owner of the Market Urbanism Report, recently wrote.

"The law represents a win for the growing nationwide movement to get state-level preemption of local zoning policy."

Efforts to get "housing choice" passed in 2018 failed after some lawmakers thought it went too far while others argued it didn't go far enough.

In May, the Charlotte City Council took a big step toward eliminating zoning laws that only allow single-family homes that would ultimately make it easier for developers to build duplexes and triplexes in neighborhoods without deed restrictions. Supporters said it would increase the city's housing supply, but councilwoman Renee Johnson said she opposed the measure.

"I think this has opened up the door and the floodgates for gentrification in neighborhoods like Hidden Valley and other vulnerable neighborhoods, so I voted no," she said.

The city council will vote on the final plan at the end of June.

Sacramento, California, also took its first steps to eliminate traditional single-family zoning this year. The city council voted unanimously to proceed with a draft zoning plan that would allow up to four dwelling units, the Sacramento Bee reported.

City officials said the move would help with the housing crisis and making neighborhoods with good schools and pristine parks available to those who could not afford the cost of buying a home in the area.

“Everybody should have the opportunity to not only play in Land Park but to live in Land Park,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg said. “That’s the Sacramento that we all uphold, that we love, that we value, and you better believe this drive for inclusion and equity is the driving force of our city, and it is going to continue well beyond my tenure here.”

Minneapolis has also allowed small apartments to be built in residential areas across the city, and in 2019, Oregon became the first state to end single-family-only zoning in cities of 10,000 or more statewide.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Lagarde, Powell Clash Over Role Of Central Banks In Fighting Climate Change

FRIDAY, JUN 04, 2021 - 11:39 AM
While investors were distracted waiting for Friday's jobs data out of the US, the FT's Gillian Tett was mediating a group of the world's most powerful central bankers - including the PBOC's Yi Gang, ECB's Christine Lagarde, BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens and François Villeroy de Galhau, the head of the Central Bank of France - who had gathered to discuss the role that central banks can play in combating climate change during the Bank of International Settlements' "Green Swan" virtual conference.

Something interesting happened after Lagarde stepped up to assert that central banks have an obligation to do whatever they can to combat climate change under their mandate, which typically extends to maintaining stable prices and healthy labor markets. But a few minutes later, she met unexpected resistance from the Fed's Jerome Powell, who asserted that the Fed doesn't have a role to play in setting climate policy, a role typically reserved for the federal government.
“We would be failing on our mandate if we did not account for climate change when it comes to understanding and measuring inflation," Lagarde said. “If we do not see that climate change could impair monetary policy transmission. We would be failing on our mandate if we not measure the impact that climate change has on the assets that we hold, on the assets that we buy, and on the collateral that we have in stock...My hope is very much that we will have a broad consensus on the part of all members of the Governing Council that climate change has to be taken into account, has to be factored in throughout the whole range of our activities," Lagarde said.

Before Powell was called on to speak, the PBOC's Yi Gang briefly discussed the PBOC's efforts to "encourage" environmentally conscious investing in China (which remains the world's biggest polluter).

Then Powell started by saying there was "no doubt" that climate change poses a serious threat "for all of us". But "in the United States, our society's overall response to climate change will have to come from elected officials."

As for the role of central banks, "it will vary across countries...but at the Fed we see our role as an important one that is tied closely to our existing mandates. While we don't have a secondary mandate to support the overall economic policy of the government..."

"We're undertaking a broad plan of careful analysis, significant public engagement, and great transparency with regard to our role in addressing climate-related financial risks. You asked about monetary policy, well there's no question that climate change...can effect the outlook for the economy, can affect monetary policy...but I would say that today climate change is not something we consider when setting monetary policy. We are exploring what climate change's implications are for our supervisory, regulatory and financial stability regulatory facilities," Powell said.

Tett responded by doubling down, asking Powell "you don't think you have a mandate to act as a cheerleader..." for policy choices that the private sector can use to fight climate change?

Yet, Powell insisted "we are not, and we do not seek to be, climate policy makers as such. We have a very specific mandate, and precious independence...which has served the public well...that's not up to us...but nonetheless I do think our work can indirectly educate the public and also I would think inform other parts of the government in the actions they are assigned to assess."

The clash is notable in that the world doesn't often see the ECB and the Fed, which have longstanding ties, disagree in such a public manner, even if it is only over a technicality. It's worth noting that in recent months, the Fed has taken a more active role in climate change oversight with the creation of two internal committees aimed at exploring the issue and by joining the global Network for Greening the Financial System. Though all of this is consistent with what Powell said about the Fed exploring how climate change might impact the Fed's regulatory duties.

View: https://youtu.be/Vc7_e71lzZQ
1:44:15 min

Of course, if the Fed changes its mind and decides that it is, in fact, obligated to engineer monetary policy with an eye toward supporting Biden's "green agenda", he could simply hike interest rates, which would hammer the coal industry.
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marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsqaFE8rdbg
8:21 min

Mark Levin: Tlaib's Inciting an INSANE "Environmental Racist" Witch Hunt

•Jun 4, 2021



BlazeTV


Rashida Tlaib sees racism under every rock and uses her congressional soapbox to espouse her call to class warfare at every turn. Her latest crusade focuses on "Economic Racism." Lack of clean air? That's environmental racism. Lack of clean water? Environmental racism. A higher death rate among Detroit's black population during COVID? You guessed it - Environmental Racism. Now, Mark takes her to task for her misleading rhetoric: while her numbers may be real, the reasons behind them are anything but racism. In fact, they are the result of failed one-party democrat-run cities.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Climate progressives launch first action against Biden amid growing frustration

BY HANNA TRUDO - 06/04/21 08:00 AM EDT 107

Climate progressives launch first action against Biden amid growing frustration

© UPI Photo

The Sunrise Movement’s relationship with the Biden administration may soon be on ice.

The progressive climate coalition is gearing up to stage a protest outside the White House on Friday in an attempt to persuade President Biden to rethink his bipartisan negotiation strategy with Republicans over their infrastructure plans. Biden is slated to hold another round of talks with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), the lead GOP negotiator, later that day.

The public demonstration represents a striking tactical and tonal shift from the organization’s prior approach to the administration.

Despite being fervent in their push for top progressive policy ideals like the Green New Deal, the group's leaders have generally communicated through official channels with the White House. Their outside-in method has allowed them to build a productive relationship with senior officials, with some working diligently to form key alliances early on in Biden's presidency.

That appears to be changing. Now, the group’s leaders are starting to direct anger openly toward Biden, setting the stage for a potential rift in the collaborative relationship.

"This is the first Sunrise Movement escalated action directly targeting Biden at the White House since he entered the presidency," a statement from the organization read. "But definitely will not be the last."

The outdoor event is expected to draw some 50 attendees, including several who are “willing to risk arrest,” said a source involved in the planning. Organizers are already discussing plans for a bigger protest later this month, though by that time it's possible Democrats on Capitol Hill will have started moving forward on infrastructure legislation without Republicans.

Before the gathering, activists in the youth-focused organization drafted a few specific demands, including asking Biden to meet with Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement's executive director, as well as constituents over the issue.

Leaders are also aiming to press the president to move forward with a "fully funded" Civilian Climate Corps, a newly proposed program loosely modeled after a bill brought forth by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Biden administration officials have mostly been receptive to working alongside progressives pushing for a variety of special interests. Across policy areas, many on the left expressed enthusiasm for several hires announced by the White House, including some who worked on joint task forces formed with Biden’s campaign and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during the Democratic presidential primary. Early in the administration, Sunrise Movement leaders were in contact with Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s office, among other senior officials.

“I was invited to the Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce to help Biden craft policy that was in line with what is necessary to meet the crises facing our nation," Prakash said in a statement. "Biden moved towards us, promising us a future, and in exchange, we worked tirelessly to get him elected. We held up our side of the deal, but now that Biden is in power, that promise of co-governance with progressives and young people has disappeared."

"He’s spent more of his time meeting with a Republican Party who to this day contests he is the democratically elected president," Prakash added.

The source involved in the planning for Friday's protest said leaders “still have correspondence” with the White House’s climate team, but stressed that, in their view, Biden’s ongoing conversations with Republicans sends the wrong message — a sentiment that has been apparent for several weeks as the administration's proposed American Jobs Plan remains under consideration for revisions.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Shocking Speech by Thierry Baudet about 2010 Document Exposes Rockefeller Foundation and Globalist Scheme (VIDEO)

By Kari Donovan
Published June 6, 2021 at 3:09pm

Rair Foundation first broke the story by posting a video of a speech by the Dutch MP, Thierry Baudet, who refers to a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation Report that laid out the pandemic and its aftermath, that is eerily like what the world has just experienced.

Baudet is a rising star in European conservative politics.

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Baudet said, “Even after the Pandemic is over, the researchers wrote the authoritarian control would remain with supervision of the citizens and their activities.”

Here is a partial transcript of what he said, but you have to watch the whole thing for yourself:

One of the most influential NGOs in the world developed several scenarios for the future of technology and international development. This report and in this report the Rockefeller Foundation describes the so-called “lick step Scenario” on the coming of a worldwide pandemic and its aftermath. Already in 2010, according to the scenario- and I have it here with me- the Chinese would be the first, to begin with, “required quarantine for all citizens.. that is a quote- and immediate and almost heretic closing off of all borders.​
National leaders would strengthen their power with laws, rules, and restrictions from the requirement of wearing masks to body temperature checks to enter their stations, planes, buildings, It all comes in here. But it doesn’t even stop there.
Rumble video on website 5:12 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

California could see blackouts this summer, utility experts warn

Officials fear a hot summer or surge in wildfires could wreak havoc with the state's power grid.

