Let us not even pretend otherwise. COVID hysteria was not that long ago, and we remember the “science” that told us standing six feet apart waiting to board the plane was necessary to slow the spread, but then we could sit shoulder to shoulder for several hours on a flight across country.
But fret not, we wore masks, because science. Of course, you could take your mask off to eat or drink, because science. Any point of view to the contrary would be, “attacks on science,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it.
Fauci may have exited stage left, but his political playbook permeates the Biden administration. Last week, the White House released its latest “National Climate Assessment.”
Reading the accompanying release, one can’t help but notice the framing of “restoring the vital role of science in guiding the Biden-Harris Administration’s decision-making.” Science!
Once politicians say they are using “science,” especially in the climate debates, hold onto your wallets and your freedoms.
The report’s widely circulated finding is “the US is warming faster than the global average.” That is scary, and it is meant to do just that.
Fearmongering is a vital part of the climate movement, and for the last few decades, we’ve had doomsday clocks and countdowns to the end. We are nearly five years into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s prediction “the world is going to end in 12 years” if we don’t address climate change. Luckily, Joe Biden has spent hundreds of billions of borrowed tax dollars, so maybe the countdown is delayed.
Forgive me for expressing skepticism about the “scientists” who authored this report. The White House may try to convince us “science” says the US is warming faster than the rest of the world, but “science” can say pretty much whatever we pay it to say.
For example, the scientists at the World Meteorological Association assert “Asia is warming faster than the global average.” The same organization contends that Africa, too, “is warming slightly above the global average”.
Not to be outdone, the Cyprus Institute affirms “the Middle East is warming nearly twice as fast” as the global average, which is shocking when you learn Australia is also warming more rapidly than the global average.
So is Latin America, and Europe, and the South Pole, but the real record breaker is the North Pole which is warming “four times faster than the rest of the world.” Wow. Warming absolutely everywhere – and everywhere above average.
The whole is no longer equal to the sum of its parts because “science” demonstrates the average of the sum of the parts is twice as great as the whole. This type of new math accounts for the nation’s $34 trillion national debt.
For one of these climate assessments to be true, the others must be flawed. Which is it? The outstanding question for climate scientists who push this doomsday scenario is this: show your work.
The 1989 UN Climate report boldly proclaimed that entire nations would be underwater by 2000 unless fossil fuels were zeroed out. We did not and yet, here we are.
Clearly the report was wrong. One could say the science was not “settled” yet the same UN in just a few short days will gather 40,000 climate activists in Dubai for COP 28 where they will make the same bold predictions.
It is beyond fair to ask why this time they are correct. What did they change in their assessment? What computer modeling was flawed? Which data set was erroneous?
If climate scientists cannot explain their errors and account for quite blatantly flawed reports, then their writings are no different than any other cult who prophesized the end times. Ten years ago it was the Mayan calendar, today it’s the United Nations. Meet the new cult, same as the old cult.
Yes, science can easily be politicized by people with an agenda. Science told us not long ago, Churches had to close but strip clubs and casinos could remain open, and this would help stop the COVID virus. Science declared ”mostly peaceful” protests for Black Lives Matter were acceptable, but you had to bury your loved ones via Zoom. Top scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Friedman, who warned Americans to stay home also encouraged Americans to join BLM protests.
So much science.
So, this Thanksgiving, be thankful there is no climate crisis, and be thankful that you are smart enough to see through the lies, the fear, and the politicized nonsense. Be resolved to fight against anyone, politicians or scientists, who tries to take your freedom or property under the guise of COVID or climate.
This Thanksgiving, rejoice that you are a free American.
Daniel Turner is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. Twitter: @DanielTurnerPTF
Social Security and Medicare are so popular they are commonly known as the “third rail” of politics. Any politician who touches them gets a nasty shock. The politically smart thing for decades has been to periodically increase benefits and not worry too much about adequately funding these supposedly self-sufficient programs
Congress designates SS/Medicare as non-discretionary spending, which allows even fiscal conservatives to earnestly explain that Congress is unable to touch them, not even to reduce the benefit increases they themselves bestowed in the past. Of course, this is ridiculous since Congress could legally eliminate the programs if it chose to do so (not recommended).
As the population has aged and birth rates have fallen, SS/Medicare have descended into serious financial distress. This year, the programs will spend $69 billion more than they take in. The programs’ trustees recently moved the date for expected insolvency up to 2031 for Medicare, 2034 for Social Security.
Yet there is little acknowledgment from the political class that a problem exists. To acknowledge it creates a mandate for making highly unpopular choices. Even Donald Trump, the would be “conservative” leader, has decreed that no part of making America great again will involve touching our major entitlements. The endless quest for re-election continues to dominate decision making in Washington.
