Monday roundup

 It's November now, and it's off to a glorious start where I live. I'm taking pictures of the trees like crazy. We haven't had this kind of splendor, certainly not this late, for several years. It's one thing that's going right in a world that is tainted in so many ways.

Several entries in today's roundup have to do with the global climate.

Stanley Young of the Heartland Institute has filed suit against the federal government for dismissing all seven members of the Clean Air Advisory Committee.

The desires of the climate alarmists notwithstanding, coal is still vital to the energy mix:

Although the COP26 virtuous don’t want you to know it, rebounding economies and the ongoing global energy crisis have vaulted much-maligned coal to the top of the energy food chain, once again.

President Biden’s energy-climate policies have apparently been more friendly to coal than those of President Trump. 

New federal data has U.S. coal-fired power generation leaping 22% in 2021 to 945 terawatt-hours - the first annual increase for coal since 2014. 

Coal will generate nearly a quarter of U.S. electricity this year, with competitor natural gas prices doubling since June to over $6.00. 

The demand boom has U.S. coal companies now offering miners six-figure salaries. 

Not too shabby for a commodity that the media has loved to leave for dead for well over a decade now. 

“Coal’s burnout,” The Washington Post declared on January 2, 2011. 

Personal politics permeating “journalism” continues to leave us energy-climate stupid. 

And with President Xi Jinping not expected to attend the upcoming COP26 climate summit, the world’s top consumer is hardly “getting off coal.

Even Europe is starting to see that its goofy skittishness about normal-people forms of energy is becoming prohibitively costly.

Good old coal is still great stuff:

Only ~20% of global coal usage is internationally traded, making coal a largely domestic resource with huge energy security advantages for consumers.  

By comparison, ~33% of gas and ~75% of oil are swapped from country to country. 

Coal is a foundational resource in all-important Asia, so demand typically grows as the population and economy expand. 

Globally, coal is still easily the main source of electricity at 37-40% of all generation. 

Coal accounts for 60-65% of the electricity generation in China and 68-73% in India – the two most significant incremental energy users that hold ~35% of humanity.

Vijay Jayaraj of the Heartland Institute takes offense at a tweet from a woman whose Twitter profile lists as her creds "trying to save the planet, got good green ideas, just need someone to help me . . . get them done," and understandably so:

n this age of green craze, the most likely response to legitimate concerns about the lack of access to energy for the world’s poor is advocacy for so-called renewable technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels.

As embarrassing as that suggestion should be to the advocate of such unreliable and impractical energy sources, there are sometimes even more cringe-worthy replies that verge on the inhumane.  A recent tweet of mine prompted one such response.

The tweet was directed to attendees of COP26, a United Nations climate conference that gets underway this month at Glasgow.  The annual conference seldom addresses third-world energy poverty, which deprives billions of people of basic needs like clean water, lights, and modern medical care.  Many of these people are subjected to indoor pollution from cooking and heating with wood and animal dung while bureaucrats and politicians preach the banning of the very fossil fuels necessary to alleviate their suffering.

When I questioned in a tweet the evident lack of empathy for poor people in developing parts of the world, a person responded that India has too many people.

“I want COP26 attendees to ask themselves a simple question,” my tweet stated.  “What are they going to do about those in the third world who still do not have access to affordable & reliable energy — both for cooking and for electricity? We need gas, oil, and coal. Do not enforce energy apartheid on us.”

The response tweet said, “India is seriously overpopulated, they need to breed less.”

Breed less?  How can an Indian like myself not be insulted by such an anti-human suggestion?  Are the 1.3 billion people of India lab rats with no right to procreate as we see fit?

Hoover Institution senior fellow and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster gives a great interview to Deseret News. A taste:

Deseret: In foreign policy, are you a realist or an idealist? 

McMaster: Those labels aren’t that useful. That polarization is rooted in what I call strategic narcissism, defining the world only in relation to us, and assuming that what we do or choose not to do is decisive in determining the outcome. On what might be called the self-loathing far left, many believe that America is the problem and therefore disengagement is good. And on the far right you have neo-isolationism, driven by a mild form of bigotry. But what they both fail to recognize is that others also have agency and authorship over the future, including our adversaries, rivals and enemies. As G.K. Chesterton observed, the best way to settle differences is to ensure they’re not settled for you.

Deseret: But should the United States be trying to export democracy and engage in nation building?

McMaster: I don’t believe we were trying to turn Afghanistan into Denmark. It just needed to be Afghanistan. That country needed a government consistent with their traditions, with their culture, with their decentralized nature. At the same time, we needed to establish a political order that was hostile to jihadist terrorists. And that’s what we had developed, and that’s what we gave up. Their society had been transformed since 2001, but not into a Jeffersonian democracy. We wasted a lot of effort based on unrealistic assumptions about Afghanistan. 

I watched Dave Chapelle's The Closer yesterday, and when I read this, I found myself resonating with its take:

Dave Chappelle is right about transgender ideology. He’s right about the disproportionate control that gender ideologues wield over pop culture and public discourse. And he’s also right that most of the people greatly upset by his jokes are white liberals who are more than happy to drop their racial consciousness at the sign of any conflict between minorities and LGBTQ activism. 

But this doesn’t, or shouldn’t, add up to conservative sympathy for him. Chappelle is not a hapless victim of a crushing ideological agenda; he’s not Barronelle Stutzman or James Eich. Chappelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robespierre of the very revolution that’s after him now. His fortune was made inside the same progressive sensibility that threatens him, and it is precisely Chappelle’s (and many other comedians) skill with which he dismissed any notion of the sacred that has taken root in the people who are walking out on his un-PC act.

Chappelle is a supremely talented comic. His timing is often sublime, and his blending of absurdism with biting observational humor is dazzling to watch. But Chappelle’s comedy, like so many others, depends critically on an “lol nothing matters” mentality. There’s an undercurrent of nihilism to his routine, a low-level hopelessness about daily life that comes through especially when he takes on those “edgy” topics like male rape or pedophilia. Chappelle has a point when he observes that nobody boycotted him for these jokes until he started saying that men are not women, but one major reason no one boycotted for those jokes was the delivery. Chappelle is a master at eliciting laughter in the face of meaninglessness.

Eric Boehm at Reason shows that Josh Hawley and his lame attempt at addressing the supply-chain dilemma is silly:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has a plan to address the current supply chain issues bedeviling the American economy.

He wants to make them permanent.

In an op-ed for The New York Times published Friday, Hawley uses the temporary supply chain problems as an excuse to push for a permanent expansion of federal power over the affairs of private businesses. We must "fundamentally restructure our country's trade policy," Hawley demands, and that means injecting both the Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucrats into companies' purchasing decisions. Under the terms of a bill that Hawley is proposing, any product determined to be "critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base" would have to have at least 50 percent of its value made in the United States.

Why is it necessary for the government to get significantly more involved in the system of global trade that's allowed Americans to enjoy unparalleled prosperity in recent years? Because "the global pandemic has exposed this system for what it is—a failure," Hawley writes.

One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.

A storm—or a pandemic—can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That's hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he's asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.

A piece at Spiked by Sean Collins entitled "Loudoun County and the Cruelty of Trans Ideology" asks where Scott Smith, the father of the girl raped in a school restroom by a dude wearing a girls' outfit, goes to get his reputation back. 

But then it's late in 2021 post-America and a school in Florida has taken students on a field trip to a gay bar.

 

From the I-probably-won't-vote-in-2022-or-even-2024 file: The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party adamantly insists here in November 2021 that the Very Stable Genius won the election a year ago.