Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Neckering

You know how some mornings you wake up with your mind empty—and not a care in the world? It’s absolute paradise. But that wasn’t today. And despite waking up in actual paradise (Necker Island), thoughts of work had scissored in and out of my dreams until finally I opened my eyes in defeat. 

Still… defeat in paradise was not so bad. On my side of the island, I was given a standalone room which is even more secluded than the stunning Great House Rooms. But the tween-agers in residence avoided waking their parents by coming to my side and conducting themselves as absolute savages. If only I’d smuggled a plastic straw into my luggage it could have served as a makeshift blowgun.

I’m not generally so unkind but the bad parents of the world are pressing on my last nerve. And if you’re in airports you see them—prodding those pajama-clad imps who will never become pursers, or pilots, or software salesmen, or any of the other professions whose travel they obstruct.

Ready to rock for the planet.

Ironically it is for future generations that I am saving the planet. A generation that includes one Seattle schoolboy, who has taken it upon himself to attack the carbon footprint of the private jet set… (aka my clients), and the very people who are actively engaged in saving our planet. Thankfully topping the list of eco-offenders were the Kardashians, but two of my clients were also in the top ten, and unhappy doesn’t even begin to cover it. The difference obviously, is my clients are in service of the planet; and this kid just wants to fault us for trying to do our jobs.

It was nearly 11:00 before I’d made any headway and hoped that people would think I was intermittent fasting rather than sleeping or watching Netflix, especially since I’m not here entirely for the holibobs.

With the pre-teen terrorists out of my 180° view, I stepped onto my veranda and witnessed the storied flock of 500+ flamingoes that have been bio-engineered back into inhabitance. Never before had I seen anything so breathtaking. I was mesmerised, and wanted to bathe my eyes in their shocking-coral beauty as long as I could. Lunch and clients would have to wait.

Eventually I made my way down and embedded my mobile in the bottom of my raffia tote. The tween-agers were now swarming around the sushi and fresh crab claws—well of course they were, and ordering specialty slushies and french fries, and the adults were hitting golf balls into the Caribbean , which suits me just fine as my game is limited to one decent big swing anyway. Despite the target being a vast azure sea… two men were debating a Golf Digest article on why the flagstick should be pulled out 99% of the time. I took this as a sign to fish out my phone.  

I was craving a Bloody Mary but coming into focus was that dreadful man from Beef Island Airport. I’d assumed we were headed to different places as he boarded a boat and I arrived by helicopter but alas, he was here. I plunged my hand into my bag and fished out my sunglasses but to no avail. He’d seen me and so I put my phone to my ear and began an entirely imaginary conversation. Just my luck, the phone rang while I was talking and I had to do the whole how weird that we got disconnected routine. 

Still hasn't got the memo.

It was daddy alerting me to the fact that Al Gore might be booted from the board at Apple. ‘Yes, we are on top of that’, I said in a voice that told my father I clearly was not.

‘Yeahhh… I didn’t think you’d seen it’, he said picking up on my tone. ‘It was done by exempt solicitation, which is likely why you missed it.  Or maybe you got sunscreen in your eyes at the office…’

Typical Daddy. ‘Indeed’ I said, and thanked him profusely for ringing me.

Lunch was over—I had work to do.  I took two steps toward returning to my room and ran smack into the annoying man, who was somehow even more off-putting in less clothing. ‘What brings you here?’ he asked.

‘Helicopter!’ I said, and made my exit.

Back in the paradise that is my room I opened my laptop. It was bad. ‘Gore’s political activism not worth his limited skill set’... ‘Was never qualified to serve on Apple’s board in the first place’... ‘Playing “Chicken Little” for global warming…’  OMG! Global warming?? We’d dropped that term ages ago! Like I said—bad.  

The sky is falling! It's the end of the world!

I scanned the internet for anything linking Richard Branson to Al Gore and found Mr Branson putting forth a prize for anyone who could extract carbon from the atmosphere. Crikey! The interview was decades old but there they were—side by side for all the world to see. When asked if this carbon trap was a gimmick Gore replied, ‘I don’t think so’. You don’t think so? Ugh! It was a blood bath… with Gore preening like someone who clearly doesn’t know he’s going to be proven wrong in the years to come. I couldn’t save him and also save the planet. It was crunch time.

Four hours later I sent time codes and a press release to my assistant and dressed for dinner. What a day it had been! Joining the other guests, the chatter was light and lyrical under a canopy of perfect sky, and not a mobile in sight. With the exception of our host that is. I could see him nervously checking on Gore’s possible ouster. He needn’t have worried though, as I’d successfully partitioned him and eventually telegraphed a smile and a thumbs up.

The finished press packet was brilliant. It ended with a clip of that fated interview wherein the host asks, ‘Is Al Gore a prophet?’  And Richard quips, ‘How do you spell profit?’

Now I can relax. 

Still the Only Thing We Have to Fear

On March 4, 1933 newly elected President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt made this famous declaration during his inaugural address: “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself; nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” FDR had his faults, as all leaders do, but uttering those words to a nation terrified by hopelessness and dread was a shining moment in his career.

On February 20, 2023 The Pipeline's editor Michael Walsh wrote this: “…democracy does not "die in darkness." It dies in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty and birthed of instability…” While I’m not willing to suggest that Walsh's eloquence should move him to seek elected office, or to be regularly photographed grinning with a fancy cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, I do believe that his declaration is every bit as profound as Roosevelt’s was ninety years prior.

In 1933 Americans were terrified by enormous economic upheaval few citizens understood. The disaster seemed unsolvable to most. In 2023 Americans are terrified by rapid advances in technologies and the sciences that – to many – seem to create problems as equally dangerous and apparently unsolvable as the Great Depression did in 1933.

FDR: Fear itself.

This writer is not an expert on all technologies and all of science. We’ve advanced way to far for anyone to lay claim to being a modern-day Da Vinci. That said, this writer is an expert on the complex intersection of chemistry, environmental protection, risk evaluation, and public policy. In that world Walsh’s description holds true: all rational parts of that equation are dying in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty, and birthed of instability. Moreover, I firmly believe that is the case in many, likely most, other areas of scientific discipline when they intersect with public policy or popular trends. In this era of mass, instantaneous communication, nothing is guaranteed to attract more attention than communicating fear.