Even beyond entitlements, America has a spending problem. The federal government spends about 25% of GDP but only takes in revenues of 19%. The rest is charged off to future generations. With interest rates returning to normal levels, federal debt service will soon exceed $1 trillion a year, roughly what we spend to defend our country.
Why do we continue to spend so recklessly in times of peace and prosperity? It’s partly our perverse politics, where spenders dare opponents to suggest fiscal reforms and then rip them for bringing it up.
It’s also a mindset. Not long ago, families were considered the primary caregivers for each other. It was contemptible to neglect your own.
Americans today believe they are entitled to have government assume what were formerly family duties. Politicians gain millions of grateful dependents and family structure suffers, but there’s no going back.
Federal decision-makers have adopted an all-purpose solution to the problems that plague us: throw dollars at it. Schools failing? Send money. Semiconductor industry struggling? More money. People still living in poverty? Appropriate even more money. Money papers over our problems but affords no actual solutions.
Nobody even talks about the monetary implications of our ongoing border crisis. Over seven million mostly unskilled illegal immigrants breached our borders. Immediately upon successfully registering their fraudulent asylum claims, they expect food, shelter, medical care, transportation, eventually education, and social services all without a thought of paying for them.
The direct and indirect costs are incalculable, but California already reports annual direct expenses of $21.76 billion while Texas pays $8.8 billion and Arizona $3.2 billion.
Yet Democrats contend only more money can solve the problem. Biden and border czar Kamala Harris claim Republicans are responsible for the border mess because they once blocked further spending increases, even though the money goes to accommodate more illegal immigration. It’s time to end this massive farce and lawfully control the border. Democrats will have to find some less costly way to recruit future voters.
Our response to the COVID epidemic was another giant boondoggle. There wasn’t much to do about the virus. Protect the vulnerable, treat the ill, develop a vaccine, and allow it to run its course.
Instead, we embraced an orgy of spending. Trillions went to infrastructure improvements, solar energy, daycare, schools, businesses, and even individuals, all inexplicably in the name of COVID. It didn’t affect the course of the disease, but our descendants will pay for this spree far into the future.
It gets worse. In 2025, the spending caps on Obamacare and other discretionary items are set to expire as are the low interest bonds the government issued when money was cheap. There will be tremendous pressure to spend yet more just to maintain the spending status quo.
Thomas Jefferson, 250 years ago, extolled the benefits of a “wise and frugal” government. We didn’t listen. We will soon wish we had.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently announced a new program in which the Xi Jinping government will subsidize the building of new coal-fired electricity generation plants. Part of an effort to ensure power grid reliability and stability into the future, NDRC’s notice says the program will commence January 1, 2024.
The program will enable new coal-fired power plants to recover about 30% of their capital costs in just the first two years of operation. The government subsidies will be funded from tariffs directed to operators of coal-fired plants by the country’s various electricity grids, using monies collected from commercial and industrial users.
The new program is just another proof point that China is continuing to increase the pace of expansion of its coal-fired power sector as time goes on. Indeed, a report released earlier this year by Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) showed China permitted more coal-fired power plants in 2022 than it had since 2015, and has six times more coal-fired power plants under construction currently than the rest of the world combined.
Meanwhile, as the Xi government continues its massive expansion of coal-fired electricity to ensure grid reliability, the Biden government in the U.S. remains intent on destroying its own coal sector. The Institute for Energy Research (IER) notes that this effort is being underwritten by liberal billionaire philanthropists like former Democrat presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has now pledged $1 billion from his personal fortune to, as he put it, “finish the job on coal.”
In September, Bloomberg Philanthropies stated, “With 372 of 530 coal plants announced to retire or closed to date—more than 70 percent of the country’s coal fleet—this next phase will shut down every last U.S. coal plant.” The effort also targets cutting natural gas-fired generation capacity by half, and would block any new plants from being built in the future. Noting that coal and natural gas power plants account for 98% of U.S. plant closures during 2023, IER points to the fact that the federal government’s forcing of those closures is now negatively impacting reserve margins on the nation’s power grids.
Until the recent hyper focus on cutting atmospheric carbon dioxide, it was customary for grid managers to work to maintain a reserve of up to 20% of total dispatchable generating capacity to be available to come online during severe weather conditions and other instances during which demand threatens to overwhelm supply. Grid managers are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid blackout conditions as grids become increasingly overwhelmed by intermittent, unpredictable wind and solar capacity at the expense of reliable dispatchable baseload.
