Brownstone Institute
The Betrayal of the Environment by Environmentalists
From the Brownstone Institute
I am an environmentalist.
I value clean air, clean water, forests, rivers, lakes, jungles, and wide-open wild spaces and well-used, well-conserved means of enjoying them. Always have. Probably always will.
And this is why I find the issues raised by so many of the self-described “greens” today who have been so subsumed and outright eaten by the “anthropogenic global warming” story so problematic:
Because they have become the enemies of actual environmentalism and ecology by setting their goals and demands in opposition to those which actually support the environment.
And this has become absurd and malformed to the point of being truly dangerous and counterproductive.
These dogmatic eco-warriors have become an actual threat to a cleaner, greener world, and they are sucking all the air out of the room, the money out of the system, and both discrediting the valid aims of what I view to be an important bottoms-up movement and championing top-down actions and mandates that will set it back a century if they don’t knock it off.
Their watermelon religion run by green-grifters and totalitarians is not progress, it’s anti-progress. It seeks to champion only the most expensive, unreliable, and unsound means of energy production to thereby make energy hideously expensive. This will impoverish us all.
And that will harm the environment because, like it or not, “environment” functions in every way like a “luxury good” in the economist’s sense of the term. Before people start howling about “The environment is not a luxury,” let me explain what that means because in the economic lexicon the meaning is very specific and not always initially intuitive:
As defined in economics, a luxury good is a good with high income elasticity of demand. Consider “Ski vacations in the Alps.”
Those with low income will choose to consume little or zero of this good. It’s expensive, and they are focused on food, shelter, health, education, and less costly entertainments than dropping $10,000 on a family weekend shooshing in Gstaad. Many want it, but most cannot afford it. However, when income rises, people begin to disproportionately select to purchase trips like this. It’s a desirable thing, and past income X, this sort of consumption rises rapidly when wealth increases.
And in human decision-making, “environment” works just like this.
It’s just a function of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People desperate to feed their malnourished children are a lot less worried about what they dump in the river than rich people are. Always will be. It’s just a fact, and there is no changing it.
Until the more basic needs are met, you cannot make them care about less pressing desires.
The only way to do this is to first evolve economies to generate plenty. And that takes energy because energy is wealth.
There are no nations that got rich without using a lot of energy. That’s HOW you get rich. And early on, it’s a messy process. Find me a country that went from “poor” to “rich” in any generally applicable fashion without going through a period of nasty environmental degradation. (And no, becoming a banking haven or city-state trade emporium does not count as this neither scales to large populations nor are they universally applicable.) It’s just not a thing. Those inept at generating and using power do not fare well. It’s a path to penury and misery. It’s a path to societal failure.
Bienvenue en Haïti…
And failing societies tend to be filthy societies. Pollution and poverty go hand in hand. They have to grow out of it, and that too can be messy.
Societies reach a stage of organization, see lots of opportunity to generate/acquire wealth, and they go for it. They make the omelets and worry about the broken eggs later. But they DO worry about it later, and that’s the important takeaway: once you cross an income point, the mess you’re making is suddenly on everyone’s mind and they not only want to do something about it, they can afford to do something about it.
Like exotic ski trips, this was a good many wanted but most could not pay for. Then one day, they could. So they did. The US, UK, Germany, even China, all crossed this line and started cleaning up. And it’s working. Air and water quality has been on the rise for decades in the West. And green cover/forests have been increasing in the rich West for decades.
It’s poor countries that strip and slash/burn them.
It’s poor countries that are dumping all the plastic into the sea.
Rich countries do not do this.
In unfortunately typical fashion, the Western climate warriors are all focused on the non-problem and ignoring the real one. Such myopic missing of the forest for the trees seems the oddly universal focus of this whole movement.
They’ll advocate anything except something that might actually work.
(Map of ocean plastic sources. SOURCE)
Despite the posturing and profession of ignorant pastoral aboriginalism, I really doubt people want to go back to scratching out mud hut-level subsistence. Doing so would be such a setback in lifestyle, life expectancy, and the ability to sustain and feed humans that we’d have ~90% fewer humans around. Odd how those professing to be truly committed to such Malthusian causes never seem to wish to lead by example on “dehumanization.” Somehow it’s always us and not them that constitutes the carbon that needs to be reduced.
It’s all just self-indulgent delusion.
The simple, unavoidable fact is this:
In anything resembling a remotely modern society energy use is wealth and wealth, in turn, is environmentalism in pretty much every meaningful sense.
For the developing world to start caring about the environment, it’s first going to have to develop, just like we did. and we need to get out of their way and let them.