Consider how many people routinely purchase indoor “air purifiers” that are designed to remove air contaminants from indoor air by generating the most widely regulated air pollutant in America: ozone. Ozone is basically oxygen on steroids; three oxygen atoms bonded together rather than the usual two. The extra atom gives ozone some unique properties, among which is its ability to react with a variety of air contaminants and remove them from the air we breathe. So far so good, except for the fact that ozone is itself a highly regulated air contaminant. Reducing ozone in the air we breathe has been the focus of EPA and environmental group efforts for over fifty years.

The EPA has reduced the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone three times since the original Clean Air Act was promulgated. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all reduced the ozone standard, largely in response to environmental group claims that the preceding standard was not sufficiently protective of human health. There are mountains of regulations designed to reduced ozone formation. Vehicles have catalytic convertors largely to reduce ozone formation. If you live in an urban area, you pay for low vapor pressure gasoline in the summer months to reduce ozone formation. The push to reduce ozone formation affects the price we pay for electricity, natural gas, consumer goods, and a host of other areas.

Liberals have toyed with the ludicrous idea of banning natural gas-fired appliances, but none seems moved to grab this incredibly low-hanging fruit: Americans are routinely purchasing air-pollution generators in the name of improving air quality! It’s the sort of exploitation of fear and ignorance that would have amazed even Orwell.

Beware the O-Zone.

Ozone-generating air purifiers are just one example of the ignorance and hypocrisy that infects issues involving science and technology. Fire up your favorite search engine and try out the following queries: “manganese pollution,” “lead toxicity,” and “poly-aromatic hydrocarbons cancer risk.” You’ll find some dry, technically-accurate but boring as hell to read discussions involving those keywords published by government agencies and academics, and you’ll also find articles in which “experts” warn readers about the extreme danger associated with exposure to those compounds.

But how significant are these supposed dangers? Let’s start with manganese. Do you or a loved one take a multi-vitamin on a regular basis? Take a look at the ingredient list. Chances are you’ll find manganese listed among the minerals included.

This may give you pause. There are plenty of stories out there that describe manganese as a dangerous neuro-toxin. There are plenty of community leaders, political types, and environmental activists wringing their hands about the fate of the poor, innocent children exposed to this poison. So what the heck is it doing in your vitamins?

The answer is that manganese is an important and necessary micro-nutrient. Your body doesn’t need a lot of it, but it needs some of it. Chemicals are neither inherently toxic or non-toxic. The dose makes the poison, so it’s the amount one is exposed to and the route of exposure that ultimately matter. Good luck finding any member of the modern intelligentsia who understands, much less can explain, that simple fact.

Most everyone is aware of the dangers associated with ingesting lead. Less well known is that virtually every kitchen in the United States contains bowls and utensils that contain lead. For lead is a minor, but measurable, component of many grades of stainless steel—and whose kitchen doesn’t have a stainless item in it?

Does the amount of lead contained in stainless steel or how it is held within the lattice structure of the metal present any concerns about lead exposure? Not really, but don’t expect the fear-mongers to figure that out, even if they cared to do so.

Safety first.

And Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH)? There’s plenty of literature talking about how these potentially toxic and/or carcinogenic compounds can be formed during the combustion of coal, oil or natural gas. True, so far as that goes, but in very tiny amounts that will expose the average citizen to concentrations so low they are hardly of concern.

On the other hand, the smoke from your campfire, the cloud coming from your charcoal grill and any smoked food you consume will contain much more PAH compounds than anything a power plant will expose you to. That doesn’t keep me from enjoying smoked and barbecue foods, but then I’m not a hypocrite.

If you’re reading this piece, most experts agree that you are probably alive. Other experts tell us that sometime in the future you will cease to be alive. In between then and now, do yourself a favor: enjoy life. One of the ways you can enjoy it best is by tuning out the sad, ignorant masters of exploitation and propaganda who dream up ways to try to control your behavior by exploiting your natural tendency to exercise extreme caution when facing fear itself.

Animal, Vegetable, or Whatever

With the Climate Cult demanding we stop eating grazing animals, transitioning ourselves to fake meat (and bugs) instead of real beef, in the name of preventing the climate from getting a degree or three warmer, causing us all to die in a few years, let’s discuss tradeoffs between digesting animal protein and vegetable matter.

Those who have spent much time around horses and cows know that they almost never stop eating if grass is within reach. A horse walking across a meadow will reach out to bite off a mouthful of grass if the rider allows it. Cows will grab mouthfuls of grass and go lie down in the shade under a tree to chew their cud, moving it from one stomach to another for hours.  Until they get up and wander off to fill their bellies again with more grass.

Grazing animals eat so much grass because vegetable matter has very little protein. Protein is what makes mammal muscle. It’s why Genghis Khan hunted and herded ruminants along his travels, and why his men defeated the local vegetarians wherever they went; they never lacked for milk or meat – animal protein – that made them stronger and gave them more endurance than those lacking in animal protein. In pre-mechanical combat, individual strength was all.

Does he look like a vegan to you?

It surprises, in the 21st Century, particularly among the Greens demanding solar power, that so many remain unaware that ruminants are solar energy storage systems. Solar power causes plant matter to grow; as plants grow, they turn that solar energy into matter. Grazers eat that solar energy converted to and stored as plant matter, processing it into muscle they then store and use to move around to live, work for us, make more ruminants, and to fertilize the ground wherever they go, nurturing more grass which, powered by sunlight, grows tall, storing more solar energy for another ruminant to store and make use of.

Humans consume this stored solar energy when eating beef, venison, rabbit, etc., allowing us to move, think, live, create. Animal manure and composted animal carcasses provide fertile soil to begin the cycle again as the sun enables new vegetable matter to grow and store yet more solar energy. In essence, animals we raise for food are organic solar batteries storing energy from the sun that we eventually use to grow, to live our lives, invent, explore, create, and procreate.

Grazing animals have digestion systems evolved and specialized to digest plant matter and turn it into useful protein. Humans, as omnivores, have different digestive systems, systems less-specialized for digesting plants. We process plant matter less efficiently than do ruminants simply because we also digest and process animal protein. The more specialized a digestive system, the more efficiently the plant matter consumed as food – stored solar energy – is turned into useful muscle, bone, skin, organs, etc. The less specialized, the less efficient.

