Government making us use play-like energy forms will consign us to a cold, dark future

 Per the Washington Free Beacon:

President Joe Biden's aggressive climate regulations targeting fossil-fuel-fired power plants will create widespread electric grid instability and lead to mass blackouts impacting millions of Americans, according to a recent studycommissioned by North Dakota's state government.

The research, conducted in May by the firm Always On Energy Research, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units. Intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions, the study found.

The study largely echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U.S. grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; regional grid operators; and power utility companies. Four regional grid operators that oversee the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warnedafter the EPA regulations were first proposed last year that grid reliability would "dwindle to concerning levels" under the regulations. The Edison Electric Institute, the lead industry group representing U.S. electric companies, in late May joined a lawsuit that challenged the EPA's finalized regulations.

"Biden's Green Agenda is shutting down baseload power and is rapidly destabilizing our electrical grid. Electricity costs are up 30% under Biden already," North Dakota governor Doug Burgum (R.) told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement. "Prices will continue to skyrocket if he's re-elected as real power demand increases dramatically for the first time in decades—for chip manufacturing and new foundational industries like AI."

Burgum, a member of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which commissioned the study, added that Biden's regulatory regime will reduce power supplies, leading to "higher prices AND less reliability."

There's a dive into some numbers so we can compare and contrast:

Solar panels, for example, produce just 25 percent and wind turbines produce 34 percent of their listed capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Coal and natural gas plants, meanwhile, respectively produce 49 percent and 54 percent of their listed capacity.

Factoring in that disparity, Always On Energy Research concluded the grid across the majority of the Midwest would experience nearly 9 million megawatt hours of unserved load, leading to blackouts costing tens of billions of dollars.

"The EPA power plant rule is exactly the wrong thing to be doing for grid reliability right now," Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon. "To be intentionally closing and, essentially, banning the facilities that are keeping the grid functioning while, at the same time, in other ways, encouraging the penetration on the grid of things like wind and solar that are making the grid less reliable is going to have incredibly poor aftereffects."

Nationwide, natural gas plants generated roughly 43 percent of total electricity produced in 2023 while coal plants generated another 16 percent, according to additional Energy Information Administration data. By comparison, wind power generated 10 percent of total electricity in the United States, and solar produced less than 6 percent.

But let's not conclude on a note of making this the main point.

The main point is that government has no effing business getting between producers and consumers of energy and limiting the two parties' options as they desire to come to an agreement - that is, a transaction. 

The pointy-headed overlords don't think we have the individual capacity to make decisions that serve our own best interests. 

The EPA will make the lights flicker, cost us an arm and a leg, and greatly erode the second most precious thing we have as human beings (after our lives): our freedom.

 

 

Imposing tyranny on two policy fronts: the family and energy

 LITD readers are familiar with my explanation regarding why, while I can't vote for a Republican Party that has wholly given itself over to the MAGA cult, I also cannot vote for any candidate of the Democratic Party. It's the party of climate alarmism, militant identity politics, and wealth redistribution.

The third characteristic is the means by which it enacts policies motivated by the first two.

Today's Exhibit A is the Biden administration's plan to subsidize day care:

It’s an election year, and so the Biden administration is going all-in on an ill-considered, poorly targeted campaign of subsidizing child care.

Biden’s child care plan is expensive social engineering that would create shortages and reward special interests while providing no help to millions of parents. While we grant it will get glowing press and might sound good in a stump speech, there are no redeeming traits to this plan. None. It is wretched from top to bottom.

“Make no mistake,” Vice President Kamala Harris posted last week. “President Joe Biden and I intend to cap child care costs at $10 a day for the average family and make preschool free for all four-year-olds.”

It’s imprudent for the government to spend tens of billions of dollars a year on child care at a time of record deficits and high inflation. Any pro-family spending or tax breaks Congress sees fit to provide should go to slight expansions of the child tax credit (indexing it for inflation, at the very least).

Giving parents money or letting them keep more of their own is obviously superior family policy because it gives parents a choice. Some will spend their tax savings on day care. Others will use the cash cushion as a way to work less and thus spend more time with children. Still others will use the money to build a granny flat or hire a nanny.

But the Biden administration seems dominated by ideologues who think there is only one right choice for a couple: two full-time jobs and institutional day care.

Most parents, however, do not want this. American Compass found in a 2021 poll that 53% of married mothers prefer to have one stay-at-home parent at least until the youngest child is in kindergarten.

This truth will be lost on the governing and media elites. “Whereas lower-, working-, and middle-class adults are most likely to choose a full-time worker and a stay-at-home parent as their ideal,” American Compass reported, “upper-class adults prefer both parents to work full-time and to rely on paid childcare.”

In this way, Biden’s day care subsidies are like his student loan bailouts: Wealth transfers to his highly educated, high-income base in high-cost states.

What’s more, the $10-dollars-a-day child care plan simply will not work. Ten dollars a day is the same tagline used by the liberal government of Canada, where the day care industry is imploding.

Subsidizing demand is not the way to make a thing more available and affordable. If you simply subsidize demand for a thing, it gets more and more expensive: See American healthcare and higher education.

