Authored by Robert Rapier,

• President Biden’s recent admission in the State of the Union that the United States will need oil for at least another decade was a significant understatement.

• While there may be a relatively large reduction in demand in a decade due to the growth of alternatives, the U.S. will remain heavily dependent on oil.

• By way of example, in 2014 Norway was where the U.S. is today in terms of EVs on the road, seven years later it had only reduced oil demand by 8%.

During President Biden’s 2023 State of the Union Address, he relayed an anecdote that I believe explains his stance toward the oil and gas industry.

At first, he stayed on script with his prepared remarks, claiming:

“You may have noticed that Big Oil just reported record profits. Last year, they made $200 billion in the midst of a global energy crisis. It’s outrageous. They invested too little of that profit to increase domestic production and keep gas prices down. Instead, they used those record profits to buy back their own stock, rewarding their CEOs and shareholders.”

As I have noted previously, oil companies made substantial increases in capital budgets last year as oil prices rose. The number of rigs drilling for oil has risen sharply, and U.S. oil production last year hit the second-highest level on record. But, President Biden — who strongly believes we need to bring down our carbon emissions — doesn’t think we are investing enough in producing more oil, even though 2023 may set a new record for U.S. oil production.

But then President Biden went off script.

He said that he had pressed oil executives on the issue of increasing investments, and he said they told him:

“We’re afraid you’re going to shut down all of the oil wells and all the oil refineries anyway so why should we invest in them?”

President Biden said he responded:

“We’re going to need oil for at least another decade.”

The chamber burst into laughter, and then Biden quickly added, “and beyond that.”

I think this attitude explains the seeming disconnect in the President’s stance toward oil and gas companies. He and some of his advisors really believe we are going to rapidly phase out oil. He views that as absolutely necessary to address climate change. Thus, in his mind, the oil industry’s relevance is going to soon fade, so there’s no harm in using them as his foil by blaming their high profits for high gasoline prices.

The reality is that we are going to need oil for a lot longer than another decade. Never mind that there is nothing in the pipeline that is going to displace jet fuel used in air traffic a decade from now. There may be some minor dent in petroleum used in marine traffic by then, but most ships will still run on oil in a decade.

But the widespread perception seems to be that electric vehicles (EVs) are going to substantially displace combustion vehicles a decade from now. That view is also not supported by facts.

U.S. EV share reached 6% of all new vehicle sales last year. The goal is to reach 50% by 2030 — just seven years from now. But that’s new car sales. The number of EVs on the road in 2022 was only about 1%.

Let’s look at Norway as an instructive example. Norway is one of the most aggressive EV markets in the world. In 2014, the country’s EV share on the roads reached 1%. By 2020, new EV sales represented 54% of new car sales in the country. This would be approximately consistent with the goals for the U.S. timeline. In 2021, over 20% of the cars on Norway’s roads were EVs, and in 2022 that number reached 25%.

How did this impact the country’s overall oil demand? According to the 2022 BP Statistical Review, in 2014 — the year Norway reached a 1% share of EVs on the roads — the country’s oil demand was 216,000 barrels per day (BPD). In 2021, with a 20% EV share, that number had fallen to 199,000 BPD. (Final full year 2022 numbers are not yet available, but preliminary numbers show a 0.4% decline from 2021).

That’s a decline of less than 8% in seven years. There’s no question that this is good, and is likely primarily due to the country’s adoption of EVs. But it also doesn’t translate to a major reduction in oil demand. When the President says “We are going to need oil for at least another decade”, I think he envisions much larger declines than this over the next decade.

Today the U.S. consumes around 20 million BPD of petroleum products. A 10% decline in this number would reduce consumption back to what we were consuming in about 2012. A large reduction, to be sure, but our transportation infrastructure would still run primarily on oil.

So, make no mistake. We aren’t going to just need oil a decade from now. We are still going to be overwhelmingly dependent on oil a decade from now. Our energy policies should reflect this reality.

Go ahead and aggressively try to speed up this transition, but also recognize that oil will still be our most important commodity in a decade; probably even two decades from now.

The Biden Administration should recognize this and cease the hostility toward this critically important U.S. industry.

Authored by Thomas Hackett via RealClear Wire,

Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life. 

They are now. 

Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution – including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands – has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning. From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.  

Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations and accrediting associations that support their efforts. 

“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”   

Diversity, equity and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). 

Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.

“It’s an industry in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale. “My suspicion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hiring people, giving them titles and pretty good money. I don’t think they do nothing.”  

It’s difficult to know how large the DEI Industrial Complex has become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t assessed its size. Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since.  

“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.”  

Yet in our time, no Roman Emperor has demanded a complete cultural transformation. No law was passed mandating DEI enactment. No federal court ruling has required its implementation. There was no clarion call on the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warning. No genuine public crisis matched the scale of the response.  

The sources of this transformation are both deep and fairly recent. On one level, they can be traced back to the egalitarian movements that have long shaped American history – from the nation’s founding, through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the battles for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and same-sex marriage. In other ways, the rapid transformation can seem no more explicable than an eccentric fashion trend, like men of the late 18th century wearing periwigs. However, a few pivot points of recent history bent its arc in DEI’s direction.  

The push for affirmative action is the most obvious influence, a program first conceived during the Reconstruction era but then abandoned for nearly a century. Although triumphs for social justice, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts of the late 1950s and 1960s didn’t stop discrimination; the country would need to take more affirmative steps toward assisting minority groups and achieving more equitable outcomes, proponents argued. A controversial policy from the start (with the Supreme Court expected to curb its use in college admissions this term), affirmative action was further complicated by immigration reforms that allowed for more non-European immigrants, setting off a seismic demographic shift that continues to reverberate.  

The diversity movement of the early 1990s was in part an attempt to capitalize on the new multicultural reality. Stressing individual and institutional benefits rather than moral failings, early corporate diversity training programs hewed to traditional values of equality and meritocracy. Creating a diverse workplace, R. Roosevelt Thomas wrote in the Harvard Business Review, in 1990, “should always be a question of pure competence and character unmuddled by birth.”  

And in many ways it appears to have worked. Just look at the tech industry, where immigrants from East and South Asia have flourished. Nigerian immigrants are perhaps the most successful group in America, with nearly two-thirds holding college degrees. Doors have opened wide to the once-closeted LGBT community.  

