On Covid-19 Spending from letter from Craig Rucker of CFACT

Adjusted for today’s dollars the Second World War cost $4.1 trillion. 

The United States just committed to spend an additional $1.9 trillion, boosting total taxpayer pandemic spending to over $6 trillion.

This is half again what it cost to liberate the world from fascism. 

We posted policy details and an extensive financial breakdown to CFACT.org.

The U.S. has not yet finished spending the funds from the last rounds of COVID relief.

Sadly, combating the virus and its economic impact is merely the tip of this latest $1.9 trillion fiscal iceberg.  The bulk of the spending in the "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021" goes to a colossal left-wing wish list and a cornucopia of good old-fashioned government waste, albeit on a 21st century scale.

The Foundation for Economic Education calculated that total federal COVID spending just hit $41,870 per taxpayer.

Less than one percent of the latest spending goes to vaccines.  Only ten percent is directly related to the virus. 

Here's a sampling of where the rest will go:

• $350 billion to cities, states and Indian tribes, including those running fiscal surpluses.  The methodology was changed to favor states that voted for Biden.  Enjoy your $26 billion windfall, California!
• $169 billion to schools and colleges, including those that refuse to open.  Where's the party teachers' unions?
• $422 billion in $1,400 per-person stimulus checks, including to those who never missed a paycheck and even federal prisoners.
• $58 billion to bail out union pension plans.
• $25 billion in increased Obamacare subsidies.
• $30 billion to AMTRAK and transit agencies.
• Expansion of the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600, extending the credit to people who don't work for the first time, effectively ending the Clinton-era work-based welfare reforms.
• $1 billion in loan forgiveness for farmers based on "racial justice."  Didn't the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbid discrimination based on race?  The Left is calling this the start of "reparations."
• $50 million in environmental justice grants.  Whom do you think will receive those?

America's national debt is approaching $30 trillion.  What if (heaven forbid) we had to fight an actual world war?

Craig Rucker is President of CFACT.

Charles' Comments:

The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly highlighted the many harms promulgated by our governments.  The NIH and Dr. Fauci provided funding for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in a Wuhan biological laboratory known to have inadequate safety procedures and whose employees were the first known to suffer the Covid-19 disease.  Then the federal, most state, and many local governments over-reacted with shutdown orders to large portions of the private sector economy.  Most schools were shutdown, forever depriving American children of about a year of much needed education.  Now, many state and local governments are inhibiting the distribution of the vaccines.  The Craig Rucker letter above directs our attention to still more of the harm our federal government has done to us.

Those who rule in America are incompetent to perform the excessive scope of function they have taken upon themselves in their quest for power.  Those who desire power over others are generally people of low moral character as well.  When they are not intending to do harm, they are sufficiently unthinking that they simply do not understand the harm they are doing.  Craig Rucker ends his letter with that classic Ronald Reagan quote:

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

The myth (and phony math) of 'green' jobs -- by Duggan Flanakin of CFACT

Governments are killing real jobs and conning us about ‘millions of good green jobs’

 
“Fool me once,” Stephen King wrote, “shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.” His adage certainly applies to the myth (and fake math) of green jobs.
 
During the 2020 election campaign, Joe Biden asserted that more than 3 million Americans are already “employed in the clean energy economy.” He then boasted that, “if executed strategically, our response to climate change can create more than 10 million well-paying jobs in the United States that will grow a stronger, more inclusive middle class … and not just in cities along the coasts.”
 
That would make Joe twice as boastful as his former boss, who promised the 2009 $787 billion stimulus package would create “over five million” green jobs. Four years later, the Brookings Institution reported that, “of the nearly 2.7 million ‘green jobs’ [the Obama-Biden Administration] identifies, most were bus drivers, sewage workers and other types of work that don’t fit the ‘green jobs of the future’” description.
 
