Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

It is a fitting coincidence that the announcement of Greta Thunberg’s honorary doctorate in theology came the same week as a new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the world has less than a decade to stop "catastrophic climate change" by halting the use of fossil fuels. You can be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu all over again, since we have been getting “less than a decade to stop climate change” warnings for more than 30 years. Only someone who has assimilated climate catastrophism as a fanatical religion could fail to be embarrassed by this record of hysteria and goal-post shifting, which makes St. Greta of Thunberg’s theology degree ironically fitting.

Yet the new IPCC report is not a report at all. It is merely a 36-page “Summary for Policy Makers” (SPM in the climate trade) ahead of a new “synthesis report” that will merely repackage the last complete three-volume IPCC climate change assessment from 2021. The new synthesis report, which will likely run a thousand pages or more, is “coming soon,” according to the IPCC’s website.

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In other words, the new “synthesis report” is not new at all, but is produced to keep climate agitation at a full boil. The SPM is released ahead of main report to generate headlines, which will then be repeated, Groundhog Day-style, when the full report is released later. The new SPM did the trick: the New York Times's chief stenographer for the climate cult, Brad Plumer, produced a breathless story that can be written now by ChatGPT, declaring that “Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade.” This whole well-worn exercise is the climate cult equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

Another reason for the early release of the SPM ahead of the complete report is that there are often discrepancies or contradictions between claims made in the SPM or its accompanying press release and the more detailed scientific reports, which the media never notice or check. Who actually writes the SPMs? The new one claims 49 “core writing team members,” along with another 44 contributing writers and editors. All this for 36 pages. The working theory seems to be that the world will be bowled over by the sheer number of the authors. The SPM is often produced without review or input by the hundreds of scientists who contribute to the full reports. A few have complained publicly about how the SPMs are politicized in service of generating headlines, but they are always ignored.

Now pay attention!

While there is nothing new in this new summary of the forthcoming synthesis report, it is possible to notice some telling shifts along with some unscientific claims about energy policy the IPCC emphasizes in its press release. When the climate campaign first got rolling back in the late 1980s, the chief buzzword attached to everything was “sustainability.” That term lives on, but today official climate discourse is obsessed with “equitable” climate action and “climate justice.” (“Diversity” shows up for duty, too.)

Beyond these gestures to Wokery, the whole exercise is a giant non-sequitur. The SPM repeats a pattern that has crippled the climate campaign from the beginning—the climate cultists seem to think that if we keep announcing a parade of future horrors, that green energy must therefore be feasible and fossil fuels can be phased out quickly at the snap of a finger. That is not a climate science judgment; it is an energy systems judgment, and it precisely on the question of real world energy where the IPCC has always had its least expertise and most superficial analysis. Here’s how the IPCC press release portrays the simplicity of the solution:

There is sufficient global capital to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions if existing barriers are reduced. Increasing finance to climate investments is important to achieve global climate goals. Governments, through public funding and clear signals to investors, are key in reducing these barriers. Investors, central banks and financial regulators can also play their part.

Rosenmontag satire: wind farms vs. natural gas.

One thing the IPCC never does it run a reality check on the track record of this pabulum. Germany has spent close to a trillion dollars on behalf of its “energy revolution,” only to see its greenhouse gas emissions rising again in recent years, including reopening coal mines and coal-fired power last year as its dependence on backup Russian natural gas revealed how rickety the whole enterprise is. There is a tight correlation between the amount of capital spent on “green energy” and rising electricity costs in Europe and elsewhere. Somehow the advocates of “climate justice” for the poor fall silent about this fact.

The "climate change" establishment has become its own worst enemy. A serious climate science and policy movement that really believed catastrophe is ahead (let’s leave aside today the weakness of that claim) would admit that we don’t know how to create a realistic non-carbon energy system. They won’t admit it because there is too much money to be made today in the grift of energy subsidies that don’t and can’t live up to promise.

More than a decade ago New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who believes the conventional climate disaster narrative, tried to warn environmentalists: “Environmental alarms have been screeching for so long that, like car alarms, they are now just an irritating background noise.” But like all cults, the climate campaigners are impervious to good advice, and will think this latest car alarm is an apocalyptic Wagnerian opera: Götterdämmerung, or, The Twilight of the Gods.

South Africa: State of Collapse

South Africa is in the midst of a political crisis, and energy shortages are at the heart of it. You'll be forgiven for not having heard—western media has preferred to focus on the war in Ukraine and everything else has fallen through the cracks. Here's a rare report on the matter, from Britain's The Spectator:

Blackouts of up to ten hours a day are bringing businesses to a halt, making teaching harder and turning traffic lights dark. Food is rotting in warm fridges. There were more than 200 blackouts last year and they have continued every day so far in 2023.... The cause is a debt-ridden and run-down fleet of power stations, which have been starved of repairs and regularly break down. Electricity supplies have to be switched off to stop the grid collapsing....

