Brownstone Institute
Imagine Life without Fossil Fuels
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/tvrd-brownstone-life-before-fossil-fuels-net-zero-image-2024-07-18.jpg)
From the Brownstone Institute
At 4 am on Tuesday 9th July in Seville (Spain), I woke up alerted by a text to my phone. “We had a bad night with Hurricane Beryl. Your house still stands and the critters are safe, two big trees down, no electricity, no Internet, and poor phone service.”
My children and I were visiting Andalusia, one of the oldest and most gorgeous European regions, blessed with the best food and the warmest people. This is one of my favorite places on earth, but for now, my family and I are calling South of Houston (Texas, US) home.
I panicked, being instantly seized by maternal instinct. Our entire house is run by electricity. On our return in a few days, there would be no warm food, no milk, no air conditioning, no TV, no running water, no toilet flushing. In town, neither kid activities nor story time at local libraries. These conditions are undoubtedly hard for young children who have only known comfort so far, although hundreds of millions of children are growing up in such circumstances daily.
Then I calmed down. The first thing to do should be thanking God for protecting human lives there, and for our wonderful friends and community.
I understood what happened immediately. Trees have fallen everywhere, taking down most of the grid and affecting more than a million people. It would take a few weeks to fix it. Houston would be first, of course, the crowded and business-minded urban areas will be rightly prioritized and rural areas follow after. After such largesse provided for the solar industry by successive American administrations, why has there been no money to put wires and cables underground in hurricane-prone regions?
We always have a month of canned meat and dry salami, drinking water, olive oil, lard, animal feed (we have some farm animals,) and 750 gallons of water in storage, candles, matches, and flashlights. For emergency situations like a war or a natural disaster. We have a pool conveniently built for Texan summer heat even though the filter won’t work. I can dig a hole in the garden if I want to give the kids some survival training, or I can use the pool water for toilet flushing. Our hens and ducks give us more than enough fresh eggs daily.
But I should have kept a few solar phone chargers and probably some solar panels for our well pump (solely activated by electricity). My husband should have had a better stock of gas to run our generator through the fridge and the two freezers. At least, I can still grill and the kids can help gather dry branches to make a fire and cook camping meals. After all, it is easier to survive without energy in a hot place than in a cold place.
My situation isn’t probably the worst, and I will be able to help some people around me with food and water. I will entertain the kids with games I used to play under the moonlight and the starry sky. However, with little or no gas (petrol) in town, and likely long lines at available stations, I will have to calculate our car trips well.
I told my 7-year-old what happened. He said he would fry eggs on the car and roast marshmallows on sticks. Young children are such marvelous beings. With only their imagination and innocence, they bring wonders to our world. Who knows, we might be lucky enough to catch some fireflies in a jar – I replied, nurturing his excitement. As his mother, I have the duty to minimize his suffering. Nevertheless, I would like to seize this opportunity to give him and his younger sister some duress training on life without fossil fuels – coal, gas, and oil to power modern devices – a bit like how I grew up.
Have the international, national, and non-governmental Net Zero crusaders ever lived a day without using any technology powered or facilitated by fossil fuels and their byproducts?
I would like to invite them to live here with us. I will show them that had I had solar panels on my roof, I would likely be cleaning up all of their dangerous debris around the house. Right now, a Tesla would be of less use than an ox cart in my Texan town.
But life at my homestead after Hurricane Beryl seems rather poetic. Well-prepared, a week or two without electricity might equal an ecological or soul-searching retreat with meditation time, good books on a hammock, bird-watching, simple yet exotic farm-to-table meals, and constellation identification.
For a real experience of a life without fossil fuels, climate leaders and activists should consider signing up for the sustainability internship program offered by Mr Jusper Machogu, a Kenyan farmer who was recently attacked by the BBC for his campaign on X requesting “Fossils Fuels for Africa.” Participants will learn how to grow foods without technologies powered by fossil fuels and live with a minimal impact on nature in rural Kisii.
Ploughing the land with bare hands before planting isn’t fun at all. Watering the crops regularly might well bring people closer to God with spontaneous prayers. Weeding or harvesting by squatting under the sun is tough. Even without factoring in any risk of pests, diseases. and unfavorable weather, what are the chances they would have to get out of poverty and food insecurity without cheap, reliable, abundant, and scalable energy?
Billions of subsistence families are still going through this. Worse, they continue to put their health at risk by cooking with agricultural wastes, wood sticks, and cow dung, while the Western world and their investment funds shamelessly demand poor countries and their populations to adopt intermittent, expensive, and unreliable green energies, instead of supporting fossil fuels (as well as hydropower and nuclear) production and infrastructure.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who repeatedly called to “close the door on fossil fuel era” (on International Clean Energy Day – 26 January 2024), would you live entirely and produce your own foods without fossil fuels?
United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) Chief Inger Andersen, who, at the closing of the 28th Climate COP (Dubai, UAE), claimed that “we know the solutions, we know what needs to be done,” would you be able to build a town for your staff without using oil, gas, and their byproducts?
