Who is to Rule: Man or Machine?

In 2015, Malcolm Harris asked in the New Republic whether history would have been different if Stalin had computers, for then Communism might have had enough computer processing power and behavioral data to make central planning work better than the market. David Brooks performed the same thought experiment in the New York Times four years later. If only Stalin had possessed cell phones then he might have controlled everyone.

I feel bad for Joseph Stalin... he was born a century too early. He lived before the technology that would have made being a dictator so much easier! ...to have total power you have to be able to control people’s minds. With modern information technology, the state can shape the intimate information pond in which we swim.

The 20th century idea that technology monotonically increased the power of the state might be true only to a point. Further advances in technology might begin to shrink rather than enlarge institutions. Daniel Araya at the Financial Times thinks artificial intelligence could actually mean the end of government. Modern AI has the ability to replace white collar workers and therefore most bureaucrats by combining deep learning with algorithmic regulation. If politics sets the desired outcome, and the system could in real-time measure whether that outcome is being achieved and algorithmically (i.e. through a set of rules) simply make adjustments until the goals are being achieved. Government could go the way of banks, once so physically ubiquitous which very much exist but are invisible, with fewer personnel or even premises in evidence. It might actually be possible to shrink the giant public sector to a fraction of its current size and even eliminate the government deficit.

But not so fast! Rather than doing away with bureaucrats, Chinese ideologues have counter hypothesized that AI could shrink the private sector instead. In 2018, an opinion piece by Tsinghua professor Feng Xiang argued that AI could end capitalism. "If AI remains under the control of market forces, it will inexorably result in a super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires who reap the wealth created by robots... But China’s socialist market economy could provide a solution to this. If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis... while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable."

The immediacy of these once science fiction questions has been stoked by media reports that AI applications are passing Wharton MBA finals tests or law school exams, and are functionally more capable than most college graduates. The growing anxiety over competition was underlined by the refusal of human lawyers to allow an AI lawyer to represent a client in a US traffic court, a kind of desperate rear guard action. The ability of AI to even write software may have prompted Piers Morgan to ask Jordan Peterson if this was the end?

Morgan: "Professor Stephen Hawking before he died gave me his last television interview and said that the biggest threat to the future of mankind was when artificial intelligence learned self-design. What do you think?"

Peterson: "The biggest threat to mankind is narcissistic compassion. Now AI you know, is a threat. But if we had our act together ethically it's possible that AI could become a useful servant rather than a tyrannical master. You don't want to automate tyrannical masters."

Peterson's conditional response comes near the heart of the problem. Most current AI isn't real general intelligence, whose attainment has eluded researchers thus far, but predictions based on statistical similarities to situations found in a vast training set. "Generalization... is the ability of a learning machine to perform accurately on new, unseen examples/tasks after having experienced a learning data set... to build a general model... that enables it to produce sufficiently accurate predictions in new cases." Thus machine learning is an amplification and extension of its training set and will abolish government or democracy and capitalism with equal earnestness. AI is a means that reflects our choice of ends. It is human culture expanded to the Nth degree. If we had our act together ethically it would serve those ends, but if tyranny is in our hearts it can do that too.

Because machine learning AI takes on the character of its designers, on account of its internal architecture and training set, no single Skynet-like machine overlord is likely to arise. Rather a number of competitive AIs embodying different civilizations will come into existence all over the world. China, reports the VOA, is creating "mind-reading" artificial intelligence that supports "AI-tocracy." And good as its threat, China tech titan Baidu announced the rollout of its ChatGPT rival in March, 2023.

As if to demonstrate the dependence of AI's character on its founders, some critics are already calling ChatGPT racist and discriminatory. "OpenAI... added guardrails to help ChatGPT evade problematic answers," but in one cited example it mistakenly deduced that good programmers are by and large white males, which if not clearly wrong, ought to be wrong. Just as with China, in order to avoid the danger of wrongful or politically incorrect inference, Washington is already fashioning an Oracle, in the form of an AI Bill of Rights, establishing limits on open machine thought. A World Economic Forum article says:

The largest source of bias in an AI system is the data it was trained on. That data might have historical patterns of bias encoded in its outcomes. Ultimately, machine learning gains knowledge from data, but that data comes from us – our decisions and systems. Because of the expanding use of the technology and society’s heightened awareness of AI, you can expect to see organizations auditing their systems and local governments working to ensure AI bias does not negatively impact their residents. In New York City for example, a new law will go into effect in 2023 penalizing organizations that have AI bias in their hiring tools.

Because machine-learning AI is not really general-purpose intelligence, instead of a single Skynet, the future will likely be divided into rival systems keyed to the dominant moral paradigm of its sponsor. Because AI is a machinery to carry out ends, the battle for AI will eventually be a battle over ends. The media once assumed science would tell us the right; yet it will make a nuclear bomb or a nuclear power plant with equal indifference because technology answers "how" but it is silent on "what" or "why." AI will ask: "whom do you serve?" and our nihilistic society has no answer. But by contrast both the Communists and Woke will have plenty to say. After all, they have a religion, and we no longer do.

Go Sell It On A Mountain

A Who's Who of the world' great if not good is converging on the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023. In addition to presidents, ministers and other bureaucrats, 116 billionaires, none of them Russian, will be at Davos, not to mention celebrities, advocates, media personalities, etc. The Business Insider describes how hoteliers are preparing to receive an Olympian throng that will include the likes of Bill Gates:

We emptied almost half of the hotel in order to set up for all of the events and prepare for the guests... no one will have access to the hotel without their badge. We have X-ray machines and metal detectors, and each and every person has to go through these to enter the building. It's almost like an airport. Davos itself is like a military zone, where you have limited access and everything is cordoned off.

Greenpeace disapprovingly noted that hundreds of ultra-short private jet flights converged on Davos, as global leaders headed to the World Economic Forum in a rush to save the planet from asphyxiating in carbon. But there is more than climate change on the agenda. Banking, finance, cryptocurrencies, racism, artificial intelligence, workplace robotics, global governance, and cybercrime are probably going to be up for discussion. It is so wide-ranging one may think of it as the first draft of tomorrow, a glimpse of a future you are going to be part of, whether you like it or not.

The return of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

This wide-ranging character is why the Davos call to action is known as the "Great Reset." Like the familiar reboot of your computer, everything you have ever known will go away and after a moment's blackness (you may be conscious of a spinner as it restarts) all will be replaced by a new OS, interface and architecture you're sure to love. It will be like you've died and gone to atheist heaven. What it will be like is hinted at in a phrase since removed from the WEF’s website. “Welcome to 2030,” read the headline to an article by a Danish member of parliament, “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

It reminds the world that Wokeness, which has points of similarity with the great religions, also has its own eschatology. There is a a hazy belief in a singularity, after which like Communism's 'withering away of the state', everything will be different. Thus the elect gather on a Swiss mountain to bring on the end of the old world and midwife the new. But while the Davos conclave has borrowed many traditional religious forms and metaphors from the great religions, there is something uniquely contemporary in its character which sets it apart.

