New Dehli Implementing Driving Bans Due To Polluted Air
In move that we’re sure we’ll eventually see in U.S. cities as the climate change rhetoric continues to go parabolic (especially heading into the 2024 election), New Dehli is now implementing license plate based driving bans in order to try and restrict the number of cars on its roads at any given time.
The measure, which separates cars into license plates ending with odd and even numbers, is going to be put in place on alternate days for a week beginning on November 13, Bloomberg reported this week.
The goal is to “lower vehicular pollution”, the report says. In addition to the car ban, heavy vehicles have also been banned from the capital city, with exceptions for essential services.
Bloomberg wrote that in recent days, Delhi has persistently emerged at the pinnacle of global pollution rankings, facing alarmingly toxic air quality conditions.
In response, the regional administration has enacted emergency protocols, including the suspension of educational institutions, a moratorium on construction activities, and a push towards greater reliance on public transportation systems, the report says.
Previously, the capital has resorted to episodic vehicular restrictions in an effort to mitigate the environmental crisis.
On the judicial front, the Supreme Court of India is slated to address the issue of Delhi’s escalating pollution on November 7th. Anticipated at this hearing, representatives from Delhi and contiguous states will brief the court on the progress and measures adopted to ameliorate the air quality disaster.
We’re certain shocked liberals in the U.S. will be beside themselves that there are other places in the world not “doing their part” to fight climate change. Has anyone in India considered taking a hammer to a piece or art to try and fix the problem?
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to hold economic talks with her Chinese counterpart this week before a potential meeting between the top leaders of the world’s two largest economies.
Ms. Yellen is scheduled to meet with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on Nov. 9 and 10, the Treasury Department announced on Nov. 6. The meetings will take place before the start of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, where Ms. Yellen will host the top finance officials and ministers from the 21 member states of APEC on Nov. 11.
The Yellen–He meeting was also confirmed by China’s Foreign Ministry. Mr. He will visit the United States from Nov. 8 to Nov. 12, the ministry’s spokesman, Wang Wenbin, said on Nov. 6.
The announcement came shortly after state media revealed that Mr. He became the head of two separate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committees that Chinese leader Xi Jinping created in March, a move to bring the financial system under the Party’s direct control.
‘Serious Concerns’
The upcoming Yellen–He meeting follows a series of diplomatic engagements between Washington and Beijing amid rising tensions. The U.S.–China relationship has been strained over issues ranging from the CCP’s military aggressions in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea to the U.S. export controls and investment bans on advanced technologies to counter the regime’s military modernization.
Ms. Yellen said ahead of the meeting that the United States is seeking “a stable and healthy economic relationship” with China that requires a “rules-based, level playing field.”
“This week, I will speak to my counterpart about our serious concerns with Beijing’s unfair economic practices, including its large-scale use of non-market tools, its barriers to market access and its coercive actions against U.S. firms in China,” Ms. Yellen wrote in a Nov. 6 Washington Post op-ed.
“In certain sectors, these unfair practices have resulted in the overconcentration of the production of critical goods inside China.”
The United States has responded by seeking to diversify its critical supply chains with a target of not triggering “a disorderly, wholesale private-sector pullback from China,” she wrote
During her four-day trip to Beijing in July, Ms. Yellen told Chinese officials that the United States wouldn’t allow its national security to be compromised.
“We continue to take targeted actions to secure our vital security interests,” she said.
At the same time, Ms. Yellen emphasized that direct conversations with the regime’s senior officials could help reduce the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation. To facilitate the communications, the U.S. Treasury Department and China’s Finance Ministry in September launched two joint working groups to deal with economic and financial issues.
Mr. He was recently appointed as the head of the office of the Central Financial Commission, a Party organ responsible for making policies and supervising the nation’s $61 trillion financial sector, state-run news agency Xinhua reported on Nov. 6.
Separately, Mr. He also assumed the leadership role of the Central Financial Work Commission, a super financial watchdog that’s tasked with strengthening the CCP’s ideological role in the finance sector, according to the agency.
The new appointments of Mr. He, a trusted ally of Mr. Xi, make him China’s new economic czar, heading the country’s top decision-making bodies in both economic and financial sectors.
Mr. He first met with Ms. Yellen in July, when the Treasury chief traveled to Beijing to meet the regime’s senior officials as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to reopen the high-level communication lines between Washington and Beijing.
