We’ve made the case time and again that the climate change movement is really just a climate change shake down. Come on. This crusade isn’t about changing the temperature of the earth. Even the most well-meaning environmental activist can’t really believe that building windmills and driving Teslas is going to cool the planet.
This all about money. Hundreds of billions of dollars of government handouts.
The one resolution of agreement among the politicians from 100 nations at the “Cop 27” climate conference in Egypt was that rich nations owe poor nations “climate reparations.” This is the looney concept that America is responsible for the supposed man-made warming of the planet by burning fossil fuels over the last hundred or so years. Joe Biden and his goof ball sidekick John Kerry were all to eager to buy into this “blame America first” narrative and write a 10-figure check to atone for our sins.
The conference in Egypt erupted into wild applause in the final hours when the multi-billion wealth transfer from American taxpayers to corrupt foreign governments like Venezuela was announced.
Wait!!! Biden thinks WE owe the rest of the world money for burning fossil fuels? Really? What have poor nations ever done for us? These supposed satanic fossil fuels have been the power source that liberated the world from human misery. They turned the lights on. They powered our factories, our transportation system, our technology industry, our homes, our hospitals our schools. This was a crime against humanity?
Fossil fuels made America rich and made the U.S. the bread-basket of the world helping end hunger and famine while developing drugs and vaccines that eradicated deadly diseases across the planet. They were the fuels used to help America win three world wars (counting the Cold War) on foreign soil against murderous fascist/communist regimes. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: “A simple THANK YOU [from the rest of the world] would suffice.”
Over the last fifty years the United States has donated more than half a trillion dollars (more than the rest of the world combined) for disaster and foreign aid to seemingly every area of the rest of the world. Who owes whom money?
Oh, and did we mention that China and India skipped out of the conference this year. These are by far the two largest polluting nations (see chart). And they want no part of this war on fossil fuels. A climate change deal without China and India signing on would be like a peace agreement during the middle of World War 2 - except the bad news is that Germany and Japan aren’t on board.
The sliver of good news here is that Republicans now run the House of Representatives and one of their first policy declarations should be to never send one thin penny of climate “reparation” payments to other nations when we have mammoth problems here to solve at home.
We are not fear-mongers, but with Biden’s $4 trillion of spending (most of which is still in the pipeline) and the national debt now well over 100% of our GDP with end in sight on the federal deficit spending binge, we found this analysis from the New York Times a bit chilling:
Officials at the Fed, Treasury and White House are among those trying to figure out whether the United States could experience its own market-shuddering meltdown, one that could prove costly for households while complicating America’s battle against rapid inflation.
President Biden has repeatedly convened his top economic aides in recent weeks to discuss market flare-ups, like the one that roiled Britain…
A financial disaster could force the Fed to deviate from its plan to control the fastest inflation in four decades, which includes raising rates rapidly and allowing its bond portfolio to shrink. Officials have in the past bought large sums of Treasury bonds in order to restore stability to flailing markets — essentially the opposite of their policy today….
Mr. Biden has pressed his team to estimate the likelihood that the United States could experience another 2008-style shock on Wall Street. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and her deputies have been closely monitoring developments in the market for U.S. government debt and searching for any signs of British-style stress.
We’re all for cutting government spending wherever and whenever possible. But the latest WSJ piece from CTUP senior fellow Casey Mulligan and his University of Chicago colleague Tomas Philipson finds the Biden Medicare cuts are going to make seniors pay more for inferior health care - without reducing the deficit:
President Biden has accused Republicans of scheming to cut Medicare. In fact, it his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, that will lead to benefit cuts and premium increases for seniors. Medicare’s popular drug-coverage program is headed for a painful amputation…
We estimate that beginning in 2025, plan subsidies—specifically, the reinsurance subsidies for the beneficiaries with the most drug spending—will be cut $30 billion, out of revenue that currently totals about $110 billion. With $30 billion less to finance prescription benefits, something will have to give. Plans currently have far too little profit to span the chasm that the Inflation Reduction Act opens between expenses and revenue...
From a political perspective, Democrats couldn’t have scheduled Medicare’s amputation for a worse time. With Congress so evenly divided, a short-term legislative fix may be impossible. By September 2024, the presidential campaign will be in high gear at the same time that beneficiaries begin to consider their 2025 Medicare enrollments. That’s when the Inflation Reduction Act will thoroughly upset tens of millions of elderly voters, all while the authors of the statute ask the country to vote for their presidential nominee. By then, America will have no doubt which party is cutting Medicare.
4) New House Democratic Leaders Are Election Deniers
For all their fulmination against Republican election deniers, media outlets are ignoring how many Democrats are being promoted after this month's election.
Take Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Congressman who is in line to be ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. In 2021, he led the second Trump impeachment effort, in 2017, he was the second House Democrat to attempt to block Trump's electoral votes from being counted. He then wanted to impeach Trump only four months into his term.
Then there is Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who with Nancy Pelosi stepping down is the clear frontrunner to become House Democratic leader. Jeffries has a long history of election denial.
Despite this record, Trump’s first press secretary Sean Spicer noted in a tweet that Jeffries got the kid glove treatment from Jake Tapper of CNN last Sunday.
5) Disney Decides Best Policy Is: Don’t Mess with DeSantis
The Walt Disney Company had some rough times after the pandemic hit. On Sunday, it fired CEO Bob Chapek and brought back Bob Iger, who ran Disney for 15 years until 2020.
Iger will have some decisions to make in how to hit the “Reset” button. In 2020, Disney was entangled in a heated dispute with Governor Ron DeSantis \over legislation barring public school discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity through the third grade. Chapek at first tried to steer clear, but a revolt by “woke” employees force him to apologize for not denouncing the bill.
Iger is hardly an improvement when it comes to genuflecting to woke progressive causes. He has said that he finds the DeSantis bill “potentially harmful to kids.”
But he also knows that DeSantis won his reelection by a 20 points landslide and that the governors’ allies won over 200 school board seats in the state in part over the Disney issue. Stockholders expect him to find a way to extricate The Mouse from the Mess it is in.
The big winner from Disney’s apparent commitment to standing down on woke policies is clearly DeSantis.
Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo notes: “After Chapek's disastrous fight with Gov. Ron DeSantis, Disney+ domestic subscriber growth collapsed, public approval dropped, and the stock price plummeted. Other causes contributed (economy, streaming saturation), but the timing suggests they paid a price for the DeSantis fight.”
Iger has to realize that Disney tarnished its brand and he sounds like the guy who can convince his radical employees that their “woke” politics have become too expensive and the company’s future as a leader in family entertainment requires a more moderate course.