Energy analyst David Blackmon later reported that Obama’s own Department of Labor acknowledged the initial failure to launch. DOL’s September 2011 report, “Recovery Act: Slow pace placing workers into jobs jeopardizes employment goals of the Green Jobs Program,” noted that only a third of the allocated funding had been spent; a fifth of the “degrees” and “certifications” went to people with a single day of training; and half of the “graduates” had five or fewer days of training. Just 2% of program participants held their jobs for at least six months.
 
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted oil industry lobbyists as holding “green” jobs! The septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry had 33 times more “green” jobs than solar electric utilities. The BLS had to admit in a June 2012 report, “Green Technologies and Practices – August 2011,” that they could identify only 854,700 “green” jobs, including janitors and cleaners.
 
What a sham! Shame on them for trying to con us.
 
David Kreutzer pointed out in a Heritage Foundation report that steel workers had the most “green” industrial jobs. Why? Most U.S. steel is recycled scrap, and some steel gets used in making wind turbines. The next largest groups were bus drivers, waste collectors and used-merchandise store employees – followed finally by engineering and architectural services. The much hated nuclear industry accounted for over 80% of the 44,000 “green” electric utility jobs. There were five times as many “green” jobs in social advocacy (environmentalist group lobbyists) as in renewable electric power.
 
Ah, but that was then – and this is now, you say. Right.  
 
In January, the Associated Press reported on “Biden’s fuzzy math” regarding his claim of creating 1 million new auto industry jobs – even if he actually replaces the 650,000-government vehicle fleet with electric cars and installs 500,000 new EV charging stations – all at taxpayer expense. Theoretically, a huge government buying program will lower EV costs, and the myriad of charging stations will lessen fears of being stuck in a hurricane evacuation in a vehicle you cannot quickly gas up. Theoretically.
 
But hold on! Every electric vehicle job will likely come at the expense of a gasoline-engine vehicle job, and every EV charging station will diminish jobs in pipeline, refining, gasoline retail, gasoline delivery, and other sectors. The AP story adds that industry analysts and the United Auto Workers union agree that EV manufacturing will likely mean fewer automotive jobs. One reason is that EVs have far fewer parts and are simpler to build, thus require fewer workers, and often just need a new $6,000 battery module. Another is that battery manufacturing is easily automated. But that is hardly the whole story.
 
Back in 2019, while losing over a fifth of its U.S. market share of sales over a 3-year period, General Motors admitted it already employed more non-union auto workers in China than union workers in the USA. The harsh reality is that there are 10 times more electric vehicle battery manufacturing facilities in Asia than in all of North America. Maybe Jinping Joe Biden is talking about the number of Chinese “green” jobs. Especially child and near-slave labor in China’s mines and processing plants.
 
Other fact checkers have also found Biden Administration green jobs claims are “mostly false.”
 
Electric vehicles are just part of the Green New Biden Deal. Surrendering our economy to the Paris climate accords and its draconian environmental restraints is another. Abandoning oil, gas and coal – and very likely nuclear energy – and all the jobs those industries create is a third. Mr. Biden is merely following Germany and other European Union countries down the primrose path to economic suicide.
 
According to Deutsche Bank, climate policy regulation of Germany’s automotive sector is triggering “the biggest structural break in the industry in decades.” A bank report explains that strict carbon dioxide limits for new passenger cars in the EU for 2021 and 2030 are forcing manufacturers to prematurely switch to higher cost electric vehicles. The resultant price increases, the bank predicts, will have a very negative effect on future employment in the Germany auto industry.
 
One reason is that the EU’s CO2 limits for passenger cars and subsidies for electric vehicles are “extremely inefficient [expensive] and hardly effective instruments” to achieve emission reduction in the transport sector. While government incentives and mandates may push people toward buying government-favored vehicles, radical climate and energy policies decrease investment in energy-intensive sectors such as metals and chemicals. This will further increase the cost of new German cars.
 
Despite the push for green energy and electric vehicles, the German Trade Union Association reports that the number of “green” jobs in the German renewables sector had fallen from 300,000 in 2011 to just 150,000 in 2018. Many of these lost jobs were due to the collapse of Germany’s solar power industry, as companies were forced out of business by Chinese manufacturers that undercut German prices – and had much easier access to raw materials.
 
