Society in General

Liberals Also Fear Radical Left Agenda

Posted on by Ron Clutz

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File

David Strom explains the growing rift between liberals and the extreme left in his article Gulp: Jonathan Chait Is Right.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I often make the distinction between liberals and Leftists.  I understand why many people think I am too generous in doing so because liberals often fly cover for or implicitly coddle the antics of Leftists, but there is a genuine difference. Liberals tend to think the antics of Leftists are a stupid distraction but fear that criticizing them would give aid and comfort to the enemy. 

Conservatives do that, too. Look at Laura Loomer as exhibit one. We have our share of loons, the big difference being that they have less power over our Party and our movement than the Left does over Democrats. And, of course, conservatives don’t control any of the levers of administrative power in America, at least at the federal level. 

There are plenty of principled people on both sides of the aisle, although far too few. Jonathan Chait, with whom I have few views in common, is one of them. 

In a great piece in New York Magazine, he calls out not just the Left, but Democrats on the Leftist authoritarians who are shutting down speech in America.  He notes the obvious: if what is being done by the Left in America was being done by the Right, Democrats would be freaking out.  Of course, Democrats are freaking out anyway, given that not all conservatives are in jail yet, but you get the idea. 

Chait, of course, is particularly bothered by the fact that Leftists are now aiming their fire at Democrats, and thus helping the Republicans. But at least he acknowledges the problem and believes that shutting down speech and harassing anybody is authoritarian. 

“The goal of these maneuvers is not to make the case for pro-Palestinian policy, but to abuse and deny basic rights to those who fail to endorse the protesters’ beliefs. And yes, being prevented from holding a planned speech to supporters, stalked on the street, or subjected to sleep denial are all forms of abuse. Almost nobody believes these are all just natural parts of the give and take of public disagreement.

The most elemental premise of liberalism is that politics
should be governed by a uniform set of
rules or norms that apply to everybody,
regardless of the content of their beliefs.

Over the last decade, an increasingly visible fault line has opened up on the left between political liberals and more radical activists. The illiberal left defines politics as a conflict between oppressor and victim and does not believe the former deserves the same rights as the latter. (Crucially, the special prerogatives of victimhood apply not only to victims but also to those struggling on their behalf.)

Abusive protesters usually meet critiques of their illiberal methods with a facile comparison to the civil-rights movement. But that movement was designed for a political environment in which basic liberal rights did not exist: Black Americans lacked the right to vote, to petition for grievances, or otherwise exert basic freedoms that white Americans enjoyed. The movement’s theorists did not intend their carefully designed arguments to be a permanent license for any progressive cause to declare itself beyond the law for all time.”

The simple truth is that the Right doesn’t do any of these things, despite the fact that the media freaks out any time more than two conservatives get together to say anything. Suddenly we are all Nazis trying to instigate a Beer Hall Putsch.  The Left, though, relies on harassment as their primary tactic. Not speeches. Not protests. But harassment. 

I’m not referring to tactics like holding protest marches, speeches, social-media posts, organizing uncommitted votes in the Democratic primary, or other exercises of First Amendment rights. I’m specifically referring to a campaign to shut down speakers who oppose (or even, in many cases, simply decline to endorse) the movement’s agenda.

Usually, it means interrupting speeches with screaming insults until the protesters are dragged out of the room, which has become the norm at Biden campaign events. At events with sub-presidential levels of security, protesters often succeed in overwhelming the event and its security and shutting down the speech or event entirely, sometimes employing violence.

I’d place in the same category aggressive personal harassment campaigns, like gathering outside somebody’s home at three o’clock in the morning with bullhorns shouting “We will not let you sleep!,” or surrounding individuals on the street to scream insults.

It is refreshing to see liberals beginning to stand up to the bullies on the Left and scream, “Enough!” It is frustrating that it has taken an outbreak of attacks on Democrats to inspire them to speak up, because I am quite certain that they have known for a while–since at least 2020–that the Left unleashed is a very bad thing for the country.

But until recently, the Left’s tactics have worked well enough. Liberals cheered on as Trump appointees were driven out of the public space, unable to even go to a restaurant without harassment.  I don’t know what Chait thought of that, so I will charitably assume he objected. As many liberals quietly did, I suppose.

As a nearly 60-year-old man (who in his head is still in his 30s, despite an aging body) I still hanker for the more sedate and norm-constrained days of the Reagan era.  Politics was still quite rough-and-tumble, and the 60s and early 70s were pretty awful. However, in the 80s and early 90s, both parties were still somewhat constrained and occasionally worked together. (The Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings were very low points, though).

As you know, I cringe at the worst rhetorical excesses of the Right. But they aren’t in even the same universe as what the Left has been doing over the past few years, escalating to what amounts to political violence and harassment.

 

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Med School Mission: Skilled Healers or Social Activists?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Henry I. Miller, MS, MD explains the either/or choice in his article Should Med Schools Strive To Produce Competent Physicians Or Social Activists?  published at ACHS (American Council on Health and Science. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Medical schools emphasizing DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)
as criteria for admissions is a prescription for disaster.

The late politician and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible. Texas physician Dr. Yakov Gizersky described a lamentable example of this in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, expressing his surprise at the influence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives on medical school admissions. 

He related that he had recently become aware of how “politicized the selection and training of …future physicians has become” while his son was applying to medical schools. Dr. Gizersky described his epiphany thusly:

Nearly all the schools requested multiple essays providing a detailed explanation of the applicant’s dedication to DEI and participating in DEI-related activism. Some schools had essays querying the applicant’s activism for or opinion of progressive border policies. Most also requested that students discuss how they have been adversely affected by systematic racism (and if they haven’t been affected, then they should discuss what they plan to do to fight systemic racism, anyway).

Finally, he noted that some medical schools have stopped requiring applicants to take the Medical College Admission Test, a useful predictor of medical school performance, for “specific applicant groups.” (Emphasis added.)

Dr. Gizerky’s observations took me back…  When I entered medical school at the University of California, San Diego, in the 1970s, a requirement for graduation was passing both parts of the medical board exams, the “med boards.” Part One tested knowledge of basic science; Part Two, clinical medicine. For several years, the medical school had conducted an aggressive program of recruiting and admitting under-qualified minority students. It turned out that they could scrape by on Part One, but many were failing Part Two.

That was not a surprise to my classmates and me. Grades on exams were posted not by students’ names but as curves. Ordinarily, you would expect the grades to fall in what’s called a “standard normal distribution,” or “bell-shaped curve,” that looks something like this:

Instead, the distribution was often more like this:

That implied, correctly, that there were two distinct populations represented by the scores, and we quickly ascertained that the lower distribution consisted of the under-qualified minority students.

Instead of tightening the admissions criteria, the administration responded by lowering the graduation requirement to passing Part One and just taking, but not necessarily passing, Part Two. Nary, a peep was heard from the faculty about this lowering of standards.

This sort of social engineering at medical schools has not been uncommon. Stanley Goldfarb, M.D., a retired dean for curriculum and co-director of the renal division at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, has repeatedly criticized the trend toward allowing “social justice” considerations to play a dominant role in medical schools’ admissions and curricula. He founded a nonprofit called Do No Harm, which aims “to combat discriminatory practices in medicine.”

Dr. Gizersky ended his letter to the editor with this observation: “Medical students are already faced with learning more information than ever, and we can’t afford to have medical schools produce better activists than physicians.”  I agree, but I would put it somewhat differently: When you’re admitted to the hospital for complicated cardiac or neurosurgery, do you want it to be done by the most competent and accomplished surgeon or by one who was admitted to medical school and residency because he or she was a member of an underrepresented group?

My Comment

Institutional curators seem oblivious to the dangers when substituting DEI ideology for traditional western democratic values.  The DEI trinity invariably leads to standards of performance degraded, accountability unenforced, and individual merit unrewarded.  This results in mediocre medical practices and betrayal of patients’ trust. Worse it can induce professionals to focus on getting their equitable share of the pie, rather than on the magnificent obsession with best outcomes for patients.

 

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When Ideologues Govern Instead of Achievers

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Joe Oliver describes how ideologues in power are breaking our society in his Financial Post article Irrational ‘progressive’ policies are driving dystopian results.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

From street names to gender, criminology and climate, our institutions
are in thrall to crazy wokeness. We need to get our culture back.

Society is in the grip of irrational ideas that defy common sense and drive dystopian policies. Some inane beliefs and trends are made up out of whole cloth; others derive from ideas that have resurfaced, Zombie-like, from the crypt of historic failures. They are advanced by “progressive” activists in thrall to a post-modern woke-ism steeped in Marxist-Leninism. What makes the phenomenon so threatening is its pervasive influence in politics, academia, media, not-for-profits and big business.

Two Finnish surveys published in March found that being woke was linked to anxiety, depression and a lack of happiness. We can only speculate why their ideas make them unhappier than the people they impose them on. Or are depressed people simply prone to socially damaging notions?
A decade or two ago people would have rejected these bizarre ideas for the nonsense they are, and their proponents as emperors with no clothes. But today they are conventional wisdom and skeptics are know-nothing deviants who must be de-platformed and punished for their heresy.A centrepiece of postmodern ideology is DEI which, by dividing us all into oppressor or oppressed, is neither diverse, nor equitable nor inclusive but conformist, unfair and exclusionary. It undermines excellence, productivity and competitiveness and is largely responsible for the assault on truth and inquiry at schools and universities, which have become left-wing breeding grounds for Gen Z.As for climate catastrophism, there are innumerable examples of the zany policies it has led to. Toronto’s fiscal situation is so dire it has just increased property taxes by 9.5 per cent. Yet its TransformTO 2022 Annual Report says that reaching net-zero goals by 2050 will require a $145-billion investment — though Toronto’s GHG emissions amount to 0.114 per cent of the global total. The U.S. government says that since 1850 the Earth’s temperature has risen 0.06C degrees per decade. That means Toronto contributes less than 0.00001 of a degree annually to global warming.

