Author: Ron Clutz

Weaponized Claims of Disinformation

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Adam Ellwanger raises a good question and provides some clarity in his American Mind article Why Do You Know That?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  The scope of his analysis is suggested by the subtitle:

Misinformation, disinformation, and the 1619 Project

The Current Drive to Curate (Control) Information

Earlier this year, Joe Biden asked social media companies to engage in more censorship in an effort to divert attention from the wholesale failure of his administration to “shut down the virus.” In a televised speech, he said “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”

More recently, CNN denounced “misinformation” that blamed high gas prices and inflation on the Biden administration. Media outlets have accused Joe Rogan of “spreading disinformation” about Covid-19 and the vaccine because… he dared to ask scientific experts questions on these topics. Other examples of ideas that the legacy media has alternately labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation” include assertions that Covid-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China; the idea that there was some orchestrated manipulation of procedures to favor Biden in the 2020 election; that Hunter Biden’s laptop offered evidence that the Biden family had been enriched by various forms of international corruption; and that powerful NGOs and world governments are leveraging the pandemic to facilitate a “Great Reset” of the global economy.

The campaign to ban these claims – most which are demonstrably true – indicates not a dangerous spread of “disinformation,” but a dangerous weaponization of the concept of disinformation in order to insulate the institutional left from criticism and opposition.

It is no accident that virtually every claim that is consistently labelled as disinformation is one that threatens the policy agenda of the Democratic party (or parts of their agenda that they are too embarrassed to state publicly). “Disinformation” is no longer a concept used to separate truth from falsehood. In the past few years, it has been rhetorically intensified to circumvent the question of truth entirely. It is a means to annex the public’s role in assessing the validity of reporting, placing this authority solely in the hands of “experts” who have the exclusive right to say what is “true.” Understanding the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation” and observing the ways these concepts are arbitrarily applied is crucial to grasping how our media and other institutions undermine genuine public deliberation—a prerequisite for any functioning democracy.

Meanings Matter

Since the rise of Trump and the media’s waning ability to control the terms of public debate in the information age, legacy and government-adjacent outlets have been in a sustained panic about misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is information that is simply wrong or incorrect, while disinformation is the deliberate spread of false information. In other words, whereas the misinformer doesn’t know that what they are saying is false, the disinformer does know.

Despite these differences, the terms are used interchangeably by the media at large. This is important. Is the left accusing Joe Rogan spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation”? Answering this question is difficult: it requires some knowledge of what Rogan knows and what he doesn’t. If he doesn’t know that what he says is (allegedly) false, then he’s not a bad guy—he just needs to be informed of the truth. But if he knows what is (allegedly) true and decides to ignore those truths in order to advance his agenda, this is something more nefarious.

The line between misinformation and disinformation is deliberately obscured to ensure that people who are disseminating information that is inconvenient for those in power can be smeared as a malevolent threat to (the catchphrase runs) “our democracy”. The motives of the populists must always be characterized as nefarious – to acknowledge that they engage the dialogue in good faith would require those in power to enter the sphere of debate.

That process of debate is what they are trying to silence and avoid:
you can’t lose a debate that never occurs.

Disinformation and the 1619 Grift

The 1619 Project’s central claim is that protecting slavery was the true impetus for the formation of the American republic, and therefore that our national “narrative” and identity should be viewed primarily through the lens of slavery. The project is named “1619” because that was the year that the first ship of African slaves arrived on the American coast— an event that 1619 proponents cite as the “true” founding of our nation (instead of 1776, and preceding even 1620). The claims of the 1619 Project have been definitively debunked by the leading historical experts on America’s founding: thus, Hannah-Jones has little authority to talk about “history” and “truth.”

When I learned of her talk, I immediately reserved my spot: I knew the affair would be tightly managed to ensure that no one on campus could disrupt the celebration of the 1619 fictions. Her presentation lasted 75 minutes. Over that period, I observed almost every hallmark of disinformation. In other words, it was evident that Hannah-Jones was spouting falsehoods, that she knew they were false, and that she was presenting those falsehoods as true in an effort to manipulate the public perception of reality.

Hannah-Jones never substantively responded to the volume of evidence marshalled by these experts against her account—instead she simply said she would have taken them more seriously had they contacted her or the New York Times before publishing the letter. Thus, she missed an opportunity to give a revised, more truthful account of history. Instead, she continues to rehearse the same falsehoods. This is the definition of disinformation, and she aggressively spread it at her talk.

An indicator of disinformation is the absence of important contextual information that would mitigate the truth status of a speaker’s claims. The so-called “fact-checkers” of the mainstream media understand this: they often label assertions “false” on the grounds of “missing context.” Yet the fact-checkers are uninterested in Hannah-Jones’ disregard of important contextual factors that would limit the force of her argument. The 1619 Project argues that anti-black racism is “in the DNA” of our country – as if slavery is unique to America. Hannah-Jones studiously avoids the global history of slavery – an institution that has existed all over the world, subjugating peoples of every race, color, and creed, since the beginning of civilization.

Further, the 1619 Project is silent about how widespread slave ownership was in antebellum America. The large majority of free people in the antebellum south never owned a single slave. This is not at all to deny the specific inhumanity that African slaves endured in America, but to deflate the claims that all white Americans held, and hold, collective race culpability for the institution and that anti-black racism is in the American “DNA.” Finally, of course, the 1619 Project ignores the role that Africans had in facilitating and maintaining the slave trade, a fact that undermines the idea that American slavery was an atrocity perpetrated exclusively by white people. This contextual information is left out of the racialist account of American history precisely because it would diminish the rhetorical power of that account: a telling feature of disinformation.

Disinformation can often be recognized when you see its purveyors shifting standards when it comes to verification. Truth is critical for historical work – it matters what actually happened.

In short, Hannah-Jones frames her project as a truth-telling exercise that aims to displace untruths. And yet, when experts on the history of our country contest the claims of Hannah-Jones’ claims by demonstrating that they are factually false, she retreats to the concept of “narrativity,” which implies that all historiography is just storytelling and that no story can be wrong. From this perspective, all history is merely subjective interpretation. . . Attacking the traditional understanding of our history as false while hawking a historical fiction as truth is a tactic that defines disinformation campaigns.

A final sign of disinformation is an adamant refusal to engage with ideas and claims that are at odds with the propaganda effort.  During her talk, Hannah-Jones dodged the scholarly attacks on her project by saying that they are driven by “credentialism” – suggesting that somehow the scholars have rejected her work because, as experts, they feel entitled to be the arbiters of history and are jealous that a journalist took on the task of writing history.

But her scholarly critics have taken issue only with her presentation of historical facts,
not with her professional status.

The Disinformation Campaign About Disinformation

Hannah-Jones’ work is only one of innumerable examples of disinformation on the left. Yet the term is applied exclusively for dialogue that comes from the political right. The left’s interchangeable usage of misinformation and disinformation is part of an effort to make these concepts more malleable, so that they can be effectively applied to any undesirable information that gets past the censors. In short, this means that the media’s constant cautioning about disinformation is in fact a disinformation campaign in itself. The application of these labels allows them to propagate the idea that only their political opponents traffic in falsehoods. By strategically accusing their enemies of spreading misinformation and disinformation, they paradoxically insinuate that average Americans are both too dumb to discern the truth for themselves, and evil enough to actively conceal or distort what they know to be true.

The weaponization of the concept of disinformation to achieve political ends is a greater threat to whatever’s left of American democracy than any isolated pieces of actual disinformation could ever be. Democracy is built on the assumption that typical citizens can discern the truth, and that they have the capacities necessary to develop and implement situations to the problems they face. The elite disinformation campaign on disinformation implies not only that regular Americans should not play any meaningful role in governance, administration, or deliberation—it insinuates that they don’t have the cognitive ability to learn the truth and to know it when they see it.

It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than that.

