Parents and Children Are the GOP Future

The fights against transgender surgeries and Big Tech addiction are two powerful examples of what a more hands-on, culturally pugnacious, parents- and children-first GOP can, and should prioritize.

by Josh Hammer for American Greatness

The Republican Party’s slow transformation from the Bordeaux-sipping party of Acela Corridor suburbanites into the beer-drinking party of working-class Rust Belt-ers and Sun Belt-ers has been picking up some steam lately. And as the GOP’s divorce from the Chamber of Commerce over irreconcilable cultural differences accelerates, a golden opportunity has emerged to recast the GOP not in a 1980s-era image of supply-side tax-cutting, but in a revamped image of the party that focuses on supporting parental rights and protecting vulnerable children from modern society’s depredations.

Some recent examples hint that the GOP may be moving beyond mere rhetorical platitude, and into the realm of concrete policy and action.

The number one killer today of Americans aged 18-45 years old is fentanyl trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, as some Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans pointed out this week during a hearing with hapless Attorney General Merrick Garland. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll showed that a 37 percent plurality of Republicans surveyed consider opioids and fentanyl to be the single greatest threat to U.S. public health, and at least some in the party are coming around to acting accordingly. Besides securing the U.S.-Mexico border once and for all, perhaps the other single most effective action the federal government could take on this front would be to formally designate the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Last month, a coalition of 21 red-state attorneys general sent a formal letter to Joe Biden, exhorting him to instruct his State Department to do precisely that.

Aside from fentanyl, which has brought annual drug overdose deaths to a horrifying 106,000 from a 1992 low of just over 5,000, there is currently no greater threat to vulnerable children than the varying tentacles of the woke ideology. The federal government is a destructive peddler of wokeism, as Biden’s recent “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” executive order demonstrates, but corporate wokeism is an arguably even greater threat. Accordingly, the imperative of the hour, in order to help parents protect vulnerable children from irremediable third-party harm, Republicans must once and for all break free of stale libertarian bromides and act to exorcize the woke demon from corporate America.

The approach of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been instructive on this front, including his championing of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which targets workplace wokeism, and, perhaps most illustratively, his much-publicized 2022 fight with The Walt Disney Company over Disney’s support for elementary school gender ideology indoctrination. After Monday’s formal abolition of Disney’s semi-autonomous Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida, DeSantis took to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday to explain the move’s necessity: “The regrettable upshot of the woke ascendancy is that publicly traded corporations have become combatants in battles over American politics and culture, almost invariably siding with leftist causes.” Accordingly, “policies that benefit corporate America don’t necessarily serve the interests of America’s people and economy.”

Translation: The somewhat apocryphal (mis)quote often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge that “the business of America is business” is no longer apt (if it ever was). The Fortune 500 should take note.

The fights against transgender surgeries for minors and Big Tech addiction are two other powerful examples of what a more hands-on, culturally pugnacious, parents- and children-first GOP can, and should, prioritize. Whereas the older, corporate-centric GOP was a party of “openness” and eschewed using statecraft to impose limitations, the newer, parents- and children-centric GOP must embrace the more frequent imposition of legal limitations and outright bans in the name of the common good.

Just this week, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves made the Magnolia State the eighth to fully ban “gender-affirming care” procedures for minors. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee made the Volunteer State the first state to affirmatively ban drag shows in the presence of minors. (In Florida, DeSantis has at times revoked liquor licenses for venues hosting drag shows with minors.) And at the federal level, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has pushed for an investigation of The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a whistleblower provided viscerally shocking details to Bari Weiss’s The Free Press last month. Hawley’s related post-whistleblower Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act would helpfully create a private right of action for individuals who were harmed by “gender-affirming care” when they were minors.

When it comes to Big Tech, a parents- and children-first GOP must treat it as an addictive product requiring the level of scrutiny and regulation that such a toxic product necessarily entails. Indeed, parents across the political spectrum are practically crying out for lawmakers and regulators to help them: A report co-released last month by the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 80 percent of parents want parental consent required before a minor opens a social media account, and 77 percent want to ensure they have administrator-level access to what their children see and do online. Hawley has again been leading the way at the federal level, with bills such as the Parental Data Rights Act (which would require Big Tech to give parents control over their children’s data) and the MATURE Act (which would enforce a 16-year-old minimum age for all social media users).