You cannot fix the environment by keeping poor people poor and “Green energy for the 3rd world” is just a nasty new way to say “Let them eat cake.”
Sorry, that’s just how it is.
Stunts and stratagems to keep them from moving to modern levels of economic output and energy consumption are simply not going to work.
No one worries about where dinner for their kids is coming from (or if it’s coming at all), cares about greenbelts and dumping stuff in rivers, or putting a little more plant food into the atmosphere.
If you don’t like it, take it up with physics and biology.
(and good luck with that…)
This endless harangue of meaningless mitigation is either the result of deeply unserious people having no idea what they are talking about or the use of trumped up claims about CO2 used to push for funding or to foist ulterior “Green on the outside red on the inside” collectivist agendas of economic dictatorship and central planning upon unsuspecting dupes. (Most likely a complex combination of the two, see the “rule by rube” Gato postulate and “Democracy dies in data adulteration.”)
And it’s certainly doing absolutely nothing positive for the world.
Wealth is also survival. Wealth is adaptation. The “heat deaths” issue is hilariously overblown. Most of the current “record heat wave” in the EU is a fabrication or the result of data being tortured until it confesses to crimes it did not commit, and cold kills FAR more people than heat, but there is another factor here as well.
To the (dubious) extent that this is actually a problem, the very air conditioning they love to vilify solves this. it’s just not widespread in the EU because, after decades of socialist policy suppressing growth and wealth accumulation, most of the EU is too poor to afford it.
These “heat deaths” are really deaths of poverty.
And that’s a very important perspective to maintain because this gang wants to cure problems of poverty with economic suppression.
And that will be an environmental, economic, and human disaster.
The social control vectors they got a taste of under covid have left them hungry for more.
They are not even trying to hide it.
Suddenly, “climate is the new covid” and in just the manner that certain internet felines have long been yowling about, they are going to play all the same stupid games and try to hand you all the same stupid prizes.
They are selling you poison and penury as panacea. The new absurdist push into “We need blackouts and climate lockdowns and 15-minute cities” is an idea as dangerous as it is deluded. It will not save. It will kill.
It’s anti-progress, anti-human, and anti-environment.
It’s also another horrendous foray into anti-science reality denial.
We just had a massive global experiment on this from covid lockdowns. Travel dropped precipitously, offices were empty, few people flew or drove, factories were idled. We experienced a level of human suppression and a drop in activity of unprecedented (and unsustainable) magnitude.
The effect on global CO2 levels was zero. Nothing changed. The rise was perfectly average and you cannot pick it out of the surrounding data no matter how hard you squint.
The most aggressive implementation of purported mitigation in human history occurred and it had no impact.
It was probably the most expensive intervention in human history and it did not move the needle even a micrometer. All cost, no benefit.
And now they want to try again?
Maybe the New York Times is right:
Maybe climate truly is the new covid…
Source NOAA. Trend lines added.
Reprinted from the author’s Substack
Author
From Brownstone Institute
I am expert in influenza, and have consulted with the WHO over the past two decades on the topic of flu vaccines. This is one subject matter I am extremely knowledgeable about. This goes back to my medical school days, when I worked with Robert Lamb, one of the top influenza virus specialists in the world. It extended through much of my career, including my serving as Director of Clinical Influenza Vaccine Research for Solvay Biologicals, in which I oversaw over $200 million in federal (BARDA) alternative (cell-based) influenza vaccine research funding.
What is happening now with “Bird flu” is another psyops campaign being conducted by the administrative/deep state, apparently in partnership with Pharma, against the American people. They know and we know that the “vaccines” being produced will be somewhat ineffective, as all flu “vaccines” are. The government is chasing a rapidly evolving RNA virus with a syringe, just like they did with HIV and Covid-19.
Generally, the currently circulating avian influenza strain in the US does not include any cases of human-to-human transmission. And the current mortality, with over 60 cases identified, is 0%. NOT 50%.
All the while they are getting prepared to roll out masks, lockdowns, quarantines, etc.
All the while getting ready to roll out mRNA vaccines for poultry and livestock, as well as for all of us.
The more they test, the more “Bird flu” (H5N1) they will find. This “pandemic” is nothing more than an artifact of their newly developed protocols to test cattle, poultry, pets, people, and wildlife on a massive scale for avian influenza. In years past, this was not even considered. In the past, the USG did fund a massive testing and surveillance program called “Biowatch.” That program was a colossal failure and a massive waste of money. Billions of dollars.
Of course, these facilities producing the tests have been repurposed from the Covid-19 testing facilities.
Key questions include:
Will we all comply?
Will we be forced to comply?