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Davos might be described as the Woodstock of power. Like its namesake, it is a new nation. In the past, the presidents and billionaires of the world were kept socially apart by distance, language, and localism. Once those barriers had been dissolved in the acid bath of air travel, the Internet, and universal English, the great men realized they were more alike than not. To a not-insignificant degree, people at the pinnacle of power have, as I like to put it, all "gone to the same school together," sometimes literally, and share more in common with other Big Guys than the unwashed in their respective national slums.

The men on Davos are a tribe; and it would be impossible to understand the nature of the Great Reset without grasping the tribal nature of this enterprise. These are the most narcissistic people on the planet. Of course they know all the answers. Why else would they be presidents and billionaires? John Kerry said it best: "it's so almost extraterrestrial."

Yet ironically the new word out of Davos is "polycrisis," meaning "multiple concurrent economic, political, and ecological shocks are converging to rock the globe in the next decade, and the world is playing catch-up to address them... Only 9 percent of respondents saw the world returning to a state of 'renewed stability with a revival of global resilience.'" This glorious world, whose leaders have gathered at 5,118 feet in the sky to congratulate themselves, is presently suffering from a kind of multiple organ failure. In the next two years, according to a WEF report, we might expect: a cost of living crisis, natural disasters and extreme weather, geoeconomic confrontation, widespread cybercrime and insecurity, large scale involuntary migration to name only some -- unless we hand over the keys now.

Of course the world must 'act together.' The WEF article on polycrisis continues:

Solving climate change is the ultimate team sport. It isn't just coming from one sector. It has to be governments, it has to be business, it has to be the finance sector to work together to really address these complex and systemic issues.

Yet in that approach may lie part of the problem. According to the Cascade Institute, a polycrisis occurs when "multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects," as when the world is wired up like an electrical circuit in series, like a line of dominoes. When components in a system are critically dependent on chains, as for example a Christmas tree with 100 light bulbs in series, if one breaks down, all of them may stop working and it will be difficult to find out the damaged one and replace it.

All hail the New World Order!

The globalization project is nothing if not a recipe for entanglement, and Davos prescribes more of it. Yet central planning by the elites may have caused at least some of the instability we are in the midst of. The men of Davos cannot pretend to stand outside the system, in which they were the leading actors, as if they had nothing to do with anything; that the polycritical world was just an unfortunate event they encountered along the road, for which they bear no responsibility. They should consider, if only hypothetically, whether they are part of the problem.

Perhaps Elon Musk, the billionaire who is not going to the WEF meeting, hit the nail upon the head. The danger isn't that the world won't hand control over to the Elect in time, but that the saviors of the planet will get in over their heads and create more monsters than they slay. "My reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring AF lol," Musk tweeted. He added that Davos is "not some illuminati plot to destroy humanity, but rather an extension of the well-meaning environmental sustainability movement that has gone too far."

How far is too far? What comes after 'polycrisis'? And do we really want to find out?

The Media's Lying Lips

According to the U.K.’s Met Office, 2022 was the hottest year on record for the U.K. Take me back forty years or so and I would have taken this for gospel. The Met Office might get tomorrow’s weather wrong but you could rely on its expertise and objectivity when it came to reporting temperature records. A similar sentiment applied to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and, no doubt, to the National Weather Service in the U.S., and to other national weather bureaus. Recall, too, if your experience is anywhere near the same as mine, that numbers of mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provided the news in a more-or-less factual way; or, in any event, we thought that they did. And now?

Now, I don’t trust anything I read, hear or see. Sadly, I’m sorry to say, this does not so much reflect on the competence of various government and news organizations; but, instead, on their allegiance to the truth. I believe that they have no compunction about lying to bolster their agendas. This takes two forms. Burying inconvenient facts and presenting fiction as though it were fact. What’s going on?

You might say that lies have always infected the public square. True enough. But this caveat reminds me of passage from the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Sheriff Tom Bell contrasts the reported transgressions of schoolboys in the nineteen-thirties with those of his day (1980). It went from talking in class, chewing gum and running in the hallways to rape, arson, murder, drugs and suicide. He drolly reckons there’s a big difference between rapin' and murderin' people and chewin' gum. I reckon too that lying has taken a big uptick in its prevalence and audacity over recent decades.

The other day, I saw George Santos, the GOP’s congressman-elect for New York’s 3rd district being interviewed by Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News. He had lied egregiously about his background to voters. He squirmed and dissembled rather than admit it. Jason Whitlock, interviewed later, made (for me) the telling point that when God isn’t thought to be around, lying for advantage is no big deal. Various clips were shown of President Biden lying his head off. Simply making things up about his past life, without any apparent shame; bare-faced. This self-proclaimed Catholic clearly doesn’t believe God is listening. Neither today do most of the political, corporate and media class. That’s the world in which we live. It is tailor made for stoking climate change alarmism, as it for stoking Covid hysteria.

Last year, on Friday December 9, Australia recorded its lowest summer temperature on record. Minus 7⁰C in the Perisher Valley in the state of New South Wales. You had to dig out the info. I had to be told about it by a conservative friend. I asked others I know. None knew. Not surprising. It wasn’t emblazoned on the news. They’d all heard of a heat wave hitting the northern part of Australia. Most of my fellow churchgoers watch the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and read the Sydney Morning Herald. They definitely heard about the heatwave; which, of course, was associated with "climate change."

Suppressing inconvenient facts is one reason despots control the media. No need in the West. Enlightened, selective self-censorship dominates the media landscape. The role of the fourth estate to hold governments and the powerful to account is dead. Unless, that is, Donald Trump is in power; and no doubt (hopefully in 2025) Ron DeSantis. The fourth estate is now predominantly an arm of the leftist-green coalition of governments, activists and rent-seeking carpetbaggers. Selective censorship is complemented by the publication of artful misinformation.

Every extreme weather-related event – heatwaves, droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires – is attributed to "climate change," even though those pushing this tendentious line must know that such events have invariably been equaled or exceeded in their intensity and frequency in the recorded past. Such information is readily available. They simply lie, and blatantly. In Australia, the lie stretches to the persistently-cultivated ludicrous proposition that the bush fires of 2019-20 and the recent floods are attributable to the previous government’s relative inaction on climate change. Yet, Australia could revert to prehistoric times tomorrow and those maniacally monitoring emissions wouldn’t notice.

The only disservice I can recall Ron DeSantis making to public debate was his assurance that there would be “no more noble lies” in the course of dealing with Covid. He was much, much too kind. The so-called noble lies were just plain old despicable lies. Lies about the effectiveness and safety of vaccines in the service of profits for Big Pharma and its lobbyists and hangers on. Lies which created the pretense that the disease put healthy children and people at material risk; and that useless lockdowns and masks were absolutely vital. All in the service of exerting power over populations and punishing dissidents. A practice run for the real plague of communists-cum-fascists who have infiltrated, permeated, saturated, wormed their way into governments, corporations and academia; and for their flag carrier, the World Economic Forum. Their lingua franca: newspeak.