Then there is the ever-more aggressive government interference in the agreements which millions of free individuals, some of whom produce cars and some of whom buy them, enter into as to what kinds of vehicles are produced and consumed, all in the name of forcing play-like energy forms down our throats:

The Biden administration is expected this week to finalize highly anticipated regulations targeting gas-powered vehicle tailpipe emissions, considered the tip of the spear in its efforts to electrify the transportation sector.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is slated to issue the final rulemaking — which officials have boasted will incentivize greater adoption of electric vehicles (EV), but which opponents have criticized as a de facto mandate — as soon as Wednesday, industry sources told Fox News Digital. The regulations, a key part of President Biden's climate agenda, would ultimately force automakers to more rapidly expand electric options in their fleets beginning in a matter of years.

They are targeting specific percentages:

Overall, under the proposal, which EPA unveiled in April 2023 and will go into effect in 2027, the White House projected that 67% of new sedan, crossover, SUV and light truck purchases would be electric by 2032. In addition, up to 50% of bus and garbage truck, 35% of short-haul freight tractor and 25% of long-haul freight tractor purchases could also be electric by then.

The White House said the proposal, which represents the most aggressive proposal of its kind ever proposed, would "accelerate the clean vehicle transition" and reduce oil imports by 20 billion barrels. Biden and climate activists have taken aim at the transportation sector over its high emissions profile — it alone produces roughly 29% of America's greenhouse gas emissions, federal data shows.

So, no, I can't subscribe to the idea that, because I understand what a disaster a Trump victory would be,  I'm obligated to vote for the alternative.

I'm staying home in November. I don't want the eternal record book to show I had anything to do with either form of American ruination. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Biden thumbs-down on LNG exports: more hatred of human advancement

 I hope that you're aware of this development:

The White House is halting the permitting process for several proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal projects over their potential impacts on climate change, an unprecedented move environmentalists have demanded in recent months.

In a joint announcement Friday morning, the White House and Department of Energy (DOE) said the pause would occur while federal officials conduct a rigorous environmental review assessing the projects’ carbon emissions, which could take more than a year to complete. Climate activists have loudly taken aim at LNG export projects in recent weeks, arguing they will lead to a large uptick in emissions and worsen global warming.

“As our exports increase, we must review export applications using the most comprehensive up-to-date analysis of the economic, environmental and national security considerations,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters on a press call. “This action includes a pause on pending applications for exports of U.S. natural gas as LNG to non-free trade agreement countries until the department can update the underlying analyses for authorizations.”

Is there any doubt who has had the administration's ear on this subject?

LNG export terminals have been opposed by Democrats and environmentalists who argue they would create harmful pollution and contribute to global warming. The issue has led to activists posting videos on social media which, over the last two months, have generated tens of millions of views.

Additionally, in December, dozens of environmental groups wrote to Granholm, imploring her to reject the LNG development “for the sake of our climate and communities.” Days later, 170 scientists penned a letter to President Biden, asking him to reject pending LNG facilities.

Here's another viewpoint, one based less on hysterics and preening, and more on an understanding of LNG's comparative advantages:

Natural gas is an incredibly versatile fuel--providing low-cost, clean residential heating; low-cost, clean "industrial process heat"; and low-cost, highly controllable and reliable clean electricity.

While natural gas used to be so hard to get that the US imported it, thanks to fracking and other shale energy technologies, the US now has a virtually limitless supply of low-cost, reliable, versatile, clean natural gas.¹

Between 2008 and 2018 fracking natural gas added 17 times more energy to the US than all solar panels and wind turbines combined. And that’s 100% reliable energy, unlike the unreliable energy from solar and wind that needs constant backup from...fracked natural gas.²

One of the best things American energy producers can do with our endless natural gas supplies is to export natural gas to places that need it. There are 800 million people who have no electricity and the 2.6 billion people still using wood or dung for heating and cooking.³

The key to exporting natural gas is LNG--liquefied natural gas. By cooling natural gas to very low temperatures, we can turn it into a liquid that can be easily and cost-effectively transported nearly anywhere in the world.

The world wants US natural gas and American companies want to build the LNG facilities to get it to them. But our government is strangling progress with an onerous and irrational permitting process.

LNG export facilities are burdened not only by standard, onerous state and federal permitting requirements in need of reform, but also requiring additional approval by the Department of Energy--which can take years.

Fortunately, there is proposed legislation that would expedite permitting for LNG exports: the “Natural Gas Export Expansion Act,” introduced by @AugustPfluger, which would allow expedited LNG approval for any country except those determined to be national security threats.⁴

There is no good reason for opposing expedited permitting of LNG. Those who complain about LNG's emissions ignore the fact that if we don't export LNG, it will be substituted for by higher-emissions Russian LNG or by coal.⁵

And our trading partners are going to find some LNG to import anyway - or substitute coal for it:

Countries that would have purchased U.S. LNG can substitute LNG from other countries. Mother Earth doesn’t really care which country it comes from.

Countries that aren’t able to substitute LNG from elsewhere are likely to use coal instead. Coal burns dirtier than LNG. The largest single reason for the decline in U.S. carbon emissions in the past several years is the switch from coal to natural gas for electricity generation. Making LNG exports more difficult hinders the ability of other countries to make that switch.

As has been proven with such developments as "gender-affirming" mutilation of thirteen year olds and an electeds-of-color holiday party hosted by the mayor of a major post-American city, progressivism doesn't need a majority of the population to impose its corrosion on the rest of us.