This is the same Toronto that is re-naming Dundas Street, which honoured
a British abolitionist, after an African tribe prominent in the slave trade.
Virtue-signalling trumping common sense is clearly rampant.

The cost for Canada to reach net zero by 2050 will be at least $2 trillion — about $180,000 for a family of four. The prime minister’s claim we must act now to avoid extreme weather is simply misinformation. Canada’s contribution to the annual increase in the globe’s temperature is less than a thousandth of a degree. And the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change tells us that in fact extreme weather events have not increased in severity or frequency. Despite incessant warnings from governments and media about a climate crisis, most people are unwilling to pay much to alleviate it. The climate consensus currently unravelling in Europe never caught on in the developing world.

An overarching concern for many Canadians is that their income has not kept up with inflation, yet the feds double down on profligate spending and ignore stalled productivity growth. They are also exacerbating a severe housing crisis by promoting the largest immigration levels since 1957 and one of the highest immigration rates in the world.

But the grand prize for cognitive dissonance goes to “Gays for Palestine,” who would be at high risk of arrest or defenestration in Gaza or the West Bank, though not in Tel Aviv, one of the world’s best places to celebrate pride. It is tragically ironic that students obsessed about micro-aggressions protest on behalf of a terrorist organization that advocates genocide. The double standard Israel faces has many rationalizations, but antisemitism has been a constant for millennia. Canada’s recent parliamentary vote calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza rewarded Hamas for its murderous rampage, which broke what was already a ceasefire.

On the criminal justice front, moving serial killer Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison outraged most Canadians, but is hardly an anomaly: fewer than 14 per cent of “dangerous offenders” are confined in maximum security prisons.  More generally, catch-and-release and lenient parole defy logic, put the public at risk and fuel the growing problem of urban crime.

Males who identify as women and use women’s washrooms and compete against women in sports are hailed as avatars of progress while anyone who points out that this could put women at risk or female athletes at a disadvantage can have their career destroyed. Get ready for complaints brought under the deeply flawed “Online Harms Bill,” C-63, which could impose sentences of up to life imprisonment for speech crimes.

Irrational, illiberal ideas are now entrenched in our most important institutions and the public is becoming habituated to them. It will require a determined effort to take the culture back and root out dysfunctional policies that undermine the economy, personal agency and our core rights and freedoms. But do we have any choice?

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Helter Skelter Climate Policies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ross McKitrick explains the dangers of making climate policies willy-nilly in his Financial Post article Economists’ letter misses the point about the carbon tax revolt.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Yes, the carbon tax works great in a ‘first-best’ world where it’s the
only carbon policy. In the real world, carbon policies are piled high.

An open letter is circulating online among my economist colleagues aiming to promote sound thinking on carbon taxes. It makes some valid points and will probably get waved around in the House of Commons before long. But it’s conspicuously selective in its focus, to the point of ignoring the main problems with Canadian climate policy as a whole.

 

EV charging sign Electric-vehicle mandates and subsidies are among the mountain of climate policies that have been piled on top of Canada’s carbon tax. PHOTO BY JOSHUA A. BICKEL/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

There’s a massive pile of boulders blocking the road to efficient policy, including:

    • clean fuel regulations,
    • the oil-and-gas-sector emissions cap,
    • the electricity sector coal phase-out,
    • strict energy efficiency rules for new and existing buildings,
    • new performance mandates for natural gas-fired generation plants,
    • the regulatory blockade against liquified natural gas export facilities,
    • new motor vehicle fuel economy standards,
    • caps on fertilizer use on farms,
    • provincial ethanol production subsidies,
    • electric vehicle mandates and subsidies,
    • provincial renewable electricity mandates,
    • grid-scale battery storage experiments,
    • the Green Infrastructure Fund,
    • carbon capture and underground storage mandates, 
    • subsidies for electric buses and emergency vehicles in Canadian cities,
    • new aviation and rail sector emission limits,
      and many more.

Not one of these occasioned a letter of protest from Canadian economists.

Beside that mountain of boulders there’s a twig labelled “overstated objections to carbon pricing.” At the sight of it, hundreds of economists have rushed forward to sweep it off the road. What a help!

To my well-meaning colleagues I say: the pile of regulatory boulders
long ago made the economic case for carbon pricing irrelevant.

Layering a carbon tax on top of current and planned command-and-control regulations does not yield an efficient outcome, it just raises the overall cost to consumers. Which is why I can’t get excited about and certainly won’t sign the carbon-pricing letter. That’s not where the heavy lifting is needed.

My colleagues object to exaggerated claims about the cost of carbon taxes. Fair enough. But far worse are exaggerated claims about both the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the economic opportunities associated with the so-called “energy transition.” Exaggeration about the benefits of emission reduction is traceable to poor-quality academic research, such as continued use of climate models known to have large, persistent warming biases and of the RCP8.5 emissions scenario, long since shown in the academic literature to be grossly exaggerated.

But a lot of it is simply groundless rhetoric. Climate activists, politicians and journalists have spent years blaming Canadians’ fossil fuel use for every bad weather event that comes along and shutting down rational debate with polemical cudgels such as “climate emergency” declarations. Again, none of this occasioned a cautionary letter from economists.

There’s another big issue on which the letter was silent. Suppose we did clear all the regulatory boulders along with the carbon-pricing-costs-too-much twig. How high should the carbon tax be? A few of the letter’s signatories are former students of mine so I expect they remember the formula for an optimal emissions tax in the presence of an existing tax system. If not, they can take their copy of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy by Prof. McKitrick off the shelf, blow off the thick layer of dust and look it up. Or they can consult any of the half-dozen or so journal articles published since the 1970s that derive it. But I suspect most of the other signatories have never seen the formula and don’t even know it exists.

To be technical for a moment, the optimal carbon tax rate varies inversely with the marginal cost of the overall tax system. The higher the tax burden — and with our heavy reliance on income taxes our burden is high — the costlier it is at the margin to provide any public good, including emissions reductions. Economists call this a “second-best problem”: inefficiencies in one place, like the tax system, cause inefficiencies in other policy areas, yielding in this case a higher optimal level of emissions and a lower optimal carbon tax rate.

Based on reasonable estimates of the social cost of carbon and the marginal costs of our tax system, our carbon price is already high enough. In fact, it may well be too high. I say this as one of the only Canadian economists who has published on all aspects of the question. Believing in mainstream climate science and economics, as I do, does not oblige you to dismiss public complaints that the carbon tax is too costly.

Which raises my final point: the age of mass academic letter-writing has long since passed. Academia has become too politically one-sided. Universities don’t get to spend years filling their ranks with staff drawn from one side of the political spectrum and then expect to be viewed as neutral arbiters of public policy issues. The more signatories there are on a letter like this, the less impact it will have. People nowadays will make up their own minds, thank you very much, and a well-argued essay by an individual willing to stand alone may even carry more weight.

Online conversations today are about rising living costs, stagnant real wages and deindustrialization. Even if carbon pricing isn’t the main cause of all this, climate policy is playing a growing role and people can be excused for lumping it all together. The public would welcome insight from economists about how to deal with these challenges. A mass letter enthusing about carbon taxes doesn’t provide it.

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The Big Lie Behind DEI

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Below is an article describing how the woke industry started and expanded by advancing a fundamental lie about human happiness and social fairness.  The image above calls attention to the notion that sorts individuals into classes and attributes inequalities in status or prosperity to oppression by others. The lie is that any disappointment or disadvantage is the fault of others, ie. privileged oppressors.  Thus is swept away standards of performance, accountability and considerations of individual merit.   As explained below the DEI bureaucracy emerged to reward so-called “protected classes” at the expense of “privileged classes.”

A Brief History of the Diversity Industry

Heather Mac Donald explains the origins and preoccupations of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE).  Whoops, I mean Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)  which is now an academic degree you can acquire.  Her Quillette article is Almost Four Decades After Its Birth, The Diversity Industry Thrives on Its Own Failures.

The diversity business originated in 1984, when R. Roosevelt Thomas, a Harvard business school graduate, founded the American Institute for Managing Diversity at Morehouse College. Corporations had been practicing affirmative action for years, but the women and minorities whom employers had hired to meet equal-opportunity obligations weren’t advancing up the career ladder in acceptable numbers. Thomas came up with a novel explanation. The problem wasn’t that preferentially admitted recruits were underqualified; the problem was that their supervisors didn’t know how to “manage diversity.” It was those supervisors who needed remedial training—lots of it—not the affirmative-action beneficiaries themselves.

screen-shot-2021-07-09-at-12.17.46-am

Managerial expectations about merit and performance often reflected cultural prejudices, Thomas and the consultants who followed him insisted. “‘Qualifications’ is a code word in the business world with very negative connotations,” a consultant with the professional-services firm of Towers Perrin (as it was then called) said in 1993. If minorities don’t meet existing employment criteria, then corporations need to expand their definition of what it means to be employable, said Alan Richter, creator of the 1991 board game, The Diversity Game. Promptness, precision, and a cogent communications style were among the attributes that diversity advisors deemed likely expendable.

A lucrative new consulting practice was born, its growth driven by a constant churn in terminology. “Valuing diversity” was different from “managing diversity.” Each newly spawned phrase came with a cadre of high-priced tutors. Lewis Griggs currently offers video trainings in such subjects as “Communicating Across Differences,” “Supervising and Managing Differences,” and “Creating, Managing, Valuing, and Leveraging Diversity,” with each video purporting to contain specialized content appropriate for different parts of an organization.

