J.D. Vance at Munich Security Conference, 2025

Vice President J.D. Vance spoke at the Munich Security Conference, February 14, 2025:

... The threat that I worry most about for Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values that are shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears.

For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.

Everything—from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship—is billed as a defense of democracy.

But when we see European courts canceling elections, and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.

And I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.

Within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against tyrannical forces on this continent.

Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, closed churches, and canceled elections. Were they the good guys?

Certainly not. And thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty—the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.

As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.

We believe those things are certainly connected. Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.”

Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online, as part of "Combating Misogyny on the Internet: A Day of Action."

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britain in the crosshairs.

A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.

Not obstructing anyone. Not interacting with anyone. Just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply: “It was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.”

Now, the officers were not moved.

Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zone” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.

He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.

But no.

This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called Safe Access Zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.

Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizen suspected guilty of thought crime.

In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.

And in the interest of comity, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.

Misinformation like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China.

Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.

So, I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer.

And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite.

And I hope that we can work together on that.

In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town, and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree.

Now, we’re at the point, of course, where the situation has gotten so bad that, this December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.

Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections.

But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective.

You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections.

We certainly do.

You can condemn it on the world stage, even.

But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their minds will make them stronger still.

Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.

Now again, we don’t have to agree with everything—or anything—that people say.

But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.

To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way—or even worse, win an election.

Now, this is a security conference, ... I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course, that’s important.

But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly, I think, to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.

Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.

If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.

Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.

You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years. Have we learned nothing—that thin mandates produce unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens.

If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern—because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things. And of course, we know that very well in America. You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.

Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. ... No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.

But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And, agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more, all over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me. I just think that people care about their homes. They care about their dreams. They care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children. And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in my brief time in politics.

Contrary to what you might hear a couple mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.

And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or, worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process, protects nothing.

In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.

And speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential.

And trust me, I say this with all humor—if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

What no democracy—American, German, or European—will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle, or you don’t. Europeans—the people—have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.

You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you.

And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we have built together as a shared society. To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice.

And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said:

“Do not be afraid.”

We shouldn’t be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.

Click here to watch the full speech on Youtube.

Have global CO₂ emissions declined due to wind energy?

From a reader:

Has global CO₂ emissions declined due to wind energy?

Grok: Global CO₂ emissions have indeed seen reductions attributed to the expansion of wind energy. Wind power, being a zero-emission electricity generation technology during its operational phase, displaces fossil fuel-based power generation, particularly from coal and natural gas plants, which are significant contributors to CO₂ emissions. Here's how:

• Reduction of Emissions: Studies and data show that wind energy has been instrumental in reducing CO₂ emissions. For instance, in 2020, wind energy contributed to a notable decrease in CO₂ emissions by providing a record increase in the share of renewables in electricity generation, which was up by four percentage points from 2019. This indicates that wind energy directly reduces the carbon footprint of electricity generation by replacing fossil fuels.


• Comparative Analysis: When compared to other forms of energy, wind energy has one of the lowest lifecycle CO₂ emissions, with onshore wind turbines emitting around 11 grams of CO₂ equivalent per kilowatt-hour (g CO₂e/kWh), which is significantly lower than coal and natural gas. This low emission profile allows wind energy to offset CO₂ emissions that would have been produced by fossil fuel plants over the lifetime of the wind turbines.
• Impact in Specific Regions: In regions where wind energy has been significantly scaled up, like the United States and Europe, it has played a crucial role in reducing emissions. In the U.S., wind energy avoided 351 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions in 2024 alone, showcasing its impact on emissions reduction.


• Global Perspective: On a global scale, the growth in wind and solar energy has been noted to prevent substantial CO₂ emissions. Posts on X have highlighted that wind and solar energy's growth has been key in either stabilizing or reducing global CO₂ emissions in certain periods by displacing fossil fuel use.

However, it's important to note that while wind energy significantly contributes to reducing CO₂ emissions, the global picture of emissions reduction is influenced by many factors including other renewable sources, energy efficiency improvements, economic conditions, and policy changes. Thus, while wind energy is a major player in emissions reduction, it's part of a broader strategy to combat climate change.

You didn’t actually say if emissions went down, just that renewables went up.

Grok: Apologies for the indirectness. Yes, global CO₂ emissions have declined due to the increased adoption of wind energy. The direct displacement of fossil fuels by wind power has contributed to a measurable reduction in CO₂ emissions. For instance, in years where wind capacity significantly increased, there has been a corresponding decrease in the rate of CO₂ emissions growth, or in some cases, an absolute decrease in emissions from the power sector. This trend is supported by data showing that in regions or years where wind energy's share in the energy mix grew, there was a noticeable impact on reducing overall CO₂ emissions.

Can you provide some data sources?

Grok: Here are some data sources related to the impact of wind energy on CO₂ emissions reduction:

• International Energy Agency (IEA):
• "Global Energy Review: CO₂ Emissions in 2021 – Analysis" for comprehensive analysis and data on how the increase in renewable energy, including wind, has affected CO₂ emissions.
• "CO₂ Emissions in 2022 – Analysis" provides insights into how wind and solar energy contributed to reducing CO₂ emissions amidst global energy changes.
• ScienceDirect:
• "The role of global installed wind energy in mitigating CO₂ emission and temperature rising" offers data on how wind energy has contributed to CO₂ emission reductions globally over time.
• U.S. Department of Energy:
• "How Wind Can Help Us Breathe Easier" from the Department of Energy's website gives specific figures on the CO₂ emissions avoided by wind power in the U.S., comparing it with fossil fuels.
• Our World in Data:
• "CO₂ emissions dataset: our sources and methods" discusses the methodologies used to estimate CO₂ emissions and how renewable energy sources like wind contribute to these reductions.
• Posts on X (formerly Twitter) have also discussed the impact of wind energy on emissions:
• General posts from users and organizations like @Greenpeace<, @UNEP, and others have highlighted specific figures on CO₂ emissions avoidance due to wind power growth. These are not conclusive but reflect current sentiment and discussions on the topic.

These sources collectively provide both quantitative data and analyses on how wind energy has contributed to the decline in global CO₂ emissions.

The graph at Our World in Data of Annual CO₂ emissions for the world show them continuing to rise (except for a dip during Covid).

Grok: You're correct in noting that "Our World in Data" shows a general trend of rising annual CO₂ emissions globally, with a notable exception during the years affected by the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic, where there was a temporary dip. Here's how this data context aligns with the impact of wind energy:

• Global Trend vs. Specific Attribution: The overall rise in global CO₂ emissions as depicted in graphs by "Our World in Data" reflects the sum of all human activities contributing to emissions, including industrial processes, transportation, and energy production from various sources. However, within this broader context, specific sectors or regions can show reductions due to the increased use of wind energy or other renewables.
• Wind Energy's Role: While wind energy's growth has contributed to reducing CO₂ emissions in specific contexts, the global emissions have not decreased in absolute terms due to the simultaneous increase in emissions from other sectors or countries with growing energy demands, primarily met by fossil fuels.
• Data from Sources:
• "CO₂ Emissions in 2022 – Analysis" from the IEA () shows that despite the growth in renewables like wind, global emissions have still increased, albeit at a slower pace than economic growth, indicating a decoupling trend.
• Similarly, "Global CO₂ emissions rebounded to their highest level in history in 2021 - News - IEA" () notes that while renewables like wind have helped curb the increase, the rebound in emissions was significant post-Covid.
• Interpreting the Data: The data from "Our World in Data" () indeed shows a continuous rise in CO₂ emissions, but this does not negate the impact of wind energy. Instead, it underscores the challenge of reducing overall emissions when global energy demand grows and not all countries or sectors are transitioning at the same pace to renewable energy sources.

In summary, while wind energy has contributed to reducing CO₂ emissions in specific contexts, the global emissions trend is influenced by a multitude of factors, including economic recovery, industrial growth in developing countries, and other sectors' reliance on fossil fuels. Thus, the observed increase in global CO₂ emissions does not diminish wind energy's positive impact but highlights the scale of the challenge in reducing global emissions.

So wind has not reduced global CO₂ emissions.