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I want to come back to Christianity. Do the climate and Covid liars feel comfortably lying because they don’t believe in God and therefore put their agenda above all ethical considerations. It must help. But is that all there is to it? A passage in Romans is apropos: Romans 1:28 (NASB version):

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a depraved mind, to do those things that are not proper.

Don’t want to get too theistic. But, under what circumstances would those in positions of power and influence, who are intelligent, who have access to information, set out deliberately to deceive and appear not to have the least qualms about it? If a complete sociopathic absence of integrity is not a sign of abandonment by God, what exactly is it? How else can it be comprehended?

The Political and Social Significance of Sam Bankman-Fried

Over the last few weeks, Sam Bankman Fried, having been extradited from the Bahamas, flown to California first class, and granted bail on a 250 million dollar bond (which allowed him to sit comfortably in his parent’s Palo Alto home instead of in some grubby jail cell), has now pleaded not guilty to the many charges against him. There’s been some populist indignation over the apparently indulgent terms of his pre-trial detention. But it’s difficult to be too indignant about what is at best a stay of execution.

Most white-collar criminals avoid prison until convicted. By now SBF is probably too famous to make a successful run for it. And given that his two top accomplices, one his former girlfriend, are apparently singing like Maria Callas to the prosecutors, he faces the realistic prospect of several decades behind bars. He might escape justice by committing suicide but that could be justice of a more uncertain kind.

SBF: "Effective altruism" in action.

As for the purely criminal aspects of the fall of SBF and his crypto-currency exchange empire, FTX, Andrew McCarthy, an experienced federal prosecutor, has already established a key point: that FTX frauds had nothing to do with the “opaque” character of crypto-currencies as such but was instead a plain old-fashioned Ponzi scheme. SBF simply diverted crypto funds entrusted to him by investors into his other failing enterprises.

If the “opaque” character of the “crypto” world was irrelevant to the operation of SBF’s fraud, however, it was vital to its social and political success. The crash of FTX should have been easily foreseeable not only by investors but also by the financial pundits, the organizers of financial conferences, the political parties that accepted his massive donations, the business and style pages of the mainstream media, and above all by the corporate global leaders of the World Economic Forum that meets annually at Davos in Switzerland. After all, the company had been offering very high fixed rates of return in a notoriously risky market less than a decade since Bernie Madoff had demonstrated the inevitable collapse of such enterprises.

Yet only weeks before the inevitable happened, SBF was an icon on the style pages of business as well as mainstream media, a panel member photographed alongside former president Bill Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair at investment conferences, the second largest donor (after George Soros) to the Democrats in the 2020 campaign, and he was a rising star in the world of the WEF—FTX was touted as a partner on its website, SBF himself was a speaker at its conference last spring, and if the recent unpleasantness had not persuaded the WEF to scrub these references from its website, he was odds-on to be added to their pantheon of Young Global Leaders.

How could the Great and the Good of our world get it so wrong? One reason, of course, is that crashes (both of the system and of particular enterprises) occur at fairly regular intervals because both market participants and official regulators come to share the same intellectual error: usually that, unlike all previous such occasions, the worst won’t happen this time because we know enough to prevent it. The worst then happens.

What's the worst that could happen?

On this occasion the tendency to believe in SBF and FTX was encouraged by the factor mentioned above: namely, the opaque nature of crypto-currencies. A great many people, including “experts,” relied on the general sense that no-one really understood how crypto-currencies worked to justify not investigating how SBF was accomplishing such miracles. If they had done so, they would have discovered—as McCarthy points out—that he wasn’t investing in crypto-currencies but merely acting as the middleman between those who wanted to buy and sell them and, in the course of this modest arbitrage, siphoning off large amounts his customers’ assets to keep his other failing enterprises afloat. But they didn’t investigate what seemed to be a very good thing.

Unfortunately, not looking too closely at something that either benefits you or appeals to your emotions in some way is a very human quality. Just as financial journalists were led astray by the hocus-pocus of SBF’s crypto-economics, so the same result was achieved at a slightly higher level by the hocus-pocus of Modern Monetary Theory. MMT—an agreeable fairy story that governments can print money indefinitely without causing either inflation or any other discernible harm—persuaded some governments, some financial agencies, some business magazines, and even some economists tired of being “grim” all the time, to dismiss the rising fears of rising inflation—until inflation happened and we all have had to tighten our belts.

My own theory is that both trust in FTX and SBF and the inflationary policies of Western governments inspired by MMT spring from the same psychological sources: optimism, market or bureaucratic groupthink, and submission to what G.K. Chesterton called “mystagoguery” or the technical demagoguery of the sophisticated that misleads those too timid to differ with experts or even to question them if something they say smells fishy.

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And, finally, there is the personal factor. SBF presented himself as someone who incarnated all the utopian virtues of the progressive age that the WEF under its founder Klaus Schwab hopes to introduce under the slogan “Build Back Better.” He lived an austere personal life (he didn’t); he was making money to give it all away (he was allegedly stealing it to keep his businesses afloat and to buy political influence); he was putting into practice a sophisticated method of philanthropy called “effective altruism” (about which his guru now confesses to second thoughts); he gave donations mainly to Democrats (noble, idealistic) but also to forward-looking Republicans (the necessary price of virtuous influence); and he had a particular commitment to funding the kind of bureaucratic health-cum-lockdown campaigns that the WEF touts as the vehicle for launching its global post-democratic technocracy under the firm direction of the Great Reset.

You can and should learn more about the Great Reset. In the meantime SBF provides us with a parable that supports its critiques: It’s not hard to build a world of global social equality—steal a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking effective philanthropy.

AGAINST THE GREAT RESET: 'Dueling Faiths: Science and Religion under the Great Reset'

Today The Pipeline concludes its series of excerpts from 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 VI: THE INEFFABLE 

Excerpt from "Dueling Faiths: Science and Religion under the Great Reset," by Richard Fernandez.

 

The Great Reset is like an Anonymized Religious Movement

Creating a morally guided war-footing bureaucracy to remake the world is quite an undertaking. As a BBC summary of the Great Reset concept noted with British understatement, it is less an engineering manual than a sweeping vision. “The scope is huge—covering technology, climate change, the future of work, international security and other themes—and it’s difficult to see precisely what the Great Reset might mean in practice.”

At the very least it will mean specifying the moral code that will guide the enterprise; a compass defining what is “holy, sacred, absolute, spiritual, divine, or worthy of especial reverence…or attitudes towards the broader human community or the natural world,” to quote Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of religion. Since the only way to solve the pandemic problem is to solve everything, the Great Reset becomes a blank check to do everything deemed good while avoiding evil. The obvious problem is identifying what is good and evil.