How may we, as voters and taxpayers, demand that decision-makers lead by example, truly adhering to their green agenda first, before they insist that others implement it?
Brownstone Institute
The Curious Case of Mark Zuckerberg
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/tvrd-brownstone-facebook-image-2024-09-07.jpg)
From the Brownstone Institute
By
On August 27, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming what the Twitter Files, Murthy vs. Missouri, and many others had long claimed – that the Biden administration aggressively pushed to censor First Amendment-protected speech on social media, in particular relating to Covid-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop.
In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg writes that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including “humor and satire.”
Zuckerberg also notes that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of. The laptop was not “disinformation”, it was real and Twitter and Facebook wrongly suppressed the New York Post story that exposed it.
But Zuckerberg’s statement missed a key detail – at least three Facebook staff members participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden table-top exercise that game-planned how to suppress the story two months in advance of the New York Post story.
The Aspen Institute “table-top” brought together a host of media and Big Tech including Facebook, the New York Times, Twitter, the Washington Post, and “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft, to create their very own disinformation operation, literally planning day-by-day how they would respond to the leak.
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Zuckerberg, however, writes, “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
You can almost see the fall maple leaves feathering their way innocently to the forest floor.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.”
But there was no surprise, as Facebook had participated in the Aspen exercise two months before the story broke.
Even for Aspen’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the exercise, things went even better than planned:
![](https://i1.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-23-796x800.png?resize=740%2C744&ssl=1)
Regarding Covid-19, Zuckerberg says the government “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor.” Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, he only mentions they were “warned” “about a potential Russian disinformation operation.” There is no mention of pressure to censor. Did the federal government push Facebook to attend the Aspen Institute exercise? It seems they attended of their own volition.
Attending the Aspen suppression planning for Facebook was Nathaniel Gleicher, “head security policy at Meta,” who continues in his position to this day. The Twitter Files show Gleicher also met regularly with the Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI, and participated in a Harvard-led pre-election tabletop with the DoD whilst the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed on Facebook.
![](https://i2.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-24-800x528.png?resize=740%2C488&ssl=1)
Surely someone as senior as Gleicher, tasked as he was with such sensitive and high-level contacts, would have told his boss about his attendance? After all, the laptop story could have a real impact on the outcome of a presidential election.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth also attended the Aspen exercise and played a critical role in suppressing the Hunter Biden story on that platform. Did Gleicher play the same role at Facebook? Gleicher’s participation has been known publicly since Michael Shellenberger first broke that story, 18 months and more than 100 million impressions ago.
If Zuckerberg believes suppressing the story was wrong, why has he kept Gleicher in such a senior role? If he knew of Gleicher’s participation in the Aspen exercise, why didn’t he blow the whistle at the time? Instead, he places all the blame at the foot of the federal government. No doubt they exerted pressure, but that does not appear to be the whole story.
Is Zuckerberg attempting to absolve himself of responsibility?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Agriculture
Glimpse into the Future of Food
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/tvrd-tvrd-inflation-groceries-image-2022-04-20.jpg)
From the Brownstone Institute
By
Is your food making you sick?
Suddenly, the fact that food is making us sick, really sick, has gained a lot of attention.
When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced he would suspend his presidential campaign and campaign for President Trump on August 23, both he and Trump spoke about the need to improve the food supply to regain America’s health.
The same week, Tucker Carlson interviewed the sister-brother team of Casey and Calley Means, coauthors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. Their thesis, borne out by thousands of medical research studies, is that food can make us very healthy or very sick. The grocery store choices many Americans have made have led us to unprecedented levels of diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic and neurologic diseases that prematurely weaken and age us, our organs, and our arteries.
There is a whole lot wrong with our available food.
- Chemical fertilizers have led to abusing the soil, and consequently, soils became depleted of micronutrients. Unsurprisingly, foods grown in them are now lacking those nutrients.
- Pesticides and herbicides harm humans, as well as bugs and weeds.
- Some experts say we need to take supplements now because we can’t get what we need from our foods anymore.
- Subsidies for wheat, corn, and soybean exceed $5 billion annually in cash plus many other forms of support, exceeding $100 billion since 1995, resulting in vast overproduction and centralization.
- We are practically living on overprocessed junk made of sugar, salt, wheat, and seed oils.
And that is just the start. The problem could have been predicted. Food companies grew bigger and bigger, until they achieved virtual monopolies. In order to compete, they had to use the cheapest ingredients. When the few companies left standing banded together, we got industry capture of the agencies that regulated their businesses, turning regulation on its head.
Consolidation in the Meat Industry
Then the regulators issued rules that advantaged the big guys, and disadvantaged the small guys. But it was the small guys who were producing the highest quality food, in most cases. Most of them had to sell out and find something else to do. It simply became uneconomic to be a farmer.
