Elizabeth Warren's Cruel Plan For "Environmental Justice"

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  • Elizabeth Warren wants to be known as the Democratic presidential candidate who has a “Plan” for everything. I count some 50 of these Plans here on her website.

  • [N]ow we can make that 51 Plans, because yesterday Warren came out with the latest and greatest of them all, titled “FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE AS WE COMBAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”

  • [According to Warren] we have a “crisis of environmental justice,” caused by racist people like you putting “profits before people” while the government “look[s] the other way.”

  • I have a different word to describe Warren’s Plan for Climate Justice. There’s nothing uplifting about my word. The word is “cruel.” Warren’s Plan is truly cruel to the poor and to the people in “frontline and fence line communities” (as Warren calls them). It is cruel because it points only toward greater dependency, which will mean worse health, and toward higher energy costs, which will mean further impoverishment.

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The Latest Icon Of The "Success" Of Socialism: Bolivia

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With the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Labour Party in the UK having gone over fully into advocacy for good old-fashioned Socialism (with a capital S), we could use a real-life example of a self-proclaimed Socialist country that can claim at least a semblance of success.

Bernie Sanders likes to say that he is advocating for Socialism on the Scandinavian model, but he keeps getting rebuked by actual Scandinavian leaders and economists who deny that their model is actually Socialist at all. For example, there was Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, in a 2015 speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Or there was Swedish economist Johan Norberg, quoted in IBD in 2016 as to that country:

"In the 1950s, Sweden was already one of the world's richest countries, and back then, taxes were lower in Sweden than in the United States." It was only after that, says Norberg, "did we start expanding the government dramatically. And do you know what happened then? We started losing," says Norberg. "It all ended in a terrible crisis." [But] Norberg says the country has become "successful again, but only after a new reform period, with more deregulation and free trade than in other countries."

So where is a good Socialist to turn? Clearly, at this point Venezuela is best ignored. (The WSJ has a big front-page story today on the struggles of a young couple trying to flee Venezuela, along with about a full tenth of the population so far.) But fear not. The Nation has the answer. Bolivia! . . .

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The Climate Strikers Are Completely Unhinged

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The Climate Strikers Are Completely Unhinged

If you’ve ever spent much time in New York, you know that it can be weather-challenged: very hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter. But September is almost always a month of near-perfect temperatures, and this year has been no exception. Nevertheless, the so-called “Climate Strike” movement chose last Friday, September 20, as the date for their big day of demonstrations.

The high temperature was an ideal 77 deg F (25 deg C). Estimates of the number of protesters that turned out range (according to the New York Times) from 60,000 (NY Police Dept.) to 250,000 (organizers). The message of the speakers was, of course, that we are in the midst of a climate crisis that must be addressed immediately by drastic and coercive government action. It seems that the organizers and leaders of the demonstrations, let alone a goodly number of the participants, have turned themselves purple with anger over unverifiable predictions of barely-perceptible future temperature increases. From the Times:

Rarely, if ever, has the modern world witnessed a youth movement so large and wide, spanning across societies rich and poor, tied together by a common if inchoate sense of rage.

Let me assemble some of the words that were used by these people. I suppose that they somehow think that this kind of rhetoric might be convincing to the normal people who were just trying to enjoy a beautiful late summer day. Is any of it persuasive to you? . . .

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Hey Democratic Candidates: Are You Going To Ban All Fossil Fuels?

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The CNN climate “town hall” was just the beginning. With each passing day it seems that there is a louder and louder chorus of voices on the left demanding that all candidates get in line with a total war against use of all fossil fuels. After all, total eradication of these evil fuels is the only way to save humanity from climate apocalypse.

Probably, you don’t read these things, so I’ll just give you a couple of examples to demonstrate how completely unhinged they have become. . . .

try this one from Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker on Sunday (September 8), titled “What If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming.”  

[E]very one of the world’s major polluting countries [must] institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. . . . [T]he carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. . . . To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. . . . [O]verwhelming numbers of human beings . . . need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. . . . They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

So where do the candidates stand? Go through the leading contenders, and you find that sure enough they are quickly lining up to eradicate fossil fuels. . . .

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The Competition Over How To Impoverish The American People Continues Among Democratic Candidates

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It was back on June 4 that I posed the eternal question, “Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?” That post noted that the Democratic candidates for President had begun a kind of bidding war over who could put forth the most extreme proposal to shackle the American economy in the name of climate salvation, while at the same time “out in the rest of the world” they were “laugh[ing] at this spectacle.” Among the data points cited in that post were that China was seeking reductions in the price of coal in order to spur consumption of electricity, and that in Australia a national election had just been lost by the party that made a principal issue out of its opposition to a huge new coal mine in Queensland.

In the three months since early June, things have only gotten sillier.

  • The Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 from the BP oil company came out. A summary of it in Forbes on June 28 noted: “Coal consumption in most of the developing world continues to grow. Asia Pacific increased consumption [in 2018] by the most overall, but its 2.5% growth rate lagged Africa's (+3.9%) and Central and South America (+3.7%).”

  • The annual Google billionaires’ climate summit was held in Sicily at the beginning of August. From euronews: “114 private jets flew into the Italian Verdura Resort, according to the Italian press, and many of the elite guest list arrived in multi-million pound yachts. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama and Prince Harry in attendance, reports Jim Dobson at Forbes, they were hardly going to be hitch-hiking. . . .” . . .

So then, by now, at least some of the Democratic candidates must have noticed that the climate change thing is over, right? Don’t be ridiculous. In fact, back in June the bidding war of insane “climate” proposals was only getting started. Now, the run-up to last night’s CNN climate “town hall” provided the impetus for a round of new and ever-more-extreme bids, each one promising some new impoverishment of the American people in the name of appeasing the climate gods: . . .

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The Anti-Climate-Change Energy Crunch Is Starting To Hit New York

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The Anti-Climate-Change Energy Crunch Is Starting To Hit New York

As you all know, the game plan of climate activists is to restrict and ultimately ban the use of carbon-based fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas. Don’t worry, those will all be replaced in due course with perfectly clean and free “renewables.” You won’t even notice that it is happening! At least until your price of electricity triples or you can’t heat your house any more.

I’ve long said that the politics of energy will change significantly when people start to get hit with reality in the form of soaring prices or shortages. An early example of the latter is starting to take shape here in New York.

In recent years, jurisdictions have competed with one another with promises to get higher and higher percentages of energy from “renewables,” and lower and lower percentages from fossil fuels, by earlier and earlier dates. For example, California claims to be “leading the nation toward a 100 percent clean energy future and addressing climate change.” California’s SB 350, enacted into law in 2015, directs the state to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. But New York was not about to cede “climate leadership” to those rubes on the West coast. As reported here on July 6, New York’s legislature had just passed the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.” It’s goals: to get 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, followed by reduction of all carbon emissions — not just from the electricity sector — by 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. Take that, California! . . .

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