 

 

Supply Chains Doomed by Carbon Accounting

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Vince Bielski explains how proposed SEC accounting for CO2 emissions will grind product supply chains to a halt.  His Real Clear Investigations article is The Green U.S. Supply-Chain Rules Set to Unspool and Rattle the Global Economy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Making a box of Cocoa Puffs is a complicated global affair. It could start with cocoa farms in Africa, corn fields in the U.S. or sugar plantations in Latin America. Then thousands of processors, transporters, packagers, distributors, office workers and retailers join the supply chain before a kid in Minnesota, where General Mills is based, pours the cereal into a bowl.

Now imagine the challenge that General Mills faces in counting the greenhouse gas emissions from all of these people, machines, vehicles, buildings and other products involved in this Cocoa Puff supply chain – then multiply that by the 100-plus brands belonging to the food giant.

Thousands of public companies may soon have such a daunting task to comply with a new set of climate rules proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Hailed by prominent environmental groups as a long sought victory, the sweeping plan released in late March would force companies to grapple with the unpredictable impact of climate change by disclosing reams of new information to investors. What are your company’s climate risks, such as severe weather, and the possible financial impacts? How have the threats affected your business strategies and what’s the plan to avoid the dangers? The most consequential and controversial piece of the SEC’s proposed regulations would require corporations to calculate their total greenhouse gas footprint, including from the supply chain.

The regulations also carry political weight for Democrats in the runup to the midterms in November. The Biden administration and centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia are trying once again to breathe life into clean energy legislation that died earlier this year amid a feud between them. If this latest effort at compromise fails – with Manchin reportedly looking for federal support for fossil fuels as well as renewable energy – then much of President Biden’s ambitious climate agenda will be left riding on the SEC proposal.

SEC head Gary Gensler says shareholders are demanding climate risk disclosures to make smarter investment decisions and hold companies accountable for “greenwashing” their operations. The regulations will also provide investors in the Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) movement more leverage in their ongoing campaigns to pressure companies to reduce their carbon footprints.

While many companies like Walmart and business groups like the Chamber of Commerce generally support the idea of required climate disclosures, they object to what they see as the SEC’s heavy-handedness in standardizing rules across the economy. The Chamber is calling for flexibility so companies can customize their climate disclosures based on what’s relevant to their businesses and investors.

Measuring the global supply chain is a tall order — “mind-boggling and certainly unprecedented.” Pixabay

The biggest beef from companies is the rule that would require them to calculate and disclose supply chain emissions, called Scope 3.

Big companies have thousands of suppliers operating in hundreds of countries, making the task of coming up with a reasonable accounting enormously complicated. First of all, many suppliers of products and services are private companies not under the control of the SEC. They may refuse to cooperate in a count because of the costs and the implications that they might have to change their business practices to reduce emissions, said Professor Gerald Patchell, who has analyzed the problems of supply chain reporting.

Another obstacle is that many smaller suppliers, like General Mills’ cocoa farmers in Africa, don’t have the capacity to measure the emissions from their own fertilizers, tractors and farming practices. So companies will have to rely on broad country or industry averages that likely don’t reflect the actual emissions created by the suppliers, according to researchers.

“The data that companies will be asked to collect from thousands of suppliers is mind-boggling and certainly unprecedented,” said Patchell, who researches environmental policy and business. “It’s an idealized concept of what can actually be done by a company.”

The upshot is that regulations meant to bring clarity to investors on climate risk may end up providing highly unreliable emissions disclosures, leaving them “worse off,” wrote SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, a Trump appointee who voted against the 500-page proposal. It “forces investors to view companies through the eyes of a vocal set of stakeholders, for whom a company’s climate reputation is of equal or greater importance than a company’s financial performance.”

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” — Ronald Reagan

Resources

SEC Agency Aims to Legislate US Climate Policy

SEC Warned Off Climate Disclosures Rule

 

 

High Cost of Green Wishful Thinking

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (left) admits, “We’re in Trouble,” as President Joe Biden (center) struggles to respond to the worst energy crisis in 50 years, and as California Gov. Gavin Newsom (right) makes homelessness worse.

Michael Shellenberger explains at his substack page Why Wishful Liberal Thinking Led to Disasters in Ukraine, Homelessness, And Climate.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some headers. H/T Tyler Durden

The good news is that everything is changing — and fast

In the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberals in the West have denounced their political opponents as deniers of climate change, science, and reality in general. Progressives and neoliberals alike argued that they alone could see the shape of the new world being born. It would be increasingly globalized, democratic, and focused on new threats, like climate change.

It’s now clear that all of that was a delusion.

Neither China nor Russia is democratizing and both have become more autocratic and totalitarian. Neither nation views climate change as a major threat. On the contrary. Russia views climate change as an opportunity to expand agriculture and shipping through its newly ice-free waters. Where both Putin and Chinese Premier Xi used to give lip service to climate change, neither even bothered to attend last fall’s United Nations climate talks.

It’s true that the West has imposed sanctions on Russia, and the Ukranian people are battling the Russians fiercely and admirably. A few days ago, Russians retreated from the capital city of Kyiv. Western nations froze bank accounts of Russian oligarchs, hammering the ruble. And European governments are calling on their citizens to reduce energy consumption.

But those are hiccups on the way to a rapidly changed world. Consider that:

♦  China aided Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through a massive cyberattack on Ukraine’s military and nuclear facilities, according to intelligence memos obtained by The Times of London.

♦  Europe continues to import Russian energy while China and India are buying Russian oil at a steep discount. There is little reason to believe conservation measures by Western consumers will make much of a dent in energy consumption.

♦  And Russia’s retreat from Kyiv appears to be temporary and strategic.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes at the very same time as: the collapse of the West’s climate and renewables agenda; an energy crisis triggered by climate activists; and a worsening drug, crime, and homeless crisis in America’s cities.

What do all these events have in common?
They all point to the grave dangers of irrational liberal optimism.

Western Leftists Soft in Defending Civil Freedoms

When it comes to the West’s failure to deter an increasingly totalitarian and violent Russia and China, the growing scarcity and unreliability of energy, and the destruction of America’s cities by open air drug scenes, the fault lies squarely with people on the Left end of the political spectrum.

Western leaders, including President Joe Biden, French President Emanuel Macron, and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, all denied to themselves, and to others, what was plainly obvious to many analysts for years: Putin intended to invade Ukraine.

Even as Russian forces prepared for war games last fall, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan wondered “why Russia would take such a military action at that time,” according to a reconstruction of the events leading up to Putin’s invasion by the Wall Street Journal.

Western Leftists Indulged in Renewables Delusion

On climate change, center-Left parties around the world deluded themselves into thinking their high-energy economies could be powered by renewables, which energy historians have known for centuries had to be abandoned for fossil fuels in order for the industrial revolution to happen. And around the world it was liberals not conservatives who fought to shut down nuclear plants and block natural gas pipelines and infrastructure.

Liberals and progressives could have embraced a climate and energy strategy focused on domestically-produced natural gas and nuclear, as I have urged them to do for over a decade, and which Putin did, allowing him to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supplies.

Such a strategy was the only one that ever made any sense from an environmental point of view. Nuclear and natural gas are the two technologies that are most responsible for declining emissions by the US and Europe since the 1970s.

Instead, the Left in Europe opted for importing fossil fuels from Russia and the Left in the US for importing solar panels made by enslaved Muslims in China.

Leftist Cities Governed into Ruin

On crime, liberal cities have gradually reduced consequences for breaking laws, whether from addiction or malevolence, resulting in rising homicides, burglaries, and open air drug scenes. Relatedly, on homelessness, progressives have funneled hundreds of billions into “Housing First,” which gives away apartments to homeless drug addicts without requiring sobriety.

The result is that, today, well over 50 percent of the people on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles are from out of town, according to expert insiders, homeless outreach workers, and the homeless themselves.

Why do liberals keep making the same mistake over and over again?