“Diversity” was eventually joined by “inclusion.” “Equity” was then added, thus yielding today’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) triumvirate (sometimes also going as “EDI”). The most cutting-edge organizations have lately appended a “B” (for Belonging), as at the Juilliard School in New York City. Distinguishing these terms is a core function of diversity training—and now, at Bentley, of diversity scholarship. The university’s new DEI major, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, will help graduates understand the “nuances of and differences between diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.”

Even by 1993, half of Fortune 500 companies had a designated diversity officer, and 40 percent of American companies had instituted diversity training. Diversity conferences were occurring regularly, attracting government and business attendees. And yet many reporters, academics, corporate consultants, and activists still insist that managers not only fail to “value diversity,” but remain complicit in creating a dangerous environment for women and racial minorities.

Example: Levi Strauss & Co., which was recognized on Forbes’s list of “Best Employers for Diversity” in 2019. The company itself boasts: “In the 1960s, we integrated our factories a decade before it was required by law. In the early 1980s, we joined the fight against HIV/AIDS early on. Furthermore, our president and CEO, Chip Bergh, was one of the first company leaders to join the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™ [in 2017], and has been on the front lines of efforts to protect Dreamers knowing that diversity and inclusivity makes our company better and our country stronger (after all, Levi Strauss himself was an immigrant).”

And yet the situation for minority employees at Levi Strauss is still so dire that the company has been hosting racially segregated healing sessions with professional mental health experts. As the Washington Free Beacon recently reported, its chief executive for DEI is trying to provide a “safe space for employees to express themselves” without feeling “triggered.”

Bentley University itself has yet to yield dividends from its longstanding diversity efforts. The school has been “working for decades on issues, challenges, and opportunities” pertaining to diversity, according to its Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Over 900 faculty and administrators have attended two-day diversity retreats; numerous committees, departments, and offices have focused on improving the school’s “diversity climate.” Bentley even has its own diversity consulting outfit, the Center for Women and Business, which advises employees and managers on such diversity pitfalls as being a mere “performative ally” of oppressed colleagues (as opposed to an active ally).

And yet, despite this effort, a Bentley Racial Justice Task Force recently found that the campus still did not understand how “race and racism” operate at the university. So difficult is it to be a diverse member of Bentley that the task force, formed in July 2020, began with a moment of “restoration,” providing to all “those who had been traumatized” at the school a “time to heal” and a time to “process the pain of racial injustice.”

One of Bentley’s biggest failings, according to the task force, has been its “false confidence” in “objectivity and meritocracy.” These are the norms of a “historically and predominantly white institution (HWI/PWI),” per the task force members. Typical of HWIs/PWIs, Bentley does not pay sufficient attention to the “systemic inequality” that such white norms engender. Equally dismaying, many students and professors apparently would rather study subjects other than racism, the task force lamented, thereby betraying their “lack of understanding about why the study of race is critical to the creation of a full academic experience.”

Diversity industry proponents would argue that white supremacy is simply too ingrained in America’s institutions to be rooted out within a mere three to four decades of diversity work.

But another possible reason why diversity training has not met its stated goals is that the field is intellectually bankrupt: Its practitioners peddle empty verbiage to fix a problem that is largely imaginary. I asked Bentley’s press office what the difference is between “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The answer was a dodge: “Rather than give students one particular view of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, Bentley’s DEI major encourages students to compare and contrast approaches to diversity, equity, inclusion and justice from across disciplines and perspectives and show how they intersect with one another.” Other questions—how the school defines a “real discipline,” what are the core texts of this new discipline, and why Bentley’s decades of diversity work have not lessened the school’s purported racism—were ignored entirely.

Bentley sociologist Gary David says that “more and more studies have shown” that diversity training and DEI perspectives make “good business sense.” But this oft-asserted claim rests on a few studies of dubious experimental design, lacking control groups. The one thing diversity trainees reliably learn is how to answer post-training survey questions “in the way the training said they ‘should,’” reports sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. As for actually changing behaviors in a diversity-approved direction, the training is not only ineffective, it is often counterproductive, according to al-Gharbi.

race-card

Far from being institutionally racist, Bentley University, like virtually every other American college today, is filled with well-meaning adults who want all their students to succeed. Corporations, law firms, Big Tech, and government agencies are bending over backwards to hire and promote as many underrepresented minorities (i.e., blacks and Hispanics) as possible. If the number of those minorities in a college or business organization is not proportional to their population share, that underrepresentation is due first and foremost to the academic skills gap. Mention of the skills gap is taboo in diversity circles, but it is real—repeatedly documented by the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, the SAT, the LSAT, the GREs, the GMAT, and the MCAT—and it is consequential.

Hiring based on any extraneous selection criterion inevitably lowers the average qualifications of the resulting employee group. Hiring based on race entails a particularly significant deviation from a meritocratic ideal, since the only reason why color-conscious hiring is implemented in the first place is that merit hiring often fails to produce a critical mass of black and Hispanic employees. In essence, the diversity conceit is a perpetual motion machine: If underqualified diversity hires are promoted out of diversity pressure, resentment and obfuscation follow. If they hit a glass ceiling, accusations of bias are inevitable. In either situation, a diversity consultant is waiting in the wings to teach managers that their expectations and standards are racist.

university lightening

The increasing power of college diversity bureaucrats over academic affairs since the 1990s has been stunning. Diversity vice-chancellors oversee faculty hiring searches, mandate quotas regarding whom search committees may interview, and sometimes even mandate quotas regarding whom they must hire. Chief inclusion officers track departmental race and sex demographics, pressuring department chairs to correct diversity deficits. Associate provosts for diversity coordinate campaigns for required courses on identity and grievance within the curriculum. Deans of inclusion teach students to recognize their place on the great totem pole of victimization. Vice presidents for equity monitor campus speech, on the lookout for punishable microaggressions. Senior advisors on race and community lead crusades against faculty who have allegedly threatened the safety of campus victim groups through non-orthodox statements regarding race and sex.

Now that the fictions underpinning this enterprise are being enshrined as an academic discipline, the possibility that the university will return to its status as an institution dedicated to the unfettered search for knowledge—and even, dare one say it, objectivity and meritocracy—will grow yet more remote.

Postscript:  When Graduates from DEI Institutions Go to Workplaces

A recent Newsweek articles reports Gen Z Is Toxic for Companies, Employers Believe.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Companies are struggling to operate as Gen Z enters the workforce at higher rates, and a growing majority of employers say the younger generation is toxic for their business.

That’s the latest from a new Freedom Economy Index report conducted by PublicSquare and RedBalloon this month. In the survey, 68 percent of small business owners said Gen Zers were the “least reliable” of all their employees. And 71 percent said these younger workers were the most likely to have a workplace mental health issue.

One of the surveyed employers spoke of Gen Z’s “absolute delusion, complete lack of common sense, and zero critical reasoning or basic analytical skills.”

The criticism for Gen Z workers was in full force, as less than 4 percent said Gen Z was the generation that most aligns with their workplace culture, and 62 percent said Gen Z was the most likely to create division and toxicity in the workplace.

Another employer noted the generation’s tendency for “expecting promotions for simply showing up every day.”

Footnote:  Boeing Learning the Hard Way About DEI Hiring

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Decarbonizing Religion Delusional

Posted on by Ron Clutz

“Climate Activism is a Religion” – Marian Tupy.  H/T Raymond.  Excerpted transcript below in italics with my bolds and added images.

“The planet is infected with us we’re all gonna die. Isn’t that all true and and correct?

It’s certainly not true and actually the history of the relationship between population growth and abundance of Natural Resources is much more complex than people realize. It’s very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. On the one hand you’ve got your Garden of Eden: that’s the world before industrialization. You have your Devils: fossil fuel CEOs and people like that. You have your Saints, Greta Thunberg. Your Priesthood is the IPCC scientists. And of course you even have indulgences like back in the days before Reformation. Where you are allowed to fly around the world on a private jet, so long as you give a few thousand pounds or dollars to a green cause. All those sins are simply washed away. And one of the fundamental features of any religion is apocalypse, the end of days.

What we are saying is that if the world is going to end. it will certainly not end because we will run out of Natural Resources. The British energy problems are not an outcome of physical limits on fossil fuels or energy that can be produced in the world. They are an outcome of stupid decisions made by your politicians for the last 20 years.

Context

Our guest today is the editor of humanprogress.org, a senior fellow at the center for Global liberty and prosperity, whose latest book is called super abundance the story of population growth Innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely Bountiful Planet. Marian Tupy, welcome to triggeronometry. Please tell everybody who you are and what brings you to be sitting here talking to us

It starts with my birth in Czechoslovakia socialist republic. When I was a child my parents moved to South Africa. Later I went to Great Britain and studied at Saint Andrews University. I’ve been in Washington DC at the Cato Institute which is a Libertarian think tank for the last 20 years. And as you mentioned I run a website called viewingprogress.org which is basically just a website trying to document and promote the notion that the world is improving along many different dimensions of human well-being. That led me to writing a book about population and Innovation and natural resources.

Well speaking of all of that Marian, the the self-evident truth that everyone’s been completely persuaded about for the last God knows how many years is the planets overpopulated,  humans are the virus infecting the planet. We’re all gonna die, and as we die we’re gonna make everything terrible. Marion why is it that so many people think that overpopulation is a real danger for our planet and the future of the human race?

