John Kerry, Climate Czar in Waiting
Never mind ballots arriving by the hundreds of thousands at 4 a.m. after “counting was stopped for the night,” but only in swing states. Never mind voting machines that, apparently, any moderately talented nerd can hack and cook. Never mind “tranches” of votes, by the thousands and all for Biden, erroneously stacking the tallies because of “upload malfunctions.” Never mind same-day registration, ballot harvesting, no voter ID requirements, or missing signatures and postmarks. Never mind that Trump earned nearly 6 million votes in California, a 35 percent improvement over his 2016 performance, actually increasing his share of total votes from 31.6 to 34.3 percent, yet lost in fracking Pennsylvania.
Never mind. Prepare for a Biden presidency, and a Biden cabinet.
In other words, just rely on the “nonpartisan” experts and ignore your lying eyes. Assume Joe Biden really is speaking from the “Office of the President-Elect” and assume what he proclaims today will become policy on January 21. Consider the gang that will surround this amiable but senescent old crook. In particular, consider Biden’s incoming cabinet, undoubtedly destined to include a mandatory assortment of race-baiting blowhards, gender obsessed fanatics, gun grabbers, abortion extremists, government union overseers, ambulance chasers, corporate cronies, Chinese operatives, bankers, billionaires, and grasping bureaucrats.
And while you’re at it, consider Biden’s choice for “climate czar”—John Forbes Kerry.
The first thing to understand about Kerry is that he is an inside member of the establishment uniparty that was horrified by Trump’s impudent decision to actually take seriously his job as president of the United States. Kerry, who married into the aristocratic Heinz family, has a personal net worth estimated in excess of $250 million. Unlike Trump, Kerry is both a partner and a puppet in the American oligarchy, which means he will do whatever is in his personal best interests, as well as whatever he is told to do. Rarely if ever will those agenda items diverge.
Whether it involves prosecuting yet another endless overseas war, or, more to the point, morphing the great American COVID lockdown into phase two—the great American climate lockdown—Kerry will put the oligarchy first, and America last. Count on it.
The beating that ordinary Americans have taken over the past year understandably has diverted their attention from the coming “climate emergency.” Americans have watched helplessly as well-funded, violent mobs pulled down symbols of their heritage, while looting and vandalizing property, sometimes burning buildings to the ground, bellowing intense hatred for every cherished American institution and tradition. Americans watched as the media either ignored this orchestrated nationwide mayhem, or downplayed it, or even pretended it was caused by Trump and his supporters.
Americans have endured a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands, prompted an endless “lockdown,” and driven hundreds of thousands into bankruptcy and madness. There’s no end in sight.
So Americans can be forgiven for not putting the impending “climate emergency” front of mind. But if and when Biden takes charge, and turns John Kerry loose, that will change.
The True Motivation for the Climate Emergency
Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty who bothers to read dissenting expert viewpoints on the issue of anthropogenic climate change knows that debate still rages as to the severity, the causes, and the appropriate responses. Excellent recent books on the topic, contrarian but scrupulously researched, include Apocalypse Never, by Michael Shellenberger, and False Alarm, by Bjorn Lomborg.
Shellenberger, a lifelong progressive who was once honored as a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” argues, using the IPCC’s own data, that the projected severity of climate change is greatly overstated, and explains how much environmental damage occurs when people in the developing world are denied access to conventional energy including hydroelectric and nuclear power.
Lomborg, a Danish economist with impeccable credentials, argues not only that climate change is a phenomenon that humanity can adapt to with relative ease, but that the policies being advocated in the name of fighting climate change yield absurd cost/benefit ratios, and explains how directing money and resources to other compelling global objectives would be far more productive.
There are plenty of other reputable climate skeptics, or climate realists, or, perhaps most transgressive of all, optimists, who still patiently argue for practical spending on cost-effective infrastructure instead of a mad, panic-stricken rush into political and economic tyranny. Listen to these voices of reason while you still can. Because the real reason for climate alarm is all about money and power. People like John Kerry have plenty of both, but they want it all, and the “climate emergency” is how they’re going to get it.