TikTok is a unique social media threat, given both its highly addictive nature for minors and its status as de facto Chinese Communist Party spyware. Almost 30 states—mostly red states—have now banned or partially banned TikTok on government devices. And an even better bill now exists at the federal level, thanks to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act, introduced in December, would ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. tout court.

Add in other pressing issues of political economy, such as the disbursement of direct “family policy” payments to working parents and even (a la Hungary and Poland) the structuring of certain tax breaks to reward stable marriages that produce children, and the playbook for the new, parents- and children-first GOP becomes reasonably clear. Whether that playbook is actually adopted by Republican elected officials en masse is a different question entirely.

And we know, On the Fringe, and more- March 3rd

 

I may not know exactly how NCIS LA will really end, and with the finale itself being announced today as being a 2 parter, it's anyone's guess right now as to what those 2 parts will do. However, I do know these 2 facts:

1, Hetty will definitely be involved.

2, All the things I want from the finale are still very open to the possibility of happening.

So until I get much more info on what the 2 parter will really be about, that's what I have.

Here's tonight's news:

One Year Later: Are Sanctions Against Russia Working?

For the moment, economic sanctions are doing what they always do: giving Western leaders a lot of virtue signaling and public relations opportunities, but with little tangible result.

by Michael Wilkerson for American Greatness

Following the launch of Russia’s “special military operation” and invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Joe Biden and EU leaders confidently asserted that Western sanctions would bring the Russian economy to its knees. A primary stated objective of sanctions was to cut off revenue to the Russian government from the sale of natural gas, crude oil, coal, and related energy products into Europe. While the West mercifully declined to impose sanctions on food and agricultural products, U.S. controlled banking and financial system blockades on payments to Russia meant that food insecure countries in Africa and elsewhere struggled with how to pay for them.

I wrote in American Greatness in June 2022 that Russia would successfully navigate economic sanctions, which I asserted would instead largely boomerang on Europe and the West. I argued that, in addition to hurting the economies of the EU member states more than Russia’s, by banishing Russia from the West, we would inadvertently strengthen China’s influence over Russia, while accelerating the process of de-dollarization and the establishment of an alternative global financial system—none of which would be in the long-term strategic interest of the United States.

Following the announcement of sanctions, the Russian stock market fell precipitously, as did the ruble against the dollar. The World Bank described U.S. led sanctions against Russia as the “largest coordinated economic sanctions ever imposed on a country,” predicting that “Russia’s economy will be hit very hard, with a deep recession looming in 2022.” Western businesses were told to get out of Russia, never mind that they are still operating in China despite the continuation there of what has been officially determined by the United States and the West to be a genocide. Many U.S. and European companies dutifully obeyed, announcing plans to leave the Russian market altogether. Some chose instead to scale back operations or at least reduce their visibility, while still others determined to remain and carry on business as usual.

Now, one year later, what do we know? How have sanctions impacted Russia?

Most of the newly released economic data for year-end 2022 largely indicates that while Russia was negatively affected, the effects of sanctions have had much less impact than predicted. Given that someone in the ether appears to be blocking access by U.S. persons (even with VPNs) to Rosstat, Russia’s official government statistical service, some of this data has been difficult to obtain. 

The most basic question is economic growth. Russia’s GDP (gross domestic product) contracted in 2022, but only by 2.1 percent (first estimate). Russia’s government had warned in mid-2022 of a 12 percent potential decline in 2022 GDP, in line with the World Bank’s estimate of 11.2 contraction. But then a remarkable thing happened. For nearly every barrel of oil, ton of coal, or cubic meter of gas that the West rejected, buyers in China, India and elsewhere took them up, minimizing the impact on Russia’s economy. For good measure, Russia insisted that their fuel stock be paid for in rubles, which the acquiring nations agreed to pay, driving the ruble, which had fallen 45 percent in February 2022, well above pre-invasion highs. The ruble ended 2022 as the best performing currency against the U.S. dollar amongst the top trading pairs. 

Rather than decreasing as planned, Russian exports increased, growing from 9.3 percent to 12.8 of GDP, as fuel and energy prices rose substantially. Imports were down some 18 percent, yet exports reached a record $532 billion, and the trade surplus hit a record high of $316 billion.  This was not the outcome the sanctioning leaders of the West had expected.

A new round of sanctions, along with price caps, were imposed in late 2022, impacting an estimated 51 percent of Russian crude and 64 percent of oil products. Yet so far in 2023, oil export volumes remain high despite these newly imposed sanctions and price cap mechanisms. 