I think it’s because the notion of finitude of atoms which is absolutely true. It is common sense and intuitive to say: If you have the finite quantity of atoms but you are increasing the people using those atoms then at some point you must run out. But this ignores a very fundamental difference between human beings and other animals. We are animals who are capable of planning forward and we are animals capable of innovating out of our problems through human knowledge. So American Economist Thomas Sowell has a famous quote:

An example is iPhone, a great way of dematerializing our the world. In other words we are saving a lot of atoms that we don’t have to put into television sets, into cameras, into Maps, into campuses, into calculators and all those other things. Instead we put it on this device. I hope it goes some way into explaining why the number of atoms in the world is actually not a limiting factor for how much of value we can create.

I think that if we are looking at the source of discomfort and a sense of dejection about the future, it may come from the fact that in Britain you cannot build that many houses. Or rather you refuse to build that many houses because of governmental policy. I’m not bashing Britain I’ve spent five years in your beautiful country and I love it and we have the same problem in the United States. it’s not that all of these people living in the cities are concerned about overpopulation, just that they’ve decided that you’re not going to build in my backyard.

It’s policy driven rather than driven by some sort of fundamental physical lack of space.

People still need a search for the transcendental; they still need to commit their lives to a meaning, to some sort of a heroic vision of themselves. What is it that they are trying to accomplish with their lives aside from going to work? And I think that many people especially in secular societies have embraced Extreme Environmentalism as a substitute for religion. um it’s very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. So I think that there are religious overtones to environmentalism. And the number of apocalyptic movies has been growing every decade since the 1950s, even though the world has improved along very many different dimensions: we live longer, we live healthier lives, we are much richer, poverty is collapsing around the world.

But with every decade the number of apocalyptic movies is actually increasing with one exception and it was 1990s because of the peaceful resolution of the Cold War.

Whatever your view on fossil fuels, whether or not you believe that emitting ever more CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem, clearly the timeline and the plan that our politicians have invented is completely unrealistic. We are not paying a price for there being too little oil or gas or uranium in the world. We are paying a penalty for politicians forcing us into energy consumption patterns which were completely unrealistic. The book tells you that there is plenty to be used for hundreds of thousands of years. We are never going to run out of these energy sources or natural resources, but yes as a society we could certainly decide not to use them and simply to shut off the lights and close the door on Western Civilization. That choice is not going to be forced on us by physical limits of the planet.

I think there is a reasonable chance that we have seen Peak apocalyptic environmentalism, for two reasons. One is that half of the world, the underdeveloped or developing world is never going to buy into our nonsense. We just have to stop thinking that and don’t even pretend that people in India and China and Bangladesh and Africa, which are still very poor are simply going to start using windmills. It’s just not going to happen for decades, if ever. They would have to be at a completely different level of Economic Development to start playing around with wind farms and whatever. So they’re going to be reliant on oil and natural gas for a long long way to come. And even that is better than using biofuels in order to power their own societies.

So that’s one half of the population; the second half are the advanced economies like yours and our economies, which are by and large democratic. And I do not believe that with any level of brainwashing coming from Whitehall or from Greta or people who glued themselves to roads or whatever. I don’t think any level of that kind of propaganda and brainwashing will make the good people in the United Kingdom to decide that this is the future they’re going have. In other words democracy is going to win. And if it’s not going to be the Tory party which changes the green policies and the green New Deal or Net Zero, or it’s going to be somebody else. And the sooner the British political establishment awakes to the fact that the British people are suffering and their living standards are collapsing, the less likely it is that you will have a really nasty party emerging that will do it for them.

I have a concern about the democracies we still have here in the West. If our center right and center left simply refuses to acknowledge that by government design lives of our people are getting worse, somebody else is going to fill that void, and that is something I want to avoid.

The reason why the public in this country and in yours holds the politicians in utter contempt is precisely because they see the level of hypocrisy that is going on in in both societies. You see them constantly raising taxes on air travel but they themselves fly around on private jets or first class which is much more carbon intensive. You see them telling you to drive you know little EVs while they enjoy being driven around in SUVs as big as a house. You see them telling you that the world is going to be swallowed up by by the oceans while at the same time they’re buying beachfront properties.

They basically think that we are so stupid and they think that can they can basically freak us out to an extent where where any kind of policy can be can be implemented. And to that extent I was actually impressed with some of the work done in the UK by the former head of your Supreme Court Jonathan Sumption, who was deeply concerned about the kind of public reaction to covid; you know, you end up with a Chinese virus but also with a Chinese Society. If people can be freaked out enough that the world is going to implode, they would be willing to part with their civil liberties and their basic freedoms.

On the other hand all of these apocalyptic predictions have been wrong in the past. And if you again put a date on it, you say that we only have five or ten years left on the planet left, when that time expires we will be wondering why we should be believing these people. What sort of credibility do they have? Do they also realize just how extraordinarily damaging it it to our institutions? How are we supposed to believe the leadership in our societies when they get these calls wrong time and time again.

They complain about populism when they are the causes of populism because
they keep on saying things which are obviously not true.

In this book we looked at 18 different data sets with some of them going back to 1850, and we looked at hundreds of Commodities: Goods, finished goods, Services, food, fuel etc. We found that for every one percent increase in population we had one percent decrease in the price of all of these Goods, services and commodities. That tells us that human beings on average are more producers than they are consumers; that we are really able to produce more wealth than we consume, otherwise you would see the opposite: With every one percent increase in population you would see an increase in prices with greater scarcity. But that is not the fact.

We are very divided in Western countries and so while remaining optimistic: How do we manage some of the trade-offs of these technological developments? Because it seems to me in social communication, cultural programs and entertainment and particularly social media are areas where everyone knows there’s a big problem but no one quite knows what to do about it.

Any technology developed by the human brain can be can be used for good and evil. A baseball bat can be used to hit a baseball and it can be used to to bash you to death, not to mention guns and um anything else, knives and on. So what you do with your Technologies also matters. I think that any new technology from gramophones to bicycles was first met with a wall of negativism. Once it was thought writing of novels was supposed to lead to mental collapse throughout the Western World. Television, radio, all of these things were considered to be potentially world-ending events, but that didn’t happen

When it comes to social media, I don’t like them and I don’t partake. I left Facebook in 2012 when I realized that it was making me unhappy. Because what I was putting up on Facebook was a curated picture of my life, and what I was consuming was a curated picture of my life. So basically I was posting lies in consuming lies, and once I realized that I left Facebook. That was a choice, a choice which can be made independently by any number of all 8 billion people

I think that what we are going through right now is a period of adjustment to a new technology but that period of adjustment will resolve itself. You know it took us 50 years to figure out that drinking and driving was not a good idea. Now it’s sort of been internalized into us that cars are much better operated when you are sober, but it took time to to to to to square the human brain with this new technology. That will probably happen with social media as well or at least I hope that people are going to realize that much of it is simply unreal, what is making them unhappy, and they could be spending their time doing better things than than being on social media. We’ll probably figure it out in the way that we have figured it out with novels and bicycles and radio and television.

I’m basically a follower of the Enlightenment. I aspire to the ideals of the Enlightenment and one of the main features of the Enlightenment was freedom of speech. We are not putting enough emphasis on the way that freedom of speech is being destroyed by our governments, by the media, by cancel culture. Freedom of speech is not only necessary in order to produce new inventions and Innovations but also to produce new ideas. In this country we need a lot of reforms because the country is not functioning very well. Things won’t improve if ideas that I propose are canceled just because they seem too outrageous. In the same way in the United Kingdom, you need to undertake a lot of reforms and what if somebody tells you that your proposal for, let’s say, NHS reform is somehow unspeakable.

We need to preserve freedom of speech, it’s absolutely fundamental and we should be talking more about people getting canceled for joking uh for expressing wrong ideas and also for having peculiar forms of behavior. and that’s important because as we discuss in our book a lot of people on whom we rely for some of the most important Innovations and inventions in the world are also very peculiar people.

I’m rationally optimistic about the future just just to just to clarify that. So long as we don’t have a massive war caused by politicians, so long as we’re able to innovate without a precautionary principle, so long as we are able to freely speak and publish and research. And so long as we have the free markets which can tell us which inventions and Innovations are valuable and which inventions and Innovations are not valuable.

Machinery for Global Sustainability Tyranny

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Terence Corcoran shines light on the emerging global control structure in his Financial Post article Is the global march towards sustainable development unsustainable? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Regulations related to climate risks could prove a costly burden
for Canadian corporations, institutions

The planned reset of global corporate capitalism to save the planet continues to stumble toward the great unknown, in the sense that even after decades of effort the machinery to expand regulatory control over investment and business decisions remains bogged down in murky conceptual clay. Developments in regulatory and legal circles suggest 2024 will be a pivotal year for the revolutionary ideas that are supposed to lead to a fundamental transition from bad economic policy to green.

The underlying concepts are well known by name. We have corporate social responsibility (CSR), environmental and social governance (ESG), the precautionary principle, and sustainable development. What all these buzz-phrases mean is another question. Looking through the latest developments around the initiatives, however, a certain sense of apprehension, doubt and even a bit of squeamish uncertainty seem to have taken hold.
In recent days major global investment firms such as U.S.-based JP Morgan and State Street have pulled away from Climate Action 100+, a global industry-led coalition with grandiose objectives to fight the “systemic risks” of climate change. The claim is that investors must ensure the businesses they own have strategies that “accelerate the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050, or sooner, and align with the goal of the Paris Agreement” set by the United Nations in 2015.  Despite decades of talk following the radical Limits to Growth movement of the 1970s, the 1987 Brundtland report and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit’s endorsement of “sustainable development,” the remake of corporations into vehicles for economic and climate control remains far from complete.
In New York this week, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation held a symposium to inform corporations, institutions, regulators and advisors on the emerging accounting and reporting standards surrounding sustainable development. “Achieving a truly global baseline of sustainability-related disclosures necessitates a strong focus on supporting implementation across all economic settings, so that all market participants can access its benefits.”One of the symposium sessions was titled: “Get ready for jurisdictional adoption: How regulators are responding to the ISSB” — the International Sustainability Standards Board. Released last June, the ISSB standards will require corporations and investment organizations around the world to adopt common reporting approaches to climate and other environmental issues. It’s an authoritarian, top-down and anti-competitive regime that leaves no country or sector free to set its own rules.

