Brand New
5-Minute Video
How Much Energy Will the World Need?
Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.
Russia’s assertion that President Biden’s son Hunter was “financing . . . biological laboratories in Ukraine” was based in truth, according to e-mails reviewed by The Post.
A trove of e-mails on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — the existence of which was exclusively reported by The Post in October 2020 — found that he played a role in helping a California defense contractor analyze killer diseases and bioweapons in Ukraine.
Moscow has claimed that secret American biological-warfare labs in Ukraine were a justification for its unprovoked invasion of the neighboring country last month. It doubled down on the accusations Thursday, claiming the labs produced biochemical weapons at the Biden family’s behest.
“US President Joe Biden himself is involved in the creation of biolaboratories in Ukraine,” Russia’s State Duma speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin said, according to state media.
It is the West’s wacko environmentalists who handed Russian President Vladimir Putin the leverage and money to invade Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine this week.
Without these wackos, Putin would be just another gangster in charge of a crumbling country, and maybe one on the verge of a revolution to depose him.
But the facts are the facts are the facts, and the facts are these… Thanks to the West’s environmentalists, those smug greenies who are more concerned with carbon output than world peace, this gangster controls much of the energy going to the European Union (E.U.). Per Statista, here are the countries most dependent on Russia for natural gas. The percentages tell us just how dependent:
It gets worse.
As of 2019, a full 27 percent of the European Union’s crude oil, 41 percent of its natural gas, and 47 percent of its solid fuel (mostly coal) come from Russia.
Why?
Well, it’s very simple. Russia is not stupid. Putin is not stupid. He drills and digs and fracks while Western countries pat themselves on the back for closing coal mines, refusing oil leases, and shuttering nuclear power plants. And in doing so, even at the expense of giving the gangster Putin leverage over them, these Western countries pat themselves on the back for decreasing their carbon footprints and going green…
Russian President Vladimir Putin (Vyacheslav Prokofyev, TASS News Agency Pool Photo via AP)
Meanwhile, Putin is given control over the very thing that allows Western Civilization to remain Western Civilization: energy.
Michael Rectenwald
Chief Academic Officer, American Scholars
Michael Rectenwald is the chief academic officer for American Scholars. He has a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.A. from Case Western Reserve University, and a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught at New York University, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of numerous books, including Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature; Google Archipelago; Beyond Woke; and Thought Criminal.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on November 7, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “The Great Reset.”
Is the Great Reset a conspiracy theory imagining a vast left-wing plot to establish a totalitarian one-world government? No. Despite the fact that some people may have spun conspiracy theories based on it—with some reason, as we will see—the Great Reset is real.
Indeed, just last year, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF)—a famous organization made up of the world’s political, economic, and cultural elites that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland—and Thierry Malleret, co-founder and main author of the Monthly Barometer, published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. In the book, they define the Great Reset as a means of addressing the “weaknesses of capitalism” that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.
But the idea of the Great Reset goes back much further. It can be traced at least as far back as the inception of the WEF, originally founded as the European Management Forum, in 1971. In that same year, Schwab, an engineer and economist by training, published his first book, Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering. It was in this book that Schwab first introduced the concept he would later call “stakeholder capitalism,” arguing “that the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.” Schwab and the WEF have promoted the idea of stakeholder capitalism ever since. They can take credit for the stakeholder and public-private partnership rhetoric and policies embraced by governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations, and international governance bodies worldwide.
The specific phrase “Great Reset” came into general circulation over a decade ago, with the publication of a 2010 book, The Great Reset, by American urban studies scholar Richard Florida. Written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Florida’s book argued that the 2008 economic crash was the latest in a series of Great Resets—including the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s—which he defined as periods of paradigm-shifting systemic innovation.
Four years after Florida’s book was published, at the 2014 annual meeting of the WEF, Schwab declared: “What we want to do in Davos this year . . . is to push the reset button”—and subsequently the image of a reset button would appear on the WEF’s website.
In 2018 and 2019, the WEF organized two events that became the primary inspiration for the current Great Reset project—and also, for obvious reasons, fresh fodder for conspiracy theorists. (Don’t blame me for the latter—all I’m doing is relating the historical facts.)
In May 2018, the WEF collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct “CLADE X,” a simulation of a national pandemic response. Specifically, the exercise simulated the outbreak of a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus, with genetic elements of the Nipah virus, called CLADE X. The simulation ended with a news report stating that in the face of CLADE X, without effective vaccines, “experts tell us that we could eventually see 30 to 40 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 900 million around the world—twelve percent of the global population.” Clearly, preparation for a global pandemic was in order.
By so many measures, Joe Biden’s presidential administration falls at the bottom of the scale. But there is one metric by which Biden is tops — in fact, the very tops in all of history. That is the regulatory costs his administration has imposed on the nation in a single year.