No ‘Smooth Sailing’ for Biden–Xi Meeting
Following visits by four senior U.S. officials, as well as a bipartisan Senate delegation, to Beijing this year, the CCP sent its top diplomat, Wang Yi, to Washington in October. During the three-day visit, President Joe Biden hosted Mr. Wang at the White House after talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan also met with Mr. Wang.
President Biden is expected to meet Mr. Xi during the APEC summit, which would mark the first in-person meeting between the two leaders in a year.
However, Beijing has yet to confirm whether Mr. Xi will travel to Washington for the summit.
Mr. Wang, who also serves as China’s foreign minister, said the Biden–Xi meeting will be challenging.
Speaking on the last day of his trip in Washington, Mr. Wang told the U.S. strategic community that arranging a meeting between President Biden and Mr. Xi “will not be smooth sailing” and that the two sides can’t rely on “autopilot” to make it happen.
Possible Cyberattack? Massive Telecommunication Outage Leaves Millions In Australia Without Cellular Service
Global internet monitor NetBlocks has reported in a post on social media X platform that millions of Optus customers cannot make calls or use the internet due to a major nationwide outage.
“Metrics show Optus mobile services are down across much of Australia, leaving millions of customers unable to make calls or access internet since early morning; authorities said to be investigating possible cyberattack as trains and infrastructure disrupted,” NetBlocks said.
Optus is aware of an issue that may be impacting some of our mobile and internet customers,” the telecommunications company wrote in a statement.
We’re aware of an issue impacting Optus mobile and nbn services and are working to restore services as quickly as possible. We understand connectivity is important and apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation said, “Federal authorities are checking whether the outage is the result of a cyber attack, although, at this stage, they do not believe it is a hack.”
The novel River City Onetells a personal tale of a soldier long returned home, but permanently adrift. Partly the experiences of a man carrying the heavy weight of many white Middle American challenges, the story’s theme of brokenness coming from war is never too far in the background. Defying expectations, tropes, and stereotypes, River City One’s story is compelling and powerful.
A novel like this must be readable, well-paced, and strike appropriate notes of plausibility and authenticity. River City One absolutely delivers as a modern American veteran’s story. The characters feel right. Their motivations, values, foibles, jobs, and dispositions command interest and draw the reader into the book’s community while at the same time not at all seeming exaggerated or caricatured. At welcome intervals, bleak-but-enjoyable segments bring a dry, fun humor to the text, usually relating to the narrator’s tragicomic job at a law practice.
Significant stretches of the narrative reflect aspects of the white Middle American experience. White men are seen as the most privileged in our society, rightfully, but communities like the protagonist John Walker’s carry terrible burdens. Many characters have largely meaningless “Bullshit Jobs,” to cite a defining sociological book of our time, jobs that neither serve nor fulfill. Long dead is Bush-era religiosity; this is an era of secular disillusionment. The characters are driven by the harsh demands of money and work, and some are deeply lonely. People lack community and are unhealthy. While the opioid epidemic does not really make an appearance, drugs and sickness are present and a minor character lost a girl decades ago to a car accident – a painful recounting of a sort of catastrophe that claims 1 percent of American lives and hollows out people and communities, much as killing does. John is an insightful observer of brokenness, and honest about crises that others dismiss or ignore.
The driving focus of the text is relationships and the lack thereof, and the story starkly depicts the white male experience of loneliness, told through an ex-military lens. Men in general are lonely in the U.S., often having few friends, often relying heavily on one marital partnership that these days has a 50 percent chance of failure. Middle-aged white men commit suicide at about twice the national average rate (with veterans spearheading the trend at a rate that eclipses our losses in war). Some simply “die of loneliness” – an epidemic of health issues related to isolation that are not widely or well understood. And of course, war adds another element. Twenty years ago, conservative-leaning, white middle class Americans (as well as African Americans from the South) signed up in droves to go fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. These ex-soldiers face a heightened crisis of health and human relationship, as we see in John Walker’s circle of military connections, who seem to all have relationship problems. With its strong and effective focus on relationships, River City One humanizes and compassionately depicts a hurting veteran.
In John’s life, we witness a deep loneliness, aimlessness, and a lack of friendship aside from an old war buddy and faintly sociopathic colleagues. “Friends don’t appear out of nowhere,” says Grace, John’s wife. “They develop over time – like, a long time, a lot longer than one week.” She intuitively understands the lack of human connection that drags John down. This crisis of relationship is seriously hurting our overworked, under-vacationed, “Bowling Alone” nation today, to name another relevant book. Sadly, Grace has faded away as an influence on John, and like so many men and especially men in masculine-coded sectors like the military, John doesn’t seem to have much connection with women as friends, or to have relationships with people who show him care and love.