A February 2023 study on the impact of oil sanctions confirms what was already increasingly evident: Russia is redirecting its crude and thereby maintaining overall volumes at near normal levels. While Russia is selling at a discount, it is a small discount, such that the revenue impact may not be as severe on the national budget at current volumes. And the study also points out that many of the sanctioning countries are buying remarketed Russian oil from markets outside of Russia. According to the authors, the best that the West can do to improve this situation is to “focus on enforcement,” and lower price caps further (what a great idea) noting that many of these sanctions have only recently been implemented.  

The value of Russia’s stock market is down substantially since the end of 2021, as foreign investors in the United States and parts of Europe were forced to divest their holdings under the sanctions regime. The MOEX Russia Index, a market-cap weighted index of Russia’s largest companies, is down over 41 percent in local currency terms from year-end 2021 through February 2023. The remaining non-sanctions aligned foreign investors have fared only slightly better, benefiting from the rise of the ruble, as the U.S. dollar denominated index of the same Russian companies, RTS, is down a mere 34 percent over the period. According to the Bank of Russia’s data, volumes for equities and derivatives collapsed some 75 percent and 90 percent, respectively, in 2022.

Russian bondholders, on the other hand, fared well, with the RUABITR aggregate bond index up nearly 10 percent in local currency terms, as interest rates fell from not only early 2022 highs but below 2021 levels. Bond and investment unit trading volumes increased by 26 percent and 44 percent, respectively, making up some of the lost ground in equities and derivatives. The bond market was nearly 10 times the size of the equities market in 2022, so the wealth effect is notable.

The EU nations appear to be adhering to Russian demands for payment in rubles, with euro to ruble trading volume on the Moscow Exchange up 47 percent year over year, according to data from the Bank of Russia. To accommodate foreign payments in rubles, and of course to finance the destructive spending required of wars, Russia’s money supply (M2 basis) increased by 24.4 percent in 2022. Banking sector total assets increased by 16 percent as the money supply grew. Look for a read through to future inflation, along with weakness in the ruble going forward. The Russian government appears to be applying stimulus on top of inflationary war spending, which may be long-term defeating, as it was for the Johnson Administration in the United States during the Vietnam War.

Russia’s official inflation rate for 2022 was elevated at 11.9 percent, nearly half the estimate from the World Bank, which predicted 22 percent inflation for 2022. Russia’s 2022 inflation was only modestly above rates seen across Europe. The Bank of Russia is now forecasting a reduction to five to seven percent inflation in 2023, tempering that optimism by noting that “pro-inflation risks from the labour market persist.” In other words, workers are scarce, especially in technical and highly skilled positions, and real wages may not keep up with inflation as the wage-price spiral continues.

In the meantime, Russia has been moving forward on alternative financial and payment systems with countries including China, India, Turkey, South Africa and many others to circumvent the U.S. dollar’s cross-border payment monopoly through the SWIFT network. At the same time, these countries are strengthening trade, economic, financial, diplomatic, and military ties in what increasingly appears to be a new anti-American alliance. We have brought this upon ourselves by the weaponization of the U.S. dollar dominated global financial system.

In summary, it appears that economic sanctions against Russia are not yet having the West’s desired effect. As painful as they may be to ordinary Russians or the government itself, they are certainly not in the magnitude expected or required to achieve the United States’ broader strategic objectives, which appear to be both destabilization of the Russian economy, stimulation of social unrest, and, ultimately, regime change. An independent poll from January 2023 indicates that 75 percent of Russians support the war, up from 71 percent last year. The government remains adequately financed and the economy holding up, with the IMF projecting some modest GDP growth in 2023. 

Since many of the sanctions only became fully effective in the fourth quarter of 2022, it may be too early to reach a definitive conclusion. But for the moment, economic sanctions are doing what they always do: giving Western leaders a lot of virtue signaling and public relations opportunities, but with little tangible result.

Next week I will expand on the question of whether sanctions are having a boomerang effect on the West, harming both Europe’s economy and energy security, while acceleration the process of undermining the U.S. dominated global financial system, and inadvertently pushing Russia, a potential U.S. ally or at least a neutral, into the hands of our most formidable potential adversary.

King Charles coronation oil is consecrated in Jerusalem

 Oil has been created using olives from two groves on Mount of Olives, and a formula dating back centuries    

The fragrant chrism oil that will be used to anoint King Charles during his coronation in May was made sacred in Jerusalem on Friday.