All nations and regulators are to be locked in a global climate-control structure.

Canada is part of that structure through the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board, which this month announced a public consultation to advance adoption of sustainability disclosure standards in Canada. The consultation begins in March and runs through to June. One objective is to determine, with provincial securities regulators, how to impose mandatory reporting to replace voluntary standards on climate and environmental issues.

The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), which includes provincial securities commissions, is being pressured to take action on the grounds that Canada could get left behind. A paper released earlier this month by the Canada Climate Law Initiative at the University of British Columbia urged regulators to move forward quickly with new sustainability standards. Failure to act in concordance with the ISSB could cause Canada to lose international investment flows, the report claims.

The document continues through 20 pages of detailed recommendations covering climate-related strategies, investments, metrics, targets, performance, cash flows, scenarios, climate transition plans and science-based taxonomies. How any of this massive effort relates to corporate performance for shareholders is not addressed.

Looking to the future, the Law Initiative suggests the CSA should also begin thinking about requiring future reports  related to a corporation’s “relationship to terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats, ecosystems and populations of related fauna and flora species, including diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems, and their interrelation with Indigenous and affected communities.”

Internationally, Canada must also deal with the uncertainty surrounding the differing emerging global standards, including the still-to-be-determined U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approach to sustainable development. As the consulting firm EY put it in an updated report last month, “Entities with significant operations in multiple jurisdictions need to understand the key differences among the SEC proposal, the ESRS [European Sustainability Reporting Standards] and the ISSB standards because they might be subject to more than one set of requirements.” Another EY report this week warns that sustainable development “continues to face a range of challenges” in terms of costs, technologies and standardization.

The legal proposals would burden Canadian corporations and institutions with massive reporting responsibilities and costs related to climate risks. On corporate governance, for example, the Climate Law Initiative calls for securities issuers to “disclose the governance processes, controls, and procedures it uses to monitor, manage, and oversee climate related risks and opportunities.”

All of this is taking place on a shaky theoretical foundation
in economics and environmental change.

The 1987 Brundtland Commission simplistically defined sustainable development as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Exactly what “needs” are is unclear. Maybe it was intended to capture Marx’s slogan: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Meaning: Take from wants of the developed world and give to the needs of the developing world?

The missing fundamentals of the 50-year-old movement to reshape the corporate model should receive a little more attention in the months ahead. Could it be that sustainable development is unsustainable?

Postscript

Meanwhile, the sustainability movement is transitioning to students. In Kelowna, B.C., and Toronto this week the goal is to inspire the next woke generation of environmentally active citizens. At the Toronto event, the organizers summarized their plan. “We welcome high school students and their teachers to this dynamic one-day conference that brings together youth and community organizations from across Ontario to discuss, collaborate and learn how to make sustainable and equitable change in our world.”

 

 

 

What Big Climate Wants to Censor

Posted on by Ron Clutz

(Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Oceana)

Nick Pope writes at Daily Caller Foreign Billionaire-Backed Climate Org Pressuring Broadcasters To Censor Ads Critical Of Biden’s EV Mandate.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A green nonprofit that is indirectly funded by a foreign billionaire is pressuring broadcasters to drop advertisements that criticize the Biden administration’s massive electric vehicle (EV) agenda.

Climate Power wrote to numerous broadcasters this week demanding that they stop airing American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers (AFPM)-funded advertisements in swing state markets that rail against President Joe Biden’s plans to impose widespread EV adoption in the coming years. The charitable organization affiliated with Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss health care mogul and billionaire philanthropist, donates millions of dollars to the Fund for a Better Future, which was the fiscal sponsor for Climate Power until 2023, a spokesperson for Climate Power previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AFPM launched its seven-figure ad campaign designed to highlight and criticize the administration’s EV policies on Tuesday. The ads, which describe Biden’s policies as an EV mandate, are airing in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Ohio, Montana and Washington, D.C.

Climate Power’s warning letter to local affiliates states that the broadcasters “must remove these ads from the air immediately” because “there is no pending federal ‘car ban,’ and to claim otherwise is patently false and intentionally misleading.” The letter suggests that AFPM’s ads could be in violation of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, and instructs the broadcasters to contact Climate Power — an Internal Revenue Service-recognized 501(c)4 that is spending more than $80 million to tout Biden’s climate policies ahead of the 2024 presidential election — to confirm that the ads are no longer running on their stations.

What Big Climate Wants to Hide

A recent Wall Street Journal video says it out loud: EVs are not practical for most people.  The short video can be seen here.  A transcript is below for those who prefer to read.

Hertz announced last week that it is selling one third of its EV fleet, about 20.000 vehicles, and will replace them with gas powered cars, citing weaker demand for electrics and their higher operating and repair costs. The car rental giant had previously vowed to convert 25% of its fleet to electric by the end of 2024. In an interview in Davos this week, President Biden’s soon to be former climate envoy,

John Kerry, blamed recent setbacks in the industry on electric car critics,
accusing them of engaging in “high levels of disinformation.”

Kerry also told the panel at the World Economic Forum that the green energy transition will continue no matter who wins the 2024 presidential race. “You think those CEOs are gonna say, Oh My God, they just elected a new president. Let’s go back and build internal combustion engine cars. Not on your life. This economic revolution is underway and it’s much bigger than any politician, any one person.”

We’re back with Dan Henniger, Kim Strassel, and Wall Street Journal columnist, Allysia Finley. So Allysia, also this week Ford announced that it is cutting back on production of its Lightning 150 electric trucks. So this is a pretty broad cutback in production.

Well, the biggest reason is there’s flagging demand. So there were a lot of, “early adopters. It was people who lived in California and big cities who bought EVs. Especially Teslas which make up about 60% of sales. And so there was a big rush of automakers, and partly propelled by the government mandates, both California’s Air Resources Board and the Biden administration’s coming mandate, which ratchets up to two thirds of all sales to be EVs by 2032.

And so they all rushed in, they started mass producing EVs. And all of a sudden they’re realizing demand’s actually softening for the mainstream public because they’re actually not ready.

And suffering difficulties. And what we saw in Chicago with the lines of people and the cold weather.  It’s cold weather and EVs don’t really work in the north very well. It’s repair costs. So it’s not easy to go long distances. It’s charging station availability, and people want sometimes to go long distances. Are those the reasons consumers are resisting?

I mean the costs are still about $20,000 higher on average, and the have to factor repair costs, yes. But also insurance costs, which are about 20% higher. In part because they’re more expensive, but also because the replacement parts are more expensive. And so they’re just not really practical for most people. This isn’t to say that someday then they’ll be much more practical and popular.

Maybe, but it doesn’t make sense to be mandating and subsidizing them at this juncture. Dan, what do you make of John Kerry’s line that this reluctance is just all disinformation by critics?

When Kerry said that, I thought he might take a side trip from Davos, Switzerland, to Germany to see what’s happening with EVs there. In December EV sales in Germany dropped by 50%. The auto industry there is really on the brink of collapse because people are simply not buying electric vehicles. And as Allysia was just describing, it that happens here, and it could, people simply say, “I’m not gonna put up , Ford and GM are really gonna get strung out and hit hard by the refusal of people.

Allysia, the one thing Kerry has going for his prediction is EVs which are being mandated by the government is that the flow of money from the Inflation Reduction Act will be so great, how much money they’re throwing at charging stations and subsidies for consumers and subsidies for production. It’s astonishing, even subsidies for batteries. Will that ultimately push EVs over the top?

Well, that is the risk in my mind, that consumers at the moment don’t want them. But the plan on the left is always that you get something in motion, you make the industry change its standards and retool and regear itself toward this goal. You put money out there as incentive for them to keep doing it and for buyers to get them. And then you can’t reverse it.

And you hope that it trundles along of its own accord. Which is why there’s growing attention in Washington, especially among Republicans, that if they’re going to try to claw back money, it ought to be more out of this area. Because if they really do care about issues like consumer choice, giving people the ability to drive what they want to drive, you’ve got to remove this government distortion that is creating this supposed economic revolution.

It’s not an economic revolution, it’s a government imposed transition.

Allysia, you wrote an interesting column about how CEOs not too long ago were cheering on this and all thinking alike about the great EV future. One of those was the Hertz CEO, another one, the Ford CEO. Are they really having second thoughts?

Well, it’s funny now in recent months, they’ve all been coming out saying, “Oh well, we need to cut production”, and “This is just not sustainable.” Across the industry, they’re definitely having second thoughts, and some of their statements are more public than others. And they’re pleading to the administration. Again this is representative of the auto industry, not the individual automakers, but they’ve sent a letter saying, please, we cannot do this. These aggressive goals are not achievable and auto workers would lose their jobs.

Covid19 mRNA Vaccines Fiasco 2024 Update

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A thorough examination of the trials and tribulations of the mRNA shots proclaimed and sometimes forced upon people comes from a dream team of experts in the field:   The authors of this research paper are highly qualified experts, including, according to Liberty Counsel, “biologist and nutritional epidemiologist M. Nathaniel Mead; research scientist Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D.; biostatistician and epidemiologist Russ Wolfinger, Ph.D.; immunologist and biochemist Dr. Jessica Rose; biostatistician and epidemiologist Kris Denhaerynck, Ph.D.; Vaccine Safety Research Foundation Executive Director Steve Kirsch; and cardiologist, internist, and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough.”