Eating vegetable matter has certain physiological consequences. Again, if you’ve been around horses or cows, or read all the “bad” things about bovine burps and farts, you know that processing vegetable matter produces methane. If, for health reasons, you have altered your diet to consume more vegetables and fruits, you understand these consequences. If you’ve spent much indoor-time with vegetarians or their more aromatic cousins, vegans, none of this is news. We are not evolved to consume only plants.

Hilarious, right?

Scientists are working on altering feed to cause cows to create less methane, which is a good thing. But that’s a long process just beginning, and runs counter to the globalists demanding we eat fake, plant-based meat, or no meat at all to stop cows from destroying our world. But is our switching to vegetable matter really changing anything for the better?

Americans consume about 70 percent of their approximately 2,500 calories per day from plant matter, and 30 percent from animal matter. If we transitioned from 70 percent to 100 percent plant matter, an increase of 43 percent, it is logical to assume our methane output also would increase by 43 percent. Moving to a plant-based/fake meat diet would increase the human-expelled methane output of the United States from 332,000,000, to over 480,000,000 liters per day.

Removing the beef industry in America also would mean putting over a million Americans out of jobs and altering our health in unknown ways of unknown magnitude as we all stop digesting the food our digestive systems have evolved to digest, switching to digestive requirements for which we have not evolved.

Mr. Olympia he ain't.

Activities involving strength and endurance – from sports to military service to jogging or walking to stay fit – would decrease, further reducing the health of Americans, as well as our entertainment opportunities and ability to defend ourselves or our allies. To say nothing of the impact on industries as diverse as shoes, coats, and car seats, industries consuming leather and producing leather goods.

Does the road to reducing methane really run through rejection of animal protein?

The 'Climate Emergency' Is Not Our Problem

Responses to the fantasy of a “climate emergency” grow crazier each year. It becomes more difficult to separate government programs from money laundering to the green lobby in it for themselves. International non-governmental organizations also have decided, somehow – and not through any popular vote or initiative – to collect and spend other people’s money (otherwise known as “other people’s labor”) in ways with which those other people may not agree and may not be happy, or willing, to support. The latest tyrannical idea, the "Fifteen Minute city," imprisoning us all within 15 minutes of our homes, is gaining favor amongst Western intelligentsia and will be coming to us (not to them!) soon.

Late in 2022, the U.N. decided that industrial, capitalistic (Western) nations must spend a few trillion dollars more, per year, bailing out poorer nations, many, if not most, of which reject both industrialization and capitalism. Which is why they are poor. President Biden offered Indonesia $20 billion for the climate scam. Why? To close their coal plants because the “rising” seas may become problematic. Even if that is true, why does that mean they need the fruits of our labor? America giving Indonesia money is just our providing labor and moving that labor to them with money, right? I don't work for Indonesia.

Happy New Year from Indonesia!

Let’s look at the numbers: Indonesia is a G20 member nation, with a Quality of Life score of 96.85, ranking #75 on their scale. While this is below the United States (#19), Indonesia outranks America in Safety (54:52) and Cost of Living Index (32:70); Indonesia is a bit safer and has a far lower cost of living than America. With a working age (15-64) population of 189,363,580, (12/2022), Indonesia’s GDP is 15th-highest in the world, at $1.05 trillion USD, or $5,545 per person of working age. America’s GDP is highest in the world, at $20.89 trillion, with a working age population of 214,685,514, or $97,305 per person of working age.

Indonesia has 54,716 km of coastline. Evidently rising seas mean the United States needs to pay for some remediation. But if that’s the case, Canada, the nation with the world’s longest coastline at 243,042 km, would also need our aid. If Indonesia needs $365,524 per km of coastline, wouldn’t Canada need the same per km, or $88.9 billion?

Indonesia has 5,123 people per kilometer of coastline; Canada only 159. Indonesia, with 32 times as many people per kilometer of coastline, should be able to remediate the “problem” much more easily with their own labor than Canada with theirs.

None of this makes any sense when you get down to facts, even if the climate scam were real. Because we are being asked – demanded – to subsidize third world countries, it makes sense to look at their history and cultures: It now is our money they are spending, the results of the labor, education, and culture of our men and women, money we earn for our children, not those of some other country to be decided by some unaccountable, usually corrupt bureaucrats not of our choosing.

If we want to talk about rising seas, let's look at the Netherlands. They’ve been dealing with sea levels for some time while becoming the world's second-largest food exporter, something their 'green lobby' is about to end at an unknown cost in global starvation. Their culture allows them to deal with sea levels not in spite of, but because of their history and culture.

The Dutch know how to do it.

If we want to talk about living near a river or on a small island – move. The idea of upending modernity because a few, or a few million people don’t want to move would be comedic even if the Klimate Kult were correct—if we didn’t have politicians demanding we cover the cost.

Perhaps it makes sense to some to demonize modernity as the source of wealth one is demanding in order to subsidize those not participating in the amazing wealth-generating machine that pulled millions of people out of poverty over the past century, and to demand it be replaced with a non-capitalist system that has proven only to generate poverty and death. Isn’t that just eating the seed corn while burning down the farm? Yet that is exactly what is being proposed by the U.N. and the various “Green lobbies.”

The Industrial Revolution and the wealth it has created have occurred because we taught ourselves to fish. The U.N. is a democratic body in which all nations, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful, vote to be given a fish. If those nations ever want to be independent and not require subsidy, they must learn to fish. Giving them fish, in the form of foreign aid, has been enormously destructive. Calling it “climate aid” will not change the outcomes.

“Aid” has in many places actually destroyed the possibility for sustained economic growth by driving local producers, especially farmers, out of business. Such was the case in Micronesia, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Haiti, Guatemala, Kenya, and many other places.

Some experts believe that food “aid” to India “may have been responsible for millions of Indians starving” Other studies have shown that malnutrition in Bangladesh actually rose as food aid to that country increased. In practically every case, the influx of “aid” has been immediately followed by the emergence of a massive, unproductive, parasitic government bureaucracy whose very existence undercuts the recipients’ ability for sustained economic growth.