By The Center Square Staff
By Cole Lauterbach
Updated: June 6, 2021 - 9:48pm

A hot summer or surge in wildfires likely are to cause blackouts across California this summer, according to a panel of public and private officials involved with maintaining the state’s power grid.

The Sacramento Press Club last week hosted Robert Foster, former Mayor of Long Beach and former president of Southern California Edison; state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, who also sits on the state’s wildfire prevention group; Elliot Mainzer, the president of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO); and Susan Kennedy, a former aide to Govs. Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The panel discussion centered around the state’s perennial issue of rolling brownouts and blackouts in time of high power need or outages caused by wildfires.

Attendees were resigned to the thought the grid will keep a steady flow of wattage this summer.

Still, California residents will see power interruptions in the event of a prolonged stretch of heat or another interruption caused by power lines being damaged by fires.

“If we get into another west-wide heating event like we saw last year, our numbers tell us the grid will be stressed again,” Mainzer said. “We will be reaching out actively to consumers to conserve energy.”

Foster praised a recent proposal to prioritize local power delivery in times of high need over “wheel-through” wattage, or power that’s passing through on its way to other states. Utilities in neighboring states have criticized the move, saying it exports California’s power struggles to other states.

After a year of what many call the nation’s most strict COVID-19 mitigations, Kennedy said California Gov. Gavin Newsom could see an outsized backlash over rolling blackouts even though he’s hardly to blame.

“Voters don’t care why something occurred, they just want it fixed,” Kennedy said. “Don’t underestimate how pissed off people will get after a year and a half of facing some of the worst times of their lives, how trigger happy they would be about blaming folks in government.”

McGuire criticized PG&E, the state’s largest utility provider, for not addressing the miles of transmission lines that remain in areas deemed at severe risk for wildfires.

“I don’t want to lose sight of the most immediate issues Californians are facing right now,” he said. “They want the public utilities commission, they want the Legislature, they want the governor to keep their damned lights on. That’s it. They want to be able to turn on their air conditioners in extreme heat days and they want to send their kids to school.”

Foster warned that a shift from fossil fuels at a large level could result in unaffordable electrical bills.

“We’re asking people to go to electric vehicles, we’re asking them to electrify their homes, electrify the ports, electrify industry,” he said. “You can’t keep that rate structure in place with that electrification.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Ep41 – Oklahoma Cattle Rancher Andrea Hutchison Sounds the Alarm On How Globalists Are Trying To Regulate Your Burger Out of Existence!

7 June 2021


As the Fauci emails prove, the only difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is 12-24 months. As we’ve told people for almost three decades, Agenda21 is not some crazy conspiracy theory, it’s an actual United Nations strategic plan by globalists to “transform” (where have we heard THAT term before?) our planet under the rubric of “sustainability.”

Oklahoma cattle rancher Andrea Hutchison has been warning people that the globalists have infiltrated the cattle and beef industries (along with every other food creation and processing industry) and are slowly strangling them with burdensome over-regulation that only serves one purpose: to put cattle ranchers out of business.

NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund not only have seats at the table where industry decisions are discussed, they are driving the agenda. Small, independent meatpackers have been driven out of business and corporate consolidations have left our entire supply of beef in the hands of four transnational conglomerates. Competitive markets have been reduced down to one and that remaining market has been grossly distorted by government involvement.

If this all sounds dire, it is. And both Republicans and Democrats are to blame. We expect Democrats to be anti-American, but it’s inexcusable for Republicans to claim to be representing We the People while at the same time working against our interests. Go to Oklahoma Independent Stockgrowers Association and R-CALF USA to learn more about pending legislation and to sign petitions to preserve and protect our beef.

Here is a list of every Republican on the House and Senate Agriculture Committees.

Contact them and tell them to stop playing politics with your food!

HOUSE
SENATE
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Exclusive – Caught on Tape: Democrat Lawmaker Admits Biden ‘Infrastructure’ Plan Is Really About Climate Change
3,227
built environment
HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images
SEAN MORAN8 Jun 20212,123

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) admitted during a recent town hall that President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan focuses more on climate change than the built environment, despite his calling for bipartisan support for the partisan legislation.

Malinowski, who represents New Jersey’s seventh district, said much of Biden’s infrastructure plan focuses on climate change and other items unrelated to building roads, tunnels, and bridges.

The seventh district serves as a prime target for Republicans to flip during the 2022 midterm elections; Malinowski beat Republican state Sen. Thomas Kean Jr. in 2020 by only 1.2 percent. Hillary Clinton won the district by one percent in 2016 and Republicans have traditionally held the district for decades.

The two-term Democrat said during a June 4th “Congress in Your Kitchen” virtual town hall that the Biden infrastructure plan contains many items that many Americans would not consider infrastructure during the town hall. He noted many Republicans had criticized Biden’s proposal for not focusing more on traditional infrastructures, such as roads, tunnels, and bridges.

He said:
President Biden, on the other hand, proposed a bill that defines infrastructure more broadly… and, on top of that, included some things that probably most people would not think of as infrastructure but that many of us think are really important for the country.
Malinowski also said he hopes to lead America from fossil fuels to clean energy, which could have a devastating impact on New Jersey jobs.

Malinowski’s clean energy transition could endanger up to 142,000 jobs at risk and increase energy costs by up to $292 per month.

He outlined, “On top of that, what I’m really pushing hard for is an investment that will help America lead the world in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.”

He said that America should also invest in electric cars and electric car charging stations.

The Democrat added that the infrastructure bill has “got” to include some clean energy provisions.

Malinowski’s admission about the nature of the infrastructure bill comes at a time the Biden administration desperately tries to strike a deal with Republicans. Democrats’ legislative agenda has hit a grinding halt after they passed their partisan $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill earlier this year, and their ability to pass an infrastructure bill could determine if Democrats could hold their historically slim House majority.

Malinowski’s ouster of then-Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ) in 2018 helped Democrats regain their House majority.

Republicans have railed against the infrastructure for supporting a bill that spends less than one-quarter on roads, tunnels, and bridges.

Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), the House Budget Committee ranking member, told Breitbart News that the infrastructure bill contains only 13 percent that would amount to physical infrastructure.

Smith said:
Now, when you look at this infrastructure bill, they’re trying to call it an infrastructure bill, but in fact out the 2.3 trillion dollars, less than six percent is actually going towards roads and bridges, less than two percent is going towards airports, dams, less than five percent goes to broadband. Less than 13 percent is going to infrastructure.
Malinowski’s confession about the partisan makeup of the legislation also runs counter to comments he also made last week when he wished for the infrastructure to have bipartisan support.

“It would be better if we did this as a unified Congress, as a unified country,” Malinowski told CNN the day before his virtual town hall. “But the bottom line is, one way or another, we have to do it. We have to deliver.”

Malinowski said this week that the passage of the infrastructure bill, which remains currently at a standstill, is critical to his reelection.

“We have to deliver for you. We have to deliver for the voters who sent us there. Otherwise, what’s the point of having an election?” said Malinowski.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t6iPAoJp8c
48:07 min

Biden's Hostile Takeover: The Great Reset of America | Glenn TV | Ep. 116
•Premiered 3 hours ago


BlazeTV

Our sacred republic has never been in more danger than it is today. Little by little, industry by industry, the far Left is fundamentally transforming the country we love. And it’s an aggressive, hostile kind of takeover we’ve only seen in some of the world’s darkest societies. Glenn exposes how the Biden administration and Democrats are aggressively scrambling to reset everything: our free and fair voting system, our kids' education, our policing, immigration and border security, our economy, our military, and our energy supply. Finally, Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) joins to discuss how Biden's "woke" policies are threatening America's national security and our way of life.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
(Linked by Revolve Magazine)


CulturalHusbandry Profile picture

CulturalHusbandry

Twitter logo
9 Jun
, 25 tweets, 6 min read
Thread.

Blackrock is buying every single family house they can find, paying 20-50% above asking price and outbidding normal home buyers. Why are corporations, pension funds and property investment groups buying...


If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension FundYield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices.
If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund

entire neighborhoods out from under the middle class? Lets take a look. Homes are popping up on MLS and going under contract within a few hours. Blackrock, among others, are buying up thousands of new homes and entire neighborhoods.



Financial Planning & Investment Management | BlackRock
Financial Planning & Investment Management | BlackRock
So who is Blackrock? Only the worlds largest asset manager and the leading proponent of The Great Reset. Theyre looking to redistribute -Get this- $120Trillion dollars. The entire wealth of the worlds middle class and poor combined several times over.



The Great Reset: BlackRock Is Fueling A $120 Trillion Transformation On Wall St. | OilPrice.comSustainability is the name of the game for today’s investors, and with trillions of dollars up for grabs, it pays to take the plunge
The Great Reset: BlackRock Is Fueling A $120 Trillion Transformation On Wall St. | OilPrice.com

As an example, a 124 new home neighborhood was bought in its entirety in Texas. Average Americans were outbid to a tune of $32million. Homes sold at an avg if 20% above listing. Now the entire neighborhood is made up of SFR's. What are SFR's??


