Finding Unity in a Divided America

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AUDIO: What kind of new coalition can bring conservatives the first landslide presidential election since 1984? – 9 minutes on KNRS Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on the Rod Arquette Show.

Finding Unity in a Divided America

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We are in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism and hard work have disappeared. Wokeness, gender ideology, and the climate cult have taken their place. We spend so much time celebrating our diversity that we forget the values that bind us together. And I believe deep in my bones that those values still exist. We can take our country back.
– Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for GOP nomination for US president

Before writing off one of the most interesting candidates to jump onto the national political stage in years, merely because he happens to be saying literally everything you want to hear, peruse what his actual ideological opponents are saying about him. From Vox, an attack piece with an incoherent theme that might best be exemplified by this excerpt: “At the root of Ramaswamy’s appeal is the pernicious ‘model minority’ stereotype — a story about self-sufficiency and innate talent woven around the creation of an Asian American professional class in the 1960s — that has since been used to dismantle civil rights, divide communities of color, and perpetuate the myth of America as colorblind.”

According to Vox, and by extension, the American Left, the story of an individual achieving success is divisive. No surprise there. The political currency of the Left, spent lavishly and to dreadful effect, is resentment and fear. America is racist. Capitalism is oppressive. A climate catastrophe is upon us. The blame falls squarely on the shoulders of heterosexual white men, and Vivek Ramaswamy is their stooge.

Leftist attacks on politicians and influencers like Ramaswamy aren’t anything new. Every time a conservative “of color” surfaces, they’re marginalized. Larry Elder, also running for the GOP presidential nomination, has been dubbed “the black face of white supremacy.” But despite coordinated smear campaigns from the Left, increasing numbers of black and Latino politicians are moving right of center. And Ramaswamy’s core message – that we are in the middle of a national identity crisis – is directly on target. Until a new coalition forms, transcending ethnicity, income, and geography, and wielding landslide, supermajority electoral dominance, American culture will remain divided and adrift.

During the final decade of the Cold War in 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reelected by a landslide. His “big tent” approach brought together fiscal conservatives, Neocons, and conservative Christians. Scarcely a generation later, in 2004, George W Bush also won a decisive victory by unifying these same factions. But the model that worked then will not work today. Fiscal conservatives have to answer for a bipartisan debt binge that started in 1980 and has gotten progressively worse. Neocons have to answer for a foreign policy that has, among other things, destabilized the Middle East, created a surveillance state at home, and is supporting a horrific war in Ukraine with no exit strategy. As for conservative Christians, the Left has unfairly but successfully defined them as anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-“trans,” and is using them to stereotype conservatives as dangerous extremists.

Restoring a positive, powerful and widely shared American identity will require assembling a new coalition, and there are plenty of new approaches that will bring Americans together again. Ramaswamy offers one avenue – a hyper-articulate messenger who is too good to be true for white conservatives, and authentic enough to attract nonwhite voters who never heard a conservative speak to them so directly. Ramaswamy embodies the colorblind essence of American values, and knows how to express them with clarity and without compromise. His presence, and the presence of politicians like him, will bring millions of ethnic voters into the conservative coalition.

Another avenue towards realignment is being trailblazed by Donald Trump, who instead of participating in this week’s GOP primary candidate debate, plans to speak to an audience of striking auto workers. The audacity of this decision is historic. Republicans never presumed to stand before thousands of striking workers, but as a populist conservative, Trump seizes the opportunity. Expect him to talk about the stupidity of trying to force EVs onto American drivers before the technology is ready. Expect him to defend conventional energy and conventional automotive technology. Expect him to tell the truth about immigration – when it is unregulated and absent merit-based criteria, it is nothing but an economic drain on the nation. Trump recognizes something the leftist leadership of these unions deny – the vast majority of autoworkers love America, believe in traditional values, and want politicians who will first protect them, before prioritizing economic refugees that arrive illegally by the millions.

What desperate leftist media institutions call “far right” are in fact common sense reforms that most Americans support. Politicians like Trump and Ramaswamy, along with hundreds of other prominent national politicians in the U.S. Congress, are promoting a pathway to restoring American greatness and a shared national identity. Joining this common sense crusade that crosses lines of ethnicity and income are not only members of minority groups and members of trade unions, but civil engineering companies that want to build infrastructure that makes economic sense, and academic reformers that want to return K-12 education to the basics and return higher education to uplifting Western values and issuing marketable degrees.

The common sense crusade can also include members of law enforcement and the judiciary, along with social workers and other public bureaucrats who have the integrity to recognize and reject the special interest capture of public institutions, resulting in rising crime along with a host of other failed public policies. Included in this cohort would be so-called Blue Dog Democrats and independent voters, tired of watching every American institution fail, one after another, always spending more and delivering less. Even disaffected environmentalists will join the common sense crusade, as they realize that environmentalism has been hijacked by financial special interests and is now doing more harm than good to the environment.

With all this potential for unity, and with this deep American reservoir of common sense, who is left? Only the scourge of civilization, that propensity for the powerful to want more power, the timeless reality that power disproportionately appeals to the corrupt, the sad erosion of checks and balances that America’s founders thoughtfully constructed in history’s finest attempt preserve a nation that respects and nurtures individual freedoms. America’s business and political elite share a vision that abandons normal citizens. A donor fed uniparty, dominated by special interests for whom profit and power is acquired because of failing bureaucracies, punitive regulations, scarce and expensive commodities, a massive dependent class of citizens and noncitizen permanent residents, and corporate consolidation of wealth.

Americans see this reality. The hardships they’re enduring offer clarity, suggesting obvious solutions. Drill for oil. Develop nuclear power. Build roads, bridges, and buses before spending countless billions on “light rail” and “bullet trains” that hardly anyone will ever ride. Replace 100 percent EV mandates with incentives to build advanced hybrids, with no technological possibilities excluded. Bring manufacturing back onshore. Preserve cash and reject digital IDs and digital currencies. Replace ridiculous energy efficiency mandates – that merely guarantee planned obsolescence and poor performance – with reasonable innovations that deliver genuine value to consumers. End the war on housing. Restore responsible logging to lower the price of lumber, create jobs, and prevent forest fires. Protect the environment but without sacrificing the obligation to preserve opportunities for Americans to afford homes and a pleasant quality of life. Restrict immigration to merit based entry, and prioritize the patient millions who have been waiting years to come in the front door. Put criminals in prison. Compel addicts and alcoholics to get treatment; compel homeless people to go to cost effective shelters. Implement school choice, and rescue public schools from the woke mafia. And so on.

These are practical, common sense policies that Americans are ready to support. They represent a consensus that defies and transcends the stereotypical notions of Right and Left, or even Democrat and Republican. They are pro-capitalist but anti-monopoly. They embrace publicly funded infrastructure, if it is practical and yields long term economic benefits, but reject welfare dependency. They support merit-based immigration but reject open borders. They believe in meritocracy but abhor racism. They support free speech, while condemning yet permitting hate speech. They support the 2nd amendment but demand the deterrent effect of strict law enforcement. They defend traditional culture and want to return it to the mainstream, but reject prejudice and bigotry.