Grok: That's not entirely accurate. Wind energy has indeed contributed to reducing CO₂ emissions, but the global emissions context is complex:

• Local and Sector-Specific Reductions: In regions or sectors where wind energy has significantly displaced fossil fuels, there have been notable reductions in CO₂ emissions. For example, in countries like Denmark, Germany, and parts of the U.S., wind power has led to substantial decreases in emissions from the power sector.
• Global Emissions: However, when considering global emissions as a whole, the growth of wind energy has not been sufficient to counteract the increase in emissions from other sources or the overall increase in global energy demand. This is due to:
• Growth in Energy Demand: The world's energy consumption has continued to rise, and in many places, this demand is still met primarily by fossil fuels.
• Variability in Adoption: Not all countries or sectors are transitioning to renewables at the same rate. Where wind energy hasn't been adopted or isn't growing fast enough, emissions continue to rise or stabilize at high levels.
• Other Sectors: Emissions from transportation, industrial processes, and deforestation still contribute significantly to global CO₂ levels, often outpacing reductions in the electricity sector.
• Net Impact: While wind energy has reduced emissions in specific instances, the global CO₂ emissions have continued to rise because the total emissions from all sources combined are still increasing. Wind energy's contribution to reducing emissions is part of a larger equation where other variables (like increased fossil fuel use in other regions or sectors) have outweighed these reductions.

Thus, saying "wind has not reduced global CO₂ emissions" oversimplifies the situation. A more accurate statement would be that while wind energy has significantly reduced emissions in specific contexts, these reductions have not yet been enough to reverse the overall trend of increasing global CO₂ emissions due to the complexity of global energy systems and consumption patterns.

You’re being casuistic. Either global emissions go down or they rise. Despite massive build-out of wind and solar, they have continued to rise.

Grok: You're right to push for clarity. Here’s a direct response:

Despite the significant increase in wind and solar energy capacity, global CO₂ emissions have continued to rise. The build-out of wind and solar has not been sufficient to offset the emissions from growing global energy demand, particularly from fossil fuels, in many parts of the world. This is evidenced by data showing that even with the expansion of renewable energy sources, global emissions have not decreased but have instead set new records in recent years.

Hugo Cordeau is not an environmentalist

Hugo Cordeau, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Toronto, writes:

Protecting natural areas such as farmland is a fundamental aspect of environmentalism. However, safeguarding these lands may inadvertently increase the cost of renewable energy just as the transition to clean energy has become critically urgent.

I like to think about this as a fight between the local and global environmentalists.

Local environmentalists prioritize land protection and stewardship. They see the transformation of forests and agricultural land as harmful to biodiversity and local habitats. As a result, they oppose projects such as solar installations on farmland, transmission lines and even initiatives by climate leaders such as Northvolt, a company at the forefront of clean battery production for electric vehicles.

Global environmentalists focus on greenhouse-gas emissions. This perspective acknowledges that substantial new mineral resources, power lines and renewable energy are necessary to reduce emissions and will come at the cost of some farmland and forests. In the meantime, it implies a reduction in activities such as fracking and oil production, which are known to cause serious health issues through air pollution.

Given the worsening climate crisis, the global environmentalist perspective may be the one of least harm. Indeed, unless we adopt a degrowth narrative, it is not feasible to protect all our natural landscapes while also achieving net-zero emissions.

What a contrast: land protection and stewardship versus a focus on greenhouse gas emissions. The latter, however, which Cordeau speaks for, are clearly not environmentalists, but rather monomaniacs. They dismiss the environmental costs of new mining, power lines, substations, and wind and solar facilities as inherently necessary in their minds, which is completely in line with every industrialist who has had to face the concerns of environmentalists. They never have to prove that reducing CO₂ emissions from energy production and consumption has a meaningful effect on the climate or on ecosystems otherwise ravaged by human encroachment, or indeed that new mining, power lines, substations, and wind and solar facilities reduce CO₂ emissions by a meaningful degree (never mind the 100s of years of accumulated CO₂ that will persist for 100s of years more).

Cordeau invokes “net-zero” – a mirage that justifies every depredation not just on the environment, but also on the budgets of rate- and taxpayers and on the social fabric and even economy of rural and coastal life. He does support some limits, including a 2-km setback from homes, but “net-zero” – as intrinsically unattainable – will always require abandoning such concerns as merely provisional lip service to the notion of balance. “Sacrifices must be made for the greater good,” as Cordeau pleads, seemingly confident that it will never be he who is called on for sacrifice.

Hugo Cordeau is not an environmentalist. He is a shill for industry, for corporate grifters and the NGOs and consultants who love them.

See also: Charles Komanoff is not an environmentalist

Environmentalism has been replaced by corporate-sponsored climatism and renewable energy fetishism

Robert Bryce, May 24, 2024

Environmentalism in America is dead. It has been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism.

The movement birthed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the early 1960s and Earth Day in the 1970s — a movement that once aimed to protect landscapes, wildlands, whales, and wildlife — has morphed into the NGO–corporate-industrial–climate complex. Rather than preserve wildlands and wildlife, today’s “green” NGOs have devolved into a sprawling network of nonprofit and for-profit groups aligned with big corporations, big banks, and big law firms. In the name of climate change, these NGOs want to pave vast swaths of America’s countryside with oceans of solar panels and forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines. They are also promoting the industrialization of our oceans, a move that could put hundreds of massive offshore wind turbines in the middle of some of our best fisheries and right atop known habitat of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.

The simplest way to understand how climatism and renewable energy fetishism have swamped concerns about conservation and wildlife protection is to follow the money. Over the past decade or so, the business of climate activism has become just that — a business. As I reported last year in “The Anti-Industry Industry,” the top 25 climate nonprofits are spending some $4.5 billion per year. As seen below, the gross receipts of the top 25 climate-focused NGOs now total about $4.7 billion per year.

These groups — which are uniformly opposed to both nuclear energy and hydrocarbons — have budgets that dwarf those of pro-nuclear and pro-hydrocarbon outfits like the Nuclear Energy Institute, which, according to the latest figures from Guidestar, has gross receipts of $194 million, and the American Petroleum Institute which has gross receipts of $254 million. (Unless otherwise noted, the NGO figures are from Guidestar, which defines gross receipts as a “gross figure that does not subtract rental expenses, costs, sales expenses, direct expenses, and costs of goods sold.” Also note that in many cases, Guidestar’s gross receipts figure doesn’t match the revenue that the NGOs are reporting on their Form 990s.)

To understand the staggering amount of money being spent by the NGO–corporate-industrial–climate complex, look at the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Colorado-based group founded by Amory Lovins, the college dropout who, for nearly 50 years, has been the leading cheerleader for the “soft” energy path of wind, solar, biofuels, and energy efficiency. (Click here for my 2007 article on Lovins.) Between 2012 and 2022, according to ProPublica, Rocky Mountain Institute’s annual budget skyrocketed, going from $10 million to $117 million.

Indeed, the group provides a prime example of how corporate cash and dark money are fueling the growth of the NGO–corporate-industrial–climate complex. Among its biggest donors are corporations that are profiting from the alt-energy craze. Last year, Wells Fargo, a mega-bank that is among the world’s biggest providers of tax-equity financing for alt-energy projects, gave Rocky Mountain Institute at least $1 million. On its website, Wells Fargo says it is “one of the most active tax-equity investors in the nation’s renewable energy sector, financing projects in 38 states.” In 2021, the bank bragged that it had surpassed “$10 billion in tax-equity investments in the wind, solar, and fuel cell industries. Wells Fargo has invested in more than 500 projects, helping to finance 12% of all wind and solar energy capacity in the U.S. over the past 10 years.”

Another mega-bank giving big bucks to RMI is J.P. Morgan Chase, which gave at least $500,000 in 2023. I took a deep dive into alt-energy finance last year in “Jamie Dimon’s Climate Corporatism.” I explained:

About half of all the tax equity finance deals in the country (worth about $10 billion per year) are being done by just two big banks, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America. The two outfits have the resources to handle the tax credits that are generated by renewable projects and pair those “tax subsidies” (the term used by Norton Rose Fulbright) with the capital financing needed to get the projects built.

Last year, Rocky Mountain Institute got a similar amount from European oil giant Shell PLC, which has been active in both onshore and offshore wind. In addition, last year, the Rocky Mountain Institute published a report in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund, which claimed, “the fossil fuel era is over.” The Bezos Earth Fund, of course, gets its cash from Amazon zillionaire Jeff Bezos. Last year, Bezos’s group gave Rocky Mountain Institute at least $1 million. In addition, Amazon, which claims to be “the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy,” is a significant donor and was the sole funder of a report published earlier this year by RMI that promotes increased use of — what else? — solar, wind, and batteries.

RMI also got at least $1 million from two NGOs — ClimateWorks Foundation and the Climate Imperative Foundation — which funnel massive amounts of dark money to climate activist groups. San Francisco-based ClimateWorks has gross receipts of $350 million. ClimateWorks lists about two dozen major funders on its website, including the Bezos Earth Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. However, the group’s tax filings show that it gets most of its funding from individuals, none of whom are disclosed on its Form 990. In 2022, ClimateWorks got $128 million from an unnamed individual, $45 million from another individual, and $24 million from another. In all, ClimateWorks collected about $277 million — or roughly 84% of its funding — from a handful of unnamed oligarchs. Who are they? ClimateWorks doesn’t say, but notes that it has “several funders that [sic] prefer to remain anonymous.”