The American Action Forum, a conservative think tank that tracks government regulation, has tallied up what agencies estimate their regulations cost. The Biden administration has now imposed $201 billion in regulations — more than three times the cost that President Barack Obama’s very left-wing administration imposed on families and businesses in its first year.
What’s more, Biden’s new regulations are forcing more than 100 million hours of annual paperwork on the nation, far more than either the Obama or Trump administration.
For a presidency that has basically failed in every important area — on COVID, on the border, on Afghanistan, on the economy — Biden certainly knows how to succeed when it comes to imposing new costs.
The single most expensive rule change, by far, is a requirement that automakers meet an unrealistic 55-mile-per-gallon fleetwide average by 2026. But this is only one of many expensive new rules that stand to sap the bank accounts and energy of entrepreneurs and families.
This is one of the many areas in which we are already missing the Trump administration. For all his faults, Trump made a point of repealing at least one regulation for every new one put into effect. This was a revolutionary idea that actually reduced costs. It was one factor that helped usher in prosperity and unprecedented low levels of unemployment prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden is now crushing the life out of the economy with his regulatory frenzy. And unfortunately, he’s only just gotten started. The new infrastructure bill that he signed will impose many additional regulations and billions in added expenses. And matters will only get worse going forward. With the failure of his legislative agenda and Democrats’ impending loss of Congress in this year’s elections, Biden is likely to follow Obama’s example and govern with his pen and his phone, using regulation where he is unable to pass laws.
From the very beginning of his presidency, when he prevented needed pipelines from being constructed and blocked oil and gas exploration on federal land, Biden has been working to make big government bigger and individuals poorer. His administration is filled with far-left ideologues who know nothing about the daily realities of making ends meet or running a business.
The new president who takes power in 2025 will need to think carefully in advance about how to undo all the damage Biden is doing right now.
Unfortunately for the United States, one of its political parties has become the home of magical thinking about energy. Here’s a hint: It’s not the Republicans.
Despite the Biden administration’s hopes to create a world in which solar panels and wind turbines power an all-electric automobile fleet, just last week, President Biden announced that the administration is considering a 20-year delay of new mining operations in northern Minnesota. These new mines eventually will produce copper, nickel and cobalt, all of which are essential minerals in manufacturing electric vehicles, batteries and transmission lines.
Apparently, no one told Mr. Biden that the administration’s entire energy policy is built on copper, nickel and cobalt. By delaying the mines, Team Biden is making communist China richer and Americans poorer. They are trading our energy independence for reliance on China for minerals, a dependence that may be far greater than any we ever had on the Middle East for oil.
At its worst, we imported less than a quarter of our oil from the Middle East. Right now, China owns or controls about 80% of the rare earth minerals on the planet.
Republican Rep. Pete Stauber from Minnesota was clear. “Rather than promoting the dignity of work, they’re comfortable seeing Minnesota’s union members and skilled workers sidelined. Instead of empowering Minnesotans to develop the minerals necessary for almost every sector of our economy under the strongest labor and environmental standards in the world, they are willing to rely on hostile nations that utilize child slave labor and terrible environmental practices.” He’s right.
In this two-part special on Kash’s Corner, Kash Patel sits down with Richard Grenell, the former Acting Director of National Intelligence, for an intimate, unfiltered, and wide-ranging conversation.
In part one, they discuss Russia, NATO, building peace between Serbia and Kosovo, and Grenell’s personal battles with cancer.
In part two, they reflect on their work together in the intelligence community and in the Trump White House. Part two will be released on Nov. 5, 2021, at 8 p.m. ET.
Besides leading the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Grenell has also served as the U.S. ambassador to Germany and as special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations.
Follow EpochTV on social media:
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The full list of Democrat nonsense contained with Biden’s budget can be viewed here, and as the RSC concludes, “Each of these 42 bullets is enough to vote against the bill. Taken together—it’s mindblowingly corrupt.”
40+ Radical Programs Democrats Don’t Want You to Notice in Biden’s Budgetby Spencer Brown October 13, 20211. Perpetuates labor shortage: Continues welfare benefits without work requirements for able-bodiedadults without dependents at a time where there are 10.1 million job openings—more openings thanthere are people looking for work.2. Commissions a climate police: Democrats stuffed $8 billion into the bill to commission a cabal offederally funded climate police called the Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) who will conduct progressiveactivism on taxpayers’ dime (pages 8, 21, and 926).3. Pushes Green New Deal in our public schools: Requires funding for school construction be usedlargely on enrollment diversity and Green New Deal agenda items (page 55).4. Pushes Green New Deal in our universities: Democrats include a $10 billion “environmentaljustice” higher education slush fund to indoctrinate college students and advance Green New Dealpolicies (page 1,935).