Will President Trump go along with the PsyWar/psyops campaign again?
We will know soon enough.
As the United States is testing everyone who has even the mildest symptoms for the H5N1 (avian) influenza, guess what – they are finding it! This is what we call in the lab, a “sampling bias.”
Globally, from 1997 until the present, there have been 907 reported cases of H5N1. And in fact, this particular outbreak was not the worst – and it is the only one where a massive testing campaign has occurred. It appears that this is partly due to the new diagnostic capabilities developed and deployed during Covid-19. The more you test, the more you find. But is it clinically significant?
The Case Study of Tetanus: Supply Chain Issues.
The CDC recommends a booster for the tetanus vaccine every 10 years for adults.
However, research published almost a decade ago suggests that the protection from tetanus and diphtheria vaccination lasts at least 30 years after completing the standard childhood vaccination series.
“We have always been told to get a tetanus shot every 10 years, but actually, there is very little data to prove or disprove that timeline. When we looked at the levels of immunity among 546 adults, we realized that antibody titers against tetanus and diphtheria lasted much longer then previously believed.”
-Mark K. Slifka, Ph.D, study author
This research, published in a highly reputable journal, suggests that a revised vaccination schedule with boosters occurring at ages 30 and 60 would be sufficient. As this was published in early 2016, the US government, at the very least, could have commissioned easily designed prospective and retrospective studies to confirm these results. And those results would have been published by now, with the tetanus adult schedule revised to reflect what is now known about the durable immunity of tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. Reducing the boosters to just two shots would save the government vast sums of money.
Not only that, but both the tetanus and diphtheria vaccines carry risks for adults. It is estimated that 50%–85% of patients experience injection site pain or tenderness, 25%–30% experience edema and erythema. Higher preexisting anti-tetanus antibody levels are also associated with a higher reactogenicity rate and greater severity (reference).
Anaphylaxis after tetanus vaccination represents a rare but potentially serious adverse event, with an incidence of 1.6 cases per million doses. That means if 100 million adults receive the booster every ten years, 320 cases of anaphylaxis will be avoided over the 30-year period – from those two boosters being eliminated. Tetanus has always been a “rare” disease, spread through a skin wound contaminated by Clostridium tetani bacteria, commonly found in soil, dust, and manure. Before vaccines were available, there were about 500 cases a year, with most resulting in death. Concerns about vaccine-associated adverse events when immunizations were performed at short intervals led to a revision of the tetanus/diphtheria vaccination schedule in 1966 to once every 10 years for patients >6 years of age.
It has recently come to my attention that the traditional stand-alone tetanus vaccine (TT) that one used to receive as an adult has been discontinued due to WHO recommendations. Their reasoning being:
Use of TTCV combinations with diphtheria toxoid are strongly encouraged and single-antigen vaccines should be discontinued whenever feasible to help maintain both high diphtheria and high tetanus immunity throughout the life course.
The CDC blames the shuttering of the only plant producing TT for the current lack of a stand-alone TT vaccine.
Now, in order to get a booster tetanus shot, an adult must take the following.
- Td: Sanofi’s Tenivac protects against tetanus and diphtheria. Given to people 7 years and older as a booster every 10 years. *A version also includes pertussis (eg DPT), but due to the risk of encephalitis, it is not recommended as a booster.
Why is the DPT combination vaccine discouraged in adults due to encephalitis risk, but is it recommended for children? Another one of those inconvenient issues that plague the CDC-recommended childhood vaccine schedule.
While supplies of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (Tdap) vaccines (Sanofi’s Adacel and GSK’s Boostrix) aren’t limited, they are more expensive, and a very small fraction of patients can develop encephalopathy (brain damage) from the pertussis component.
In the United States, diphtheria is virtually non-existent, with only 14 cases reported between 1996 and 2018. Of those cases reported, most were from international travelers or immigrants.
The market for a stand-alone TT vaccine vanished worldwide due to WHO recommendations to stop the sales of the TT vaccine. Which was due to the relatively few, economically stressed countries where diphtheria is still an issue. So, therefore, the only facility manufacturing the TT vaccine was shut down within the last year.
The blowback from the WHO recommendations is that now there is a shortage of tetanus and diphtheria (Td) vaccine in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.
This all comes down to poor planning. And illustrates why supply chain issues and infectious disease countermeasure stockpiles are essential considerations for governments.
The good news is that unless one is immunosuppressed, most of us have almost lifelong immunity against tetanus and diphtheria.
My recommendation is that unless one gets a very deep and dirty puncture wound and has not had a tetanus shot in over ten years or longer, avoid that booster.