The power cuts are affecting every sector. Erratic supply is hitting the country’s mining giants, its major exporters. Small grocers and supermarkets are shutting shop. ShopRite, Africa’s biggest grocer, said in its financial results that it had to spend an extra £26 million on diesel in the final half of last year to run supermarket generators during power cuts. The country’s sugar industry estimates it will lose £33 million this year. Unemployment is running at around a third.

And if you are wondering what this means for regular South Africans, read this lengthy Twitter thread. A few excerpts:

How did this happen? It is a complex story, but it has a few key themes running through it. First of all, corruption at the state-run energy utility Eskom. Farmer details how former president Jacob Zuma spent years helping his cronies embezzle money from Eskom. But the corruption didn't end when Zuma left office. When Eskom brought in a new CEO, André de Ruyter, to reform the organization, he found that it was rife with criminality. According to de Ruyter, "Machinery has been deliberately sabotaged so that gangs can benefit from maintenance contracts; good coal is stolen and sold off, to be replaced with poor-quality fuel or even rocks." And when he tried to get to the bottom of it, someone slipped cyanide into his coffee. De Ruyter recovered, but he ultimately resigned in frustration, and has decided to leave the country. He told The American Conservative's Helen Andrews, “I think it will be good for my health.”

Hard times, indeed...

Second, incompetence. Andrews' report explores how the centrality of affirmative action polices -- intended to combat inequality in a nation which spent decades under a notorious apartheid regime -- has left the company unable to deal with this kind of crisis.

In 1995, [Eskom's] senior management was mandated to go from 70 percent white to 50 percent black by 1999 and 75 percent black by 2005. In 2008, Eskom’s head of human resources announced, “Over the next five years...Eskom has to appoint two new staff every day, and it is adamant that one of them will be a black woman.”

Well it has now been 15 years, and the company is $26 billion in debt and the power grid is on the verge of collapse. Aptitude-based hiring does have its advantages.

And, of course, there is the environmentalist angle. South Africa is known for its coal mining, something that environmentalists and their political lapdogs have been complaining about for years. In order to stay in the good graces of their western counterparts, South Africa's government—lead by the corrupt African National Congress party of Nelson Mandela since 1994—has signed onto increasingly onerous environmental regulations over the last several years. Their object is the eventual phase-out of coal. What will it be replaced with? There have been some vague gestures at renewable energy, but the real answer is nothing. They haven't thought that far ahead.

Which is to say, western elites have fomented this crisis. Moreover, a lot of this should remind you of their vision for America. Skyrocketing energy prices, inflation, crime rates, equality-of-outcome-ordered affirmative action, pie-in-the-sky energy policies -- sounds like a Leftist paradise. Except none of them would want to live there.

Is Water Racist? Isn't Everything?

It is not news that California has a severe water shortage, and in fact “shortage” is too mild a term, as the once golden state has been under an official “state of emergency” for the last several years, which enables the government to impose strict rationing on water use. California’s water shortage is a combination of several drought years, along with a deliberate disinvestment in water infrastructure over the last several decades. California hasn’t built any significant new water projects or a single dam in more than 40 years, even as the state’s population has nearly doubled. In other words, California’s water problems are more artificial—that is, political—than natural.

The best example of the political distortion of California’s water supply can be seen in the fact that despite officially declaring water to be a “fundamental human right,” human access to water has taken a back seat to the Delta Smelt, a tiny fish whose endangered status has led to court rulings that the fish has greater claim on California’s water supplies than humans do. Trillions of gallons of fresh water have been diverted from human use to save the Delta Smelt over the last few years, making a mockery of the “human right” to water.

Who smelt'd it, Delta'd it.

So what is California’s extensive water bureaucracy most worried about right now? Racism and “equity,” of course.

Last year California’s State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), explicitly responding to the suddenly discovered legacy of “white supremacy” and “the national and worldwide backlash against racism toward Black people and related Black Lives Matter protests of 2020,” passed a nine-page resolution (accompanied by 47 pages of “reference literature”), headlined “Condemning Racism, Xenophobia, Bigotry, and Racial Injustice and Strengthening Commitment to Racial Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, Access, and Anti-Racism.” One might have thought “inclusion” would have involved mentioning homophobia and Islamophobia, too, except that Black Lives Matter and their supporters get very angry when you mention the importance of any non-black group.