The legacy of war is a deep and powerful undercurrent of the text… and is also elusive. John’s acquaintances wonder what it was like to kill an Iraqi or Afghan (the settings – past and present, in war or in peace – are ambiguous) or how it was to lose a comrade. John does not offer a fixed answer or take a uniform approach to the question, and he actually doesn’t have a fixed answer. Our defining memories of trauma change over time, like our national memory of 9/11 or a child’s experience of losing a parent. Like insensitive acquaintances who ask John about killing and dying, we readers are partly-unwelcome interlocutors in John’s life, witnesses of a painful inner journey, not people entitled to a juicy story. Soldiers and veterans aren’t there to fulfill our fantasies or show us deep truths about honor or heroism. Their way is hard for anyone committed to holding onto goodness, and their job is not part of the purpose we humans are for. John teaches his son to pray for souls in purgatory even though he says “doesn’t know what that means.” Perhaps he does know, more than most.
The author’s role in telling this story is a contribution to the world. But we as a society must consider the consequences of war not just for the soldier, but for the people he or she is supposed to be protecting, at home and (in theory) abroad. The perhaps $8 trillion that the United States expended on the War on Terror caused maybe a million to four-and-a-half million deaths – almost all poor people in Muslim countries – and shattered many communities, many families, many dreams. The war disillusioned millions of Americans and billions of people in the Global South.
And the cost of the war precluded building the society that John needs and longs for, one that is beautiful, healthy, and rich in relationships and free time for its residents. Let us imagine John comes from an economically average U.S. city of 500,000. Its proportional financial share in the War on Terror was over $12 billion. Especially considering that investing in human capital and healthy development yields exponential returns, those $12 billion are a huge loss. They could have addressed drug dependence, mental health, urban beautification, safe and sustainable transit. Instead, the resources went to failed wars. As veterans like the author intuitively know, we as a country misused our resources. Money, yes, and even more than that, the youth and strength of young men and women who could have served in other ways.
Those who have borne burdens for their service to our country don’t just deserve care, love, healing, and resources. As we offer support to those who have been harmed in body, mind, or soul, let us also learn from the caution of so many veterans. Do not repeat the mistakes of the past. Do not send more young people to be broken in expeditionary wars of choice. The failures of the administrations – all administrations – of the last decades must not be repeated. In the end, in this life, it is not the decision-makers who pay the price.
David Lapp-Jost (M.Ed.) is a Friedensarbeiter (Peace Worker) with the German Mennonite Peace Committee, which since World War II has worked for peace in Europe.
30,000 Pounds Of Tyson “Fun Nuggets” Hit With Recall Over Metal Shards
Tyson Foods has issued a recall for 30,000 pounds of its “Fun Nuggets,” a fully cooked chicken product targeted at children, due to concerns over potential contamination from metal fragments.
“A limited number of consumers have reported they found small, pliable metal pieces in the product, and out of an abundance of caution, the company is recalling this product,” Tyson wrote in a press release.
According to a release from the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the nuggets were shipped to distributors in Alabama, California, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin in 29-ounce packages.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service said the problem was discovered after a number of customers complained about “small metal pieces” in the nuggets.
“There has been one reported minor oral injury associated with consumption of this product,” the food agency said.
Tyson’s recall was classified as “Class I,” indicating a “reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death,” according to the FSIS.
Consumers purchasing Tyson Fun Nuggets for their children might ask this question: How did the metal get into the nuggets?
One of the individuals who created the data to challenge thousands of voters during Georgia’s controversial 2020 election and subsequent runoff testified to the pains taken to ensure the lists were fair.
Derek Somerville said he and data analysis partner Mark Davis used multiple databases and levels of comparison to identify Georgia voters who didn’t live where they were registered to vote and then to exclude many who were, in fact, legal voters.
They are two of six individuals named, along with the True The Vote organization, in a federal lawsuit alleging that their work intimidated minority voters and was a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
They are being sued by Fair Fight, an organization founded by two-time Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to fight voter suppression. Fair Fight seeks to stop True The Vote and the co-defendants from any election integrity work in Georgia. Their non-jury trial in Gainesville, in Georgia’s Northern District, before Judge Steve Jones, began on Oct. 26.