It would seem the first place to look for answers would be in our civilizational legacy, particularly in the great religions with millennia of evolutionary experience in trying to resolve these issues. These religions have evolved in the forge of schism, persecution, social collapse, and even pestilence, and hence their doctrines possess an evolutionary toughness that ideologies like political correctness have yet to demonstrate.

In fact, this was the way it used to be, but using the great religions as moral reference is problematic for the giant bureaucracies that need to create their own absolute justifications for their expansive agendas. Without a time-tested belief system to fall back on, governments must find a source of legitimacy to rearrange—i.e., “reset”—the world.

The most popular candidate for the next holy writ is science. After all, popular culture often assumes science can make the moral choices for us, an expectation often associated with the phrase “trust the science.”

After all, if science tells us the “truth” about the natural world, why can’t the “experts” also have the last word on moral questions such as whether and when to disconnect life-support systems and whether molecular biologists should be free to unravel the entire human genome without any intervention. Why can’t science tell us what virtue is?

It’s already being invoked. Preventing “climate change,” for Schwab and Malleret, is not only “more respectful of Mother Nature” (more virtuous) but is also scientific. The new rule is that following science is virtue. In place of the prophets, you have the experts.

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However, many scientific aspects of the climate models are disputed. When Steven Koonin, a former undersecretary at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, revealed that some consensus-supporting climate scientists had serious doubts about the supposedly “settled science,” global warming advocates simply argued that it didn’t matter.

Yet the particulars do matter, especially in complex systems like a planetary climate. Any actual plan to prevent climate change almost certainly will involve geoengineering, in which details matter because even small mistakes can lead to vastly different outcomes. Write Drs. Neil Craik and Wil Burns in a recent joint paper, “Geoengineering and the Paris Agreement,” prepared for the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada:

In order to meet the Agreement’s objective (outlined in article 2), of keeping global average temperature increase “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit that increase to 1.5°C, it is likely that significant carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be required. Almost all of the modelled scenarios for achieving the 2°C objective include a significant deployment of one carbon dioxide removal option, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), towards the middle and end of the century.

Being “respectful of Mother Nature” boils down to funding giant engineering projects. For example, the Independent has described plans to dim the sun by shooting particulates into the upper atmosphere:

Plans to geo-engineer the atmosphere by blocking out sunlight have been floated before, but an experiment launched next year by Harvard researchers will be the first to test the theory in the stratosphere. The team will use a balloon suspended 12 miles above Earth to spray tiny chalk particles across a kilometer-long area, with the intention of reflecting the Sun’s rays away from the planet. In doing so, they will attempt to replicate on a small scale the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.

Readers who might be worrying about what could go wrong with dimming the sun or mimicking a cataclysmic volcanic eruption should recall that Schwab and Malleret wrote their Great Reset book months before Joe Biden publicly acknowledged that the coronavirus epidemic might have originated in a Chinese lab. When one recalls that the 1977 H1N1 pandemic that killed seven hundred thousand people in Central Asia probably resulted from another Chinese lab accident, there exists the possibility that science itself might be a source of a catastrophe.

If scientists who meant well accidentally killed seven hundred thousand people, then our confidence in science cannot be absolute because when it comes to complex systems—as Schwab and Malleret themselves have noted—minor errors can have huge consequences. Our ability to predict what viruses and dimming the sun will do is limited.

Since the facile equivalence between virtue and science is not always guaranteed, it is not sufficient to “trust the science,” but we must “trust and verify.”

Science Cannot Tell Us What Is Virtuous

Most people are familiar with the philosophical distinction between ends and means. Because extreme ends impel extreme means, communities are usually careful about declaring the equivalent of war. War justifies actions that would never be countenanced in peace. If you are really out to save the planet, then dimming the sun is a reasonable risk.

Can we get such imperative ends from science? It may come as a shock to a generation taught to equate science with progress that it is silent on intrinsic values. Science will equally make an electric toaster or an electric chair. Science itself doesn’t care whether humanity survives or not. It concerns itself with anticipating the outcomes consequent to certain physical arrangements. The moral values of those outcomes must be supplied from elsewhere. Ever since Newton, science has consciously restricted itself to constructing mathematical models that can usefully predict observable phenomena. If governments want science to prophesy on morals, it will be a silent prophet.

Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Gloving

Ten a.m. is not generally the time I find myself at a bar but I’m being photographed at The Kensington for having won the World Economic Forum’s New Champions Award. I’m actually quite happy about being featured… anything to take the focus off the disastrous United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop27). It was bad enough that the media made a big deal out of the 100 private jets, but beyond that it showed that we did not progress commitments, or show evidence of improvement. So when they suggested shooting me in Stella McCartney, Armani, and Fendi, I was all in.

I also didn’t mind the early hour as the Kensington is just three miles from my childhood home in St John’s Wood, where I’ve been staying off-and-on since lockdowns. 

We’re on a short break because I guess it’s what one does post-Covid and the wardrobe mistress needed to explain to the photographer why my gloves don’t fit and why she can’t get another pair. So I made a call to my assistant—no answer. Then I rang my father who told me perfection is the enemy of good but agreed to fetch a pair of gloves from mummy’s wardrobe.

Stella, saving the world one glove at a time.

‘Are you sure?’ Daddy asked.

‘Yes of course I’m sure!’ I said. ‘The ones they gave me could fit The Hulk’.

‘No, I just meant are you sure, because my coming to you adds to the carbon footprint of your eco-award’.

UGH! ‘See you soon,’ I said, and rang off. 

Just then my assistant strolled in, latte in hand and apologising for not being available all day yesterday. I hadn’t even known she was out-of-pocket yesterday too, but now that I think about it she was supposed to prepare some climate numbers for my interview. Instead she wanted me to go over some appropriate gifts for my Christmas swag bag. ‘Socks that Plant Trees' was the first suggestion. I nixed it because they actually don’t plant trees — though purportedly someone somewhere, is more likely to be able to plant trees since he bought these socks. Hard pass.

Next up Bees Wrap Food Wrap—it's waxed paper that I have to wash (without soap) and re-use—no thanks. Next up ‘Grow Cocktails’. How could that be bad? Except it's just an egg carton that grows herbs. And not even juniper berries. Then there were robes made from repurposed saris. Double hard pass. First I don’t accept there are that many saris waiting to be repurposed and when I look back to a week in the life of a sari—no thank you. This wasn’t working, but just then Daddy had arrived with several of Judith’s gloves—and they fit—just like a glove.

The 19-something male model they hired to pose behind me had just arrived in London and all but admitted he was working without a visa. Maybe he thought I’d see this as a reason to help him along but I needed to think about the upcoming interview. This was, after all, about recognising my contribution to the planet. Daddy stuck around to run questions with me…

‘So…The Africa Cop…’ He began. 

‘Well, technically it was slated as “Cop27” but yes, the focus was Africa…’ I said.

‘Right, so Africa… to highlight innovation? Progress?’

‘NO Daddy, because Africa needs $2.4 trillion due to its vulnerability to climate change’.

