Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego Is Lying Through Her Teeth

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego Is Lying Through Her Teeth

by | Sep 18, 2023 | Opinion

By Jeff Caldwell |

A couple weeks ago, after Mayor Gallego did her interviews and headed home from the City Council meeting on September 6, she posted a photo on X of her pouring milk from a $7 half-gallon carton into an empty bowl next to a knife. (Because what normal person doesn’t enjoy eating cereal with a knife?)

While Gallego says she is not banning meat, there is no meat in the photo.

What made her post this image with these self-righteous campaign slogans under her Official X account?

The power of Public Comment.

Earlier that day, about a dozen Grassroots citizens attended the Phoenix City Council meeting and told the mayor they do not support policies banning meat.

A constant factor was brought up by multiple public speakers: Gallego is the Vice-Chair of the C40 Cities. According to the C40 Cities website, “C40 is a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis.” C40 has many documents outlining the organization’s desire to reduce and abolish the consumption of meat.

And the citizens don’t want it!

The troubling fact is, on March 4, 2020, Gallego and the Council passed the 2025 Phoenix Food Action Plan. In Strategy 2, under Goal 1, the fifth “Progress on Action” creates a new policy for the Office of Environmental Programs (OEP) at the City of Phoenix to enter a contract with Arizona State University to “establish an AgriFood Tech Incubator in 2023 to accelerate ventures in sustainable food systems…​”

But this is nothing new. The City of Phoenix has multiple policies for sustainable food systems in the 2020 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory report conducted by ASU. And Gallego also has many policies tied to ASU. In fact, she is funding and has teamed up with the college for multiple environmental and sustainable projects. What type of environmentally sustainable policies does ASU believe in?

Let’s check out their degrees in “Sustainable Food Systems.” The Bachelor of Science degree states, “Students become effective agents of change” and “Students are engaged in an active community collectively working to achieve the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.” The degree for Online Master of Science in Sustainable Food Systems lists Kathleen Merrigan as the leader of the degree program.

According to ASU’s biography page for Merrigan, she is the Kelly and Brian Swette Professor in the School of Sustainability and executive director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. She was listed as one of Time magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2010. And she is a partner in Astanor Ventures along with being an advisor to S2G Ventures—two firms investing in ag-tech innovation. Merrigan also holds a PhD in Public Policy and Environmental Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In an article titled, “In Light of Climate Change Debates, ASU Continues Sustainability Efforts,” Merrigan is quoted as saying, “Get rid of the plastic water bottles, eat less meat…” to make ASU more sustainable. Furthermore, ASU has a research program that is teamed up with Merrigan and the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. The program states it is ASU’s desire to find out how to implement “dietary shifts towards plant-based diets” through “interventions.” Peoples’ eating habits in reaction to COVID-19 lockdowns, a major intervention on society, are listed in this document.

Now, consider one major food intervention taken by Mayor Gallego. Just two weeks after passing the 2025 Phoenix Food Action Plan, she decided to lock Phoenix down due to COVID. After the lockdown began, the Medical Director for Disease Control with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, Dr. Sunenshine, gave public testimony at the March 23, 2020 Phoenix City Council meeting. Dr Sunenshine stated that the Mayor shut the city down without reaching out to her office first. Dr. Sunenshine also said she would have recommended staying open.

Locking down the city implemented the most direct intervention on eating habits we have seen in our lifetime. Shutting down restaurants cut off 50% of our food supply because the government prevents restaurant food from being sold in grocery stores. The lockdown drastically constrained supply, damaged the supply chain for food, and helped lead to the astronomical food prices we see today.

While Gallego is able to say she is not literally banning meat, she is implementing policies that make meat more expensive and will lead to major reductions of meat consumption in the future. Dare I suggest by 2030?

Just to demonstrate that Gallego is implementing an ideology and that this is not isolated to only Phoenix, consider this. On April 24, 2023, Gallego posted a video with Mayor Quinton Lucas from Kansas City celebrating his “first fully-autonomous ride with Waymo.” Does Kansas City have a plan to reduce meat consumption?

Of course, they do! Under Lucas, Kansas City passed its Climate Action Plan in September 2022. Kansas City’s Climate Action Plan Food section in each division of Kansas City lists promoting plant-based diets!

Another city recently popped up in the news cycle. Chicago is possibly going to open city-owned grocery stores, so I looked up their action plans. In 2021, Chicago began reducing red meat from its schools, juvenile detention center, and Chicago Park District menus. The same document identifying Chicago reducing meat claims Chicago wants “to foster more racially and socially equitable supply chains across the region.” They are saying the quiet part out loud! They want to disrupt the supply chain to reduce meat consumption. Now, if Chicago does end up opening city-owned grocery stores, do you think they will sell meat? Absolutely not!

But let’s get back to Mayor Gallego’s post from a little over a week ago. Her claim of reducing energy costs is another bold-faced lie. Gallego teamed up with the “Climate Mayors” from across the country to release an op-ed on September 10, 2023 claiming the implementation of green energy plans have reduced the cost of energy!