The peer reviewed paper is at Cureus COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Our understanding of COVID-19 vaccinations and their impact on health and mortality has evolved substantially since the first vaccine rollouts. Published reports from the original randomized phase 3 trials concluded that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could greatly reduce COVID-19 symptoms. In the interim, problems with the methods, execution, and reporting of these pivotal trials have emerged. Re-analysis of the Pfizer trial data identified statistically significant increases in serious adverse events (SAEs) in the vaccine group. Numerous SAEs were identified following the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), including death, cancer, cardiac events, and various autoimmune, hematological, reproductive, and neurological disorders.

Furthermore, these products never underwent adequate safety and toxicological testing in accordance with previously established scientific standards. Among the other major topics addressed in this narrative review are:

♦   the published analyses of serious harms to humans;
♦   quality control issues and process-related impurities;
♦   mechanisms underlying adverse events (AEs):
♦   the immunologic basis for vaccine inefficacy; and
♦   concerning mortality trends based on the registrational trial data.

The risk-benefit imbalance substantiated by the evidence to date contraindicates further booster injections and suggests that, at a minimum, the mRNA injections should be removed from the childhood immunization program until proper safety and toxicological studies are conducted. Federal agency approval of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines on a blanket-coverage population-wide basis had no support from an honest assessment of all relevant registrational data and commensurate consideration of risks versus benefits.

Given the extensive, well-documented SAEs and unacceptably high harm-to-reward ratio, we urge governments to endorse a global moratorium on the modified mRNA products until all relevant questions pertaining to causality, residual DNA, and aberrant protein production are answered.

Background

Political and financial incentives may have played a key role in undermining the scientific evaluation process leading up to the EUA. Lalani and colleagues documented the major investments made by the US government well before authorization [18]. Even prior to the pandemic, the US National Institutes of Health invested $116 million (35%) in mRNA vaccine technology, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) had invested $148 million (44%), while the Department of Defense (DOD) contributed $72 million (21%) to mRNA vaccine development. BARDA and the DOD also collaborated closely in the co-development of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, dedicating over $18 billion, which included guaranteed vaccine purchases [18]. This entailed pre-purchasing hundreds of millions of mRNA vaccine doses, alongside direct financial support for the clinical trials and the expansion of Moderna’s manufacturing capabilities. The public funding provided for developing these products through Operation Warp Speed surpassed investments in any prior public initiative [19]. Once the pandemic began, $29.2 billion (92% of which came from US public funds) was dedicated to the purchase of COVID-19 mRNA products; another $2.2 billion (7%) was channelled into supporting clinical trials, and $108 million (less than 1%) was allocated for manufacturing and basic research [18]. This profuse spending of taxpayer dollars continued throughout the pandemic: BARDA spent another $40 billion in 2021 alone [20].

Using US taxpayer money to purchase so many doses in advance would suggest that, prior to the EUA process, US federal agencies were strongly biased toward successful outcomes for the registrational trials. Moreover, it is reasonable to surmise that such extensive vested interests could have influenced the decision to prematurely halt the registrational trials. Unblinding essentially nullified the “placebo-controlled” element of the trials, eliminating the control group and thus undermining the ability to objectively assess the mRNA vaccines’ safety profile and potential serious AEs (SAEs). Thus, while the accelerated authorization showcased the government’s dedication to provide these novel products, it also raised concerns among many experts regarding risk-benefit issues and effectively eliminated the opportunity to learn about the potential long-range harms of the mRNA inoculations. The political pressures to rapidly deliver a solution may have compromised the thoroughness and integrity of the scientific evaluation process while downplaying and obfuscating scientific concerns about the potential risks associated with mRNA technology.

Concerns about inadequate safety testing extend beyond the usual regulatory approval standards and practices. Although we employ the terms “vaccine” and “vaccination” throughout this paper, the COVID-19 mRNA products are also accurately termed gene therapy products (GTPs) because, in essence, this was a case of GTP technology being applied to vaccination [21]. European regulations mandate the inclusion of an antigen in vaccines, but these immunogenic proteins are not intrinsic to the mRNA vaccines [22]. The GTP vaccine platform has been studied for over 30 years as an experimental cancer treatment, with the terms gene therapy and mRNA vaccination often used interchangeably [23]. This is due to the mRNA products’ specific mode of action: synthetic mRNA strands, encapsulated within a protective lipid nanoparticle (LNP) vehicle, are translated within the cells into a specific protein that subsequently stimulates the immune system against a specific disease. Another accurate label would be prodrugs because these products stimulate the recipient’s body to manufacture the target protein [24]. As there were no specific regulations at the time of the rapid approval process, regulatory agencies quickly “adapted” the products, generalized the definition of “vaccine” to accommodate them, and then authorized them for EUA for the first time ever against a viral disease. However, the rationale for regulating these products as vaccines and excluding them from regulatory oversight as GTPs lacks both scientific and ethical justification [21]. (Note: Throughout this review, the terms vaccines and vaccinations will be used interchangeably with injections, inoculations, biologicals, or simply, products.)

Due to the GTPs’ reclassification as vaccines, none of their components have been thoroughly evaluated for safety. The main concern, in a nutshell, is that the COVID-19 mRNA products may transform body cells into viral protein factories that have no off-switch (i.e., no built-in mechanism to stop or regulate such proliferation), with the spike protein (S-protein) being generated for prolonged periods, causing chronic, systemic inflammation and immune dysfunction [25,26]. This S-protein is the common denominator between the coronavirus and the vaccine, which helps to explain the frequent overlap in AEs generated by both the infection and the inoculation [25]. The vaccine-induced S-protein is more immunogenic than its viral counterpart; and yet, the increased antibody production is also associated with more severe immunopathology and other adverse effects [27]. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA products contain mRNA with two modified codons that result in a version of the S-protein that is stabilized in its prefusion state [28]. This nucleoside-modified messenger RNA technology is intended to extend the synthetic mRNA’s persistence in the body. When the S-protein enters the bloodstream and disseminates systemically, it may become a contributing factor to diverse AEs in susceptible individuals [25].

Revisiting the registrational trials

Although randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are viewed as the gold standard for testing the safety and efficacy of medical products (due to minimizing bias), trials of limited scope can readily obscure the true safety and efficacy issues with respect to different segments of the population. In this case, the trials excluded key sub-groups, notably children, pregnant women, frail elderly persons, and immuno-compromised individuals, as well as those with cancer, autoimmune disease, and other chronic inflammatory conditions [45]. Whereas the founding trials did not recruit individuals with comorbidities, vaccine recipients in the rollouts showed the actual presence of these underlying conditions. Rather than assess these well-known safety and comorbid risk concerns, the focus was narrowly placed on the potential for inflammatory lung injury as had been seen in COVID-19 patients and, many years earlier, in immunized animal models infected with SARS-CoV [46]. We are now beginning to recognize the folly of this narrow safety focus, as millions of severe and life-threatening events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines continue to be documented in the medical literature [47-51].

What did the pivotal trials reveal about overall (all-cause) mortality? After carefully analyzing the ACM for the Pfizer and Moderna trials, Benn and colleagues found 61 deaths total (31 in vaccine, 30 in placebo) and a mortality RR of 1.03 (0.63-1.71), comparing the vaccinated to placebo [52]. These findings can be interpreted as “no significant difference” or no gold-standard evidence showing these mRNA vaccines reduce mortality. The lack of significant differences in deaths between the study arms is noteworthy. The true mortality impact remains unknown in this context, and this fact alone is relevant, as it would be preferable to take a vaccine with good trial evidence of reduced mortality than to take a vaccine where trial evidence does not show convincing evidence of improved survival [53]. Similarly, a subsequent analysis of the Pfizer trial data concluded that mortality rates were comparable between vaccinated and placebo groups during the initial 20-week period of the randomized trial [54]. The fact that the mRNA vaccinations did not lead to a reduction in overall mortality implies that, if the injections were indeed averting deaths specifically attributable to COVID-19, any such reduction might be offset by an increase in mortality stemming from other causes, such as SAEs.

For the Pfizer and Moderna registrational trials, Benn et al. also reported a non-significant 45% increase in cardiovascular deaths (RR=1.45; 95%CI 0.67-3.13) in the vaccine arms of the trials [52]. This outcome was consistent with numerous reports of COVID-19 vaccine-related cardiovascular pathology among both young and old segments of the population [57-63]. None of the mortality estimates from the trials are statistically significant. Nevertheless, the upward trends for both ACM and cardiovascular deaths are concerning. If the Pfizer trial had not been prematurely discontinued, and assuming death rates remain the same in both arms as observed in the first six months, the ACM difference would reach the standard threshold for statistical significance (p < 0.05) at approximately 2.8 years (34 months). The p-value is 0.065 at 2.5 years and 0.053 at 2.75 years (see Appendix 1). These calculations were independently confirmed by Masterjohn [64].

Absolute risk and the “number needed to vaccinate (NNV)”

It is imperative to carefully weigh all potential risks associated with the COVID-19 mRNA products. Should substantial harms be linked to their use, the perceived “reward” conveyed by the NNV would necessitate a re-appraisal. For example, assuming an NNV of 119 and an IFR of 0.23% (both conservative estimates), approximately 52,000 vaccinations would be needed to prevent one COVID-19-related death. Thus, for the BNT162b2 injection, a generous estimate would be two lives saved from COVID-19 for every 100,000 courses of the biological. Given the evidence of trial misconduct and data integrity problems (see next section), we conjecture that this estimate is an “upper bound”, and therefore the true benefit is likely to be much lower. Regarding potential harms, assuming 30% false-positive reports and a moderate under-reporting factor of 21, we calculate a risk of 27 deaths per 100,000 doses of BNT162b2. Thus, applying these reasonable, conservative assumptions, the estimated harms of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines greatly outweigh the rewards: for every life saved, there were nearly 14 times more deaths caused by the modified mRNA injections (for details, see Appendix 2).