‘…And they are more vulnerable because they lack resources and manpower?’

‘No…okay, admittedly they are a mess, and they don’t do anything well, but if we want them to be better caretakers of the planet we have to pay for it’.

What "white savior" complex?

‘OK so we have to pay. And in order to find this $2.4 trillion we have to be more productive—but somehow productive in a way that doesn’t also use more energy or resources? Did I get that right?’ he asked.

‘Well, yes’. I said, ‘But otherwise we can just give our extra money—money we already have!’ 

‘I see. Our extra money. The money we don't really need. So your plan is we make ourselves poorer so that the most resource-abundant continent on earth can manage their resources the way we tell them to’.

UGH! ’Yes, if you have to put it that way… YES!’

Daddy got up, gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, ‘Well, you look lovely, kitten, and I’ve brought you three pair from which to choose… kidskin, silk, and poly-satin. This way you can choose whom to offend’.

That’s Daddy. But I was grateful for the delivery, and honestly the silk ones were divine. I doubted I could find these in any store today.

My assistant was back with another set of options. Reusable paper towels? No on every level. Plant your pencil? A pencil that when finished is pushed into the ground and actually contains seeds. No. Reusable make-up remover pads… I could just see me leaving them in every hotel bin… NO.

‘What about a counter-top trash composter?’ she asked.

‘NO! And NO!’ I said. ‘I’ve had very bad luck with composters as gifts’. I told her the story, briefly reliving my previous embarrassment.

‘But this one is a living composter…you put in food scraps, and worms and…’

‘WORMS? Worms on a kitchen counter?' I shrieked. ‘NO!’

Readily available!

I sent her to chat with junior James Bond and opened my laptop to look for gifts. I landed on the Citizen Eco Watch. PERFECTION! I quickly sent a link to my father and rang to ask his opinion.

‘Well?? It’s eco. Right?’ I asked.

‘It uses FEWER batteries, Jennifer, it runs on light sources, but a back-up battery will still need to be changed about every ten years’.

‘But less is more, right? I asked. 

‘But why not a self-winding watch? No battery at all?’

‘Cause it doen’t SAY eco-watch. This one is named "The Citizen Eco Watch"—perception is everything!’

He had no argument. And as he very well knows… perfection is the enemy of good.

Your Papers Please, Comrade

We are seeing the beginning of the end - or is it the end of the beginning? – of the CCP (the Climate Covid Party) "emergencies." For those who may have doubted these were linked, I give you the G20 summit. It seems the G have decided that Covid digital passports are to be required to move freely about the planet. For those who wondered what Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab were doing speaking this week to a meeting of national leadership: now we know.

Because the G20, with the exception of China, are at least putative democracies, an objective observer would assume this is the result of what the people wanted. One would be wrong. No one voted for or against this; it's never been presented for the approval of the representative governments, or citizens or subjects of the G20, or the people of any other nations.

We know these passports have nothing to do with the spread of this manufactured virus. Just last month BigPharma testified to the European Parliament that these injections were never tested for their ability to repress or stop the transmission of Covid-19. If an injection won't stop transmission, which has been the stance of the CDC for months, the purpose of getting a "vaccine" to travel, would be... what, exactly?

Yup.

At the same time as G20 is COP27, the annual boondoggle of those so worried about the climate that they all take private jets from around the planet (spewing millions of tons of "greenhouse gasses" along the way) to consume vast quantities of exotic foods (flown in from around the planet) cooked (with GHG) and served to them as they meet in air-conditioned ballrooms to discuss how we, the workers and families of the world—the productive classes—are destroying the planet with our transportation, stoves, and HVAC.

As we've discussed here before, this virus was most likely man-made. No trace has been found of it or a progenitor in nature in well over two years of investigation or the testing of over 50,000 animal subjects. Once Dr. Fauci admitted the “possibility” of its creation in a lab and covering emails began showing up, that jig was up. The "vaccine" was created and patented ten days after the first sequence of the Covid genome. This simply is not possible unless both were concurrently designed and manufactured. And, yes, the "vaccine" was designed; it is not from an inactivated virus, as all other,genuine vaccines have been in medical history. It's an artificially-created DNA map.

Various studies based on governmental databases of adverse events show that these "vaccines" may have killed as many as 600,000 Americans, and perhaps, millions, worldwide. While these numbers may or may not be high, the numbers of adverse events are so high that many countries are recommending against vaccinating people under 30, and Big Pharma, belatedly, has decided to investigate whether their injections are causing myocarditis, a term in common use today of which few of us were aware in the Before Times.

Which brings us to Klaus Schwab. Herr Schwab, of course, leads his WEF creation, a cohort believing that the global population must be reduced to under one billion souls from the current eight-plus billion. “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” in the words of WEF Advisor/Historian Yuval Noah Harari, because most of us, evidently, are “useless eaters.” An invented virus that kills millions, an injection killing millions more and inducing infertility to reduce future populations are but two steps on the road to the goal of our elites, those running the Covid & Climate scams.

[The accuracy of the documentary linked above, which has been of course banned by YouTube, has been questioned by the usual suspects in academe, the medical establishment, and the media. A sample:

Members of the anti-vaccination movement and of its media arm excel at portraying themselves as “those who care.” The rest of us—scientists, doctors, politicians, journalists—are represented as either apathetic or simply evil. The latest “documentary” to emerge from this movement, Died Suddenly, is an exercise in reframing compassion. It also represents the apogee of conspiritualist ideas, where grand conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines are painted on a canvas so large, they involve a Biblical war between the forces of absolute good and those of pure evil.

Who are portrayed as ringing the alarm for Armageddon in Died Suddenly? Embalmers... The problem is that embalmers and funeral directors are not medical professionals. Don’t take it from me, but from the National Funeral Directors Association in the United States, whose representative told me as much, and from Ben Schmidt, a funeral director and embalmer with a bachelor’s degree in natural science. Schmidt wrote a detailed explanation of what is happening here. Clots can easily form after death, as the liquid and solid parts of blood separate and as formaldehyde and calcium-containing water used in the embalming process catalyze clotting. Refrigeration can also be to blame, especially when a rapid influx of bodies due to COVID necessitates longer stays in the cooler as embalmers make their way through their backlog.

[Watch it and decide for yourself.]

Another step down the road to perdition is digital "money." If I must have a digital passport to travel, why not just digitize my money as an added convenience? And since Schwab has told us we "all" will be chipped one day, coding "our" money and vaccine passport into an injected chip that automatically access “our” “money” at the Fed (banks will be useless and so closed; think of the taxing advantages!) and provides our "vaccination" status to a digital reader, perhaps even as we just walk past a sensor entering a store or airport or transit station, would be convenient, no? Hello, Bill Gates.

President Biden has decreed via executive order, without presentation to representative government or to the citizens of the United States (perhaps it is now "subjects") for our approval, that the Federal Reserve explore the creation of a “Central Bank Digital Currency,” “CBDC,” or digital “dollar,” and MIT is working it out.

