Brownstone Institute
The Betrayal of the Environment by Environmentalists
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
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
Brownstone Institute
The Most Devastating Report So Far
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Brownstone Institute
The Revolution of 2024: A Rare Victory for Anti-Establishment Fury
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
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