Here is the ugly secret about influenza vaccines. They are given to protect one group of vulnerable people. Those who are immunosuppressed, and that cohort includes the very elderly.
If those influenza vaccine manufacturing plants only make enough vaccines for those susceptible to a severe case of the flu, there would not be enough of a market to sustain their production costs. Furthermore, if there were a pandemic of some sort of highly pathogenic influenza, there would not be sufficient capacity to make enough vaccines to meet demand.
Egg-based influenza vaccine production requires super “clean” eggs; about 100 million “clean” fertilized eggs are needed annually for vaccine production in the US alone. Candidate vaccine viruses are injected into the eggs. If the process is shuttered, the whole production comes to a screeching halt. Many vaccines can be stored for long periods. Even as long as a decade. This stockpiling system works well for DNA viruses with a low mutation rate. Stockpiling is rarely a solution for vaccines developed for RNA viruses that mutate rapidly.
Therefore, the influenza vaccine is pushed on the American people year after year. As a way to maintain “warm base manufacturing” and ensure sufficient market size to support industrial operations.
I have spoken on this subject at the WHO and US government agencies, as well as many, many conferences. Unfortunately, because the mRNA and RNA vaccine platforms require a lot of freezer space (commonly -20°C) to stockpile for even short periods, this limits the ability to stockpile. Furthermore, the frozen storage requirements are only for up to 6 months. That means stockpiling for more extended storage is not currently done, and it is back to square one on the supply chain issue.
The issue with freezer space and mRNA vaccines is one that most likely won’t be solved. This benefits the manufacturers of this vaccine technology – the US government has an endless need for new vaccines as the old ones expire.
My small hope is that the mRNA platform will be too costly to justify its continued use, as appeals concerning safety (or lack of) seem to fall on deaf FDA ears.
In the meantime, don’t believe the hype generated by ex-officials from the Biden and Trump administrations.
Both Dr. Lena Wen, CNN correspondent, and Dr. Redfield, ex-director of the CDC, have gone on to mainstream media shows and promoted the narrative that the case fatality rate for avian influenza is over 50 percent. This, frankly, is a lie that the WHO is promoting. Bird flu generally is not tested for when someone has flu symptoms. When an outbreak of avian flu occurs on a poultry farm, testing of farm workers who are seriously ill will commence. This has led to the generation of the 890 case reports since 2003. Of those seriously ill patients reported to the WHO, over 50 percent died.
This is not an actual case fatality rate of avian flu around the world. It is, again, a sampling error due to a tiny data set derived from those who are at greatest risk due to general health. And just like the WHO reported on an exaggerated case fatality rate for mPOX, which was also based on a sampling error, or for Covid-19, again a sampling error, it is now used to justify psychological bioterrorism on the world population. Please don’t fall for it.
El Gato Malo on X succinctly points out that Dr. Leana Wen and her public health ilk are advancing:
1. Do more of the same lousy testing used in Covid-19 to overstate a disease and cause panic.
2. Develop another non-sterilizing non-vaccine that does not work to be pushed on “the vulnerable.”
3. Doing it “right now” under EUA, so whoever makes these tests and jabs can cash in and be shielded from liability.
4. Claiming that proxies like “triggers antibody production” demonstrate clinical clinical efficacy.
It’s just one last smash-and-grab for cash before the Brandon (Biden) administration ends. Anyone who falls for this one will truly fall for anything.
Question: what are Leana’s conflicts of interest? Who is paying her or giving her grants?
For those that haven’t viewed Dr. Redfield speaking of the avian flu case fatality rate, have a watch below. It is genuinely shocking. This fear-mongering comes from an ex-director of the CDC. Shame on him.
Frankly, it reminds me of the 51 intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake.
One has to wonder what conflict of interest motivated him to say this on national TV?
Remember in the US, there have been 62 cases of avian influenza discovered, and all but one case were very mild.
This deep dive into the supply chain issues is meant to show that public health has put itself into a groupthink situation that it can’t escape.
Many solutions to this quandary do not involve an evermore expanding schedule of vaccinations, stockpiled for some future use. I have some general thoughts before I sign off.
- The use of early treatments via safe, proven drugs is a good solution.
- We now have many antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. Vaccines do not always need to be our first defense.
- Our medical system is very good at treating infectious diseases. The risks from such diseases are much less than it once was. People do not have to live in fear of infectious disease. I like to ask people, how many people do you know have died of flu? If you know of any (I don’t), how old were they?
- The need to scare people into more and more vaccines is a dangerous trend.
- And yes, the more vaccinations one receives, the more likely an adverse event.
- Vaccinating pregnant women and babies should always be a last resort.