President Biden will sign an Executive Order outlining the first ever, whole-of-government approach to addressing the risks and harnessing the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology. The Order lays out a national policy for digital assets across six key priorities: consumer and investor protection; financial stability; illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation. Specifically, the Executive Order calls for measures to:

  • Protect U.S. Consumers, Investors, and Businesses by directing the Department of the Treasury and other agency partners to assess and develop policy recommendations to address the implications of the growing digital asset sector and changes in financial markets for consumers, investors, businesses, and equitable economic growth. The Order also encourages regulators to ensure sufficient oversight and safeguard against any systemic financial risks posed by digital assets.
  • Protect U.S. and Global Financial Stability and Mitigate Systemic Risk by encouraging the Financial Stability Oversight Council to identify and mitigate economy-wide (i.e., systemic) financial risks posed by digital assets and to develop appropriate policy recommendations to address any regulatory gaps.
  • Mitigate the Illicit Finance and National Security Risks Posed by the Illicit Use of Digital Assets by directing an unprecedented focus of coordinated action across all relevant U.S. Government agencies to mitigate these risks. It also directs agencies to work with our allies and partners to ensure international frameworks, capabilities, and partnerships are aligned and responsive to risks.
  • Promote U.S. Leadership in Technology and Economic Competitiveness to Reinforce U.S. Leadership in the Global Financial System by directing the Department of Commerce to work across the U.S. Government in establishing a framework to drive U.S. competitiveness and leadership in, and leveraging of digital asset technologies. This framework will serve as a foundation for agencies and integrate this as a priority into their policy, research and development, and operational approaches to digital assets.
  • Promote Equitable Access to Safe and Affordable Financial Services by affirming the critical need for safe, affordable, and accessible financial services as a U.S. national interest that must inform our approach to digital asset innovation, including disparate impact risk. Such safe access is especially important for communities that have long had insufficient access to financial services.  The Secretary of the Treasury, working with all relevant agencies, will produce a report on the future of money and payment systems, to include implications for economic growth, financial growth and inclusion, national security, and the extent to which technological innovation may influence that future.
  • Support Technological Advances and Ensure Responsible Development and Use of Digital Assets by directing the U.S. Government to take concrete steps to study and support technological advances in the responsible development, design, and implementation of digital asset systems while prioritizing privacy, security, combating illicit exploitation, and reducing negative climate impacts.
  • Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) by placing urgency on research and development of a potential United States CBDC, should issuance be deemed in the national interest. The Order directs the U.S. Government to assess the technological infrastructure and capacity needs for a potential U.S. CBDC in a manner that protects Americans’ interests. The Order also encourages the Federal Reserve to continue its research, development, and assessment efforts for a U.S. CBDC, including development of a plan for broader U.S. Government action in support of their work. This effort prioritizes U.S. participation in multi-country experimentation, and ensures U.S. leadership internationally to promote CBDC development that is consistent with U.S. priorities and democratic values.

Which now brings the climate scam into the discussion. What has digital money to do with climate? Lots.

If I've consumed my "climate allotment" of gasoline this month I could be prevented from using “my” digital “money,” to fill my tank. You didn't think a "climate lockdown" would be voluntary, did you? The jet set wouldn't trust us to stay home, even after so many millions of us voluntarily did so for "two weeks to flatten the curve," wore one mask or two, and agitated against, and sometimes attacked, our fellow human beings for not going along with the crowd.

So you were on your way to Yellowstone and now neither can continue nor return home with the kids? Sorry! Buy a steak for supper tonight? But you had one two weeks ago! Your commute uses so much gasoline you'll need to move to an apartment near a mass transit station in the inner city? It's for the common good. You run a feedlot and can't buy feed for your hundreds of heads of cattle? Oh, well. You need to restock your ammunition? LOL.

They're coming for us, too. Once we all are chipped and our travel and spending controlled, the “emergencies” will be over. None of this has ever been about a virus or the weather. It's always been about destroying the middle class, our representative governments, and the liberty have convinced ourselves we have. We don't.

"Papers, please!" to travel our world, and needing the government's permission to spend our own money—the fruits of our own labor—are but the end of the beginning of global totalitarianism. These are why we are, and why you should be, Against the Great Reset.

AGAINST THE GREAT RESET: 'Then Fall, Davos'

Published today by Bombardier Books in conjunction with Simon and Schuster, the-Pipeline.org is proud to present Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order. Edited by Michael Walsh, our distinguished contributors are drawn from across the Anglosphere, and include Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, the late Angelo M. Codevilla, James Poulos, Conrad Black, Michael Anton, David P. Goldman, Janice Fiamengo, John Tierney, Harry Stein, Salvatore Babones, Martin Hutchinson, Alberto Mingardi, Jeremy Black, Richard Fernandez, and Michael Walsh.

What is the Great Reset and why should we care? What are its aspirations, prescriptions, and proscriptions, and how will it prospectively affect us? Why is the Swiss-based World Economic Forum (WEF) under Klaus Schwab advocating a complete “re-imagining” of the Western world’s social, economic, and moral structures? And why now? What are its aspirations, prescriptions, and proscriptions, and how will it prospectively affect us?

Weighty historical issues are often best debated promptly, when something can yet be done about them; in the meantime, historians of the future can at least understand the issues as the participants themselves saw and experienced them. Whether the formerly free world of the Western democracies will succumb to the paternalistic totalitarianism of the oligarchical Resetters remains to be seen. But this is our attempt to stop it.

Please join us in our crusade.

Against the Great Reset

On sale today. Please order at the links above.

With governments around the world still refusing to entirely let go of some Covid-19 restrictions on liberty, we herewith present an excerpt from "The Shape of Things to Come: the Tyranny of Covid-19" by John Tierney:

The Great Resetters have got one thing right in their manifesto at the World Economic Forum: the Covid-19 pandemic has indeed provided a “unique window of opportunity,” although not the kind of window they have in mind. They mean it’s a chance to “build a new social contract,” entrusting the governance of society to globalists and technocrats blessed with “vision and vast expertise”—i.e., themselves. But before we sign away our future to them, we should consider what they’ve done, and the pandemic offers us a unique window into the world they wish to create.

They have used Covid to conduct a trial run of the Great Reset. It has been the most radical public health experiment in history, conducted on the entire population by scientists and bureaucrats granted unprecedented authority to deploy their “vast expertise.” At the start of the pandemic, even Dr. Anthony Fauci doubted that Americans would submit to a lockdown like China’s. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s long-standing plan for dealing with a pandemic didn’t recommend mask mandates, school closures or any shutdown of businesses. But the plan was cast aside by leaders who claimed the power to close anything for as long as they deemed fit.

