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If there's a single tableau that kind of sums up the moment we're living in, it's a group of half-demented 80-year-olds sitting around yelling about things they don't really understand. | ||
And no, that's not Thanksgiving dinner with the grandparents. | ||
It's our federal government, an organization run by people who don't care about the future because they don't have one. | ||
There may be no one in the country who cares less about the future of the United States than climate czar John Kerry, who turns 80 next week. | ||
Kerry turned up at a conference in the Middle East the other day and announced that at his advanced age, he's become a, quote, militant on the subject of coal-fired electricity plants. | ||
Watch this. | ||
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There shouldn't be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world. | |
That's how you can do something for health. | ||
And the reality is that we're not doing it. | ||
So, you know, the measure here is really Sounding the alarm bell, I find myself getting more and more militant because I do not understand how adults who are in position of responsibility can be avoiding responsibility for taking away those things that are killing people on a daily basis. | ||
Now, this is an emissary of the fabled United States government. | ||
This is a former presidential candidate, a long-serving United States senator. | ||
What are people saying about what John Kerry just said? | ||
Well, in case you're wondering about the Biden administration's Because these are people with economies they need to tend to, and people they need to feed. | ||
They don't have time for self-harm. | ||
China, for example, burns more coal each year than the rest of the world combined, and that will not change. | ||
In fact, it's accelerating. | ||
This year, the Chinese have generated 14% more electricity from coal than they did last year. | ||
Same thing in India. | ||
80% of all of that country's electricity now comes from coal. | ||
That's up from 73% just last year. | ||
Now, it's not a small thing because those two countries make up a third of the world's entire population. | ||
And it's not just India and China. | ||
Last year, Indonesia burned 33% more coal than it did the year before. | ||
And so on. | ||
Something you should also keep in mind is that burning coal for electricity bears little resemblance to what it used to look like. | ||
There are fairly sophisticated emissions scrubbers. | ||
It's not quite as bad as it once was for the air. | ||
But does John Kerry even know this? | ||
Does he know any of this? | ||
Does he care? | ||
Probably not. | ||
Global warming may be global by definition, but according to John Kerry and everyone else in the Biden administration, only the United States causes global warming. | ||
Watch Carmela Harris threaten anyone who refuses to believe that. | ||
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Around the world, there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. | |
Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action, and spread misinformation. | ||
Corporations that greenwash climate inaction and lobby for billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies. | ||
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In the face of their resistance, and in the context of this moment, we must do more. - Oh, Bayer will hurt you! | |
Now, in a healthy, decent society, of course, everything here is measured through a binary. | ||
Is it true? | ||
Is it false? | ||
Is the person saying it an honest person or a liar? | ||
Misinformation is not a category. | ||
But in America in 2023, the question of whether something is true or false is immaterial. | ||
The only thing that matters is, does it challenge the regime? | ||
Is it, in other words, misinformation? | ||
And if it is, Carmela Harris suggests, they're going to punish you. | ||
The only crime is questioning what the people in charge are doing. | ||
Now, if it looks like people like Carmela Harris and John Kerry are getting a lot more radical recently, they are. | ||
It's not your imagination. | ||
As the grand project of neoliberalism fails spectacularly around the world, collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity, The people who lead that project inevitably become increasingly hysterical and inward and apocalyptic. | ||
At this point, they are secular millennialists. | ||
They're screaming about doomsday like Jim Jones and his compounded Guyana. | ||
But the question is, how can the rest of us avoid drinking the purple Kool-Aid? | ||
Because there are real-world consequences of this stuff. | ||
Michael Schellenberger is one of the best journalists in English. | ||
He's the author of Apocalypse Never, among many other works. | ||
He's been following this story. | ||
He joins us now. | ||
Mike, thanks so much for coming on. | ||
In a debate about actual science, the person in possession of the cutting-edge scientific information will present it to the public and then kind of welcome questions and then explain it. | ||
But that's not at all what we're watching here. | ||
We're watching people push an orthodoxy at increasing volume with increasing hysteria and with increasingly severe penalties for disagreeing. | ||
So what is that? | ||
Yeah, I mean, I think what's so interesting about what's happening right now, Tucker, is that... | ||
Just even a year or two ago, global elites used to pretend to care about people, but they're not even pretending anymore. | ||