Mr. Somerville returned to the witness stand on Nov. 3 after testifying the previous day. He testified that he and Mr. Davis compared state-published voter rolls, absentee ballot rolls, post office change of address records, and geospatial data.
They first created a list of 364,000 voters who had moved from where they were registered to vote. They then used that and other data to “funnel” it down to 39,000 voters for whom there was “probable cause” to believe they were no longer entitled to vote where they were voting.
He described some of the “funnels” they used to exclude people from the probable cause list. Those who move within 30 days of an election may vote at their old address. They went back 18 months, but no more, because federal law requires states to review and purge their rolls every two years, and that’s done after general elections.
Military service members and their families, moving from base to base, may be entitled to vote from a home address elsewhere, as are college students in dorms or apartments away from their family homes.
They used mapping data to locate and then eliminate thousands of people in those categories, he testified. He gave Atlanta’s Morehouse College, a historically black university and the alma mater of Martin Luther King, as one location where they performed that exclusion.
They also used the mapping data to exclude those who moved within the same county, which had less effect on their voter eligibility.
Those on the final “probable cause” list weren’t intended to be automatically disqualified from voting, he said. That would be up to their county board of elections, which would need to review and investigate a case before making that determination, he said.
And, he said, in most cases being notified of a challenge to their voting status wouldn’t keep them from going to the polls because, in most counties, they were only told of the challenge if they showed up to vote.
Mr. Somerville said his work was non-partisan, not examining the data for party registration, race, or gender, and only doing so after the fact to ensure their work had been accurate. It was, he said.
The defendants’ lawyers said in a trial brief that black voters represent about 29 percent of Georgia voters but only 27 percent of those on the list, showing there was no discriminatory intent.
One of their lawyers, Michael Wynne of Houston, told The Epoch Times that Mr. Davis had been studying the issue for 30 years, going back to the last century, and that Mr. Somerville shared the interest. Their work was of interest primarily to computer and statistics buffs until the closely fought election of Nov. 3, 2020, made it a hot issue.
Mr. Somerville said he had never heard of True The Vote until Dec. 15, 2020, when he was contacted by co-defendant Ron Johnson about the organization and then had dinner the same night with True The Vote co-founder Catherine Engelbrecht. That was only three weeks before the Jan. 5, 2021 runoff in which both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats were in play for control of the chamber. True The Vote sought to empower private citizens, who by law in Georgia can challenge voter registrations, to do so.
And part of his interest in the issue, Mr. Somerville said, was to counter some of the more far-fetched election conspiracy theories purporting to show why then-President Donald Trump was running more than 11,000 votes behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Georgia’s tally.
Their techniques, using public data and modern statistical analysis tools, gave those interested a more concrete and rational way to consider election results, he said. And he hoped that it would restore confidence in the system among those so disillusioned they hesitated to vote in the runoff.
Both he and Ms. Engelbrecht have testified that state governments are years behind in their techniques for keeping their data up to date.
Both have used the word “nerds” on the stand to describe themselves and each other: those who love data, computers, and what you can do with them.
“We were relatively obsessive about it,” Mr. Somerville testified under direct examination by one of the defense attorneys, Cameron Powell of Houston.
Their geeky demeanor on the stand belies the intensity of what transpired three years ago.
Now-President Biden’s narrow lead in Georgia of 11,779 votes sparked recounts and not only then-President Trump’s repeated charges of electoral fraud, but his second impeachment over his efforts to overturn the state’s count and his pressuring of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a lengthy telephone call alleging many irregularities in the process and how they affected the count:
“So, what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already.” And “Look Brad. I got to get … I have to find 12,000 votes and I have them times a lot. And therefore, I won the state.” And, “You will find you will be at 11,779 within minutes, because Fulton County is totally corrupt.”
The impeachment failed, but President Trump currently faces criminal conspiracy charges in Fulton County over the matter. Among 18 co-defendants are some who have pled guilty, making them available to testify against the former president.
The turmoil also led to the Jan. 6, 2021 breach of the Capitol, which Democrats and others have sought to label an “insurrection.”
A year ago, Ms. Engelbrecht was in jail, where she and True The Vote’s co-founder Gregg Phillips spent a week for contempt of federal court in Texas over their refusal to identify a whistleblower giving them information in a different elections case.
The trial involves a lot of fine points of federal law, including the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which makes voter intimidation easier to prove, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which directs states to update voter rolls regularly.