The problem of lack of dispatchable reserves was highlighted in a deadly way in Texas during February 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, a series of three severe cold fronts that froze most of the state for almost a week, leading to blackouts in which an estimated 300 Texans died. In the storm’s wake, the legislature and regulators identified a series of issues on the grid and at grid manager ERCOT that needed correcting, many of which were dealt with in that year’s legislative session.
But the grid’s shortage of dispatchable thermal capacity – a long-known issue – was left unresolved that year. The 2023 legislature enacted a ballot proposal (Proposition 7) creating a fund to subsidize the rapid building of up to 10 GW of new natural gas generation capacity in the coming years. It is exactly the opposite approach being pushed by the Biden government and its political funders in the climate alarmist community, like Bloomberg.
Texas voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 7 in the November 7 election. In doing so, Texans rejected the notion that their state, which produces more natural gas than all but two other countries, should ever be subjected to an unreliable, unstable power grid that causes hundreds of deaths during weather emergencies.
Sadly, Americans living in other parts of the country will remain saddled with the destructive Biden approach, with little hope for anything improving until at least 2025.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
If you look up “failure” in the dictionary, it’s probably only a matter of time until you start seeing images of Katie Hobbs’ time as Governor of Arizona. Hobbs kicked off her reign back in January and immediately got off to a rocky start. After being in office for just over a month, Hobbs had her inauguration fund called into question, had her pick to lead the Arizona Democratic Party rejected, and was booed at the 16th Hole of the Waste Management Phoenix Open.
If that wasn’t enough, Hobbs’ nominations for agency directors have been a complete disaster. Her pick to lead the Department of Health Services, Dr. Theresa Cullen, was rejected for her COVID imperialism. Her nominee for Housing Director was rejected due to a history of plagiarism. And she was forced to withdraw her nominee for Arizona Registrar of Contractors, former Democratic State Senator Martín Quezada, over his alliance with antisemitic extremism. It’s no wonder why Hobbs was listed as one of the least popular governors in the nation.
That’s probably why Hobbs is willing to do anything she can to get some good publicity, but her latest stunt was another misfire…and broke the law…
It seems that any meeting between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping inevitably presents another opportunity to render the U.S. increasingly reliant on China for its energy security.
This week’s meetings at the APEC conference in a suddenly cleaned-up San Francisco were no exception.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the bilateral meetings between the U.S. and China was the looming presence of John Kerry at the table. Kerry serves as Biden’s “climate envoy,” a made-up job that is not even a confirmed position and does not merit a seat at such meetings. But there he was, making sure the President and other U.S. officials toe the line on climate commitments.
Fox News reports that Kerry’s efforts resulted in more security compromising fruit, as State Department officials agreed with their Chinese counterparts to triple down on commitments to further inhibit American energy and national security in the name of climate change. The two governments agreed to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation” with renewables and electric vehicles in the coming years, a pledge that China has already undermined with its implementation of a new round of subsidies for the acceleration of its already-massive expansion of coal-fired power plants in the coming years.
It is the sort of deal China has routinely violated in recent years as it continues to prioritize its own energy security at the expense of stated climate goals. It is also the sort of deal that Kerry, Biden and other Democrats have systematically used over recent decades to render the U.S. increasingly reliant on China for its own energy future.
“The agreement speaks heavily about advancing — doubling down and tripling down on renewables, wind and solar. The majority of them are made in China,” Daniel Turner, the founder and executive director of Power The Future, told Fox News Digital. “It is basically guaranteeing China decades of wealth, guaranteeing America is going to buy their products.”
Turner isn’t wrong, and the effects on climate change from the latest Kerry-led deal will be negligible, if not actually negative given China’s far lower environmental regulations and standards. Even worse, China’s control of the supply chains for most of the parts and metals that go into the making and deployment of renewables and EVs leaves the U.S. and other western nations with a steadily diminishing sphere of geopolitical leverage.
But Americans did receive a bit of positive news in the green energy realm this past week from a seemingly unlikely source: Oil major ExxonMobil. The biggest U.S.-based oil company announced the kickoff of a new project to produce lithium from a deep underground saltwater formation in southern Arkansas called the Smackover.
Somewhat ironically, ExxonMobil will deploy standard oil and gas drilling, production and reinjection technologies and processes to produce, extract and process the lithium. If successful, the project will turn America’s biggest major oil company into one of the country’s biggest lithium companies, too.
This is probably not exactly the model Biden’s regulators, many of whom are alumni of leftist anti-fossil fuel lobby groups, envisioned when they began launching their myriad efforts to subsidize and regulate this artificial energy transition into being, but they should be glad to take the help where they can get it.