But in other ways, the recent explosion of DEI initiatives reflects shortcomings of earlier efforts, as suggested by the headline of 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Diversity Fails.” Even as high-achieving first- and second-generation immigrants have thrived in certain industries, particularly STEM fields, people of color remain scarce in senior institutional positions. There is also the deeper issue of what many in the post-George Floyd era have taken to calling systemic or structural racism, citing major disparities for black Americans in education, healthcare, homeownership, arrests, incarceration, and household wealth. 

More recently, a spate of widely publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans has galvanized a growing belief, especially among progressives and especially since Donald Trump’s election, that America is an irredeemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd murder and in advance of a fraught election, a moral panic set in. Having increased their ranks, social justice entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were poised to implement an ideological agenda and compound their institutional power. 

Although no hard numbers exist on the exact size of the industry, the “DEIfication” of America” is clear. From Rochester, New York, to San Diego, Calif., cash-strapped municipalities have found the funds to staff DEI offices. Startups and small companies that once relied on their own employees to promote an inclusive culture now feel compelled to hire diversity consultants and sensitivity trainers to set them straight. The field is so vast it has born a sub-field: recruiting agencies for DEI consultants. So-called “authenticity readers” tell publishing companies what are acceptable depictions of marginalized groups and who is entitled to tell their stories. Master’s degree and certificate programs in DEI leadership at schools like Cornell, Georgetown, and Yale offer new and lucrative bureaucratic careers. 

At Ohio State University, for example, the average DEI staff salary is $78,000, according to public information gathered by economist Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute – about $103,000 with fringe benefits. Not to be outdone by its Big Ten conference rival, the University of Michigan pays its diversity officers $94,000 on average – about $124,000 with benefits. Until he retired from the position last summer, Michigan’s chief diversity officer, Robert Sellers, was paid over $431,000 a year. His wife, Tabbye Chavous, now has the job, at the vice provost rank and a salary of $380,000.  

For smaller organizations that cannot afford a full-time equity officer, there are other options for shoring up social justice bona fides – namely, working with any of the hundreds of DEI consulting agencies that have risen like mushrooms after a night’s rain, most of them led by “BIPOC” millennials. With some firms, the social justice goals are unmistakable. The Racial Equity Institute is “committed to the work of anti-racist transformation” and challenging “patterns of power” on behalf of big-name clients like the Harvard Business School, Ben & Jerry’s, and the American Civil Liberties Union. With others, the appeal has less to do with social change than exploring marketing opportunities and creating a “”with-it” company culture, where progressive politics complement the office foosball tables and kombucha on tap.  

“Diversity wins!” declares the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Certainly diversity officers have been winning, although opposition is building in Florida and elsewhere, where the wider woke agenda that includes DEI has advanced. Even minimally trained practitioners are in high demand, and signs of their influence abound.   

Wells Fargo offers cheaper loans to companies that meet racial and gender quotas. Private equity and venture capital firms like BlackRock and KKR declare their commitment to racial “equity.” Bank of America tells its employees they are implicated in a white supremacist system. Lockheed Martin asks its executives to “deconstruct their white male privilege.” Major tech companies like Google publicly chart the “Black+ and Latinx+” people they’ve hired, and assure the public that Artificial Intelligence will prioritize the DEI political agenda. ChapGPT, an AI model that can generate remarkably cogent writing, is been designed with a liberal bias, summarily rejecting requests that don’t conform to the algorithm’s notions of “positivity, equality and inclusivity.” Disney instructs employees to question colorblind beliefs espoused by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Fire departments are told to lower their physical fitness requirements for women. Similarly, universities are dropping standardized tests to yield more admissions of certain minorities (typically not Asians). And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, hoping to award more “films of color,” inspects Oscar-nominated films for cast and crew diversity. (Netflix has been a notable exception, last May laying off dozens of employees working on such issues. Under Elon Musk, Twitter is also flouting woke orthodoxies.) 

In education, college students are required to take DEI-prescribed courses. Community college employees in California are evaluated on their DEI competencies. Loyalty oaths to the DEI dogma are demanded of professors. Applicants to tenure-track positions, including those in math and physics, are rejected out of hand if their mandatory DEI statements are found wanting. Increasingly, DEI administrators are involved in hiring, promotion, and course content decisions.  

“Academic departments are always thinking, ‘We need to run this by Diversity,’” says Glenn Ricketts, public affairs officer for the National Association of Scholars.  

The industry’s reach can also be seen in the many Orwellian examples of exclusion in the name of inclusion, of reprisals in the name of tolerance. Invariably, they feature an agitated clutch of activists browbeating administrators and executives into apologizing for an alleged trespass against an ostensibly vulnerable constituency. When that has been deemed insufficient or when senior executives have sensed a threat to their own legitimacy, they’ve offered up scapegoats on false or flimsy pretexts. That might be a decades-long New York Times reporter, a head curator at a major art museum, an adjunct art history professor, a second-year law student, or a janitor at a pricey New England college. (The list is long.) 

Often enough, the inquisitions have turned into public relations debacles for major institutions. But despite the intense criticism and public chagrin, the movement marches on. 

The expansion “happened gradually at first, and people didn’t recognize the tremendous growth,” Perry says. “But after George Floyd, it really accelerated. It became supercharged. And nobody wanted to criticize it because they would been seen as racists.”  

Not playing along with the DEI protocols can end an academic career. For example, when Gordon Klein, a UCLA accounting lecturer, dismissed a request to grade black students more leniently in 2020, the school’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion office intervened to have him put on leave and banned from campus. A counter-protest soon reversed that. However, when Klein also declined to write a DEI statement explaining how his work helped “underrepresented and underserved populations,” he was denied a standard merit raise, despite excellent teaching evaluations. (He is suing for  defamation and other alleged harms.)  

Scores of professors and students have also been subject to capricious, secretive, and career-destroying investigations by Title IX officers, who work hand-in-glove with DEI administrators, focusing on gender discrimination and sexual harassment. As writer and former Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis recounts in “Unwanted Advances,” individuals can be brought up on charges without any semblance of due process, as she was, simply for “wrongthink” – that is, for having expressed thoughts that someone found objectionable. With activist-administrators assuming the role of grand inquisitors, “the traditional ideal of the university – as a refuge for complexity, a setting for free exchange of ideas – is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear,” she writes. And it would appear that students and professors would have it no other way. By and large, they want more bureaucratic intervention and regulations, not less. 