If our largess has been used so sub-optimally by receiving regimes, how are we to know that this new demand for another few trillion dollars will not be so abused, as well?

It makes sense to teach them to fish, which we have been doing for some time. Since 1960, America, alone, has distributed to other nations in foreign aid well over $1.5 trillion in non-Department of Defense aid. At some point, enough must be deemed enough. Will sending $20 billion more to Indonesia, or $2 trillion more to the U.N. be enough? How will we know? How will they?

How does the scam end… ever?

Who's Afraid of a Gigaton?

The Global Carbon Project, a cohort of self-anointed “experts” intent on proving that the Klimate Kult fiction through which they generate their funding is real, tracks carbon output across nations and creates a carbon “budget” of what they feel is allowable for humanity. When tracked against economic output, the report, "CO2 emissions have been flat for a decade,” is fascinating. It proves that what our elites are doing is exactly the opposite of what they’d be doing if they believed the green agenda were needed, let alone critical. How dare they?

Using gigatons of CO2, by nation, the GCP provides a metric of this “pollution” by country with the obvious intent of shaming the miscreants other than not-Green China and not-Green India into reducing their output of the CO2 that is a fundamental requirement for life on earth. Red China is allowed by those preening themselves over greenhouse gasses (GHG) to skip the entire Paris “agreement” and just not worry about CO2 output. The same CO2 measurements are the primary focus of the Green Inquisition to bash the U.S.A. for ours. Let’s look at the numbers:

Not-green China, a command economy under communist rule, the economic model preferred by our elites and to which our ruling class has been shipping all our jobs and prosperity for decades, generated in 2021, per this report, 11.5 gigatons of CO2, while creating an economic output of $17,734,000,000,000, or emitting 1.3 pounds of CO2 per dollar of economic output. America, a (semi-)free market, capitalist economy under ostensibly democratic governance, generated in 2021, 5.0 GTon of CO2, while creating an economic output of $22,196,000,000,000, emitting 0.45 pounds of CO2 per dollar of economic output.

In other words, America generates 288 percent of the economic output of China while emitting 43 percent of China’s CO2. Six times the economic output per Gton of CO2. If the political establishment pushing green actually were pushing green and de-carbonization, they’d recognize that a higher standard of living at a lower CO2 cost (i.e. a more efficient and productive use of energy) is being attained under our political-economic model than under that of Red China.

 

If our self-proclaimed “green” elites actually believed in “Climate Change” and were concerned about CO2 emissions, not only would we not be offshoring our manufacturing and prosperity and future, our elites would be making the pitch to all the world to move their manufacturing to America, and to move the entire planet to a capitalist free-market economy as this model provably provides more economic output per GTon of CO2 than any other, higher living standards than any other model in human history, and reduces carbonization along the way.

How to do this is not to sign-on to a global minimum tax, but to allow all countries to compete for industry – and jobs and living standards – using tax and market policies anathema to our rulers but liberty-generating for the global middle classes the WEF/Davos crowd is trying to annihilate, while reducing CO2 impact for all.

No one wants to decrease their living standards. This is why immigrants are flocking to America rather than to China or Mexico. If the world wants to decrease GHG and “Global Warming,” and to not reduce living standards, we need to move industry to the country and economic system with the highest GDP per ton of CO2: the United States, and to return to a free-market economy so derided by globalist elites.

The upsides of moving industry back to, or to, America are two. If, against all current and historical data, the earth is being heated by human-emitted GHG, we can reduce the CO2 output while simultaneously increasing global economic production - and so global standards of living. If, as the data actually show, the earth is entering a cooling period, then we will have the necessary industry here to at least keep us warm.

Plus, the working class grows wealthier, which history shows leads to a higher level of concern about the environment.

The point here isn’t that CO2 is increasing or decreasing, that the planet is warming, cooling or in stasis. The point is that the elites, the same ones telling us we must reduce our energy usage to pre-industrial levels, are acting against – not just ignoring, but acting against – what they insist be done. Which means they don't believe it, either.

What they insist on is contributing to the increase of GHG and, per their models, to the global warming about which they only pretend to care as a control device over our liberty and prosperity, the destruction of which is their actual goal.

We aren’t talking about private jets or big houses or multiple houses or extravagances those of us working and providing them their wealth cannot afford due to the policies of these same rulers. We’re talking about the facts on the ground: moving industry to a command economy increases rather than decreases GHG emission per economic unit of measure. Reducing GHG while keeping or increasing global living standards means moving jobs and industry back to a free-market economy and away from command economies.

More than any other report, this GCP report ought to convince everyone paying attention that the U.N. is not kidding in its statement of their goal for the entire climate change hoax. As noted by Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change in Brussels, in 2015, the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

“Changing the economic model” that has done more than any other in history to reduce poverty and improve global standards of living and, not coincidentally, to reduce greenhouse gasses better than any other, is the goal of our elites.

Their goal with “Climate Change” has nothing to do with saving the planet. Adding this report to the actions of our greenies proves that they are intent on adding to the global carbon output and increasing climate change while reducing our prosperity; as noted here early and often, to destroy the global Middle Classes.

These are the facts as presented by the GCP, an instrument of the Klimate Kult seemingly oblivious as to what its data show.

This has nothing to do with climate. It never has. It never will.

AGAINST THE GREAT RESET: 'The Anti-Industrial Revolution'

For the next three weeks, The Pipeline is presenting the remaining excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, which was published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now at the links. 

 

Part V: THE PRACTICAL

Excerpt from "The Anti-Industrial Revolution" by Martin Hutchinson

The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset is a major revision of the economic policies that have pulled humanity to its present state of modest prosperity. Its central premise is captured by the epigraph: “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” But ownership is what divides modern free men and women from medieval serfs—without it, we are subject to the whims of our masters and unable to fashion our destiny. The Great Reset not only resets our social status, but also, over time, it will reset our living standards to those of our serf ancestors.

The WEF, based in Switzerland, aims to create a Fourth Industrial Revolution; apparently, electrification and computers were numbers two and three. (As an old-fashioned sort, I prefer to think there has been only one Industrial Revolution, which is still ongoing, and that subsequent technological advances are developments of the original leap forward, which unlike its supposed successors, was not a mere technological add-on to previous progress, but a paradigm change in humanity’s destiny.) The Covid-19 pandemic was the pretext for the group to call for a “Great Reset,” in which governments can change the conditions of economic life so that the WEF’s own policy preferences are favored. As President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in 2009, “Never let a plague go to waste.”