The track record for American renewable industry jobs vis-à-vis Chinese competition has mimicked the German experience. A primary reason is China’s near-monopoly on rare-earth metals essential for the Green revolution. Despite these realities, Biden “climate envoy” John Kerry recently said displaced American oil and gas workers can simply and easily go to work making solar panels.
 
Energy economist Tilak Doshi agrees the West’s fascination with renewables-only de-carbonization, and ultimately de-industrialization, is a recipe for economic suicide. He notes that Germany’s “green” world involves behemoth wind turbines with blades made of petroleum-based, fiberglass-reinforced resins; motors built with iron and rare earths extracted, processed and smelted using fossil fuels; concrete that also requires fossil fuels; and factories run on coal and natural gas. Solar panels have the same pedigree.
 
The turbines and panels are installed in forests, grasslands, farmlands and coastal areas, where they destroy scenic vistas and wildlife habitats. Turbine blades kill endangered birds and bats.
 
The result of this save-the-planet zeal? Germany has a burgeoning 17% poverty rate, thanks largely to its shutdown of reliable nuclear and fossil fuel power plants and the resultant skyrocketing electricity prices for homes, factories, businesses and hospitals over the past 15 years.
 
Back in the USA, California operates the world’s fifth largest economy by importing most of its crude oil from overseas (despite massive in-state reserves) and a third of its electricity from other states (also for political expediency). As a result, Californians now pay 60% more than the national average for residential, commercial and industrial electricity, while enduring frequent rolling blackouts due to pricey weather-dependent energy and pathetic forest management. People and industries are fleeing the state.
 
And Team Biden-Harris (Harris-Biden?) wants to turn the rest of the United States into California!
 
Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
 

Why don't these black lives matter? by Paul Driessen

Child labor, human rights abuses and deaths are routinely ignored by Greens and Democrats

Marathon Petroleum recently announced it will “indefinitely idle” its Martinez Refinery. The decision will remove hundreds of jobs, billions of dollars, and nearly 7 million gallons of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum liquids per day from the energy-hungry California economy. It will also send fuel prices even higher for minority and other poor families that already pay by far the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States: $1.32 more per gallon of regular than in Louisiana and Texas.

California’s green and political interests don’t want drilling or fracking, pipelines, or nuclear, coal or hydroelectric power plants – or mining for the materials needed to manufacture electric cars. They prefer to have that work done somewhere else, and just import the energy, cars and consumer goods.

They’ve long wanted a totally electric vehicle (EV) fleet, which they claim would be clean, ethical, climate-friendly and sustainable. Of course, those labels hold up only so long as they look solely at activities and emissions within California state boundaries – and not where the mining, manufacturing and electricity generation take place. That kind of “life cycle” analysis would totally disrupt their claims.

Consider copper. A typical internal combustion engine uses about 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of this vital everyday metal, the International Copper Association says. A hybrid car requires almost 90 lb (40 kg); a plug-in EV needs 132 lb (60 kg); and a big electric bus can use up to 812 lb (369 kg) of copper. If all 15,000,000 California cars were EVs, they would need almost 1,000,000 tons of copper.

But copper ores average just 0.5% metal by weight, notes energy analyst Mark Mills. That means 200,000,000 tons of ore would have to be dug up, crushed, processed and refined to get that much copper. Almost every step in that process would require fossil fuels – and emit carbon dioxide and pollutants.

That’s just California. According to Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Technology Michael Kelly, replacing all the United Kingdom’s vehicles with next-generation EVs would require more than half the world’s annual production of copper; twice its annual cobalt; three quarters of its yearly lithium carbonate output; and nearly its entire annual production of neodymium.

Just one electric car or backup-power battery weighs 1,000 pounds and requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of various ores, Mills says. The true costs of “green” energy are staggering.

Imagine replacing all of the USA’s nearly 300,000,000 cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, buses, trucks and other vehicles with electric versions under the Green New Deal – and then charging them daily. The millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of backup-power batteries, thousands of miles of new transmission lines, grid upgrades and million or so fast charging stations all across America would also require copper, concrete, all these other metals and many more materials, in incomprehensible quantities.