Climate Imperative, also based in San Francisco, doesn’t reveal the identities of its funders, nor does it publish the names of all the activist groups it funds. But it is giving staggering sums of money to climate groups. Climate Imperative’s gross receipts total $289 million. The group’s goals include the “rapid scaling of renewable energy, widespread electrification of buildings and transportation, [and] stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Elite academics produce studies that provide ammunition to the NGO–corporate-industrial–climate complex. Last year, in an article published in the left-wing magazine Mother Jones, Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, claimed, “We now have the potential to rebuild a better America.”

Doing so, he explained, will require a much larger electric grid with “up to 75,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines by 2035.” That’s enough, he noted, to “circle the Earth three times.” He continued, saying the U.S. will also need utility-scale solar projects covering “an area the size of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined, and wind farms that span an area equal to that of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.”

Jenkins claims we can have a “better America” by covering an area the size of eight states with solar panels (most of which are made with Chinese components) and endless forests of massive, noisy, bird-and-bat-killing wind turbines. Put another way, the Princeton net-zero plan would require paving some 239,000 square miles (620,000 square kilometers) of land with solar and wind projects, and that doesn’t include the territory needed for all the high-voltage transmission lines that would be needed!

On its face, the notion is absurd.

Nevertheless, the scheme, published in 2020 and known as the Net-Zero America study, got positive coverage in major media outlets, including the New York Times.

Despite the cartoonish amount of land and raw materials it would require, the Princeton net-zero plan shows how renewable energy fetishism dominates today’s energy policy discussions. Nearly every large climate-focused NGO in America claims our economy must soon be fueled solely by solar, wind, and batteries, with no hydrocarbons or nuclear allowed. But those claims ignore the raging land-use conflicts happening across America — and in numerous countries around the world — as rural communities fight back against the encroachment of Big Wind and Big Solar.

Perhaps the most striking example of the environmental betrayal now underway is the climate activists’ support for installing hundreds, or even thousands, of offshore wind platforms on the Eastern Seaboard, smack in the middle of the North Atlantic Right Whale’s habitat. Last month, I published this video showing habitat maps and the areas proposed for wind development.

Among the climate groups shilling for offshore wind is the Center for American Progress (gross receipts: $40 million), founded by John Podesta, who now serves as President Biden’s advisor on “clean energy innovation and implementation.” Last year, Podesta’s group published an article claiming “oil money” was pushing “misinformation” about offshore wind.

Rather than defend whales, the group claimed the offshore wind sector is “a major jobs creator and an important tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” Who funds the Center for American Progress? Among its $1 million funders are big foundations, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Gates Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Two familiar names, Climate Imperative and ClimateWorks, each gave the group up to $500,000 last year. On the corporate side, the group got up to $500,000 from Amazon.com and Microsoft.

Now, let’s look at the Sierra Club (gross receipts: $184 million), a group whose mission statement states that it aims “To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth.”

Alas, protecting wild places doesn’t include our oceans. In March, Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club, defended the offshore wind industry, claiming that “fossil fuel industry front groups” were trying to make “whales and other marine species a cultural wedge issue.” He also claimed that “disruptions in the whales’ feeding patterns, water salinity, and currents are likely the result of climate change,” adding that “climate change perhaps is the largest overriding problem, and our transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy the solution.”Just for a moment, imagine what Podesta’s group, or the Sierra Club, would be saying if those scalawags from the oil industry were planning to put hundreds of offshore platforms in the middle of whale habitat. The wailing and gnashing of teeth would be audible from here to Montauk. Those NGOs would be running endless articles about the dangers facing the Right Whale — of which there are only about 360 individuals left, including fewer than 70 “reproductively active females.” But since the industry aiming to industrialize vast swaths of our oceans has been branded as “clean,” the response from the Sierra Clubbers has been, well, crickets.

If the climate groups are seriously concerned about reducing emissions, they would be clamoring for the increased use of nuclear energy, the safest form of zero-carbon electricity generation. It also has the smallest environmental footprint. But the Sierra Club, in its own words, “remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.” Furthermore, leaders at the Natural Resources Defense Council (gross receipts: $548 million) cheered in 2021 when the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York was prematurely shuttered. What does NRDC claim we can use to replace nuclear? Offshore wind, of course.

The punchline here is obvious: It’s time to discard the shopworn label of “environmentalism.” The NGOs discussed above, and others like them, are not environmental groups. Their response to the specter of catastrophic climate change will require wrecking our rural landscapes, the killing of untold numbers of bats, birds, and insects, and industrializing our oceans with large-scale alt-energy projects.

America needs a new generation of activists who want to spare nature, wildlife, and marine mammals by utilizing high-density, low-emission energy sources like natural gas and nuclear energy. We need advocates and academics who will push for a weather-resilient electric grid, not a weather-dependent one. Above all, we need true conservationists who promote a realistic view of our energy and power systems. That view will include a positive view of our place on this planet, a view that seeks to conserve natural places, not to pave them.

Excerpts from a couple of essays in Tablet magazine

From “The Culture of Transgression,” by Michael Lind, July 31, 2023

Everywhere we see our political, cultural, and financial elites bankrolling activists to dismantle traditions. While flags and slogans celebrating racial or sexual identity are proudly displayed by Western governments and corporations, overt displays of national patriotism are regarded by establishmentarians on both sides of the Atlantic as vulgar and distasteful. Religions tend to be viewed with distrust and contempt by the trans-Atlantic elite, unless their premodern teachings have been modified into alignment with the views of the campus left. The Western canon, instead of being enlarged to include unjustly excluded authors, has been jettisoned, and liberal education has been replaced by ideological indoctrination in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

Iconoclasm is nothing new in history. The term was coined to describe the controversy over icons in medieval Byzantium, and has come to mean any attack on cherished traditions and familiar imagery. Radical Protestant reformers broke the stained glass and smashed the statues of Mary and the saints. The Taliban dynamited Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in 2001, and later ISIS destroyed many ancient Mesopotamian monuments and statues.

In most historic cases, programmatic iconoclasm has been temporary and accompanied or followed by the fabrication of new traditions and the imposition of new orthodoxies. In communist Russia, the statues of the czars went down and statues of Lenin and Stalin went up. ...

But the cancellation of the Great Books curriculum has not led to a new consensus canon featuring minority, female, and nonbinary authors along with a smaller number of “dead white males” who are deemed acceptable. Instead, much of the energy of woke jihadists goes into purging or censoring existing works of art and thought—rewriting the novels of Roald Dahl, for example—or randomly parachuting nonwhite or “queer” characters into movie remakes instead of creating something new.

The cultural ferment in contemporary North America and Europe does not feel like an interregnum between one cultural regime and a stable successor. It feels like a permanent revolution.

Put another way, the Western elite culture of transgression is an example of antinomianism, not iconoclasm. Unlike iconoclasm, antinomianism is not a temporary campaign of destruction of older iconography and traditions to clear the way for the imposition of new canons and orthodoxies. Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy. ...

At the moment, the fashionable justifications invoked by the elite antinomian vandals attacking Western society from within are climate change, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and “anti-fascism” as a catchall category. Upper-middle-class young men and women who throw paint at artistic masterpieces or glue themselves to trains claim they are defending the earth’s environment, but they could just as well say they are fighting white supremacy or patriarchy. They are acting out the ethos of a Western elite culture that believes the act of transgression itself is virtuous; the alleged goal of the transgression is merely an excuse.

Call it “the culture of transgression” of the dominant overclass in North Atlantic democracies. The three saints of transgression are the illegal immigrant, the transsexual, and the woman who proudly celebrates abortion. All three are idealized by our revolutionary ruling class precisely because they violate traditional norms—the traditional norm of patriotism, based on the legitimacy of the city-state or nation-state or kingdom and its laws and borders; traditional gender norms; and traditional family norms, which celebrate the capacity of women to give birth and to nurture their infants and of men to provide for them. Most of what is called “progressivism” today is really transgressivism.

y now the antinomians in Western nations have won their war against tradition in every realm. The members of the credentialed corporate-government-nonprofit-academic-media oligarchy, along with billionaire entrepreneurs and bankers who themselves are usually born into managerial-professional families, are almost all modernist in their aesthetics, libertine in their views of sex and recreational drug use, and dismissive of nationalism and patriotism and religion, which they regard as mental diseases of the lower classes. They work in offices designed by trendy “starchitects” decorated with abstract art, and often live in postmodern homes designed to be sterile, off-putting, and the very opposite of petty bourgeois comfort.