According to Schwab and Malleret: “to achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”

Schwab’s Great Reset agenda has three main components. First, it “steers the market towards fairer outcomes”—Schwab  and his cronies deciding what is fair. Second, the Great Reset agenda ensures that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability. (There appears to be no provision for those of us who do not share these goals.) The third priority is to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.”

The one and only.

Clearly, the Great Reset agenda has little in common with conventional market capitalism. To highlight the differences, I will compare its approach point by point with the policies that gave Britain the original Industrial Revolution—the most comprehensive advance in human civilization since the invention of agriculture, and with more unequivocally positive effects on living standards. I shall demonstrate that in almost all areas, the Great Reset advocates the opposite of those policies. It then seems inescapable that it is likely to produce the opposite results, in other words, an Anti-Industrial Revolution, in which human economic progress in living standards goes into reverse.

Individual Freedom
The Industrial Revolution occurred in Great Britain between 1760 and 1830,13 although its roots go back a century earlier, to the entrepreneurial outward-looking society that arose in the Restoration period after 1660. That society differed from all Continental societies of the period (except the Netherlands) in one overwhelmingly important
respect: almost all its people were fully free. That freedom derived from the period after another pandemic, the Black Death.

Nearly three hundred years before the Black Death, the Norman Conquest had sharply compromised the living standards and embryonic freedoms of the indigenous Saxons. The Normans appropriated the large landholdings, exterminating almost all the Saxon nobility, and then imposed the more severe French version of feudalism on the remainder of the indigenous population. In consequence, most of the Saxon population existed in an unfree status for the succeeding centuries, each member providing labor and possibly military service to their feudal lord and receiving no cash compensation for doing so. As England became more settled and its wealth increased, more land was cleared and cultivated. However, population increase among the serfs kept them mired in serfdom, even though the nonrural sectors of the economy were developing a cash economy with free exchange.

Then the Black Death happened, wiping out at least a third of the population. The result was a severe labor shortage, combined with a decline in food prices since there was no longer enough labor to cultivate all the available land. In response, the upper classes that controlled Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers 1351, prohibiting working men from demanding higher wages. These restrictions were initially effective, but over generations, with people moving, new employers emerging, and new job types appearing, they became a dead letter—the “Peasants’ Revolt” of 1381 and other labor unrest were symptoms of the ex-serfs asserting their new autonomy. By the fifteenth century, the restrictions had effectively disappeared—the descendants of the serfs freed themselves and worked for the much higher wages now available. This period was in retrospect known as “Merrie England.” For the ex-serfs, if not for their former masters embroiled in the Wars of the Roses, it was indeed Merrie!

This liberation happened across Europe at this time for similar demographic reasons, but England and the future Netherlands saw workers liberated more fully and permanently than in France, Spain, or the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, even though living standards declined again with increasing population after 1500, the greater freedom of English labor, maintained even through the impoverished early seventeenth century, was an important contributor to the Industrial Revolution.

The freedom of labor in eighteenth-century England was not simply a matter of its working status. English law had always restricted the central power—we find a detailed description in Sir John Fortescue’s 1470 “The Difference Between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy” of how the English monarchy was bound by the law, rather than absolute like the French one. The Civil War and the Interregnum, together with the legalism of the seventeenth century and the 1689 Bill of Rights established English legal freedoms of the individual as a bedrock constitutional principle. Consequently, English working men were free to move about the country, provided they could support themselves—only the 1601 Poor Law, which provided a minimal subsistence for the indigent on a parish basis, forced those who could not do so to return to their home parishes. They were also free to work in any occupations they chose and to make any arrangements they could negotiate with their employers.

These freedoms were essential to the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, and a leading reason why it happened in Britain and not elsewhere. The Holy Roman Empire, for example, however full of industrious and well-schooled German engineers, was still bedevilled by serfdom and feudal obligations in the eighteenth century because the Thirty Years’ War had reimmiserated much of its populace. Consequently, German industrialization was almost entirely delayed until after 1850.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

The WEF in its report exhibits attitudes about ordinary consumers that would not have been out of place in a thirteenth-century donjon. Some allowance must be made for the report having been written in June 2020, but in discussing the Covid-19 outbreak, it rejects indignantly the idea that closing down the economy might cause misery, noting smugly “Only saving lives will save livelihoods,” quoting the efficacy of masks and restrictive regulations. The divergence in U.S. unemployment rates in 2021 between Republican-run states that generally reopened early and Democrat-run states that stayed locked down demonstrates that lockdowns indeed imposed additional misery and doubtless additional lives lost.

The report’s contempt for the man in the street shows itself elsewhere. Consumers are “obsessive” about inflation, we  were told, before we were reassured that “it is hard to imagine how inflation could pick up anytime soon.” The report also sought to establish a “global strategic framework of governance”—guess how much democratic input there will be into that!

The report also urged replacing GDP—the statistic that reflects the overall output of the economy—with a “doughnut” whereby the inner ring would represent what’s needed to sustain the “good” life and the outer ring what the environment can support. Naturally, governments and institutions such as the WEF would determine what the “good life” consists of and precisely how much the environment could support and would engage in redistribution within the doughnut to ensure that the good life was shared by all and that the environment was protected. Individual consumers would have no say in the matter—nor would they have any right to squawk as the doughnut got thinner and thinner with all the redistribution and environmental costs until the “good life” proved to be unattainable without wiping out half the world’s population.

However, the most consumer-unfriendly and freedom-killing section of the Great Reset is its glee over contract-tracing applications on cell phones, which it describes as an “unprecedented opportunity.” We have already seen what this leads to in Britain, where huge numbers of the population have been forced through the government’s Test and Trace software to self-isolate for a week or more, without any symptoms or other evidence that they are infected what with widespread vaccination is generally a mild or even undetectable disorder. We have also seen the Chinese “social credit” system, enabled by cell phones, that allows an authoritarian Communist state to control its people and weed out dissidents.