If You Can't Beat Institutional Real Estate Investors, Join ThemInstitutional real estate investors are buying up single family homes and making it more difficult for individual buyers. Join them!
If You Can't Beat Institutional Real Estate Investors, Join Them

Single Family Rentals. Now, your potential lower to middle class home owner is positioned to be a permanent renter. This matters because for the lower and middle class owning a home is the most major part of any financial success, and future upward mobility.

This is wealth redistribution, and it ain’t rich people’s wealth that’s getting redistributed. It’s normal American middle class, salt of the earth wealth heading into the hands of the worlds most powerful entities and individuals. The traditional financial vehicle gone forever.

Home equity is the main financial element that middle class families use to build wealth, and black rock, a federal reserve funded financial institution is buying up all the houses to make sure that young families can’t build wealth.

Thats right!

FEDERAL RESERVE FUNDED FINANCIAL INSTITUTE.

Let that sink in for a minute. Got it? They’re using your tax dollars to **** over the lower and middle class, and its permanent. Not 1 Pres. administration of bullshit. This is a fundamental reorganization of society.

So where does this position the average American in 30 years when its a given that every new neighborhood is to be bought up whole so they can be utilized as SFR's? It positions them as peasants. Being poor can be temporary condition bettered by upward mobility.

In the US and other nations home ownership is often the 1st and most vital step. This can provide for generational wealth and success. But as permanent, guaranteed renters youre pissing away a lifetime of equity and the chance for mobility. You just become a peasant.

The Great Reset is real. It is happening. This will be the greatest transfer of wealth, and greatest consolidation of power in the history of mankind. If they get away with it revolution will be the only cure. It will be awful. Wake up. Get active. Stop this now!!

This is warfare. Make no doubt about it. Lloyds bank in London is doing it, as is every great financial institute across the world. This must be stopped. Its a greater threat than the slow creep of Communism, BLM or anything else you can think of COMBINED. It is a death stroke.

Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street control 20 trillion dollars worth of assets. Blackrock alone has a 10 billion a year surplus. That means with 5-20% down they can get mortgages on 130-170k homes every year. Or they can outright buy 30k homes per year. Just Blackrock.

Now imagine every major institute doing this, because they are. It can be such a fast sweeping action that 30yrs may be overshooting it. They may accomplish feudalism in 15 years.
People will say "They can't just piss away money on buying tens of thousands of houses that are all at a loss."

WRONG. YOU AND I CANT DO THAT.

They are fronting the federal reserve, and are financed by an endless stream of freshly created fiat money.

And whats the global reserve currency???? Oh ya... green funny money.

You may ask "Suppose the banks wont finance new housing?"

Or

"But Companies are buying them for way above asking price, can it last?"
Well, the banks are controlled by and in bed with the same cabal buying everything up. You think this will be corrected by market forces when it is a financial and political pincher movement pushed by the same cabal that stole the 2020 election & hid COVID Truth?
You are ****ed.


America’s Largest Landlord Adds $1 Billion for Its House HuntThe agreement between Invitation Homes, the country’s largest rental-home owner, and Boston property investor Rockpoint will add enough cash to buy about 3,500 homes.https://www.wsj.com/articles/invitation-rockpoint-forge-1-billion-rental-home-venture-11602067500?mod=article_inline




Meet Your New Landlord: Wall StreetBig investors transform suburban neighborhoods by buying up single-family homes and renting them out. Their bet: the U.S. homeownership rate will stay low and rents will continue to rise.https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-your-new-landlord-wall-street-1500647417?mod=article_inline


Read.



If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension FundYield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices.https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-the-buyer-might-be-a-pension-fund-11617544801?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/uTagTOQQgI

corporateletscompany.co.uk/lloyds-bank-pl…



Project Generation: Lloyds Bank to become private landlordLloyds Bank has revealed to The Financial Times that it is to enter into the residential property market as a large private landlord.
Project Generation: Lloyds Bank to become private landlord



How corporations are buying up houses — robbing families of the American DreamOne morning in 2012, Phoenix real-estate developer Geoff Jacobs was playing golf when he got a surprising phone call. One of his employees, trying to bid on a house they wanted at auction, told him…https://nypost.com/2020/07/18/corporations-are-buying-houses-robbing-families-of-american-dream/amp/




Is Wall Street upending Nashville neighborhoods? These professors want to know
Is Wall Street upending Nashville neighborhoods? These professors want to know



When Wall Street Is Your LandlordWith help from the federal government, institutional investors became major players in the rental market. They promised to return profits to their investors and convenience to their tenants. Investors…https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/single-family-landlords-wall-street
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson: G7 Nations Must Build Back in a Greener, More Gender Neutral and Perhaps More Feminine Way (VIDEO)

By Cristina Laila
Published June 11, 2021 at 11:05am

IMG_2041.jpg


The G7 leaders posed for a photo in Cornwall ahead of the summit on Friday.
Joe Biden looked clueless as usual.

VIDEO:
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1403346731593617416
2:43 min

Since Boris Johnson’s young wife wasn’t a part of the photo op, Joe Biden decided to grab onto French President Emmanuel Macron and get in his personal space.

Joe Biden just can’t help himself. He can’t keep his hands to himself.

VIDEO:
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1403345536414015492
.14 min

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson kicked off the summit by telling the other leaders his vision of a new world order run by Communists.

The “Great Reset” according to Johnson is both gender neutral, yet feminine.

“We’re building back better together – building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal…and in a more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way!” Boris Johnson said.

VIDEO (via Grabien News):
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1403372579394576389
2:09 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

‘Climate Diplomacy Veterans’: G7 Leaders To Launch ‘Climate Justice’ Crisis Amid Mass COVID Vaccination Compliance

By Alicia Powe
Published June 11, 2021 at 7:45pm
hoax.jpg

Climate change is a looming, apocalyptic crisis akin to the COVID pandemic that can only be mitigated by rich G7 countries redistributing their wealth to undeveloped nations, modeling the Chinese economy and developing a one-world government, a panel of “climate diplomacy veterans” warned ahead of the Group of Seven Nations Summit.

The global economic lockdown and nearly universal compliance of mask and vaccine mandates ushered during the coronavirus pandemic has set a precedent for similar regulations to be imposed to deter the existential threat posed by climate change, Dr. Rachel Kyte, dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston, argued Wednesday in a G7 Summit briefing, “Rich Countries and Their Climate Promises”

The climate justice “hook is provided by the pandemic. We have learned that you can’t protect yourself unless you protect everyone, we’ve learned that in our communities in the developed world,” Kyte explained. “Still, we struggle to manage the pandemic with policies that really reflect that piece of learning. That same learning is at the heart of the climate crisis.

“We cannot protect ourselves if emissions are still coming up from anywhere in the world. This truly is a race where everybody has to cover, has to complete the race. Everybody has to follow the – get over the finish line.”

Implementation of so-called “climate justice” relies on the G7 nations’ ability to vaccinate its populace and distribute their vaccines to undeveloped nations, explained Kyte, the World Bank Group’s former special envoy to the Paris Agreement negotiations and a former special representative of the United Nation’s Secretary-General.

“I don’t see how you engage in a global negotiation on climate change if the North will not share its vaccines,” she said. “How many vaccines will you put on planes in the next seven days? Because I think you can’t strip out success on climate negotiations from what’s going on for people around the world.”

Kyte implored G7 leaders must capitalize on the pandemic and incite global panic over greenhouse gas emissions with an unprecedentedly aggressive climate justice campaign to finally achieve climate justice.

G7 leaders must “indicate that the developed world will actually share its vaccine surplus and share it now, so that countries can actually improve their performance against the virus, and that the whole world starts to move through,” she said. “Otherwise, we’re just going to have variants and mutants coming back and coming back, and we’re just never going to escape.

“This is a microcosm of the same dynamic of climate change. Unless we can wean the entire world off of coal, until we can move everybody into systems where they can get affordable, reliable, clean energy, there’s no way that we are going to do okay.”

Director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, who trained diplomats from the Global South who inserted the 1.5 C goal in the Paris Agreement, blasted the leaders of G7 nations for not forming a one-world government, warning wealth redistribution amongst the biggest economies to undeveloped nations is crucial to curtailing the pandemic and achieving sustainable climate justice.

“Effectively, we don’t have a global government. We have the United nations with 200 countries meeting, talking, discussing things, but that’s not government,” Huq lamented. “Unfortunately, what these leaders have demonstrated so far is they see themselves as the leaders of their own countries, and protecting their own budgets and their own citizens. This is starkly evident in the COVID-19 situation, where they’re vaccinating their own populations and they don’t care about the rest of the world.”

View: https://youtu.be/h1_rjl4H4s0
59:16 min

RELATED: Eco-INSANITY: University Bans This Popular Food To Stop "Climate Change" (VIDEO)

“To me, the greatest person that we need to be thinking of and listening to is the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who is putting this point to her parents and her elders, are you going to be able to deal with this global problem or not? So far, they’ve failed the challenge. I’m still hoping that they might be able to rise to it in the next few days.”

Huq railed against former President Donald Trump for refusing to bow to climate alarmism during his tenure in the White House.

“The President of the United States of America, four years ago left the Paris Agreement and caused us to go backward on the issue of climate change. We are much worse off now, four years after Mr. Trump,’ he said. “Now, it’s very good that Mr. Biden is back in the White House and that he has rejoined the Paris Agreement, but there’s a lot of catching up to do by the United States of America. It was the President of the United States of America who took the US out and caused a lot of damage to the rest of us. Never forget that.”