A ceremony took place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the holy oil was consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, and the Anglican archbishop in Jerusalem, Hosam Naoum.

It has been created using olives harvested from two groves on the Mount of Olives, at the Monastery of Mary Magdalene and the Monastery of the Ascension.

The olives were pressed just outside Bethlehem and the oil has been perfumed with sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, benzoin, amber and orange blossom.

The king will receive the sovereign’s orb, sceptre and coronation ring and will be crowned and blessed during the ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 6 May. Camilla, the Queen Consort, will also be anointed with holy oil and crowned. 

The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said: “I am honoured and grateful that His Beatitude Patriarch Theophilos III and Archbishop Hosam Naoum have consecrated the oil that will be used to anoint His Majesty the King.

“I want to thank especially His Beatitude for providing this coronation oil, which reflects the king’s personal family connection with the Holy Land and his great care for its peoples. I am also delighted that the Anglican archbishop in Jerusalem shared in the consecration of the oil.

“Since beginning the planning for the coronation, my desire has been for a new coronation oil to be produced using olive oil from the Mount of Olives. This demonstrates the deep historic link between the coronation, the Bible and the Holy Land.

“From ancient kings through to the present day, monarchs have been anointed with oil from this sacred place. As we prepare to anoint the king and the queen consort, I pray that they would be guided and strengthened by the Holy Spirit.”

The oil is based on that used at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953, with a formula that dates back hundreds of years.  

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/03/king-charles-coronation-oil-is-consecrated-in-jerusalem?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1677881270

And the Roald Dahl Censorship Effort Takes an Even More Orwellian Turn

And the Roald Dahl Censorship Effort Takes an Even More Orwellian Turn

Brad Slager for Red State March 02, 2023

RICARDO SANTOS

The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.

Bad enough any publisher wants to alter classics of literature, but forcing these censorship efforts on customers is very dark.

The case of the move to alter and homogenize classic literary novels is roundly disturbing. Let’s be frank and call it what it is – censorship. This is the latest example of a disturbing shift in an industry that has long preserved our freedom of expression. Publishing has long been the sanctuary of our liberties in this regard. There is a reason “book burning” is often used as a pejorative charge in these kinds of discussions.

Tragically, we have moved into an era where publishers have relinquished this once rock-ribbed position. The gatekeepers of the cherished right to free speech have shown they are nowadays more than willing to not only permit the actions long held to be abhorrent in their industry but to engage in those troubling acts. I covered recently how a New York Times book editor displayed how examples of the silencing of voices and self-censorship have been creeping into the publishing houses in recent years.

It made splashy news when it was announced that Puffin Books — an imprint of Penguin-Random House – was going through the collected works of famed author Roald Dahl and altering language that would be deemed offensive by today’s tender social activist standards. As Bob Hoge revealed earlier, the individual behind these censorial edits is a multi-checkbox diversity hire who ran the literature through a woke filter.

The chief censor of the great children’s author Roald Dahl has now been revealed, and it’s Jo Ross-Barrett, a person with they/them pronouns who describes themselves as a ‘”non-binary, asexual, polyamorous relationship anarchist who is on the autism spectrum.”

Thankfully, and justifiably, the reaction to this move was met with very loud pushback from the public, to the extent the publisher relented on the decision – sort of. It was later announced that Penguin would provide what they call “classic editions” of Dahl’s canon of work, which is to say, the original unadulterated versions. But there is another angle to this that takes the disturbing moves by the publisher and launches those up to the Orwellian Strata of censorship.

People who had purchased the novels of Dahl’s works on e-readers — such as Amazon’s Kindle, or Barnes & Knoble’s Nook — discovered that these edits to the books were made in their digital copies. Books purchased years ago, well ahead of this decision, had been altered automatically, without any announcement being made.

The explanation from publishers regarding digital book copies is that you do not own the content in the same fashion as if you bought a physical copy of a book. When you make these “purchases” what you actually are paying is a licensing fee to access the content. You do not pay the price to have the full book sent permanently to your device. This means, as an example, if you buy an ebook from a merchant that later goes out of business you will lose access to the purchased work.

What makes this particularly bothersome is that this takes place without permission from nor notification of the consumer. This flexibility with ebooks is double-edged. There could be times when updates or expanded versions could come along and enhance the product. Frequently, when a book moves to a paperback edition, expanded content is included, or maybe a nonfiction work could include some new information that transpired since the original publication.