This cliché-ridden piece of predictable performance posturing is a case study of several intertwined traits of progressive governance today. California’s State Water Resources Control Board (and nine regional subordinate water boards) dates back to the 1960s, and was initially charged with monitoring the state’s water with an eye to detecting and remediating pollution from major sources such as industrial production, agricultural runoff, wastewater, and natural sources of unhealthy water. Surface and subsurface water quality is one of the more challenging environmental problems the nation faces because of the wide variety of ways water quality can be degraded, so it is not surprising that water monitors and regulators have a large range of factors to manage, from underground storage tanks to—in California’s case—the effects of specialized industries such as winemaking to, more recently, cannabis cultivation.

But as with all bureaucracies, mission creep and the political imperative of ever larger budgets and staff always leads to inexorable growth of power and reach, even as its primary original mission remains unfulfilled. Naturally the Board now includes "climate change" as one of its primary concerns, and “public outreach” and education—essentially propaganda and self-congratulation—as key functions. It is not surprising that it would jump on the anti-racist bandwagon along with everyone else in Leftist government.

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It almost doesn’t matter whether the issue is water, air pollution, or access to food stores (the “food desert” argument). The by-the-numbers racism-all-the-way-down playbook is essentially the same. Any statistical disparity between races on any measure is taken as proof of racist intent and latent “white supremacy.” The state board's resolution declares as a matter of fact:

Historically, decision-makers representing government agencies used race to establish structures and systems that continue to deliver disparate outcomes, including wealth, health, educational, and environmental inequities.

No proof is offered for this sweeping statement, but in typical fashion the resolution attempts to overwhelm readers with a pile of “reference literature,” no doubt compiled by a university “racial justice studies” department, all detailing statistical disparities unfavorable to minorities, as though this proves racist intent. It leads to the resolution’s conclusion: “In fact, race is the strongest predictor of water and sanitation access.”

It sounds persuasive until you notice what is missing from this body of “evidence”—income correlation and time. If you ask about poverty rather than race, you find virtually the same result. In other words, race is really a proxy for poverty, especially in California, which has the highest poverty rate in the nation thanks to “progressive” economic policies that throttle economic growth and opportunity especially for low-income minorities. But even the race or poverty measurements often don’t hold up under close scrutiny. A good example elsewhere is coal ash tailings. Environmental justice warriors have long alleged that hazardous coal ash tailings are disproportionately located near minority populations, though an EPA study found that most coal ash tailings are located in majority white areas.

To the extent that minorities live near chemical plants, refineries, landfills, or poor public infrastructure, it is usually for the simple reason that the cost of living is cheaper there, and the record shows that low-income people settle in such areas for that very reason. From the environmental justice rhetoric, you’d think oil refineries were built next to low-income minorities on purpose, when the reverse is nearly always the case in California: the refinery or chemical factory preceded local neighborhood settlement. (Most or all of these towns and neighborhoods have long been run by Democrats, it should be noted.)

Maybe a few more of these would help.

The SWRCB resolution is long on the typical critical race theory language of pervasive racism, but remarkably short on remedies, beyond more funding—always more funding. But also more “empowerment” of marginalized voices, which means de facto quotas (though this is now called “diversity”), as this passage makes clear:

The Water Boards’ workforce does not reflect the racial composition of the state. United States Census Bureau data collected via the 2019 American Community Survey (ACS) show that 37 percent of California’s population is white, yet the Water Boards’ workforce census data from 2020 show that 57 percent of the Water Boards’ workforce and 69 percent of the Water Boards’ management is white... The Water Boards’ plan directs hiring managers and supervisors to take specific short-term actions to improve workforce diversity while a more holistic plan is being developed.

One statistical disparity none of these reports and studies ever address is whether higher minority representation leads to lower disparities of outcomes. Last week the EPA finally determined that the water in Jackson, Mississippi, was safe to drink again, after several months of a public emergency because Jackson’s water treatment facilities were in disarray. Water treatment is a local government responsibility, and Jackson’s African-America mayor and city council were clearly negligent in their management of their water infrastructure. Mere “equity” in representation doesn’t assure better outcomes for the very people the environmental justice warriors claim to care about.

And if Democrat-run California really wants to supply more abundant, high-quality water for everyone, is should start building dams and water projects again, as California Democrats used to do on a large scale before “progress” became the perverse creed it is today.

Who's Afraid of the CCP Vaccine?

It wasn’t George Orwell’s animals or calendar, or Ray Bradbury’s firemen or Anthony Burgess’ clockwork that ought to have worried us. No; it was Mary Shelley’s doctor.