Reports of China being the most polluted country in the world are premised on misinformation, the panel claimed.

“Who is number one in cumulative emissions? The United States of America. So, when we talk about these kinds of issues of the $100 billion and who has to do how much on mitigation and so forth, do not fall into that trap of saying China is the biggest polluter and the US is second.

It’s actually the reverse and that puts a different framework on all of these discussions,” claimed Mark Hertsgaard, executive director at Covering Climate Now and environment correspondent for The Nation magazine.

In addition to a one-world government, achieving climate justice requires the establishment of a multilateral banking system while $100 billion is allocated annually from advanced economies to developing countries, Kyte asserts, because, “We only have one planet, so everybody’s got to be in the same journey.”

“[Undeveloped nations] need to have access to aid and technical assistance bilaterally, but also they need a multilateral development bank system that is pushing all in one direction. They need to signal what else they’re going to do to relieve countries of their debt so that countries can manage their way through one threat in plain sight, which is already here, which is the pandemic, and the one that’s already here and will come – will be even worse, which is climate change.”

Climate justice is explicitly on the agenda at the annual G7 Summit Friday in Britain, where leaders of the seven richest per-capita nations on earth are meeting.

The historic climate justice push comes after a report published in October by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development warns of an imminent “climate emergency lockdown.”

“The world may need to resort to lockdowns again – this time to tackle a climate emergency,” reports Mariana Mazzucato, founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. “Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban the consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.

While a single individual has yet to die from climate change, the WBCSD, like the climate diplomacy veterans, conflates climate with the manufactured COVID pandemic.

“Many think of the climate crisis as distinct from the health and economic crises caused by the pandemic,” the report states. “But the three crises – and their solutions – are interconnected.”
 

von Koehler

Has No Life - Lives on TB
There's only one problem with their thinking: the premise that "global warming" is harmful and man made is completely false.

CO 2 is plant food. The Earth goes through regular cycles of warming and cooling.

Actually the planet is currently descending into a cooling period and mankind can neither cause climate changes or prevent them.

What these people are really about is imposing their dystopian vision of a depopulated planet, ruled by them.

What is needed are a new breed of politician who will deny this "climate change" nonsense.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden’s Climate Change Stance Exposes A Delusional Administration

It's no wonder Biden joked to the troops, 'I keep forgetting I'm president.' It's long past time for him to start remembering.

Gabe Kaminsky

By Gabe Kaminsky
JUNE 12, 2021

In an address this week to U.S. military forces at the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, President Joe Biden tried to convince troops climate change is “the greatest threat facing America.”

“You know, when I went over in the Tank in the Pentagon, when I first was elected Vice President, with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were — the greatest physical threats,” Biden said. “And this is not a joke:

You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming. Because there’ll be significant population movements, fights over land, millions of people leaving places because they’re literally sinking below the sea in Indonesia; because of the fights over what is arable land anymore.”

While some might be shocked at such a claim — one that ignores a whole host of legitimate foreign and domestic threats facing America today — Biden’s rhetoric aligns with his prior remarks, as well as the sentiments from his administration.

In October 2020, in an interview with Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor in the Obama administration, Biden said climate change is the “number one issue facing humanity.” Forget Russia, Communist China, the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, the Black Lives Matter organization, Antifa, Islamic terrorism, or the nation’s suicide and mental health crisis. There is no shortage of items more threatening than an issue both highly politicized and steeped in ambiguous science.

Vice President Kamala Harris noted in her May commencement speech at the Naval Academy that there are three notable threats our military will be tasked to deal with: COVID-19 and preventing pandemics, intelligence hacking, and — you guessed it — climate change. Of course, Harris has yet to take seriously her role as a world leader, and America eagerly awaits her presence as border liaison.

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee soon after Biden’s address. Foreseeably placed in an odd position by the president, Milley was unwilling to take a firm stance against Biden.

“The president is looking at it from a much broader angle than I am,” Milley testified. “I’m looking at it from a strictly military standpoint. And from a strictly military standpoint, I’m putting China and Russia up there.”

But in a more clear fashion, Austin aligned with Biden. Indeed, his opening statement mentioned the phrase “climate change” 15 times. It was nothing out of left field for the defense secretary, however. After all, it was Austin who spoke at the Leaders Summit on Climate in April and called climate change an “existential threat.”

“Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does,” Austin said, in addition to, “climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.”

Milley and Austin’s remarks are more guarded than Biden and Harris’s but still point to a White House inadequately communicating what represents the greatest crisis facing the United States.

Still, while migrants cross the border in numbers unseen in decades, the White House blames climate change for the surge instead of its Remain in Mexico repeal and flimsy stance that signals to illegals that they will face fewer consequences for breaking the law in Biden’s America.

Biden has been more focused on appeasing the far-left wing of the party that thinks we will drop dead if we don’t start devouring insects or buying exorbitant electric cars. To the administration, killing jobs over climate orders, joining a costly international agreement, offering climate change as infrastructure, touting trillion-dollar federal plans, and appointing John Kerry as a climate envoy with no scientific experience are all deemed as more pertinent than any legitimate threats.

Even the U.S. Army has joined the energy bandwagon, releasing a memo titled “U.S. Army: Addressing Climate Change Threats” that states climate change is a “serious threat to U.S. National security interests and defense objectives” and “The Army has a lot to be proud of, yet there is a lot of work to continue to operate efficiently across extreme weather and climate conditions.”

Still, data indicates climate change is not the threat that members of the Democratic Party claim it is. As energy expert Marc Morano pointed out to the Federalist in March, “The alleged ‘climate emergency’ is merely a premise for achieving the political goals that the left has sought for decades.” The aim? Expanding the role of government until it has been involuntarily injected into our homes. And as long as the left operates in a vacuum of idealism and denial, it will continue to hurt the American people.

It is no wonder Biden joked to the troops and said, “I keep forgetting I’m president.” It’s long past time for him to start remembering.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Joe Biden Goes Global with $40 Trillion ‘Build Back Better for the World’ Infrastructure Plan
379
U.S. President Joe Biden poses for a picture during a meeting with Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson (not pictured) ahead of the G7 summit Carbis Bay Hotel, Carbis Bay, Cornwall, Britain, Thursday June 10, 2021. (Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP)
Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP
CHARLIE SPIERING12 Jun 20213,109

President Joe Biden will announce during talks with world leaders at the G7 summit on Saturday a global $40 trillion infrastructure plan to “Build Back Better for the World.”

During their meeting, World leaders at the G7 summit plan to meet about the importance of a “fair, sustainable, inclusive global economy,” including a discussion about China.

The White House previewed the initiative in a call with reporters, promoting a plan that would compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. (A White House official branded Biden’s Build Back Better for the World proposal as “B3W” as opposed to China’s “BRI.”)

“We’ve seen the Chinese government demonstrate a lack of transparency, poor environmental and labor standards, and a course of approach that’s left many countries worse off,” a senior official said.

Biden’s plan would offer a different option for the world, the official noted, competing with China by offering a plan with the “highest labor and environmental standards.”

“This is about providing an affirmative, positive, alternative vision for the world than that is presented by China and, in some similar ways but also in some different ways, Russia,” the official said.

The White House stated that Biden would work with Congress to increase overseas infrastructure financing and coordinate funding from other G7 nations and the private sector to help fund infrastructure for low- and middle-income countries.

They cited a needed $40 trillion investment estimation by the World Bank through 2035 for their price tag.

“[W]e’re aiming for an ambitious and credible scale,” an official said.

One official noted that the G7 nations will also discuss the problems with China’s practice of forced labor in Xinjiang.

“The point is to send a wake-up call that the G7 is serious about defending human rights and that we need to work together to eradicate forced labor from our products,” the official said.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Macron to Joe Biden: “What We Need is Cooperation – I Think It’s Great to Have a US President Who is Part of the Club” – Biden Nods in Agreement (VIDEO)

By Cristina Laila
Published June 12, 2021 at 11:28am
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Joe Biden sat down with French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday at the G7 summit in Cornwall, England.

Emmanuel Macron clearly had the upper hand in the conversation and demanded cooperation from the United States.

In a sign of weakness, Joe Biden nodded in agreement as Macron told him the US’s role in world.

“What we need is cooperation. I think it’s great to have a US President who is part of the club and you are willing to cooperate and I think what you demonstrated is that leadership is partnership,” Macron said as Biden nodded in agreement.

Pathetic.

VIDEO:
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1403715607766474752
.29 min

On Friday, Joe Biden’s message to the world was: “America last.”

Biden shuffled in the back of the pack as G7 leaders took a photo with Queen Elizabeth.
IMG_2066-1.jpg
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

"It Won't Be Pleasant" - Mark Carney Unveils Dystopian New World To Combat Climate 'Crisis'

SATURDAY, JUN 12, 2021 - 11:30 PM
Authored by Peter Foster via NationalPost.com,

What Carney ultimately wants is a technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism...


In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney, former governor both of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a “climate emergency” that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom, industry and corporate funding.

Carney’s views are important because he is UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is also an adviser both to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the next big climate conference in Glasgow, and to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Carney has been front and centre in the promotion of a political agenda known as the “Great Reset,” or the “Green New Deal,” or “Building Back Better.” All are predicated on the claim that COVID, and its disruption of the global economy, provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not just to regulate climate, but to frame a more fair, more diverse, more inclusive, more safe and more woke world.

Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.

The agenda’s objectives are in fact already being enforced, not primarily by legislation but by the application of non-governmental — that is, non-democratic — pressure on the corporate sector via the ever-expanding dictates of ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) and by “sustainable finance,” which is designed to starve non-compliant companies of funds, thus rendering them, as Carney puts it, “climate roadkill.” What ESG actually represents is corporate ideological compulsion. It is a key instrument of “stakeholder capitalism.”

Carney’s Agenda is promoted by the United Nations and other international bureaucracies and a vast and ever-growing array of non-governmental organizations and fora, especially the World Economic Forum (WEF), where Carney is a trustee. Also, perhaps most surprisingly, by its corporate victims. No one wants to become climate roadkill.

Carney clearly feels himself to be a man of destiny. “When I worked at the Bank of England,” he writes in Value(s), “I would remind myself each morning of Marcus Aurelius’ phrase ‘arise to do the work of humankind’.” One is reminded of French aristocrat and social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon, the “grand seigneur sans-culotte,” who ordered his valet to wake him with similar words: “Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do.”

That is not the only thing Carney has in common with Saint-Simon, who believed that society should be ruled by savants such as himself; an alliance of engineers and other technocratic intellectuals, along with bankers. Carney is very much a banker technocrat, not merely at ease gliding along the corridors of global bureaucratic power, but expert at framing arguments that support an ever-expanding role for his class.

His expansive pretensions first appeared at the Bank of Canada. If the economy is like a game of ice hockey, then central bankers should, ideally, be like Zamboni drivers, whose job is to keep the ice flat (Carney had in fact been a goalie during his academic years at both Harvard and Oxford). At the Bank of Canada, he often seemed like the Zamboni driver who thought he was Wayne Gretzky. He could never resist lecturing private businesses to stop sitting on “dead money,” or telling them they were too timid in the international arena, or advising consumers that they were spending too little, or borrowing too much. He promoted “macroprudence,” the idea that regulators, in their panoptic wisdom, would focus on the forest, not the trees. Now, he wants to establish himself as an intellectual.

Carney has a lot to put straight with the world. According to his new book, and the related BBC Reith Lectures that Carney delivered last year, the three great crises of credit (2008–09 version), COVID and climate are all rooted in a single problem: People in general, and markets in particular, are not as wise, moral or far-seeing as Mark Carney. He sums up this failing as the “Tragedy of the Horizon,” a phrase he concocted for a speech ahead of the 2015 Paris climate conference.

However, Carney is sophistic when it comes to the alleged moral shortcomings of capitalism. It has been one of the most tedious tropes of the left since at least The Communist Manifesto that the rise of commerce would drive out all that is virtuous in society, leaving nothing but the “cash nexus” of trade. One of Carney’s favourite philosophers is Harvard’s Michael Sandel, who produces endless trivial examples suggesting that we have moved from a “market economy” to a “market society.”

“Should sex be up for sale?” Carney thunders, following Sandel. “Should there be a market in the right to have children? Why not auction the right to opt out of military service? Why shouldn’t universities sell admission to raise money for worthy causes?” But the very fact that people reflexively feel uneasy about — or outright reject — such notions entirely disproves his point. People do not believe that everything is, or should be, for sale.

Carney notes the long debate, going back to classical times, on the nature of commercial value. This was theoretically resolved by the “marginalist revolution,” which put paid to the “paradox of value” that puzzled over the (usually) low price of useful water and the (usually) high price of useless diamonds. The marginalists pointed out that commercial value isn’t determined by usefulness or labour input. It is inevitably subjective, based on personal preferences and available resources. There is no paradox. Someone dying of thirst in the middle of the desert might be more than willing to offer a bucket of diamonds for a bucket of water.


Mark Carney is a UN Special Envoy on Climate Action. PHOTO BY TOLGA AKMEN/POOL VIA REUTERS/FILE

However, market valuations are essentially different from moral values, a distinction Carney continually muddles. He misrepresents the marginalist/subjectivist perspective, claiming that it implies that anything not commercially priced is not considered valuable.

“Market value,” he writes, “is taken to represent intrinsic value, and if a good or activity is not in the market, it is not valued.” But who holds such an idiotic view? Nobody “prices” their family, children, friends, community spirit or the beauties of nature, although there is certainly lots of calculation going on in the background. Carney constantly berates “market fundamentalist” straw men who employ “standard economic reasoning” and who believe that people are rational and markets perfect.

He incorrectly claims that Adam Smith — in his first great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments— said that a sense of morality was “not inherent.” In fact, Smith believed that we are born with such a sense, which is then fine-tuned by the society in which we grow up.

However, Carney — like all leftists — leans towards the blank slate, nurture-over-nature perspective because it suggests that human nature might be beneficially reformed under the right (that is, left) social arrangements.

Carney believes our moral sentiments started going astray around the time of the publication of Smith’s better-known book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776, when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to take off. He rightly suggests that one should read both books to gain a full appreciation of Smith’s insights, but he seems to have missed the significance of Smith’s putdown of “whining and melancholy moralists,” his cynicism about “insidious and crafty” politicians, and his thoroughgoing skepticism about those who would “trade for the public good” (that is, the ESG crowd). Moreover, Smith noted that the greatest corrupter of moral sentiments was not commerce but “faction and fanaticism,” that is, politics and religion, which come together in the toxic stew of climate alarmism and ESG.

ESG used to be called Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. The Nobel economist Milton Friedman warned against its subversive nature 50 years ago. He noted that taking on externally dictated “social responsibilities” beyond those directly related to a company’s business opened the floodgates to endless pressure and interference. The big questions are responsibility to whom? And for what?

Carney also typically misrepresents Friedman, suggesting that he claimed that shareholders should rank “uber alles,” and to the exclusion of other legitimate stakeholders such as employees and local communities. Carney claims that “At times, large positive gains could accrue to society if small sacrifices were made on behalf of shareholders.” But by what right would management “sacrifice” shareholders, and who would decide which sacrifices should be made?

Carney admits that the “integrated reporting” required by ESG is a morass: “ESG ratings consider hundreds of metrics, with many of them qualitative in nature… Putting values to work is hard work, but as with virtue, it should become easier with sustained practice.” No need to ask whose version of values and virtue is to prevail.
* * *

Despite his thorough castigation of market society, Carney somehow also believes this “corroded” society is clamouring to make great personal sacrifices for draconian climate actions and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Carney has been a prime pusher of “net-zero,” the notion that climate-related human emissions must be entirely eradicated, buried or offset by 2050 if the world is to avoid climate Armageddon. He claims that net-zero is “highly valued by society.” In reality, the vast mass of people have no clue what it entails; when Carney talks about this version of “society,” he is talking about a small, radical element of it.

Carney peddles the non-sequitur that because the world wasn’t ready for COVID, this confirms that the world is being short-sighted about climate catastrophe. But COVID is an obvious reality; an existential climate catastrophe is a hypothesis (frequently promoted — admittedly with great success — by those with agendas). He claims that “A good introduction to this subject can be found in journalist David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth,” a work heavily criticized even by prominent climate-change scientists for its factual errors and exaggerations. Indeed, even its author admitted its tendentious purpose.

Carney also commends the knowledge and wisdom of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg: “The power of Greta Thunberg’s message lies in the way she drives home both the cold logic of climate physics and the fundamental unfairness of the climate crisis.”

Anybody who cites an anxious 17-year-old as an authority on climate science and moral philosophy should be an object of deep suspicion, but then, according to Carney, climate science is easy. Greta’s “basic calculations” are ones that she could “easily master and powerfully project.” (Carney says he once gave Greta a tour of the Bank of England’s gold vaults. One wonders if she also offered up tips on monetary policy.) But then, in early 2020, Greta demonstrated her complete disconnect from reality when, at the WEF in Davos, she called for an immediate cessation of emissions, which would tank the world economy and potentially kill millions. Even Carney admits deviating from her wisdom on that point.

Far from demonstrating a firm knowledge of the climate system himself, Carney cites scary but misleading statistics. “Since the 1980s,” he writes, “the number of registered weather-related loss events has tripled, and the inflation-adjusted losses have increased fivefold. Consistent with the accelerated pace of climate change, the cost of weather-related insurance losses has increased eightfold in real terms over the past decade to an annual average of $60 billion.”

I asked Professor Roger Pielke, Jr., an expert on climate and economics at the University of Colorado, to comment. He replied “(Carney) has confused economics with weather. The increase in losses he describes is well understood to occur for two main reasons: more wealth and property exposed to loss and better accounting of those losses. To assess trends in extreme weather one should look at weather data, not economic loss data.”


Among Mark Carney’s current responsibilities since leaving the Bank of England as its governor is advising Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. PHOTO BY SEAN KILPATRICK/THE CANADIAN PRESS/FILE

Carney’s confusion is hardly innocent since his Agenda depends on incessantly claiming that “What had been biblical is becoming commonplace.”