As more institutions create DEI offices and hire ever more managers to run them, the enterprise inevitably becomes self-justifying. According to Parkinson’s Law, bureaucracy needs to create more work, however unnecessary or unproductive, to keep growing. Growth itself becomes the overriding imperative. The DEI movement needs the pretext of inequities, real or contrived, to maintain and expand its bureaucratic presence. As Malcolm Kyeyume, a Swedish commentator and self-described Marxist, writes: “Managerialism requires intermediation and intermediation requires a justifying ideology.”  

Ten years ago, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg found that the ratio of administrators to students had doubled since 1975. With the expansion of DEI, there are more administrators than ever, most of whom have no academic background. On average, according to a Heritage Foundation study, major universities across the country currently employ 45 “diversicrats,” as Perry calls them. With few exceptions, they outnumber the faculty in history departments, often two or three to one. 

At Michigan, Perry wasn’t able to find anyone with the words “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” in his job title until 2004; and for the next decade, such positions generally remained centralized at the provost level, working for the university as a whole. But in 2016, Michigan president Mark Schlissel announced that the university would invest $85 million in DEI programs. Soon after, equity offices began to “metastasize like a cancer,” Perry says, across every college, department, and division, from the college of pharmacy to the school’s botanical garden and arboretum, where a full-time DEI manager is now “institutionalizing co-liberatory futures.” All the while, black enrollment at Michigan has dropped by nearly 50% since 1996.  

Despite the titles and the handsome salaries, most DEI administrative positions are support staff jobs, not teaching or research positions. In contrast with the provisions of Title IX, DEI is not mandated by law; it is entirely optional. DEI officers nevertheless exert enormous influence, in part because so few people oppose them. The thinking seems to be that if you’re against the expanding and intrusive diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, you must be for the opposite – discrimination, inequality, and exclusion.  

“By telling themselves that they’re making the world a better place, they get to throw their weight around,” says Ricketts. “They have a lot of money, a lot of leverage, and a lot of people who just don’t want to butt heads with them – people who just want to go along to get along. People who are thinking, ‘If we embrace DEI, nobody can accuse us of being racist or whatever.’ They’re trying to cover their backsides.” 

Some organizations, it seems, are merely trying to keep up with cultural trends.  

Consider Tucson, Ariz., where diversity is not a buzzy talking point but an everyday reality. With a population that is 44% Hispanic, 43% white and only 4.6% black, the city has had no major racial incidents in decades. Yet like hundreds of others communities, Tucson suddenly decided in direct response to the George Floyd murder 1,600 miles away that it needed an office of equity. To many observers, it seemed that the city was just “getting jiggy with it,”  pretending to solve a problem that didn’t exist. After a two-year search, it hired Laurice Walker, the youngest chief equity officer in the country, at age 28, with a salary of $145,000 – nearly three and a half times what Tucson’s mayor, Regina Romero, earns. 

Not that the mayor is complaining. “I think this position is about putting an equity lens into all that we do,” Romero said in May, by which she means – well, nobody is quite sure what “equity” means, particularly with respect to federal legislation clearly prohibiting positive and negative discrimination alike.  

But trying to get out in front of the DEI train can also result in getting run over by it.  

When the city council of Asheville, N.C., hired Kimberlee Archie as its first equity and inclusion manager, its members probably didn’t anticipate being accused of having a “white supremacy culture.” After all, city manager Debra Campbell is black, as are three of the seven women making up the city council. The council had cut police funding and unanimously approved a reparations resolution. Archie nevertheless complained that her colleagues still weren’t doing enough to advance racial equity. “What I describe it as is kind of like the bobblehead effect,” she said in 2020. “We’d be in meetings … and people’s heads are nodding as if they are in agreement. However, their actions didn’t back that up.”  

The drama in western North Carolina illustrates a dilemma that organizations face going forward. They can pursue an aggressive political agenda in which white supremacy is considered the country’s defining ethos (per The New York Times’ “1619 Project“) and present discrimination as the only remedy to past discrimination (see Ibram X. Kendi). Or they take the path of least resistance, paying rhetorical tribute to DEI enforcers as the “bobbleheads” that Archie disparages but doing little more than that. After all, they still have universities, businesses, and sanitation departments to run, alumni and investors to satisfy, students to teach, research to pursue, roads to be paved, sewage to be treated, costs to be minimized, and profits to be maximized.  

Perhaps, too, senior administrators and executives are beginning to realize that, despite the moral panic of 2020, the most culturally diverse country in the world might not be irredeemably racist, even if it’s no longer acceptable to say so. The United States twice elected an African American man named Barack Hussein Obama as president. His first attorney general was a black man, who would be replaced by a black woman. His vice president would pick a woman of mixed race as his running mate. The mayors of 12 of the 20 largest U.S. cities are black, including the four largest cities. Likewise, many of the people whom Americans most admire – artists, athletes, musicians, scientists, writers – are black. Lately most winners of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants are people of color. Gay marriage is legal, and enjoys wide public support, even among conservatives. The disabled, neurodivergent, and gender-divergent are applauded for their courage and resilience. And nonwhite groups, particularly Asians, Latinos, and African immigrants, have been remarkably upwardly mobile (often without official favoritism). 

Clearly, troubling disparities persist for African Americans. What’s much less clear is that racism, systemic or not, remains the principal cause of these disparities or that a caste of equity commissars will reverse them. And now, it would seem that narrowing these disparities runs counter to their self-interest. 

“I don’t want to deny that there’s genuine goodwill on the part of some of these programs,” says Prof. Schuck, stressing that he hasn’t examined their inner workings. “But some of these conflicts are not capable of being solved by these gestures. They have to justify their own jobs, their own budgets, however. And that creates the potential for a lot of mischief. They end up trafficking in controversy and righteousness, which produces the deformities we’ve been seeing in policies and conduct.” 

Still, to hear DEI officers, it’s they who are beleaguered and overwhelmed. Yes, they have important-sounding jobs and rather vague responsibilities. They are accountable to nobody, really. Rather than fighting “the man,” they now are the man, or at least the gender-neutral term for man in this context. But this also means that they are starting to catch flak, particularly as the evidence mounts that the institutions they advise and admonish aren’t actually becoming more fair, open, and welcoming. They’re not even becoming more ethnically diverse.  

Like other DEI advocates, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education has declined to answer questions for this article. Its officers are too busy traveling to conferences to do so, a spokeswoman said.  

