Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Pfizer and its partner BioNTech could be open to lawsuits for including a DNA sequence in their COVID-19 vaccine.

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, known as the PREP Act, largely shields COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits, but companies can be sued for “willful misconduct,” which includes acts taken “intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose.”

“I think what we have here is willful misconduct,” Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, told The Epoch Times.

The Pfizer-BioNTech, in testing by outside scientists, was discovered to contain a Simian Virus 40 (SV40) DNA sequence despite the public never being told about the sequence.

Regulators in Canada and Europe have since acknowledged that the companies did not highlight the sequence and that they should have, although regulatory submissions did show the full DNA sequence of the vaccine plasmid.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has refused to disclose whether the companies highlighted the sequence.

The FDA alleged no safety concerns have been identified from the residual DNA left behind by the SV40 sequence, though the agency provided no evidence on the matter.

“I can’t imagine that the FDA knew about this. There’s nothing in the FDA documents that would that I am aware of yet where they knew about this contaminant,” Mr. Staver said.

Under a declaration by then-Health Secretary Alex Azar in 2020, COVID-19 vaccines fall under the PREP Act. That act is aimed at allowing a quicker response to a health emergency and grants widespread immunity to manufacturers of vaccines and treatments, as well as administrators of the drugs.

The protection remains in place to this day thanks to extensions through both the Trump and Biden administrations.

The PREP Act has largely prevented lawsuits concerning the COVID-19 vaccines, but several recent developments could change that.

In August, a Michigan judge ruled that the drug manufacturer Gilead Sciences was not protected by the act in the case of a man who needed his leg amputated after receiving Gilead’s drug remdesivir, used as a treatment for COVID-19. The administered drug was said to be contaminated with glass particles.

The other is the revelation that Pfizer’s shot contains the SV40 sequence.

That could help plaintiffs “pierce that legal immunity that’s otherwise provided by the PREP Act,” Mr. Staver said.

He said he’s heard from personal injury firms and organizations who are exploring suits and that Liberty Counsel is considering bringing some as well in light of the developments.

Liberty Counsel has been involved in multiple major suits concerning COVID-19 vaccines, including some with military members who were denied in form letters requests for religious exemptions from the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The firm helped win orders blocking the military from discharging those members.

Pfizer and BioNTech have not returned requests for comment.

Warner Mendenhall, another American lawyer, said on a recent call that lawyers are talking about taking a different approach.

“The latest conversation that we’ve been talking about … is whether we have access right now, at least for some people, to prove battery,” he said.

Informed consent requires having information, “and nobody knew about the SV40,” he said.

Without such knowledge, vaccine recipients could not properly give consent, according to Mr. Mendenhall.

“And if you haven’t consented, and somebody does something to you without being informed and given proper consent, it’s called battery. So, there is some opening for battery cases. And we’re in discussions right now, and those may be able to be brought as as what are called mass torts or mass cases. So we’re working on that.”

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

TikTok is a key tool in communist China’s strategy to manipulate Americans and undermine the United States’s ability to respond to crises, according to experts and lawmakers.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, will likely use TikTok in its effort to wage “cognitive warfare” against the United States, said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.).

“The CCP calls it ‘cognitive domain warfare,’ part of their larger political warfare strategy,” Mr. Gallagher said in prepared comments for a Nov. 30 hearing of the House Select Committee on the CCP.

Mr. Gallagher, who chairs the committee, said that the United States was struggling to respond to the threat, as the nation had no grand strategy or apparatus for confronting propaganda from authoritarian powers.

“Cognitive warfare is not something we tend to think about here in the West. Sure, we have ideas like soft power, but they’re not a national strategy,” Mr. Gallagher said.

“On the ‘smokeless battlefield’ of people’s minds, we don’t have a standing military at all.”

CCP Seeks ‘Mind Dominance’

The Pentagon’s 2022 China Military Power Report (pdf), which distills the Defense Department’s most authoritative assessments of China’s strategy and capabilities, highlighted the development of the CCP’s new method of psychological warfare.

It said that the CCP and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), were developing and deploying methods for conducting cognitive warfare to win military advantage.

“As the PLA seeks to expand the reach of its influence operations around the world and to seize information dominance on the battlefield, it is researching and developing the next evolution of psychological warfare called cognitive domain operation[s] (CDO) that leverages subliminal messaging, deep fakes, overt propaganda, and public sentiment analysis,” the report stated.