Climate alarmism brings together an older element of the leftist impulse - class-based antipathy toward organizations formed for industrial purposes (see California Governor Gavin Newsom's accusation that "big oil" is gouging prices and lying about the effects of its products), and the profits resulting from their activity - with more modern features of that impulse: a deification of the ball of dirt and water we inhabit, and an "intersectional" lumping together of its adversarial stance toward normal-people energy forms with its paradoxical portrayal of the female half of the human species: portraying them simultaneously as helpless and particularly vulnerable, and powerful and assertive in the same way a man is. 

The entire vision is mad. It's also collectivist in the extreme. It allows its architects to supposedly justify the sinking of government's teeth into every realm of human activity.

Would that we had some kind of coherent and viable political counterforce that could mitigate this onslaught. That's not in the offing at present. 

 

 

 

One reason having Trump as the GOP standard bearer is harmful to conservatism: it taints the effort to show that transitioning to play-like energy forms is a lot of hooey

 Scott Waldman, who covers the climate beat for Politico, doesn't even try to conceal where he's coming from regarding the energy-policy component of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.

Let 'er rip, Scott:

Conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change — and it wouldn’t stop with President Joe Biden’s policies.

The 920-page blueprint, whose hundreds of authors include former Trump administration officials, would go far beyond past GOP efforts to slash environmental agencies’ budgets or oust “deep state” employees.

Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.

If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.

“Project 2025 is not a white paper. We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, which compiled the plan as a road map for the first 180 days of the next GOP administration. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”

Now, yes, Heritage has undergone a Trumpward drift in the last few years, and a lot of the rest of Project 2025 reflects "deep state" paranoia - and would set the table for the Very Stable Genius to amass power unconstitutionally in the presidency, but the energy-policy aspect is good stuff. Waldman writes his article with a can-you-believe-how-awful-this-is tone, but anybody who actually understands why fossils fuels are a blessing and essential to human advancement will have a "sounds great to me" response.

More than 400 people participated in crafting Project 2025’s details. Former Trump administration officials played a key role in writing the chapters on dismantling EPA and DOE.

The plan to gut the Department of Energy was written by Bernard McNamee, a former DOE official whom Trump appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. McNamee, who did not have regulatory experience, was one of the most overtly political FERC appointees in decades. He was a director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that fights climate regulations, and was a senior adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

McNamee outlines cutting key divisions at DOE, including the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office. He has called climate change a “progressive policy.”

He also calls for cutting funding to DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, in part to stop “focusing on grid expansion for the benefit of renewable resources or supporting low/carbon generation.” Instead, he calls for strengthening grid reliability, which he describes as expanding the use of fossil fuels and slowing or stopping the addition of cleaner energy. Part of his plan includes a massive expansion of natural gas infrastructure.

“Prevent socializing costs for customers who do not benefit from the projects or justifying such cost shifts as advancing vague ‘societal benefits’ such as climate change,” McNamee wrote in the report.

McNamee did not respond to requests for comment.

Preventing the expansion of the electric grid would slow down renewable energy projects, threatening U.S. climate goals while cooling the sector’s economic growth, said Mike O’Boyle, a senior director at the nonpartisan policy firm Energy Innovation and head of its electricity program.

“If we totally step away from the role of the federal government, our economy is going to miss out in a big way because the rest of the world is moving on climate, so they’re poised to reap the benefits both for their energy consumers but also in terms of manufacturing,” he said.

Mandy Gunasekara, who was EPA’s chief of staff under Trump, wrote a chapter within the plan to move the agency away from its focus on climate policy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

It outlines eliminating or downsizing agency functions including the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, and the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. It also would also relocate regional EPA offices and would “downsize by terminating the newest hires in low-value programs.”

The overarching theme in remaking federal agencies is to shift power away from the federal government and toward states, in an effort to diminish regulations.

“The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states,” Gunasekara wrote.

Diminish regulations! Heaven forfend!

McNamee is exactly right when he speaks of justifying cost shifts. It's also known as redistribution backed by the unique coercive power of government. 

Wind and solar do not hold their own in the energy marketplace. They need a leg up in the form of subsidization. That's because they are intermittent, whereas fossil fuels are dense, readily available, and comparatively inexpensive.

But here's the problem with Project 2025: It's way too bound up with Trump. And that's unavoidable, because energy-policy experts with their heads on straight and free-market proponents who were understandably eager to serve in federal-government positions from 2017 to 2020 were going to have to serve in an administration with his name on it.

The Politico piece features a photograph of Trump announcing US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

Again, a great move, but let's not kid ourselves for a second that Trump actually gave a diddly about why. His handlers told him it would make him look great, and that's all he needed to know.

The overwhelming presence of Trump in the Republican Party provides the opportunity for "journalists" like Waldman to conflate sound and much-needed moves on the energy front with the most unfit president in the nation's history.

I saw all this coming when Trump's cult began forming in 2015. The uninformed masses were going to associate actual conservatism with Squirrel Hair's incoherent mishmash.