Having vandalized every premodern tradition, the elite antinomians of the modern West now don’t know what to do next. What should rebels against the bourgeoisie rebel against when the bourgeoisie has fallen?

The answer, it is increasingly apparent, is to rebel against the proletariat. Instead of shocking the bourgeoisie, our post-bourgeois managerial overclass now delights in shocking the working class. ...

Whatever working-class “normies” believe and enjoy, the most influential tastemakers of the trans-Atlantic ruling class denounce and seek to ban, using one of their three or four specious all-purpose justifications. ...

By declaring the democratic preferences of the working class a danger to society, the West’s oligarchs justify subjecting their enemies to pervasive surveillance and other counterextremism measures originally designed for foreign terrorist groups. ...

From “The Obama Factor,” by David Samuels, August 02, 2023

[Note: There’s a lot of (counterfactual) anti-Putin/Trump crap in this piece, which rather plays right into the very stuff the authors critique. Samuels is also offended by Obama’s supposed minimization of American exceptionalism, but he equates that exceptionalism with empire, which Obama clearly embraced (to great harm).]

... By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms.... The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. ...

Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a long article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office. Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school D.C. reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion. But the D.C. press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful. ...

At bottom, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama [by David Garrow] is a tragic story about a young man who was deeply wounded by the abandonment of both his white mother and his Black father—a wound that gifted him with political genius and at the same time made him the victim of a profound narcissism that first whispered to him in his mid-twenties that he was destined to be president. It is not hard to see how Garrow has come to believe that Obama’s ambition proved to be toxic, both for the man and for the country. ...

My own read of Obama has always been that he was a skillful elite-pleaser with a radical streak that did in fact emerge from the anti-imperialist politics of the 1970s, the foundational claim of which was that equality trumps freedom. ...

Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.

It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.

Ghettos were invented for Jews. Concentration camps, too. How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem. ...

[Obama] was the guy chosen by history to put something in the American goldfish bowl that made all the fish go crazy and eat each other: America’s emerging oligarachy cementing its grip instead of going bust. The rise of monopoly internet platforms. The normalization of government spying on Americans. Race relations going south. Skyrocketing inequality. The rise of Donald Trump. The birth of Russiagate. It all happened with Obama in the White House. ...

[The interview:]

DS: What do you see as the connection, if any, between the personal lives of powerful men and their public lives, based on your years of research on Dr. King, and your experience writing about Obama?

DG: I think one can in large part, in King’s case, say these were sort of two separate lives. Because he lived it that way. He lived it as two separate lives.

DS: Might one make the same case about Obama, but in reverse? It seems clear that Obama leads an exemplary, highly controlled private life, consuming exactly seven almonds while watching The Man in the High Castle or Draymond Green highlights on ESPN for stress relief.

DG: Right. Yes.

DS: In fact, I can make the case that Obama’s public life was the amoral part, beginning with the toleration of genocide in Syria and the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens, and extending to wide-scale illegal surveillance and spying, and his now becoming the spokesperson for gutting the First Amendment in favor of government censorship of large tech platforms. ...

DS: So Obama starts out as an eloquent opponent of the Patriot Act, etc., etc. By the end of his presidency, his people are unmasking intercepts of his political opponents every day, and the FBI is spying on Donald Trump.

DG: That’s right. ...

DS: What interests you most about Obama today?

DG: The number one thing about Barack this past five years is how completely he’s vanished.

DS: Why is he living in the center of Washington, D.C., then?

DG: Well, how much time is he spending there as opposed to Martha’s Vineyard? I have no idea.

DS: Between July Fourth and Labor Day, sure. The rest of the year, he lives in a large brick mansion in Kalorama. Doesn’t it strike you as weird that he’s an ex-president, he’s comparatively young, and he’s living in the center of Washington, D.C.? The original excuse was that Sasha had to finish school. Then you could say, “Well, the opposition to Trump needs a figure to rally around.” But now Sasha has graduated from USC, Trump is gone, Joe Biden was elected present, but he’s still there.

DG: I never see any mentions of him.

DS: Doesn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, I have heard from more than one source that there are regular meetings at Obama’s house in Kalorama involving top figures in the current White House, with Secret Service and cars outside. I don’t write about it because it’s not my lane. There are over a thousand reporters in Washington, and yet there are zero stakeouts of Obama’s mansion, if only to tell us who is coming and going. But he clearly has his oar in.

DG: I don’t follow the Iranian stuff super, super carefully, but I have been puzzled at the Biden administration’s continuing attachment to the Iran deal.

DS: The easy explanation, of course, is that Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn’t.

DG: Rob Malley was the guy on that.

DS: Rob Malley is just one person. Brett McGurk. Dan Shapiro in Israel. Lisa Monaco in Justice. Susan Rice running domestic policy. It’s turtles all the way down. There are obviously large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they’re staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him. Personnel is policy, as they say in Washington.

Which to me is a very odd and kind of spooky arrangement. Spooky, because it is happening outside the constitutional framework of the U.S. government, and yet somehow it’s been placed off the list of permitted subjects to report on. Which is a pretty good indicator of the extent to which the information we get, and public reactions to that information, is being successfully controlled. How and by whom remain open questions, the quick answer to which is that the American press has become a subset of partisan comms.

DG: I’m going back to something you said 20 minutes ago. From the get-go, I know enough intelligence community stuff that from the first time I saw it, I realized that Christopher Steele’s shit was just complete crap. It was bad corporate intelligence, even. It was nonsensical.

DS: What scared me back then was coming to understand that a new milieu had been created consisting of party operatives, the people in the FBI and the CIA who are carrying out White House policy, and the press. It is all one world now. And that’s something people still seem loathe to admit, even to themselves, in part because it puts them in a state of dissonance with this new kind of controlled consensus that the press maintains, which is obviously garbage. But if you question it, you’re some kind of nut. ... Now the question becomes, why are they still fixated on Iran after the Iran deal failed, its premises are exploded? And who are “they,” exactly?

DG: Well, for Barack, everything has to be a success. Everything has to be a victory. I mean, I’m not a health policy expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always thought that the whole Obamacare thing was, in large part, a fraud. It’s a great achievement for the health insurance industry.

DS: Obama reluctantly started talking about health care because it was Hillary Clinton’s issue in 2008, and then they were like, “Well, you have to have a healthcare plan, because Hillary has her big healthcare plan.” It was like, “All right, fine, I’ll have one too.” ...

DS: I think future historians are going to look at the Obama presidency and see it as the moment when this new oligarchy merged with the Democratic Party and used the capacities of these new technologies and the power of this new class of people, the oligarchs and their servants, to create a new apparatus of social control. How far they can go with it, what the limits are … you see them trying to test it out every week or so. ... So if Obama is the first U.S. president from the periphery of empire, he’s also the first president from the billionaire-foundation-NGO complex, which makes him the perfect mediating figure between the progressive part of the party, the billionaires, and the security state. ...

DS: As someone who has been a serious student of this subject for the past 45 years, how consequential is the court’s decision to overturn Roe?

DG: It’s a class issue. That’s the number one thing. Even before Roe [and https://kirbymtn.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-threat-to-abortion-and-reproductive.html], if you were a woman who had your life together and could get yourself to New York, you were fine. If you had the time and the ability to buy yourself a plane ticket to New York City, you were fine. Anybody from the Rio Grande Valley needed to get, past tense, to San Antonio or Austin to get an abortion. And that’s what we’re looking at now, is that it’s a travel challenge, because there’s going to be this whole swath of states—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas—where folks are going to need to get to New Mexico, Colorado, or Illinois. ...

[T]he problem with the reproductive rights movement, going all the way back to Mrs. Sanger in the teens and the ’20s, is that the activist population has no connection to the beneficiary population. Because the beneficiary population is generally poverty-class women who have messed-up lives—and, in some circumstances, abusive life situations. But they are working-class or poverty-class people for whom the ability to get out of Pittsburgh, just to use the local geography, to fly out of Pittsburgh, would be a humongous challenge for them. They can take the bus around Pittsburgh, but how do you get to the airport? How do you get a ticket? Where do you go? Do you have an internet connection at home? ...

DS: So how do you talk all this foundation-land, community-organizer shit and then preside over the transformation of the country into a Gilded Age oligarchy? Maybe I just answered my own question: Obama is the Magic Negro of the billionaire industrial complex. And targeting Jews as outsiders and pushing them outside the circle was the way that the Gilded Age oligarchy consolidated itself in America, back then and also now. ...

DS: [I]magine telling Harry Truman, “Hey, why don’t you sell that old house and buy three or four huge mansions in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii and Washington, D.C., and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with big corporations while you’re vacationing on rich people’s yachts?” ...