But these are positives for a consumer and there is also the chance to give the purchaser the opportunity to update their edition, if they so choose. But for a publisher to go in and make these edits without asking, and without notice, is a disturbing turn. It is yet another example of how publishing has made some very problematic shifts, as well as showing how more components within our culture have become far too comfortable with the concept of censorship. To see this playing out in one of the historical bastions of free expression is particularly troubling.

Tucker Carlson Outlines the Danger of Weak Public Officials Who are Installed to Allow Others Control

In his opening monologue last night, Tucker Carlson notes the danger of weak people taking on positions of leadership.  Their weaknesses provide opportunities for those in actual control of the levers to wreak havoc without supervision or consequences.  WATCH:

Faced With Their Own Idiocy On The Lab Leak, Media Double Down On Calling You A Racist Rube

Somehow blaming the CCP for Covid, and not the Chinese people, is proof of racism and xenophobia in America that must be silenced.

Mark Hemingway reporting for The Federalist

This week, two government agencies — the Department of Energy and the FBI — announced that they had concluded the most likely origin of the Covid virus, which has killed 6 million people worldwide, was that it leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reaction to this news, which at this point was hardly an earth-shattering conclusion, is more interesting for the question it prompts about the state of American discourse: How do you have an argument with people who will never admit when they’re wrong?

Not coincidentally, if you’re interested in checking out the state of late-night “comedy” — I have to explain to my kids that this used to be a sector of popular entertainment that people actually watched and enjoyed — here’s “Daily Show” guest host Hasan Minhaj weighing in on the matter: “By the way, [the Department of Energy’s] conclusion with ‘low confidence’ is such a f-ckboy move,” he said, adding, “And now, every f-cking idiot I went to high school with is like, ‘Apologize to me right now, Hasan! I told you I was right, and if your hand is bigger than your face, you’re gay.’”

I haven’t laughed that hard since Minhaj hosted the White House correspondents’ dinner. Which is to say I will also tell my kids that the correspondents’ dinner was a decadent self-congratulatory exercise in speaking power to truth that no respectable person didn’t revile.

Anyway, to paraphrase a comedic maxim, what Minhaj is saying is not funny because it’s not true. Perhaps Minhaj gets a pass here because he’s a comedian, right? And to be fair, if you watch the whole clip Minhaj does say he doesn’t know what to think about the virus’ origins. However, his bit does reveal a deeper, if unintentional, truth — he’s channeling a concise distillation of the textbook two-step that was broadly and institutionally adopted to downplay the significance of the DOE and FBI coming out and admitting they think the lab leak is the most likely explanation for the origin of the virus.

The first move was to throw cold water on the certainty of the Energy Department and FBI’s conclusions. Yes, other government agencies have concluded that a “zoonotic” origin — that the virus jumped from animals to humans — is more likely. Are the agencies that came to the opposite conclusions as qualified in making their determinations as the DOE or FBI? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? Because the fact there’s disagreement here is entirely beside the point.

The second part of the process was to deliberately revise history to completely misrepresent the nature of the original debate over the virus’ origin, to dismiss the real reason people now feel vindicated. It’s not because the DOE or FBI has settled the debate. It’s because we were never allowed to have a debate over the virus’ origins in the first place.

The media consensus on the lab-leak theory congealed so rapidly that it completely distorted the debate in two more distinct ways. First, it viciously and dishonestly conflated anyone who espoused the possibility of the lab leak with the fringe Alex Jones crowd who was speculating that China had deliberately released an engineered bioweapon against the West. The Washington Post more or less libeled Sen. Tom Cotton for fanning “the embers of a coronavirus theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts,” when the experts quoted by the Post later admitted they misunderstood his remarks.

Second, media “fact-checkers” all weighed in against the lab leak, and for some reason, these incompetent journalistic meter maids are deferred to by Big Tech companies to make rulings about complex political and scientific issues that ultimately determine what you can and can’t say online. The result is that for a year or so you were censored on Facebook for discussing even the possibility of the lab leak.  

Anyway, it’s also worth taking special note of the subtle rhetorical sleight of hand Minhaj employs to dismiss those who feel vindicated by the fact you’re now allowed to discuss the possibility that Covid leaked from a laboratory doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that’s curiously close to where the outbreak originated: He calls them “f-cking idiots” and then dunks on his supposedly less successful high school classmates for an added soupçon of moral superiority. (For what it’s worth, even former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart apparently qualifies as a “f-cking idiot” regarding the lab-leak theory.)

