No, We Can’t ‘Trust the Science’

No, We Can’t ‘Trust the Science’

By James Gorrie

February 12, The Epoch Times


No, We Can’t ‘Trust the Science’

Commentary

The title of a new Oxford University study, “COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US,” is as shocking as it is misleading. The headline is frightening because it was meant to be.

But is the SARS-CoV-2 virus really one of the most lethal threats to American children and young people up to the age of 19?

Experimental Mass Vaccination Pushed by Fear, Sensationalism

Let’s take a closer look at Oxford’s assertion.

Since the study describes the virus as “a leading cause of death” in children, one would suppose that it would be near the top, right? If not No. 1, it certainly would be No. 2 or perhaps No. 3.

But that isn’t the case.

Actually, as the writers of the article concede, COVID-19 is only the eighth-ranked cause of death, responsible for only about 2 percent of deaths of American children. The relationship that the researchers (or the person who wrote and/or approved the headline) draw between the ranking and the importance of it is inverse, to say the least, and largely irrelevant.

Since when is an eighth-place causal ranking a “leading cause” of anything, particularly when that ranking has a statistical value of about 2 percent? It’s simply not true, so why try to make that case?

Now, contrast the sensationalist Oxford study with another UK study published in November 2022, which is calmly titled “COVID-19 deaths in children and young people in England, March 2020 to December 2021: An active prospective national surveillance study.”

Note the lack of hyperbole in that study’s title. It’s entirely neutral and objectively descriptive. More importantly, however, is the fact that the researchers found that over 22 months, with all co-factors considered, COVID-19 was responsible for 1.2 percent of deaths in the younger-than-20 age group in England. Granted, 1.2 percent is less than 2 percent, but that difference is marginal relative to the remaining 98 or 98.8 percent.

The researchers rightly concluded in the study that “death due to COVID-19 is very low in CYP (children and young people), even with the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.”

On a side note, COVID-19 has supposedly surpassed the flu as a significant cause of childhood deaths in 2022. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the 2018–19 season, there were 136 pediatric flu deaths reported, and 188 in the 2019–20 season.

But in the 2020–21 season? Just one.

Imagine childhood flu deaths dropping by 99.99 percent in a single year. That’s an amazing medical accomplishment that one would think would capture headlines around the world.

Children rest at a community vaccination center after receiving a dose of Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine following the COVID outbreak, in Hong Kong on Feb. 25, 2022. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

An attempt is made to explain the drop. The narrative goes as follows: Under lockdown, the 2021 flu season affected a much lower number of people than usual in all major regions of the United States. And yet, somehow, the COVID-19 virus, a variant of the common cold, was just that much smarter than the flu virus and could infect millions of people.

It will be interesting to see 2022’s flu report when it comes out in April.

Deception and the Drive to Vaccinate Children

What can one make of the seemingly exploitative attitude of the Oxford study? Why would Oxford University and its researchers overstate the risk that the virus poses to young people?

One explanation could be for the sheer sake of exploitation itself. It’s difficult not to recognize two closely related facts concerning Oxford University and COVID-19.

First, Oxford University has reportedly received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation made sure that much of that money went into Oxford research that resulted in the AstraZeneca mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. AstraZeneca has since seen billions of dollars in profit from its COVID-19 vaccine business.

Second, the Gates Foundation reportedly funded pharmaceutical companies and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) in the UK, such as the Wellcome Trust, an international vaccine research and development group, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. These groups have a mutually supportive relationship with almost zero accountability.

A big part of the global COVID-19 agenda and funding effort, which is led by the CDC, is to vaccinate children, even though the science tells us that they’re at very low risk of being harmed by the disease. Coincidentally, the CDC and the World Health Organization are also funded by the Gates Foundation. A suspicious mind might conclude that describing COVID-19 as “a leading cause of death in children” could be an effort toward pushing more vaccines onto more children.

Deception Surrounds Everything About the Virus

Oxford certainly isn’t the only highly rated institution to twist the facts to fit the narrative and blind people from reality. Denying and withholding medical data on vaccine injuries and deaths is the policy of medical and drug bureaucracies in the United States and elsewhere.

