Civil Defense Perspectives 34(1): January 2019 (published May 2019)
The new date for the Apocalypse has been set for 12 years, unless “we” take immediate drastic action. Schoolchildren are “striking” (skipping school) to urge governments to do something to save their futures.
Former bartender, new Democratic Socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) (D-N.Y.) crashed into the new Congress, holding a sit-in in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office even before Congress convened, to advocate the Green New Deal. Many Democrat candidates for President and dozens of congressmen have signed on. It calls for a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II” —with a “near total economic transformation.”
This would require generating 100% of power from “renewable” sources, “upgrading” all buildings for energy efficiency (cost to meet California requirements for an average home, $58,000), and replacing 260 million gasoline-powered cars with all-electric vehicles (or perhaps just junking them).
Socialist add-ons include single-payer healthcare, federal job guarantees, basic income, rapid rail transit to replace most air travel, and universal access to healthy food.
AOC acknowledges some difficulties, as in immediately getting rid of “farting cows” or airplanes. There are approximately 85 million cows in North America (and 200 million roaming the streets of India). They generate methane, which constitutes 0.36% of all greenhouse gases. And should we stop the re-introduction of bison? Some 150 years ago, about 65 million of them were producing methane (tinyurl.com/y4q2y745).
Neither Green, New, Nor a Deal
AOC’s proposal is part of the UN’s global Agenda 21 Sustainable Development. Tom DeWeese writes that foreign nongovernmental organizations are often more open than American NGOs. The French Novethic proposes forbidding all new construction of single-family homes except trailers. New condos would permit a maximum of 320 sq ft of living area per person. [No room for a piano, a library, or extra supplies.] Meat and dairy consumption would decrease by 10% per year, to 55 lbs of meat per person per year in 2030 (https://tinyurl.com/y34vojlb).
A product of the 1992 Rio Conference, Agenda 21 was to be implemented worldwide in order to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world (tinyurl.com/y6bxewwz).
One example is to control how much sand we are permitted to use (https://tinyurl.com/y268m8ap).
The GND first appeared in England in 2008 with a 44-page report by the Green New Deal Group, writes Patrick Wood. To address the “triple crunch of financial meltdown, climate change and ‘peak oil,’ a global technocracy scheme is proposed: (1) a structural transformation of national and international financial and taxation systems and (2) energy conservation and renewable energies, coupled with “effective demand management.” A low-carbon energy system would make “every building a power station” and create a “carbon army” of “green collar” jobs. Unapproved financial products would have their contracts made unenforceable by law (https://tinyurl.com/y5hcdvdm)—i.e. no free-market deals allowed.
Much of AOC’s text was probably plagiarized from Rethinking the Economic Recovery: A Global Green New Deal by Edward Barbier, for the UN Environment Programme in 2009 (tinyurl.com/y4llt6t3). Ten years later, Barbier writes: “The brown economy remains pervasive, partly because it is buttressed by market-distorting subsidies.” Still, “the US Green New Deal represents the first time a major western economy has proposed a comprehensive 10-year plan for a green transition.” He claims that with all the new taxes, deficit spending would not be needed—we could even raise the minimum wage, retrain displaced workers, and help households burdened by the transition (Nature 1/3/19).
While the GND can be called socialist, the old socialists at least claimed to benefit the working class, but GND redistribution goes from poor workers to the capitalist aristocracy pushing wind and solar, writes Rupert Darwall. In Germany, more than 300,000 households were being disconnected from the grid for inability to pay soaring energy bills (tinyurl.com/y563gud8).
The AFL-CIO immediately slammed the GND for threatening the livelihood of millions (tinyurl.com/yxbp3ygp).
And just how green is it? Shuttering nuclear and hydro power plants, and converting our transportation and shipping would require twice as much electricity as generated today. Manufacturing and installing 154,000 wind turbines offshore and 335,000 onshore, and 75 million residential, 2.75 million commercial, and 46,000 utility-scale solar systems sprawling across millions of acres would require removing hundreds of billions of tons of rock to extract tens of billions of tons of ores. Done overseas, there would virtually no health, environmental, or human rights protections, writes Paul Driessen (tinyurl.com/y5q8cusk). So much for the stated noble goal of ending oppression.
Back-up Strategy
According to public documents obtained by Climate Litigation Watch, if “conventional approaches” (legislation) fail, a youth climate movement with children’s street marches and litigation was planned. This would lead to the imposition of a GND equivalent through consent decrees (tinyurl.com/y27uukcc).
“Beginning in 2012 environmental activists, backed by wealthy individuals and organizations and in concert with plaintiff law firms, began devising and advancing a strategy to use law enforcement to attack the energy industry, and even think tanks and other policy groups, in the name of ‘climate accountability.’” To advance an extremist policy agenda and “fulfill a vision of an energy-starved world,” the plan was to “criminalize, bleed and financially undermine an entire industry” (tinyurl.com/y38tj47b).
Green Roots
The global warming scare began in 1941, when German climate scientist Hermann Flohn wrote “The Activity of Man as a Climate Factor.” The exceptionally warm Dust Bowl years of the 1930s were attributed to industrial capitalism. “Sustainable development”—ecological totalitarianism—was a Nazi idea closely tied to eugenics (https://tinyurl.com/y3qbao3k).