Alaska’s Pebble Mine deposit has an estimated 35 million tons of high-grade copper ore and 3 million tons of molybdenum and other critical GND ores. The copper alone is nearly two times the world’s 2019 output of that essential element. Permits were blocked for years for questionable reasons. But the US Army Corps of Engineers recently found that mining would not have a “measurable effect” on sockeye salmon numbers in the Bristol Bay watershed and should be allowed to proceed, under tough US pollution control, reclamation, wildlife protection, workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws.

Environmentalists intend to delay the Pebble Mine as long as possible – and block other US exploration and mining projects. That’s why most mining and processing is done overseas, much of it in China and Mongolia or by Chinese companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where none of these laws apply.

Most of the world’s rare earth ores are extracted near Baotou, Inner Mongolia by pumping acid into the ground, then processed using more acids and chemicals. Producing one ton of rare earth metals releases up to 420,000 cubic feet of toxic gases, 2,600 cubic feet of acidic wastewater, and a ton of radioactive waste. The resulting black sludge is piped into a foul, lifeless lake. Numerous local people suffer from severe skin and respiratory diseases, children are born with soft bones, and cancer rates have soared.

Lithium comes largely from Tibet and arid highlands of the Argentina-Bolivia-Chile “lithium triangle.” Dead, toxic fish join carcasses of cows and yaks floating down Tibet’s Liqi River, which has been poisoned by the Ganzizhou Rongda mine. Native people in the ABC triangle say lithium operations contaminate streams needed for humans, livestock and irrigation, and leave mountains of discarded salt.

The world’s top producer of cobalt is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some 40,000 children as young as four toil with their parents for less than $2 a day up to 12 hours a day. Many die in cave-ins, or more slowly from constant exposure to toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air that puts dangerous levels of cobalt, lead, uranium and other heavy metals into their bodies. The cobalt ore is sent to China for processing by the Chinese-owned Congo Dongfang International Mining Company.

That’s just to meet current raw material requirements. Try to picture the raw material demands, Third World mining and child labor conditions, and ecological destruction, under the Green New Deal.

Liberals often say they support sustainable, ethical coffee, sneakers, handbags and diamonds. No child labor, sweat shops or unsafe conditions tolerated. But it’s a different story with green energy and EVs. In 2019, California Assembly Bill 735 proposed that the state certify that “zero emission” electric vehicles sold there are free of any materials or components that involve child labor. Democrats voted it down. The matter is complicated, they “explained.” It would be too hard to enforce, cost too much and imperil state climate goals. And besides, lots of other industries also use child labor. (So shut up about it.)

Last month, the US House of Representatives had an opportunity to legislate a national certification that federally funded electric buses and charging stations would not include minerals mined with child labor. The Transportation Committee approved the amendment 43-19 (all 19 nay votes were Democrats). But Pete DeFazio(D-OR) quietly replaced the enforceable certification language with a meaningless statement that “it is the policy of the United States” that funds “should not be used” for items involving child labor.

DeFazio claimed certification is unnecessary because US trade agreements prohibit child labor. But there is no agreement with Congo, and China has shown no interest in ending child labor in its supply chains. (Plus, the matter is complicated, hard to enforce and perilous for climate and Green New Deal goals.)

It’s easy for Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues to wear Kente cloth stoles in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. And for Sierra Club staff to criticize the organization’s “history and culture of white supremacy” – what I call callous, deadly and arguably racist eco-imperialism and carbon colonialism. We need real reform, and an end to the cancel culture that silences discussion about the horrors of what’s going on in too many non-white areas of the United States and world.

 

The human and ecological realities of GND policies cry out for debate. So do the violence and death that preceded and followed George Floyd’s inexcusable death. Not just the 25 police killings of unarmed blacks all across America in 2019 that have become the narrow focus of Black Lives Matter, politicians and rioters. But also the murders of David Dorn, Patrick Underwood and other police officers; Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and other black children gunned down by their fellow blacks; and as many as 7,000 American black men, women and children murdered by blacks every year.