Signs are held up at a rally against COVID-19 vaccine mandates in New York on Oct. 12, 2021. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Dr. Deborah Birx, former response coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration, said she deliberately misled then-President Donald Trump by exaggerating the risk of asymptomatic transmission of the virus to justify longer and more extensive lockdowns. It wasn’t about following the science that led to economically and socially disastrous lockdowns in the United States. It was about following the politics.

As for the vaccines themselves, Big Medicine and Big Pharma colluded with Big Tech, Big Media, Big Academia, NGOs, and the Biden administration to deny and censor any bad news about the experimental mRNA vaccines that were pushed in the United States and much of the rest of the world.

More than that, medical doctors with stellar reputations and research achievements were banned, humiliated, fired, censored, and otherwise publicly pilloried for daring to provide alternative and simple treatments with a proven 80 percent reduction in hospitalizations and a 75 percent reduction in deaths.

Furthermore, recently uncovered documents show that the CDC was aware of mRNA vaccines causing myocarditis but refused to disclose those facts.

This denial and manipulation of science aren’t restricted to the United States. Scotland has recently seen a rise in neonatal deaths, up from 2 per thousand to 4.9, but medical authorities have ruled out the mothers’ vaccine status as a factor in the deaths without even checking. The neonatal deaths, which apply to infants up to four weeks old, are recorded as stillbirths to avoid alarm or vaccine hesitancy.

Their reasoning? They don’t want anyone to draw “the wrong conclusions.”

Or, perhaps, the right ones.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

 

 

Massive Harms’ From Lockdowns Shouldn’t Be Forgiven: Dr. Scott Atlas

Massive Harms’ From Lockdowns Shouldn’t Be Forgiven: Dr. Scott Atlas

Massive Harms’ From Lockdowns Shouldn’t Be Forgiven: Dr. Scott Atlas

By Eva Fu

November 6, 2022 The Epoch Times


Dr. Scott Atlas
Dr. Scott Atlas, a founding fellow of Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom, at the Hillsdale College Kirby Center in Washington on March 17, 2022. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)

Restrictive pandemic policies shouldn’t be forgiven after the “massive harms and destruction” the lockdowns caused to the American public, according to Dr. Scott Atlas.

Atlas, a COVID-19 adviser during the Trump administration and a contributor to The Epoch Times, was responding to a recent Atlantic article calling for a “pandemic amnesty.” The argument goes that the pandemic missteps were a result of “deep uncertainty” rather than “moral failing,” and it’s time to let the issues go and move on.

The author, “while trying to be nice, is really missing the more important point of what happened during the pandemic management,” Atlas told The Epoch Times.

“The massive harms and destruction from lockdowns and school closures cannot just be simply ignored and forgiven because these were intentional, unethical, and grossly erroneous applications of public health guidance,” he said.

The school closures especially, he said, “inflicted massive harms into our younger generation—all of which were predictable, many of which were already known.”

“And to simply wipe them away by ‘forgiving’ people will minimize the seriousness of the errors and not correct this for future health care crises,” Atlas said.

An August 2021 analysis by McKinsey & Co. found that school shutdowns cost K–12 students nationwide five months of learning in math and four months in reading, with low-income and minority students being hit even harder. The unfinished learning could create a ripple effect that leads them to earn between $49,000 to $61,000 less over their lifetimes, according to the McKinsey report.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” last month appraised national math test and reading scores in fourth and eighth grades to be at a historic low.

But it isn’t just the learning loss that Atlas is seeing. The lack of contact between children and education personnel also led to a surge in child abuse in broken families. Meanwhile, youth mental health issues, substance abuse, and suicide attempts also spiked.

That, he said, is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the damage wrought on the younger generation by the government-mandated pandemic restrictions. A March 2021 report by American Psychological Association found that six in 10 U.S. adults reported undesired weight change since the start of the pandemic. For college-aged adults, more than half of the respondents reported weight gains of an average of 28 pounds, which Atlas called an “obesity crisis.”

“In some fantasy, contrary-to-science effort to stop infections, we’ve used children as shields, and we’ve inflicted more damage on poor kids and low-income families than the affluent,” he said.

“It’s nowhere near enough to just say: ‘Oh, it’s okay,'” Atlas said. “It’s not okay. There needs to be public accountability—a public admission of grievous errors by our public health leaders and our university experts, as well as by educational leaders, including university presidents, and our K–12 school leaders.