“The goal of CDO is to achieve what the PLA refers to as ‘mind dominance,’ defined as the use of propaganda as a weapon to influence public opinion to effect change in a nation’s social system, likely to create an environment favorable to China and reduce civilian and military resistance to PLA actions.”

The report described CDO as “a more aggressive form of psychological warfare” intended to “affect a target’s cognition, decision making, and behavior.”

Mr. Gallagher said that CCP leader Xi Jinping considered CDO as a vital weapon in the regime’s arsenal that could be used to manipulate the American people at key moments, such as during an election cycle.

“In Xi Jinping’s view, the war has already started on the most important battlefield: your mind,” Mr. Gallagher said.

Data Suggests TikTok Taking Direction From CCP

Mr. Gallagher pointed to TikTok as the regime’s most powerful tool for conducting cognitive warfare.

Though the company denies that it takes direction from China-based parent company ByteDance, executives have previously acknowledged its censoring and “heating” of content at the request of the CCP.

To that end, Mr. Gallagher shared several slides suggesting that TikTok is still taking orders from Chinese communist authorities.

The slides demonstrated that posts about “viral topics” in politics and pop culture were proportionately represented on TikTok and Instagram in relation to the number of monthly users that both apps had.

Thus, there were about twice as many posts about Democrats, former President Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, and the “Barbie” movie on Instagram because Instagram has about twice as many monthly users as TikTok.

That proportionality changes, however, when one looks at topics heavily criticized or censored by the CCP.

There were about nine times fewer posts about the Uyghurs on TikTok than on Instagram, for example. And there were 30 times fewer posts about Tibet.

Moreover, there were 153 times fewer posts on TikTok about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a topic heavily censored by Beijing in the mainland.

“In the best-case scenario, TikTok is CCP spyware—that’s why so many state and national governments have banned it on official phones,” Mr. Gallagher said.

“In the worst-case scenario, TikTok is perhaps the largest scale malign influence operation ever conducted.”

TikTok Could Cause ‘Absolute Chaos’ in 2024 Elections

What’s more, Chinese state-owned media outlets have explicitly cited TikTok as a tool for advancing the regime’s goals, testified John Garnaut, a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank.

Mr. Garnaut noted that the CCP Central Committee’s official paper described TikTok as a key component in its effort to “allow short video platforms to become ‘megaphones’ for telling Chinese stories well and spreading Chinese voices well.”

Another story in the same paper said that the concepts of freedom, democracy, and human rights were invented to “compete with us [the CCP] for positions, hearts, and masses, and ultimately overthrow the leadership of the Communist Party of China and our country’s socialist system.”

To that end, Mr. Garnaut said that TikTok was “a project of total ideological control” by the CCP, with “enormous” potential to radically shape the information that Americans receive.

“The ability of this platform to manipulate public opinion at crucial moments … I think that’s the issue for deep concern,” Mr. Garnaut said.

Mr. Gallagher said earlier in the week that the CCP could exploit the app to cause “absolute chaos” in the U.S. 2024 presidential election.

Mr. Garnaut agreed with that sentiment, saying that the presence of any CCP disinformation could have detrimental effects regardless of whether it was believed. He pointed to the 2016 elections as evidence for such a phenomenon.

“Mueller found no evidence that Russia caused the election of Trump or that Trump had colluded with Russia,” Mr. Garnault said. “Nevertheless, Russia’s interference fed perceptions that bitterly divided Americans and wounded the faith of many that the election had been free and fair.”

Governments formulate lists of critical minerals according to their industrial requirements and strategic evaluations of supply risks.

Over the last decade, minerals like nickel, copper, and lithium have been on these lists and deemed essential for clean technologies like EV batteries and solar and wind power.

Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti and Zach Aboulazm created the following graphic, using data from  IRENA and the U.S. Department of Energy, to identify which minerals are essential to China, the United States, and the European Union.

What are Critical Minerals?

There is no universally accepted definition of critical minerals. Countries and regions maintain lists that mirror current technology requirements and supply and demand dynamics, among other factors.

These lists are also constantly changing. For example, the EU’s first critical minerals list in 2011 featured only 14 raw materials. In contrast, the 2023 version identified 34 raw materials as critical.

One thing countries share, however, is the concern that a lack of minerals could slow down the energy transition.