Fortunately, Carney has been making claims about worsening weather for long enough that we can assess some of his predictions. In his recent book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Steven Koonin, former undersecretary for science at the Obama-era U.S. Energy Department, cites the speech Carney made to Lloyd’s of London before the Paris climate conference in 2015. The speech was designed to frighten the insurance industry into divestment from fossil fuels, on the basis that many oil and gas reserves would be “stranded” as we exhaust our allowable carbon “budget.” Carney pointed out that the previous U.K. winter had been the “wettest since the time of King George III.” He went on to say, “forecasts suggest we can expect at least a further 10% increase in rainfall during future winters.” For support he cited the U.K. Met Office’s forecast for the next five years. It turned out to be dead wrong. The six winters after 2014 averaged 39-per-cent less rainfall than the 2014 record. Meanwhile a Met Office report in 2018 acknowledged that the “largest source of variability in U.K. extreme rainfalls during the winter months was the North Atlantic Oscillation mode of natural variability, not a changing climate.”

“(I)t’s surprising,” notes Koonin, “that someone with a PhD in economics and experience with the unpredictability of financial markets and economies as a whole doesn’t show a greater respect for the perils of prediction — and more caution in depending upon models.”

During his BBC Reith Lectures last year, on the topic of “How We Get What We Value,” Carney received few challenges from his handpicked questioners, but a couple came from eminent historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson asked Carney why, in his discussion of the climate issue, he made no reference to Bjorn Lomborg (a much more knowledgeable Scandinavian than Greta), and in particular to Lomborg’s book, False Alarm, in which Lomborg establishes — using “official” science — that there is no existential climate crisis, that adapting to climate change is manageable, and that the kinds of policies promoted by Carney are likely to be far more costly than any impact from extreme weather.

Carney of course hadn’t read that book, but he dismissed Lomborg by saying that “it’s 15 or 20 years ago when he first came out with his ‘Don’t worry about the climate.’ How’s that working out for us?” But Lomborg never said “Don’t worry about the climate,” he just suggested that we had to put risks into perspective. Meanwhile Lomborg’s non-alarmist thesis is working out much better than that of doomsayers such as Carney.

This offhand rejection of someone as widely respected as Lomborg exposes the hypocrisy of Carney’s statement in Value(s) that “experts need to listen to all sides…All of us as individuals have a responsibility to be more open and to engage respectfully with different views if we want constructive political debates and to make progress on important issues.” Except, climate-catastrophe dissenters don’t make it into the debate. There can be zero diversity of views on net-zero.

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marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2

Ferguson put another thorny question to Carney at that Reith lecture: He pointed out that since the 2015 Paris agreement, China had been responsible for almost half the increase in global carbon emissions, and it was building more coal capacity in the current year than existed in the entire United States. What did China’s promises of net-zero by 2060 mean, Ferguson asked, if it was “actually leading the pollution charge”? Carney’s non response was that China is the largest manufacturer of zero-emission cars, and the leading producer of renewable energy.

Koonin notes in his book that Carney “is probably the single most influential figure in driving investors and financial institutions around the world to focus on changes in climate and human influences upon it…. So it’s important to pay close attention to what he says.”
* * *
Mark Carney cries crocodile tears at the possible viability of the Marxist perspective in today’s political environment. But if there is one sure sign of a Marxist, it’s a belief that capitalism is — or is about to be – in “crisis.” His new book has an appendix on Marx’s theory of surplus value: that all profits are wrung from the hides of labour. He also cites Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels. In particular he notes “Engels’ pause,” the one period in capitalist history, early in the 19th century, when workers may not have shared the increases in productivity brought about by industrialization.

Carney projects that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (a phenomenon much invoked by the WEF) might bring about a similar period, thus providing a source of political unrest. “(I)t could be generations before the gains of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are widely shared,” he writes. “In the interim, there could be a long period of technological unemployment, sharply rising inequalities and intensifying social unrest… If this world of surplus labour comes to pass, Marx and Engels could again become relevant.”

He rather seems to hope so.

Carney claims powerful parallels between Marx’s time and our own. “Substitute platforms for textile mills, machine learning for the steam engine, and Twitter for the telegraph, and current dynamics echo those of that era. Then, Karl Marx was scribbling the Communist Manifesto in the reading room of the British Library. Today, radical viral blogs and tweets voice similar outrage.”

In fact, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, based on a tract by Engels, in Brussels, not at the British Library, but it’s more important to remember where Marx’s misguided and immutable outrage led: to a disastrous economic and political model that generated poverty and mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile “outrage” is surely a dubious basis for policy.

The outraged are certainly a useful constituency for those seeking power, however, which brings us to the influence on Carney of the man who first tried to put Marxism into practice.

When it comes to the COVID crisis, writes Carney, “We are living Lenin’s observation that there are ‘decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen’.” Strange that Carney would cite one of the most ruthless murderers in history for this rather bland insight, but then Carney’s Agenda is not without its own parallels to Lenin (minus, one presumes, the precondition of rampant bloodshed).

Although Vladimir Lenin didn’t know much about business or economics, he declared that “’Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Carney’s plan is global. “We need,” he claims, “to electrify everything and turn electricity generation green.” The problem is that wind- and solar-powered electricity needs both hefty government subsidies and fossil-fuel backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Green electricity is inflexible, expensive and disruptive to grids.

Carney cites Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction,” but his own version involves not the metaphorical and benign process of market innovation making old technologies redundant, but a deliberate suppression of viable technologies to make way for less reliable and less economic alternatives.

When Lenin wrecked the Russian economy after brutally seizing power in 1917, he was forced to backtrack and allow some private enterprise to prevent people starving. However, he assured his radical comrades that he would retain control of “the commanding heights” of heavy industry. Carney’s plan is to control the global economy by seizing the commanding heights of finance, not by nationalization but by exerting non-democratic pressure to divest from, and stop funding, fossil fuels. The private sector is to become a partner in imposing its own bondage. This will be do-it-yourself totalitarianism. Indeed, companies in our one-party ESG state are already pleading like show-trial defendants, making suicidal net-zero commitments, lest banks cut them off.


Left: A portrait of Karl Marx. Top right: Vladimir Lenin makes a speech in Red Square on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Below right: Teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg delivers brief remarkssurrounded by other student environmental advocates in 2019. Mark Carney draws on all three in his agenda to address the “climate emergency,” writes Peter Foster. PHOTO BY FILE; HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; SARAH SILBIGER/GETTY IMAGES/FILE

To further that end, Carney has helped to start a key organization, the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a collection of central banks and regulators. He has also signed up an ever-growing constituency of activist policy wonks who peddle emissions measurement and certification, eco audits and ESG rankings. This agenda is inevitably appealing to transnational organizations such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, whose empires are all lucratively intertwined with the global governance thrust. In May, the IEA issued a report calling for an immediate end to fossil fuel investment to get to net-zero.

Part of Carney’s strategy is to force “voluntary” standards on banking and industry, then have governments make those standards compulsory. The major accounting firms appear keen to promote the possibility of endless auditing extensions, under which the relatively straightforward metric of money is to be replaced by the infinitely malleable concepts of “purpose” and “impact.”

Carney has also helped turn the accounting screw though “carbon disclosure.” Companies are pressured to make explicit the kind of damage they might suffer if the alarmists’ worst nightmares are realized. Such disclosure is a variant on that famous loaded question “When did you stop beating your spouse?” Instead, carbon disclosure asks the climate equivalent of “If you were to beat your spouse, what sort of injuries might he/she suffer?” Companies must also disclose their plans to deal with the presumed crisis. No company dares to say “We do not believe your apocalyptic forecasts.” They meekly regurgitate the required climate porn about floods and droughts and hurricanes, and make elaborate fingers-crossed emissions-reductions commitments. This in turn leads them into arrangements such as buying emissions offsets, a complex scheme analogous to the medieval Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences. Carbon markets have inevitably led to a surge in work for offset generators, certifiers and auditors. Carney projects this market could be worth $100 billion.

Ironically, earlier this year Carney found himself tangled in the murky metrics of offsets. In 2020, he was appointed a vice chairman with Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management, where he is in charge of “impact investing.” As historian Tammy Nemeth points out in her critical study of the “Transnational Progressive Movement,” of which Carney is a leading light: “(I)t is perhaps ethically murky for someone who is actively working within the UN and advising two different governments on how to change national and global financial rules to be working for a company that will be a direct beneficiary of those rule changes.” Still, who better to lead your company through a minefield than the person who planted the mines?

Except that Carney was hoist with his own petard when he claimed that Brookfield, which has major investments in fossil fuels and pipelines, was already “net-zero” due to emissions “avoided” as a result of its investing in renewable energy. Carney’s claim produced instant refutation and accusations of greenwashing. The Financial Times called it a “major stumble.” A representative of CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) castigated those who attempt to hide “dirty coal issues.” Carney subsequently issued a qualified mea culpa on Twitter: “I have always been — and will continue to be — a strong advocate for net zero science-based targets, and I also recognize that avoided emissions do not count towards them.”

* * *
H. L. Mencken observed that “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule.” So, just how big a threat is the agenda of Mark Carney and his fellow “transnational progressives”?

In his book, Value(s), Carney lays out rationalizations and autocratic pretensions, although he is less forthcoming about his motivations. He writes that “Leaders need to renounce power for its own sake and discern the power of service.” Mencken would be amused.

The shambolic response to COVID of many governments, not least in Canada, and the distinctly unsettled nature of pandemic “science,” have not done much for the credibility of either governments or experts. The Carney-backed agenda is not predicated on working through democratic institutions but on circumventing them. Still, he is also reported to have more conventional political aspirations, namely to join the federal Liberal party and rise within it, very possibly to prime minister. (Carney recently gave a speech at the Liberal national convention, where he pledged his full support.)