Clarity is called for regarding climate hooey, but the drool-besotted leg-humpers have made achieving it damn difficult. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Environmental Protection Agency is an instrument of tyranny

 As if this agency comprised entirely of unelected pointy-headed collectivists hasn't done enough damage since its 1971 inception, it just issued a new proposal:

The technology-based standards EPA is proposing include: 

• Strengthening the current New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for newly built fossil fuel-fired stationary combustion turbines (generally natural gas-fired)
• Establishing emission guidelines for states to follow in limiting carbon pollution from existing fossil fuel-fired steam generating EGUs (including coal, oil and natural gas-fired units)
• Establishing emission guidelines for large, frequently used existing fossil fuel-fired stationary combustion turbines (generally natural gas-fired)

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who may be the last Democrat alive with his head on straight,  is not on board:

“This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” Manchin said in a statement. “I fear that this Administration’s commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security and I will oppose all EPA nominees until they halt their government overreach.”

This development comes about as this administration is attacking human advancement from this angle as well:

There’s no serious dispute that one of the most significant obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is the lack of suitable charging infrastructure to back them up, something of particular importance given the anxiety that many consumers feel about the range an EV can go without a charge and, for that matter, the amount of time that it takes to charge an EV.

Henry Grabar looks at this issue in the Atlantic:

Recently, I was chatting with a friend who drives an electric vehicle in New York City—and parks it at the curb. There are no curbside chargers in his neighborhood, so powering up requires dipping into a nearby garage for a few hours, or driving to a curb in a different neighborhood entirely. Full battery? Move that car or keep paying the charging company. Studying the charging landscape to save time, money, and energy has become “his whole personality,” he told me. As he sent me image after image of prices, charging maps, and street-parking setups, I could see he wasn’t totally kidding.

The reality, of course, is that (in the end) quite a few of the central planners “managing” the transition to EVs do not believe that cars of any type belong in cities, at least in large numbers. Urban residents, they believe, should be happy with public transport and their supposedly delightful “15-minute cities” (a topic for another time). For such planners, the difficulty faced in finding a charger is a feature not a bug, if not one they can admit to. Yet. Frogs in a pot and all that.

Factors such as cost and convenience are the most immediately effective way to present the argument that all this is wrong to the American public.

But I would posit that they are secondary to the central issue: freedom.

Look, I get that there were growing pains attendant to the industrial revolution, from the pollution so prevalent in its early days to the historically unprecedented phenomenon of summoning men (at first; later, women, too) out of their homes in which work and family life had previously seamlessly blended and into aesthetically stultifying behemoth buildings to perform tasks of mind-numbing repetition. But human ingenuity set about addressing these matters. The fields of manufacturing and resource extraction are quite clean today, and the fact that they continuously employ technological advancements has made the work much more engaging.

And, of course, the central question continues to loom: Would you rather forego heart transplants, emergency-rescue helicopters, smart phones and air conditioning?

The collectivists would respond that in our bright future, we'll have all these things; they'll just be powered by clean energy. We'll make private-sector makers of these things cover as much of the costs as they can, and we'll subsidize the rest.

But isn't that for each consumer, and, for the matter, producer, to decide? If I want a petroleum-powered car the next time I go shopping for a vehicle, shouldn't I have access to the full panoply of options that makers might want to offer me?

Damn it, let's review a fundamental and morally irrefutable law of economics:

A good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period. No other entity, most certainly not government, has any business being part of that agreement.

Always been true, always gonna be true.

Don' stand for what the EPA is trying to cram down your throat.

Donald Trump is not, and never has been, a conservative

 Consider what he had to say about a couple of particular topics in Iowa:

Former President Donald Trump drew contrasts between himself and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday in Davenport, Trump’s first visit to Iowa since announcing a run for president. 

Speaking to a full Adler Theatre, Trump called his potential rival “very, very bad on ethanol,” compared him to 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney, and accused DeSantis of supporting raising the minimum age for Social Security benefits.

During his 2012 campaign for Congress, DeSantis expressed support for restructuring Social Security and Medicare, which aid millions of seniors in the United States, to make them more financially sustainable.

While in Congress, DeSantis voted on nonbinding budget resolutions that called for raising the retirement age and slowing the growth of future spending.

This bit of ethanol pandering is classic Trump transactionalism. He knows that the subsidies are federal gravy for Iowa corn producers and framing it as sacrosanct just may buy their loyalty, the only thing the Very Stable Genius gives a flying diddly about in this universe. 

It also makes clear that Trumpism is not about the free market, or, if you want to put it in macro terms, an allocation of resources that is in any way efficient:

One of the key reasons for the growth in ethanol production has been government subsidies for ethanol — $45 billion in tax credits giving 45 cents to ethanol producers for every gallon they produced between 1980 and 2011. This was a strange subsidy considering ethanol's inefficiency as a fuel, and given the fact that unlike other renewables, burning ethanol continues to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It's not like the farmers growing subsidized corn for ethanol production didn't already have a market for their produce. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones calls it "shoveling... ag welfare to a group of people who were already pretty rich."

In January 2012, the legislation that authorized the ethanol tax credits expired. But this didn't end the subsidies for ethanol. Why did the powerful corn ethanol lobby let the tax credits expire? According to Aaron Smith of the American Enterprise Institute:

The answer lies in legislation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.

The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of the 2011-12 corn crop be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars. The ethanol mandate is causing corn demand to outstrip supply by more and more each year, creating a vulnerable market in which even the slightest production disturbance will have devastating consequences for the world's poor.[AEI]

So the ethanol subsidies are still alive through government-guaranteed demand from the Renewable Fuel Standard mandate.

There are so many curbs on human freedom involved here: a mandate, government playing favorites, wealth redistribution.