In Chicago, over the July 4 weekend, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen of those shot were children caught in the crossfire, the New York Post despaired. In fact, the black-on-black Windy City murder toll over almost any two recent successive weekends exceeds those 25 police killings.

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted, “and 97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community.” The solution is defunding the police?

ALL these African, Asian, Latin American and minority American lives matter. It’s time to talk about it honestly, figure out what’s really driving the inhumanity, and create a world we can be proud to live in.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. 

No end in sight for the biofuel wars by Paul Driessen

Biofuels are unsustainable in every way, but still demand – and get – preferential treatment

The Big Oil-Big Biofuel wars rage on. From my perch, ethanol, biodiesel and “advanced biofuels” make about zero energy, economic or environmental sense. They make little political sense either, until you recognize that politics is largely driven by crony-capitalism, campaign contributions and vote hustling.

Even now, once again, as you read this, White House, EPA, Energy, Agriculture and corporate factions are battling it out, trying to get President Trump to sign off on their preferred “compromise” – over how much ethanol must be blended into gasoline, how many small refiners should be exempted, et cetera.

This all got started in the 1970s, when publicly spirited citizens persuaded Congress that “growing our own energy” would safeguard the USA against oil embargoes and price gouging by OPEC and other unfriendly nations, especially as our own petroleum reserves rapidly dwindled into oblivion. Congress then instituted the Renewable Fuels Standard in 2005, when the Iraq War triggered renewed fears of global oil supply disruptions. The RFS requires that almost all gasoline sold in the USA must contain 10% ethanol – which gets a third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline and damages small engines.

But, we were told, these fuels are renewable, sustainable, a way to prevent “dangerous climate change.”

It’s all bunk. In recent years, the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution has given America and the world at least a century of new oil and natural gas reserves. America has become the world’s largest oil and gas producer and within five years could be producing far more oil and gas than any other country in the world. Terminals built years ago to import fuel from distant lands are being reconfigured to export abundant US oil, liquefied natural gas and refined products to distant lands.

Average global temperatures – as actually measured by satellites and weather balloons – are now almost a full degree Fahrenheit lower than predicted by climate models (the average of 102 IPCC computer model forecasts) that also foretell the daily litany of climate and weather cataclysms. However, hurricanes are less frequent and intense than a half-century ago, and Harvey was the first Category 3-5 hurricane to make US landfall in a record 12 years. Violent F4-5 tornadoes have also been less frequent over the past 34 years than during the 35 years before that, and not one F4-5 tornado hit the USA in 2018.

Over their full life cycle (from planting, growing and harvesting crops, to converting them to fuel, to transporting them by truck or rail car, to blending and burning them), biofuels emit just as much (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide as oil-based gasoline and diesel. Those biofuels also require enormous amounts of land, water, fertilizer, insecticides and energy. None of this is renewable or sustainable.

In fact, corn turned into E85 fuel (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) and grown where rainfall is insufficient requires irrigation – and up to 28 gallons of water from rivers or groundwater supplies per mile traveled!

US ethanol production utilizes 38% of America’s corn and 27% of its sorghum – grown on cropland the size of Iowa: 36 million acres, much of which would otherwise be wildlife habitat. And the fertilizers used to grow those crops, especially the corn, result in nutrient-rich runoff that increases nitrogen levels in the Gulf of Mexico, causing deadly algal blooms. When the algae die and decompose, they create low and no-oxygen zones the size of Delaware – killing marine life that can’t swim away quickly enough.

In short, biofuels have huge downsides and do nothing to address the scary scenarios that have either shriveled amid the winds of history – or were wildly exaggerated or imaginary to begin with.

But once these biofuel programs were launched, they became permanent. They created a biofuel industry that wants to get bigger every year, and supports politicians who want to get reelected year after year. That brings us back to the Executive Branch biofuel battles – and to issues that I myself struggle to comprehend, amid the morass of acronyms and conflicting policies and mandates.

Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency require that refiners blend “conventional biofuel” (mostly ethanol) into gasoline – and also meet various “advanced biofuel” and biomass-based diesel requirements. However, too much ethanol in gasoline damages engines in older cars, generators, garden equipment and boats; that puts a limit on how much ethanol can actually go in the fuel supply (the “blend wall”). As a result, while ethanol blending continues to increase gradually, American motorists have never been able to consume enough ethanol to satisfy applicable Renewable Fuel Standards.

However, biofuel interests want the government to keep mandating even more ethanol – a desire that faces multiple problems. Gasoline demand is decreasing, as people drive less, in more fuel-efficient cars, and in electric and hybrid vehicles (that are heavily subsidized under other laws).

Tariff wars with China and other countries have hurt corn and sorghum farmers, who want to be “compensated” via more biofuel mandates under the Renewable Fuels Standard – even though beef, pork and poultry farmers get hurt by higher grain prices resulting from so much corn devoted to ethanol.

Declining fuel demand and the blend wall mean refiners cannot mix all the mandated 15 billion annual gallons of ethanol into gasoline. They are thus forced to over-comply with the “advanced biofuel” part of the RFS mandate by buying expensive foreign biodiesel and “renewable” diesel. Refiners that do not control the point where biofuel can be blended into gasoline (eg, large distribution terminals or local gas stations) must buy “credits” called Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) that show (or pretend to show)  the required (foreign) biofuels were mixed with the gasoline they make domestically.

This all gets really expensive, really fast, which is why the law allows exemptions to small refiners that  face “disproportionate economic hardship” from costs that have gotten so high that courts have ordered the EPA to grant more “small refinery exemptions” (SREs) – waivers from the RFS mandates.

However, biofuel has been blended into the fuel small refiners make anyway. This situation resulted in ample supplies of RFS compliance credits, and RIN prices have dropped from over 90 cents apiece to 12 or 20 cents over the past two years or even lower at times. Of course, this all angered the biofuel lobby, which has attacked the Administration for issuing SREs, falsely claiming the exemptions are   “destroying demand” for biofuel and “hurting American farmers.” 

They levied these attacks on EPA, despite the fact that the Trump Administration granted the biofuel industry its biggest request in 20 years: an air quality waiver that allows E15 to be sold year round. So some in the Administration have proposed to “reallocate lost biofuel gallons” the biofuel industry says were caused by SREs. But there’s nothing to reallocate, since ethanol is being blended despite the SREs.

The reallocation proposal thus has the practical effect of increasing the biofuel mandate by over 700 million gallons above the 15-billion-gallon statutory ceiling on ethanol. That brings us back to the fact that America is not producing enough advanced biofuels, biodiesel or renewable diesel. That means refiners have to buy more foreign supplies of these fuels, from Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, et cetera.

Of course, that does nothing to help American farmers. It just turns the Renewable Fuel Standard into a big foreign biofuel mandate. It also means President Trump is caught between trying to placate two of his core constituencies: farmers, primarily in the Midwest, and the oil and refining industry with all its jobs.

This is mind-numbingly complicated. But the bottom line is pretty simple: Every time Congress gets involved in trying to fix complex energy and economic problems – instead of letting free market industries and innovators sort things out – it creates a legislative, regulatory, legal and lobbying mess. Every attempted additional fix makes things worse. And trying to justify all the meddling, by claiming we’re running out of oil or face manmade climate cataclysms, just makes things worse.

We should end this crazy-quilt biofuel program. But anyone who thinks that will happen in Washington, DC or Des Moines, Iowa is smoking that stuff that’s now legal and widespread in Boulder, Colorado. But President Trump and his EPA should at least reduce – and certainly not increase – any biofuel quotas.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

Charles' Comments:

Crony-capitalism is a self-contradiction.  The correct term is mercantilism, the common practice of kings and the aristocracy who granted special business privileges and monopolies to friends and supporters since ancient times.  We still are governed by an aristocracy, though their titles have changed from king, baron, earl, and count to President, Senator, Representative, and about a million bureaucrat titles.  The aristocracy still believes that force makes right and they know the needs and what the aspirations should be of the serfs / deplorables better than they do.