Given that the ExxonMobil project will qualify for the tax incentives contained in the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden officials will even be able to point to it as a success story related to that costly legislation.
Given that the administration’s own efforts to source domestic supplies of critical energy metals and free their supply chains from Chinese dominance have to this point borne little fruit, the project being mounted by ExxonMobil amounts to a great leap forward.
What it all demonstrates is that all the handshake deals between government Mandarins like Kerry in the world cannot match the power of innovation and ingenuity from America’s private sector. It also demonstrates the absolute necessity of maintaining a healthy and robust domestic oil and gas industry, without which none of this is remotely possible.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Democrats claim election fraud is a myth. But videos don’t lie.
Roll the tapes:
On Nov. 1, Connecticut Judge William Clark overturned the results of the Bridgeport mayoral primary, calling video evidence of potential fraud “shocking.” Wanda Geter-Pataky, the vice chair of the Bridgeport Democratic Town Committee, appears to have been caught on video stuffing handfuls of ballots into a drop box outside City Hall.
On Oct. 25, in Paterson, New Jersey, the sitting president of the City Council, Alex Mendez, was charged with personally collecting large numbers of mail-in ballots in his district, destroying ballots that did not favor him and replacing them with ballots that falsely chose him. New Jersey’s Attorney General Matthew Platkin states that Mendez “personally observed from his wife’s vehicle as a large, heavy bag, completely filled with ballots, was emptied into the Haledon postal box prior to the election.”
On Nov. 2, in Springfield, Massachusetts, mayoral candidate Justin Hurst was nailed by city election officials for allegedly buying votes during early voting. Videotape shows individuals being dropped off in black Suburbans and Expeditions, and entering City Hall to vote. When they exited, a man “takes out what appears to be a large bundle of cash” and peels off a bill for each individual, according to an affidavit by election commissioner Gladys Oyola-Lopez.
In one week, election fraudsters were busted in three major Northeastern cities.
Leftist organizations such as the Brennan Center for Justice and the League of Women Voters claim voter fraud is a “phantom” and “extremely rare.” Don’t buy it. The evidence is all around us.
Cheating is a cakewalk because of accommodations pushed by Democrats, including universal mail-in voting and unmanned drop boxes.
Now is the time to scrutinize the 2023 races and plug the obvious gaps. Cheating should not determine the outcome in the highly consequential 2024 national election.
In Bridgeport’s 2023 mayoral primary, Democratic candidate John Gomes was ahead, until he got crushed late in the process when absentee votes favoring incumbent Mayor Joe Ganim were counted.
One Bridgeport poll described the use of absentee ballots there as “an art form.” That “art form” may partially explain how Ganim, who was Bridgeport’s mayor from 1991 to 2003 — before serving seven years in federal prison for racketeering, extortion, filing false tax returns, and other crimes — was able to stage a comeback upon his release from prison and win election in 2015 and 2019.
In Connecticut, Democrats are singing one song: Fraud is “unique to Bridgeport” and isn’t a problem elsewhere. Wrong.
Last year, John Mallozzi, then chairman of the Democratic Party in Stamford, was convicted of forgery and making false statements related to absentee ballots. His ruse was uncovered when a voter named on a fraudulent absentee ballot actually showed up at the polls.
Connecticut Republican legislators are pushing to improve voting security. Rep. Doug Dubitsky, a Republican, says “this exact same thing could be happening in every single municipality in this state.” But Democrats who control both houses of the state legislature and all statewide offices refuse to tighten voting procedures.
That’s not hard to explain. In statewide races, including for governor or president, Republicans historically have been ahead until the absentee ballots in the Democrat-controlled cities in Connecticut are tallied.
Across the nation, Republicans are pressing state legislatures to eliminate drop boxes and bar third parties from collecting huge numbers of completed ballots — a practice called “harvesting.” Republicans also want to use software to match the signature on the mail-in ballot to the signature on the voter registration form.
Democrats almost universally oppose these safeguards, calling them “voter suppression.” “Cheating suppression” is more like it.
Perceptions of unfairness are corrosive. At a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing in June, polls were cited showing 37% of Democratic-leaning voters and 71% of Republican-leaning voters doubt the honesty of elections.
Most European countries require voters to show up in person, unless they are out of the country or disabled. These countries tried mail-in voting and eliminated it in the face of widespread fraud.
Americans need to get smart. Convenience shouldn’t take priority over security. Before you board a plane, you have to wait in line while your carry-ons are inspected. It’s inconvenient but worth it.
Same is true for voting. When you turn on the TV on election night to watch the returns, you want to know the results are honest, whether your candidate wins or not.
Betsy McCaughey is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