Since learning this, I have several times blessed the grouchy elderly Luddism that has caused me to reject getting a cell phone over the last decade...

Next week: an excerpt from "The Great Reset and 'Stakeholderism'," by Alberto Mingardi. 

The ESG Counter-Revolution Has Arrived

With this week’s announcement by the asset management giant Vanguard that it is exiting the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, a sub-unit of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, it is clear that the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement is no longer in unfettered ascension. Although we're still far from being able to claim that U.S. investors are free of the talons of ESG, it is clear that the voice of investors and industry leaders who have been the target of these evangelists can no longer be ignored.

Created to repair the purported damage caused by capitalism, the ESG construct is in reality, far more sinister. The scheme was created as a mechanism to reorient capital flows toward political and social objectives that its progenitors from the World Economic Forum deem important. With help from its less attractive, though equally mischievous step-brother, the United Nations, they together seek to coerce political and social change that many investors do not want.

Vanguard’s announcement came about a week after Consumers’ Research and 13 state attorneys general asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to review Vanguard’s request to own energy company stocks, and sought to intervene in Vanguard's blanket authorization renewal request that was pending before the commission. Their brief pointed out that collectively, Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock hold the largest voting blocs for most of the S&P 500, and are the largest investors in public oil, gas, and coal companies, having a combined $300 billion fossil-fuel investment portfolio.

Fools and their money, etc.

But their membership in the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, created an intrinsic conflict of interest: support the decarbonization of the industries in which you invest, or do what is legally required and represent the best interest of their investors by maximizing returns. The decision was binary. For Vanguard, reason and legal obligation have won out over activism and social bullying.

Until now, asset-management firms have been happy to oblige the vision of these globalists because they believed they would benefit financially. Working in contravention of the sole interest rule and in defiance of legally mandated fiduciary obligations, the largest asset management firms have been attempting to force ESG adoption upon the boardrooms of publicly traded companies so as to transition them to the envisioned New World Order. Seeking power, wealth, and control, they have ordained themselves the arbiters of the acceptable, attempting to define which industries and companies should be permitted to participate in the capital markets and which should be relegated to a world they and their globalist masters unilaterally have decided should no longer exist.  

But now, with Vanguard’s withdrawal from the Net Zero Alliance and BlackRock’s recent market thrashing, asset management meddling may have reached its apex. Beginning earlier this year, investors and states attorneys general and treasurers, like those involved in the Consumers' Research filing, began to assert that investors’ interests were not being fiduciarily represented. These asset management giants have until now believed that their sheer economic heft would allow them to coerce companies and investors into using the ESG yardstick while diverting capital into companies that would help shape the new world they and the global activists envision. With a combined portfolio of $15 trillion under management, they unequivocally represent economic heft. But economic scale aside, market returns and the legal protections conveyed to investors and codified in U.S. law remain an unforgiving reminder of reality.

This week Vanguard was reminded by business leaders and investors of its core business and related legal obligations. Its very existence was threatened by its ESG promises to impede returns. Likewise, BlackRock pension fund clients have reminded CEO Larry Fink that his annual pronouncements of the value of stakeholder capitalism and ESG are falling flat. In the face of abysmal returns and market conditions created by poor economic and monetary policy, investors are demanding an abandonment of the ESG eco-system.

The states beg to differ, Mr. Fink.

BlackRock’s unprecedented $1.7 trillion losses in the first six months of the year has caused an exodus of pension fund clients worth nearly $4 billion. Arizona’s treasurer last February quietly pulled $543 million from BlackRock. Then in early August, 19 state attorneys general sent a joint letter to them expressing concerns that the company’s ESG agenda is impeding its ability to deliver a maximum return on investment for its shareholders. They wrote:

Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, BlackRock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field. As a firm, BlackRock has committed to implementing an ESG engagement and voting strategy across all assets under management, and held over 2,300 company engagements on climate, the most of any category of engagement.

Then last month, Missouri Attorney General Scott Fitzpatrick divested $500 million in assets managed by BlackRock on behalf of the Missouri State Employees’ Retirement System. Louisiana’s treasurer, John Schroder told the Financial Times that he will divest $794 million. Utah and Arkansas likewise committed to pull $100 million and $125 million, respectively. Meanwhile, South Carolina’s state treasurer will remove $200 million of state retirement funds from BlackRock. And most recently, Florida announced it will pull $600 million of short-term investments, while freezing $1.43 billion of long-term securities, with an eye on reallocating the capital to other money managers by the start of 2023.

These state attorneys general and treasurers understand leverage. BlackRock assets under management dropped 16 percent year-on-year to $7.96 trillion, decreasing its net income by 17 percent. Meanwhile, shares in BlackRock are down roughly 30 percent this year ----underperforming the benchmark S&P 500 Index.

Vanguard has taken notice of BlackRock’s plight and correctly understands that the horizon looks stormy for those in the financial sector who choose to ignore their legal obligations to investors. Still, the ESG counter-revolution has only just begun. Whatever ESG ground that might be lost by private-sector asset management firms, one should assume that a doubling down by the Biden administration is already in motion. Whether through executive orders or regulatory mandates, ESG is the mechanism for governments and globalists to create the dystopic world they yearn for. Investors and states must maintain the pressure. 

Decolonize the Green Movement!

It doesn't take a lot of effort to find places where the Left's rhetoric and ideals fail to align with their real-world actions. Their years of pearl clutching about election denialism after making a celebrity of election denier Stacey Abrams and, more recently, selecting election denier Hakeem Jeffries to replace Nancy Pelosi as Democratic House Leader are examples which come immediately to mind.

But there are darker examples. For instance, if you've spent any time in the presence of Leftist academics over the past quarter century, you have likely observed their obsession with colonial imperialism, which they contend to be among the greatest evils ever perpetuated by man. Though the major western empires were dismembered over the course of the 20th century, the Left's fixation on imperialism is justified by the claim that that system has left indelible marks on both the imperialists and their former colonial subjects to this day. And yet, as Michael Schellenberg has pointed out, a form of imperialism is still alive and well...  and being practiced by prominent Left-leaning environmentalist governments:

The narrative is that imperialism is, by its very nature, exploitative, that it consisted of, in Shellenberger's words, "rich nations taking raw materials from poor nations and leaving behind poverty rather than development." While the historical reality might be more complicated than that presentation suggests, the modern day geo-political reality perfectly matches this critique. Keen-for-Green Germany is paying African nations not to use coal to help save the planet... and then using the coal itself.