With most countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the total mineral demand from clean energy technologies is expected to double by 2040.

U.S. and EU Seek to Reduce Import Reliance on Critical Minerals

Ten materials feature on critical material lists of both the U.S., the EU, and China, including cobalt, lithium, graphite, and rare earths.

Despite having most of the same materials found in the U.S. or China’s list, the European list is the only one to include phosphate rock. The region has limited phosphate resources (only produced in Finland) and largely depends on imports of the material essential for manufacturing fertilizers.

Coking coal is also only on the EU list. The material is used in the manufacture of pig iron and steel. Production is currently dominated by China (58%), followed by Australia (17%), Russia (7%), and the U.S. (7%).

The U.S. has also sought to reduce its reliance on imports. Today, the country is 100% import-dependent on manganese and graphite and 76% on cobalt.

After decades of sourcing materials from other countries, the U.S. local production of raw materials has become extremely limited. For instance, there is only one operating nickel mine (primary) in the country, the Eagle Mine in Michigan. Likewise, the country only hosts one lithium source in Nevada, the Silver Peak Mine.

China’s Dominance

Despite being the world’s biggest carbon polluter, China is the largest producer of most of the world’s critical minerals for the green revolution.

China produces 60% of all rare earth elements used as components in high-technology devices, including smartphones and computers. The country also has a 13% share of the lithium production market. In addition, it refines around 35% of the world’s nickel, 58% of lithium, and 70% of cobalt.

Among some of the unique materials on China’s list is gold. Although gold is used on a smaller scale in technology, China has sought gold for economic and geopolitical factors, mainly to diversify its foreign exchange reserves, which rely heavily on the U.S. dollar.

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Analysts estimate China has bought a record 400 tonnes of gold in recent years.

China has also slated uranium as a critical mineral. The Chinese government has stated it intends to become self-sufficient in nuclear power plant capacity and fuel production for those plants.

According to the World Nuclear Association, China aims to produce one-third of its uranium domestically.

Authored by Marina Zhang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

But recent survey findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics suggest that melatonin consumption in U.S. children and adolescents is “exceedingly common.”

Around one-fifth of American children use melatonin for sleep, with some parents beginning administration to their children at the early age of 1, the authors wrote.

The United States has seen a rapid rise in pediatric melatonin use due to sleep problems. Some clinicians attribute these sleep problems to an increase in mental illness and screen use.

According to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) survey findings, between 2017 and 2018, around 1 percent of children and adolescents under the age of 19 consumed melatonin in the past 30 days.

The JAMA Pediatrics study authors compared this finding to their own research results, reporting that the current data indicate a rise in use of about 20 percent. Parents surveyed also reported that their children take the supplement on average two to five days per week, and many take it daily.

The common use of melatonin has also contributed to melatonin poisoning. Between 2012 and 2021, poison control centers in the United States have seen a 530 percent increase in melatonin ingestion reports among children, some of which resulted in hospitalization and death, according to research published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) publication.

Insufficient Sleep Is Common Among Children

“A lot of people think that kids don’t have sleeping problems, and that is absolutely not true,” sleep medicine pediatrician Dr. Gayln Perry, CEO of the Perry Center for Pediatric & Adult Sleep Care, told The Epoch Times.

Kids have always had sleeping problems, and these don’t differ much from those of adults.

COVID has also escalated problems. Around 25 percent of children suffered from disrupted sleep prior to the pandemic, and this jumped to nearly 46 percent in 2020.

Just as stress, anxiety, and depression can cause insomnia in adults, the same can occur in children who have different worries from day to day. These may include schoolwork, pressure from peers, and social media interactions.

Many teenagers are also over-committed in their school activities, which impacts their ability to get to bed on time.

Additionally, homeschooling during the pandemic increased children’s screen time. Screens are highly stimulating; their light can suppress and disrupt the sleep cycle.

There is a significant problem with electronics in general, “to the point that some parents really have lost control,” Dr. Perry said. Kids may get up in the middle of the night or early in the morning before school to get on their tablets or phones or to play video games.

Pediatrician Dr. Derek Husmann said he believes screen use is the main problem causing disordered sleeping in children.

Autism and attention-deficit/hyperactive disorders, whose rates have been growing among children, are also associated with poor sleep and difficulty falling asleep.

A Cheap and Accessible Sleep Aid

Parents and caretakers have, therefore, turned to melatonin.