Leftists Projecting Own Mindset, Ignoring Reality

In part, it’s because of what cognitive psychologists call “theory of mind.” Liberals tend to think that other people think like they do. Western liberal leaders thought Putin was one of them, a liberal democrat committed to rule of law, even though he repeatedly said he wanted to reconstruct the Soviet empire.

Similarly, leading liberal leaders think homeless drug addicts are seeking a better life, and just need their own apartment to quit drugs, get a job, and re-connect with family and friends. In truth, many if not most homeless addicts maintain their addiction until they are forced to quit.

On energy and climate change, progressives indulged in the fantasy that we could power the world with energy sources that have no negative consequences. They convinced themselves that renewables were better in every way than either fossil fuels and nuclear, even as they demanded massive subsidies for, and the right to kill endangered species in, their deployment.

And liberals engaged in wishful thinking that high standards of living can be maintained with much lower levels of energy consumption, and that poor and working people will accept low standards of living.

There were financial rewards for such wishful thinking. Politicians like Newsom can raise much more money from homeless housing developers than from homeless shelter providers. Center Left parties take money from renewable energy companies all over the world. And it’s now clear that climate activists in Europe, and perhaps the United States, took, took money from the Russian government to fight fracking and natural gas production.

Stunning Failure of Leftist Governance 

The good news is that the failure of elites to govern at local, national, and international levels points to a coming change of leadership, triggered by covid, but ultimately resulting from the exhaustion of post-Cold War ideologies and institutions.

It will gradually become clear that the West must defend itself more vigorously against resurgent illiberal regimes, particularly Russia and China, which could well invade Taiwan, or even attempt to take a Japanese island, in the coming months or years.

And major political changes are afoot. Republicans will likely take one or more house of Congress, and President Joe Biden is unlikely to run again in 2024. The result will be major changes within both parties. California, long a leader of change, for good or ill, will likely see the recall of district attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the election of a new attorney general, and the election of a new, more moderate, governor.

In this context, it becomes clear that the claims of reality denial by progressives were a kind of psychological projection. It was progressives who denied the realities of climate change and energy, the intentions of Vladimir Putin, and homelessness. The good news is that people are waking up, and quickly.

The trend toward the dismantling of civilization could soon reverse itself.
But, ultimately, what happens next is up to us.

 

 

Toxic Feminizing Running Amok

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Preface

In a previous post Is “Emotional Intelligence” an Oxymoron? I began by reflecting on a pattern often seen in organizational settings.

Warning: This post will express sincere thoughts that are politically incorrect, for example accepting that males and females have differing predominant behaviors and traits.

The title refers to a notion that came up in the fields of management science and industrial psychology, coincidental with increasing numbers of women practicing in those disciplines. I am prompted to write about this upon realizing that our present social divide is more fundamental than many think. This century, we see increasing numbers of people choosing to operate from emotions rather than intelligence.

This pattern is in contradiction to the trajectory of Western civilization placing reason as primary and individual rights and freedoms as essential.

In a recent article thread a comment caught my attention. “It has been said men rank, women exclude, and that is very true IMO. All-female groups are very exclusionary to anyone who does not fit in.” That expression of Ranking vs. Excluding was new to me, and it may be changing this century, what with women competing with other women in sports, and with men as well in the workplace. Still, it points to our present social struggle whereby “diversity” is employed to divide a nation into identity groups to protest prejudice and claim reparations against grievances. The US as usual is the leading example of this culture war. Ironically, tribalism is rearing its ugly head in precisely the nation-state that so successfully created an American tribe that included any and all ethnic and religious groups.

Ranking vs. Excluding also explains such events as the Senate hearings on Judge Kavanaugh. Clearly his opponents sought to exclude him not only from the Judiciary, but to banish him from the human race. Their fierce and unrelenting animus to this day is frightening for the republic. Ironically, Kavanaugh prevailed in the process only by an emotional outburst, his outrage finally waking others up to the enormously evil beheading underway. This was out of character for a man by all accounts extremely reasonable and unprejudiced, and even in this testimony his intelligence was evident and in control.

It also shows up in the warfare between Trump and the leftist media. From the moment of Trump declaring candidacy, the left has been focused on excluding Trump from legitimacy, not only as President, but as an human being. Meanwhile, he is focused on the ranking: Winning is what matters, coming in first place. And despite the media’s attempts to paint him racist and sexist, I see no evidence that he excludes losers in a contest. On the contrary, he and Senator Rubio are on the same side pushing back against election fraud in Florida. The media can not recognize Trump is driven by intelligence despite his determined actions pursuing rational policy goals, and unbowed by social pressure and disapproval.

This modern tribalism emerged from the academic world and has now spread into the wider society as graduates gain employment in private and public sector institutions. However, many of them carry a virus along with whatever knowledge and skills they have been able to acquire in their studies.

Philip Pippin brings the issue up to date writing on the corrosive social effects from today’s male/female culture warfare in his America Greatness article Who’s Toxic Now?  Excerpts on in italics with my bolds and added images.

Is America suffering from toxic masculinity—or toxic femininity?

So far this year, events are rapidly unwinding in chaos both at home and abroad. Inflation is soaring; the nation’s southern border is effectively dissolving; violent crime is escalating in many cities, seemingly unchecked; radical indoctrination is replacing proper education in public schools; and Russia is emulating the Nazis’ savage blitzkrieg-cum-genocide strategy of conquest, with relative lassitude by America.

It is vital to reflect on what autocratic Democratic rule—yes, rule, not governance—in Washington, D.C. has produced since Joe Biden’s inauguration and the leftist seizure of near-total control of the national legislative agenda. Such reflection can emanate from a myriad of perspectives, both mundane and esoteric, but there is a cultural lens I’d like to peer through here in this critical election year.

Those who value fact-based realities over “social constructs” meant to facilitate and justify ideological imperatives like identity politics and tribalism accept that there are two—and only two—sexes. Social “innovations” such as “gender fluidity” and the heated efforts exerted by their proponents to normalize them are designed to confound, disrupt, and ultimately destroy the organic social order that has evolved over centuries of experimentation across many societies. These proponents euphemistically label this “fundamental transformation”; those well-acquainted with world history and the relentless delusions of social utopians, foreign or domestic, more accurately call this “social engineering.” Usually, decadence in all forms attends the drive towards “perfecting” society by “perfecting” all the people who live in it. Rampant amorality, the debasement of all civilized norms of behavior, and the successful elevation—even glorification—of perversions of all kinds become milestones on the way to “utopia.” The result? Narcissistic elites prosper, and everyone else slides into misery and poverty as mere tools for the elite’s aggrandizement of power and lucre.

One of the modern whipping boys to advance this savage menace has been “toxic masculinity,” embodied in and epitomized by white, hetero, generically (but not exclusively) Christian, middle- and working-class males. Traits of this supposed scourge include tendencies toward emotional aggression, physical intimidation and violence, attitudes of patriarchal disdain and supremacism, and the usual laundry list of demonic isms and phobias: racism, sexism, various LGBTQ-centric phobias, and Islamophobia.

In a word, men are the problem, and particularly white, heterosexual men who possess natural masculine attitudes, values, and predispositions.

This perspective deliberately ignores the positive traits of masculinity that have long been esteemed and celebrated in America and throughout all organized societies. These include the capacity to design and build structures and organizations; the ability to preserve and protect through exertion of physical strength; the ability to produce and amplify material wealth by the use of rational thought and physical labor; and the ability to produce food and water supplies. “Toxic masculinity” is really just a propaganda meme of the utopian Left created for the purpose of besmirching the strong individualism and independent mindset of society’s motivated producers, who, predominantly, happen to be male.

So, what of femininity? If in fact there is a tangible taint known as “toxic masculinity” beyond just being an inflammatory meme designed to divide and alienate people from one another for purposes of aggrandizing political power, is there something rightfully labeled “toxic femininity”? I assert there is, and it is likely even more menacing.