He thus has a rather ill-fitting section in Value(s) on “How Canada Can Build Value for All.” It reads like a Liberal party stump speech. According to Carney “We (in Canada) routinely transcend the limitations of our size to model values and policies for other countries.” It’s the old chestnut that no progressive Canadian leader ever seems to tire of: The world needs more Canada.

Carney is a classic example of what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of constructivist rationalism: the belief that the largely spontaneous institutions of the market order should be rejected in favour of more deliberately planned arrangements. Carney is undoubtedly an intelligent man, but Hayek stressed that the thing that intelligent people tend most to overestimate is the power of intelligence — particularly if they happen to be socialists.

Carney is also of the class that philosopher Karl Popper described as “enemies” of an “open society.” Popper noted that social upheavals tend to bring forth prophets who claim to understand the forces shaping the future, and promise salvation if they are given absolute power. Such was Plato’s model — in response to the upheavals of the Peloponnesian War and the first wave of democracy — of a necessary dictatorship in which the rulers lived as communists, using a specially bred military to control a cattle-like populace. Similarly, Marx’s communism was a response to the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution.

Considering the squalor of Manchester in the 1840s, one might forgive Marx and Engels for thinking a radical response was in order. But given the success of capitalism and the horrors of autocratic systems in the intervening period, it takes considerable chutzpah to be promoting net-zero totalitarianism.

Still, Carney claims that great crises demand great plans. He cites Timothy Geithner, secretary of the U.S. Treasury under president Obama, saying “plan beats no plan.” But Geithner was talking about the very real and immediate 2008–09 financial crisis. Carney’s climate plan is much closer to the notion of Soviet central long-term planning. Clearly, when it came to the subsequent welfare of the Russian people, “no plan” would certainly have beaten “plan.”

What Carney ultimately wants, like Saint-Simon, is a technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism. He suggests that “governments can delegate certain aspects of the calibration of specific instruments… to Carbon Councils in order to improve the predictability, credibility and impact of climate policies.” These carbon councils will be able to demand that national governments “comply or explain” when they inevitably fall short of targets. How these commissars will bring governments into line is unclear, although Nobel economist William Nordhaus has suggested “Climate Clubs” that will punish recalcitrants with punitive tariffs.

The threat of punishment will clearly be necessary because governments are doing little more than hypocritical tinkering on climate policy. China and India are hardly even playing lip service to the “climate emergency.” Nevertheless, according to Carney “political technology” is needed to “build a broad consensus around the right goals.” No question of debating the goals, or the science, just building a consensus to support them.

Carney is a man on a mission to change global society. “Business as usual” — the most hated phrase in the socialist lexicon — is “ultimately catastrophic,” he writes. There is too much “misplaced acceptance of the status quo.” But somehow the new socialism will not be socialism as usual. This time it’s different. We can because we must. The threat is too great to permit any argument. It’s surprising that as he was picking out choice quotes from Lenin for his book, Carney missed this one: “No more opposition now, comrades! The time has come to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it. We have had enough opposition!”
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Wizard Of Oz: The Dark Reality That The Deep State Hides From The World

MONDAY, JUN 14, 2021 - 12:00 AM
Authored by Andrew Korybko via OneWorld.press,

The world's permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep states”) together with their perception managers in the Mainstream Media and the education system are hiding a very dark reality from everyone that's much more nefarious than what the Wizard of Oz hid from Dorothy.


The “Deep State”
Nothing is ever as it seems, especially when it comes to the modern world in which everyone lives. “There Are No Democracies Or Autocracies, Only Governments”, I wrote last week, and they're all comprised of permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, or “deep states”, which handle matters largely considered (whether rightly or wrongly) to be beyond the responsibility of the average citizen. This power structure is allied with influential perception managers in the Mainstream Media and the education system in order to hide a very dark reality from everyone that's much more nefarious than what the Wizard of Oz hid from Dorothy. Supporters might say that “it's better this way” since “society needs to be controlled” whereas critics claim that this is highly manipulative and against people's fundamental human rights. Whichever side of the divide one falls on, there's no denying that the real world is much worse than the average person thought.

Bread & Circuses”
All people across the world are strongly encouraged by their governments to go about their daily lives and behave as economically productive and socially responsible citizens. To this end, they're distracted with “bread and circuses” by being kept above the minimum subsistence level at the very least and pressured to focus more on their personal pursuit of happiness than everyone else's. The exception of course is those who show a sincere interest in how the world works and are considered by the so-called “powers that be” as “ideologically reliable” after years of relevant indoctrination in the higher education system. This elite category of citizens learns how the world really operates after getting to peek behind the curtain ahead of actually getting to play a direct role of some sort in managing this secret state of affairs. Sometimes average people learn about the truth on their own or through whistleblowers, but it mostly remains obscured.

Information Warfare
The system upholds itself by obsessively discrediting those intrepid enough to research its inner workings and publicly share their findings as so-called “conspiracy theorists”, “foreign agents”, or whatever else.

That's not to say that there's no such thing as factually unsubstantiated speculation that can legitimately be described as a conspiracy theory or that foreign powers aren't infiltrating society through actual agents and even those of so-called “influence” (the latter of which may not even be conscious of the role that they're playing), but just to point out the techniques used to discredit those who occasionally break through the “deep state's” informational firewall in order to enlighten the masses about what's really going on. In fact, different countries' media outlets are presently waging an intense information war against one another's target audiences in order to convince them that their own “deep states” are lying to them, which adds a hybrid dimension to all of this.

The New Cold War
Behind the “glitz and glamour” of the “everyday life” that most people have been misled by the “deep state” and its perception management allies into believing is “real”, the world has actually been in the midst of a New Cold War since long before its seemingly official commencement in 2014 following the US' simultaneous attempt to more openly “contain” Russia and China in Eastern Europe (Ukraine) and Southeast Asia (the South China Sea). This is also taking place against the backdrop of profound civilizational changes in the information-communication, military technology, economic-industrial, and healthcare fields that will fundamentally revolutionize life as everyone knows it. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic (regardless of whether one believes it's real, fake, or exaggerated) ushered in a new era whereby “deep states” across the world are now actively working to indoctrinate everyone into accepting this “new normal” that was already a long time coming.

The Truth About US-Chinese Relations
For starters, the post-Old Cold War system of American-led unipolarity was structurally unsustainable as proven by historical precedent. It ended a lot sooner than its most passionate supporters expected due to the US' inadvertent subsidization of China's unprecedented historic rise as a result of its leaders' self-interested economic motives that are nowadays dishonestly dismissed as so-called “misplaced optimism” over that country's supposedly “inevitable liberalization” via trade with time. Although some elements of the US' “deep state” consistently sought to subvert and ultimately destroy China as they'd attempted to do since the 1989 Tienanmen Square Color Revolution, they failed to succeed both because of their target's structural resilience and the lack of support from America' economic and political elite that had an interest in indefinitely profiting from China's astronomical rise.

Reinterpreting Russia's Role
As for Russia, it was never the “anti-Western Phoenix” that both its top foreign supporters and detractors alike misportrayed it as for different reasons, but always sought to incorporate itself into the larger Western-led world, albeit in a manner that preserved as much of its sovereignty as possible. This was unacceptable for the West which demanded full submission, especially to the diktats of hyper-liberalism in both the economic and social senses, which prompted President Putin to proudly resist these efforts while nevertheless always keeping his country's olive branch extended. Russia simply wanted to carve out its own comfortable niche in the US' “New World Order”instead of reattempting to following in its predecessor state's revolutionary footsteps by pioneering an entirely new one. The public friction between the US' unipolar demands and Russia's multipolar vision was responsible for the world finally beginning to realize that a New Cold War was afoot by 2007-2008.

Great Power Competition
Trump's much-hyped “trade war” with China was really just him trying to revert back to “the good 'ole days” of the pre-globalizatiion era, though of course modified a bit to accommodate for some of the irreversible processes that had since unfolded across the world in the decades since the US-Chinese detente of the late 1970s changed the very nature of the global economy. He also more confidently popularized the notion of the New Cold War by openly embracing Great Power competition, which never actually went away since the end of the Old Cold War but the illusion thereof was simply a masterful means for managing the perceptions of the global population by getting them to focus less on international affairs and more on the plethora of “bread and circuses” that were produced since 1991. Trump's vision also aligned with the irreversible trend of multipolarity, accelerated as it was by the US' own missteps of the prior decades, which “normalized” the New Cold War.

The Military-Industrial Complex
Amidst all of this and even arguably preceding it for quite some time already, the Great Powers (first and foremost among them the US, China, Russia) were already intensely competing in multiple domains, with only the economic one emphasized in the public sphere (and even that wasn't even widely recognized until Trump's presidency). Militarily, all of them continued to develop new weapons systems, including missile defense shields, hypersonic missiles to piece the former, drones, and space weapons. Their military-industrial complexes have been working on such munitions for a long time already, and the rare instances in which the public accidentally caught sight of them were conveniently described as so-called “UFO sightings” in order to distract the masses from what was really going on. Everyone was aware of this arms race during the Old Cold War, but it became taboo to talk about after 1991, though that's recently changing since it's becoming impossible to deny.