If the candidates that offer these solutions can do so without compromise, and leaven their delivery with firm but friendly optimism, they will get elected. If they keep their promises, they will be reelected. And the new supermajority that will elect them will be impossible to stop, because apart from those members of the elite that remain recalcitrant – few in number, wielding a narrative that has been utterly discredited – everyone will be part of it.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

California AG Sues Big Oil for Telling the Truth About Fossil Fuels

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Don’t lie, don’t deceive, don’t hide from the public clean energy pathways forward, and don’t hide from the public the existential threat that fossil fuels created in terms of climate change and extreme weather and damage to the environment.
– California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Sept. 20, 2023, PBS Interview

Bonta’s statement exposes the inherent and fatal flaw in his case. You can’t lie when you’re telling the truth. And the truth is as explicit as it is heretical: the theory that fossil fuel creates an immediate and existential threat in terms of “climate change and extreme weather” is a theory. It is an increasingly discredited theory. It is not “settled science,” and it never was.

Millions of people doubt the climate crisis narrative, and the fact that nearly all of them are afraid to say so is testimony to the campaign of intimidation, censorship, brainwashing, and litigation that is condoned and often coordinated by one of the most powerful and pernicious coalitions of special interests in the history of the world. Publicly challenging the “consensus” often spells career and corporate suicide. And that, too, ought to be obvious.

The policies being put in place to supposedly mitigate the impact of CO2 and other “greenhouse gasses” are enabling a massive transfer of wealth and centralization of public and corporate power. By micromanaging energy use via “climate action plans” and “carbon accounting,” literally every human activity becomes highly regulated and more expensive. This reduces the middle class to subsistence, enlarges the dependent class, drives small and mid-sized companies out of business, allows monopolistic companies to consolidate entire industries, and expands the size and reach of government to grotesque proportions. It erases liberties taken for granted in America for over two centuries including unrestricted mobility and a reasonable chance to afford a home.

California’s attorney general Rob Bonta, for all his self-righteousness and phony demeanor, is not stupid. He understands the consequences of what he’s doing. But Rob Bonta is a puppet. He is owned by public sector unions, California’s most powerful special interest, and nothing will expand unionized government more than climate mitigation – more regulations meant to cope with the “climate crisis” means more bureaucracy, more agencies, more fees, and more taxes.

In Bonta’s run for Attorney General in 2022, he collected the maximum permissible contribution, $16,200, from 33 entities. Every one of them was a union funded small contributor committee. Every single one. Of his largest contributors, the first 52 were unions, nearly all of them public sector unions.

How public sector unions control Rob Bonta is reflected in his actions as attorney general. Does he use the power of his office to make a dent in rampant crime in California counties where District Attorney’s won’t prosecute criminals? Does he challenge court rulings that make it impossible to compel homeless addicts and alcoholics to move into safe shelters? Does he investigate the corruption that drives a homeless industrial complex of public bureaucrats, “nonprofits,” and politically connected developers who have snarfed their way through over $20 billion in taxpayer money in just the last four years, with billions more on the way, merely to make California’s homeless population bigger than ever? Has Bonta supported repeal of Prop. 47, which downgraded property and drug crimes in California? No. No. No. And no. Because if the answer to any of those questions was yes, Bonta would be defying the agenda of unionized government and their quasi-private sector cronies.

Bonta has, however, sued a courageous school board that, gasp, decided to require parental notification if their child yields to transexual propaganda, online peer pressure, and classroom indoctrination to start “identifying” as a member of the opposite sex. Because that’s none of a parent’s business, right? Let the government raise your child. More school psychologists and counselors, more administrators, more unionized public sector employees, more union dues, more union power.

Which brings us back to Bonta’s case against Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP. Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is extortion. It might be perfectly legal, but it is extortion, following what is becoming a well traveled path of “climate change litigation.” Sadly, the oil companies will probably refrain from fighting this as aggressively as they ought. The reality, which with aggressive counsel would come out in discovery, is quite likely that through the years, most oil company executives believed, with evidence, that fossil fuel would not cause extreme climate change or extreme weather.

But it doesn’t matter, because even if they did think they were being deceitful to make that assertion at the time, they weren’t. Not then, and not now.

Fossil fuel is not playing a decisive role in affecting climate, the climate is not rapidly changing in ways to which we cannot readily adapt, gradual warming will probably cause on balance more good than harm, fossil fuel has done far more to uplift humanity than to harm humanity – including generating the wealth we’ve needed to protect the environment from genuine pollution – and even today, we are still nowhere near ready to replace fossil fuel with new energy technologies.

Why doesn’t Rob Bonta sue the five biggest environmental advocacy groups in California, for their public misinformation campaigns, political lobbying and litigation that demonized loggers, ranchers, and private property owners, preventing them from performing the logging, grazing, mechanical thinning and controlled burns that up until the 1990s kept California’s forests from becoming dangerously overgrown? Why doesn’t Rob Bonta, along with Gavin Newsom, publicly acknowledge that environmentalist pressure groups regulated sensible forest management out of existence in California, that a century of fire suppression along with 2-3 decades of management neglect have left tree density in California’s forests at 5-10 times what is historically normal, and that is the reason they’re dried out, unhealthy, and burn like hell?

For that matter, why doesn’t Rob Bonta sue EV manufacturers, and the environmentalist pressure groups that demand rapid and exclusive adoption of EVs? Hasn’t this led to a catastrophic uptick in mining around the world, in nations where environmental and labor standards are nonexistent? Perhaps Rob Bonta should spend some quality time picking cobalt out of toxic slurry in West Africa, before he pretends more EVs will somehow save the planet.

All of this is willful ignorance. Bonta told a fawning PBS interviewer on 9/20 that if the fossil fuel companies had been, according to him, paragons of honesty back in the 1950s, “choices would have been different, like doubling down and investing on clean energy and phasing out of fossil fuel.” This is absurd. Even now, the materials science that may someday result in sustainable, affordable, practical batteries for EVs is still in its infancy.

Bonta is posturing. He might be forgiven for believing the alleged consensus on climate change, simply because everyone he’s surrounded himself with, including all his donors, are telling him the same story. But Bonta cannot be excused for his blithe indifference to the benefit of fossil fuel, the wealth and broadly distributed prosperity it has given people everywhere, the fact that it still provides more than 80 percent of global energy, the complete lack of scalable alternatives to fossil fuel in past decades, and the extraordinary technological challenges we still face to successfully replace it.

Rob Bonta needs to go back to prosecuting criminals. And if he wants to courageously face down opportunistic dishonesty and deception, perhaps he should look in the mirror.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in The American Spectator.

The Hidden Agenda Behind Lockdowns

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You can call it a “road diet,” or “15 days to stop the spread,” or a “fifteen minute city,” or a “smart city,” a “central bank digital currency,” or just an EV that comes with a virtual leash attached in the form of limited range and limited recharging options. Or you can be more explicit and just call any one of these examples an assault on your mobility, i.e., a lockdown. Whatever you want to call them, they’ve arrived, and it’s just begun. Americans, along with their European brethren, are being turned into livestock, living in high-tech pens, where literally every aspect of our lives is monitored and everything we do or consume is rationed.