If “toxic men” can be overly aggressive and intimidating, then “toxic women” may be overly passive-aggressive and covertly conniving, working behind the scenes to get what they want by subterfuge. If “toxic males” can be too direct and “in your face” with their demands, needs, and wants, then “toxic females” can be intentionally indirect, coy, sly, and even deceitful to get whatever they want. If the former can be physically violent based on emotions gone awry, then the latter can be emotionally manipulative towards others, playing on their personal fears, vulnerabilities, and sensitivities.

If men and women share both masculine and feminine traits, in varying degrees, then this discourse can hardly be defamed as a diatribe aimed invidiously at women as women. Rather, these behaviors exist in the politics, ideological conflicts, and rivalries bedeviling our nation today—modes employed by both men and women.

Today, Democratic politicians at every level of government and their ideological cohorts in major media, academia, Hollywood, and Big Tech are increasingly being outed as serial liars, deceitful spin artists, subversives, and cynical manipulators of our people’s basest emotions and instincts. Their predations did not start with the 2020 elections, of course. However, in achieving greater normalization, they threaten to subvert and topple not only our own civil society and republican form of government, but the world order, which is predicated on unparalleled American military strength, economic power, and historical values.

If not checked decisively this year by the sane, the rational, the historically literate, and the spiritually conscious, historians of the future may well ascribe America’s devolution and ultimate collapse as a free, independent, and sovereign nation primarily to a pandemic of “toxic femininity.”

It is, to be emphatic, a fully inclusive, “pan-gender” affliction embodied in men and women of all “gender orientations.” That said, the biological men in power today acting as “toxic females” will be most to blame. There are many: Biden, Blinken, Austin, Garland, Kerry, Mayorkas, Buttigieg, Milley, Schumer, Schiff, and Nadler. So, the ladies will have to move over. They have once again been usurped.

See Also To Be a Man, Or Not to Be (Fight Degendering)

Why Ocean Keeps Its Cool at 4 Celsius

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Water (H2O) has magical properties that make our planet suitable for us.  The video explains why most of the ocean water is about 4 degrees Celsius.  A transcript from another presentation draws the implications. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

At the surface, ocean water can vary wildly in temperature – the water at the equator is around 30 degrees Celsius and the water at the poles is, well, freezing.  But surface waters are only a small fraction of the total water in the ocean.  Dive a little deeper, and you’ll find that a whopping 75 percent of the ocean’s water is all at the same temperature…and we’re not talking averages or anything – the vast majority of ocean water is 4 degrees Celsius.  And that’s not just a coincidence – it’s because water is weird.

As a liquid cools, its molecules slow down and the liquid generally gets denser and denser.  That’s how molten metals, wax, nacho cheese, and basically everything else behaves – except water.  Water does become denser as it cools though, but only up to a point.  Then it reverses course and actually gets less dense.

This happens because once water molecules slow down enough, intermolecular forces due to the water molecule’s unique shape start pushing the molecules apart until – at zero degrees and below – they form a lattice-like structure.  That’s why ice is less dense than water.

But the magic temperature where water is actually densest is 4 degrees Celsius. This weird maximum density is what causes the vast majority of the ocean to be stuck at the same temperature.

By about 1000 meters down, water has cooled to around four degrees. Any water here, or below, that happens to warm up – say, via heat from a hydrothermal vent or underwater volcano – will get a little less dense and float upwards, as less-dense things tend to do – out of this 4-degree zone.  Strangely, water cooler than 4 degrees will behave the same way; any water that loses a little bit of heat will also become a little less dense and balloon upwards.

As a result, all the ocean water below 1000 meters or so is about 4 degrees. 
Well, almost all the water. 

The very deepest parts of the ocean can get just a tiny bit colder, because of salt.  When salt ions are stuck to water molecules, they weigh them down, making saltier water a little denser than less salty water.  So when polar ice forms, salt gets pushed into the surrounding water, making it super-salty.  This super-salty water is most dense slightly below 4 degrees, in addition to being a little denser than less salty water, so, it has the tendency to plummet straight to the seafloor.

This heavier, colder water makes the deepest depths of the ocean slightly colder and denser than the water above.  Expeditions to the deepest parts of the ocean, like the Challenger Deep of Mariana’s Trench have recorded temperatures of 1 degree.  However, the same rules apply down there as they do in the rest of the water column – any water that warms or cools, even a bit, will become less dense and float away into the higher, less dense layers above.

If these weird water density rules didn’t apply – if water behaved like, say, nacho cheese – ocean water would just solidify from the bottom up as it’s cooled, and we wouldn’t have liquid oceans at all.

 

 

Pfizer’s Paxlovid Pill–Just Say No

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Hypothetical model illustrating the inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 replication by ivermectin mediated through the blocking of α/β1-importin (imp) as well as 3CLpro enzymatic activity. Mody et al (2021)

The Medical Pharmaceutical Industrial complex waged psy-ops warfare against effective and safe generic medicines, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.  Now FDA approves pills from Pfizer and Merck for “emergency use”, and in Quebec where I live, they follow along like lemmings rolling out Paxlovid, claiming the pill is a “game changer.”  All this ignores that once again trials have been compressed so that longer term side effects are unknown, and Pfizer and Merck have no liability while expecting billions in profits.

As the background post below shows in some detail, these pills are not only pale substitutes for the proven generic therapeutics, they risk stimulating further viral mutations and prolonging the infectious activity in vaccinated and pill-popping developed societies.  Fortunately, Africa and much of Asia and South America will be spared this latest public health experiment, as they have natural covid immunity from the virus itself with HCQ and IVM protecting people from severe illnesses.

IVM Beats Pfizer and Merck One-Trick-Pony Pills

John Campbell explains in the video below how the new Pfizer pill copies one trick from Ivermectin, without IVM’s other anti-viral mechanisms, resulting in an inferior and dangerous medicine.  I have transcribed the basic message along with excerpts and links to several papers to which he refers. Excerpts are in italics with my bolds.

Pfizer’s new antiviral drug PAXLOVID™ shows very high levels of efficacy in preventing serious disease hospitalization and people dying.  And that drug works in a particular way, what we call a pharmacodynamic action.

But there’s another generic drug called Ivermectin that you might have heard of that works in exactly the same way as that. Now no one’s saying that information has been deliberately suppressed for years while millions of people have died but what we are going to show on this video is conclusive proof from the literature that this modality of action is the same.

How Coronavirus Infects Its Host

Before we crack into that we need to look at what’s happening so when a virus, in this case coronavirus2 gets into a cell. What happens is it makes lots of proteins. It starts off making  these long proteins, out of hundreds of amino acids sometimes. A few thousand amino acids all strung together.

The problem is they’re too long for the job that’s required. So it’s a bit like a building site and when a big log of wood arrives it needs to be trimmed down into bits that fit in your door frames and your window frames. So these proteins need to be trimmed down and it has to be done in a biochemical way.

In the case of coronavirus two, there’s an enzyme called 3CL protease which breaks
down protein into smaller pieces. it’s what we call proteolytic and it will take these long proteins and it will chop them into shorter proteins it’s what we call an endopeptidase. So now instead of having one long protein we’ve got two short ones and these fit together just nicely for the new virus that we’re we’re trying to make.

These new drugs are what we call protease inhibitors because they stop the protease from working. If the protease is like this scissor, the inhibitor is like this tape stopping the cutting up of long proteins.

When there’s another long protein that needs to be processed the 3CL protease comes along ready to chop this up. But now these drugs have bounded up the active site of the protease and they stop the protease from chopping up the big proteins into smaller strings of amino acids. Since they can’t build the virus, it inhibits viral replication.

This is the new Pfizer drug which is designed to block the activity of the sars coronavirus2 3CL, so that 3CL protease now won’t work. It won’t open so i can’t chop my proteins into the correct length to build a nice new virus.   And of course a 3CL protease inhibitor will stop it from making sars coronavirus2 and is therefore anti-viral.

