The Current Legal Onslaught Is Unlikely To Limit World Oil Production Significantly

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  • As you may be aware, a big part of the recent strategy of environmental activists supposedly to address “climate change” has been a multi-front legal onslaught against the major oil producing companies. The onslaught has included everything from hundreds of lawsuits in as many jurisdictions, restrictive new laws, regulatory initiatives, proxy contests, and much else.

  • The past few days have brought news of what may appear to be a couple of major victories by the activists. In the U.S., insurgent shareholders on May 26 scored a victory in a proxy contest involving ExxonMobil, successfully electing two directors (out of twelve) to the board of the company. Separately, on the same day, in a lawsuit brought in the Netherlands by Friends of the Earth, a court in The Hague ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions by some 45% by 2030.

  • Various media sources, including the Wall Street Journal at the two links above, are reporting these developments as significant defeats for the oil and gas industry, and even as harbingers of its impending rapid decline in the face of mounting legal obstacles. But is such a decline really likely?

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“No Evidence Covid-19 Came From a Lab”: The Media Blow Another Hole in Their Credibility

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  • For a full year, the official media narrative was that there was “‘Exactly Zero’ Evidence Covid-19 Came From a Lab.” (That from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in May 2020) To suggest any such evidence might exist was a pure conspiracy theory. The scientific community had come to a consensus on the subject, one that had been fact checked by multiple independent news sources such as the Washington Post and Politifact.

  • It’s funny how many big news stories, especially those that may be politically sensitive, get framed with this type of hyperbolic language: “Fact-checked. We are absolutely certain, without a doubt, that there’s nothing more to see here.” That’s especially true if the story might lead a remotely curious person to question the official narrative.

  • But that makes it more important than ever that we keep paying attention. In the case of the Covid-19 lab leak, there is an abundance of articles from last year to this year that show the media’s 180 degree pivot.

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"Defund The Police": Maybe The Most Counter-Productive Progressive Policy Yet

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  • One of the big themes of this blog over the years has been chronicling the counter-productive results of various progressive government schemes for perfecting the world — everything from “anti-poverty” programs, to “affordable” housing, to energy restrictions in the name of the “climate,” to punitive tax rates on high earners, and so on and on.

  • My general observation has been that all of these things inevitably fail to ameliorate the problem they are supposed to address, and instead bring about gradual economic and societal decline in the jurisdictions that try them. Decades into the effort, places that have continuously followed the progressive prescriptions have turned into what I have called the “basket case” cities — cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and many more, that have seen a long term of premium taxes and large “caring” bureaucracies, but accompanied by inadequate private investment, shortage of good jobs, declining populations and high rates of crime and violence.

  • But at least the declines of these places have generally been gradual — often so gradual that the people living through the decline can barely perceive it. Not so with the latest progressive fad, the movement to “defund the police” and otherwise withdraw political support for assertive policing, theoretically replacing that with some kind of “new paradigm” of social workers or something.

  • The defunding movement, and related initiatives, has been followed by sudden and dramatic jumps in the rates of violent crime, particularly murders, in the progressive jurisdictions. The overall result has been thousands of additional deaths, mostly of young black men. This could be the most counter-productive progressive policy yet.

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"Settler Colonialism": More Of The Usual Progressive Racism And Hatred Of Freedom

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  • Several years ago, in connection with a family trip to Israel, I looked into the issue of Israeli “settlements” in the areas of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. I then had a post in June 2017 titled “Do You Know The Difference Between ‘Settlers’ And ‘Immigrants’?” .

  • The Israeli settlements, and the “settlers” who inhabit them, have come in for constant attacks from the international left, culminating in condemnation from a UN Security Council resolution in 2016. The resolution was approved by a 14-0 vote in 2016 (on which vote the U.S., during President Obama’s tenure, abstained, rather than exercising its right to veto).

  • Yet viewed in a broader context, the Israeli settlements are a tiny part of annual migrations of millions of people around the world, going from one political jurisdiction to another. All, or nearly all, of these other migrations are applauded by the international left. Indeed, these other migrations are applauded even when they are clearly violative of the law of the destination — illegal immigration into the United States being the most prominent example.

  • So what makes the Israeli settlers so subject to widespread condemnation while other migrants are applauded?

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What Biden And The Environmental Left Are Really Planning For Us

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  • Can you remember as far back as the 2020 campaign for President? If you can, you will surely recall candidate Joe Biden carefully positioning himself as the moderate relative to the other candidates from his party.

  • This principle applied particularly to issues of energy and “climate.” For example, candidate Biden repeatedly denied on the debate stage that he had any plans to ban “fracking” for oil and gas. . . .

  • Well, that was then, and this is now. So what’s the real story? You’ll never find out where this administration is going from trying to listen to Biden himself, since he doesn’t say much, rarely takes a question, and in the few things he does say generally borders on incoherence.

  • But there’s another place you can look. As President, Biden gets to appoint all kinds of advisory councils and committees. The members of these things are not subject to confirmation. He (and his handlers) can put on them anyone they want, without asking anyone’s permission. Essentially, the whole “advisory council” thing therefore is a well-understood ruse, where members can be chosen based on their already-known positions, and the “advice” consists of recommending to the powers that be that they should do what they already wanted to do.

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Add The Wall Street Journal To The People Who Can't Do Basic Arithmetic

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  • Let’s face it, lots of people aren’t very good at math, even rather basic math. On the other hand, some people are quite good at it. If you aren’t very good at math, there are plenty of other things for you to do in life. My own field of law practice mostly does not require much skill at math, and there a plenty of math-challenged people who are nevertheless very good lawyers.

  • But some big societal decisions require a certain level of math competence. Some of these decisions can involve multi-hundreds of billions of dollars, or even multi-trillions of dollars.

  • For example, consider the question of whether proposed electricity generation system X has the capability to deliver the amount of electricity a state or region needs, and at the times it is needed. Answering this question is just a matter of applied basic arithmetic.

  • Given the dollars involved, you would think that when a question like this is being addressed, it would be time to call in some people who could do the arithmetic, or who at least would be willing to try.

  • Yet when the issue is replacing generation of electricity by fossil fuels with generation by “renewables,” it seems that the need to believe that the renewables will work and be cost effective is so powerful that all efforts to do the arithmetic get banished.

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