The farmers and ranchers that were left often became the equivalent of serfs on their own land.
Did you know:
- “Ninety-seven percent of the chicken Americans eat is produced by a farmer under contract with a big chicken company. These chicken farmers are the last independent link in an otherwise completely vertically integrated, company-owned supply chain.”
- “Corporate consolidation is at the root of many of the structural ills of our food system. When corporations have the ability to dictate terms to farmers, farmers lose. Corporations place the burden of financial liability on farmers, dictate details of far.”
- ” Corporations also consolidate ownership of the other steps of the supply chain that farmers depend on — inputs, processing, distribution, and marketing — leaving farmers few options but to deal with an entity against which they have effectively no voice or bargaining power.”
When profitability alone, whether assisted by policy or not, determines which companies succeed and which fail, cutting corners is a necessity for American businesses — unless you have a niche food business, or are able to sell directly to consumers. This simple fact inevitably led to a race to the bottom for quality.
Look at the world’s ten largest food companies. Their sales are enormous, but should we really be consuming their products?
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Perhaps the regulators could have avoided the debasement of the food supply. But they didn’t.
And now it has become a truism that Americans have the worst diet in the world.
Could food shortages be looming?
If it seems like the US, blessed with abundant natural resources, could never suffer a food shortage, think again. Did you know that while the US is the world’s largest food exporter, in 2023 the US imported more food than we exported?
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Cows are under attack, allegedly because their belching methane contributes to climate change. Holland has said it must get rid of 30-50% of its cows. Ireland and Canada are also preparing to reduce the number of their cows, using the same justification.
In the US, the number of cows being raised has gradually lessened, so that now we have the same number of cows that were being raised in 1951 — but the population has increased by 125% since then. We have more than double the people, but the same number of cows. What!? Much of our beef comes from Brazil.
Pigs and chickens are now mostly raised indoors. Their industries are already consolidated to the max. But cows and other ungulates graze for most of their life, and so the beef industry has been unable to be consolidated in the same way.
But consolidation is happening instead in the slaughterhouses because you cannot process beef without a USDA inspector in a USDA-approved facility — and the number of these facilities has been dropping, as have the number of cows they can handle. Four companies now process over 80% of US beef. And that is how the ranchers are being squeezed.
Meanwhile, efforts are afoot to reduce available farmland for both planting crops and grazing animals. Bill Gates is now the #1 owner of US farmland, much of which lies fallow. Solar farms are covering land that used to grow crops — a practice recently outlawed in Italy. Plans are afoot to impose new restrictions on how land that is under conservation easements can be used.
Brave New Food
That isn’t all. The World Economic Forum, along with many governments and multinational agencies, wants to redesign our food supply. So-called plant-based meats, lab-grown meats, “synbio” products, insect protein, and other totally new foods are to replace much of the real meat people enjoy — potentially leading to even greater consolidation of food production. This would allow “rewilding” of grazing areas, allowing them to return to their natural state and, it is claimed, this would be kinder to the planet. But would it?
Much of the land used for grazing is unsuitable for growing crops or for other purposes. The manure of the animals grazing on it replenishes soil nutrients and contributes to the soil microbiome and plant growth. “Rewilding” may in fact lead to the loss of what topsoil is there and desertification of many grazing areas.
Of course, transitioning the food supply to mostly foods coming from factories is a crazy idea, because how can you make a major change in what people eat and expect it to be good for them? What micronutrients are you missing? What will the new chemicals, or newly designed proteins, or even computer-designed DNA (that will inevitably be present in these novel foods) do to us over time? What will companies be feeding the insects they farm, when food production is governed by ever cheaper inputs?
It gets worse. Real food production, by gardeners and small farmers or homesteaders, is decentralized. It cannot be controlled. Until the last 150 years, almost everyone fed themselves from food they caught, gathered, or grew.
But if food comes mainly from factories, access can be cut off. Supply chains can break down. You can be priced out of buying it. Or it could make you sick, and it might take years or generations before the source of the problem is identified. How long has it taken us to figure out that overprocessed foods are a slow poison?
There are some very big problems brewing in the food realm. Whether we like it or not, powerful forces are moving us into the Great Reset, threatening our diet in new ways, ways that most of us never dreamed of.
Identifying the Problems and Solutions
But we can get on top of what is happening, learn what we need to, and we can resist. That’s why Door to Freedom and Children’s Health Defense have unpacked all of these problems and identified possible solutions.
During a jam-packed two-day online symposium, you will learn about all facets of the attack on food, and how to resist. This is an entirely free event, with a fantastic lineup of speakers and topics. Grab a pad and pencil, because you will definitely want to take notes!
The Attack on Food and Farmers, and How to Fight Back premieres on September 6 and 7. It will remain on our channels for later viewing and sharing as well. By the end of Day 2, you will know what actions to take, both in your own backyard, and in the halls of your legislatures to create a healthier, tastier, safer, and more secure food supply.
See below for a summary and for the complete program.
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