The other topic on which he pulled the I'll-never-change-one-thing-about-this-government-goodie was Social Security. We covered this last month at LITD, excerpting generously from a piece by Tiana Lowe. We'll just re-up the relevant portion of that:

 I want to discuss a Washington Examiner piece by Tiana Lowe that deserves wide readership. It's short, and it's some bracing straight talk about that perennial third rail: Social Security.

She starts by recounting what President Biden had to say about it last night:

"So tonight, let’s all agree to stand up for seniors," Biden said. "Stand up and show them we will not cut Social Security. We will not cut Medicare. Those benefits belong to the American people. They earned them. If anyone tries to cut Social Security, I will stop them. And if anyone tries to cut Medicare, I will stop them."

Lowe point out that this is a lot of sound and fury over something that ain't even happening:

But not only is Biden arguing against a straw man here — sadly, no sitting Republicans actually are pledging to cut entitlements — but he is also forgetting that doing nothing is tantamount to a massive cut of Social Security benefits!

Why is that the case?

Absent a major reform from Social Security, the program will become insolvent in a little more than a decade. Upon insolvency, benefits will be slashed by 20% to 25% across the board.

Okay, nobody is talking about cutting benefits or structurally reforming the program. Well, where do we look next to face our country's debt-and-deficit precipice?

If Republicans wish to balance the budget within the decade without touching entitlements or defense spending, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects Congress would need to slash 85% of the rest of the budget.

Could tax hikes fill in the void of the Social Security Trust Fund once insolvency hits? Maybe — if Democrats and Republicans were comfortable with jacking up the payroll tax by 25%.

And then there's what the VSG had to say on Truth Social about one of America's thorniest foreign-policy problems:

“Kim Jung Un of North Korea, who I got to know and got along with very well during my years as President, is not happy with the U.S. and South Korea doing big training and air exercises together,” Mr Trump said. “He feels threatened. Even I would constantly complain that South Korea pays us very little to do these extremely expensive and provocative drills. It’s really ridiculous. We have 35,000 in jeopardy soldiers there, I had a deal for full payment to us, $Billions, and Biden gave it away. Such a shame!!!”

Folks to the right of center finding appeasement of totalitarian belligerents loathsome has Cold War roots, but it's still found fairly recent expression. Barack Obama deservedly came in for outrage for his apology tour, accepting a Loan Chomsky book from Hugo Chavez in front of the world's cameras, and pursuing a worthless agreement with Iran about its nuclear program.

But the VSG speaks in terms about Kim suggesting maybe they ought to get a room, and the drool-besotted cult is fine with it. 

And there's the transactional element again. These allies, they need to pony up! We're putting a lot of young US asses on the line over there!

No, his culture-war nods, delivered in the most boneheaded manner possible, do not make up for stuff like this.

Still, most Republicans want him to be the 2024 presidential candidate. 

That's sick. 

 

I'd love to see Jennifer Rumsey and Steven Koonin sit down for a conversation about net zero

 Cummins, Inc. which characterizes itself as a "leader in global power technology," had been teasing the public for weeks, in the form of Facebook posts and highway billboards, with a major development the company intended to unveil on March 8.

This being the 9th, we now know what the development was. We now know that it is 

the launch of Accelera by Cummins, a new brand for its New Power business unit. Accelera provides a diverse portfolio of zero-emissions solutions for many of the world’s most vital industries empowering customers to accelerate their transition to a sustainable future. 

The launch of Accelera is a significant step forward in Cummins’ efforts to achieve its Destination Zero strategy, focused on evolving Cummins technologies to reach zero emissions across its product portfolio. Cummins’ Destination Zero strategy is rooted in the understanding that multiple solutions are required to achieve industry-wide decarbonization across the diverse applications the company powers. Over the past several years, Cummins has invested more than $1.5 billion in research and technology, capital and acquisitions to build Accelera’s leadership and technological capabilities. Accelera is now a global leader in zero-emissions technologies, providing battery electric and fuel cell electric solutions across commercial and industrial applications with hundreds of electrolyzers generating hydrogen around the world today. 

“Achieving our goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 requires leveraging our entire portfolio of businesses,” said Jennifer Rumsey, Cummins President and Chief Executive Officer. “As we have continued to lead in and advance the engine-based solutions that power our customers’ businesses, we have also built the broadest combination of zero-emissions technologies dedicated to the commercial vehicle industry like battery electric and fuel cell electric powertrain solutions and electrolyzers for green hydrogen production. Establishing Accelera reinforces our commitment to leading in zero-emissions solutions and highlights our unmatched ability to leverage our deep understanding of our customers’ needs and applications, technical expertise and extensive service and support network to walk hand in hand with our customers throughout the energy transition.” 

Accelera is advancing a range of zero-emissions solutions, including hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, e-axles, traction systems and electrolyzers, to sustainably power a variety of industries from commercial transportation to chemical production. Both a components supplier and integrator, Accelera is decarbonizing applications like buses, trucks, trains, construction equipment, stationary power and carbon intense industrial processes. 