Supplements for children are accessible, unregulated, and can be bought without a prescription. Available in the form of gummies and liquids, they are also appealing to young children.

“The majority of parents that come into my clinic have at least tried melatonin, or the child is already on melatonin—either per recommendation from a general pediatrician or on their own,” Dr. Perry said.

Between 2016 and 2020, sales of melatonin supplements increased by around 150 percent, according to the MMWR. Beyond sleep, people also supplement melatonin for its antioxidizing, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and neuroprotective effects.

Melatonin is a natural hormone the body produces to regulate the sleep-wake cycle. Light suppresses, while darkness stimulates the release of melatonin from the pineal gland.

Generally, melatonin supplements are advised to be taken one to two hours before bedtime to mimic the natural cycle.

“If taken later, it might be that the ‘window of opportunity’ has been missed,” Henriette Edemann Callesen, a neuropsychiatry consultant for the Danish Health Authority, wrote to The Epoch Times via email.

Melatonin’s effects only last about two hours. “It’s going to facilitate falling asleep quicker, but it’s not going to be around long enough to impact sleep quality,” said Dr. Perry. While parents typically report a short-term benefit when administering melatonin, as time passes, the supplements may not work as well, and the dose may need to be increased.

Dr. Husmann has seen this in his patients.

“It used to bother me a lot when I came across those patients that have been on it for months and months. I asked them to try to wean their kids off … but there are some cases where they try, and it’s not particularly successful,” he said.

Whether prolonged melatonin use leads to tolerance, like other sleeping pills, remains up for debate. Studies have shown conflicting evidence. However, long-term supplementation is typically not advised.

The Dangers

Doctors also generally do not recommend melatonin supplementation for healthy children under age 3 since difficulties falling and staying asleep in these children are almost always behavioral in nature. Yet there have been numerous cases of melatonin use in infants and toddlers.

High melatonin levels have also been detected in deceased children.

“I suspect the biggest issue is easy access to melatonin and its ill-perceived safety,” sleep medicine pediatrician Dr. Muhammad A. Rishi at Indiana University Health wrote to The Epoch Times via email. 

A North Carolina autopsy report detailed seven cases of suspected melatonin involvement in pediatric deaths.

One case was of a 3-month-old girl routinely given eight to 10 daily doses of 5 milligrams of melatonin supplements as a sleep aid. Such a dosage is well above what’s recommended for a child of any age. The child’s cause of death was inconclusive.

Doctors still do not know why melatonin supplementation may be associated with death, given its assumed high safety profile. It should also be noted that deaths from melatonin supplements make up only a very small percentage of all melatonin poisoning reports.

Dr. Perry said she has never had a patient die from melatonin and expects that since melatonin is an endogenous hormone—meaning it naturally occurs in the body—it should have a wide safety margin.

“I don’t see a lot of downsides other than I wish so many kids didn’t need it in the first place,” Dr. Husmann agreed.

However, Dr. Rishi argued that melatonin is a drug, meaning that it changes a person’s mental or physical state and, therefore, should be treated as such.

By Charlie Zhu and Helen Sun, Bloomberg markets live reporter and strategists

Three things we learned last week:

1. A protracted slump in China’s property market is hampering the broader economy’s recovery. Official data showed manufacturing activities contracted in November, while the services sector also lost momentum. A surprise pickup in a private manufacturing gauge was met with skepticism.

The latest data show there’s no end in sight for the crisis, with the decline in China’s home sales worsening. Homebuyer sentiment remained weak amid uncertain employment and income prospects, according to Fitch Ratings. Concerns over developers’ home delivery weighed on the market as more firms faced liquidity issues, analysts led by Karl Shen wrote in a report.

Neither infrastructure construction nor high-end manufacturing can fill the missing demand from a lack of home purchases, Wu Ge, chief economist at Changjiang Securities Co., wrote in a note. Wu previously worked at the central bank’s monetary policy department.

What’s worse, policy push to have banks offer a lifeline to developers is adding more pain to the financial sector. Lenders, which have already been suffering from soaring bad loans and record low net interest margins, face the prospect of big losses and job cuts.

2. China was left out in the everything rally that lifted global assets in November, underscoring the depth of pessimism. The CSI 300 benchmark closed near its weakest level of the year on Friday, even after a report that a state entity has purchased ETFs lifted stocks off their session lows.