Yes, I know — it’s late-night on basic cable. Clown nose is on. Except once again, Minhaj is perfectly representative of the disingenuousness to be found elsewhere. Here’s MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan saying the quiet part out loud earlier this week:

The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ *theory* is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bio weapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists.

In other words, the lab-leak theory was closely associated with people they disagreed with who they themselves deliberately conflated with conspiracists. Got it. This isn’t even the worst of it; there was a real consensus that the only possible motivation anyone may have had to discuss the lab leak was the same motivation the bad people have for everything: rayyycccissssm. Here’s the attempt of former Vox columnist David Roberts to sum up the lab-leak debate:

From what I can tell:

1. There’s no real practical *consequence* to whether the virus came from a lab or a market.

2. Nonetheless, a set of pundits has *obsessively* pursued the leak theory, repeatedly declaring victory despite a lack of evidence.

3. However, the pundits involved are at great pains to assure us that there’s definitely no racism or xenophobia involved in their obsessive pursuit of this theory w/ no evidence & no real consequences.  

What explains the obsession? They don’t say. Definitely not xenophobia though!

Now it bears saying that Roberts is something of an edgy liberal journalist — not that there’s anything wrong with that, if anything I appreciate the honesty. However, this same view has been manifested in much more insidious ways throughout the media in such a way as to define the debate over the lab leak from the outset.

In February 2020, when Covid fear was spreading rapidly and the Chinese government was actively stonewalling international attempts to investigate what was going on, super serious “Face the Nation” invited the Chinese ambassador on. Well, you can watch the clip for yourself, but the host of the show lobbed hanging curveballs about Tom Cotton’s alleged “conspiracy theories” over the plate to a mouthpiece for a government that has ethnic minorities in literal concentration camps, and then just stood back in sympathetic silence as the commie bastard denounced America’s “xenophobia”:

Now, I went to a public university and haven’t ascended to the dizzying heights of, say, guest-hosting a show on basic cable no one’s cared about in a decade. But let me see if I have this correct. Our two choices for how the virus originated are:

1) The virus escaped from a sophisticated virology lab doing research with U.S. funding, and the leak was covered up by an oppressive unrepresentative communist government that cared more about preserving its reputation than saving lives.  

2) A bunch of poor people half a world away whose dietary habits are fueled by exotic traditions got sick selling and eating bizarre bush meats in an unhygienic “wet market.”     

Confronted with those possibilities, somehow blaming the communist government for the pandemic, rather than the Chinese people, is proof of a rising racism and xenophobia in America that must be forcibly silenced?

In the end, it does not matter that what happened in the lab-leak debate was unfair and obviously wrong. The self-appointed gatekeepers must persist in lying to everyone — including themselves — both about what they did to skew the facts and their own virtue relative to those they disagree with. If mere reality were allowed to disrupt the feedback loop of self-justification involved in all things Covid, a whole lot of arrogant people would wake up feeling sick about themselves, plagued by the feverish sensation that they were the real “f-cking idiots” they tried to warn everyone else about.  

Unlock the Grid

Unlock the Grid

James B. MeigsMarch 2023 - Commentary.org

My phone buzzed with an incoming text just before midnight on Christmas Eve. “ConEd Alert,” the message read. “Please conserve energy.” New York’s power grid was at the breaking point, our power company warned us, owing to “extreme cold, high energy use & interstate equipment problems.” To help stave off a blackout, we were advised, we should lower our thermostats and “postpone running appliances.”

Oh, and one more thing, Con Edison added: “We wish everyone safe & happy holidays.” Now, my home isn’t one where milk and cookies are left out for Santa or stockings are hung by the chimney with care. But we do enjoy having lights and heat during the holiday season. In the end, most New Yorkers squeaked through the emergency without losing power. In the Southeast, many households weren’t so lucky. Millions across North Carolina, Tennessee, and other states lost electricity. Some outages were caused by downed powerlines. In other cases, power companies deliberately cut off power to large groups of customers, a process known as “load shedding.” The utilities simply didn’t have enough electricity to go around.