Now, Cummins employs some of the best and brightest, and has some notable concrete efforts to show for its net-zero zeal:

Recent zero-emissions highlights that Accelera will continue to build on include:

• Completing the acquisition of Meritor, Inc., and Siemens Commercial Vehicle business to advance electric powertrain solutions 
• Increasing global electrolyzer manufacturing capacity with gigawatt-scalable plants in Fridley, Minnesota – its first in the United States – and in Spain (now under construction)
• Powering the world’s largest proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer in  operation in the world in Bécancour, Canada
• Powering the world’s first hydrogen refueling station for ships, cars, trucks and industrial customers in Antwerp, Belgium
• Powering the world’s first megawatt-scale demonstration plant for storing wind energy in the natural gas grid in Windgas Falkenhagen, Germany
• Powering the world’s first fleets of hydrogen fuel cell passenger trains in Germany
• Deploying four hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered class 8 heavy-duty trucks with several marquis fleet customers in the United States
• Powering 52 fuel cell city buses in Lingang, Shanghai
• Powering refuse trucks with FAUN across Europe

Impressive stuff. But theoretical physicist and American Enterprise Institute fellow Steven Koonin, in an interview with Genn Loury, casts doubt on whether such measures are going to be adequate to Cummins's vision:

Now, what about the Paris Accords, the possibility of international diplomacy being able to get the Chinese and the Indians and the Europeans and the North Americans all on the same page on this? I mean, particularly in light of what you just observed about the fact that most of humanity has yet to fully empower itself to enjoy the benefits of the modern technological civilization that we take for granted, which depends on fossil fuels.

Ain't gonna happen, all right? We're not gonna reduce, we're not gonna go to zero certainly by 2050. Even John Kerry admits that now. And we're not gonna go to zero globally certainly before the end of this century.

Oh, excuse me. Can you just explain to people what “go to zero” means?

Okay, so the world emits a certain amount of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, every year. Most of that emission is due to the burning of fossil fuels. Because the world is developing and the population is increasing, the amount of fossil fuels we burn every year goes up, has been going up at about one-and-a-half percent a year. In order to stabilize—not reduce but just stabilize—human influences on those emissions have to go to zero. If you want to stabilize the climate, allegedly, at one-and-a-half degrees temperature rise, it needs to go to zero by 2050. If you go to zero more slowly, the temperature will be higher, they say. 

So the goal, the political goal, the goal of the Paris Accord is to get to zero some time in the latter half of this century, globally. That means no emissions of fossil fuels used in the conventional way. Also, by the way, you gotta fix agriculture, which accounts for about 25% of emissions. But basically to get to an emissions-free world by 2050 or 2100. So that's kind of the goal. 

But if you look at the drivers, the development, the rate of change of technology, the somewhat modest increase in population expected over the next 80 years, there's just no way that's gonna happen. And you can understand that from the point of view of the Chinese or the Indian. Their overwhelming priority is to get enough energy for their people so that they can improve their lives. But the issue of, well, something might happen to the climate a hundred years from now is just not particularly important relative to that overwhelming need.

A whole lot of effort is being expended to address something that is not a crisis.

And there's a whole lot of the world that would like to enjoy the Western standard of living. Leapfrogging over the employment of the energy forms that made that standard of living possible isn't going to achieve that.

Cheap, dense and ready available energy is still the foremost kind. 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 Daren Jonescu teaches philosophy at a university in Korea. He's not exactly a ray of sunshine, but his insights are often valuable, as is the case with this post at his blog, "Melancholy, Modernity and the Free Soul":

Modernity has largely robbed melancholy of its meaning and cosmic significance, by robbing freedom of its meaning and psychological significance. Modern philosophy, obsessed with practical equality and its thought-diminishing fantasy of universal enlightenment, has redefined freedom as randomness, or rather, stated in political terms, as the right to be random. This is freedom reduced to spiritual chaos and lack of purpose, except for the deflated purpose of protecting and aggrandizing the chaos itself, which purpose we moderns call “self-preservation,” or even, more recently, “self-fulfillment.” 

Having lived so long in the dim light of this degraded notion of freedom, it now seems counterintuitive to us, or even self-contradictory, to see freedom as the ancient thinkers did, namely as a higher (i.e., nobler) form of limitation or restraint — the self-restraint of the civilized individual, who neither requires nor responds to any external coercion to live rationally — which derives its meaning by analogy with the relation of the true governor to his governed domain.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic examines "Why Everything in Tech Seems To e Collapsing All At Once":

The tech industry is experiencing a midlife crisis.

After using its metaphorical youth to experiment with social media and consumer tech through boundless investment and endless optimizations and A/B tests, many tech executives and investors today feel like they’ve essentially solved the most interesting and important problems of basic digitization. This is not just my opinion: Four years ago, the tech analyst Ben Evans observed that software had scaled the mountain of advertising and media and connected the world, and tech was looking to climb new mountains and find new challenges. One chapter was closing, and the most prominent tech executives and investors were looking for the next story.

Executives of the largest tech firms have for years been shifting resources toward new ventures with uncertain returns. Amazon recently employed more than 10,000 people to work on its AI product, Alexa. (Jeff Bezos stepped away from the company he founded to work on rocket ships.) At Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—Reality Labs, the division working to build a metaverse, has about 15,000 employees. Apple reportedly has 3,000 people working on an augmented-reality headset, and thousands more are working on Google’s voice assistant. At the same time, the venture-capital community has been looking for its own moonshot, and many investors have found one (or, at least, have wanted people to believe that they have) in crypto. VCs have reportedly bet dozens of billions of dollars in the space, even though, for all the bluster and investment, it mostly remains a technology in search of a use case beyond betting money on tokens that cash out in dollars. Meanwhile, in what may be a literal midlife crisis, Elon Musk, a car and rocket executive, has installed himself at the helm of a digital delivery mechanism for news outrage with, at best, a chaotic plan for resurrecting its business.