Everyone in human biology has heard of chymotryptin. It’s an enzyme released by the pancreas to digest protein. It’s a protein chopping up enzyme so this chymotryptin-like protease inside the virus is working in a very similar way to the chimbotryptin that your pancreas produces to digest your proteins.

Evidence from Pfizer News Release

Pfizer’s novel COVID-19 oral antiviral treatment candidate reduced risk of hospitalization or death by 89% in interim analysis of phase 2/3 EPIC-HR study.

  • PAXLOVID™ (PF-07321332; ritonavir) was found to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% compared to placebo in non-hospitalized high-risk adults with COVID-19
  • In the overall study population through Day 28, no deaths were reported in patients who received PAXLOVID™ as compared to 10 deaths in patients who received placebo
  • Pfizer plans to submit the data as part of its ongoing rolling submission to the U.S. FDA for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) as soon as possible.

If approved or authorized, PAXLOVID™, which originated in Pfizer’s laboratories, would be the first oral antiviral of its kind, a specifically designed SARS-CoV-2-3CL protease inhibitor. Upon successful completion of the remainder of the EPIC clinical development program and subject to approval or authorization, it could be prescribed more broadly as an at-home treatment to help reduce illness severity, hospitalizations, and deaths, as well as reduce the probability of infection following exposure, among adults. It has demonstrated potent antiviral in vitro activity against circulating variants of concern, as well as other known coronaviruses, suggesting its potential as a therapeutic for multiple types of coronavirus infections.

Evidence for 3CL protease inhibitors from September 2020

Identification of SARS-CoV-2 3CL Protease Inhibitors by a Quantitative High-Throughput Screening Zhu et al. (Sept 3, 2020)

Viral protease is a valid antiviral drug target for RNA viruses including coronaviruses. (13) In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, great efforts have been made to evaluate the possibility of repurposing approved viral protease inhibitor drugs for the clinical treatment of the disease. Unfortunately, the combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, both approved HIV protease inhibitors, failed in a clinical trial without showing benefit compared to the standard of care. (14) To address this unmet need, several virtual screens and a drug repurposing screen were performed to identify SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro inhibitors.

In conclusion, this study employed an enzymatic assay for qHTS that identified 23 SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro inhibitors from a collection of approved drugs, drug candidates, and bioactive compounds. These 3CLpro inhibitors can be combined with drugs of different targets to evaluate their potential in drug cocktails for the treatment of COVID-19. In addition, they can also serve as starting points for medicinal chemistry optimization to improve potency and drug-like properties.

Ivermectin Emerges as Top Antiviral Candidate for CV2

Identification of 3-chymotrypsin like protease (3CLPro) inhibitors as potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents Mody et al. (2021), source of diagram at top. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Fig. 4: Ivermectin exhibited complete inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro enzymatic activity whereas micafungin partially inhibited the enzyme.

The off-target drugs that are being used to treat non-viral ailments selected by in silico studies were screened for their inhibitory activity against SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro enzyme.

Interestingly, one of the OTD (Off Target Drugs), ivermectin was able to inhibit more than 85% (almost completely) of 3CLpro activity in our in vitro enzymatic assay with an IC50 value of 21 µM. These findings suggest the potential of ivermectin to inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 replication. In support of this, a recent finding suggested that ivermectin (5 µM) inhibited the replication of live SARS-CoV-2 isolated from Australia (VIo1/2020) in Vero/hSLAM cells23. They found that >5000-fold viral counts were reduced in 48 hr in both culture supernatant (release of new virion: 93%) as well as inside the cells (unreleased and unassembled virion: 99.8%) when compared to DMSO treated infected cells.

Earlier studies have demonstrated that the possible anti-viral mechanism of ivermectin was through the blockage of viral-protein transportation to the nucleus by inhibiting the interaction between viral protein and α/β1 importin heterodimer, a known transporter of viral proteins to the nucleus especially for RNA viruses19,20,21,22,23. However, in this study, we have reported that ivermectin inhibits the enzymatic activity of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro and thus may potentially inhibit the replication of RNA viruses including SARS-CoV-2. These studies suggest that ivermectin could be a potential drug candidate to inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 replication and the proposed anti-viral mechanism of ivermectin presented in Fig. 8 and in vivo efficacy of ivermectin towards COVID-19 is currently been evaluated in clinical trials (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04438850).

Ivermectin Strong Against Multiple Targets

Inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 key target proteins in comparison with suggested COVID-19 drugs: designing, docking and molecular dynamics simulation study.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Double-click on image to enlarge.

In conclusion, both ivermectin and remdesivir could be considered potential drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Ivermectin efficiently binds to the viral S protein as well as the human cell surface receptors ACE-2 and TMPRSS2; therefore, it might be involved in inhibiting the entry of the virus into the host cell. It also binds to Mpro and PLpro of SARS-CoV-2; therefore, it might play a role in preventing the post-translational processing of viral polyproteins. The highly efficient binding of ivermectin to the viral N phosphoprotein and nsp14 is suggestive of its role in inhibiting viral replication and assembly. Remdesivir may be involved in inhibiting post-entry mechanisms as it shows high binding affinity to N and M proteins, PLpro, Mpro, RdRp, and nsp14. Although the results of clinical trials for remdesivir are promising (Beigel et al., 2020; Wang Y. et al., 2020), similar clinical trials for ivermectin are recommended. Both these drugs exhibit multidisciplinary inhibitory effects at both viral entry and post-entry stages. Source: Molecular Docking Reveals Ivermectin and Remdesivir as Potential Repurposed Drugs Against SARS-CoV-2

Conclusion from John Campbell

So whereas the Pfizer drug is only working as far as we’ve been told in the proviso press release against one biochemical modality of viral replication, the Ivermectin mechanism is working at many different levels. The fact that the the the Pfizer medicine is only working against one particular biochemical pathway means to me that the virus could learn to avoid that. It could evolve to be drug resistant as indeed the early antiretrovirals did with HIV.

With ivermectin, because it’s working on so many different levels, it is improbable, to put it mildly,that a virus would mutate in a dozen different ways to avoid all those different mechanisms. We’ve talked about six mechanisms today. It’s very unlikely that we get six mutations that could dodge all of those all at the same time.

So I’ve a brief message to world leaders, people that are making the decisions about this. Come on you all, you’re not a horse and you’re not a cow. You’ve got a human intellect. Let’s use it to follow the scientific evidence to save human pain, suffering and death.

Comment

Ivermectin is the most successful and proven protease inhibitor in production. Just as with Paxlovid, ivermectin decreases the protease enzyme but…the benefits of ivermectin in Covid treatment are obvious and not present in paxlovid. Additional actions of ivermectin include anti-coagulant action and anti-inflammatory actions, both observed in Covid infections. Hydroxychloroquine is also a protease inhibitor and also works against COVID.

So why PAXLOVID? Because it’s from big pharma, is less proven than other drugs in terms of safety, and was approved without input from the external committees and the public. If that inspires confidence, then I don’t know what will give you pause.

Footnote:  This video focused on Pfizer’s pill, but Merck’s Molnupiravir pill is also a one-trick-pony.  See Why Merck Dissed Its Own Invention Ivermectin

Vexing Truths About Energy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Philip Dick’s insight has a corollary:  Reality is also that which doesn’t happen no matter how much you want it to.  Chris Wright explains the contradictions with energy fantasies in his Denver Gazette article Inconvenient truths about energy.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The energy transition is not happening. Or not nearly at the pace that everyone believes or wishes. At current rates the “transition” is set to finish in the mid-2600s. The U.N. Rio Convention and subsequent Kyoto Protocol launched the energy transition drive in 1992. Global energy consumption from hydrocarbons has grown massively since then, with market share only declining by four percentage points over the last 30 years from 87% in 1992 to 83% today. I am not celebrating this fact as I have spent years working on energy transition technologies.