The Information-Communication Industry
The other trend that took place during these decades was in the information-communication industry. The global spread of the internet gave certain countries like the US a strategic edge, especially in intelligence collection, though that's now being challenged by China's cutting-edge technological developments and its much more affordable competitive products. The controversial concept of 5G is just the latest stage of this game. It basically functions as the means for managing the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which will further enhance its pioneers' strategic edge. Although there are reportedly serious health risks associated with it, the nature of the New Cold War is such that no actor can afford to delay this technology's development out of fear of irredeemably falling behind its “peer competitors”. The hullabaloo about Huawei and other Chinese tech companies is simply a public cover for justifying the US' power moves against its top technological competitor.

The “Fourth Industrial Revolution”/”Great Reset”
The IoT will facilitate the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR), which will totally transform mankind's economic-industrial relations considering the increased dependence on autonomous systems. This project was already proceeding apace prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the virus (again, whether or not one believes it's real, fake, or exaggerated) served as the pretext to accelerate its rollout across the world in the most dramatic way possible via what's now widely regarded as the “Great Reset” (GR). The resultant outcome will necessitate greater state intervention in the economy in order to subsidize the newly unemployed masses, which will resemble a comparatively more “socialist” system, even if only imperfectly/superficially Some might even describe the state-corporate partnerships that emerge from them as being more akin to “economic fascism”, which hints at a worldwide competition between “socialist” and “fascist” systems in the future.

COVID-19 Vaccines
Regardless of the semantics that one uses, there's also no denying that mankind itself might be somewhat genetically different in this dark future than it presently is as a result of the experimental gene therapies that are being pushed upon hundreds of millions of people under the pretext of serving as vaccines against COVID-19. There are high hopes that mRNA technology might truly achieve miracles like curing cancer if responsibly utilized, but such technology requires many more years of testing before it has a credible chance of changing the world for the better with the lowest amount of risk possible The COVID-19 pandemic has been exploited by Big Pharma in order to test these treatments in real-time on the largest number of people in order to accelerate this technology's development considering the competitive context of the New Cold War. The West was already far ahead in this field, hence why most of its vaccines are mRNA ones unlike the non-West's.

Collateral Damage”
It can't be known for sure, but Big Pharma (and presumably also its “deep state” backers) probably only sought to experiment on hundreds of millions of people in such a deceptive way because they sincerely thought (whether rightly or wrongly) that the consequences are minimal and that the “collateral damage” can therefore be “manageable”. They might truly believe that any long-term health problems that these experimental gene therapies contentiously marketed as vaccines might cause could in theory be treatable within the next decade following the quantum leap that this technology might make by then as a result of this ongoing real-life mass testing. This line of thinking presupposes that the symptoms of such speculative problems might not occur until the next decade, which is of course a risky bet to make and arguably unethical if that's the case since those being experimented on “in the name of the greater good” might not be aware of it and thus didn't consent.

Genetic Engineering
To expand a bit more on the topic of vaccines, it's questionable whether the mRNA COVID-19 ones even present a viable solution to the pandemic (again, whether or not one believes that it's real, fake, or exaggerated). After all, COVID-19 no longer exists in its “pure” form after having evolved countless times into new strains which might be impossible to perfectly vaccinate against anyhow. This means that the experimental gene therapies that many people have already taken might actually be redundant, ergo the need for more vaccines to supposedly counter forthcoming strains, which in turn actually leads to more real-life testing for Big Pharma to accelerate the perfection of this technology ahead of its foreign competitors. Once that happens, genetic engineering could even lead to “super soldiers” and human-animal hybrids (“chimeras”).

The “Green” (“Depopulation”) Agenda
The other dark reality hidden from the public eye by the “deep state's” perception management operations pertains to the speculative campaign of “depopulation”. There's no denying that there are some influential forces who are in favor of this for ideological (“green”) and “pragmatic” (“overpopulation”) reasons (especially in the context of the unfolding 4IR/GR), but it's unclear whether the ongoing mass vaccination of hundreds of millions of people with experimental mRNA gene therapies is part of this, at least directly.

While nobody knows for sure what the affect will be on fertility, it can reasonably be discounted that these treatments are meant to kill off many people in the near future. After all, despite the 4IR/GR, the “deep state” still requires a tax base and some human labor to build the “new economy's” machines. Considering the fact that so many younger people have already been vaccinated, it's unrealistic that they'd kill off their most promising labor pool.

Trump Spills The Beans
In any case, the global public must become aware of the so-called “green agenda”, which is also part and parcel of the earlier mentioned trend towards comparatively more “socialist”/”fascist” economic systems.

The climate is veritably changing regardless of whatever one attributes this to, be it mankind and/or natural cycles, but every “deep state” has an inherent interest in exploiting this to enhance its power over the population. That's not to say that every member thereof is doing so for “evil purposes” since many might sincerely believe that it's for the “greater good” however they rationalize it, but this dynamic is undeniable.

Former US President Trump did a lot to popularize awareness of this and some of the other trends that were earlier discussed, which he did on his own prerogative but in a way which greatly upset most of the world's “deep states”, including his own. This explains the universal revulsion that they had for him.

QAnon & “5D Chess” Canard
In their minds, Trump wasn't supposed to “spill the beans” about the way that the world really works since he wasn't supposed to have been elected in the first place. The “deep state” made sure by hook or by crook that he wouldn't win a second term and thus stand a greater chance of reforming some of their forthcoming governance plans in the context of the “4IR/GR” (“socialism”/”fascism”). Furthermore, they feared that he could inspire the most passionate members of the population to peacefully exercise their political rights through rallies and the like in an attempt to meaningfully change the situation, even if only by publicly showing how popular his envisioned future was among the masses. The response to this “threat” was the QAnon movement which sought to preemptively neutralize these forces by capturing their minds through the manipulative narrative constructive of “5D chess”, which is just a coping mechanism for dealing with reality.

Part 1 of 2
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2

The Hybrid War Of Terror On America
That said reality is that Trump was basically “a king without a country” since the most powerful elements of his “deep state” continued to oppose him at every twist and turn, thereby sabotaging his envisioned policies. Instead of peacefully rallying in his support when he needed it most, his top supporters were brainwashed into thinking that “he had it all under control” and that every objectively existing setback was really just a “masterful 5D chess move”. By surrendering the streets, they facilitated the kinetic phase of the “deep state's” decades-long Hybrid War of Terror on America via Antifa and “Black Lives Matter” (BLM), which paved the way for the dystopian hellhole that Biden's presently presiding over as that same “deep state's” puppet. The only “storm” that ever arrived was the “deep state's” on election day. The successful anti-Trump regime change sequence led to the “swamp” finally swallowing him and Biden's “Cyber Stasi” suppressing most subsequent digital dissent.

Social Media Censorship
The digital dimension is so important too because it's the only realistic “commons” in which meaningful opposition to these trends can be organized, but it's now almost entirely under the “deep state's” control with few exceptions (like Russia's VK). The pretext for seizing control over this domain was to stop any repeat of the 6 January events as well as reduce the chances of actual foreign meddling in the US' domestic processes via Hybrid War means. About the latter, this threat veritably exists but not to the extent that the “deep state” claimed. It's already done the exact same to countless other countries and much more effectively than they could ever do to the US, but the “deep state” fears the introduction and proliferation of “politically inconvenient” narratives into the American political conversation, hence the need to so aggressively censor social media. To be fair, other countries are implementing similar policies for the same security-centric reasons.

People=Pawns?
What most folks don't realize is that they're really just pawns in a global game between competing “socialist”/”fascist” “deep states” as part of the New Cold War. Their individual views don't matter so long as they keep them to themselves, but they become “troublesome” once they're shared with others and might eventually influence a larger change in socio-economic and/or especially political behavior (e.g. voting patterns, provoking protests, etc.). It's one thing to “know the truth” as one understands it to be (whether realized on one's own and/or due to the influence of whatever they come across on the Internet, including that which is shared with them by foreign parties, be it state or civilian), and another entirely to actually act upon it in a peaceful way within the legal limits of their respective constitutions, many of which at least in the West superficially respect the right to the freedoms of speech and assembly.

Reality Check
In fact, this very analysis will probably only at most make “fellow travelers” feel like they're not alone or “crazy” as opposed to having any meaningful effect on shaping the course of events. Be that as it may, everyone deserves to learn how the world really operates, even if only to be at peace with how powerless they might actually be if that's what makes them feel a bit better. Others might be inspired to share this insight with others in the hopes that enough people can eventually come together to peacefully express their constitutionally enshrined rights in a last-ditch attempt to at least slow down the implementation of the “4IR/GR”. This is especially so with respect to raising awareness of the speculative risks associated with volunteering oneself to be a guinea pig for “deep state”-backed Big Pharma's massive gene therapy experiment designed to give their government a strategic edge in the New Cold War at the arguable expense of their citizens' human rights.

Welcome To World War C
The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in what can be described as World War C, or the full-spectrum paradigm-changing processes catalyzed by the world's uncoordinated attempt to contain the virus (again, whether or not one believes that it's real, fake, or exaggerated). All preexisting trends are now being accelerated and compressed, including the geopolitical, military, economic-industrial, information-communication, healthcare (genetic engineering), governmental (“socialist/”fascist”), and “green” (“depopulation”) ones. This means that everyone is truly living in an unprecedented era of history whereby literally everything about life as they know it will be completely different within a decade. The very nature of international, economic, civil-state, and even human-to-human relations is transforming at a record pace, with folks either choosing to remain asleep like the “deep state” wants or wake up and peacefully try to stop them if it's even at all still possible to do so.
 
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