But at a recent association meeting, Anneliese Singh of Tulane University invoked Rosa Parks’ refusal to take a back seat to discrimination. Although Parks was a housekeeper and diversicrats have comfortable university sinecures, their struggles are analogously distressing, Singh suggested. The latter, too, are on the “front lines” in a harrowing war. However, she said, her colleagues needed to remember what mattered most: Looking out for themselves.  

“It is not self-indulgence,” she said, now quoting the feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lord. “It is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.”  

For the moment, it’s a war Singh and her DEI colleagues are clearly winning.  

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I am always happy to welcome new content from The Brownstone Institute, one of the last few beacons of common sense left in the world.

This week they published a new piece on how, as the Covid emergency fades away, the climate emergency is becoming prominent. After lamenting the rights that were taken from citizens during the Covid emergency, the article looks at exactly what superpowers the government would get in declaring a climate emergency. You guessed it: more power to ram through ways for government to micromanage your life, interfere with the economy and – best of all – further the Keynesian nightmare by printing and spend as many U.S. dollars as they want without consequences.

I contacted them last year and requested permission to share their content when I enjoy it, in full, with my readers, which they kindly granted. If you’re interested in the topic – or simply just having a grasp on the objective truth – I believe it is a “must read”.

The article is written by W. Aaron Vandiver, a writer, former litigator, and wildlife conservationist. He is the author of the novel, Under a Poacher’s Moon. Photographic annotations have been added by QTR.

In February 2022, 1,140 organizations sent President Biden a letter urging him to declare a “climate emergency.” A group of US Senators did the same, in October 2022, and a House bill, introduced in 2021, also called on the president to “declare a national climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act.”

Biden has considered declaring such an emergency, but so far he has declined, to the disappointment of many progressives.

The United Nations (UN) has urged all countries to declare a climate emergency. The state of Hawaii and 170 local US jurisdictions have declared some version of one. So have 38 countries, including European Union members and the UK, and local jurisdictions around the world, together encompassing about 13 percent of the world’s population.

Hillary Clinton was reportedly prepared to declare a “climate emergency” if she had won the 2016 election.

A “climate emergency” is in the zeitgeist. Those words were surely uttered by the billionaires, technocrats and corporate CEOs attending the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos.

But what does it actually mean for the president of the US to officially declare a “climate emergency?”

Most people don’t realize that under US law, a national emergency declaration triggers a set of emergency powers that allows a president to act without the need for further legislation.

The Brennan Center for Justice compiled a list of the 123 statutory powers that may become available to the president upon declaration of a national emergency (plus 13 that become available when Congress declares a national emergency).

The scope of these powers is difficult to summarize, except to say that if exercised to their maximum extent, they potentially encompass vast areas of American life.

For civil libertarians across the political spectrum, from left to right, a “climate emergency” should be a focus of concern.

Even environmentalists who may instinctively and understandably support the idea should be worried about the potential for the authoritarian model of “emergency” governance that arose during COVID-19 to overtake climate policy.

One can believe in protecting and preserving the planet, as I do, while insisting on environmental policies that are consistent with democracy, civil liberties, and human rights.

Elements of the left and right should be coming together to reject demands that we sacrifice democratic norms, rights, and freedoms for flimsy promises of safety from political and economic elites who seek to exploit a crisis — a cynical ploy that COVID-19 thoroughly exposed.

Recall that it was President Trump who issued a COVID-19 “national emergency” declaration on March 13, 2020. This was accompanied by “public health emergency” orders at the federal and state levels, and by the World Health Organization (WHO), which unleashed an intense phase of lockdowns and a tsunami of health-and-safety rules and restrictions — many imposed on the public in circumvention of the normal democratic process.

Before that, I might have supported a “climate emergency” without a second thought. Now, after three years of lockdowns, mandates, censorship and other heavy-handed policies, the trust is gone.

The leaders pushing for a new emergency who have failed to repudiate the abuses of the last one — even those with the purest of intentions regarding the environment — have lost credibility.

Many others feel the same way. We need to know exactly what a “climate emergency” really means.

So what would an official “climate emergency” look like?

Just like the “COVID-19 emergency,” it would be far-reaching, with potentially dramatic effects on the economy and society. Emergency measures may even cause serious harm to the environment — while failing to meaningfully address climate change.

Even if you tend to pay attention to climate-related issues, the implications of a “climate emergency” may surprise you.

How would a ‘climate emergency’ even work?

Environmental advocacy groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity have called on the Biden administration to invoke specific emergency statutes that would give him the power to:

• Ban crude oil exports.

• Stop oil and gas drilling on the outer continental shelf.

• Curtail international trade and investment in fossil fuels.

The Center for Biological Diversity says that these emergency powers would allow Biden to put the U.S. on the path to “jettison the fossil-fuel economy and burgeon a just, anti-racist, and regenerative America in its place.”

However, there are many reasons to doubt such grandiose claims. Numerous energy and materials experts, including the well-known analyst Vaclav Smil, have concluded that a rapid transition to “green” energy may not even be possible.

Further, the Biden administration would probably not take steps to quickly phase out fossil fuels at the risk of crashing the economy. As BlackRock noted its 2023 Global Outlook: “The faster the transition [the] more volatile inflation and economic activity.”

If Biden exercised his emergency powers, he would most likely use them to fast-track “green” energy projects while stopping far short of serious efforts to phase out fossil fuels.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 already set the precedent: It included hundreds of billions of dollars for “green” energy subsidies and opened millions of acres of public lands and offshore waters to fossil-fuel development.

This play-both-sides approach would obviously do little to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, which rose globally to 52 billion tons in 2022 (including about 36 billion tons of carbon) from 51 billion tons in 2021.

Even if Biden fully exercised the emergency powers identified by the Center for Biological Diversity, this would have little effect on emissions.

Climate experts who must speak on the condition of anonymity to “avoid upsetting colleagues” admit that “while a climate [emergency] declaration is important in terms of media attention and galvanizing the climate movement, it does not have significant impacts on carbon pollution.”

When you look at the wish lists of the Senate and House members who want Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” and the demands of the many activists who say we must reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050, the emergency powers listed by the Center for Biological Diversity barely scratch the surface of what most say is needed.

The big question is, what else will the government be tempted to do to reach net-zero by 2050 — a goal Biden already directed the US government itself to reach via executive order — once a “climate emergency” has been initiated?