The justification for these lockdowns is to protect us from pandemics, to protect the environment, and – in a society with diminished opportunities and a reduced standard of living – to ensure “equity” for members of protected status groups. The common thread? Protection. And where there is a need for protection, there is a threat. A killer virus. A “climate crisis.” A toxic environment of white privilege.

In reality, however, the policies being promulgated to counter these supposedly existential threats are grossly out of proportion to the actual threats. There is a hidden agenda.

While the worst interpretations of this hidden agenda may be overstatements, we would be well advised to hear them out. An early and comprehensive assessment of how the COVID pandemic was exploited to move Americans closer to the status of livestock came from Catherine Austin Fitts in her video “Planet Lockdown.” Some of her ideas and allegations may stretch credulity, but nonetheless are essential concepts for anyone trying to make sense of where we could be headed as a civilization.

Fitts observes that the wealth of the world is becoming more and more concentrated into nations with advanced technology, and within those nations, disproportionately to a small elite. She claims the COVID pandemic provided an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.

According to Fitts, in 1995, as neoliberal ideology took hold in both political parties in the U.S., the decision was made to transfer most of the wealth out of the country. This is the hollowing out that Trump’s populism attempted to reverse. But now, with the process nearly complete, Pitt alleges the pandemic is the cover whereby the unsustainable financial situation in the United States – because it was hollowed out – can be “reset.” She then claims the virus is being used as the means to compel mass vaccine injections that will make it possible to digitally identify and track every person. These biometric markers will then be used to connect people to a new cyber currency, allowing complete control. She believes there are five sectors working in tandem to create this new world order:

(1) Technology industry building clouds. (2) Military doing space development. (3) Big pharma developing injections to modify human DNA. (4) Media providing propaganda. (5) Central bankers engineering a new crypto system of global currency.

What Fitts is describing is a dark version of futurism. Her perspective is negative, but coherent. Technology has created barriers to entry that make it easier for a shrinking group of elite special interests to consolidate entire sectors of the economy and become very powerful. But why the new world order? Why the “reset”? Why turn humans into livestock, without rights, without property? Fitts offers a logical answer:

“If technology can make it possible for people to live 150 years, and it isn’t possible to keep this a secret, then why not downsize the population, integrate robots, so you can have a very wealthy and luxurious life without the management headaches?” In one particularly chilling quote, Fitts says “I was having a conversation with a venture capitalist, billionaire type, and he looked at me with these amazingly dead eyes and said ‘I can take every company and completely automate it with software and robotics and fire all the humans. We don’t need them any more.’”

Another explanatory warning, much more recent, came from Vera Sharav, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, speaking at the 75th Anniversary of The Nuremberg Code. Next to America’s Bill of Rights, the Nuremberg Code is one of humanity’s greatest weapons against medical slavery. For an 86-year-old who can personally recall being herded into concentration camps, Sharav is remarkably lucid.

Sharav describes the gradual onset of slavery in Nazi Germany, how the instruments of oppression rolled out over several years. In particular, she explains how medicine was perverted from its healing mission and was weaponized. She puts forward the ten point statement handed down by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1948 as essential guidelines that restrict medical experimentation. As COVID variants, and COVID vaccines, appear poised to make a timely comeback, it will be useful to be familiar with the human rights set forth in the Nuremberg Code. But why is this happening? Sharav is explicit, and like Fitts, references transhumanism:

“Transhumanism is a bio-tech enhanced caste system. Transhumanists despise human values and deny the existence of a human soul. This is the new eugenics. It is embraced by the most powerful global billionaire technocrats who gather at Davos: big tech, big pharma, the financial oligarchs, academics, government leaders & the military industrial complex. These megalomaniacs have paved the road to another Holocaust. This time, the threat of genocide is global in scale.”

States of Emergency, Permanent Lockdown

To categorically dismiss these terrifying scenarios is to ignore the history of the world and the human capacity for evil. It is to deny the power of deception, and the propensity of millions, gripped by mass psychosis, to participate in abominations while thinking all the while that they are saving the world.

For each of the big three alleged existential threats to the American people – disease, climate catastrophe, and systemic bigotry – there is a curated, sponsored groundswell of popular demand for the government to declare an emergency. And in a state of emergency, human rights are suspended. But some of the more insidious threats to American freedom are moving forward without needing a state of emergency. The official response to the “climate crisis” offers countless examples.

If ongoing pandemics condemn Americans to recurrent lockdowns (a word once only used in the context of maximum security prisons, but to which we are now completely desensitized), it is to save the climate that might inform how our cells are designed. They’re not pretty. Across America, single family homes with yards are being outlawed. New construction is prohibited and existing suburbs are being rezoned. This is to reduce “greenhouse gas,” despite weak arguments that low density housing causes more “greenhouse gas,” even if you think “greenhouse gas” is a real problem.

More generally, a whole new genre of creative accounting has been invented, called “carbon accounting,” whereby corporations, along with state and local governments, are now required to calculate how they will reduce their “carbon footprint.” Failure to do so results in the loss of subsidies and grants, as well as access to investment capital. Carbon accounting encompasses every imaginable aspect of life. Have a look at this “Climate Action Plan,” prepared for California city with 400,000 residents. There is nothing it will not regulate; all personal appliances, building codes, real estate zoning, transportation policy, every business, every industry, right down to cow farts and light bulbs.

The variables that “carbon accounting” purports to measure and manage are infinite. Rarely in human history has a new enterprise been so riven with subjectivity, so conducive to manipulation, so unnecessary, or so parasitical. But these credentialed minions, most of them utterly convinced of their messianic indispensability, are the foot soldiers of the great reset. When they’re done, you will live in small apartments, consuming strictly rationed resources, and locked down like an inmate, like a penned veal calf, whenever there’s a viral surge or the sun is too hot.

The third leg of the triad, equity, is a risky strategy. But so far, it’s working spectacularly well. Every time another outrageous and divisive initiative is announced, whether it’s paying reparations, condoning the 2020 riots, or taking children away from their parents so they can be castrated, the population is distracted. But it is possible that members of these disparate, artificially enflamed identity groups may someday recognize a planetwide lockdown being orchestrated in the background, and stop fighting each other.

It is possible that tens of millions of Americans will begin to question the credibility of pandemic and climate catastrophists, and realize the already red-pilled skeptics are not “conspiracy theorists,” or “haters,” but people just like them, fighting to keep everyone free. That day may arrive, and if it does, there is hope. We may be allowed to remain humans after all, possessing our dignity and our agency, and not turn into livestock.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

Precautionary Principle Extremism

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Most people with any understanding of risk are familiar with the precautionary principle. It is defined as “the precept that an action should not be taken if the consequences are uncertain and potentially dangerous.”