Shellenberger goes on to argue that this is tantamount to bribing the "corrupt" leaders of poor nations to keep their countries poor, while publicly lying about what they're doing and why:

Sounds like some of the worst excesses of colonial imperialism.

Here's another example -- perhaps the only institution which is worse than imperialism in the Leftist mind is slavery. Now, slavery is a grave evil, and its extirpation in the wake of the Civil War is among the glories of our nation. (Of course Leftists hate when you point out that it is thanks to the Republican Party that this came about.) But, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War, and the ratification of the 14th Amendment, progressives insists on using it as a cudgel to batter every opponent, whether or not their ancestors had anything to do with slavery, and as a condemnation of the nation itself.

Historically, slavery was colorblind.

But its worth noting that slavery still exists in the world today, not just in failed states like Libya (thanks to Barack Obama and Hillary "We came, we saw, he died!" Clinton's decision to back the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi), but in places like the People's Republic of China. And yet, "progressives" love China, and openly argue it should be a model for the west. Moreover, China is the world leader in solar panel construction, and solar panels are central to the Left's vision of the future. Consequently, they have an incentive to look the other way.

And yet it is becoming increasingly clear how central slavery is to the production of solar panels. According to Andrew Follett,

In 2021, a shocking 42 percent of the world’s production of the kind of silicon used to manufacture solar panels took place in areas of China known to employ slave labor, and China’s dominance of the solar market is expected to continue to grow.... Slave labor is also used for the mining, smelting, and slicing of silicon into the wafers used in panels that convert sunlight into energy — processes for which China has over 95 percent of the existing global industrial capacity.

Amazingly, when Biden Administration "climate czar" John Kerry was asked about China's use of forced labor in the process of producing solar panels he replied that that was “not my lane.” The hypocrisy is not only astounding. It is also commonplace.

'Global Warming' Meets the Kobayashi Maru

Have you ever wondered how progressives were going to get the West to pay for climate reparations, estimated to cost between $1-1.8 trillion, yet limit economic activity enough to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C and do so with significantly fewer people? The populations of nearly all the present great military and economic powers will collapse in this century. One has to wonder who's going to be left to foot the bill.

For example, unless things radically change, Ukraine will halve from its 1990 level by 2100, annihilated not by Russia, but by legacy Soviet population control policies. Russia's population is also in free fall. It has already lost more than two million people since the fall of the USSR, even counting Crimea which it may not be able to keep. Even worse new census data shows that the only regions growing are ethnically non-Russian. "All predominantly ethnic Russian areas are declining." By 2100 China will have nearly half a billion people fewer than today. The One Child Policy is aging it fast. Japan's population, a World Economic Forum publication notes, is shrinking by a quarter million people each year. By the end of the century Europe will have diminished by 117 million.

By contrast, Africa’s population will soar from 1.34 billion to 4.28 billion, drawing nearly level with Asia in numbers by the dawn of the 22nd century. But though numerous authorities predict the Third World will be devastated by "climate change," a World Bank blog observes, "the climate crisis is a deeply unfair one: the poorest people in the world contribute the least to climate change."

Which way to the Camp of the Saints?

We return to the affordability of climate reparations. One might for a moment imagine a future world limping along where the only remaining licit sources of energy are the winds, the sun and the tides; where coal, petrochemicals, and nuclear power have been proscribed. But conceiving of how such an energy-handicapped world could pay compensation to teeming Africa from a dwindling workforce of aged climate criminals staggers the mind. By 2100 the median age in China will be 57 years of age, with half the Chinese older than that.

Can the aggrieved global South depend on that? People pose a dilemma. On the one hand they create wealth, so necessary for "redistributive justice." On the other hand they consume raw materials and threaten the planet. Do we celebrate the decrease of people in productive economies or fear it?

One answer, featured in the New York Times, posits that it's better to just bring down the curtain on the whole human story. "For the sake of the planet, Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, has spent decades pushing one message: 'May we live long and die out'". There is no alternative because "wealthy countries with relatively smaller populations like the United States are generating most of the pollution that is driving global warming." To force them to generate the income to pay climate reparations is to risk still more warming. “The lack of freedom to not procreate,” Mr. Knight argues, has doomed the earth. “We’re not a good species,” by his reckoning.

A better solution, says Lord J. Adair Turner of the World Economic Forum, is automation. "In a world of rapidly expanding automation potential, demographic shrinkage is largely a boon, not a threat. Our expanding ability to automate human work across all sectors – agriculture, industry, and services – makes an ever-growing workforce increasingly irrelevant to improvements in human welfare." It will not matter if half the people in China are over 57 if all the work is done for them by advanced robots and artificial intelligence.

There is, Turner notes, one fly in the ointment. In a world where robots make everything, most Africans can't get jobs. "Automation makes it impossible to achieve full employment in countries still facing rapid population growth," because unskilled labor will become worthless. He points to India as an actual example. "Although annual GDP growth has averaged around 7% for the last five years, it has been powered by leading companies deploying state-of-the-art technology. The expansion has created almost no new jobs, and an increasing share of India's population is either unemployed or underemployed in the country’s huge low-productivity informal sector.... But we should at least recognize that this is where the real demographic threat lies. Automation has turned conventional economic wisdom on its head: there is greater prosperity in fewer numbers."

Africans, as ever, are stuck on the wrong side of the door. They are inconveniently numerous and pose a problem for the few. The obvious expedient is to tax the rich old Asians and Europeans of their automated wealth and give it to those populations who stubbornly cling to the quaint old custom of having children. Forestalling instability, though Lord Turner may be wary of saying so directly, may be the real underlying reason why Western governments are pushing so-called climate reparations. "For years, the United States and other wealthy nations have blocked calls for loss and damage funding, concerned that it would open them up to unlimited liability," until Washington realized that it could be cheaper to pay Third World populations "climate compensation" rather than face billions of people, recently and permanently unemployed by technology, angrily demanding a Universal Basic Income.