DG: Everybody, especially white folks, thought that having a Black family in the White House would be cure for the legacy of American racism. Now there’s no question in anybody’s mind that on that score, that scale, the presidency was a total failure. But why are race relations, at least as people perceive them or imagine them, ostensibly well worse today post-Floyd than they were in 2008? ...

DS: [T]he point where race relations in America turned sour wasn’t with George Floyd in 2020; it was with BLM in 2014, and that’s squarely during Obama’s second term ...

DG: I think it’s inescapable that Barack’s success in ‘08 is rooted in white people seeing him as an easy ticket toward racial absolution. It’s a need that white people in this country have. And what we’re still seeing week after week now for these past two or three years, especially with places like the Times and the Post, is that this white need for absolution was not cured by the Obama presidency. ...

DS: The protagonists of the grand drama of race in America are the cultural and actual descendants of the Puritans, not Black people—who, as Americans, mainly desire the same things that other Americans do, like safe streets and decent jobs and health care and not to die prematurely from heart disease. White Puritans have more elevated concerns.

DG: Exactly. For them, 200-year-old statues are more important than five-year-old Black children. ...

DS: What do the Obamas and their circle have in common with each other? They are Ivy League people, who ran away from whatever they came from in order to become members of the credentialed elites, whose loyalty is to the system that gives them prestige—or rather, gives prestige to their degrees, of which they are the holders. Once they pair off and reproduce under the seal of Harvard or Yale, they may find it seemly to donate money to an NGO that offers microloans to female entrepreneurs in Pakistan. So why should Obama, the ultimate winner, carry on the charade that he’s part of a community, whatever that means, with these people? He’s happy to go on NPR and talk about meaning or Marilynne Robinson novels or whatever, to make the wine moms identify with him, so he can put one over on them. Just don’t ask him to visit the hospital when you get cancer, because he’ll be hanging out on someone’s yacht, with the other winners. ...

Climate change–fueled weather demands action now, sez Sarah Copeland Hanzas — annotated

Sarah Copeland Hanzas was a Vermont House member for 18 years before being elected as Secretary of State in 2022. This commentary, reproduced here in full with notes following, was published in several news outlets (without the notes).

Vermonters have always rallied to protect and care for our friends and neighbors in a crisis. I am grateful for Governor Scott’s calm and measured response when Vermont is in crisis. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Governor Scott followed the science and took the appropriate steps, despite considerable opposition,^a to keep Vermonters safe and to prevent a greater tragedy. Now, we need the same courage and focus as we grapple with flood recovery and take action to address the underlying forces of climate change^b that drove its severity.

So far this summer, Vermont has seen a record heat wave in May,^c the state’s worst air quality in history in June, and recently a record rainstorm^e that dumped as much as two months of normal rain on towns around the state in just over a day.

And this is clearly the new normal^f for Vermont as the impacts of global warming hit us. Nolan Atkins, the former chair of the atmospheric sciences department at Vermont State University said: “In a warmer world and a warmer climate, [we should expect] these more frequent and more intense weather events.”

Yet despite the science, and clear evidence of increasingly severe weather, the Governor has vetoed every major piece of climate legislation the Vermont Legislature has put before him in recent years. We need Governor Scott to direct state agencies to recognize the climate emergency and treat climate action with the same emergency response and focus we are seeing right now during the floods, and that we did during Vermont’s Covid response.^g

As the former co-chair of the Legislature’s Climate Solution Caucus, I traveled throughout the state listening to Vermonters’ concerns about the looming impacts of global warming and the urgent need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. I heard over and over that if we don’t act on climate and curb our emissions we will run out of time; we will be too consumed by the effects of climate change to focus on transitioning to renewable energy.^h

I have seen our pragmatic Governor do a policy pivot when faced with an emergency. After the shooting threat in Fair Haven High School, he was a constructive and supportive partner for meaningful gun safety reforms.

It is time for the Governor to pivot on climate policy. There are a few simple things the Governor can do right now to make a difference and help Vermont be a leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And more importantly, prevent greater tragedy.

First, the Governor should direct his appointees on the Climate Council to shift to an emergency response.ⁱ The most immediate and constructive action he could take at this moment is to make sure Vermonters whose heating systems were destroyed in the flood are encouraged and incentivized to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.^j Let’s help provide loaner heating systems to get through the upcoming heating season and accelerate our investment in our green energy workforce. This will not only speed up Vermont’s green energy transition but also create jobs; we can combat climate change and help Vermont’s economy at the same time.

Second, direct his Agency of Natural Resources and Department of Public Service to become willing partners in implementing the Clean Heat Standard to help all Vermonters transition from fossil fuels for heating and cooling their homes and businesses. Over one-third of Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions come from heating and cooling our homes and businesses. Despite this, Governor Scott and his administration have inexplicably been an anchor in getting this groundbreaking initiative into action.

And third, support legislation to ensure Vermont gets 100% of its electricity from renewable energy by the end of the decade. With the passage of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar power are cheaper than ever^k and price competitive with new natural gas. Vermont needs to do its part to clean up its electric sector and end our environmentally unjust practice of importing our power from oil- and natural gas–burning plants in low-income communities in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

I’m not saying it’s simple and easy, I understand firsthand the challenges rural Vermonters face in heating their homes and getting to work. But if we think transitioning to renewable heating and transportation is inconvenient or possibly a little more expensive, just look around at what we will be facing if we don’t.^l Can we afford not to?

-------------------

^a“despite considerable opposition” — Actually, the considerable opposition was that he wasn’t draconian and dictatorial enough.

^b“to address the underlying forces of climate change” — The earth revolves around the sun with a tilted axis, thus causing the seasons, and turns on that axis, thus causing day and night. These cause weather.

^c“Vermont has seen a record heat wave in May” — And then it was over. We’re looking at a rather cool end of July and early August.

^d“the state’s worst air quality in history in June” — Canadian forest fires, which we can hardly do anything about.

^e“a record rainstorm” — Well, no, it wasn’t.

^f“clearly the new normal” — If you were born yesterday.

^g“We need Governor Scott to direct state agencies to recognize the climate emergency and treat climate action with the same emergency response and focus we are seeing right now during the floods, and that we did during Vermont’s Covid response.” — That “emergency response” to Covid was futile and harmful, as indeed is almost all of the “climate legislation” that the legislature has passed. In fact, Montpelier, along with other towns on rivers regularly floods and businesses bounce back. But they are only now recovering from that Covid response and don’t have the resilience and resources they would have otherwise.

^h“transitioning to renewable energy” — From normal New England weather to CO₂ emissions as the culprit to renewable energy as the solution, this is a study in non sequitur. It is telling that as co-chair of the Legislature’s Climate Solution Caucus, she heard only people clamoring for what she is here clamoring for.

ⁱ“shift to an emergency response” — If everyone is already clamoring, it most certainly does not require an emergency response to force it on them. This “emergency response” is required precisely because people like to make their own decisions about how their homes are heated, weighing costs and benefits for their individual situation. Again, that “Covid emergency” was similarly imposed precisely to prevent people from making personal risk-benefit decisions, even to punish people for insisting on their right to make such decisions for themselves.

^j“replace fossil fuels with renewable energy” — What is she talking about? She means replacing systems that burn fuel on site to provide warmth with electric space heaters. Granted, in Vermont, much of that electricity is from Canadian hydro, but the expanded demand of electric heat (and cars) will be provided by burning natural gas, converting a fraction of the released energy to electricity, transporting that electricity over powerlines at further loss, and then converting it back to heat. The inefficiency compared to burning fossil fuels on site is staggering, not to mention insanely bad policy.

Furthermore, every Vermonter knows that they need to be prepared for power outages, which can sometimes last for days. Depending on electricity for anything that you don’t have to is simply foolish. You will effectively be replacing efficient fossil-fuel systems with increased reliance on fossil fuel–powered back-up generators.

^k“wind and solar power are cheaper than ever” — In fact, wind and solar are only getting more expensive. They completely depend on subsidies from taxpayers and ratepayers to be built at all.

^l“just look around at what we will be facing if we don’t” — And we close with the veiled threat, based on the false premises the whole essay started with. “We’ll make sure you can’t afford not to make the choices we make for you.”