Some animals always have been – and always will be – more equal than others. Though today’s “equity” totalitarianism denies this, studies of global population IQ are definitive. If the Left really thought we all were equal, they’d not be replacing Equal Opportunity with Equity, itself an acknowledgement of inequality.

A danger exists within “equity.” As Louis Marano notes in his review of Charles Murray’s new book, Facing Reality, a look at disparities between humans:

The disaster materializes if the white majority gets fed up, has had enough, and pushes back. Or, in Murray’s words, “when working-class and middle-class Whites adopt identity politics.”

One might recall what Admiral Yamamoto is supposed to have said after Pearl Harbor – another attack on the American society… "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." He ought to know, since he planned the attack himself.

Welcome to the brave new world.

Today’s Left may be intrigued by the Brave New World idea of growing fetuses in a bottle and injecting different proteins to create a worker, a drone, a consultant or an elite – but they seem more interested in killing fetuses and babies. They aren’t worried about the constant telescreen – they carry one in their pocket.

Amazon already has perfected burning disliked books: Move the reader to Kindle and then alter or remove the content however and whenever desired without reader awareness. Or stop selling it, having run nearly all local retailers out of business.

We’ve been watching the clockworkian dystopia burn our cities, murder our cops and attack innocents for over a year – no one seems to mind; at least not enough to do anything about it other than increase the dosage in our soma by defunding cops, releasing perps with no bail, no charge, no trial to do it all again.

But Ms. Shelley’s doctor created a technology with which her society was unable to deal. The result was murderous. Our doctors today? Easy: Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Tony Fauci. The results are worse.

Eeek.

We aren’t talking about a single monster of technology turned loose to terrorize. No, we’re looking at real Frankenstein monsters, monsters of technology we are so far unwilling to control, attacking liberty and freedom and prosperity and the future - globally. We have, to our detriment, fallen in love with our monsters. Try to get a friend off Zuckerberg’s monster, or Dorsey’s. How many of us refuse Bezos’ wares to support local businesses?

Before our wonderful vaccine technology advanced so far that we don’t even need normal trial durations before turning it loose, we dealt differently with diseases.

I was born in the 1950s. I’m not anti-vax. My generation still has the scar on our left shoulder from smallpox vaccine. We ate a sugar cube laced with polio vaccine. But those were (and this is a term of art) “perfect” vaccines. We didn’t have vaccines for mumps (which, if a boy didn’t get it before puberty, might make him sterile) or German measles (which, if a woman got it during pregnancy, her baby stood a good chance of birth defects) or chicken pox (a mild form of herpes as a kid, a serious problem as an adult). What did we do?

Easy – when a kid got the mumps, all the parents sent their sons over to play and spend the night. When a kid got the measles… when a kid got chicken pox. It was, seriously, a party. Hang out with your buds, have some pizza, get sick, get over it, be immune the rest of your life.

But the BigPharma/BigGov response to the good Dr. Fauci’s function-gained bat flu technology has changed all that. Not only did we not have a party, we locked-up those with no chance of a serious illness or death so that we could not gain permanent immunity. And now we have a vaccine that is (another term of art) “leaky.”

The other good doctors of social media then refused any discussion not supportive of their – uneducated – narrative, including all discussion of decades-old medicines that showed positive results by the millions: Ivermectin and HCQ.

The doctor is our friend.

What is a “leaky vaccine?” This is a good piece describing “leaky” and “perfect” vaccines in layperson terminology. (emphasis mine)

The deadliest strains of viruses often take care of themselves — they flare up and then die out. This is because they are so good at destroying cells and causing illness that they ultimately kill their host before they have time to spread.

But a chicken virus that represents one of the deadliest germs in history breaks from this conventional wisdom, thanks to an inadvertent effect from a vaccine. Chickens vaccinated against Marek’s disease rarely get sick. But the vaccine does not prevent them from spreading Marek’s to unvaccinated birds.

“With the hottest strains, every unvaccinated bird dies within 10 days. There is no human virus that is that hot. Ebola, for example, doesn’t kill everything in 10 days.”

And how is the CCP Virus vaccine described? Stop me if you’ve heard this, but, per PBS,

Vaccines don’t always prevent infection,

and, per the CDC,

… people fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) are less likely to have asymptomatic infection or to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others.

"Less likely." Sounds "leaky," right? These not-quite-a-vaccination “leaky” jabs allow the host (you) to continue spreading the virus, allowing it to get “hotter” (more lethal).

Ms. Shelley’s monster now is among us, let-loose by our new Dr. Frankensteins, with millennia-old, successful, practices of virus immunization rejected by the same “experts” who created it and who quash all discussion of alternatives.