Weather-related grid failures—resulting both from high and low temperatures—are a growing threat. California residents suffered through power outages during a 2020 heat wave and barely dodged more rolling blackouts last summer. In 2021, a stretch of frigid weather in Texas triggered power failures that led to nearly 250 deaths. A Wall Street Journalinvestigation last year showed that prolonged blackouts from all causes have more than doubled since 2013.

After major energy shortfalls, officials often mumble something about “the increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change.” These excuses fall flat. Yes, the weather outside was frightful this past Christmas—temperatures reached single digits. But that’s not unprecedented for my area. We generally get one or two hard cold snaps each winter. Even the southern U.S. can expect an Arctic blast every two or three years. So what made this cold wave a crisis rather than an inconvenience?

---

The problem isn’t the weather. It’s the power grid. Most of us take our electric power for granted. We might not understand how the grid works, but we assume the experts know what they’re doing. It turns out the experts are nervous as hell. “Everything is tied to having electricity, and yet we’re not focusing on the reliability of the grid,” Curt Morgan, CEO of the power-plant operator Vistra Corp., told the Journal. “That’s absurd, and that’s frightening.” The federal and regional agencies tasked with keeping the grid running smoothly keep issuing warnings: We don’t have enough power to cope even with normal swings in the weather, they say. More blackouts are coming.

Let that sink in. The U.S. leads the world in innovation: digital tech, pharmaceuticals, spaceflight… And yet our power sources are becoming undependable. The infrastructure that delivers that power to users is getting old and fragile. And it’s all part of the plan. I don’t mean that our power grid is the victim of some evil-mastermind conspiracy. What I mean is that the sorry state of our electrical system is the direct result of very deliberate, if mostly wrongheaded, policy decisions. For three decades, political leaders, regulators, and energy technocrats have been working to make our grid more efficient, more market-driven, and of course, greener. In the process, they’ve implemented a lot of innovative—one might even say, experimental—ideas about how the grid should operate. Most of these experiments aren’t working very well.

“Everybody talks about what I call the ‘could’ grid,” energy analyst Meredith Angwin told me. That’s the futuristic grid we could have, the one Biden talks about in speeches and that you read about on tech blogs. It will be powered by giant solar farms and offshore constellations of wind turbines. It will have long-distance transmission lines to shuttle power from, say, sunny Arizona to gloomy Chicago, and huge battery arrays to fill any gaps in supply. Angwin is the author of Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid. She writes that, while energy wonks and policymakers fantasize about the could grid, the actual grid—the one that’s delivering power to your home right now—is “going downhill.”

I’ve seen the problem first-hand where I live. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged that the state would achieve “100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040.” He committed to huge expenditures on wind and solar development. He shut down fracking and blocked new natural-gas pipelines. New York was “poised to adopt the country’s most ambitious climate targets,” David Roberts exulted at Vox. In a particularly deft display of political thuggery, Cuomo also orchestrated a plan to force the retirement of Indian Point, the big nuclear plant 40 miles north of New York City. The governor wanted New York to be the test case for the could grid, in other words.

It didn’t work. Before it was closed, Indian Point was making 25 percent of New York City’s electricity. It made more juice than all the state’s wind and solar facilities combined. That power was utterly reliable and carbon-free. Today, Indian Point is being cut up for scrap. But while it was headed to retirement, two new natural-gas plants were being built. (Cuomo might have tried to phase out natural gas, but the power companies know they can’t make enough electricity without it.) So downstate New York now gets over 80 percent of its power from fossil fuels. Our carbon emissions have shot up. Electricity prices have climbed even more. And we still don’t have enough power for high-demand days. Hence those Christmas Eve texts.

How did we get into this mess? The problems started in the 1990s when federal officials launched a series of reforms meant to deregulate our power system. Under the traditional model, a vertically integrated utility owned most everything, from the generating plants to the power line running into your house. It was a government-approved monopoly: The state regulator approved the utility’s major infrastructure investments as well as the rates it is allowed to charge customers. Under this plan, utilities were generally guaranteed a modest but predictable profit. They had strong incentives to build a highly reliable grid, but not many incentives to lower prices. In fact, the relationship between regulators and utilities often tended toward cronyism. It was not a perfect system.

So, in 1999, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a ruling encouraging alternatives to the traditional utility model. They created quasi-public agencies known as Regional Transmission Organizations (or RTOs) that supervise power distribution in regions made up of one or more states. (Not all states have made the switch; some still rely on traditional utilities.) Under this system, your power now comes from a whole array of companies. The RTO simply sets the ground rules for how they compete. If a new business thinks it can produce power competitively—from wind, solar, natural gas, whatever—it’s free to build a plant and start peddling watts.