Efforts at one of China’s largest investment banks to silence bearish commentary deepened investor worries about a lack of access to transparent data and research. A rally in equities traded on the Beijing Stock Exchange, which has been an outlier in the sluggish market, also lost steam.

Still, some investors are spotting opportunities. Fidelity International is timing a re-entrance into the market as Beijing prioritizes growth, while Franklin Templeton sees valuations as too attractive to ignore.

3. Amid all the gloom, the emergence of a new technology giant suggests the country is still a dynamic market. Shares of PDD Holdings Inc., an eight-year-old e-commerce platform, surged after reporting a near doubling in revenue. Its market cap outstripped Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. last week in a landmark shift for the country’s tech industry.

More of those valuable startups originating from China may become available for public investment. Fast-fashion retailer Shein is said to have filed confidentially with US regulators for an initial public offering that could take place next year.

Authored by Jonathan Turley via jonathanturley.org,

We recently discussed the runaway grade inflation at Harvard where roughly 80 percent of grades were As. Now the Yale Daily News is reporting the same percentage of As. Indeed, the percentage is virtually identical. Harvard is handing out 79 percent agrees where Yale is apparently more rigorous at 78.9.The report is apparently an embarrassment to the university since the dean of Yale College said that professors are not adhering to guidelines for grading.Yet, this could hardly be a surprise to the dean since these grades are reported and issued by the records office.

Indeed, this average is reportedly down from the prior year where 81.97 percent of students were given As. So not getting an A at Yale meant that you were in the bottom 20 percent of the class.

That means that for virtually all of the students at Yale there was a three-grade system that runs from A+, A, and A-.

The percentage was higher in the African American Studies department at 82.21 percent. However, it was the Gender Students department that showed that 92.6 percent of grades were in the A range. So only 7 % of students did not receive an A in gender studies.

For employers and other universities, it renders the grades from Yale meaningless in judging the capabilities and record of students.

They are not apparently alone.

At Spellman College, economics professor Kendrick Morales was fired after objecting to the school raising his grades without his consent, even after massively increasing the grades.

Morales worked for two years at Spellman and taught two upper-level courses. In one class, he added a 28-point grade bump for one test at the request of his department chair.

When students overall bombed the final, Morales  “pre-emptively” raised them 36 points so that a student receiving a 57 would receive an A.  Yet, even with that increase, 44 percent of that class would still fail. Indeed, they had failed, but Morales says that Undergraduate Studies Dean Desiree Pedescleaux bumped up the students’ grades again without his approval.

He was later fired.

The allegations not only raise questions over the academic standards at Spellman, but the violation of academic freedom.

Grade inflation is only the latest sign of how school administrators have lost control of universities and colleges. It also reflects a growing expectation of students in terms of higher GPAs.

It is easy to say that this is the byproduct of the “trophy generation,” but this is not their fault. Years ago, I had an interesting conversation with one of my classes over this negative image and one student said that they never wanted participation trophies. She noted it was my generation that wanted them to have them, not the kids. Another student said that she would routinely throw away trophies as meaningless and insulting.

The same could well prove true for grades that they will become worthless and discarded if this trend continues. That will undermine a critical role of universities in evaluating the performance of students. That role not only helps future employers. It is even more important in offering students a true appraisal of their work. Often students will pursue degrees for the wrong reasons and not consider other fields that may be better suited to their talents and interests. If you are getting nothing but As in your economics or gender studies course, there is little reason to consider alternatives.

When John F. Kennedy was given an honorary degree at Yale, he quipped “it might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.” It turns out that both now come with the same 80 percent likelihood of receiving an A. The question is not the degree but the education at either school with such grade inflation.

Media trust among Americans has reached its lowest point in six years.

Gallup began its survey on media trust in 1972, repeating it in 1974 and 1976. After a long period, the public opinion firm restarted the polls in 1997 and has asked Americans about their confidence level in the mass media – newspapers, TV, and radio – almost every year since then.

Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti and Sam Parker illustrates Gallup’s latest poll results, conducted in September 2023, in the graphic below:

Americans’ Trust in Mass Media, 1972-2023

Americans’ confidence in the mass media has sharply declined over the last few decades.

In 2016, the number of respondents trusting media outlets fell below the tally of those who didn’t trust the media at all. This is the first time that has happened in the poll’s history.