The precautionary principle is an important governing concept when applied to climate change mitigation. The possibility of human CO2 emissions causing a catastrophic climate outcome is used to justify major policy shifts designed to lower or even eliminate these emissions. The impracticality of this endeavor is considered insignificant in the face of potentially terrifying consequences of doing nothing.

A recent post on X by a prominent Englishman, Ben Goldsmith, offers an excellent example of this mentality at work. Goldsmith writes:

“Climate change ‘doubters’ share one thing in common: they lack any understanding of risk. There is a not-insubstantial risk that the world’s climate scientists (and pretty much the entire scientific community) are right, and we are now facing a civilisation-ending threat. Any reasonable risk management strategy would be to do whatever it takes to mitigate that risk. Ask one of these nutters this, if they knew that there was a 10% probability of a particular aircraft crashing on its next flight, would they board it? I doubt they would, even if the risk was 1%. And how about if all the engineers responsible for that aircraft said it was *going* to crash? These people are today’s equivalent to the appeasers of the 1930s, only stupider and far more dangerous. They must be discredited and defeated.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, as there is in Goldsmith’s sarcastic response to a critical reply accusing climate alarmists of being motivated by money and power. Goldsmith writes:

“The climate scientists are the ones making the money. Right. Not the giant global fossil fuel companies and their executives, paid lobbyists and shareholders.”

Apart from his social media remarks presenting a useful summary of “whatever it takes” alarmist thinking, something that deserves far more analysis and criticism than it gets, why Goldsmith? Why else highlight his opinions? Because Goldsmith, along with his alarmist certainty and propensity to verbally abuse his critics, was born into fabulous wealth, and his words exemplify the elitist arrogance that currently threatens the freedom of the world.

Goldsmith accuses giant global fossil fuel companies of still having a vested interest in climate denial, but ignores the fact that fossil fuel interests, all of them, have a vested interest in making sure supplies of the fuel they control never quite catch up to exploding global demand, because that increases their profits. A politically contrived, managed cutback of their production suddenly becomes climate virtue, instead of price fixing. And it’s fair to wonder if Goldsmith’s apparent preference for non-fossil fuel solutions has anything to do with his position as CEO of Menhaden Resource Efficiency PLC, an investment company that “seeks to generate long-term shareholder returns, by investing in businesses and opportunities, delivering or benefitting from the efficient use of energy and resources.” Would that include any “renewables?”

When you’ve lived in an environment of fabulous wealth, it’s easy to sit back and call people who question your precautionary principle extremism “nutters, “stupid,” “dangerous,” and “freaks.” But as someone invested in “energy and resources,” Goldsmith is certainly aware of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, one of the most authoritative sources available on what fuels power the world. And with only a rudimentary aptitude for basic arithmetic, Goldsmith must know that for everyone on earth to consume only half the energy that Americans consume, per capita, global energy production will have to double. And, also reported in BP’s annual digest, “renewables” only provided 6.7 percent of total energy consumed worldwide in 2021, the most recent year for which we have data.

Goldsmith also is savvy enough to know that abundant, affordable energy is a prerequisite for prosperity, and that without it, upward mobility for low income communities in the developed world, along with entire nations in the developing world, is impossible. Goldsmith knows that barring unforeseen breakthroughs in energy technologies, achieving “net zero” by 2050 is impossible. But nonetheless, he claims we must all do “whatever it takes to mitigate that risk,” the risk, that is, of a climate catastrophe. But how much risk are we really talking about?

A few years ago, Ph.D geophysicist Judith Curry, current chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, published a report on sea level rise in which she evaluated the most recent IPCC analysis along with several other international and national assessment reports. Her conclusions, which she maintains are consistent with the evidence, include this: “In many of the most vulnerable coastal locations, the dominant causes of local sea level rise are natural oceanic and geologic processes and land use practices. Land use and engineering in the major coastal cities have brought on many of the worst problems, notably landfilling in coastal wetland areas and groundwater extraction.”

She follows up to conclude that “the appropriate range of sea level rise scenarios to consider for 2100 is 0.2–1.6 m. Values exceeding 2 feet are increasingly weakly justified. Values exceeding 1.6 m require a cascade of extremely unlikely to impossible events, the joint likelihood of which is arguably impossible.”

Arguably impossible. Does an event that is “arguably impossible” justify “any means necessary” to avoid it? What about the other possible consequences of this alleged climate crisis we face? The following series of graphs present data that contradicts the climate panic narrative. They are just a small sampling of what is known and available. In virtually every type of climate trend, the data does not back up the nonstop alarm.

To begin with, “global warming,” which has morphed into “climate change,” along with the more recent “global boiling,” is itself questionable. Using data from the U.S. EPA’s “Climate Change Indicators in the United States,” the prolific fossil fuel champion Alex Epstein has produced a chart that clearly shows far more alarming incidences of heat waves in the 1930s. Imagine what ABC’s eminent thespian masquerading as a journalist, nightly news anchor David Muir, would have said about the 1930s dust bowl. Most climate scientists agree there is a gradual worldwide warming trend that began around 1850 when earth emerged from the so-called Little Ice Age. But there is ample data indicating warming in recent decades is not accelerating or unprecedented. Yet the hype is unceasing.

For wildfires, the graph on the right shows what alarmists depict as a terrifying trend. But the graph on the left widens the timescale to put recent years into perspective. Yes, acres burned has risen since the 1980s. But if you go back to the 1930s, it is clear that the extent of fires today is a mere fraction of what burned nearly a century ago. This graph was posted on X by Tony Heller, and it corroborates with data from the US Dept of Agriculture, National Report on Sustainable Forests – 2010, pg II-48. By any reasonable historical standard, America’s forests are not burning up.

This next chart, posted on X by John Shewchuk, and originally posted by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, shows over a century of data indicating the percent of area in the U.S. that was either “very wet” or “very dry.” It is clear from this chart that if anything, precipitation is generally increasing in the U.S., and since water is life, that is a very good thing. America has not entered an era of excessive droughts.

What about tornados? For this, again using data from NOAA, the incidence of strong to violent tornadoes in the US has trended down over the past 70 years. Global “major hurricane” frequency is also flat if not slightly down. The next graphic depicts both of these trends. America is not experiencing an epidemic of tornadoes, and the world is not experiencing an epidemic of major hurricanes.

This rendering was created by John Shewchuck, but its origins are traced to compilations by Wei Zhang, using data from NOAA, the National Weather Service, and reputable studies. Wei, a climate scientist at Princeton University and research scientist with NOAA, has the following quotes pinned to the top of his profile on X:

“I call it the “climate industrial complex”. So many people now make a living off of the #ClimateCrisis that there is no way they will let the narrative die, regardless of what the data shows.”

On August 29, Wei noted that “Censorship is everywhere now. I’ve made perhaps three edits in my life to Wikipedia. I don’t remember doing anything on climate. I think I edited LPGA golf page once. But somehow, I’m on Wikipedia master censorship list for my dangerous views.”