Washington, DC is a swamp predominantly controlled by predatory special interests who feed on the vast majority of Americans.  When anyone threatens their control, a vast coalition of usually disparate groups arises to oppose that threat, though in normal times these groups behave more like hyenas fighting over a carcass -- the stolen fruits of production of the American people.  We see a great example of that in the effort to remove Trump from office by many denizens in the bowels of our thieving government even before he took the oath of office.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Minnesota, says that the production of a gallon of ethanol from corn takes anywhere from 5 to 2,138 gallons of water, depending on the irrigation needs of the area in the United States where the corn is grown.  As the amount of corn dedicated to ethanol production has grown, the amount of land dedicated to corn planting has increased.  That increase has required that land less and less suitable to corn production be used.  When ethanol production was doubled between 2005 and 2008, the amount of water used in ethanol from corn production more than tripled.  The proposal to make 15% ethanol in gasoline the requirement will cause a further increase in corn production for ethanol and still more water use.  In many areas of the U.S. water aquifers have been depleted at alarming rates as it is.  The huge Ogallala aquifer stretching from South Dakota to Texas is a particularly important and very stressed aquifer.

More buckets of icy cold energy reality by Paul Driessen

Democrats, Green New Dealers and UN gabfest attendees need to get ‘woke’ on eco-energy

The full-court press is on for climate chaos disaster and renewable energy salvation. CNN recently hosted a seven-hour climate event for Democrat presidential aspirants. Every day brings more gloom-and-doom stories about absurd, often taxpayer-funded pseudo-scientific reports on yet another natural event or supposed calamity that alarmists insist is due to fossil fuels that provide 80% of US and global energy.

MSNBC just hosted another two-day Democrat presidential candidates climate forum at Georgetown University – where I spoke at a contrarian program. Meanwhile, a big Climate March took place in New York City, while protesters tried to block Washington, DC streets. They were all kicking off the UN’s “Global Climate Week” in NYC, featuring a Youth Climate Summit and UN General Assembly event where world leaders will demand “global action” to supposedly stop the supposed climate crisis.

Their standard solution is biofuel, solar, wind and battery power. My recent article dumped buckets of icy cold reality on several of those claims. They obviously need to be doused with a few more icy buckets.

To reiterate: Wind and sunshine are free, renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. However, the lands and raw materials required for technologies to harness this widely dispersed, intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not. In fact, their environmental impacts are monumental.

The Democrat candidates and their supporters want to replace coal and gas backup power plants with batteries, to ensure we have (much more expensive) electricity even when intermittent, weather-dependent wind and sunshine refuse to cooperate with our need for 24/7/365 power for our electricity-based homes, schools, hospitals, factories, businesses, computers, social media and civilization.

So let’s suppose we blanket the United States with enough industrial-scale wind and solar facilities to replace the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours Americans used in 2018 – and we manufacture and install enough king-sized batteries to store sufficient electricity for seven straight windless or sunless days.

We would need something on the order of one billion 100-kilowatt-hour, 1,000-pound lithium and cobalt-based battery packs – similar to what Tesla uses in its electric vehicles. (This does not include the extra battery storage required to charge up the cars, trucks and buses we are supposed to replace with EVs.)

All these batteries would support the millions and millions of Green New Deal solar panels and wind turbines we would have to build and install. They would require prodigious amounts of iron, copper, rare earth metals, concrete and other raw materials. And every one of these batteries, turbines and panels would have to be replaced far more often than coal, gas, nuclear or hydroelectric power plants.

Indeed, what are we going do with all those worn-out and broken-down turbines, panels and batteries? The International Renewable Energy Agency has said disposing of just the worn out solar panels that the UN wants erected around the world by 2050, under the Paris Climate Treaty’s solar energy goals, could result in two times the tonnage of the United States’ total plastic waste in 2017!