Their new social contract banned or restricted commerce, education, recreation, travel, dining, and meetings—even family gatherings for weddings, holidays, and funerals. The CDC became the national landlord by forbidding any tenants from being evicted. The Four Freedoms famously declared by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 were suspended. Freedom of speech was limited on social media platforms—today’s public square—by censoring those who questioned the opinions of Fauci and his colleagues. Freedom of worship was restricted to Zoom. There was no freedom from want for those who lost their jobs and businesses, and no freedom from fear for anyone who heeded the daily doomsday pronouncements from public officials.

Americans and people throughout the world were frightened into surrendering their basic liberties, and what did they get in return? Worse than nothing. There has never been convincing evidence that lockdowns reduced Covid mortality anywhere except possibly on a few islands and in other isolated spots that sealed their borders. The places that eschewed lockdowns and mask mandates, like Florida and Sweden, did better than their locked-down peers in preventing Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, there is no doubt that the lockdowns have caused large numbers of excess deaths from other causes and will likely prove more deadly than the coronavirus because of the long-term medical, social, and economic consequences.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings decline. Children, never at serious risk from the virus, in many places lost a year or more of school—and of normal childhood as they were confined to home or forced to stare at one another behind masks. Worldwide, the rate of hunger rose dramatically as the economic fallout of the West’s lockdowns pushed more than one hundred million people in developing countries into extreme poverty.

The one great technocratic triumph—the rapid development of Covid vaccines—was achieved by the private sector in America, the nation ritually denounced by progressives for not shackling its pharmaceutical industry with price controls (like the ones that drove the industry’s most productive researchers from Europe to America). The vaccines were subsidized by taxpayers, but they did not require rewriting the social contract. It’s clear in retrospect that there was
no need during the pandemic for any sort of reset, great or otherwise, and that the extraordinary powers granted to bureaucrats and politicians produced an unparalleled public-policy disaster. Except during wartime and possibly the Great Depression, when else has the ruling class in America inflicted so much needless suffering on the entire populace?

Schwab: "you will own nothing and be happy."

Yet the response to Covid is now being hailed as a model for dealing with climate change and the rest of the Great Resetters’ agenda. Their chutzpah would be laughable if it weren’t for their success in persuading so many people—a majority in surveys—that their mandates have been necessary and effective. If they continue to hide their mistakes from the public, they will exploit that window of opportunity to seize more power. We all need to see clearly what went wrong in their trial run—and why the Great Reset would be still worse.

The Great Reset is being sold as a bold innovation, a novel strategy employing a grab bag of emerging technologies called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But it’s not new. Strip away the Davos jargon, and the Great Reset is Plato’s dream of a philosopher king society. Intellectuals have always yearned for a world run by intellectuals, and politicians have always found reasons to give themselves more power.

The pandemic panic was the worst example yet of a phenomenon I call the Crisis Crisis: the endless series of alarms fomented by a codependency of politicians, technocrats, activists, and journalists. This crisis industry is a long-standing problem—the ruling and chattering classes have always exploited crises, real or imagined—that has worsened exponentially with cable news and the web. These fearmongers don’t need to worry about accuracy—or the damage when the panic leads to a cure that’s typically worse than the disease. By the time they’re proven wrong, their false alarms will be forgotten, and journalists will be seeking their wisdom on a new crisis... the tyranny of Covid should be a lesson in what not to do and whom not to trust.

The Deadly Threat of 'ESG'

In recent months there has been growing awareness about the detrimental nature of the environmental, social and governance construct known as ESG. Using the pretense of social diversity and environmental protection allegedly needed to repair damage caused by capitalism, ESG represents an expanding threat to many industries, to the larger corporate culture and increasingly, to America itself.

The ESG construct creates competing frameworks, reporting systems, and scoring systems for environmental and social reporting—but without quantifiable economic measurements or metrics. While presently focused on publicly traded companies, ESG is being used to evaluate private companies and eventually even individuals, thus creating a social credit score not unlike what Communist China uses to oppress its citizens.

While the origins of ESG reach back over two decades, with the initial funding by the World Economic Forum (WEF) of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), the network that grew from that initial effort consists predominantly of governments, non-profit organizations, and large publicly traded companies and their capital and banking partners. Together they have created a validation feedback loop that promotes political and social change using the capital markets—other peoples’ money—to re-direct investment capital toward companies that align with the political and social worldview of ESG activist profiteers.

Guess who?

Though touted as a non-political effort, but sounding conspicuously ideological, the progenitors of ESG assert,“ without the intervention of non-market entities such as the state, international organizations and social forces, capitalism as an economic system simply will not safeguard our planet."

While the legality of re-directing investor capital to achieve political and social outcomes has yet to be adjudicated, there is no question that banking and asset management firms intend to force political change.

In 2017, BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, said he intended to change the direction of corporate America. “At Blackrock we are forcing behaviors,” he said of the company’s ESG scoring approach. “You have to force behavior, and if you don’t force behavior whether it’s gender or race or any way you want to say the composition of your team, you’re going to be impacted.”

By incentivizing companies with the prospect of higher management and consulting fees, and the ability to direct the capital toward companies in their portfolios that reflect their politicized world view, investor "best interest" is sacrificed. Best interest, a legal obligation, has never been part of the calculus of the ESG gangsters. Knowing that markets and democratic institutions would never offer them a path to their vision of the world, they need other peoples’ capital to force the creation of their dark, unfree world.

While profit-making would still not make ESG social scoring any more acceptable, the current capital re-orientation efforts have been unequivocally disastrous for investors. In June, BlackRock posted a stunning $1.7 trillion loss of investor capital, the largest loss ever for a single firm in a six-month period. Helping BlackRock achieve these disastrous outcomes was Unilever, run by Alan Jope. The consumer-goods giant put its sustainability plan to a shareholder vote where it passed with 99.6 percent shareholder support. Let’s hear it for groupthink!

At the time Jope said he credited BlackRock with leading the support and described the investment firm as "one of the finest commentators on sustainability and what companies should be doing.” Not surprisingly Jope was recently fired. Investors don’t agree with BlackRock’s Fink, Jope or the WEF. Jope’s tenure began in 2019 and he immediately began parroting the WEF’s stakeholder capitalism spiel and espoused the same ESG mandates promoted by BlackRock.

Jope-a-dope.

Through this alignment of overly interested global actors and self-interested financial services actors, the ESG construct has been able to get a footing in the boardrooms of publicly traded companies. But needing to create the perception of upholding fiduciary obligations, "stakeholder capitalism" has become the philosophical underpinning ESG. By expanding and conflating shareholders (investors) with stakeholders (everyone else), the activist class believes it can perpetrate an anti capitalist slight-of-hand: changing a free society into a centrally planned and controlled society.

According to WEF Founder, Klaus Schwab, "stakeholder capitalism" is a system in which private corporations are moral trustees of society and work for the benefit of everyone. Stakeholder capitalism is celebrated by BlackRock to Bank of America and from the WEF to Wall Street. Certainly not groups one thinks of as “working for the benefit of everyone.” Toward their centrally planned end, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said, "to uphold the principles of stakeholder capitalism, companies will need new metrics. For starters, a new measure of 'shared value creation' should include 'environmental, social, and governance' (ESG) goals as a complement to standard financial metrics. Fortunately, an initiative to develop a new standard along these lines is already under way, with support from the 'Big Four' accounting firms and the International Business Council.”