Which brings us back to Ben Goldsmith, who in another comment he recently posted on X said that “Quite a few nutters on here claiming there is in fact *zero* risk of the scientific community being right on the climate threat. Zero, they say, with tremendous confidence. Climate doubter Twitter is a whole new level of stupid.”

Goldsmith’s annoyance over links and observations on X belatedly allowing us to find scientifically valid evidence that most scientists and government institutions don’t themselves acknowledge is because it refutes the entire climate alarm paradigm. When examining the evidence, instead of biased models, all we are left with is a remote chance that catastrophic climate change is imminent, and if so, an even more remote possibility we can actually do something about it. And on that dubious basis, instead of adapting and thriving, we are told to dismantle our civilization, consigning ourselves to poverty and tyranny.

This is an extremist application of the precautionary principle, and it violates any genuine understanding of risk, for the simple reason it exchanges one very likely catastrophe – an energy starved civilization descending into mass poverty, oppression and war – for one very unlikely catastrophe, a global climate meltdown so severe it defies any attempts by humans to adapt.

Perhaps, Mr. Goldsmith, you are the one who lacks any understanding of risk.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Can California’s Forests Survive Environmentalism?

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Earlier this month an environmentalist group that calls itself the John Muir Project, joined by a few other state and local like minded organizations, sued the U.S. Forest Service. The transgression? A proposal to thin 13,000 acres of forest near Big Bear Lake, in the heart of California’s San Bernardino Mountains.

You would think they’d learn. One of the most devastating fires in California history raged through the San Bernardino Mountains over 20 years ago. Named the Old Fire, over 90,000 acres were burned, nearly 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed, and over 70,000 people were evacuated.

Time passes. Forests regenerate. And if you suppress natural fires, you either reduce forests through logging, grazing, controlled burns and mechanical thinning, or you wait until they’re overgrown tinderboxes and then watch them burn to the ground in catastrophic superfires. And that is the apparent preference of California’s environmentalist lobby.

Critics opposing the forest thinning project around Big Bear Lake contend the introduction of big machines to remove excess trees and understorage is harmful to the forest ecosystems and less effective than simply creating defensible 100 foot perimeters around homes in the forest. They even contend that removing trees makes wildfires burn and spread faster.

This assertion, which contradicts the experience of professional forest managers, ought to be debunked in court. Notwithstanding the problem of property owners in California’s forests themselves having difficulty obtaining permits to thin trees and understorage around their homes, sensible land management would be to do both. There is ample evidence that mechanical thinning is effective. There is also ample evidence that a superfire can hop a 100 foot “safety perimeter” as if it isn’t even there.

Southern California Edison owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake, located in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. They practice what is known as total ecosystem management. It works. In the summer of 2021, when the Creek Fire burned an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in those mountains, the 30 square mile island of SCE managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. This is because for decades, SCE has been engaged in timber operations they define as “uneven age management, single-tree selection,” whereby the trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the areas to be burned are well-managed with logging and thinning.

The practice of uneven age management could be used in riparian canyons, or in areas where valuable stands of old-growth trees merit preservation. The alternative, a policy of hands-off preservation, has been disastrous. Tree density in the Sierra Nevada is currently around 300 per acre, whereas historically, a healthy forest would only have had around 60 trees per acre. Clearly, this number varies depending on forest type, altitude, and other factors, but overall, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result is trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, far less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

This alternative—manage the forest or suffer fires that destroy the forest entirely—cannot be emphasized enough. In the Feather River Canyon, along with many other canyons along the Sierra Nevada, the east-west topography turned them into wind tunnels that drove fires rapidly up and down the watershed. Yet these riparian areas have been among the most fiercely defended against any logging, which made those fires all the worse. The choice going forward should not be difficult. Logging and forest thinning cannot possibly harm a watershed as much as parched forests burning down to the soil, wiping out everything.

Even clear-cutting, because it is now done on a 60- to 100-year cycle, does more good than harm to forests. By converting one or two percent of forest back into meadow each year, areas are opened up where it is easier for owls to hunt prey. Also, during a clear cut, the needles and branches are stripped off the trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. The runoff is managed as well, via contour tilling which follows the topography of the hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows, which is also where the replacement trees are planted. In forests managed by Sierra Pacific, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests.

Responsible, large scale logging operations, now more than ever, are a prerequisite to competent wildfire and wildlife management. Forests in California today are too overgrown to be safely returned to their historical tree densities merely by allowing natural fires to burn. In an overgrown forest, natural fires turn into superfires, decimating the ecosystem and the wildlife and taking much longer to recover.

California’s forests, 33 million acres, generate about 8 billion board feet of natural growth per year. Up until 100 years ago, natural fires started by lightning or natives would burn off an equivalent amount. Up until the 1980s, California’s timber industry removed 5 billion board feet per year (down from nearly 6 billion board feet up through the 1960s), but starting around that time increasing regulations overreacted and now have reduced the annual harvest to 1.5 billion board feet. At the same time, overregulation has made it almost impossible for property owners or even state and federal land managers to do any controlled burns or mechanical thinning. Grazing of cattle, goats and sheep also helped keep undergrowth down, but that, too, has been regulated out of existence.

Tree density in California’s forests is on average about five times what it was for the last 20 million years. The trees are stressed because there isn’t enough space, soil nutrients, light, or water for so many trees. This is why they are less healthy and in many cases prey to bark beetle infestations and other diseases. This is also why our forests are tinderboxes and why our wildfires are so intense.

Excessive tree density is an objective fact. But instead of rewriting all these counterproductive regulations, our politicians and the special interests who control them bloviate about “climate change” while doing little or nothing that might actually help the forests.

And abetting them at every turn are “environmentalists,” whose well intentioned but misguided lobbying and litigation have done more to decimate California’s forests than nature and the changing climate ever could.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in City Journal.

Unexplained Excess Deaths Persist in Post-COVID Era

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According to data reported weekly by the CDC, the death rate in America remains elevated. In the six years prior to the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as the U.S., the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding the 2020, for example, the population growth adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

None of that is true today. The increase in total deaths – deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths – is up significantly. If the period between October 2019 and June 2023 had adhered to predictable mortality rates, 10.5 million Americans would have died. Instead, during that period, 12.4 people died. This prolonged period of so-called excess deaths, 17 percent above normal, is only rivaled by the estimated 675,000 deaths from Spanish Flu in America in 1918-19 when the country had a much smaller population.

To illustrate how aberrant these grim statistics are, the chart below plots on a blue line the actual weekly deaths from all causes in the United States from the Fall of 2019 through the Spring of 2023. The grey line plots how many deaths would have occurred if mortality rates had adhered to predictable trends based on highly consistent statistics from the six prior years, 2013 through 2019. The data is indisputable, even if the causes remain mired in controversy. During the so-called COVID era, nearly 2.0 million people are dead who, if it had been normal times, would still be alive today.

There appears to be no end in sight, even though the horrific surges appear to be behind us. As shown on the right edges of the chart, going into the summer of 2023, weekly deaths from all causes remained persistently higher than normal. For example, during the last week of June, which is the most recent week for which there is reasonably complete reporting, 55,000 Americans died. Based on historical patterns, only 51,000 Americans would have died. Excess deaths in the U.S. are still about 7 percent above normal.