“We cannot let this happen again.”

During his four months serving on the White House’s coronavirus task force, Atlas made a forceful push for reopening schools and businesses while increasing testing at nursing homes—views he said were often at odds with those of government experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the retiring director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Dr. Deborah Birx, then-coordinator of the task force.

“When you shut down the economy and had a severe economic downturn, you kill people, that translates into lost lives,” he said. “It was a false dichotomy set up by people who wanted lockdowns. They set up a false dichotomy that somehow if you were against lockdowns, you were choosing economy over lives.

“The truth is, it was lives versus lives.”

Fauci, who in December 2020 drew criticism for flip-flopping on reopening schools, recently rejected that he was ever responsible for pushing for school shutdowns.

“If you go back, and I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I’ve said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip,” he said in an October ABC interview, without specifying which clip he was referring to. “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci is responsible for closing the schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it]. I mean, let’s get down to the facts.”

The pandemic management “debacle,” Atlas believes, has left America in a crisis, with its ethical principles broken.

“There’s an unprecedented denial of fact, rampant on university campuses, in the media, in science, and in public health,” he said. “America’s credentialed class that leads our public health agencies, our universities, our doctors, our scientists, our schools—that class of experts has been exposed as non-experts, politicized, and lacking in ethics.

“We’ve seen our school and university leaders break the social contract with our children, harming them and failing as role models, and in the United States now, the free exchange of ideas that is fundamental to any free society is under threat.”

Rather than forgive and forget, America has a long to-do list for restoring public trust, according to Atlas.

In his view, that requires courage from “individuals with integrity” to “rise up and have their voices heard;” greater transparency into government agencies, scientific journals, and universities; accountability for those “use character assassination to delegitimize people”—“including in the courtroom;” ensuring public health guidance to consider the impact on overall health rather than a single disease; and in a legislative sense, defining public health emergency with time limits.

He also pointed to more than a dozen universities that received more than $500 million in federal grants last year from the National Institutes of Health alone.

“We need to hold these universities accountable for that money,” making sure “they allow the free exchange of ideas that they are entrusted with by the American public.”

But most of all, he wants a public apology from public health officials over their lockdown “legacy.”

“Their legacy includes avoidable death in society’s most vulnerable, massive destruction of low-income families, ongoing enormous health damages to children, and this severe loss of trust in public health and in science itself,” Atlas said. “That is their legacy. It must be publicly admitted and apologized for before we can move forward.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to NIAID and ActivePure Technology, where Birx now serves as chief medical and science adviser, for comment.

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/massive-harms-from-lockdowns-should-not-be-forgiven-dr-scott-atlas_4844772.html

FBI Sends ‘Clear Message’ to Trump, His Supporters: The Swamp Is Real, Rep. Davidson Says

FBI Sends ‘Clear Message’ to Trump, His Supporters: The Swamp Is Real, Rep. Davidson Says

FBI Sends ‘Clear Message’ to Trump, His Supporters: The Swamp Is Real, Rep. Davidson Says

By Katie Spence

August 11, 2022 Updated: August 11, 2022 The Epoch Times


The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago is an escalation of an ongoing attack on anyone who dares to upset the political status quo in Washington, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) says.FBI Raid at Mar-a-Largo

“I think a lot of my constituents were shocked, frankly, across the political spectrum. But obviously, the more supportive of President Trump, the more upset they were,” Davidson told The Epoch Times and NTD as part of a special report on the raid airing on Aug. 11 on EpochTV at 9 p.m.

“I think for anyone who doubted that there was a swamp when Donald Trump was saying ‘drain the swamp,’ now I think there’s true believers. So it’s historic.”

In support of his statement, Davidson pointed out that the FBI still has many of the same people who spent years supporting a Russia collusion narrative that was based on a falsified warrant.

More concerning, Davidson says, is that the FBI appears to have wholly ended its pretense of objectivity.

Davidson pointed out to The Epoch Times that former IRS o�cial Lois Lerner, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger, and even Hillary Clinton allegedly mishandled and destroyed classified information but avoided raids by the FBI.

He then pointed out that the FBI has taken no action on Hunter Biden, despite a mountain of evidence of suspect business dealings.