Elizabeth Kolbert, a leading climate journalist, recently wrote an article “Climate Change from A to Z,” published in the New Yorker. Here’s what she says must happen to reach net-zero by 2050:

• The fossil fuel industry will essentially have to be dismantled, and millions of leaky and abandoned wells sealed.

• Concrete production will have to be reengineered. The same goes for the plastics and chemicals industries.

• The fertilizer industry will also have to be refashioned.

• Practically all the boilers and water heaters that now run on oil or gas, commercial and residential, will have to be replaced. So will all the gas stoves and dryers and industrial kilns.

• The airline industry will have to be revamped, as will the shipping industry.

• Farming “emissions, too, will have to be eliminated.”

• Electrical transmission capacity must be “expand[ed] so that hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, and buses can be run on electricity.”

• “Tens of millions” of public charging stations [must be installed] on city streets and even more charging stations in private garages.

• Nickell and lithium must be extracted for electric batteries, “which will mean siting new mines, either in the U.S. or abroad.”

• New methods for producing steel or building a new infrastructure for capturing and sequestering carbon” must be invented.

“All of this should be done — indeed, must be done,” Kolbert wrote. “Zeroing out emissions means rebuilding the U.S. economy from the bottom up.”

All of that must be done? We must “rebuild the US economy from the bottom up?”

What does it even mean to “revamp” the airline industry, or “refashion” the fertilizer industry or “eliminate” emissions from the farming industry?

In reality, most of those things cannot be done. They certainly cannot be accomplished within any reasonable exercise of presidential emergency powers.

If a president attempts to directly intervene in industry after industry to accomplish these unrealistic goals — or pretends for political reasons to be trying to accomplish them — a “climate emergency” could gradually expand in scope to unimaginable proportions, unless reined in by the Supreme Court or the political process.

These are not idle concerns. The pressure on the government to do something now is immense and growing, with the slow-moving democratic lawmaking process increasingly seen as an obstacle.

A 2021 report by Deutsche Bank said that we may have to accept “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship” to reach net-zero by 2050. The UN has suggested countries are moving too slowly, leaving us with no option but the “rapid transformation of societies.”

And Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said, “only root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”

“Getting to zero will be the hardest thing humans have ever done,” Bill Gates, who is heavily invested in numerous climate-related businesses, wrote in his final blog post of 2022.

Gates added:

“We need to revolutionize the entire physical economy — how we make things, move around, produce electricity, grow food, and stay warm and cool — in less than three decades.”

Many want the president to use his emergency powers to get started right now, without waiting for Congress to act.

But this would be a dangerous misuse of federal emergency powers, which were not intended to give the president an end-run around Congress, as senior director of Liberty & National Security at the Brennan Center for Justice Elizabeth Goitein warned. Nor were emergency powers designed to address a complex long-term challenge like climate change.

Once emergency powers are invoked, the temptation will be to expand them. The only way President Biden or a future president could reach for any kind of significant, broad-based climate goals using his existing emergency powers, Goitein said, would be to “stretch them beyond all recognition, using them in legally dubious ways Congress never intended … the idea that emergency powers are infinitely malleable is both false and dangerous.”

If you are not yet a subscriber to Fringe Finance, wish to support the blog and have the means, I can offer you 50% off an annual subscription for reading today’s piece. The discount never expires. You can use this coupon: Get 50% off forever

How a ‘climate emergency’ could infringe on civil liberties and human rights

How worried should we be that a “climate emergency” intended to “rapidly transform” our entire society by 2050 — which would be the 80th national emergency in US history — might gradually expand in scope to infringe on basic civil liberties and human rights?

A 2018 article in the Atlantic, “The Alarming Scope of the President’s Emergency Powers,” warned of nightmarish scenarios that could ensue if President Trump abused his emergency powers.

“The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’ — a decision that is entirely within his discretion — he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority,” the article warned. “The president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts,” and much more.

We can certainly hope that a “climate emergency” would not morph into such a dangerous scenario. Historically, most national emergency declarations have been benign.

Yet the “COVID-19 emergency” initiated on Trump’s watch and carried on by Biden has unfortunately set a new and troubling authoritarian precedent that cannot be ignored.

Nowhere is that precedent more apparent than in the lingering notion of “locking down” the population.

In October 2020, University College of London economics professor Mariana Mazzucato, who chairs an economics council for the WHO, published an article expressly raising the possibility of “climate lockdowns” to address a “climate emergency.”

Mazzucato wrote:

“In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again — this time to tackle a climate emergency. … Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling.”

What these “climate lockdowns” would amount to is various forms of “green austerity” — strict limits on consumption and personal behavior — imposed on the population.

This is a real possibility — not a conspiracy theory (despite the protestations of biased fact-checkers).

Far from being fringe, Mazzucato’s article about “climate lockdowns” as a response to a “climate emergency” was published by a website, Project Syndicate, that receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other influential organizations that vigorously supported COVID-19 lockdowns.

The article also was endorsed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a “CEO-led organization” that represents 200 of the world’s largest corporations.

Mazzucato is only one of many climate policymakers who want to harness the extraordinary technocratic/authoritarian powers that were used during COVID-19 “lockdowns” to fight climate change.

For example, a paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability cited the “window of opportunity provided by the Covid-19 crisis,” arguing that “Covid vaccine passports could be succeeded by personal carbon passports.”

“Carbon passports,” along with digital IDs, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), social-credit scores and other means of tracking and restricting consumption, travel, diet and personal behavior are routinely bandied about at the WEF and other elite technocratic organizations.

Worries about “carbon passports” take on added urgency in light of the recent G20 conference, which resulted in an agreement in principle to establish a system of digital vaccine passports for international travel, to be administered by the WHO.

How might such restrictions be incorporated into American law and life? There are various ways: legislation, agency rulemaking, international treaty, city ordinance.

A “climate emergency” is a powerful legal tool that could conceivably be used to impose “green” restrictions on the public in circumvention of the normal democratic lawmaking process, particularly if a presidential administration comes under pressure to stretch its emergency powers beyond their intended purpose.

Recall that it is not just presidents who can trigger a state of emergency. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), state governors and the WHO all have the power to declare a “public health emergency” within their respective areas of authority.

This is exactly what happened in early 2020, illustrating how a future “climate public health emergency” might take shape.

What happens if global, federal and state officials declare a ‘climate public health emergency’?

It was not only President Trump’s national emergency declaration that led to lockdowns and so many other abuses of power and violations of basic rights during COVID-19. His order helped establish the framework for emergency governance, but other “public health emergency” orders were crucial.