Equally if not more alarming, even though the number of reported cases of COVID has been sharply down ever since the last major surge in January 2022, they now account for less than one in five of this persistent elevated death rate. Even during the first week of January 2023, when total deaths reached a yearly peak of 70,165 compared to a normal average estimate for that week of 57,545, only 3,656 of those 12,620 excess deaths were reported as COVID deaths. During the last week for which we have completed data, the week of June 26, 2023, of the estimated excess deaths of 3,265, only 566 were reported as caused by COVID.

In an attempt to get an idea of who is dying, the next chart shows deaths by week for the period January 2015 through June 2023, plotted by age group. The results are interesting. The most obvious observation is that the top two lines, which plot weekly deaths of people over 75 and over 85, respectively, account for most deaths in the U.S., as would be expected. These two age groups also experienced the highest spikes in mortality during the COVID years. The next two lines, representing Americans from 65 to 74, and from 45 to 64 track remarkably close to each other up until the COVID years and don’t diverge sharply even during the COVD years.

To dive deeper into the trends among Americans over 45, notice where each line begins and ends. The very old Americans are dying today in about the same numbers as they were in 2015, as are Americans between 45 and 64. In the case of the 85+ Americans, the cause may be there simply aren’t as many of them left, since so many were lost during the COVID years. In the case of the 45-64 year olds, the return to normal may be attributable to their relative good health and resilience compared to their older counterparts. But notice the trend that applies for the 65-74 and the 75-84 year olds. The summertime low for 65-74 year olds in 2015 was around 9,000 per week, and today it is elevated to around 13,000 per week. Similarly, and in even more dramatic fashion, the summertime low for 75-84 year olds in 2015 was around 12,500 per week, and now it is all the way up to nearly 18,000 per week. Most of the persistent increase in the death rate can be found in Americans between 65 and 84.

For young Americans, two things are evident. First, during the COVID years there was a significant increase in the death rate among 25-44 year olds, and even though the numbers are relatively small, they are currently dying at a significantly greater percentage rate than in the pre-COVID years. Second, it is quite clear that for Americans under the age of 25, as shown in the virtually horizontal plot at the bottom of the chart, COVID was of zero statistical significance, nor are they experiencing statistically relevant excess deaths today.

Wading through this data reduces to a sobering reality: Americans over the age of 65 are dying in numbers and at rates far in excess of what data from recent but pre-COVID years would predict. These are not Americans that typically show up in the elevated drug overdose and homicide statistics. And at least according to the CDC, the vast majority of them are not dying of COVID.

Altogether, based on CDC statistics, the difference between excess deaths and deaths reported as COVID deaths in the United States over the past three years now exceeds 650,000. The percentage of excess deaths that are not recorded as COVID deaths has never been higher, and currently exceeds 80 percent. Without far more analysis, as well as the truths that will eventually emerge through the filter of history, it is sufficient to say excess deaths in the United States that aren’t caused by COVID might be primarily the sum of increases in suicides, murders, car accidents, drug overdoses, a disproportionately large number of 1946 babies reaching the limit of their life expectancy, and deferred diagnoses and deferred treatments. Or it might be something else.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How to Realign California and Save the Middle Class

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AUDIO: Do you want California to become safe and affordable again? Do you want California’s schools to properly prepare the next generation to lead productive, independent lives? Do you want to realign California’s politics to fill the state legislature with politicians that will enact realistic, nonpartisan, decisive solutions to the challenges facing hard working families trying to live here? Then focus on the three issues that matter: education, law enforcement, and the high cost-of-living. This presentation focuses on these big three issues and proposes specific solutions.

Saving the Salton Sea

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The Salton Sea has been called the biggest environmental disaster in California’s history. Formed in 1905 when a canal diverting water from the Colorado River to farms in the Imperial Valley breached during heavy rains, barely a century later the lake is drying up. How to save the Salton Sea, or at the least, how to manage its decline, is a confounding challenge.

At first almost everything about the newly formed Salton Sea was good. The canals were fixed, a process that took nearly two years, and Southern Californians found themselves with 350 square miles of freshwater lake where previously there had been nothing but desert. Into this new wonderland came entrepreneurs, stocking the lake with fish and building plush resorts for fishing and boating only a few hours from Los Angeles. During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, resorts along the lake boasted yacht clubs, golf courses, and entertainment venues that drew top celebrities.

All the while, a catastrophe was brewing. The Salton Sea is located within the Salton Sink, a basin straddling the San Andreas fault. With an average elevation 250 feet below sea level, there is no outlet to the ocean for the water. The lake is large but shallow, and even at its greatest volume never held more than around 7.5 million acre-feet (MAF) of water. As it happens to be located in California’s lower Colorado Desert, a place of blistering heat more than half the year, the estimated annual losses from evaporation are roughly 1.3 MAF. It doesn’t take an environmental hydrologist to see where that leads. All runoff has some salt, picked up from the soil. When there is no outlet, salt accumulates since fresh water perpetually evaporates. Dissolved salts and every other introduced contaminant will stay in the sea.

For several decades, it didn’t matter. The salinity gradually increased, but fish and wildlife continued to thrive. The Salton Sea was adopted by migratory birds as a vital stop-off point on the Pacific Flyway, and runoff from irrigated Imperial Valley agriculture, flowing downhill into the lake, maintained the lake volume. But starting around 2000, after decades of warnings from lake watchers, the Salton Sea’s decline became acute.

To begin with, the salinity in the lake finally reached toxic proportions. Current salinity in the Salton Sea is 60 parts per thousand, not quite twice what is normal in the ocean, and nearing the point where the lake will die completely, joining the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea as host to nothing living apart from bacteria and some resilient strains of algae. Worse, at least for humans living near the Salton Sea, starting in 2003 the farmers in the Imperial Valley began selling some of their irrigation water to California’s coastal cities and using their remaining allocations far more efficiently. Consequently, instead of around 1.3 MAF of agricultural runoff going into the sea each year to replace evaporative losses, only about half that much has gone in. And all along, the agricultural runoff deposited not only salt but traces of fertilizer and pesticide, which have now accumulated to levels toxic to wildlife.

Estimates vary, and occasional rains have temporarily reversed the trend, but at present the total volume of the Salton Sea is down to about 4.5 MAF, a roughly 40 percent decline from its peak. Simply letting the lake dry up might seem like a rational solution, since before man intervened back in 1905, there was no lake. But the region has changed over the past 120 years: The Coachella Valley, northwest of the lake, is now home to over 370,000 people. If the lake bed becomes exposed, so too will the concentrated salts and every leached toxin and introduced ag chemical that ever ran out of the Imperial Valley. When the Santa Ana winds blow hard enough, toxic dust will fill the air from Bombay Beach — essentially a lakeside ghost town, home to a handful of eccentrics — to downtown Los Angeles.