The energy transition isn’t failing for lack of earnest effort. It is failing because energy is hard, and 3 billion people living in energy poverty are desperate for reliable and scalable energy sources. Meanwhile, 1 billion energy-rich people are resistant to diminishing their standard of living with higher cost and an increasingly unreliable energy diet.

There is no “climate crisis” either. If there is a term more at odds with the exhaustive literature surveys of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) than “climate crisis,” I have not heard it.

Climate change is a real global challenge that is extensively studied. Unfortunately, the facts and rational dialogue about the myriad tradeoffs aren’t reaching policy makers, the media, or activist groups. Or are they are simply ignoring these inconvenient truths?

For example, we hear endlessly about the rise in frequency and intensity of extreme weather. This narrative is highly effective at scaring people and driving political action. It is also false. The reality is detailed in countless publications and summarized in the IPCC reports. Deaths from extreme weather have plunged over the last century, reaching new all-time lows last year, an outcome to be celebrated. This is not because extreme weather has declined. In fact, extreme weather shows no meaningful trend at all.

Deaths from extreme weather events have declined because highly energized, wealthier societies are much better prepared to survive nature’s wrath.

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

Recognizing reality

You are not supposed to say out loud that there is no climate crisis or that the energy transition is proceeding at a glacial pace. These are unfashionable and, to many, offensive facts. But let’s be honest. Energy transition ambitions must recognize reality. Otherwise, poor investment decisions and regulatory frameworks will lead to surging global-energy and food prices. This is exactly what is happening. We are here today in large part because energy transition efforts that previously encompassed solely aggressive support of alternative energy policies, economics be damned, have recently supplemented this strategy with growing efforts to obstruct fossil fuel development.

Fossil fuels make the modern world possible.

The real crisis today is an energy crisis. It began to reveal itself last fall with a severe shortage in globally traded Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). The LNG crisis has not abated and it gives Russia’s Vladimir Putin tremendous leverage over Europe. Without Russian gas, the lights in Europe go out. Amid war, public outrage, and intense sanctions, Russian gas flows to Europe remain unchanged. Russian oil exports have continued with minimal interruption. The world can talk tough about sanctioning Russian energy exports, but those exports are vitally needed; hence they continue. Energy security equals national security.

The world energy system, critical to human wellbeing, requires meaningful spare capacity to handle inevitable bumps in the road. In the electricity sector, which represents only 20% of global energy but 40% in wealthy countries, this is called reserve capacity. In the oil market, spare production capacity today is shrinking and concentrated in OPEC nations like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Also, there is a massive global storage network in both surface tanks and underground caverns. In natural gas markets, there are both extensive underground storage reservoirs and typically spare export capacity through pipelines and large industrial LNG export and import facilities.

The last several years have seen this spare capacity whittled away due partly to lower commodity prices and poor corporate returns shrinking the appetite to invest.

Excess capacity has also shrunk due to regulatory blockage of critical energy infrastructure like pipelines and export terminals. Roadblocks for well permitting and leasing on federal lands, together with a mass public miseducation campaign on energy and climate alarmism, are also stymieing hydrocarbon development. Investment capital is further constrained by a corporate Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) movement, and divestment campaigns. These factors are shrinking hydrocarbon investment below what it otherwise would be in response to price signals and outlook for supply and demand.

The net result is a constrained supply of oil, natural gas, and coal, which means higher prices and greater risk of market dislocations like the one unfolding today.

High energy and food price inflation is the cruelest form of tax on the poor. After a few specific examples, I’ll return to what we should do now to reverse these damaging and deeply inequitable trends.

In denial about demand

Why does the world today suffer from a severe shortage of LNG? Demand for natural gas has been growing strongly for decades. It provides a much cleaner substitute for coal in electricity production, home heating, and a myriad of industrial and petrochemical uses. Rising displacement of coal by natural gas has been the largest source of GHG emission reductions. Unfortunately, the aforementioned factors have prevented supply from keeping pace with rising demand. Energy shortages drive rapid prices rises and have cascading impacts on everything else. Energy is foundational to everything humans do. Everything.

Perhaps the most critical use of natural gas is nitrogen fertilizer production. Roughly a century ago, two German chemists, both subsequently awarded Nobel Prizes, developed a process to produce nitrogen fertilizer on an industrial scale. Before the Haber-Bosch process innovation, nitrogen content in soil was a major constraint on crop productivity. Existing nitrogen sources from bird guano, manure, and rotating cultivation of pea crops were limited. Today, elimination of natural gas-synthesized nitrogen fertilizer would cut global food production in half.

The now six-months-long LNG crisis translates into a worldwide food crisis as skyrocketing fertilizer prices are cascading into much higher food prices. Wheat prices are already at a record high and will likely head higher as spring plantings suffer from under fertilization.

Global LNG markets are tight because rising demand has outrun the growth in LNG export capacity in the United States, now the largest LNG exporter. We have an abundance of natural gas in the United States. Unfortunately, we have a shortage of pipelines to transport this gas and LNG export terminals, preventing us from relieving the energy crisis in Europe and around the world. These pipeline and export terminal shortages are due in large part to regulatory blockage. The result is that natural gas prices in the United States and Canada are five to ten times lower than in Asia and Europe. This deeply disadvantages consumers and factories (like fertilizer factories) in Europe and Asia that rely on LNG imports to fulfill their needs.

Failed energy policies

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not cause today’s energy crisis. Quite the reverse. Today’s energy crisis is likely an important factor in why Russia chose to invade Ukraine now. Europe’s energy situation is both tenuous and highly dependent on Russian imports. Russia is the second-largest oil and natural gas producer after the United States. Russia is the largest exporter of natural gas, supplying over 40% of Europe’s total demand. Additionally, Russia is the largest source of imported oil and coal to Europe. Europe put itself in this unenviable position by pursuing unrealistic, politically-driven policies attempting to rapidly transition its energy sources to combat climate change.

Europe’s energy pivot has been a massive failure on all fronts: higher energy costs, grave energy insecurity, and negligible climate impacts.

Germany is the poster child of this failure. In 2000, Germany set out to decarbonize its energy system, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this effort over the last 20 years. Germany only marginally reduced its dependence on hydrocarbons from 84% in 2000 to 78% today. The United States matched this 6% decline in hydrocarbon market share from 86% in 2000 to 80% today. Unlike in the US, Germany more than doubled its electricity prices — before the recent massive additional price increases — by creating a second electric grid. This second grid is comprised of massive wind and solar electric generating sources that only deliver 20% of nameplate capacity on average, and often less than 5% for days at a time. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Hence, Germany could only shrink legacy coal, gas and nuclear capacity by 15%. It now must pay to maintain both grids. The legacy grid must always be flexing up and down in a wildly inefficient manner to keep the lights on, hospitals functioning, homes heated, and factories powered. Outside of the electricity sector, Germany’s energy system is largely unchanged. It has long had high taxes on gasoline and diesel for transportation, and lower energy taxes on industry. Germany subsidizes industrial energy prices attempting to avoid the near-complete deindustrialization that the UK has suffered due to expensive energy policies across the board.

Over the last 20 years, the United States has seen two shale revolutions, first in natural gas and then in oil.

The net result has been the U.S. producing greater total energy than consumed in 2019 and 2020 for the first time since the 1950s. The U.S. went from the largest importer of natural gas to the second-largest exporter in less than fifteen years, all with private capital and innovation. The shale revolution lowered domestic and global energy prices due to surging growth in U.S. production. Surging US propane exports are reducing the cost and raising the availability of clean cooking and heating fuels for those in dire energy poverty still burning wood, dung, and agricultural waste to cook their daily meals. U.S. GHG emissions also plunged to the lowest level on a per capita basis since 1960. Imagine the world’s energy situation today with the American shale revolution.

We are starting to hamstring and squander the enormous benefits of the shale revolution. The same misinformed anti-hydrocarbon crusade that impoverished Europe and made it heavily dependent on Russia is now sweeping the US. California and New England had already adopted European-style energy policies driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and driving manufacturing and other energy-intensive, blue-collar jobs out of their states. Colorado is not far behind.