Artificial Scarcity Empowers the Oligarchy
There are obvious upsides to “climate mitigation” for several powerful special interest groups. It’s a gold mine for the public sector, which expands its ranks in order to intrude into every segment of our lives and help us “manage” our consumption. Everything we do becomes the business of government enforcers, from when and how much water or electricity we consume to where and how much we travel. Even the size of our windows or the types of outdoor landscaping we tend will come under their scrutiny.
But when it comes to coping with the “climate emergency,” industry is a willing partner to government.
Think about it. Everything has to be reinvented and replaced, because everything is suddenly obsolete, wasteful, exploitative, and immoral.
The homes we live in, our workplaces, our home appliances, our vehicles, all of it has to be rebuilt.
“Planned obsolescence,” something that leftists used to decry back in the days before they merged with corporate America, is now considered a virtuous feature.
Joining manufacturers to supply critical components is the tech sector, ready to ensure that everything we use, from our car to our coffeemaker, is wired to the internet. And to help us out, the software that is suddenly necessary to run a toaster will have to be updated periodically, requiring us to no longer own our appliances, but to lease them. Permanent revenue streams. Micromanaged consumption. The planet is saved.
But there’s a deeper motivation at work behind the public narrative of the climate alarmists. It’s connected to the financialization of the American economy. The debt binge that began in the 1980s under Reagan and which has enjoyed bipartisan continuity ever since, depends on federal deficits and trade deficits to maintain America’s economic growth. The primary beneficiaries of America’s debt binge have been government workers, very large corporations, banks and billionaires, while real wages have gone down for ordinary workers.
But to keep the debt party going, America needs more collateral to borrow against. Enter artificial scarcity. It starts with real estate, America’s biggest asset.
The Synergy of a Financialized Economy and Climate Alarm
In the name of environmental protection, and now even more urgently in the name of fighting “climate change,” and on a fraudulently thin but nonetheless unchallenged scientific basis, America’s cities are being cordoned off.
As America’s population grows by millions each year, the preponderance of new real estate development occurs within the footprint of existing cities, causing the value of housing and commercial properties to rise because demand is increasing but supply is forcibly limited. As assessments go up, additional borrowing collateral is created.
The equation is simple: When politically contrived artificial scarcity is imposed on a market, an asset bubble is formed. As long as the scarcity can be maintained, the bubble will expand. The beneficiaries of a real estate bubble are public entities, which collect higher property taxes based on higher assessments, thanks to the inflated values.
Public sector pension funds also benefit, because their real estate portfolios benefit from the asset appreciation. Needless to say, private speculators and investors also benefit from a rising housing market, but its impact on the average homeowner is a slow train wreck.
When consumers borrow, home equity is their collateral. It might seem logical that rising home values would benefit consumers. But people trying to buy homes cannot afford them, or they manage to buy them anyway, enduring punishing mortgage payments. And an often unavoidable debt trap is imposed on those people who bought their homes when they were still affordable.
If they are typical middle-class Americans, their property values have risen, as has the cost-of-living (including property taxes), while their inflation-adjusted wages have fallen. So they borrow against their rising home equity in order to pay their bills, and America’s financialized economy keeps spinning. Caught in an unavoidable spiral of debt accumulation, by the millions, Americans sink further into financial servitude.
This is the consequence of artificial scarcity, designed to sustain a financialized economy that is addicted to debt accumulation. Climate change is just the moral rationalization that enables a few more innings of this unsustainable game. And the imposition of artificial scarcity is not confined to real estate.
A similar profiteering opportunism underscores the renewables and conservation mania. Not only do high tech companies capitalize on fantastic opportunities to sell gadgets to create a panopticon of energy surveillance a la the “internet of things,” where every home appliance is wired and monitored by the utilities. At the same time the highly regulated public utilities are offered spectacular new avenues for higher profits, because while their profit percentages are fixed, and the units of energy they can generate are fixed, when they sell expensive renewable energy to the consumer instead of inexpensive natural gas or nuclear power, they can still double their revenues and profits.
The Green Enabling of Scarcity Profiteers
In the name of saving the earth, a collection of special interests share the same goal: make water, energy, transportation, and housing as scarce and expensive as possible. Increase regulations and unleash an avalanche of lawsuits so only the biggest, most resilient corporations survive and emerging competitors are crushed.