[[[[ ]]]]

From The History of Athens Vermont, Lora Wyman, 1963:

«Freshets and floods occurred too frequently down the years to mention more than a sample of them. A few that did the most extensive damage to Athens were the freshet of Oct. 4, 1869; the great blizzard of Mar. 12, 1888; the floods of 1927, 1936; and the great hurricane of 1938. Practically all adults living today can remember the destruction caused by the hurricane of 1938. In Athens countless trees were blown down, the roof on Henry Ward’s milk house and one side of the barn were blown off. A small bridge near Camp Nai-neh-ta was washed away and abutments on others were weakened. About one-half mile of the main road to Cambridgeport, parallel with the brook above Brookside bungalow was washed away. Traffic was detoured around the road past the David Karlson farm. Two of Ned Wyman’s 10′ × 12′ chicken houses on the lower road, floated down stream, one lodging in a tangle of brush. Next morning, expecting to find the 50 or more chicks housed inside drowned, Mr. Wyman happily discovered them all perched on the roost above the water, waiting for breakfast.»

Also see: 1816: The Year Without a Summer

Responses to Emily Oster’s plea for ‘covid amnesty’

emily oster's no good, really bad, terrible idea
"when we were in the dark about covid" is not a useful excuse for bad behavior
el gato malo

... just to be clear, emily is not advocating forgiving “those who deliberately spread misinformation” (though she does seem a bit confused about just who that might be) but her “we were all in the dark and people said lots of things and some wound up right and some wrong and we all just need to get over it and move on as recrimination is not useful” take rings hollow and false here.

what does this serve?

why should we forgive those who through stupidity, cupidity, and fear spent 3 years denying 100 years of evidence based science to attack our lives and livelihoods?

oh, no worries! i'm sure you had your reasons?

you were "just following orders"?

you were just doing what the authorities said?

because i seem to remember a whole pile of excuses that sounded an awful lot like that being rejected back in the late 40’s.

and i must agree with that take and take issue with emily. ...

it is precisely BECAUSE following vicious, evil orders is so easy in times of fear and that humans break and bow to authority with such ease that there must be sharp penalties, reputational and otherwise, for so doing.

otherwise, you're just greasing the rails for next time.

it’s the low energy path of submission, and freeing it from consequence serves only to render it a path more followed. ...

even if we accept this “we were in the dark” line of reasoning it still makes no sense.

1. we were not in the dark. we had 100 years of evidence based pandemic and epidemiological guidance and guideline upon which to rely. some tried to follow these bodies of canon and were shouted down by those seeking to do exactly what that guidance admonished against. that is lack of knowledge abrogating actual knowledge and panic driven superstition superseding evidence. equating those two viewpoints as “equivalent” is pure nonsense.

2. even if truly no one knew anything, then this is a reason for humility, not stridence. the base case is always “respect others and their rights. do not panic. don’t do anything crazy or drastic without a very sound reason.” that’s not what happened. a bunch of terrified anti-science loons got loose with global government and pushed literally unprecedented in human history programs of societal and economic upheaval that flat out broke the world while, predictably, having zero effect on the pandemic. guys, you took you lead from china. china. the precautionary principle does not state “every time you get scared, do the most radical thing you can think of it if feels like safety.” that is precisely what it warns against. such excursions into superstitious supplication of pseudoscience are not evidence based epidemiology. they are not even sanity. and again, calling that an equivalent viewpoint to “we need strong, data-driven evidence to take such outlandish actions” (presuming they are permissible at all, itself deeply questionable) is pure nonsense.

3. the presumption of prerogative to force upon others the unfounded desires of “those in the dark” fails inherently on every metric germane to sustaining a free society. “we didn’t know, so we took your rights away just in case” is not much of justification. this lays claim to “emergency powers” of dictatorial nature and is exceedingly dangerous as a societal foundation. it’s also incompatible with the basic idea of a republic in which the rights of the individual stand paramount to the whims of the state or the mob. this ought be especially so in emergencies with low information for what could be more likely to work vast harm than great power to coerce usurped and wielded by “those in the dark”? again, this is not a viewpoint that can be granted equivalence to a system that respects rights. doing so is, yet again, pure nonsense. ...

of all the people who should have had the confidence to follow data over diktat, should not a trained professor of data handling rise to the fore?

but this failed. and if we would avoid such failure in the future, perhaps a bit of culpability ought be spread around.

as an economist, surely ms oster must understand incentives. if there is no cost to having acted poorly, rashly, and without consideration or information despite the ill effects it had on others, are we not just subsidizing more such antisocial activity in the future? ...

but this gets more complex: being wrong is one thing. OK, you made a mistake. and this, i can forgive so long as it was YOUR mistake. but when you take that mistake and make it mine by forcing upon me actions and restrictions to which i do not consent and to threaten the lives and livlihoods of me and mine because you’re running around half-cocked and have no respect for the rights of others, well, that’s something altogether different, isn’t it? ...

getting a disease wrong is one thing, but presuming the coercive dispensation to take whatever your “conclusion” is (especially if you are “in the dark”) and force it upon the rest of us because it makes you feel less frightened (or perhaps allows you to savor the dark frisson of being beastly to others while telling yourself you’re a good person for doing it) is not something you get amnesty for.

there is a sleight of hand in the thinking here like somehow having misunderstood a pandemic excuses the mass scale abrogation of rights and reason.

it doesn’t.

such ideas are anathema to the persistence of a free society.

and this is not where team oster came down. ...

even had they been right on covid and NPI’s or anything, they still had no right to do this. they had no right to take over media, social and otherwise and censor it. that is “the dark.” they had no right to lock you down, mask you up, and force an ill-tested and ill-effective jab on people as predicate for basic freedoms.

and all the people who favored that, who brayed and cheer led for it, they are guilty too. and i just cannot see “just dropping the matter” because they’d like it to go away now. ...

if you got rolled by this, got jabs you did not want, and suffered as many did, well, so long as you did not advocate forcing this on others, you already have my forgiveness. you were a victim here.

but as soon as you cross the line into advocating coercive policy or willful data suppression, that’s a whole separate issue.

being wrong is no crime nor even is being bullied into acquiescence.

but forcing others to join you is.

knowingly suppressing data and spreading lies is. ...

if you wielded the whip hand of of the covidian crusader i’m sorry, but i don’t care if you were “in the dark” as that is no excuse. it stands rather as indictment.

having done so out of ignorance (or worse the sort of dark desire to act the dictator or demagogue by assuming a faux moral mantle to vilify and attack others) makes you a hazard and precisely the sort of actor that ought be penalized, not accommodated.

society must develop an immune system to you.

forgiving such would be past enabling and into ennobling anti-social action and technocratic science perversion. ...

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"Amnesty" Is Not the Solution to Disastrous Policy Decisions
And "gloating" is not the motivation for calling them out
AJ Kay

... I write today in response to Emily Oster’s most recent Atlantic article entitled, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

The piece starts with a lively anecdote by Emily in which her family is hiking outdoors in cloth masks, and her son screams at another small child for getting too close to him.

“These precautions were totally misguided,” she said, “But the thing is: We didn’t know.”

Two things right off the bat: They weren’t ‘precautions’ because the Precautionary Principle requires us to weigh the costs of implementing any ‘precaution’ with the same critical eye as not. We didn’t do that.

And, of course, we absolutely did know.

That’s just the first paragraph in Emily’s pseudo-conciliatory piece, which is littered with precisely the same kind of gaslighting, self-interested double-speak that landed us here. ...

Emily says, “Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic.”

We were never facing a grabbag of completely disorienting situations and unknowable outcomes. Our positions were clear and fully aligned with this list of things we knew by or before March 2020:

• COVID has a clear risk-stratification skewing dramatically toward the elderly
• COVID is not nearly as deadly as once feared
• Panic, stigmatization, mandates, and politicization are anathema to public health
• We have immune systems, and natural immunity exists
• Missing school hurts kids, especially disadvantaged ones
• Isolation of anyone is cruel and harmful
• Loneliness kills
• The media profits off fear-mongering
• Health is not just about disease avoidance
• Masks don’t work + faces are important
• Forcing people to die alone is inhumane
• Lockdowns are human rights violations
• Informed consent is essential
• Bodily autonomy is paramount
• Incentives incentivize
• Shutting down manufacturing causes supply chain disruptions
• Supply chain disruptions threaten economic stability
• Science doesn’t advance by “following”
• Panicked people don’t make rational decisions

Acknowledging the truths above would’ve been enough to keep probably 90% of the harm from occurring. But not only were they ignored, they were suppressed, despite rational people screaming them from the rooftops. ...

“In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.”

Luck was not a factor. Just a dash of common sense was sufficient for most, and the lion’s share of the wrongs perpetrated were absolutely moral failings, not least of all because one could not promote the prevailing narrative without obfuscating the truth.

A team led by Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and including D.A. Henderson, the man credited with eradicating smallpox, wrote the following in 2006:

«Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.»

For whatever reason, to whatever end, the powers that be implemented policies that ran counter to everything we knew about public, mental, social, developmental, and immunological health, as well as virology, epidemiology, and pandemic management.

And we knew it. ...