The WHO declared COVID-19 to be a “public health emergency of international concern” on Jan. 30, 2020. This move triggered a coordinated global response and had wide-ranging repercussions.

The next day, Trump’s HHS secretary declared a COVID-19 “public health emergency,” an order that has been repeatedly renewed and is still in effect.

Trump’s subsequent national emergency declaration on March 13, 2020, endorsed that order while authorizing HHS to exercise additional emergency powers.

Three days after that, on March 16, Trump issued the “coronavirus guidelines” that advised Americans to “avoid social gatherings in groups of more than 10,” which served as a basis for the lockdowns that swept the nation.

Governors of each state issued their own public health emergency orders, too. State public health agencies operating under those emergency orders were instrumental in enacting lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, vaccine mandates and other “emergency” policies in cooperation with federal agencies and the White House.

It is not far-fetched to think that the WHO, HHS and state public health agencies could eventually declare a “climate public health emergency,” following the COVID-19 script.

There have already been calls for the WHO to officially declare climate change a “public health emergency of international concern.”

At the direction of an executive order from President Biden, HHS recently established an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. “We will use the lessons learned from COVID-19” to address the effects of climate change on the nation’s health, said HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel L. Levine.

The WHO and major public health organizations — including the American Public Health Association (APHA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and top medical journals — already have declared climate change a “public health crisis.”

The Lancet called climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

We do not yet know if or when this “public health crisis” will turn into a full-fledged “public health emergency.” If it does, think of all the extraordinary powers that public health agencies claimed in response to the COVID-19 emergency, extending even to an eviction moratorium that grossly exceeded the agency’s lawful authority.

Now imagine those administrative powers applied to a new, even broader and much more long-lasting emergency that plausibly touches on so many different aspects of human health.

The public health leviathan is preparing to expand its powers in response to climate change, just as it did with COVID-19. We cannot predict how this effort will fare in the years ahead. The WHO may or may not declare climate change a “public health emergency.”

HHS may refrain from doing so, pursuant to recent Supreme Court precedent limiting the ability of federal agencies to address “major questions” like climate change without clear Congressional authorization. Politics, of course, will play a huge role. At this point, we simply do not know how a “climate public health emergency” will play out, but in the wake of COVID-19, it remains a serious concern.

How ‘green’ is green energy, really?

Despite the risks to democratic governance and civil liberties outlined here, those who support a “climate emergency” can at least claim that they are doing what is necessary to kick-start the “green” energy revolution that will save the planet, right?

Not so fast.

A small environmental group called Protect Thacker Pass, which opposes a major lithium mine in Nevada, pointed out that “green” energy projects that are “fast-tracked” under a “climate emergency” would not only have access to streamlined federal financing, they might also be permitted to skip environmental review and compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

This would be a replay of the “emergency” mode of governance established during COVID-19 when products privately owned and developed by Big Pharma were fast-tracked through the federal approval process.

In both cases, large corporations would be using an “emergency” to bypass legislative safeguards put in place to protect human health and the environment.

Indeed, there is a very strong case to be made that fast-tracking a massive build-out of “green” energy would immediately make a range of environmental problems much worse.

The book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, by three environmentalists, methodically picks apart arguments that solar, wind and other “green” energy technologies are clean, renewable or good for the planet.

Even to find sufficient quantities of minerals for “green” energy to be developed at scale, mining companies may begin “deep-sea mining” — some have already applied for permits — which ocean ecologists fear could annihilate ocean ecosystems.

Mining for lithium and other metals at a large enough scale would also have to take over vast areas of wildlife habitat, worsening the global biodiversity crisis.

Due to exploding demand and limits on mineral availability, mining companies have a strong incentive to mine every available source, without regard to ecological damage.

Climate activists and progressive politicians seem to believe that this collateral damage to the environment is a small price to pay for a “green” economy, which will ultimately save more of the planet than it destroys — but there are reasons to be skeptical.

Geology Professor Simon Michaux, PhD, for instance, concluded there are not enough minerals and other resources on Earth to build economy-wide “green” energy technologies and infrastructure.

And of course, it remains doubtful that “green” energy is even capable of powering the growing global economy, which still gets over 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. Even under a “climate emergency,” for the foreseeable future, we will most likely be stuck with the environmental damage caused by both fossil fuels and “green” energy.

Missing from the conversation about a “climate emergency” is a broader understanding of how ecological damage to soil, water, forests, biodiversity and ecosystems drives climate change and interrelated environmental problems.

As activist Vandana Shiva, PhD, explained, the globalized industrial food system is a main driver of climate change due to land use change, agrochemical pollution, monocultures, and other unecological methods.

Yet there is little talk of using emergency powers to shift to local, agroecological or traditional food systems.

Just the opposite. All signs indicate that the US and other world governments want to expand the reach and control of the globalized industrial food system, further concentrating power in the largest Big Food corporations.

Governments around the world are using environmental goals to forcibly shut down small farms as they promote dependence on industrial technologies and factory foods that could make climate change and other environmental problems worse.

We see the same shortcomings in the blinkered concept of “net-zero,” an accounting scheme formulated with the heavy input of corporate interests, which Shiva calls “corporate greenwashing.”

“If we continue to reduce the climate narrative to simply an issue of reducing carbon emissions to ‘net zero’ without understanding and addressing the other aspects of greater ecological collapse,” Shiva said, “climate chaos will only continue.”

A “climate emergency” as currently conceived would, if anything, exacerbate these negative trends. It would further centralize power, enrich corporate interests, treat ordinary citizens with a heavy hand and perversely cause immediate harm to the natural world — without significantly slowing down climate change or leading to genuine sustainability.

Would government officials use a ‘climate emergency’ to let Bill Gates ‘dim the sky?’

As if all the above were not worrisome enough, there is one final thing that the US government operating under a “climate emergency” might try to do — something that has unparalleled potential to end in ecological disaster.

Another New Yorker article — this one by the country’s foremost climate activist, Bill McKibben, who has led the charge for a federally declared “climate emergency, warns, “Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It.”

McKibben’s article is about “solar engineering” — spraying reflective chemicals into the stratosphere — to cool down the planet. Scientists funded in part by Gates have been studying the issue.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy also recently announced a five-year study to assess “solar and other rapid climate interventions.”

“The scientists who study solar engineering don’t want anyone to try it,” writes McKibben. But according to him, “climate inaction is making it more likely.”