He concludes that most likely "we are in an intermission between technological epochs."

"'Vital Tension' as the Creative Spiritual Energy of History" by Charles Klamut at The Imaginative Conservative  looks at this concept's uses and misuses through the centuries:

“Vital tension” is a phrase used in the writings of Christopher Dawson to describe the unique source of creative spiritual energy which has inspired the great personalities and achievements of Western culture.

Dawson was an intellectual and cultural historian of the 20^th century whose life work was dedicated to studying the relationship between religion and culture. He insisted that behind every culture is a religion, and that behind Western culture is Christianity. While aware of the baggage of Christianity so scorned by secular critics, Dawson demonstrated the overwhelmingly positive creative force Christianity has been overall as the driving religious ideal behind Western culture.

Christianity helped transform the deadly violent tension of tribalism and ideological strife, transferring it inward to a vital moral and spiritual tension played out in the realm of personal responsibility, conscience, conversion, and, ultimately, love. This had very positive and creative implications over the course of Western cultural history. The pattern of accuse others/excuse self was reversed, as followers of the way of Jesus sought to first get the “plank” out of their own eye rather than the “speck” from their neighbor’s eye.

The condemnation of “those people” was replaced by the new command of Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations, gathering all into oneness under the headship of Jesus. Self-assertion was replaced with self-emptying. Domination was replaced by service. Revenge was replaced by forgiveness. The first centuries of Christianity saw the church grow through the sacrificial death of the martyrs and the love of its adherents toward one another and even toward their enemies. In imitation of Jesus, the early Christians helped establish the church by shedding their own blood, not that of others.

Dawson sought to demonstrate that history is a dynamic spiritual process whose best fruits are the result of concentrated personal and collective moral and spiritual effort. And, correlatively, its worst fruits are the result of the abandonment of this process.

Dawson drew from the tradition of the Gospels and St Paul, with their teachings on personal repentance and conversion. The spirit and the flesh are two opposing principles of the will (a moral, not a metaphysical distinction), and through the grace of the Holy Spirit comes the real possibility of personal and societal renewal. A careful study of Western culture provides an accumulation of evidence and examples, to which Dawson’s lifetime body of scholarly work testifies.

Dawson especially drew on St Augustine’s development of this tradition and his idea of the two cities: the city of God, characterized by love of God to the contempt of self; and the city of man, characterized by the love of self to the contempt of God. This was a moral, rather than metaphysical, distinction. It occurs beneath the surface of events, beginning in the hidden realm of personal existential choice. The unfolding of history is a playing out of these two opposing moral principles, beginning in the heart of each person.

But that conception of vital tension has fizzled out in our lifetimes:

More recent times, with shrinking notions of the moral and spiritual (though not scientific and technical) possibilities of humanity, have seen a reversion from“vital tension” back to the external tensions played out in the realm of post modern ideologies. From the scandalous wars between religions following the Reformation in the 17^th century, through the revolutions of the 18^th and19^thcentury, through the fascist and communist scourges of the 20^th century, and into the current era of Al Qaeda and the “clash of civilizations,” or the many lesser clashes played out between red state-blue state, 99%-1%, etc. We see the pattern playing out time and again, in more and less bloody forms but nevertheless, charged with acrimony and volatility.

Much of the strife of recent centuries, argues Dawson, can be linked to the abandonment of the Christian ideal of vital tension which was the chief source of creative spiritual energy for so many centuries since the coming of Christ. What we are seeing in its progressive abandonment is a reversion to the blood feud, played out ideologically. The pre-existent psychological pattern of moral dualism, the fruit of Christianity, is abandoned and instead sublimated and transferred outward again into new and more sophisticated forms.

How's this for a stark verdict?

 Modern man is a spiritual failure.

This is the provocation with which Christopher Dawson begins the first chapter of Understanding Europe, written in 1952. It is a theme that runs throughout his works. Why is modern man a spiritual failure? Because he has proven unable to control the new forces he has created. Educated, economically shrewd, technologically advanced, materially successful… none of these have been enough to hold at bay the centrifugal, de-unifying tendencies unleashed by the abandonment of the Christian ideal of personal conversion and a universal spiritual society. Evidence of these tendencies is seen in the trajectory of history for especially the past four or five centuries, up through today’s postmodern era of widespread alienation and division and global volatility, and in the nihilism and despair which stifle and censor serious attempts at higher meaning and authentic human aspiration, at least in the developed, post-industrial Western world.

Power the Future, a consortium of thinkers focused on a sane energy policy, has released an itemized roadmap for achieving one. The top ten solutions it offers are these:

1. Repeal Joe Biden’s Natural Gas Tax   7

2. EndBiden’sOilandGasLeasingMoratorium/
   Return Power to States   7

3. Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline   9

4. Block Biden’s ESG Regulations   9

5. Repeal the California Waiver   10

6. End Activist-led “Sue and Settle” and “Citizen Lawsuits”   11

7. Ban Use of the “Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases”   12

8. Automatic Approvals for LNG Export Terminals   13

9. Overturn Massachusetts v. EPA   14

10.Stop Biden’s War on Coal   15

A lady named Beanie has a Substack focused on the state of education and what might be done about it. An essay there entitled "The Damage of Academic Decline Is Exposed" posits that it's not just the impact of COVID that has brought about such a bleak landscape. We've been headed to our present juncture for decades. What to do?