The defense has sought to show that the defendants—True The Vote and the individual defendants—didn’t communicate with challenged voters or seek to intimidate them. After the plaintiffs rested their case in the morning, the defense moved to dismiss the case, saying the plaintiffs hadn’t supported the allegations they’d made.
At the very least, defense attorney Jake Evans of Atlanta argued to Judge Jones, four of the six co-defendants, including Mr. Somerville, Mr. Davis, Ron Johnson, and James Cooper, should be dropped from the lawsuit because little testimony had born upon them and their connection to the case was so tangential.
Judge Jones, appointed to the federal bench in 2010 by President Barack Obama, questioned plaintiffs’ attorneys, including Christina Ashley Ford and Uzoma Nkwonta, both of Washington, D.C., sharply over the four co-defendants but ended up declining to dismiss them from the lawsuit.
California Spent $4 Million On Gender-Affirming ‘Enhancements’ For Prisoners
California is helping prison inmates cope with their stints, having forked over more than $4 million of taxpayer funds on surgical sex changes and cosmetic “gender-affirming” enhancements for 157 inmates, including four who are on death row, the Washington Free Beacon reports.
The state has spent over $1 million removing the breasts of female prisoners
“People who think they’re transgender have rights, and they should be treated with dignity and respect, but it does not include taxpayer dollars being used to do surgeries that are experimental at best and scientifically unjustified at worst,” said attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who has represented California inmates.
California’s lack of guardrails for trans-identifying prisoners stands in sharp contrast to its rules around inmate dental care, for instance, which don’t allow for root canals on back teeth, cosmetic tooth restoration or replacement, or treatment of oral ulcers—among other services.
From 2017 through mid-July 2023, taxpayers have bankrolled at least 157 transgender procedures and treatments, spending nearly $2.5 million on vaginoplasties—the creation of artificial vaginas and vulvas—for 35 male prisoners, according to previously unreported records obtained by women’s prison advocate Amie Ichikawa and reviewed by the Free Beacon.
Four people on death row have received sex reassignment surgery.
Meanwhile, corrections officials have requested nearly $2.2 million in new funds just for transgender care, according to budget documents.
The state’s mandate to cover sex-change procedures for inmates stems from a 2016 legal settlement with convicted male murdere Shiloh Quine, who is serving a life sentence. Quine was represented by the George Soros-funded Transgender Law Center.
Quine secured the right for trans-identifying prisoners to have items typically prohibited to male inmates for security reasons—such as chains, necklaces, and scarves.
In 2014, just 131 California inmates identified as transgender. At last count this month, that number was up to 1,847, including hundreds who identify as nonbinary. A February 2021 legislative report said the corrections agency “believes that the recent growth in the transgender inmate population is due to agency efforts” to transfer inmates based on their chosen “gender identity.” -Free Beacon
Stunning and brave, and not what Californians voted for (or is it?).
Billionaire philanthropist and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged $500 million in September toward shifting electricity production in the United States to wind and solar energy and shutting down its coal- and gas-fired plants.
However, some experts say that Bloomberg’s millions, together with the billions being spent by the Biden administration, are paving a road to ruin.
The donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which adds to the $500 million Mr. Bloomberg pledged in 2019, aims to “finish the job on coal” and “accelerate the clean energy transition to reach the goal of 80 percent of total electricity generation” from renewables, according to an official statement.
“With 372 of 530 coal plants announced to retire or closed to date—more than 70 percent of the country’s coal fleet—this next phase will shut down every last U.S. coal plant,” Bloomberg Philanthropies stated.
The effort also aims to “slash gas plant capacity in half, and block all new gas plants.”
Many of those who study America’s electric infrastructure say this is taking us down a dangerous path.
“We’re following people here that are pied pipers,” physicist and energy analyst John Droz told The Epoch Times, referring to the literary character who led children to their doom through delusive enticement.
“This whole business of promoting renewables as a solution is completely unproven, scientifically.”
The transition is destabilizing America’s power grid, which could damage transformers and cause long-term outages, according to Steven Milloy, energy expert, news commentator, and publisher of Junkscience.com.
“We are in this nonsensical, headlong rush to wreck our grid,” he told The Epoch Times.
What’s overlooked in this drive to close coal and gas plants is America’s ability to keep the lights on. And while neither the Biden administration nor Mr. Bloomberg has produced a cost-benefit analysis for their plans, analysts say we can look to places such as Germany and Texas, which have taken the lead in transitioning to wind and solar, for a preview of what’s in store.