Notice McKibben says, “climate inaction” makes “dimming the sun” more likely. That sort of logic can go on interminably.

There will always be “climate inaction,” at least for the foreseeable future, because the global economy has no realistic path to significantly reduce its carbon emissions. “De-carbonizing” the growing global economy remains a pipe dream.

The potential side effects of “dimming the sun” are mind-boggling. They include turning the sky from blue to white and plunging entire regions of the Earth into ecological chaos.

‘Left’ and ‘right’ must collaborate to pursue alternatives to a ‘climate emergency’

As I have tried to demonstrate, an official “climate emergency” has enormous implications.

Activists who are pressing hard for an emergency declaration may not completely understand what they are asking for, and those in opposition may not fully realize what they are up against.

This issue should not be framed as a dispute between “deniers” and “believers” in climate change. The prospect of a wide-ranging and long-lasting emergency mode of governance should prompt serious questions from everyone across the political spectrum.

These questions include:

• Will a “climate emergency” put us on the path to solving climate change, or will it merely centralize power and enrich special interests while potentially undermining democracy, civil liberties and human rights?

• Will a “climate emergency” be used to promote dubious or even dangerous “green” technologies that actually harm the environment?

• What happens if/when emergency measures most likely fail to affect climate change? Will the government keep doubling down on policies that do not actually work, creating a doom loop of failure followed by louder calls for more to be done?

Only a political coalition consisting of elements of the left and right can find viable alternatives to a “climate emergency” as currently conceived.

The political pressure to do something about climate change — even things that make no sense — will surely intensify in the coming years. A populace that sees no other option may very well embrace some version of authoritarianism for the “greater good,” as much of the public did during the pandemic.

Elements of the left and right should be trying to build political alliances based on the preservation of democracy, civil liberties, human rights, local control, community values and nature itself — forests, rivers, grasslands, oceans, air, soil, wilderness and wildlife — as an alternative to the centralized command-and-control of society.

One major cause that a left-right coalition could get behind is local, small-scale, organic agriculture — healthier and much friendlier to the environment than the globalized industrial food system, which is responsible for at least a third, and by some estimates, a majority of greenhouse gas emissions.

Small-scale organic agriculture also is good for family farmers and small business owners, and more conducive to local food security in a time of global instability and economic uncertainty.

Building resilience to the environmental challenges of the future, while defending the population from powerful economic and political forces that seek to exploit a crisis, is a project that more people from across the political spectrum might be able to agree on.

That lesson should have been learned during the COVID-19 fiasco.

In contrast, most “green ‘thought leaders,’” writer Paul Kingsnorth observed, have “a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this story before, just dig out your dirty old covid mask. It will all come flooding back.”

We can do better than that. An effective political coalition will hopefully strive for a consensus that realistically addresses the environmental challenges of the 21st century while serving as a counterweight to the drive for centralized control under the guise of emergency governance.

Otherwise, the “zero-carbon pen,” in Kingsnorth’s turn of phrase, awaits.

Article originally published from Children’s Health Defense.

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Canadian officials have asked New York City Mayor Eric Adams to “immediately” stop sending illegal aliens across the northern US border into Canada, just one week after reports that the National Guard has been helping distribute taxpayer-funded one-way tickets from Manhattan.

“Any form of assistance to migrants crossing the border where it is strictly forbidden to do so should stop immediately,” reads a statement from the office of Quebec Premier Francois Legault. “We understand that the situation of migrants in New York poses major challenges, but the situation in Quebec and particularly in Montreal is even worse and constitutes an important humanitarian issue.”

The NY Post reported last week that “thousands of new migrants” have been helped cross the US-Canada border, including some who “reported their desire to relocate to other cities, and Catholic Charities provided some assistance for their travel expenses.”

The Post also reports that migrants are tearing up their American immigration documents between Plattsburgh and the Canadian border – leaving scraps of paper from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the floor of a shuttle van which has the word “Frontera” (border) on the side.

As many as 250 migrants use the Roxham Road crossing to illegally enter Canada each day, with nearly all of them settling in Montreal, Quebec’s biggest city, Legault spokesperson Ewan Sauves said.

The situation has overwhelmed Montreal’s ability to provide housing and other public services, with the flood of new students alone equivalent to the opening of 13 new schools, he said.

Last year, 39,161 people used Roxham Road to illegally enter Canada, comprising 99.1% of all such border crossings, Sauves said. –NY Post

On Monday, NY City Hall said that officials had processed over 45,600 migrants since the spring, with around 29,100 housed in emergency shelters as of Sunday – figures which the Post suggests are likely an undercount because they don’t include migrants who are staying with relatives, friends and other people in their networks after arriving in New York.

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Joe Biden has removed Capitol architect Brett Blanton from his post in the aftermath of an inspection which revealed Blanton had abused his position.

Blanton will cease to serve as the architect of the Capitol at 5:00 PM EST, the White House announced.

Biden removed the architect, who serves at the president’s pleasure, after Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he had lost confidence in Blanton’s ability to perform his job.

“The Architect of the Capitol, Brett Blanton, no longer has my confidence to continue in his job,” McCarthy wrote in a Feb. 13 Twitter post. “He should resign or President Biden should remove him immediately.”

Blanton was “terminated at the President’s direction,” the White House said on Monday.

Concerns about Blanton center around an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report finished last year that found “administrative, ethical, and policy violations.” These included abuse of his government vehicle and misrepresentation of himself as a law enforcement officer (pdf).

At the top of the document, the OIG report concludes:  “J. Brett Blanton, Architect of the Capitol, Abused His Authority, Misused Government Property and Wasted Taxpayer Money, Among Other Substantiated Violations.”

“Prior to and throughout the OIG investigation, Blanton consistently contradicted his vehicle-use authority,” the report reads.

The report relays an ethics tip describing an encounter with Blanton’s vehicle.

The complainant spotted Blanton’s government-issue black Ford Explorer. At the time, the vehicle was reportedly “driving extremely reckless[ly]” through a parking garage. The driver, a female, was going an estimated 65 miles per hour or faster in an area with a speed limit of 30.

Read more here…

Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

We have word from the FBI.

They will provide us with their interview(s) of Jeffery Epstein in the next couple months.

Here’s the FBI’s representation:

“FBI has completed its search for documents responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request and anticipates beginning to produce any non-exempt documents responsive to Plaintiff’s request as early as April 2023. FBI anticipates only one production of documents instead of rolling productions due to the relatively limited number of responsive documents.”

