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Brownstone Institute

The Betrayal of the Environment by Environmentalists

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY El Gato MaloEL GATO MALO  

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.

Environmental vulnerabilities are linked to every other problem in Haiti |  National Catholic Reporter

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.

Image

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

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  • El Gato Malo

    El Gato Malo is a pseudonym for an account that has been posting on pandemic policies from the outset.

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Brownstone Institute

If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker 

Who Controls the Administrative State?

President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.

It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.

The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.

How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.

All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.

The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.

Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.

This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.

The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.

The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.

The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.

A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.

There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.

Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.

Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.

After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?

So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.

What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.

We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.

All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.

What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.

For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.

That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.

That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.

There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.

First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.

That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.

Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.

In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.

Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?

Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.

Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.

If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.

The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?

Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.

Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

The New Enthusiasm for Slaughter

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute David Bell  

What War Means

My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.

Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.

It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.

People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.

Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.

I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.

The EU Reverses Its Focus

When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.

Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.

We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.

In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”

The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.

As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?

Europe’s Need for Outside Help

A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.

Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.

Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.

Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.

There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.

Author

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

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