Underreporting of harms and data integrity issues

When Pfizer’s Six-Month Interim Report of Adverse Events (C4591001) revealed a total death count of 38 [35], the number seemed unexpectedly low for a clinical trial involving 44,060 participants amidst a pandemic. To investigate, Michels and colleagues estimated the anticipated deaths based on US mortality rates in 2020, presuming comparability across participating countries [54]. With 132 trial sites in the US and 80% of subjects, they estimated that 222 deaths should have occurred between July 27, 2020, and March 13, 2021, making the observed 38 deaths only 17% of the projected number. Most of the trial sites had fewer deaths than anticipated, possibly attributed to a considerable percentage of “Lost to Follow-up” subjects (4.2% of randomized subjects), including 395 unique subjects within the study period. While some sites recorded negligible losses, others exhibited substantial figures, up to 5% of the site’s subjects [54]. These numbers likely contributed to the seemingly low overall death count and should have prompted increased efforts to locate these individuals. Losing track of nearly 400 study participants in the follow-up observation period could have substantially compromised the validity and generalizability of the results. The missing data can produce biased estimates, leading to invalid conclusions. This could result in a distortion of vaccine efficacy and underestimation of SAEs (including deaths), thus misrepresenting the safety profile of the mRNA products. In short, Pfizer’s failure to minimize participant attrition seriously undermined the accuracy and reliability of the six-month study’s conclusions.

These concerns are further compounded by revelations concerning substandard research practices and inadequate data management in the pivotal trials. A whistleblower report by a former employee of the contract research organization responsible for enrolling patients in Pfizer’s pivotal trial raises significant questions regarding data integrity and the safety of trial participants [85]. Among the trial conduct issues documented were failure to report protocol deviations, improper storage of vaccines, mislabeling of laboratory specimens, and lack of timely follow-up for patients experiencing AEs, possibly leading to underreporting. In terms of regulatory oversight, the FDA inspected only nine out of the 153 study sites involved in the Pfizer trial [86].

Finally, an unblinding of participants occurred early in the trial, potentially on a wide scale across different study sites. Participants were not presented with clear information regarding potential AEs in both trial protocols and consent forms [87]. Some parts of the consent form were misleading and merely intended to elicit participation that might not otherwise have occurred if the volunteers had been made aware that what was promised in theory or “on paper” was unlikely to happen in reality [87]. As a result, participants were not being granted truly informed consent; the potential injuries and AEs most likely to be caused by the vaccinations were never openly stated.

This lack of informed consent carried over into the real-world setting following the EUA. For example, not publicly disclosing the Pfizer trial’s exclusion of pregnant women is arguably among the CDC’s most egregious oversights when asserting the safety of COVID-19 vaccine administration during pregnancy [1]. The Nuremberg Code established patients’ rights to voluntary informed consent in the aftermath of World War II [88]. US courts consistently support informed consent as a fundamental right for patients’ autonomy [89]. Informed consent procedures must provide clear distinctions between risks that are frequently observed, risks that occur rarely, and the more obvious risk of lack of effectiveness or waning immunity, which is separate from the risk of SAEs. Whether in a clinical trial or free-living real-world setting, informed consent is essential to providing a clear understanding of the potential risks associated with receiving a genetic vaccine. Throughout the pandemic, healthcare workers were duty-bound to provide clear risk-benefit information to patients. In practice, however, informed consent was non-existent, as information sheets were blank [90], and vaccinees were never informed of potential risks beforehand.

Shifting narratives, illusions of protection

The best evidence for the failure of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine’s ability to confer protection against COVID-19 comes from two large cohort studies of employees within the Cleveland Clinic Health System (CCHS) after the bivalent mRNA boosters became available [99,100]. In the first study (n=51,017), COVID-19 occurred in 4,424 (8.7%) during the 26-week observation period [99]. In terms of preventing infections by the three prevailing Omicron subvariants, the vaccine effectiveness was 29%, 20%, and a non-significant 4%, respectively [99]. No protection was provided when the XBB lineages were dominant. Notably, the risk of “breakthrough” infection was significantly higher among those who received the earlier vaccine, and a higher frequency of vaccinations resulted in a greater risk of COVID-19 [100]. In a second CCHS cohort study (n= 48,344), adults who were “not up-to-date” by the CDC definition had a 23% lower incidence of COVID-19 than those “up-to-date” with their vaccinations [100]. These findings are further reinforced by multiple real-world studies showing rapidly waning protection against Omicron infection after the boosters [101]. The vaccine effectiveness against laboratory-confirmed Omicron infection and symptomatic disease rapidly wanes within three months of the primary vaccination cycle and booster dose [97].

In a recent study of nearly five million adults, those who had a SARS-CoV-2 infection within 21 days post injection showed an eight-fold increased risk of ischemic stroke (OR=8.00, 95%CI 4.18-15.31) and a five-fold increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke when compared to vaccinees without concurrent infection (OR=5.23, 95%CI 1.11-24.64) [121]. The risk was highest for those receiving the mRNA-1273 injections. Thus, SARS-CoV-2 infection close to the time of vaccination produced a strong association with early incidence of ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes [121]. Again, with a hybrid immunity approach, the potential harms may greatly outweigh the rewards.

Natural immunity carries none of these risks and is more than sufficient against the mild virulence of Omicron subvariants. Much evidence now indicates that natural immunity confers robust, durable, and high-level protection against COVID-19 severe illness [122-126]. A large United Kingdom (UK) study of over 30,000 healthcare workers, having a prior history of SARS-CoV-2 infection, showed an 84% reduced risk of reinfection, with a median protective period of seven months [125]. In a large observational study in Israel, previously infected individuals who remained unvaccinated were 6-13 times less likely to contract the virus compared to those who were vaccinated [122]. Among 32,000 individuals within the same healthcare system, vaccinated individuals had a 27-time higher risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 and an eight-time higher risk of hospitalization compared to their unvaccinated counterparts [122].

After recovering from COVID-19, the body harbors long-lived memory immune cells, indicating an enduring capacity to respond to new infections, potentially lasting many years [127]. Mounting evidence suggests that the training of antibodies and induction of T-cell memory resulting from repeated natural infection with Omicron can augment the mitigation of future infections [128,129]. In a recent cohort study, children who had experienced prior infection showed long-lasting protection against reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 for a minimum of 18 months [130]. Such children between the ages of five and 11 years demonstrated no decline in protection during the entire study, while those aged 12-18 experienced a mild yet measurable decline in protection over time [130]. For these younger generations in particular, natural immunity is more than sufficient and of course vastly safer than the mRNA inoculations.

Analyses of serious harms to humans

For both the Pfizer and Moderna trials combined, there were about 125 SAEs per 100,000 vaccine recipients, which translates into one SAE for every 800 vaccinees [50]. Because the trials avoided the most frail as participants, one would expect to see even higher proportions of SAEs in the population-wide rollouts. Remarkably, the Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of SAEs in the vaccine group compared to the placebo, with a risk difference of 18.0 (95%CI 1.2-34.9) per 10,000 vaccinated; risk ratio 1.36 (95%CI 1.02-1.83). These findings stand in sharp contrast with the FDA’s initial claim that SAEs reported by the two pivotal trials were “balanced between treatment groups” [15,50]. The discrepancy may be partly explained by the fact that the FDA was focusing only on individual participant data, and yet many of those individuals were experiencing multiple SAEs. Instead of analyzing individuals, Fraiman et al. focused on total SAEs to take into account the multiple, concurrent events [50]. When the SAEs were viewed collectively, the risks in the vaccine group were substantially elevated beyond those previously determined by the FDA.

Analyses of two large drug safety reporting systems in the US and Europe revealed over 7.8 million AEs reported by approximately 1.6 million individuals following COVID-19 vaccination [47]. When compared to individuals aged 18-64 years, the older age groups exhibited a higher frequency of death, hospitalizations, and life-threatening reactions, with RR estimates ranging from 1.49 (99%CI 1.44-1.55) to 8.61 (99%CI 8.02-9.23). Signals were identified for myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism, cardio-respiratory arrest, cerebral infarction, and cerebral hemorrhage associated with both mRNA vaccines. These signals, along with ischemic strokes, were confirmed by a large disproportionality analysis [48]. In an independent risk-benefit analysis, BNT162b2 produced 25 times more SAEs than the number of severe COVID-19 cases prevented [51].

Finally, autopsy studies have provided additional evidence of serious harms. In a comprehensive systematic review with full independent adjudication, 74% of autopsy findings (240 out of 325 cases), were judged to have been caused by the COVID-19 mRNA products [139]. The mean time from injection to death was 14.3 days, and the vast majority of deaths had the cardiovascular system as the single fatal organ system injury to the body.

These findings help explain the wide range of well-documented COVID-19 vaccine-induced toxicities that impact the nervous, gastrointestinal, hepatic, renal, hematological, immune, and reproductive systems [25,144,145]. Post-mortem examinations are critical for identifying potential SAEs of the mRNA inoculations. However, as clinics and hospital administrations have a large vested interest in the COVID-19 vaccines’ distribution, the common administrative practice of discouraging autopsies and postponing autopsy reports only serves to undermine comprehensive risk assessment, perpetuate public misconceptions regarding safety, and weaken public health policymaking [145].