I mean, here they fly their private jets, you know, separate private jets, including for the prime minister of Britain, his foreign secretary, King Charles, all taking their own private jet at the very moment that they're raising energy prices to historically high levels. | ||
And as you just saw there with John Kerry demanding the shutdown. | ||
of coal plants, which will mean that people will burn wood and dung in China and they will starve and they will not have enough to eat and you'll have riots in the streets. | ||
I think that what's so different now is that the elites are just openly and blatantly expressing their hatred of humankind, particularly the hatred of working people, of poor people. | ||
People both in the United States, in the so-called flyover states that they hate so much, but also in places like India and China and Africa, where people want to live a better life, and that's what coal has traditionally provided. | ||
You know, what's so interesting, of course, is that the obvious alternative to coal is natural gas. | ||
If you cared about climate change, if this was actually about climate change, you would just produce more natural gas because it produces half the carbon emissions of coal. | ||
The United States reduced our carbon emissions by 22% between 2005 and 2020, with 61% of that reduction coming just from switching from coal to natural gas. | ||
But John Kerry and other climate activists are against natural gas, and they've been stifling the production of natural gas, clean-burning American natural gas, which is the cleanest in the world. | ||
So it's so obviously hypocritical, but worse than that, I think it's really anti-human, and that's really what gets added. | ||
It's a religion. | ||
It's a cult, like you said, and it really is about being against humankind, against humanity. | ||
There's so many interesting threads here. | ||
I mean, one is that the rest of the world is ignoring it, and they pay lip service to it, and they're happy to sign treaties that they ignore or that have carve-outs for their behavior. | ||
But it really is an Anglosphere thing. | ||
It's a Western religion. | ||
It's only the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, who really believe, and Germany, maybe, really believe this nonsense. | ||
And China and India are like, you know, we've got a billion people here. | ||
We have to feed them. | ||
They don't care. | ||
Yeah, that's right. | ||
And there's a financial element here, obviously, too, where the largest donor to the Democratic Party, George Soros, but also Michael Bloomberg, and a whole set of other oligarchs have a strong interest in keeping energy scarce. | ||
I think that's what is a big driver of this. | ||
That's why they want to shut down. | ||
Nuclear plants, coal plants, they want to stifle natural gas production, and they want us to use weather-dependent, energy-dilute, primitive sources of energy, so-called renewables that are actually anything other than renewable. | ||
And these are technologies that require 300 to 900 times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants and that keep energy expensive and scarce so that they can control the energy markets around the world. | ||
And so it's really all three of these things. | ||
It's sort of a grotesque display of anti-human power, of elitist power. | ||
It's also a religion. | ||
These guys actually think of themselves as saving the planet. | ||
But it's also just a grift. | ||
It's a scam in order to keep energy supplies, energy which should be abundant. | ||
I mean, natural gas and nuclear are basically infinite sources of energy and trying to keep energy scarce and dependent so that they can exercise greater control over the population. | ||
Where are the energy companies, the oil and gas companies in this? | ||
You would think, since they're famously profitable and big, some of the biggest companies in the world, that they would be making a lot of noise pushing back. | ||
They do in subtle ways, but they don't do it in public. | ||
Why is that? | ||
Well, they've basically been bullied into submission. | ||
And so you've seen the ESG movement has basically convinced the world that natural gas and nuclear are bad and that, you know, solar panels made by Uyghur Muslims in China and wind turbines, which are threatening to make the North Atlantic right whale extinct in the United States, that those are somehow better for the environment. | ||
It's a complete corruption. | ||
Of science, of rationality. | ||
Anybody can see that natural gas and nuclear are the superior forms of energy. | ||
But the ESG movement has used political activism to put pressure and also used pension funds to put pressure on the oil and gas industries to basically sell out their main product. | ||
I mean, here you have the... | ||
It's actually in many cases cheaper. | ||
I mean, natural gas is so abundant in the United States. | ||
It should be one of our greatest export commodities. | ||
And so they've gotten the pension funds organized through ESG. They've gotten the political actors like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, to campaign against oil and gas, even though it's been the biggest driver of carbon emissions reductions over the last 20 years, and not just in the United States. | ||
I mean, people don't know that carbon emissions peaked in Britain and France and Germany in the mid-'70s, mostly because of natural gas and nuclear. | ||
So I think you've just seen cowardice set in in response to some pretty intense ESG bullying by activist pension funds and by, frankly, sociopathic political leaders like Gavin Newsom. | ||
So, I mean, since this is fundamentally nonsense, the math doesn't work, as they say. | ||
Wind farms can't power the New York City subway. | ||
They can't fly airplanes. | ||