“No accountability for Hunter Biden, no action on that; no action on any number of things that they could have taken action on, like for example, targeting of Supreme Court justices,” Davidson said.

He added it is really hard to believe that the bureau believes that it’s objective. Davidson says the message the FBI is sending is clear.
“Hey, if you support the cause, we got your back. But if you’re working against us, as [current Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer promised Donald Trump, they have six ways to Sunday to wreck you.

“And they seem to have been very focused on doing that to Donald Trump.”

Davidson added the FBI isn’t just targeting Trump; it’s also targeting his supporters.

“[The FBI] seized the chairman of the Freedom Caucus’s phone. They didn’t do it in a no-knock warrant raid in the middle of the night with CNN cameras staged in the street or anything. But they did track him down.”

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Scott Perry’s (R-Pa.) phone was returned to him, but Davidson said that the FBI action to track Perry down was deliberately intended to paint him as a criminal.

Furthermore, the message is that if the FBI can target people such as Trump and Perry, imagine what they could do to an everyday American, he said.

“I think they’re trying to intimidate and scare people from, you know, being supportive of Trump or being too opposed to the status quo,” Davidson said. “You know, stay within the mainstream, don’t push back against the status quo.”

The response to the FBI raid has been overwhelmingly negative among Americans who support Trump, Davidson said.

He said Trump supporters are rightly upset about the raid and how they’re expected to respond to it. Davidson says he hopes it doesn’t go beyond anger into illegal actions and instead energizes people to vote.

“If this had happened to a Democrat president, you know, we might have more of the summer of 2020, where it was covered by the press [as] ‘mostly peaceful protests,’ but we know that mostly peaceful means it wasn’t peaceful.”

A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump supporters are very aware that they may be targeted if they protest against the latest treatment of the former president, Davidson says.

“But if [their support] was the slightest bit of anything that was run afoul, the mainstream media and, frankly, many of our federal agencies would treat it as … some sort of, you know, violent uprising by the right and so, I think people on the right are cautious.”

Davidson said he hopes it doesn’t come to violence but acknowledged a growing frustration among Republicans over an apparent two-tier system of justice.

“Unfortunately, this reinforces it because the people that we’ve suspected had no accountability, like the Clinton Foundation, as an example, [or] like Hunter Biden.

“But then very selective accountability … for [former] President Trump.”

Holding the FBI Accountable

Davidson stated that if Republicans retake a majority in the House in November, they need to step up and not just hold hearings about the FBI’s actions.

“We are going to have to cut funds and say, ‘Hey, we … don’t want to shut the government down. We want to fund our government. But we’re unwilling to fund a government that does these things or fails to do these other things.'”

Davidson said the FBI isn’t objective or applying justice objectively. While he said there was hope that Director Christopher Wray would return the FBI to a non- partisan agency, “On the contrary, every step seems more focused on undermining the confidence of ordinary Americans.”

However, if “you’ve got the far left of the Democratic Party’s agenda in mind, the FBI seems to have your back,” he said.

He notes that the FBI is “incredibly powerful” and Republicans can’t try to hold them accountable halfway; the GOP must “get after that in a very serious way.”

Even as he wants to be fair to the working men and women at the FBI, Davidson said Republicans need to acknowledge that top leadership at the bureau is corrupt, as is “the IRS, banking regulators, all the EPA, all these agencies, Securities and Exchange Commission,” and they’re abusing their power.

“The far left has really gotten a firm grip on the administrative state.

“They’ve used the influence over the administrative state to get a firm grip into much of corporate America,” he said. “So it’s almost like there’s collusion between these government agencies and the top level.

“No one loves big government like big business, so some of our biggest businesses are also working in concert with these biggest regulatory agencies.”

Top Democrat Blocks Legislation Aimed at Preventing School Shootings

Top Democrat Blocks Legislation Aimed at Preventing School Shootings

Top Democrat Blocks Legislation Aimed at Preventing School Shootings

By Zachary Stieber

May 26, 2022 Updated: May 26, 2022 The Epoch Times


Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)

Commentary

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blocked legislation on May 25 that proponents say could help prevent school shootings.

The legislation, known as the Luke and Alex School Safety Act, would require the Department of Homeland Security to establish a clearinghouse on the best school safety practices after consulting with education, justice, and health officials.