There is no easy fix, and doing nothing is not an option. Exactly what to do calls into question the viability of California’s governing model in the 21st century. Certainly if the people running California in 1950 had the technology we have today and faced this problem, within ten years the problem would have been solved.

Here’s what would happen today under more decisive governance:

It is less than 100 miles from the shores of Camp Pendleton, federally owned land along the Pacific, to the western edge of the Salton Sea. In a water project guaranteed to restore the Salton Sea, a pipe would be laid connecting the Pacific Ocean to it, and because the pipe would terminate at an elevation 250 feet lower than where it originated, there would be no energy requirement: Gravity would be enough. Ocean water at a salinity of 35 parts per thousand — far lower than the Salton Sea’s — would then flow into the Salton Sea at the rate of 750,000 acre-feet per year, which, combined with agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley, would maintain the lake at its desired “historic” level. If the 250-foot drop in elevation were engineered adequately, it is even possible that several hundred megawatts of baseload electric power could be generated by running the flow through turbines.

At the same time, the agricultural runoff would be cleaned using reverse-osmosis filtration, sending fresh, clean water into the Salton Sea. If necessary, water already in the Salton Sea could be withdrawn and also filtered, ensuring the desired level of salinity in perpetuity. Because reverse osmosis, at most, requires only about 400 megawatts of input per million acre-feet of purified water per year, power harvested from the Pacific Ocean pipe could be sufficient to treat the agricultural runoff with enough power left over to also treat 250,000 acre-feet per year of water in the Salton Sea. The comparable drop in elevation from the Imperial Valley to the Salton Sea might also enable engineers to generate electricity from that water transfer.

Conceiving a plan like this — ambitious but possible — is how Californians thought about problems back in the 1950s and 1960s. With 21st-century sensibilities would come more extensive mitigation measures. For example, the intake pipes could be put well offshore and dispersed to draw water that could filter down to intakes buried under the seabed, engineered in a manner that would all but eliminate any impact on marine life. These features would add cost, but the extra costs would be affordable, because — if, again, we imagine a mid-20th-century approach to the plan — the projects would get done. They wouldn’t be mired in litigation and continuous reengineering and endless compromises, costing additional billions of dollars and taking decades to resolve. Like the great reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping stations constructed in the last century, these projects would take years instead of decades, and the money would be spent on construction labor and materials, instead of attorneys, bureaucrats, and bankers.

Now imagine the reverse: If the politicians and political culture of today’s California were in place in 1950, nothing would have been built. We would have no state water project, no freeways, and no reliable power. We live today on the capital investments made by people whose like no longer have a seat at the table, much less call the shots.

This fact bears emphasis. Before discussing what solutions are actually being put forth to save the Salton Sea, it’s important to emphasize just how dysfunctional California’s governing elite has become. Gridlock and the exploitation by special interests of regulations and opportunities for litigation have made it impossible for the state to do anything big. The most monumental project the state has undertaken this century is so-called high-speed rail, planned to eventually link the state’s northern and southern megacities. “Eventually” is the key word. Every time the project releases an update, the price tag rises. The first 171-mile segment, linking Merced to Bakersfield — i.e., in the flattest, most rural portion of the entire planned line — is now estimated to cost $35 billion, that is, over $200 million per mile. More than ten years and ten billion dollars after construction ostensibly began, not one single piece of track has been laid. This is governance in California. This is Gavin Newsom’s legacy. This is a fiasco on a scale so huge it defies description.

Only in this context can the convoluted compromises that constitute Salton Sea restoration proposals be properly evaluated. There are sources of money. A lot of money. Already, state and federal sources have committed over a half billion dollars to Salton Sea restoration, with much more possible. And private-sector funds could be forthcoming.

Earlier this year, Controlled Thermal Resources, a geothermal-power developer, announced that its planned 1.1-gigawatt geothermal plant would also extract 300,000 tons of lithium carbonate from the Salton Sea’s geothermal brine each year. If this plant goes into full production, it and subsequent facilities may generate the energy, and the wealth, needed to fund restoration efforts. But it’s way too soon to pop open the champagne. The technology is not proven, and local tribes and environmentalists have concerns. Can direct lithium extraction be done without causing more harm than good? Will political support for green power overcome objections from the usual suspects?

In December 2022, Brent Haddad, a UC Santa Cruz professor of environmental studies, and Robert Glennon, a University of Arizona law professor, who participated in the State of California’s Salton Sea independent review panel, published a summary of ways to save the Salton Sea. Reflecting the most recent recommendations to the panel, most of them propose to maintain the lake in its shrunken state or allow it to shrink down further to a size that can be supported by what remains of agricultural runoff and occasional natural runoff. The centerpiece of their plan is a desalination plant that “would remove 200 million gallons of high-salinity water daily from the Salton Sea and produce 100 million gallons per day of desalinated water, which would be returned to the Salton Sea.”

These authors, and the panel they were part of, may be commended for coming up with a big idea. Desalinating 100 million gallons per day is twice the capacity of California’s one and only large desalination plant, the Carlsbad plant in San Diego, which desalinates 50 million gallons per day. Haddad and Glennon are proposing to desalinate and return to the Salton Sea 112,000 acre-feet per year, which means the entire 4.5 MAF volume of the lake would be turned over every 40 years. Assuming this project ever gets built, it’s a good start. But what about the exposed seabed around the shrinking lake? What about the agricultural runoff? What about the brine?

To handle a shrinking lake, the plan is to “stabilize the exposed playa [lake bed]” by plowing furrows and planting vegetation. The plan for the brine is to dry it out in evaporation ponds and transfer “dried salts from the ponds to landfills or industrial uses.” It isn’t clear how agricultural runoff would be treated, apart from the possibility that runoff could be channeled directly into the desalination plant for pretreatment before going into the lake. But that would require an even bigger desalination plant. Good!

Proposals to draw water from the Sea of Cortez or the California coast were both dismissed as impractical. But the authors, the panel, the legislators, and the activists who want to save the Salton Sea must face a bleak reality: There is no plan that involves any major infrastructure that will not be controversial and costly. The compromise plan put forward — let the lake shrink, purify the water with a massive land-based desalination plant, and mitigate the exposed playa with furrows and vegetation — is projected to cost $63 billion. Sixty-three billion. Why?

Even at today’s California prices, a coastal desalination plant the size of two Carlsbads would cost “only” about $2 billion. A pipeline traversing the land from Camp Pendleton to the Salton Sea might cost an estimated $10 billion (of course, that’s before the litigators and regulators get involved), and would generate, not consume, electricity. A sensible solution would be to disburse the brine in the Pacific Ocean, but if there’s a land-based solution for brine disposal, put the desalination plant at the receiving end. How did these planners come up with their cost estimate? Where do all those billions and billions of dollars go?