In California, and increasingly in other states, a punitively high cost of living is the result of conscious political choices, and the primary force behind these choices is not desire to protect the environment, it is greed. The people who profit by artificial, contrived scarcity don’t want anything to change. They are government employee unions, utility companies, trial lawyers, Silicon Valley “green” entrepreneurs, and billionaires who already own the artificially limited supplies of land and housing. Does that sound like the potentially incoming Biden cabinet?
And if a “climate emergency” is declared, expect this so-called “great reset” to take place without any constitutional checks to slow its implementation or its scope.
Here’s a recent quote from John Kerry:
“Climate change is a threat multiplier for pandemic diseases, and zoonotic diseases—70 percent of all human infections—are impacted by climate change and its effect on animal migration and habitats.”
Got that? Climate change will not just be a “climate emergency,” it will be a “health emergency.” Good luck falling back on the Bill of Rights when you’re up against two declared federal emergencies. Climate change mitigation is a scheme to take from the have nots, and transfer it to the haves. To accomplish this, epic, world-class creativity has been harnessed. Perhaps among all the methods by which this redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the super rich will occur, nothing tops the proposed sale of carbon credits.
If “carbon emissions auctions” trading ever takes hold nationally, it will launch the biggest skim operation in the history of the world. In this extraordinarily comprehensive system of economic control, every molecule of carbon embodied in every joule of energy will have to be reported, using a preposterously complex, eminently corruptible if not completely fraudulent new form of financial accounting. Every “carbon unit” will have to be tracked, so that rights to produce and consume them can be traded on an exchange, with Wall Street brokerages taking a cut, time after time. All of this will be implemented and operated at stupefying expense. Imagine the tens of trillions of dollars in annual transactions that will pass through this gauntlet, and you can better understand the slavering lust with which the financial community anticipates a Biden presidency.
John Kerry represents not the lunatic fringe of Biden’s budding entourage of administration insiders, but rather its larcenous core. Kerry, because of the “climate emergency” measures we may expect him to implement, is the most dangerous man in America.
There is an alternative to this madness. The government could partner with unions and private civil engineering firms in a grand bargain to construct cost-effective conventional energy infrastructure, along with upgraded water and transportation infrastructure. Instead of rationing, produce more. Instead of enforcing artificial scarcity, create abundance. Build enabling infrastructure and let the private sector compete again to profitably build homes that ordinary workers can afford. This is a virtuous, public-minded scheme that Joe Biden is old enough to remember. It worked back in the 1950s and 1960s and created a capital endowment we’re still living on. That is the “build back better” investment that could be a genuine gift to the American people.
Don’t hold your breath. You will be fighting, like Trump was, against the bureaucrats, the bankers, and the billionaires.
The privileged elites are doing just fine, feeding off the dying remains of the American middle class. They aren’t about to let a populist movement, including any practical public policies that such a movement might support, spoil their meal. And as they stigmatize their critics as “climate deniers,” they are the true deniers, ignoring a debt tsunami that is a far more imminent threat than rising oceans.
They weren’t just coming for Trump. They are coming for you.
It is terribly ironic that the militant wing of the Democratic Party, soon to militantly back whatever John Kerry proclaims as our “climate czar,” bills itself as “anti-fascist.” Because the “climate emergency,” ultimately, is itself fascist both in a political and an economic context. As political fascism, it relies on crisis, fear, scapegoating, and simple but transformative “solutions.” As economic fascism, it concentrates power in the hands of the state, with industrialists and bankers as senior partners. Remember that, if the day arrives when you have to listen to John Kerry, “climate czar,” spew forth self-righteous exhortations in the name of supposedly protecting the planet.
This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.
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Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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Excellent article! I would note that the author fails to understand that the eugenic global organization in Geneva and the WEF are behind the "green" movement.
It’s initially about gaining government control, but ultimately the purpose of this whole "climate change" movement is about depopulation… The climate change, great reset and covid czars are all the same group, the deep state in Geneva. They control the UN and use it a shadow government of the world.
They hijacked leftist political parties around the world… Left political groups are all on board with the Homeless Industrial Complex, the climate change hoax, covid requires vaccines task force globally when it has a survival rate of 99.98 % under 70 years old, the global push for "social justice" and equality, the global rise of fascist socialism.
All of these things are being pushed and enacted by the same group of eugenics that are based in Geneva… The land of the NGO’s who control the world, and elections.
I actually bought Apocalypse Never, close to halfway through… Excellent read