There’s a ton of unanswered questions about Epstein’s involvement with the FBI, and we hope that these records provide some answers. The FBI has fought the disclosure of these records, necessitating the filing of our lawsuit (a lawsuit which was possible through your support – thank you for that).

We won’t overpromise or guarantee what these documents might reveal. Until we get our hands on the documents there are still a ton of questions, such as: will the FBI improperly redact the interview(s), or will the FBI refuse to release all their Epstein interviews?

We’ll see.

The Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell “John Does”

There’s more on the Epstein front. A federal judge in New York’s Southern District is currently considering whether to disclose the names of the “John Does” arising out of Virginia Giuffre v. Ghislaine Maxwell. Here’s the list she’s reviewing.

Sadly, reporting from the media has created a lot of false hope about whose names might be unsealed. I have to break the unfortunate news: this isn’t “Epstein’s list.”

Let me lay out the facts of what we do know about these individuals. Here’s the breakdown:

• There are approximately 165 “John Does”. These are not all perpetrators. The vast majority are witnesses of varying degrees (meaning material or immaterial), employees of Epstein, or affiliates of Epstein or the victims. The term “affiliate” ranges from those in Epstein’s address book to the doctors or acquaintances of the victims.

Subscribers to The Reactionary can read the rest here…

NORAD has announced Tuesday that it scrambled jets to intercept four inbound Russian military aircraft near American airspace off Alaska the day prior.

“The Alaskan Region of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) detected, tracked, positively identified and intercepted four Russian aircraft entering and operating within the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) on Feb.13, 2023,” an official statement reads.

The response included a pair of US F-16 fighter jets, assisted by two more F-35A fighters, an E-3 Sentry, and two KC-135 Stratotankers, all of which were sent to intercept the Russian aircraft, which included among the the four aircraft a Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” long range bomber and SU-35 fighter jet. 

But interestingly, NORAD called the incident “routine” – given it has happened an estimated six to seven times a year on average over the past decade or more. Additionally, no breach of actual US airspace was reported by the Russian planes, just the outlying ADIZ.

“Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace. This Russian activity in the North American ADIZ occurs regularly and is not seen as a threat, nor is the activity seen as provocative,” the statement continued.

However, currently there are heightened tensions with Russia related to the Ukraine war, but also given the unusual spate of ‘unidentified object’ shootdowns by US fighters over the last week – two of which were in far northern regions, including northeastern Alaska and Canada’s Yukon territory.

Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,

Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.”

Number one on the school’s focus list?

“Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.”

But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient.

Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago. 

The failure list in math is even longer. There are 53 schools statewide where not one kid is proficient in math.

The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schools is yet another indictment of the state’s educational system. At Wirepoints, we covered in detail the failures of Illinois education across the state in Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system.

The data comes straight from the Illinois State Board of Education. 

This column focuses on schools where zero percent of kids are able to read or do math. But we could have just as easily looked at the 622 schools where only 1 out of 10 kids or less can read at grade level. That’s a whopping 18 percent of the state’s 3,547 schools that tested students in 2022.

And only 1 out of 10 kids or less can do math at grade level in 930 schools…that’s more than a quarter of all schools in the state.

Defenders of the current system are sure to invoke covid as the big reason for the low scores. But a look at the 2019 numbers show that the reading and math numbers were only slightly better than they are now.

Take Spry, for example. Just 2 of the school’s 127 students in 2019 could read at grade level before the pandemic. In math, zero students were proficient.

The failure isn’t about money, either. Data from the Illinois State Board of Education shows spending at Spry was already at $20,000 per student before the pandemic. Today it spends $35,600.

What’s really incredible is that many of these schools are rated “commendable” by the Illinois State Board of Education. That’s the 2nd-highest of four “accountability” ratings a school can receive.

Not a single one of the 113 students at Sandoval Sr High School can read or do math at grade level. And yet the school is “commendable.”

Same with Ralph Ellison Chicago International Charter School. Over $24,000 spent on each of its 172 students. Labeled “commendable.” And none of the students are proficient in either reading or math.

In a sane world, schools that don’t and can’t teach a single student the most basic of skills would be shut down. But here, they carry on…the system thrives while students wither.

Today, the Q4 13-F season begins (and ends tomorrow) and while we will have a comprehensive summary of what hedge funds did in the fourth quarter (which ended 45 days ago), we start our reporting with what the grand daddy of all modern day hedge funds, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, did.

Which actually was very little: the reported value of Berkshire’s long-only equity portfolio rose modestly from $296BN to $299BN, with only modest underlying changes.

Here are the most notable ones:

• Added to just three positions, and in very modest amount: boosted its stake in AAPL (which remains the fund’s largest position worth just over $116BN as of Dec 31), by 333,856 shares and BRK now holds 895.136 million AAPL shares; increased its stake in Paramount Global by 2.7%, or 2.421 million shares to 93.637 million shares, and also boosted its Louisiana Pacific position by 21.5% or 1.249 million shares to 7.044 million shares.
• Trimmed holdings in eight positions, including:
  • Chevron, 1.4% cut in shares held from 164.4 million to 163.0 million
  • Activision Blizzard, stake cut by 12.3% or 7.424 million shares to 52.717 million
  • Bank of New York Mellon, stake slashed by 59.7% or 37.1 million shares to 25.1 million shares
  • US Bancorp, stake slashed by 91.4% ot 71.1 million shares to 6.67 million shares
• Most notable was the sizable cut in the Taiwan Semi position, which was cut by 86.2%, from 60.06 million shares to just 8.293 million as of Dec 31. This is a big change for a stock which as of Sept 30 was not only a new position for Berkshire, but one which just made the company’s top 10 holdings with value of $4.1 billion as of Sept 30.

Remarkably, for the first time in years, Berkshire neither added new position nor fully liquidated existing holdings in the fourth quarter.

As of Dec 31, Berkshire’s largest position remains Apple at 895.1 million shares or $116.3 billion as of Dec 31. Other top 5 holdings are:

• Bank of America Corp.: unchanged at 1.01 billion valued at $33.5 billion
• Chevron: cut by 2.4 million shares to 162.9 million valued at $29.3 billion
• Coca-Cola: unchanged at 400 million valued at $25.4 billion
• American Express: unchanged at 151.6 million valued at $22.4 billion

Full details of all Berkshire Q4 moves can be found in the table below.

Soruce: SEC Edgar