I mean, it's like, actually, if you don't have cheap energy, you don't have advanced civilization. | ||
So how long does this kind of posturing go on before it has to end? | ||
Tucker, I think you said it exactly right. | ||
I mean, we know that the pillars of civilization are cheap energy, meritocracy, law and order, and free speech. | ||
And all four of those pillars are currently under attack. | ||
And so you start with cheap energy. | ||
You can't maintain modern civilization without cheap energy. | ||
We know we couldn't have had the Industrial Revolution for physical reasons. | ||
If they hadn't found coal, and they hadn't made a use of coal with a steam engine. | ||
So the attack on cheap energy is truly an attack on modern civilization, and it should frighten us, and we should be aware to it and alive to it. | ||
I think, you know, what gives me hope here is that, you know, environmentalism, it used to have a kind of utopian, positive side. | ||
That's all gone. | ||
I mean, we saw with Greta Thunberg in Extinction Rebellion, it became very nihilistic, it became very anti-human. | ||
So dark, it was basically just about preventing the end of the world, preventing the apocalypse. | ||
They used to still try to hide their hatred of humanity a little bit. | ||
But this year, I mean, gloves are off and masks are off. | ||
And you can just see here they are openly flying their private planes to a climate conference where they're demanding that ordinary people pay much more for energy, that we keep energy supplies secure. | ||
You know, our electric grids right now in the United States, Tucker. | ||
Are in serious jeopardy. | ||
I mean, we're having reliability crises, not just in California. | ||
That's the most famous one, but we've seen it all over the country, Texas. | ||
We saw it in the Midwest and Southeast last year during winter. | ||
So we're seeing an attack on the grid, which is really a testament to modern civilization. | ||
It's happening everywhere at the same time, Europe, United States. | ||
What gives me hope is that I think it's finally becoming obvious to people that it's a scam and that the people that are pushing this Really hate civilization, or at least they hate civilization for others. | ||
They want it only for themselves. | ||
And that they're in the grip of a really dogmatic cult philosophy. | ||
I mean, I think it's fair to call it a death cult at this point, when you're stifling energy supplies that are necessary to keep people alive, allow poor people to escape from the use of wood and dung. | ||
I don't know what else you call that than an anti-human death cult. | ||
That's right. | ||
It's not environmentalism. | ||
It's the snarling face of tyranny, obviously. | ||
Final question I read the other day. | ||
The new frontier in renewable energy, wind and solar, is to clear-cut forests, to cut all the trees down, because they somehow contribute to global warming, too. | ||
And I sort of wonder, like, will people put up with that? | ||
What about the old... | ||
I mean, are there still old-fashioned environmentalists who believed in trees, like Julia Butterfly Hill, who kept the redwood from being cut down by living in it? | ||
Like, people actually cared about the physical environment. | ||
Will they rally and say, I'm sorry, you can't cut all the trees down? | ||
Or they just sit back and watch it happen? | ||
You know, the truth is, Tucker, they've actually been organizing and rallying under the leadership of some pretty extraordinary people. | ||
There's a woman named Lisa Linose, who I work with, who has done incredible work documenting how the increase of wind industry activity on the East Coast is directly causing the death of the North Atlantic right whale and the potential extinction of that species, as well as other whales. | ||
They've organized... | ||
The Save the Right Whales Coalition, and we've seen huge popular response to it. | ||
I mean, even the people conducting the autopsies of all the whales being killed off the East Coast, Tucker, are paid off by the wind industry. | ||
So the wind industry has paid off the news media, they've paid off the politicians, they've paid off the aquariums. | ||
They paid off Woods Hole. | ||
I mean, shame on Woods Hole. | ||
These venerable scientific institutions have all been taking money from the wind industry. | ||
So we may not see it in the mainstream news media, but you can find it on free platforms, free speech platforms like X and Rumble. | ||
The true story of the resistance to these environmentally destructive, you know, so-called renewable energy projects. | ||
There is a resistance rising, not just in the United States, by the way, but also by indigenous communities. | ||
Around the world, from Mexico to Norway, we see indigenous people fighting back against these big industrial wind farms. | ||
I think when these movements find each other, when we see that we have common cause for a pro-human environmentalism, a pro-human conservationism, I do think that the end is near because it's destroying Europe. | ||
I mean, Europe will be the first to fall. | ||
You can already see Germany is in huge trouble because of the loss of the Nord Stream pipeline, but also because of its over-dependence on... | ||
You know, land use intensive renewables. | ||
So I do think there's reason to have hope, but there's a lot more of a fight that we're going to need to have over the next several months and years. | ||
I wish they stopped calling themselves environmentalists, because if you don't care about animals and trees, you are not an environmentalist. | ||
Sorry. | ||
Mike Schellenberger, who is a great journalist. | ||
I appreciate you coming on. | ||
Thank you. |