California, a state with a plentitude of blessings, managed to create the highest adjusted poverty rate in the nation with an expensive, unstable power grid increasingly reliant on coal-powered electricity imports from Nevada and Utah.

New England’s proximity to Pennsylvania’s clean low-cost natural gas resources was a stroke of luck. But it refused to expand the natural gas pipelines running from Pennsylvania, leaving it chronically short of natural gas, its largest source of electricity and cleanest option for home heating. Instead, it remains heavily reliant on fuel oil for home heating and occasionally imports LNG from Russia to keep the lights on. Last winter New England burned copious amounts of fuel oil to produce electricity which went out of fashion in the 1970s elsewhere in the US.

Texas has not been immune from energy illiteracy and collateral damage. Texas’ poorly designed electric grid, structured to encourage investment in renewables, led to hundreds dying last year in the Uri cold spell. No one would pay the same price for an Uber that showed up whenever convenient for the driver and dropped you off wherever they desired. But that is what Texas does with electricity: paying the same price for reliable electricity that balances the grid as they do for unreliable, unpredictable electricity. No wonder the reliability of the Texas grid has declined and is headed for more trouble.

Misplaced faith

The common thread in these cases is unrealistic beliefs in how rapidly new energy systems can replace demand for hydrocarbons, currently at all-time highs. Political intervention and miscalculation have led to over-investment in unreliable energy sources and, far worse, under-investment in reliable energy sources and infrastructure. The full costs of this colossal malinvestment have been somewhat hidden from view as spare capacity in the global energy network has mostly kept the train on the tracks. Now that excess capacity has shrunk to a critically low level, more impacts are hitting home.

Like the disease itself, the cure takes years to run its course. But that longer time frame is no excuse not to act now in a thoughtful fashion to begin rectifying historical blunders.

Steel, cement, plastics and fertilizer are the four building blocks of the modern world and all are highly reliant on hydrocarbons.

Most critically this means removing the growing myriad obstacles to hydrocarbon development, justified in the name of fighting climate change. This is nonsense. Overly cumbersome hurdles to hydrocarbon development in the U.S. do nothing to change oil and gas demand. They simply displace U.S. production overseas where production practices are less stringent and less ethical. Resulting in increased GHG emissions and other air pollutants, reduced economic opportunities for Americans, and increased geopolitical leverage of Russia and OPEC — see the invasion of Ukraine.

Climate change is a long-term problem best addressed with technologies cost-effective today like natural gas, energy efficiency, and nuclear. The solution requires combining today’s commercial low-carbon energy sources with research and technology development in carbon sequestration, next-generation geothermal, and economical energy storage to make solar and wind more viable.

Today the price mechanism must destroy energy demand to bring it in line with short-term supply. This reduces the quality of living, especially for low-income families. The price mechanism will also incent new supply to the extent possible in the face of growing regulatory hurdles, infrastructure shortages, and capital starvation. A revaluation of all three of these factors is urgently needed.

♦  Is the overarching goal “energy transition” at all costs?
♦  Or is it humane policies that better human lives and expand opportunities for all?

We need to replace the former mindset with the latter.

Chris Wright is chairman and CEO of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based hydraulic fracturing company. Read “Bettering Human Lives”, a report released last year for more information on the above issues.

 

 

April 1 Resilient Arctic Ice (No Fooling)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Previous posts showed 2022 Arctic Ice broke the 15M km2 ceiling in February, followed by a typical small melt in March.  Climatology refers to the March monthly average ice extent as indicative of the annual maximum Arctic ice extent.  The graph above shows that the March monthly average has varied little since 2007, typically around the SII average of 14.7 M km2.  Of course there are regional differences as described later on.

The animation shows ice extent fluctuations during March 2022. Bering Sea (lower left) gained ice over the month, while ice in Okhotsk (higher left) retreated. At the top Kara and Barents seas lost and then gained ice.  Baffin Bay lower right lost ice during March.  The main changes were Baffin losing ~360k km2 of extent and Okhotsk losing ~260k km2.

The effect on NH total ice extents is presented in the graph below.

The graph above shows ice extent through March comparing 2022 MASIE reports with the 16-year average, other recent years and with SII.  Hovering around 15M km2 the first week, 2022 ice extents dropped sharply mid month, then stabilized and at March end matched the average. Both 2020 and 2021 ended nearly 400k km2 below average. The two green lines at the bottom show average and 2022 extents when Okhotsk ice is excluded.  On this basis 2022 Arctic was nearly 400k km2 in surplus, then declined mid month before ending nearly 200k km2 in surplus to average, except for the ice shortage in Okhotsk.

Region 2022090 Day 90 Average 2022-Ave. 2021090 2022-2021
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 14563095 14616765  -53670  14266634 296461 
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1070776 1070116  660  1070689 87 
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 966006 963906  2100  966006 0 
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087137 1086102  1035  1087137 0 
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897845 896958  887  897827 18 
 (5) Kara_Sea 935023 918083  16941  935023 0 
 (6) Barents_Sea 748326 645014  103311  602392 145934 
 (7) Greenland_Sea 616239 652388  -36148  620574 -4334 
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 1441014 1400528  40486  1243739 197275 
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 854685 852982  1703  854597 88 
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1260903 1254217  6687  1260903 0 
 (11) Central_Arctic 3245216 3232275  12941  3192844 52373 
 (12) Bering_Sea 785874 720525 65348  549939 235935 
 (13) Baltic_Sea 52068 63446  -11377  33543 18525 
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 596190 849221  -253031  942085 -345895 

The table shows that the large deficit in Okhotsk is only partially offset by surpluses in Bering and Barents Seas.  All other regions show typical extents at end of March

 

April 1st Footnote:

It has been a long hard winter, requiring overtime efforts by Norwegian icebreakers like this one:

In addition, cold March temperatures led to unusual sightings of Northern creatures:

Not only Polar bears are flourishing!

 

Hubris is Spelled N-E-T-Z-E-R-O

Posted on by Ron Clutz

William Watson explains in his Financial Post article  How does Ottawa spell hubris? N-E-T-Z-E-R-O.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Tough question: If you think central planning is disastrous for economies, and it is, do you want your central planners to be competent and efficient or do you want them to be jokers, engaged in barely concealed fraud?

The projections included in the government’s “2030 emissions reduction plan” released this week show that in the 14 years between 2005 and 2019 total Canadian emissions of carbon dioxide equivalents fell by just nine megatonnes (Mt), from 739 to 730. Yet from 2019 to 2030, the plan would have us believe, they will fall by 287 Mt — more than 30 times the 2005-19 change.

Take buildings. From 2005 to 2019 emissions from buildings actually rose by six Mt, from 84 to 91. But “where we could be in 2030,” according to Ottawa’s chart, is 53 Mt. The chart explains: “A whole-of-government and whole-of-economy effort focusing on regulatory, policy, investment and innovation levers is needed to drive decarbonization of the buildings sector. To this end, the Government will develop a national strategy for net-zero and resilient buildings …”

That load of yet-to-be-delivered national strategy supposedly will eliminate 38 Mt of emissions when all the housing efficiency programs from 2005-19, and there have been lots, enabled an “improvement” of minus seven Mt? You’ve got to know a “whole-of-government” effort to operate the “investment and innovation levers” will not be speedy or efficient.

And even more impressive 2020s miracles apparently are on order.

In the electricity sector, emissions fell 61 Mt from 2005-2019, thanks largely to the elimination of coal. From 2019-2030 they supposedly will fall another 47 Mt, even though coal can’t be eliminated again. In heavy industry, the reduction was 10 Mt; it’s now going to be another 25 Mt. In transportation, emissions actually rose 26 Mt over the last 14 years but by 2030 they supposedly will fall 43 Mt.