The World Economic Forum website helpfully informs us that the natives would be restless without it: "The alternative to not having UBI is worse – the rising likelihood of social unrest, conflict, unmanageable mass migration and the proliferation of extremist groups that capitalize and ferment on social disappointment. It is against this background that we seriously need to consider implementing a well-designed UBI, so shocks may hit, but they won’t destroy."

It's not climate reparations; it's a redundancy payment. And a bribe.

But if, as Lord Turner assures us, robots can provide for everything then the progressives can have their cake and eat it too: the empty West, a populous global south sustained by UBI, all powered by no more than the sun, wind and waves. But because AI and robots use power also, often much more than a 20 watt human brain, the Green dream is constrained by the law of physics prohibiting getting something for nothing. The sad reality is that "machine learning is on track to consume all the energy being supplied. Perhaps there is not enough free energy on the planet to automate the dreams of ideologues.

In former times civilization saw humanity as the crowning glory of earth. Freeman Dyson once said, "the more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we are coming." Today it sees man as a problem. The leading intellectuals can hardly wait for man to give way to something else, for he is too creative; too inclined to disrupt. The only way to stop climate change is to dampen the source of change. The only fully predictable world is a quiet place where everything stays where it should is perfect in its own way. In other words, a dead one.

Concerning the Great Elec-Trick

The next time you hear about a proposed measure that promises to lower greenhouse gas emissions by millions of tons per year, consider the following response: “so what?” Many of us grow up thinking that “millions” represents a massive amount of whatever it is we’re counting. The tyranny of millions is a powerful tool when placed in the hands of the PR professionals who push climate change and other environmentally driven agendas.

Replacing incandescent lightbulbs in the United States with LEDs and other technologies that were more energy efficient was supposed to fight climate change by reducing electrical consumption and thus reducing the amount of fossil-fuel electricity generated and thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with fossil-fuel combustion. I doubt the actual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions associated with this program was in the millions on a net basis, since incandescent bulbs generated measurable and useful heat the LEDs do not. But it really doesn’t matter, because when you’re dealing with emissions in the billions of tons per year, a million tons here or there is hardly a blip on the radar.

We’re at the same point with the latest panacea: electric vehicles. Like LED light-bulbs, electrics will save the planet, at least according to dopey reporters and politicians. It’s a toss up whether electric vehicles are a net environmental benefit, however one feels about the "climate change" issue. You have to draw some pretty small boxes in order to make the case.  One box must encompass the electric vehicle alone, specifically its lack of a tailpipe. Without a tailpipe environmentalists can congratulate themselves for not directly introducing any air pollutants into the environment whilst cruising about town. The fact that the ultimate source of the energy involves a lot of fossil fuel combustion seems not to matter, or at least not nearly so much as it mattered during the Great Light Bulb Reformation.

Halfway there.

Nor does the tiny box consider all of the other environmental consequences associate with going electric. This includes items such as the cost of mining and refining the metals needed to make high capacity batteries, the amount of energy needed to do so, and the difficulty of disposing of the batteries when they reach the end of their useful life.

Embracing electric vehicles also necessitates a fanatical belief that unilateral action by America can significantly influence the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We cannot. Moving to electric vehicles, as it appears we are determined to do, will have no measurable effect on global greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve reduced so much that further reductions hardly matter. The future use of fossil fuels and the effect of their use on the environment is a discussion that involves China and India alone. Everyone else is merely a bystander.

For example, the once sane state of California recently passed a law that will ban the sale of gasoline powered vehicles within its borders starting in 2035. The California Air Resources Board praised the measure, saying “the proposal will substantially reduce air pollutants that threaten public health and cause climate change.” What exactly constitutes “substantial” reductions? After poking about the Energy Information Administration (EIA) a bit, it appears that making California all electric is pretty inconsequential from an environmental point of view, even if it can be done, which is very doubtful.

The law does not outlaw driving gasoline powered vehicles in the state, it merely bans their sales within the state. Like most draconian measures it’s unlikely that the ban will do much to change the mix of vehicles on the road, it will merely shift where people who chose to drive gasoline powered vehicles purchase them. Automobile dealerships in Oregon, Nevada and Arizona ought to send thank you notes to Sacramento.

While recognizing the implausibility of eliminating use of the internal combustion engine in California, it’s interesting to examine what would happen if such a thing were possible. First of all, California would need to come up with more power – a lot more power. According to EIA data the state consumes about 2,625 trillion Btu of energy annually producing electricity. Motor vehicles consume an additional 1,465 trillion Btu of energy from gasoline. If one is not using gasoline, the energy has to come from somewhere. The 1,465 trillion Btu represents around 21,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity that would have to be added to the grid. That’s about as much energy as a mid-sized state like Illinois requires on a typical summer day.

Gonna need a lot more of these things.

Currently, wind and solar power represent about 20 percent of California’s energy portfolio, generating about 7,000 megawatts on average. If all the additional electrical demand is to be met by wind and solar, they would have to quadruple that portion of their portfolio. Possible? Maybe. Expensive? More and more eyesores? More and more bird strikes? More and more rolling blackouts? You bet.

Would the woke "sustainable" fantasy save planet Earth? Ignoring the fact that building and operating all those windmills and solar farms involves the use of fossil fuels, and also ignoring the fact that you’d have to have fossil-fired backup power because neither wind nor sunlight are reliable energy sources, you get a theoretical carbon dioxide emissions reduction of about 24 million tons per year.

Sure, 24 million tons sounds like a big number, but it’s really not. That’s about as much China emits every 12 hours. Or to look at it another way, given that global carbon dioxide emissions are about 36 billion tons per year, California’s fantasy would reduce that number by about 0.03 percent.

The simple fact is that if you really think we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it’s all about China. America could reduce her greenhouse gas emissions to zero and the amount of carbon dioxide would still continue to increase based on China’s past and projected rate of growth. Did you know, for example, that last year world wide coal consumption hit an all-time high? That didn’t happen because of coal-fired power plants in the United States. Our coal fired generation capacity continues to dwindle. The bulk of the coal is going to China and, to a lesser extent, India.

But we are talking California, so solving a make-believe problem using a pretend solution shouldn’t surprise anyone. As far as environmental policies go, California remains Fantasyland, and Tinkerbell rules.