German energy economist Lars Schernikau has assessed the results of his country’s “Energiewende” (energy transition) and warns Americans to not follow Germany’s example.
“Wind and solar do not seem to work; otherwise, after 20 years of ‘Energiewende,’ power prices would be lower and Germany would not be in trouble,” he told The Epoch Times.
Germany spent hundreds of billions of euros to build wind and solar facilities since 2002, doubling its power generation capacity and boosting the share of renewables to 60 percent from about 10 percent. However, its electricity production has been flat, while the cost of electricity skyrocketed.
Wind and solar don’t increase output proportionately because of their significantly lower “capacity factor,” or the percentage that’s actually generated versus capacity built.
The capacity factor for wind and solar is about 35 percent and 25 percent, respectively, compared to roughly 92 percent for nuclear and 50 percent for coal and natural gas. That many utilities prioritize buying power from wind and solar facilities rather than from coal and gas plants artificially inflates the capacity factor for wind and solar, even from these low levels.
For all the billions spent, Germany’s “Energiewende” has delivered an increasingly unreliable electric system at a cost to consumers that’s higher than virtually every other developed country.
The process of shuttering coal and nuclear plants has left the country at the whim of the weather and unfriendly neighbors, such as Russia, and also dangerously short of dependable power that can be adjusted to meet fluctuations in demand.
Before the current trend of closing coal plants, electric utilities in the West typically ran their power generation systems with a 20 percent installed reserve margin over expected peak demand, to ensure that they could always meet consumers’ needs.
That margin ensured that the electric grid would still function even during unpredicted events, such as a winter freeze in Texas or a summer heat wave in California.
Depleting Reserves to Balance Renewables
The transition to renewables is now eroding that safety margin. Germany, where peak demand is around 80 gigawatts, once had about 100 gigawatts of reliable, dispatchable capacity; now, reliable capacity is down to 80 to 85 gigawatts, according to Mr. Schernikau.
“That means they are actually at the margin,” he said. “As soon as you get close to the margin, whether your reliable power supply equals or is barely above your peak power demand, you’re running into trouble, which is exactly what Texas has done.”
Electric utilities in the United States, one by one, are following in Germany’s footsteps, and we’re already seeing similar results. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that coal and natural gas plants will account for 98 percent of plant closures in 2023 and that U.S. utilities have halted an average of 11 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity per year since 2015.
The problem for the electric grid as a whole is that the electricity supply must always match the demand. If the system goes out of equilibrium, substantial damage to the grid’s hardware could result, leading to long-term outages.
“Wind comes and goes, and you can’t operate off of something that’s an unpredictable source; you need an auxiliary source of power to balance it out,” Mr. Droz said. “Something like 99 percent of that balancing power is gas.
“When these people say wind, that is deceptive because there is no such thing as wind by itself. What they should be saying is a wind-plus-gas package.”
What many U.S. utilities are doing is expanding their wind and solar capacity but not adding reliable backup facilities to match it, he said. Instead, the utilities “just dump any excess need for balancing onto the system,” hoping that they can draw on other regions when there’s a shortfall.
Increasingly, they’re also drawing on the emergency reserve.
“The wind developers are using the reserve as the auxiliary, and that’s not supposed to be what happens,” Mr. Droz said. “They should not be allowed to take from the emergency reserve to balance their wind projects.”
Brent Bennett, policy director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, refers to this process as “reliability chicken.”
“They’re having to play a lot of games now in order to justify building more wind and solar,” he told The Epoch Times.
Among the utilities, Mr. Bennett said, “everybody is pointing at each other and saying, ‘We’re going to get energy back from these guys,’ and these guys over here say, ‘We’re going to get energy back from those guys.’”
As long as there’s only a small percentage of wind and solar in the system, “they can get away with that,” according to Mr. Droz.
“But when you get a more severe case, like the Texas freeze, all of a sudden that reserve that was built in for emergencies is completely gone,” he said.
Texas’s winter storm Uri in 2021 caused hundreds of deaths, many from hypothermia, when power outages prevented Texans from heating their homes. In that case, utilities in the state came within minutes of collapsing the grid for weeks or longer.
Ultimately, Texas electricity operators were able to implement emergency rolling blackouts and shed enough load to rebalance the system in time to prevent an even greater catastrophe. However, experts warn that operating so close to the margin is a very dangerous game to play.