Conclusions

Based on the research presented in this narrative review, the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign should be regarded as a grave medical error. Medical errors represent a substantial threat to personal and public safety and have long constituted a leading cause of death [288-290]. Misguided political and regulatory decisions were made at the highest levels and may have been heavily influenced by financial incentives. Government agencies should have considered all reasonable treatment alternatives and deflected away pressures from the medical-pharmaceutical industry rather than allowing population-wide distribution of experimental genetic vaccines.

Had the FDA recognized the nearly four-fold increase in cardiac SAEs (including deaths) subsequently identified in the Pfizer trial’s vaccine group [54], it is doubtful that the EUA would have transpired in December 2020. An in-depth investigation of the COVID-19 vaccine’s long-term safety profile is now urgently needed. Despite the many striking revelations discussed in this review, most developed countries continue to advocate the ongoing adoption of COVID-19 mRNA boosters for the entire eligible population. US federal agencies still emphasize the safety of the vaccines in reducing severe illness and deaths caused by the coronavirus, despite the absence of any randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials to support such claims. This reflects a bewildering disconnect between evidence-based scientific thinking and public health policy.

Careful, objective evaluation of COVID-19 mRNA product safety is crucial for upholding ethical standards and evidence-informed decision-making. Our narrative review concerning the registrational trials and the EUA’s aftermath offers evidence-informed insights into how these genetic vaccines were able to enter the market. In the context of the two pivotal trials, safety was never assessed in a manner commensurate with previously established scientific standards either for vaccines or for GTPs, the more accurate classification of these products. Many key trial findings were either misreported or omitted entirely from published reports. The usual safety testing protocols and toxicology requirements were bypassed by the FDA and vaccine manufacturers, and the premature termination of both trials obviated any unbiased assessment of potential SAEs due to an insufficient timeframe for proper trial evaluation.

It was only after the EUA that the serious biological consequences of rushing the trials became evident, with numerous cardiovascular, neurological, reproductive, hematological, malignant, and autoimmune SAEs identified and published in the peer-reviewed medical literature. Moreover, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines produced via Process 1 and evaluated in the trials were not the same products eventually distributed worldwide; all of the COVID-19 mRNA products released to the public were produced via Process 2 and have been shown to have varying degrees of DNA contamination. The failure of regulatory authorities to heretofore disclose process-related impurities (e.g., SV40) has further increased concerns regarding safety and quality control oversight of mRNA vaccine manufacturing processes.

Since early 2021, excess deaths, cardiac events, strokes, and other SAEs have often been wrongly ascribed to COVID-19 rather than to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations. Misattribution of SAEs to COVID-19 often may be due to the amplification of adverse effects when mRNA injections are followed by SARS-CoV-2 subvariant infection. Injuries from the mRNA products overlap with both PACS and severe acute COVID-19 illness, often obscuring the vaccines’ etiologic contributions. Multiple booster injections appear to cause immune dysfunction, thereby paradoxically contributing to heightened susceptibility to COVID-19 infections with successive doses. For the vast majority of adults under the age of 50, the perceived benefits of the mRNA boosters are profoundly outweighed by their potential disabling and life-threatening harms. Potential harms to older adults appear to be excessive as well.

Given the well-documented SAEs and unacceptable harm-to-reward ratio, we urge governments to endorse and enforce a global moratorium on these modified mRNA products until all relevant questions pertaining to causality, residual DNA, and aberrant protein production are answered.

 

Delusions of Davos and Dubai

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Edward Ring dispells the smoke and mirrors surrounding renewables in his American Greatness article The Delusions of Davos and Dubai – Part Two: Can Wind & Solar Energy Expand 50-100 Times? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Procuring 90+ percent of global energy from wind and solar energy is a fool’s errand.

In the most recent “Conference of the Parties,” otherwise known as the United Nations extravaganza that convenes every few years for world leaders to discuss the climate crisis, several goals were publicly proclaimed. Notable were the goals to triple production of renewable energy by 2030 and triple production of nuclear energy by 2050. Against the backdrop of current global energy production by fuel type, and as quantified in Part One, against a goal of increasing total energy production from 600 exajoules in 2022 to at least 1,000 exajoules by 2050, where does COP 28’s goals put the world’s energy economy? How much will production of renewable energy have to increase?

To answer this question, it is necessary to recognize and account for the fact that most renewable energy takes the form of electricity, generated through wind, solar, or geothermal sources. And when measuring how much the base of renewables installed so far will contribute to the target of 1,000 exajoules of energy production per year in order to realize—best-case scenario—800 exajoules of energy services, the data reported in the Statistical Review of Global Energy is profoundly misleading.

[ Ring is referring to the fanciful projections compared to realities reported in the 2022 consumption statistics from Energy Institute. For example, from that report

The graph shows that global Primary Energy (PE) consumption from all sources has grown continuously over nearly 6 decades. Since 1965  oil, gas and coal (FF, sometimes termed “Thermal”) averaged 88% of PE consumed, ranging from 93% in 1965 to 82% in 2022.  Note that in 2020, PE dropped 21 EJ (4%) below 2019 consumption, then increased 31 EJ in 2021.  WFFC for 2020 dropped 24 EJ (5%), then in 2021 gained back 26 EJ to slightly exceed 2019 WFFC consumption. For the 58 year period, the net changes were:

Oil        194%
Gas      525%
Coal     178%
WFFC  239%
PE        287%]

If we’re setting a goal of 1,000 exajoules of ultimate world energy production and assuming 80 percent of that 1,000 exajoules of energy input shall be realized as end-user energy services, then we have to examine how much usable energy wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear are actually being generated today. That means we need to know how much electricity they actually generate and send into the grid. An imputed, grossed-up number is not helpful.

It must be again emphasized that it is an extraordinary assumption to project an 80 percent retention of energy from input into the grid to actual end use. For example, we might assume that from the generating plant, 5 percent was lost in transmission, another 5 percent lost from charging and subsequently discharging the electricity to and from utility-scale storage batteries, another 5 percent in the charge/discharge cycle through an onboard battery in an EV, and another 5 percent converting that electricity into traction from the electric motor. Those are extraordinarily optimistic numbers, using a best-case example.

The point here is 1,000 exajoules represents the absolute minimum to which global energy production must grow in the next 25 years if every person on earth is to have access to enough energy to enable prosperity and security. How do we get there? Let’s take the experts at their word and assume that use of coal, oil, and gas will be completely eliminated by 2050.

On the chart below, the assumptions governing the future mix of fuels worldwide adhere to the resolutions just made at the recent Conference of the Parties. That is, nuclear energy will be tripled, and use of oil, natural gas, and coal will be eliminated. To take some of the pressure off of the required expansion of solar and wind energy, for this analysis, the sacrilegious assumption is made to double hydroelectric capacity, double geothermal production, and double biofuel production. It won’t matter much. Here goes:

There’s a lot to chew on in these data, but it’s worth the effort. Because the facts they present are immutable and carry with them significant implications for global energy policy. The first column of data shows how much fuel was burned or generated worldwide in 2022—the raw fuel inputs, which total 604 exajoules.

The second column of data shows the number of energy services that reached end-users in 2022 in the form of heating, cooling, traction, light, communications, etc. It is clear that for thermal sources of energy, the lower numbers reflect the currently estimated degree of conversion efficiency worldwide, about 40 percent. But for non-thermal sources of energy (appended to the right with “gen,” signifying generated energy), these numbers are based on terawatt-hour reports featured in individual sections of the Statistical Review dedicated to those sources of energy. Converted from terawatt-hours to exajoules, these are the actual amounts of electricity that went into transmission lines around the world to be consumed by end users.

The third column of data calculates a hypothetical 2050 global fuel mix based on the agreed COP 28 targets. As seen in column 4 “multiple,” nuclear energy is tripled in accordance with COP 28. Also, in accordance with COP 28, use of coal, oil, and gas is eliminated. Not agreed to at COP 28, but to help reach the 1,000 exajoule target, production of geothermal and biofuel energy are both doubled. That leaves the remainder of the needed power to be provided (in this example) equally by wind and solar. It is reasonable to assume, based on everything they’re saying in Dubai and Davos, that this is the model. This is the logical realization of what they’re calling for.

These calculations yield an overwhelming reality check.
Yet what assumption is incorrect?

The target of 1,000 exajoules is almost certainly too low. Nuclear power is tripled, and hydropower and biofuel are both doubled. None of that is easy; in the case of biofuel, it could be an environmental catastrophe. But even if those other non-thermal sources of energy were to increase two to three times, without coal, oil, and gas, a stupefying expansion of wind and solar would be required. “Tripling” these renewables doesn’t even get us into the ballpark.

To deliver 1,000 exajoules of power to the world by 2050, for every wind turbine we have today, expect to see more than 60 of them. For every field of photovoltaics we have today, expect to see nearly 100 more of them. Is this feasible? Because from Dubai to Davos, this is what they’re claiming we’re going to do.

Confronted with these facts, even the most enthusiastic proponents of wind and solar energy may hesitate when considering the magnitude of the task. Eliminating production of fossil fuel entirely by 2050 ought to be seen, for all practical purposes, as impossible. The uptick in mining, the land consumed, the expansion of transmission lines, the necessity for a staggering quantity of electricity storage assets to balance these intermittent sources, the vulnerability of wind and solar farms to weather events including deep freezes, tornadoes, and hail, and the stupefying task of doing it all over again every 20-30 years as the wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and storage batteries reach the end of their useful lives—all of this suggests procuring 90+ percent of global energy from wind and solar energy is a fool’s errand.