- It is time for Congress to rethink the vaccine liability laws.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The recent Telegraph headline rang out of England recently with unsettling tones: Tenth of farmland to be axed for net zero
More than 10 per cent of farmland in England is set to be diverted towards helping to achieve net zero and protecting wildlife by 2050, the Environment Secretary will reveal on Friday.
Swathes of the countryside are on course to be switched to solar farms, tree planting and improving habitats for birds, insects and fish.
The move comes on the back of an aggressive and highly unpopular inheritance tax placed on generational farmers by British politician Rachel Reeves that has drawn sustained protest in the country. The commercial officer of Britain’s largest supermarket chain Tesco warned Reeves’ tax raid on farmers is placing “UK’s future food security is at stake.”
What if that’s the whole point? Tucker Carlson recently asked Piers Morgan this uncomfortable question.
Morgan refused to let his mind go there. And for good reason. It’s a dark premise. Yet one with historical context that must be analyzed due to the aggressive moves now in play against farmers around the world and humanity at large.
The British East India Company was the early template for the modern mega-corporate monopoly, globalization & vehicle to expand colonial power. Eventually dominating trade between Indian and Britain and far beyond. To say the company’s practices were ruthless would be putting it lightly.
Thomas Malthus was the East India Company’s first economist training individuals for service as administrators for the organization. Malthus was also a eugenicist in the economic wheelhouse of the world’s largest corporate monopoly with its own private army.
He wrote the following in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population:
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
Eugenicists aren’t picky. Whatever gets people off the planet en masse – they’re into. Notice his last sentence, when bases are loaded and “success be still incomplete,” it’s the famine that is the preferred home run hitter – the weapon of choice.
In the 1860s, the full weight of the East India Company’s monopoly helped kill off India’s economy of textile industries putting countless out of work and forcing them into agriculture. This, in turn, made the Indian economy much more dependent on the whims of seasonal monsoons as dry seasons gripped the country.
The Indian and British press carried reports of rising prices, dwindling grain reserves, and the desperation of peasants no longer able to afford rice.
All of this did little to stir the colonial administration into action. In the mid-19th Century, it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature’s way of responding to overpopulation.
The current overlay argument government, NGOs, and global bodies like the United Nations are using to interrupt farming during present day is because of ‘net zero’ goals.
[See video below on the origin of the ‘climate crisis’ narrative highlighting the Club of Rome’s hand in crafting the modern day operation.]
Cows create greenhouse gases, carbon emissions from fertilizers, destruction of wildlife, and people themselves are all, we are told to believe, BIG negatives for the earth. Therefore they must be reduced.
Not in an orderly way, but as fast as possible because we’re told change in climate is the biggest, world-ending threat humans face – or something like that.
The United Nations [think Agenda 2030, Paris Agreement] has been the prime mover, policy-shaping action arm to accomplish this ‘net zero’ utopia. Enter Julian Huxley.
Huxley emerges after World War 2 as a crucial bridging figure from what has been referred to as “old eugenics” [Malthus] to a new eugenics based on molecular biology and human evolution.
In 1945 as World War 2 was ending, the United Nations was founded in New York. That same year, the United Nations Conference for the Establishment of an Education and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was also founded in London with Julian Huxley becoming the first Director-General.
One year later Huxley wrote UNESCO ITS PURPOSE AND ITS PHILOSOPHY stating:
At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for Unesco to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.
As it appears we are now in the home stretch of the environmental overlay of modern-day eugenics, the consensus-building and subtle messaging are being done away with.
A 2022 research article published in the journal Social Studies of Science titled Environmental Malthusianism and Demography writes:
Some bioethicists argue that, because ‘we are threatened with more population than the planet can bear’, humans simply ‘don’t have a right to more than one biological child’ (Conly, 2016: 2). Some recommend that governments act to uphold this limit (Hickey et al., 2016). Even feminist historians and sociologists of science, including some sharp critics of the population control projects of the late 20th century, now call for measures to reduce childbearing as a means of combatting climate change. Environmental Malthusianism, the idea that human population growth is the primary driver of environmental harms and population control a prerequisite to environmental protection, is experiencing a resurgence.
The current leadership of the UK, EU member states and the U.S. in regards to climate. Where Keir Starmer is racing to fulfill ‘net zero’ goals, as of last week, the U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change via executive order.
Without food, food production, and farming, there is famine. It’s that simple. The failed pandemic response was a reminder of that.
It has been assumed that leaders and policymakers, especially the United Nations, know these basic historical and current facts. Farmers are becoming endangered because of government policy to meet ‘climate goals’ and it’s being allowed to happen.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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