Will we put a bandaid on the blister and strap on the same shoes that created it in the first place? Or will we decide to implement educational techniques that will allow optimal learning and set students up to truly excel? Just as one shoe doesn’t fit every person exactly right, it is unlikely that one type of learning environment will fit every student just right. We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of American education (and the future of millions of children) right now and have plenty of evidence to support its need. One step is allowing families, not the government, the ability to choose the best learning environment for their children. Another is reviving reading instruction techniques that are proven to put more students on the path to literacy proficiency. 

Ian Birrell, writing at UnHerd, looks at how disgraced FTX hustler Sam Bankman-Fried is jus the latest embodiment of a trend Birrell calls "elitist altruism": 

Elizabeth Holmes dressed in the same style every day: black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and black low-slung shoes. This “uniform” underlined her deified status as a busy billionaire dedicated to changing the world, setting her apart from mere mortals with time to choose their clothes. “My mom had me in black turtlenecks when I was, like, eight,” she told one women’s magazine. “I probably have 150 of these. It makes it easy, because every day you put on the same thing and don’t have to think about it — one less thing in your life. All my focus is on the work. I take it so seriously; I’m sure that translates into how I dress.”

Yet this story of her image, like the blood-test technology that won her fame and fortune, was fake. One former colleague later revealed how a “frumpy” Holmes had adopted the look to mimic the signature style of Steve Jobs, even tracking down the exact Issey Miyake turtleneck favoured by the Apple founder. Her pose as a cool, black-clad genius worked for a while, fooling some of the best-known financiers and public figures in the United States. Then it had to be ditched in favour of dull suits to appear in court for fraud. And soon will switch to dowdy prison scrubs after her conviction and 11-year sentence.

Silicon Valley superstars love to embrace a simple style. Rich enough to buy anything in the world and puffed up with self-importance, they use clothing to send out the message that they are too important to waste their precious intellect and time on deciding what to wear every day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when quizzed about his uniform of grey T-shirts and blue jeans. (This is, lest we forget, the man who set up a website to rank attractive women at university that exploded into one of the planet’s most pernicious companies.)

Sam Bankman-Fried also tapped into this approach: he presented himself as a financial prodigy who disdained societal mores while set on saving the world. He went for the scruffy skateboarder look, a man-child with an unkempt bubble of hair who even wore his T-shirt, shorts and sneakers when sitting on stage next to a former US president and a former British prime minister.

It is no surprise that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair fell for such a phoney. Yet they weren’t the only ones suckered by this high priest of cryptocurrency, who preached of earning billions through his unique financial acumen, promised to pour the money into philanthropy, and then crashed to earth with his fortune evaporating. “SBF” championed a modish millennial approach to philanthropy, that claims to harness data, in tandem with supreme brainpower, moral leadership and relentless logic to improve the cost-efficiency of charity and tackle state failures. But his downfall has exposed the hollowness at the heart of this cult that has become as much part of Silicon Valley’s uniformity as their T-shirts and turtlenecks.

Birrell basically warns us to ask ourselves if we'd really want a savior to bee as arrogant as these people:

Many people yearn for superheroes, visionaries and wunderkinds to offer hope of salvation on a complex, messy planet. But altruism built on avarice is simply a comfort blanket for billionaires. Behind the stylised images, the sci-fi sheen of technology, the bold claims to have remodelled philanthropy, the arrogant insistence some people are so important they should be spared taxes, lies the same hubristic mentality that tarnished the aid industry. It is based on the cynical idea that a small, superior and wealthy elite knows best — and that they should not be thwarted in their drive to earn billions since they are indisputably the good guys. As two new age messiahs stumble and fall, we ought to be more sceptical over billionaire geeks posing as god-like saviours and show a bit more faith in our communal ability to resolve serious problems.

 Matt Labash, one of the best essayists of our time, knocks it out of the park once again with "Enjoy Every Sandwich" at SlackTide, his Substack. Not even gonna try to tease you with excerpts. You need to read the whole thing. It's deeply human and heartfelt, with a leavening touch of his characteristic acerbity. There is and always has been a surfeit of enjoy-life's-blessings-as-they-happen literature. It takes a really fresh approach to stand out in the genre. Trust me, Labash has provided one.

For a long time, I've yearned for someone to pen a really effective takedown of half-baked smartass Robert Reich, who offers vague pieties as economic solutions and peddles "fairness" as the aim of economic policy at the expense of even rudimentarily sound analysis. Paul Roderick Gregory, an economics professor at the University of Houston and Hoover Institution research fellow writing at Forbes, has taken on the task splendidly and systematically. It's gonna leave a mark.

And I've been busy at my Substack, Precipice. My three latest are "Is Versus Should Be," which looks at the fine line between a candid assessment of the lay of the land and being resigned to it, a little something different entitled "The Best to You Each Morning," a look at the colorful figures involved in the development of America's breakfast cereal industry, and "An Unfortunate New Fissure in an Already Narrow Sliver of Terrain," which looks at David French's take on the Respect for Marriage Act and the subsequent fallout from that,