Emily’s diagnosis of the problem is: “The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat … Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people wracked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.”

Are you kidding, Emily? The backlash to this article was not a result of some trivial scorekeeping fixation. These policies hurt people. They killed people.

And it’s misleading to even talk about “choices” because, in most cases, we didn’t have any (at least not legally). Masks were mandated. Testing was mandated. Vaccines were mandated. Travel was restricted. These “choices” were imposed upon people.

And the worst part is that we absolutely knew better.

And we’re not going to allow people to claim they didn’t.

Not because of “points” but because we don’t want it to happen again. ...

You can’t blame “fog of war” when you walk around with a fog machine mounted to your back. Likewise, “We were in the dark!” loses plausibility when you block everyone’s access to the light switch.

The reason I refuse to accept calls for “amnesty” is not because I am vengeful.

It’s because granting “amnesty” leaves the people who have already been crushed by the weight of these decisions vulnerable still. ...

If they really want society to recover from the last two going on three nightmarish years, Emily et al are going to have to dig a little deeper. Pleas for forgiveness ring hollow when there’s no acknowledgment of error. “But we didn’t know!” is just more of the same self-interested trope we’ve been spoon-fed for years.

Because we did know.

And we have receipts.

And we’re going to keep showing them for as long as it takes to begin the actual recovery.

Because while Emily may want forgiveness, what we want is for this to never, ever happen again.

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Osterism
When you want to move on from the damage you helped cause but haven't told the truth about it
E.Woodhouse

Dr. Emily Oster, the Brown University economist who spent a good part of the pandemic response denying that her own data indicted the uselessness of masking kids in schools, published an article in The Atlantic today, calling for “a pandemic amnesty.” Short version: Let’s chalk up the devastation caused by fear-driven policies to benign ignorance and good intentions. ...

Oster’s implicit claim that next-to-nothing was known about SARS-CoV-2 – and therefore all the pointless, unethical, & illegal things people were forced to do are understandable – isn’t the pathway to healing, because it’s dishonest. Inexplicably, she denies that, from the get-go, we knew (for example)

• covid’s risks were highly skewed toward sick elderly people,
• plexiglass & masks don’t stop viruses,
• school closures are harmful, and
• exposure quarantines & contact tracing are useless.

She also defends things like closing beaches as “hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.” This twisted thinking - this Osterism, I’ll call it - both a) denies the truth about what was known, and b) excuses doing the worst, most non-sensical and predictably harmful things in the name of not knowing.

If an out-of-touch professor were the only person pushing such ideas, we could ignore it. Unfortunately, other vocal credentialed experts - not to mention public officials, school & church leaders, and friends/family members who embraced all manner of superstitious and harmful mitigations - have a similar mindset.

Osterism in any form will never, ever lead to healing, nor will it prevent this nightmare from happening again. ...

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Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty,” suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID”
eugyppius

I don’t know much about the American pandemic pundits, but I gather that Brown University economist and “parenting guru” Emily Oster is far from the worst of them. Her Twitter timeline suggests she spent the early months of the pandemic terrified about the virus until school closures took their toll on her kids, at which point she repositioned herself as a kind of lockdown moderate, opposing the worst of the hystericist excesses while validating their central premises whenever possible to save face with friends and colleagues.

«April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

«These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.»

The thing is, Emily Oster, that we did know. We’ve studied respiratory virus transmission for years. All the virologists and epidemiologists who aren’t total morons knew your 2020 mask routine was crazy and they just didn’t care. They wanted you to do it anyway, because they thought that if they got you to act paranoid and antisocial enough, your insane behaviour might have some limited effect on case curves. Joke’s on you, and it’s sad you still haven’t realised.

«[T]here is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.»

No, reasonable people could see already in March 2020 that SARS-2 posed no measurable threat to children. There was never any honest debate to be had about this.

«We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. … [W]e need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

«Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.»

I’m sorry somebody called you genocidal, Emily Oster. That must’ve been tough for you. You know what’s also tough? Getting your head kicked in by riot police because you had the temerity to protest against indefinite population-wide house arrest.

Or being fired from your university job and banned in perpetuity from the premises because you uploaded a video to social media complaining about the onerous and expensive testing requirements imposed upon unvaccinated staff. Or being confined to your house and threatened with fines because of personal medical decisions that had no chance of impacting the broader course of the pandemic in the first place. But somebody called this woman genocidal in French and she’s ready to move on, so it’s all good.

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

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“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”—Not
Let’s not declare a pandemic amnesty. Let’s declare a real pandemic inquiry.
Michael P Senger

... The article is about as pathetically transparent as it is self-serving. Gee, I wonder what Oster did and said during Covid for which she might want amnesty ...

First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say “We didn’t know any better at the time!” Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and canceling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.

Second, “amnesty,” being an act of forgiveness for past offenses, first requires an apology or act of repentance on the part of those who committed the offense. Not only has no such act of repentance been forthcoming, but in most cases, establishment voices like Oster’s have yet to stop advocating these same policies, much less admit they were wrong. With no accompanying act of contrition, these calls for “amnesty” in light of rapidly-shifting public opinion have a real ring of fascist leaders calling for “amnesty” after losing the War.

Third, there’s some question as to whether Oster herself really did know better at the time. Like many other mainstream Covid voices, Oster had long been closely attuned to Covid data showing that these mandates did not work, yet she often seemed reluctant to share that data insofar as it contradicted the mainstream orthodoxy that mandates were necessary. In that sense, the policy prescriptions of Oster and those like her may have had less to do with ignorance than with cowardice, tribalism, and “following orders,” which can’t be considered acting “in good faith.”

And that leads to the ultimate problem, from a legal perspective, with Oster’s call for “amnesty” for the advocacy of totalitarian policies during Covid: The implicit assumption that all those who advocated lockdowns, mandates, censorship, and an indefinite state of emergency, all the way up the chain of command, did so in good faith. If those who advocated these policies are simply presumed to have done so out of well-meaning ignorance, then any inquiry into the many outstanding questions as to the origin of these policies—and the underlying motivations of highest-level officials who promulgated them—is foreclosed.

The implicit assumption is that, owing to their socioeconomic status, the superficial cutesiness of public health, and the panic surrounding the pandemic, all those who advocated these mandates must have done so in good faith. But this argument presupposes that the “pandemic” was a natural phenomenon, like a tsunami, which would have inevitably led to panic. On the contrary, studies have long shown that it was the mandates themselves that caused the public to panic, making them believe their chances of dying of Covid—which never had an overall infection fatality rate much higher than 0.2%—were hundreds of times greater than they really were. Further, there’s a growing mountain of evidence that the handful of key officials who led the initial push for unprecedented lockdowns and mandates did not, in fact, do so in good faith.

Our institutions are in serious need of restoration after the incalculable damage that’s been done to them during the response to Covid. But we forget, at our peril, that those institutions weren’t built with flowery words and good intentions. They were built with blood, sweat, and tears, by those who fought for them with their lives. Let’s not declare a pandemic amnesty. Let’s declare a real pandemic inquiry.

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With whom does Emily Oster want an amnesty? Moms, so they will return to the democratic fold
Just another cynical attempt to ask women to forget the harms of the last few years.
Emily Burns

... The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. Many Republicans and so-called Libertarians quickly capitulated the primacy and importance of individual liberties. Whereas supposedly equality-loving democrats embraced policies that in no uncertain terms screwed women, children and the poor. The 2020 democrat campaign slogan might as well have been “protect the rich, infect the poor.” Or “only the rich need to learn.” They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. ...

First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit the freedoms that really count. That while Democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of our living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose the real threat.

The problem for Emily is that while the hardcore democrat base of women voters never questioned any of these policies, others did—and they incurred significant personal costs for doing so.

An embarrassing portion of well-educated women acted as the regime’s stormtroopers. They sicced social media mobs on any who dared to voice a question, much less dissent. The pain of having family, friends and neighbors turn on them for voicing an opinion or asking a legitimate question caused many women to seek out others with similar questions.

In so doing, we found a smart, snarky, data-driven community pushing back hard on the totalizing power of a government trying to re-define reality. In some cases women were the generals, in others we were the infantry, going forward and taking constant fire from above, so that some recently discredited truth might once again retake its rightful place in the sun of acceptable opinion.

Emily Oster would like us to forget that. But we can’t—and I hope we won’t—because we were there bringing the government’s own data to shine a light on the lies it so ceaselessly manufactured. These weren’t lies of omission, they were lies of commission. They were lies that were wrought by smelting the credibility of science and medicine in the fires of politics to create weapons wielded by the powerful against us. They literally called us terrorists for our opposition.