For a free-market fan like me, this sounds promising. More competition should mean more innovation and lower prices, right? But far from simplifying energy markets, Angwin argues, the RTO model has led to “overlapping thickets of regulation.” The rules involving how companies buy and sell power are so byzantine that almost no one understands them—except insiders who shamelessly game the system. (Remember Enron? This was one of their rackets.) Worse, the RTO system creates perverse incentives that erode grid reliability.

Here’s why: The RTOs hold auctions in which power plants offer to sell their power in five-minute intervals. The companies that offer the cheapest power get the business, of course, while higher-priced producers have to take their generators offline. (Too much electricity on the grid is just bad as too little, so the RTO must exactly match power production and consumption on a second-by-second basis.) The auction system is a boon to solar and wind producers. Their panels and turbines sit idle most of the time. But when the sun shines or the wind blows, they produce torrents of very cheap power that they can sell into the grid at a moment’s notice. Nuclear and coal plants, on the other hand, are at their best producing steady “baseload” power 24/7. These plants lose money any time they have to throttle down.

The RTO auction system therefore rewards intermittent wind and solar producers while penalizing the baseload providers. This is one reason so many coal and nuclear plants have closed in recent years. For fans of the could grid, of course, this is exactly the point. To make the transition to renewable energy even faster, the federal government and most states also offer huge subsidies to wind and solar producers. (Fortunately, many policymakers are belatedly recognizing that nuclear power is a zero-carbon energy source and including it in subsidy programs. A better plan would be to reduce market-distorting subsidies across the board.)

The long-term trend is clear: As more of our power comes from intermittent renewables—and baseload power disappears—the grid gets harder to manage. Take California, which leads the nation in solar-power capacity. On sunny days, solar panels produce more power than the state needs. But then comes sundown. Suddenly, the grid needs all the power it can get. Since California has already shuttered almost all its coal plants—and all but one nuclear plant—it has only two options. One: Import power from nearby states (most of which do burn coal, which is why they have power to export). Two: Burn lots of natural gas.

Natural-gas plants are easier to crank up quickly to meet rising demand. And ever since the fracking revolution of the late aughts, gas is one of the cheaper sources of energy. That makes natural gas the dirty secret of the “renewable power” revolution: Since neither wind nor solar can be counted on to deliver power at all times, efforts to increase those sources also require building a backup network of gas-fired power plants. Advocates for “zero-carbon” power like to tout all the wind and solar resources the U.S. has added to the grid over the past two decades. They usually don’t mention that, over the same period, we’ve doubled the amount of gas we burn to make electricity.

Three decades ago, our power grid was based on a mix of dependable energy sources, mostly coal, gas, nuclear, and hydropower. If one source faltered, others could step up production. If we stay on our current path, we’ll have a grid that runs mostly on intermittent wind and solar combined with on-again-off-again natural-gas plants trying to keep up with wild swings in renewable output. We’ve eliminated our safety margin. And that ramping up and down of different power sources is hard on infrastructure. Power-plant components wear out faster; transformers overheat. Our grid is crumbling under the strain.

The growing reliance on natural gas also brings big risks. Coal plants keep piles of fuel sitting on site. Nuclear plants have months of fuel already in their reactors. But a natural-gas-fired power plant gets its fuel through a pipeline on a minute-by-minute basis. During the pandemic, we learned that just-in-time supply chains can be vulnerable to disruption. We need to recognize that making our entire power grid dependent on just-in-time gas deliveries is insanely reckless. During cold spells homeowners burn more gas for heating. That leaves power generators short of fuel just when they need it most.

What’s the answer? First, a big dose of realism. We can’t run the grid without baseload power plants. It’s great to retire dirty coal plants, but we need to replace them with other dependable power sources. That makes it critical to preserve our existing nuclear plants, and to speed up plans for building new ones. We also need to unwind the perverse incentives in our RTO networks; power companies should be rewarded, not penalized, for providing reliable energy. And let’s hack back the regulations that make it hard to build new powerlines, power plants, or pretty much any sort of infrastructure today.

In the end, the Christmas cold snap lasted only a couple of days. Worse ones will come. We’re the nation of Apple and SpaceX. We ought to be able to keep the lights on.

Photo: Tiado