So another icy cold reality is this: All this “free, renewable, sustainable, eco-friendly, ethical” energy would require the biggest expansion in mining the world has ever seen. But when was the last time any environmentalist or Democrat supported opening a single US mine? They detest mining.

Which brings us to the dirtiest pseudo-renewable, pseudo-sustainable energy secret of all – the one these folks absolutely do not want to talk about: slave and child labor.

Because of rabid environmentalist opposition, the United States and Europe no longer permit much mining within their borders. They just import minerals – many of them from China and Russia. And the same groups that extol the virtues of wind, solar and battery power are equally opposed to Western mining companies extracting rare earth, lithium, cadmium, cobalt and other minerals almost anywhere on Planet Earth – even under rigorous Western labor, safety, environmental and reclamation rules.

That means those materials are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control. They are dug out and processed by fathers, mothers and children – under horrific, unsafe, inhuman conditions that few of us can even imagine ... under almost nonexistent labor, wage, health, safety and pollution standards.

Those renewable energy, high-tech slaves get a few pennies or dollars a day – while risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air. The mining and industrial areas become vast toxic wastelands, where nothing grows, and no people or wildlife can live.

For cobalt alone – say UNICEF and Amnesty International – over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away in mines, from sunrise to sundown, six or even seven days a week. That’s today. Imagine how many will be needed to serve the “ethical green energy utopia.”

Green New Dealers demand sustainable, ethical, human rights-based coffee, sneakers, T-shirts, handbags and diamonds. Absolutely no child labor, sweat shop, or toxic, polluted workplace conditions allowed. But they have little or nothing to say about the Chinese, Russian and other companies that run the horrid operations that provide their wind turbines, solar panels, smart grids – and batteries for their cell phones, Teslas, laptops and backup electrical power.

I’ve never seen them make ethical wind turbines, solar panels and batteries an issue. They’ve never protested outside a Chinese, Russian or Congolese embassy, or corporate headquarters in Beijing, Moscow or Kinshasa. They probably don’t want to get shot or sent to gulags.

And just a few weeks ago, California legislators voted down Assembly Bill 735. The bill simply said California would certify that “zero emission” electric vehicles sold in the state must be free of any materials or components that involve child labor. The issue is complicated, the legislators said. It would be too hard to enforce. It would imperil state climate goals. And besides, lots of other industries also use child labor ... they “explained.”

As Milton Friedman said, there is no free lunch. Wind, solar, biofuel and battery power are not free, clean, green, renewable or sustainable. America must not let delusion, dishonesty and ideology drive public policies that will determine our future jobs, prosperity, living standards, freedoms and civilization.

What Green New Dealers are talking about has nothing to do with stopping dangerous manmade climate change – or with real sustainability, resource conservation or environmental protection. It has everything to do with increasingly socialist, largely taxpayer-financed activists, politicians, regulators and crony capitalists controlling people’s lives; dictating our energy use, economic growth, job opportunities and living standards; and getting richer, more powerful and more privileged in the process.

Meanwhile poor, minority and working class families – pay the price. And destitute families in hungry, impoverished, electricity-deprived nations pay the highest price. China, India, Indonesia and Africa are not about to give up their determined efforts to take their rightful, God-given places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. They are not going to stop using fossil fuels to reach their goals.

They are not going to let anyone – including the UN, EU, US Democrats and other eco-imperialists – tell them they can never enjoy those blessings. Or they will be “allowed” to improve their health and living standards only at the margins, only to levels achievable with wind, solar and cow dung power.

That’s why, even as the United States reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 12% between 2000 and 2017 – India’s plant-fertilizing CO2 emissions soared by 140% and China’s skyrocketed 194% – further greening Planet Earth. In 2019 alone, China alone will add more coal-fired generating capacity than what all existing US coal-fired power plants generate.

While all these countries continue using more and more fossil fuels to improve their economies, health and living standards – why in heaven’s name would the United States want to join Green New Dealers and other crazies in an environment-destroying ban-fossil-fuels economic suicide pact?

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate, environmental and human rights issues.