Now, after having been called terrorists by our governments for arguing for the well-being of our own children, Dr. Oster wants us to forget that. In asking us to forget, she beseeches those who strayed from the flock to return, to believe that it is not their shepherd who takes them to slaughter that would do them harm, but the wolf lurking unseen in the shadows of the wood. So now we must talk about abortion.

What Democrats, and their credibility-launderers like Oster want women to do, is to put two things on the scales. On one side is the fear of a loss of access to abortion services. They hope that their female base will forget that rather than living in 1972, with limited access to contraception, we live in 2022, where contraception that is more than 99% effective is inexpensive and widely available, even if paying out of pocket; that this contraception includes abortion pills, which can be accessed anywhere in the country by mail up to 10 weeks of gestation. They want you to forget about the interstate commerce clause which would make hindering this nearly impossible—even, or especially, with a conservative court. They want you to forget that a flight to an abortion-providing state is at most a $200 plane ride away. Or that should you fail to secure an abortion, the worst-case scenario results in a baby you choose to give up for adoption. They want you to forget that if they [anti-abortion politicians] win the senate, they would still have to overturn the filibuster and the important political stabilization that the 60-vote threshold provides.

They want you to forget that they failed to legally codify access to abortion for 50 years. And they want you to forget that there is no way on earth they are going to give up the only issue they have to reliably stoke fear, drum up dollars, and drive women to the polls. Not a chance in hell.

On the other side is the harm that was done to your children, to you, to your community over nearly three years. On the other is the fear of a loss of access to abortion services. What they are hoping is that their female base will believe the lie that Dr. Oster is peddling, that it was all just an unfortunate mistake, and could never happen again. It’s in the past! Don’t worry about it.

But it wasn’t a mistake. It was a political calculation, and on the cost side of that equation was the education and welfare of our kids—and so much more. The people who made this calculation wagered that the fear that they could drum up around access to abortion could be used to distract women from the manifold harms these policies caused to children and/or that they could craft a narrative that would mask the truth. If you understand the cynicism of that decision, you have to expect the same cynicism on the other side of the equation. ...

The narrative that conservatives seek to limit access to abortion in order to keep women down is a just that—a story. In order to prop it up, fetuses had to be literally dehumanized, and the narrative bolstered with overtly anti-natal supporting philosophies, philosophies which, in their anti-natalism rob life of most of its meaning for most people. For women, this anti-natalism is expressly anti-mother, hence, anti-feminine, transforming motherhood—one of the few truly transcendent human experiences—into a dupe’s prison.

That said, I remain pro-choice, fundamentally because after the past two+ years, all I want is the government smaller and weakened in every possible capacity. I don’t want the government legislating or coercing morality (we’ve had quite enough of that over the past few years) any more than I want it coercing medical decisions. Further, I believe that the vicissitudes of life can make such government interventions result in dangerous corner cases.

But despite being pro-choice, I have become a single issue voter. My vote this cycle is a vote for vengeance against the party that kept my kids masked for two years; that robbed me of my best friends, and strained every relationship I have; that caused us to move to an entirely different part of the country; that perverted a discipline that I love, and which I use to navigate my life (science); and that then lied about doing it, and called me a terrorist for being upset about it. After this cycle, my vote will always be for the party that represents the most decentralized power structure, and the greatest respect for individual rights and responsibility. For me, the new f-word is “federal”.

While I can only speak for myself, my experience has been that in the aftermath of our leaders’ decision to break and reset the world, there are new coalitions forming. I don’t think I’m alone in my efforts to try to better understand the positions of others who became my “comrades in arms”—and I have felt that reciprocated, with the possibility of compromise arising out of mutual respect and in the face of a greater perceived mutual threat. At the moment, I think this is only happening on the “right”. But if the democrats get the drubbing that looks likely in the mid-terms, this will also happen on the left; it’s why this drubbing needs to happen. Such a shake-up can only be to the good. Indeed, our leaders may yet have gotten a “Great Reset”—just not the one they were hoping for. ...

Moms in general, and stay-at-home moms in particular, played a very significant part in the grassroots pushback of COVID policy malfeasance. I believe this was due to three key things. First, COVID policies created many more SAHMs, as the exigencies of virtual school made work impossible. Second, these SAHMs experienced the harmful impacts of COVID policies directly for years in their own lives, and in those of their children. Third, I think that SAHMs ended up being a very important and vocal minority because they could be. You can’t fire or cancel an SAHM, and there is significant power in not being anonymous.

As women, we have felt far more acutely than at any time in the past what it really means for government to interfere in our lives—controlling whether our children go to school, whether we can socialize, or go to a gym, or a restaurant, how many people can be invited to our home, whether we can spend holidays with family, whether we can run our businesses. These are all violations, violations of our personal liberty that harmed us, our children, and our communities, and which were done solely in service to political power. We have internalized this, and many will not be quick to forgive.

Emily is asking us to forgive a mistake. There was no mistake. There was a political calculation that harmed us, but even more, that harmed our children. The harm was considered acceptable because those who undertook it, took the votes of women for granted. They assumed they could lie and manipulate us into believing these harms were necessary, or barring that, unintentional. If we, as women, want our votes to be courted in the future by either party, we must vote to punish the past three years treachery. ...

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Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain
Shuck-and-jive from America’s broken thinking class, the people who pretend to know better than everybody else.
James Howard Kunstler

By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about … really … everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries.

These dissenters turned out to be “right for the wrong reasons,” she declared, the main reason being that they were not aligned in good-think with the Woke-Jacobinism of her fellow “progressives” at Brown U, and academics all across the land, who were righteously busy destroying the intellectual life of the nation, making it impossible for the thinking class to think.

Let’s face it: every society actually needs a thinking class, a cohort able to frame important issues-of-the-moment that require argument in the public arena to align our collective thoughts and deeds with reality. America used to have a pretty good thinking class, with a pretty good free press and many other platforms for opinion — all animated by respect for the first amendment to the Constitution.

The thinking class destroyed that by vigorously promoting a new censorship regime in every American institution, shutting down free speech and, more crucially, the necessary debate for aligning our politics with reality. Hence, America’s thinking class became the torchbearers of unreality, in step with the Party of Chaos which held the levers of power. This included the powers of life and death in the matter of Covid-19.

These were the people who militated against effective early treatment protocols (to cynically preserve the drug companies’ emergency use authorization (EUA) and thus their liability shields); the people who enforced the deadly remdesivir-and-ventilator combo in hospital treatment; the people who rolled out the harmful and ineffective “vaccines”; who fired and vilified doctors who disagreed with all that; and who engineered a long list of abusive policies that destroyed businesses, livelihoods, households, reputations, and futures.

How did it happen that the thinking class destroyed thinking and betrayed itself? Because the status competition for moral righteousness in the sick milieu of the campus became more important to them than the truth. In places like Brown U, what you saw was an escalating contest for status brownie-points, which is what virtue-signaling is all about. And the highest virtue was going along with whatever experts and people-in-authority said — the pathetic virtue of submission. Anything that got in the way of going along — such as differences of opinion — had to be crushed, stamped out, and with a vicious edge to teach the dissenters a lesson: dissent will not be tolerated!

Some thinking class. The case of Emily Oster should be particularly and painfully disturbing, since she affects to specialize, as an economist, on “pregnancy and parenting” (her own website declares), while the Covid regime of public health officialdom she supported instigated a horrendous pediatric health crisis that is ongoing — it was only days ago that the CDC added the harmful mRNA “vaccines” to its childhood immunization schedule for the purpose of conferring permanent legal immunity for the drug companies after the EUA ends, a dastardly act. Where’s Ms. Oster’s plea to the CDC to cease and desist trying to vaccinate kids with mRNA products?

The CDC is still running TV commercials (during World Series ballgames!) touting its “booster” shots when only weeks ago a top Pfizer executive, Janine Small (“Regional President for Vaccines of International Developed Markets”), revealed in testimony to the European Union Parliament that her company never tested its “vaccine” for preventing transmission of SARS CoV-2. The CDC under Director Rochelle Walensky is still extra-super-busy concealing or fudging its statistical data to obfuscate the emerging picture that MRNA “vaccines” are responsible for the shocking rise of “all-causes deaths” in the most heavily-vaxxed nations. In short, the authorities are to this minute still running their whole malign operation.

Notably, Ms. Oster’s plea for amnesty and forgiveness, showcased in The Atlantic, omits any discussion of accountability for what amounts to serious crimes against the public. A whole lot of people deserve to be indicted for killing and injuring millions of people. At the heart of her plea is the excuse that “we didn’t know” official Covid policy was so misguided. That’s just not true, of course, and is simply evidence of the thinking class’s recently-acquired allergy to truth. The part she left out of her petition for pandemic amnesty is: We were only following orders.