That year was marked by sharp criticism of the media from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In 2017, the use of the term ‘fake news’ rose by 365% on social media, and the term was named the word of the year by dictionary publisher Collins.

The Lack of Faith in Institutions and Social Media

Although there’s no single reason to explain the decline of trust in the traditional media, some studies point to potential drivers.

According to Michael Schudson, a sociologist and historian of the news media and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, in the 1970s, faith in institutions like the White House or Congress began to decline, consequently impacting confidence in the media.

“That may have been a necessary corrective to a sense of complacency that had been creeping in—among the public and the news media—that allowed perhaps too much trust: we accepted President Eisenhower’s lies about the U-2 spy plane, President Kennedy’s lies about the ‘missile gap,’ President Johnson’s lies about the war in Vietnam, President Nixon’s lies about Watergate,”

MICHAEL SCHUDSON – COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL

More recently, the internet and social media have significantly changed how people consume media. The rise of platforms such as X/Twitter and Facebook have also disrupted the traditional media status quo.

Partisans’ Trust in Mass Media

Historically, Democrats have expressed more confidence in the media than Republicans.

Democrats’ trust, however, has fallen 12 points over the past year to 58%, compared with 11% among Republicans and 29% among independents.

According to Gallup, Republicans’ low confidence in the media has little room to worsen, but Democrat confidence could still deteriorate and bring the overall national reading down further.

The poll also shows that young Democrats have less confidence in the media than older Democrats, while Republicans are less varied in their views by age group.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

John Kerry, special presidential envoy on climate matters, announced Saturday that the United States has “proudly” committed to not to build any new coal plants and to get rid of existing ones entirely.

“To meet our goal of 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035, we need to phase out unabated coal,” Mr. Kerry said in a Dec. 2 statement, in which he announced that the United States had officially joined a coalition of 56 other countries who all plan to ditch coal in the name of climate change.

“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities,” Mr. Kerry said in his statement.

“The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants.”

While no specific date was given for when the Biden administration plans to nix America’s existing coal plants, other regulatory actions by the administration zero in on 2035 as the year when coal ends.

Just under 20 percent of U.S. electricity was powered by coal as of October 2023, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).

Anti-Coal Alliance

The anti-coal pact that Mr. Kerry said Washington had just joined is called the Power Past Coal Alliance, which was started six years ago and had 50 members until Saturday, when the United States, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo, and Norway joined bringing the total to 56.

Citing IEA’s Net Zero Roadmap, the Power Past Coal Alliance said in a Dec. 2 statement that, in order to “keep the 1.5°C goal within reach,” advanced economies like the United States need to immediately end the construction of new coal power plants and phase out existing plants by 2030, and by 2040 in the rest of the world.

The 1.5°C threshold, first established in the Paris Agreement in 2015, aims to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2100.

In 2022, coal-fired plants generated 36 percent of global electricity, outstripping all other sources. Over half of this output was in China, which is building new coal plants at a fast pace, undeterred by various climate pledges and goals that the country’s leadership has paid lip service to.

The next three largest contributors to global coal-fired electricity are India, the United States, and Japan, which jointly account for around 25 percent of the total.

Coal Use In China, Elsewhere

China saw coal power projects jump in 2022 despite the country’s pledge to cut down coal consumption by the end of the decade.

In 2022, coal power construction starts, new project announcements, and plant permissions “accelerated dramatically” in China, according to a February report (pdf) by Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), which noted that roughly two new coal power plants were being permitted per week in China.

“50 GW of coal power capacity started construction in China in 2022, a more than 50 percent increase from 2021. Many of these projects had their permits fast-tracked and moved to construction in a matter of months,” the report said.

“A total of 106 GW of new coal power projects were permitted, the equivalent of two large coal power plants per week,” the report continued.

“The amount of capacity permitted more than quadrupled from 23 GW in 2021.”

The second-largest consumer of coal, India, has also seen its coal consumption rise. According to the “Coal 2022” report  by the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal demand in India rose by 14 percent in 2021.

Meanwhile, coal demand in the United States saw a growth of 15 percent in 2021, per the IEA report.

Meanwhile, a recent report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found that roughly a million coal jobs could be lost by 2050 as mines retire—even without any climate policies being implemented.

The vast majority of job losses would be in Asia, with China and India taking the brunt.