But mayors cannot claim they are reducing energy costs! The cost of energy is set by Corporation Commissions with utilities providers. Mayors have nothing to do with the cost of energy.

But let’s pretend they do. The Federal Reserve states that the cost of energy for the Greater Phoenix Area is skyrocketing! It’s higher than any point over the past five years!

FRED Chart showing Average Price for Electricity in Phoenix, Mesa, and Scottsdale

The policies Mayor Gallego is implementing are detrimental to our well-being and set to a radical left agenda. They should not be accepted, and they should not be tolerated.

That’s why it’s critical for the people of Phoenix to stand up, speak up, give public comments, and more. It’s the best way to stop these radical policies that price people out of being able to afford meat, interrupt the supply chain of meat, and make energy costs skyrocket.

Jeff Caldwell currently helps with operations at EZAZ.org. He is also a Precinct Captain, State Committeeman, and Precinct Committeeman in Legislative District 2. Jeff is a huge baseball fan who enjoys camping and exploring new, tasty restaurants! You can follow him on X here.

Our Elitist Environmental Experts Are Driving Us Over the Cliff

Our Elitist Environmental Experts Are Driving Us Over the Cliff

by | Aug 5, 2022 | Opinion

By Dr. Thomas Patterson |

Leftist thought leaders insist that we are facing an environmental holocaust unless we immediately, drastically reduce carbon emissions.

Yet it’s curious. The governing and influence elites demand massive societal sacrifice, while they are apparently not concerned enough to alter their own extravagant lifestyles. They own multiple sumptuous homes, cars, and yachts. They fly individual private jets to their annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland, where they assure each other that it is their solemn responsibility to save the rest of us from ourselves.

They refuse to engage in thoughtful debate on any notions that challenge their woke orthodoxy. Instead, those advocating ideas different from their own are dismissed as “climate deniers.”

Take electric vehicles. EVs are touted by enviros as the obvious antidote to carbon belching SUVs. But they aren’t.

Fossil fuels produce most of their electricity. The manufacture and disposal of batteries—and the rare metals required—have significant environmental impacts. A growing consensus now acknowledges that EVs may produce more net carbon emissions than today’s cleaner burning gasoline cars.

You would think anyone with genuine concern about the environment might reconsider EV policy. But they don’t engage. Instead, they soldier on, funding yet more subsidies, benefits, and charging stations. Taxpayers get dinged for billions with no discernible benefit.

Clearly, to these decision makers, climate change isn’t about climate. It’s about power. Egomaniacal persons of all stripes throughout history have had the unquenchable desire to control the lives of others and operate the world from their centers of power. Think Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Gates, Zuckerberg – make your own list.

One irony is that the consequences of rising temperatures may not be that harmful. According to Swedish economist Bjorn Lomborg, higher temperatures are far less harmful than lower ones.

500,000 people worldwide die annually from heat-related causes, while 4.5 million die from cold. Over the last decade or so, rising temperatures have caused 116,000 more heat deaths yearly, but also 283,000 fewer cold-related deaths per year. How many hysterical accounts of coming devastation would you have to read to learn that?

It’s not the heat but the political responses to climate change that are causing real harm. Low-cost synthetic fertilizer is an innovation that has greatly enhanced our ability to feed the world. Because it is made from natural gas, climate activists have limited its use, even though 1 billion people worldwide are facing imminent threat of starvation.

Other pressing needs have been drowned out by the insistence on prioritizing climate change. Recent increases in energy prices were exacerbated by Biden’s self-proclaimed war on fossil fuels. Europe’s refusal to capitalize on its shale reserves and their shunning of nuclear power also resulted in higher energy prices and lower security, as did subsidies of solar and wind, which are still not substantial, reliable suppliers to the electrical grid.

The costs of climate activism will be even higher if governments seriously pursue their stated aim of producing net zero emissions by 2050. The truth is that climate is a global problem. With our current technologies and geopolitical realities (i.e., China) such goals are simply not attainable.

But the price for such climate grandstanding would be $5 trillion per year for 30 years according to McKinsey. Every single American would have to pay $5,000 per year to achieve even 80% of the goal by mid-century.

Ordinary citizens are getting fed up with these elitist obsessions. Polls show climate change far down the list of Americans’ concerns.

40,000 Dutch farmers recently held a mass protest against government mandates that nitrogen-oxide and ammonia emissions, produced by livestock, be reduced by 80%. The government of Sri Lanka resigned after a ban on synthetic fertilizers decimated food production and the economy collapsed.

Remember, we’re only in the early phases of the alarmists’ grand plans to reorder society. Already, California and other areas, possibly including Arizona, are facing the threat of rolling blackouts. An EU official recently warned that millions of Europeans may not be able to heat their homes this winter.

Climate change is manageable through mitigation and innovation. The fabulously expensive, impractical nostrums being pushed by our self-appointed experts are a recipe for human suffering and chaos.

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.