This page has no sympathy for central planners. Central planning does not work, whether of the Soviet or the Trudeau-Guilbeault kind. And it wouldn’t be a good idea even if it did. On the other hand, we have immense sympathy for central plan-ees — the people who are subject to central plans. Elsewhere on this page is a plea from Francis Bradley of Electricity Canada, an association of the people who run the country’s electricity grids. All net-zero plans involve a big expansion of electricity use: all those electric vehicles, including electric trucks not yet invented, have to be charged somehow. But, Bradley warns, the clock is ticking. If the government is serious, it needs to make critical decisions now about such things as whether it will allow generation with natural gas, how much financial assistance it will provide for re-fitting and new building of transmission lines and whether it will override burdensome and lengthy approvals processes.

What does this week’s “plan” provide in the way of detail?
Aspiration, aspiration, aspiration.

It is, as Elizabeth May noted, a lovely document, with attractively coloured charts and diagrams. But if you assumed an emissions reduction plan would provide a detailed checklist of policy actions the government would be taking, you assumed wrong.

Each of a series of chapters, one per major sector of the economy, is structured the same way: a few paragraphs outlining “Current sector emissions”; another few on “(Industry X) in context: key drivers”; even more on “What have we done so far?”; a word or two about “What was heard from the 2030 engagement process”; and, then, finally, “What’s next?” Apart from “What’s next?” it’s all filler.

I copied and pasted all the “What’s next?” passages into a single file. They total a little over 8,600 words, about 10 times the length of this column. Google tells me 8,600 words would take an average adult roughly half an hour to read. Yet this is a document that purports to plan major changes in how a 40-million person, $2.5-trillion economy operates.

The “What’s next?” section for electricity is just 482 words, which I doubt will satisfy Bradley’s plea for detail. And much of it is filler — for instance, 182 words describing the “clean electricity standard” consultations processes: “Establishing a net-zero-emitting electricity sector will require substantial effort from provinces and territories, and a CES will provide the regulatory signal to support decision-making at all levels of government to achieve this goal.” No doubt that’s all true. But tell us something that’s not obvious — like what the regulatory signal actually is going to be, not just that there will be one.

Apart from filler, the detailed actions are that the feds will provide $25 million for planning “regional strategic initiatives,” will “lead engagement” on the Atlantic electric loop, and will “support de-risking and accelerating the development of transformational nation-building inter-provincial transmission lines.”  All clear now? I doubt the grid people will think so.

An institution — the federal government — that has struggled for 15 years to replace just a few dozen obsolete fighter jets supposedly is going to oversee the radical transformation of a modern economy in just eight years.

It would be laughable if it weren’t also so frightening.

There is a big opening and an urgent need for a political party that would impose a meaningful carbon tax, use the revenues to reduce other taxes and then retire from the emissions business and let markets figure out what happens next.

 

Green Apocalyptic Adventists

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Pascal Bruckner writes at City Journal  Apocalyptic Daze.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Secular elites prophesy a doomsday without redemption.

My point is not to minimize the dangers that we face. Rather, it is to understand why apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists, and intellectuals, who insist on reasoning and arguing as though they were following the scripts of mediocre Hollywood disaster movies.

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world’s human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery.

No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning.

How did this change happen? Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world’s woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, “Third World” ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West, supposedly the inventor of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the earth. Indeed, environmentalism sees itself as the fulfillment of all earlier critiques. “There are only two solutions,” Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. “Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies.”

So the planet has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation
—if necessary, by reducing the number of human beings,
as oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said in 1991.

One could go on citing such quotations forever, given the spread of the cliché-ridden apocalyptic literature. Environmentalism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence—not merely modes of production but ways of life as well. We rediscover in it the whole range of Marxist rhetoric, now applied to the environment: ubiquitous scientism, horrifying visions of reality, even admonitions to the guilty parties who misunderstand those who wish them well. Authors, journalists, politicians, and scientists compete in the portrayal of abomination and claim for themselves a hyper-lucidity: they alone see clearly while others vegetate in the darkness.

The fear that these intellectuals spread is like a gluttonous enzyme that swallows up an anxiety, feeds on it, and then leaves it behind for new ones. When the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down after the enormous earthquake in Japan in March 2011, it only confirmed a feeling of anxiety that was already there, looking for some content. In six months, some new concern will grip us: a pandemic, bird flu, the food supply, melting ice caps, cell-phone radiation.

The fear also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the press reporting, as though it were a surprising finding, that young people are haunted by the very concerns about global warming that the press continually instills in them. As in an echo chamber, opinion polls reflect the views promulgated by the media. We are inoculated against anxiety by the repetition of the same themes, which become a narcotic we can’t do without.

Atime-honored strategy of cataclysmic discourse, whether performed by preachers or by propagandists, is the retroactive correction. This technique consists of accumulating a staggering amount of horrifying news and then—at the end—tempering it with a slim ray of hope. First you break down all resistance; then you offer an escape route to your stunned audience. And so the advertising copy for the Al Gore–starring documentary An Inconvenient Truth reads: “Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced—a catastrophe of our own making.”

Now here are the means that the former vice president, like most environmentalists, proposes to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions: using low-energy lightbulbs; driving less; checking your tire pressure; recycling; rejecting unnecessary packaging; adjusting your thermostat; planting a tree; and turning off electrical appliances. Since we find ourselves at a loss before planetary threats, we will convert our powerlessness into propitiatory gestures, which will give us the illusion of action. First the ideology of catastrophe terrorizes us; then it appeases us by proposing the little rituals of a post-technological animism.

But let’s be clear: a cosmic calamity is not averted
by checking tire pressure or sorting garbage.

Another contradiction inherent in apocalyptic discourse is that, though it tries desperately to awaken us, to convince us of planetary chaos, it eventually deadens us, making our eventual disappearance part of our everyday routine. At first, yes, the kinds of doom that we hear about—the acidification of the oceans, the pollution of our air—charge our calm existence with a strange excitement. The enemy is among us, and he waits for our slightest lapses, all the more insidious because he is invisible. If the function of ancient rites was to purge a community’s violence on a sacrificial victim, the function of our contemporary rites is—at first—to dramatize the status quo and to exalt us through proximity to cataclysm.

But the certainty of the prophecies makes this effect short-lived. The language of fear does not include the word “maybe.” It tells us, rather, that the horror is inevitable. Resistant to all doubt, it is satisfied to mark the stages of degradation. This is another paradox of fear: it is ultimately reassuring. At least we know where we are heading—toward the worst.

One consequence of this certainty is that we begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to warn us so much as to condemn us.

In a secular society, a prophet has no function other than indignation. So it happens that he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no basis, calling down the destruction that he pretends to warn against. You’ll get what you’ve got coming!—that is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema.

What is surprising is that the mood of catastrophe prevails especially in the West, as if it were particular to privileged peoples. Despite the economic crises of the last few years, people live better in Europe and the United States than anywhere else, which is why migrants the world over want to come to those places. Yet never have we been so inclined to condemn our societies.

Perhaps the new Green puritanism is nothing but the reaction of a West deprived of its supreme competence, the last avatar of an unhappy neocolonialism that preaches to other cultures a wisdom that it has never practiced. For the last 20 years, non-European peoples have become masters of their own futures and have stopped regarding us as infallible models. They are likely to receive our professions of environmentalist faith with polite indifference. Billions of people look to economic growth, with all the pollution that accompanies it, to improve their condition. Who are we to refuse it to them?

Environmental worry is universal; the sickness of the end of the world is purely Western.

To counter this pessimism, we might list the good news of the last 20 years: democracy is making slow progress; more than a billion people have escaped absolute poverty; life expectancy has increased in most countries; war is becoming rarer; many serious illnesses have been eradicated. But it would do little good. Our perception is inversely proportional to reality.

The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God’s kingdom. Today’s has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy’s fine novel The Road.

How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious
and that so many strange predictions flourish?

 

Background see post Progressively Scaring the World