As for the United States, the GEM report estimates more than 15,000 jobs in the coal sector will be lost per decade in the 2030s and 40s, and less than 15,000 jobs to be lost in the 2050s.

For the current decade, the report estimates a U.S. coal job loss of below 15,000.

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“I think the Chinese leadership at this juncture is overwhelmed by its internal challenges,” said Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.

“My thought is perhaps this is not a time for them to consider a major invasion of Taiwan,” she continued, and reasonable people across the planet prayed she’s right.

“This is largely because of the economic, financial and political challenges, but also because the international community has made it loud and clear that war is not an option, and that peace and stability serves everyone’s interest.”

War, of course, is always an option.

And peace and stability do not serve everyone’s interest, they serve almost everyone’s interest.

For the few, war is lucrative. Which is why conflict features so prominently in human history. After a brief respite in hostilities, the war in Gaza resumed. Fighting continues unabated in Ukraine. And mankind’s enduring struggle to tame nature showed no sign of material advance. That said, the UAE announced a $30bln climate fund in partnership with Blackrock, Brookfield, and TPG. The hope is to leverage this sum to attract $250bln in investment by 2030, with an increasing focus on the Global South, which stands to suffer most profoundly in this war.

And if you squint your eyes and gaze at the horizon, you can almost see a world where China becomes more focused on internal growth than its Taiwan ambitions. With the West increasingly intent to disengage economically and with over 20% youth unemployment, sluggish growth, and a stock market at 4-year lows, it would be in Beijing’s interest to seek peace and stability.

The prosperous nations of the Middle East seek peace and stability as they determinedly drive to diversify their economies away from oil and gas. And it’s not inconceivable that we are approaching an end to the conflict in Ukraine, having accomplished little more than untold suffering.

Take those three conflicts off the table, focus humanity’s efforts on our battle with nature, perhaps throw in some productivity gains due to AI, and you have the makings for an increasingly prosperous world. Let’s hope this is what the market in its infinite wisdom sees, rather than the recent rise in asset prices being little more than hopes for a Fed pivot.

On Friday, shortly after Powell failed to hammer the hawkish case in his “fireside” chat with stocks eager to take out 2023 highs, we said that Powell has a big problem on his hands not so much because if the market was indeed correct about imminent easing that only assures that inflation will come back with a vengeance and Powell would indeed be the “second coming” of a former Fed Chair – only Burns not Vlcker  – but because the kneejerk surge higher in gold (and digital gold) meant that the once again deathwatch for the dollar – and fiat in general – had resumed.

Well, with futures having opened for trading on Sunday night, what we joked about on Friday, namely that Powell – having seemingly once again lost control of the hawkish narrative – may be leaking emergency rate hikes though Nick Timiraos on Dec 12, ahead of the December FOMC (now that the Fed is in blackout mode)…

Smells like Powell will be leaking emergency rate hikes through Nikileaks on Dec 12

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 1, 2023

… is all too real because suddenly everything that is non printable is soaring, starting with gold, which has exploded as much as $60, spiking to a new all time high of $2,135…

… while bitcoin, and the entire crypto sector following closely, spiking above $40,000 for the first time since May 2022.

The bitcoin move was to be expected after what we reported yesterday, namely that cryptos had just seen their largest inflows in two years… and Friday’s comments by Powell only guaranteed even more capital would flow into the largely illiquid asset class.

“Bitcoin continues to be supported by optimism around SEC approval for an ETF and Fed rate cuts in 2024,” Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG Australia Pty, wrote in a note. Technical chart patterns point to $42,330 as the next level to watch for, he added.

As for gold, everything is suddenly going in its favor, and not only the violent resumption of the Israel-Hamas war (which now includes attacks on US warships in the Gulf)…

… as well as the relentless buying out of China which we discussed last week in “Behind The Mysterious Explosion In Gold Prices: China’s “Massive Accumulation Of Gold” which noted the staggering divergence between Shanghai and London gold prices, a clear proxy for outsized demand for physical gold on the mainland…

… but also years of market reflexes which prompt algos to buy gold any time the Fed is set to ease, something which markets assigned 80% odds on Friday could happen as soon as March.

And so, going back to square one, Powell is once again boxed in: either he pushes back on the market’s sudden dovish euphoria which could well send dollar sparling lower, and in turn send commodities exploding higher guaranteeing that all the worst aspects of Burns Fed make a triumphant return, or he does nothing, and we see gold go parabolic.