Ultimately, the chances that anything significant will ever be done to save the Salton Sea are remote. Not because it is such a challenging undertaking — though it is — but because the culture that might have moved forward decisively to build the big infrastructure it’s going to take to solve the problem is long gone. Californians feel this every day as they pay punitive prices for rationed water, rationed energy, and insufficient housing. This abuse is sold as necessary “to save the earth” while benefitting politically connected special interests. Soon, every time the Santa Ana winds blow across the tainted bed of what used to be the Salton Sea, millions of Southern Californians are going to feel even more acutely the consequences of small thinking and gridlock masquerading as virtue.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

Saving the Environment from Environmentalists

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“The oceans director of Greenpeace told USA Today that groups attempting to link offshore wind to whale deaths are part of a “cynical disinformation campaign.”
–  “Whale carcasses on Martha’s Vineyard fuel speculation about wind turbines,” New Bedford Light, June 22, 2023

If you want to know just how far the environmentalist movement has fallen in recent years, the destruction of marine life off the coast of Massachusetts in 2023 provides a disgraceful example. Greenpeace, an organization that not only led the earliest vanguard of the modern environmental movement, but was specifically formed to save the world’s whales, is actively denying what is likely the most egregious massacre of whales by Americans in over a century.

Greenpeace is not alone. This shameful demonstration of mass deceit is on full display by all the organizations that supposedly exist to protect wilderness and wildlife, along with the media that marches in lockstep with their every whim. As usual, a Google search turns up a nearly monolithic edifice of articles decrying the “anti-renewables” lobby for their “misinformation.” From Time Magazine, “conspiracy theorists think wildlife groups are covering up whale deaths.” From FactCheck.org, “No Evidence Offshore Wind Development Killing Whales.” From CBS News, “No known connections between wind power and whale deaths.” From the US Dept. of Energy, “Addressing Misinformation on Offshore Wind Farms and Whale Deaths.” From NPR, “Dead whales on east coast fuel misinformation about offshore wind.” And on and on it goes. The same story. The same disinformation. Everywhere.

The fact that so many so-called authoritative sources could engage in a coordinated campaign of denial is not new. But their willingness to make these assertions in the face of such compelling evidence to the contrary, and in such contradiction of the environmentalist values they all ostensibly share, indicates a new low for America’s controlled media, and the cowards it employs.

The only charitable explanation is that the urgency of the “climate crisis” has addled the minds of journalists that ought to have enough common sense, or courage, to acknowledge the obvious. When you detonate massive explosives, repeatedly drive steel piles into the ocean floor with a hydraulic hammer, and blast high decibel sonar mapping signals underwater, you’re going to harm animals that rely on sound to orient themselves in the ocean. To say it is mere coincidence that hundreds of these creatures have washed ashore, dead, all of a sudden, during precisely the same months when the blasting and pounding began, is brazen deception.

A recent and scathing set of articles published over the past few weeks by Michael Shellenberger on his substack account provide some excellent examples of how misguided environmentalism, specifically with respect to the environment, is doing far more harm than good. He is one of the only journalists in America to report honestly on the cause of whale deaths.

Shellenberger offers additional examples of misguided environmentalism. He exposes the fraudulent essence of most plastic “recycling,” wherein the plastic, painstakingly sorted by consumers and collected at considerable extra cost by overbuilt waste management companies, ultimately ends up not being recycled. The recycler “instead ships the waste to poor nations, where it ends up in rivers and oceans.” Shellenberger also points out the sordid symbiosis between misguided environmentalism and woke ideology, using as an example perhaps one of the most infamous men in the world today, the arrogant M. Kaleo Manuel, who denied water to Maui firefighters during the hours when lives might still have been saved, because “he would be willing to consider doing so but only after he and they had ‘true conversations about equity’.”

There’s something else at work, however, bigger than climate crisis panic, and bigger than woke ideology, that has turned the environmentalist movement into a monster that often does more harm than good. The environmentalist movement has been hijacked by financial special interests. In the office towers of Boston, attorneys, developers, and politicians today are slavering with lust over the billions in fees, subsidies, and donations their firms, their companies, and their campaigns will collect as they deploy offshore wind energy atop the carcasses of humpback whales. “Offshore wind is for the greater good, because it’s going to save the planet from extreme weather,” is their unassailable public argument, as the cynics among them laugh at all the gullible suckers.

Clean technology” is a good idea, but often horrific in practice. There’s nothing remotely competitive about offshore wind energy, although you’ll have to work awfully hard to find anything but pollyanna prognostications in a Google search. But a well researched article published earlier this year by David Turner, “Exploding the Cheap Offshore Wind Fantasy,” exposes the inconvenient truths about this destructive boondoggle. The corrosive power of saltwater and salt-laden sea air make maintenance of offshore turbines an expensive proposition that only increases over time. Accessing these turbines for maintenance is impossible during heavy storm events when repairs are often most needed. Turner estimates the useful economic life for these fabulously expensive leviathans at a mere 12 years.

Equally daunting facts surround the actual productivity of these offshore wind farms. The biggest offshore turbines currently available generate 10 megawatts. They stand over 1,000 feet tall and require about one square mile each in order to maximize efficiency by not cannibalizing wind needed to drive nearby rotors. Even if the offshore wind blows 50 percent of the time, and no study however optimistic and supportive of wind energy has ever predicted a higher yield, this means each one will provide – once you’ve installed storage assets and transmission lines at stupefying additional cost – 5 megawatts of baseload power. If that sounds like a lot, it’s not.

New England’s electricity demand averages around 25 gigawatts in 2023. Bear in mind this demand will increase not by increments, but by multiples, if and when New England – along with the rest of the nation after the great green reset – electrifies much of its transportation and residential sectors. For offshore wind turbines as described to provide 25 gigawatts of baseload electricity, five thousand of them would have to be built. Imagine how these billions might be better spent. And kiss the whales goodbye.

These examples just scratch the surface of how thoroughly environmentalist extremism, represented as no vice when in defense against the climate crisis, is actually harming the environment. Ask the orangutans of Borneo, casualties along with countless other species as rainforest gives way to palm oil plantations for biodiesel. Ask the jaguars of Brazil, as rainforest on that side of the world is incinerated in order to become carpeted with sugar cane plantations to produce ethanol. As Californians import biodiesel in ships powered by bunker fuel, virgin land is seized and stripped, its ecosystems decimated with biofuel monocultures saturated with pesticide and petroleum-based fertilizer. So far over 550,000 square miles have been given over to biofuel farming, in exchange for making less than a 2.0 percent dent in the global supply of petroleum based transportation fuel.

These are the excesses of environmentalism today. To put a human face on this catastrophe, consider the trafficked and enslaved children toiling in the Chinese owned cobalt mines of West Africa, so virtue signaling dweebs can drive 6,000 pound, resource guzzling EVs on American streets that were never designed for so many heavyweight vehicles. For that matter, on a topic that only seems unrelated, consider the millions of Americans that can’t afford homes, because environmentalist policies are enforcing “greenbelts” around every major urban area, limiting supply and driving up prices.

For these and numerous other examples of greed masquerading as green, there is big money talking, right alongside big power. Environmentalism in 21st century America has very little to do anymore with environmentalism. Those millions of Americans who can remember when Greenpeace actually cared about saving the whales need to realize that brand equity was squandered and discarded, a long, long time ago.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.