Testifying before the U.S. Senate in 2015, former CIA Director James Woolsey was asked what would happen to Americans if the electric grid went down for an extended period.
“There are essentially two estimates on how many people would die from hunger, from starvation, from lack of water, and from social disruption,” he said.
“One estimate is that within a year or so, two-thirds of the United States population would die. The other estimate is that within a year or so, 90 percent of the U.S. population would die.”
Despite that risk, government policies are pushing utilities to move faster to shut down coal and gas plants.
“All the incentives are for utilities to build more wind and solar,” Mr. Bennett said.
Biden Briefed On China’s Plans For First Military Base In The Middle East
China is reportedly seeking to establish a permanent military base in the Middle East for the first time, which Washington will certainly see as a significant ‘challenge’ – also given the planned base would be in the Arab Gulf region, where the US also has major bases, as in the case of the Navy Central Command installations in Qatar and Bahrain.
“President Joe Biden has been briefed on what his advisers see as a Chinese plan to build a military facility in Oman, people familiar with the matter said, amid a broader effort by Beijing to deepen defense and diplomatic ties with the Middle East,” Bloomberg writes in its major Tuesday story.
“Biden was told that Chinese military officials discussed the matter last month with Omani counterparts, who were said to be amenable to such a deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. They said the two sides agreed to more talks in the coming weeks,” the report continues.
It’s as yet unknown precisely where the potential Oman base would be located. Just last August, Oman and China held a formal celebration for their 45 years of official diplomatic relations.
The Chinese and Omani militaries have in the recent past coordinated events and exercises, with Oman’s port of Muscat semi-regularly hosting Chinese PLA warships. Last month, the Omani and PLA militaries held joint drills, and pledged to work “to expand their naval defense and military cooperation.”
China is also believed to have long eyed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a possible host country for another base. Currently, Beijing’s only other significant overseas military base is in the East African country of Djibouti.
Bloomberg suggests the deepened military ties between China and Oman parallels energy ties:
Oman is sometimes referred to as the Switzerland of the Middle East given that it follows a policy of neutrality and regularly acts as a mediator, including between the US and Iran. It’s also sought to balance between maintaining its partnership with the US and nurturing ties with China, which imports the bulk of its crude output. China also invested in the first stage of Oman’s Duqm special economic zone, which will be the site of the Middle East’s biggest oil-storage facility.
The US itself doesn’t have a permanent, stand-alone military base inside Oman; however, it has a key agreement with the government to use Omani bases when needed for a variety of operations.
For example, the US Air Force uses RAFO Thumrait airbase, a military airport located near Thumrait in the country’s south. The US Navy also frequently patrols waters off Oman’s coast, looking for Iranian weapons and sanctioned oil or other shipments. One military publication has described of the Pentagon’s minimal presence (compared to other Gulf nations) in Oman as follows:
The U.S. maintains an ability to use Omani bases through the Oman Facilities Access Agreement, originally signed in 1980, and most recently renewed in 2010.55 This accord made Oman the first country among the Persian Gulf States to explicitly partner militarily with the U.S.56 According to the agreement, the U.S. can request access to these facilities in advance for a specified purpose. Some of the bases listed in this section are those the U.S. may access, but not necessarily where a presence is maintained. Oman has allowed 5,000 aircraft overflights, 600 landings, and 80 port calls annually.
Starting in 2021, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) began warning that China is not content with its Djibouti base on the continent’s east coast, but is looking to establish a military presence on the Atlantic. The US has long seen China as the top threat to the so-called “rules-based international order” (alongside Russia)–but Beijing very obviously lacks a global military presence like Washington has.
China also has a small naval outpost at Pakistan’s major Indian Ocean port.
Lately, every Chinese move to expand militarily is seen as a serious “threat” by US officials, and this is even more acute now with the Ukraine and Gaza wars happening, given Beijing often takes stances opposite Washington’s when it comes to these raging conflicts.
Imagine that it’s 5th August 1945 and you’re the only person in Hiroshima who knows that, the following day, the US will drop an atom bomb in your back yard.
It goes without saying that you’d choose the fastest form of transportation available to you and head out of the city as quickly as possible.
Where would you go? It wouldn’t matter very much. The goal would be to get as far as possible from Hiroshima, since you wouldn’t know how far out the damage would extend.
For many years, I’ve been advising people on what I’ve perceived as a coming economic crisis that would carry with it both a political crisis and a social crisis of epic proportions.