Unconcerned about the rights of investors, and feeling triumphant over publicly traded companies, ESG activists are now more assertively turning their sights toward private equity and even individuals. While many of the largest private equity firms have already willingly begun to report their ESG data, many still do not. According to CDP’s strategy document:

Accelerating the Rate of Change: 2021-2025… businesses, including private companies, need to overhaul their operations and ensure they will remain viable within environmental boundaries. Governments must set the example and provide the regulatory environment that supports and encourages responsible corporate action.

The message is clear: do what you’re told or you will not be permitted to participate in their centrally planned society. From publicly traded companies to private companies, the activists class intends to control everyone, including individuals.

Those efforts are already beginning. Bans on natural gas-powered stoves and heating systems in California and Washington State for new construction are already in place. But even closer to home are the new generation of appliances. Some features are only available through an app the owner must upload on their phone. No app, no access to those feature. More creepy still are pregnancy tests. Traditional indicators like +/- or single versus double bars have announced to women for years of the impending arrival of a crumb cruncher. In the new world of social scoring, however, those tests now offer a “result reader” that is available through an uploaded app on her phone. Slowly changing the behavior of consumers will allow these societal score-keepers to more easily track an individual’s carbon footprint.

Many legal challenges loom against ESG advocates and the firms that do their bidding. As in previous conflicts throughout history, victory isn't won simply by the efforts of businesses, but rather by individuals willing to defend the lines of liberty and personal autonomy.

Dumb and Dumber, To

Must be the passing years. More things irritate me. For example, the chap at my club’s gym the other day who spent some ninety percent of his time poring over his smart phone. People still wearing masks outside. Then there was the (retired) bishop at my church who had the straightforward job of delivering the sermon at a memorial service for the late Queen Elizabeth. On the throne for seventy years, she had kept her views on political matters to herself. The bishop couldn’t manage it for fifteen minutes. Unmistakably congratulating the new King Charles for his former princely far-sighted views on the environment (go figure), and then clearly signaling his own support for the monarchy, about which there is a lively debate within Australia.

Now I happen to think that Prince Charles’s views on the environment were inane, while agreeing with the bishop that the monarchy has served Australia well. However, whether I agree or disagree is beside the point. The pulpit is for preaching the gospel; and, in this special case, to honour the Queen’s life. It is not for political posturing. Unfortunately, unlike the late Queen, many churchmen are incapable of keeping fittingly shtum. And climate change, in particular, excites their appetites to be heard and seen being virtuous (apropos Matthew 6:5) at whatever cost to Christian good fellowship.

No gas emitted!

From discordance to discourse. I was to be at lunch recently with someone who works within the renewable energy industry (everyone has to earn a living) and yet retains a balanced outlook. We discussed hydrogen harmoniously. Why not. He made the logical point that while blue hydrogen made of natural gas, with CO2 sequestrated, must by definition result in more expensive power than using natural gas directly, green hydrogen faces no such inherent limitation. Thus, conceivably, the price per kilowatt hour of electricity generated using green hydrogen could eventually fall below the corresponding price using natural gas. At the same time, he acknowledged the size of the task and the possibility that it might prove to be infeasible. Indeed, it might.

Cheap green hydrogen. That’s the goal of mining billionaire Andrew Forest in Australia. He’s not alone. He’s part of a global pursuit for a stash of loot; akin to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, if you want to strike a movie parallel. In the movie, if you recall, there was the possibility of only one winner, such was the level of avarice among the competitors. There could be more than one winner in the green-hydrogen stakes. But pointedly not all nations can be the leading exporter of green hydrogen and surely only very few can be among leading exporters. I suspect that a fallacy of composition is afoot. The world isn’t big enough. Be that as it may, notwithstanding the geographical limitations of the world, Australia, according to its governing powers, is on track to be a leader, if not the leader.

Yet, unaccountably, when that esteemed body, the World Economic Forum identified six likely leading candidates for producing green hydrogen, Australia was missing. There was China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Come on guys. Where’s Australia? A mere afterthought, as it happens. Appended among Chile, Namibia and Morocco, et al.

But surely, that can’t be right? It was only in September this year that an international conference on green hydrogen was held in Australia’s so-called Sunshine State. Plenty of sun and wide-open spaces in Queensland to plant solar and wind farms in order to power electrolysis; lots of water up north too. Also, I misspoke, pardon my slip. It wasn’t a mere “conference” but a “summit” no less. Hydrogen Connect Summit, it was called. Henry Kissinger comes to mind. There you have it. Australia is surely at the epicentre of the green hydrogen revolution.

Suitable for a "green energy" summit.

Not so fast. I searched. Quickly found summits everywhere; not a conference in sight. The FT [Financial Times] Hydrogen Summit in London in June; the World Hydrogen Energy Summit in India, coming in October; the World Hydrogen Summit in the Netherlands in May; the Asia-Pacific Hydrogen Summit in December 2021; the Hydrogen Shot Summit, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy in August/September 2021. No doubt there’s more.

All appear to be part of a chronological series of summits; more planned for 2023. "Summit," as presently defined in the dictionary, is clearly inadequate to encompass the modern-day renewable-energy world. Need a new twist. Let’s say, meetings of government apparatchiks and rent-seekers; particularly in the cause of obtaining taxpayer handouts to fund a fanciful green-hydrogen future.

It's hard to get reliable evidence on relative costs and prices of different hues of hydrogen. There is much noise and vested interest. I prefer to rely on those with a current stake in the game. Santos is Australia’s largest producer of natural gas. Here is its CEO Kevin Gallagher at a conference in June:

If we look at current prices in Australia, hydrogen made in Moomba from natural gas with carbon capture and storage would be about $14 per gigajoule before transport. Green hydrogen made at Port Kembla would be at least $38 per gigajoule before transport – a price Australian manufacturers could not pay.

This price differential quoted by Gallagher is in line with other estimates (e.g., an EIA estimate) which suggest that green hydrogen costs about three times that of blue hydrogen. Now those favouring green hydrogen claim that its cost will fall steeply over time as a result of technological breakthroughs and scale. The first is nothing more than wishful thinking. The second, debatable; when producing green hydrogen at scale is the essence of its predicament. But we’re missing something. We’re comparing dumb with dumberer.

In the ten years from 2011-12 to 2020-21, thus leaving aside this year’s artificial spike, wholesale natural gas prices in Sydney averaged a little over A$6 per gigajoule. Why pay $14 for blue, never mind $38 for green, when you can have it au naturel for single-digit dollars; and especially so, if drilling and fracking were undemonized? That’s the question lost to your average bishop and prince who are gung-ho for green and damn the cost to the hoi polloi.