The War on Meat
Planetary health is now supposed to be our preoccupation, even with every bite we eat. The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health produced a 47-page report in January 2019, by 37 experts from 16 countries. It states that “unhealthy and unsustainably produced food poses a global risk to people and the planet.” It defines sustainable food production as staying within “safe planetary boundaries for six environmental processes that together regulate the state of the Earth system, and include climate change, land-system change, fresh water use, biodiversity loss, and interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.” We need a “Great Food Transformation” because “civilisation is at risk.” Total meat consumption should be less than 28 g (1 oz) per day (tinyurl.com/y6qmrvxy).
Family physician Lalita Abhyankar, M.D., writes in AAFP News that “we all need to be on board to improve not only our own health, but the health of the planet, as well.” She acknowledges that ordinary people would have a lot of trouble implementing these recommendations (tinyurl.com/y3qoyhkm).
The EAT-Lancet program was launched in Norway, even after the World Health Organization (WHO) dropped its high-profile endorsement because of complaints by some African countries that it would destroy their livestock-dependent economies (https://tinyurl.com/yxcplwe9).
Myths and the Plant-Based Sustainable Diet
Livestock Produce 14.5% of Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions: This is because of less productive livestock in underdeveloped countries. In India, the average cow produces 2.5 kg milk/day vs 31 kg in the U.S. (https://tinyurl.com/yyoy7mbf).
Livestock Deplete Resources, Contribute to Hunger: In fact, animals produce more highly valuable nutrients for humans, such as proteins, than they consume. And 86% of livestock feed is not suitable for human consumption (ibid.).
Plant-based Foods Are Healthier: Carbohydrate foods (grains and vegetables) are calorie-rich but lacking in bioavailable minerals, essential fatty acids, and digestible protein (ibid.).
Precedents for Food Utopia (Dystopia)
The UN claims that “tackling meat is the world’s most urgent problem.” Note that in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, synthetic food is integral to the theme.
Fascism: Benito Mussolini ordered the formation of the Committee for the Study of Soya and boldly announced a plan to require soy flour as a mandatory ingredient in polenta.
Communism: In the 1950s and 60s, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union pushed soy protein and margarines for low-cost feeding of the masses. Stalin’s efforts to collectivize agriculture involved the liquidation of the kulaks. They opposed giving up their cattle and land, and were a counterweight to Soviet power.
Controlling Native Americans: “Make them poor by the destruction of their stock [bison], and then settle them on the lands allotted to them,” said Major-General Phillip Sheridan.
Controlling the food supply is a constant theme of totalitarianism. Historically, consumption of nutrient-dense animal-source foods is associated with wealth, health, strength, and intelligence, empowering the individual and enabling independence (ibid.).
Practical Impediments to GND
High-speed Rail: The first section of the planned bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, from Bakersfield to Fresno, is $5 billion over the $6 billion budget and 3 years delayed. Later difficulties will include crossing mountains and entering major urban areas. The $77 billion cost was probably a gross underestimate (TWTW 2/9/19, www.sepp.org). New governor Gavin Newsom pulled the plug (TWTW 2/16/19).
Back-up Power: A Wall Street Journal reader estimated the cost of replacing the 850 gigawatts of uranium and fossil-fuel installed electricity capacity in the U.S. as of 2016 to be $425 billion, assuming significant (highly unlikely) reductions in costs—without backup. Battery backup would cost roughly 20 times as much, bringing the total cost to about $9 trillion—unless we have a technological breakthrough such as extracting sun-beams from cucumbers as described by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (TWTW 2/16/19). In Australia, Elon Musk’s giant 100 MW lithium-ion battery, which can deliver a maximum 129 MWh of power, cost $150,000,000 and delivers an occasional spurt of power to allow the 200 MW Hallett power station a few minutes of lead time to fire up when the wind dies down. Hallett usually burns diesel (https://tinyurl.com/y34ffcfh).
Unmentioned Costs of the GND
“Renewables are picking up” is the title of a graph showing a rise in energy from wind and solar (at the same slope as the rise in energy from coal, or oil, or gas)—to a tiny fraction of the total, in an article by Christiana Figueres, convenor of Mission 2020 (Nature 12/6/18). Calculating the cost of the ambitious agenda to “decarbonize” is left to others. Ed Hiserodt expresses it in land area required for wind and solar installations. Wind turbines would require a cleared land area greater than that of N.Y., Pa., Ohio, N.H., N.J., Mass., Del., Md., and R.I. combined. Add W.V. for the energy to run electric cars. And more states to charge battery backups. Acres required to generate 1,000 MW: nuclear, 421; solar, 37,900; wind, 154,000. Replacing batteries could cost trillions of dollars every 3-5 years (tinyurl.com/y69k36ys).
Wind turbines require 750 cubic yards of concrete and 50 tons of rebar. (tinyurl.com/y4j7k24h). Making concrete is the source of 8% of carbon emissions, vs. 2.5% for aviation fuel and 12% for global agriculture (tinyurl.com/y7tlptyh).
The GND cannot possibly sustain the earth’s current population. Might a drastic human die-off be the whole purpose?
Climate Change and 10 Warning Signs for Cults
If the Climate Change movement seems more and more like a religious movement, see the ten warning signs for unsafe groups developed by Rick Ross, an expert on cults and interventions (tinyurl.com/y6svj6pu). Should you debate someone caught up in the movement, or consider an intervention?
Educating the Young
Camp Constitution (www.campconstitution.net) offers an antidote to government school indoctrination. Next camp is July 28-Aug 3. Sample talks by Willie Soon: https://tinyurl.com/y2wytmz9 and https://tinyurl.com/y2q3v2b6.