These three arrows would be concurrent, with each one exacerbating the other two.
Not surprisingly, many people have been either unwilling or unable to accept that such a major series of events might take place.
However, the writing is now very much on the wall and even those who don’t really understand the crisis have a feeling in the pit of their stomachs that unfolding events will end very badly.
So, we’re at the Hiroshima moment – that brief time prior to the collapse stage of the crisis when it may still be possible to “get out of Dodge.”
And much like Hiroshima, the devastation will have its epicentres. They will be the major cities of those countries that will be most greatly impacted.
We can expect that New York City, London, Toronto, Tokyo, Melbourne and others will experience dramatic decline in quality of life. In fact, this is already under way and people have begun exiting the affected cities, not planning to return.
We can imagine these epicentres as the bullseye in the image above. They represent the worst places to be caught in the coming years of crisis.
But like Hiroshima, the areas immediately outside the city will be the second-riskiest places to be. We might see them as the red ring on the target in the image above.
What locations might they be?
Well, the fact that some of the world’s most prominent cities will be the epicentre tells us that the countries in which they exist have devolved to the point that their economies are deeply in trouble.
Therefore, after an initial hit in the major cities, the remainder of each country will experience economic turmoil, which will generate political and social turmoil.
And again, this has already begun in such countries as the US, UK, Canada, the EU and Australia.
Therefore, those who were located in, say, New York, may have already left for perceived greener pastures in Colorado, Texas or Florida.
But this solution may well prove to be very temporary, as the same governments that created the strife in the cities will impact those who have sought to escape but who remain within the country’s borders. Also, these locations are now filling up with “refugees” from cities, who often find themselves unwelcome by longtime residents.
What locations, then, would constitute the white band above – the next band away from the bullseye?
Well, that might be those countries that are not part of the former Free World, the host of countries that followed the US into prosperity after World War II, then followed it into destructive debt decades later.
They would be the countries that have existed on a lower economic tier – failing to get on the A-team, but still having ridden on the coattails of the US, via trade agreements.
Such countries would be heavily impacted by the collapse, but with less distance to fall. They would therefore not experience such dramatic change.
Such countries might include Mexico, Spain, Colombia and a host of others.
Then, even further from the epicentre would be the outer rings – those countries that have taken on a minimum of trade and/or other forms of dependence upon the US and its main partners.
They would include Thailand, Uruguay and other far-flung “under-achievers.”
Uruguay, for example, imports only about ten percent of what it consumes and almost all of that comes from other Spanish-speaking countries. It also exports only about ten percent of what it produces. Whilst this has caused Uruguay to remain a sleepy little country with minimal dynamics, it has allowed it to sit out major events elsewhere in the world. (In the last century, it sat out both World Wars and the Great Depression.)
Therefore, those who recognize that their home country and its population centres may soon become less than livable, may find that, by moving to Cafayate, Argentina, Chiang Mai, Thailand, or Lake Chapala, Mexico, may dramatically decrease the odds of becoming a casualty of the unfolding crisis.
But there’s another, final ring on the target above: the white ring. This one goes one step further.
In times of crisis, wealth does not vanish. It simply changes hands and, often, geographical location.
Therefore, as wealth exits the more troubled countries of the world, it will gravitate to the less-troubled jurisdictions. As the old saying goes, “Money flows to where it’s treated best.”
When this occurs, the target jurisdictions will experience development, prosperity and trickle-down advances in social conditions. There will, therefore, be locations in the world that are on the rise, as other locations are in decline.
In the West, there are only a handful of jurisdictions that stand to rise as a result of the crisis. However, in Asia, there are many. Indeed, in each of the more productive countries of Asia, the mood on the street is one of opportunity. In Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam and others, the mood is buoyant. Asians fully understand that this is their century.
On any evening out with Asian businessmen, we find that the former perception of playing second fiddle to the West is gone, that the only obstacle remaining to Asians is China. Asian industrialists regard their main objective to be building up factories and exports to raise their position against their one great local rival.
Over the coming decades, Asia will be in a literal gold rush as nations compete to challenge China’s present lead.
Conversely, the closer the individual is to the epicentre of the crisis, the poorer his chances are to thrive in what is certain to be a period of dramatic change.
At such a time, it might be advisable for the reader to ponder which of the rings would best represent the one in which he presently resides and whether it might be advantageous or even necessary to choose another.
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