“It’s pretty simple. It just creates a clearinghouse of information of the best practices for school safety. It ensures that parents, teachers, school officials, and other stakeholders have input into what those best practices are. It doesn’t allow the clearinghouse to mandate any school to take any certain action. Maybe most importantly, it publishes the available grant programs and federal resources available for school safety,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said on the Senate floor in Washington.

The bill is named for Luke Hoyer and Alex Schachter, who were both killed when a man with a gun opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018. It’s backed by the parents of the boys.

“It’s a good idea. It could save lives. It is an action, when people are calling for action following this tragedy,” Johnson said.

He asked for unanimous consent for the legislation. That enables a bill to pass with no recorded vote, but also opens up the possibility that a single senator could block the request.

Schumer blocked it, referencing the mass shooting that took place this week in Uvalde, Texas.

The “sad truth” about that shooting is that “hardening schools,” or ramping up prevention techniques and strategies, “would have done nothing to prevent” the shooting, Schumer said.

“In fact, there were guards and police officers already at the school yesterday when the shooter showed up. One was a school police officer, two were from the Uvalde Police Department. The shooter got past all of them, with two assault weapons that he purchased. They couldn’t stop him,” Schumer said. “The bill would not have protected those children. More guns won’t protect our children. That is the wrong answer.”

He said he was open to adding the bill’s language as an amendment to a bill he supports, but only if Republicans voted for it.

Johnson responded, saying that he would “not engage in partisanship, other than to say it is just sad.”

“It is just sad that this body can’t pass this bill, when about a month ago, they passed an identical bill that applied to churches. This one applies to schools, and yet it’s inappropriate, according to the majority leader, to pass this nonpartisan bill by unanimous consent,” he said.

The Senate is in negotiations on different measures regarding guns, but with its 50–50 divide between Republicans and Democrats, few of them, if any, are expected to be approved.

Max Schachter, Alex’s father, denounced the blocking of the bill.

“I hoped after 21 were murdered in Uvalde, partisan politics would be put aside,” he wrote on Twitter. “I WAS WRONG.”

 

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

By Stephen Moore, The Epoch Times May 25, 2022


Solar Panel Range

Commentary

President Joe Biden keeps claiming that wind and solar energy are going to save money for consumers. But more government subsidies to “renewable energy” is a key feature of the White House anti-inflation strategy recently announced by Biden.

He probably got that idea from John Kerry, the administration’s climate czar, who recently claimed that “solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas.” Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Transportation secretary, makes the same claims about the thousands of dollars that motorists can save if they buy electric cars.

This couldn’t be more wrong.

Proponents of “green” energy boondoggles are often masters at playing with the numbers, because that is the only way that wind and solar electricity generation make any sense. Advocates such as Kerry love to focus on the low operating costs of solar and wind since they don’t require constant purchases of fuel. Ignoring the relatively short lifespan of solar and wind components, as well as the high initial investment, can make it appear as though solar and wind operate at lower costs than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Let’s get the facts straight. The cost isn’t just what you pay at the retail level for gas or power. It also includes the taxes you pay to subsidize the power. A 2017 study by the Department of Energy found that for every dollar of government subsidy per BTU unit of energy produced from fossil fuels, wind and solar get at least $10.

That’s anything but a money saver.

The reason the subsidies are so high is that solar and wind have additional costs compared to their more reliable competition. “Green” energy sources are non-dispatchable, meaning their output can’t be changed to match demand. The wind doesn’t blow harder, and the sun doesn’t shine brighter, just because electricity use is peaking.

Conversely, fossil fuel entities—such as a coal plant—can ramp up generation when we need it most and ramp down when demand falls.

Widespread adoption of solar and wind generation would necessitate expensive batteries on a large scale to ensure that people still have power when the wind stops blowing or when the sun stops shining—like it does every single night.

So, unlike reliable and flexible natural gas, solar and wind require large-scale storage solutions: massive banks of batteries that are hardly environmentally friendly but are also extremely expensive. And since batteries don’t last forever, they add to both the initial expense and maintenance costs during the life of a solar or wind energy generating station.

The same problem exists with electric cars. The sticker price on EVs is considerably higher than for conventional gas-operated cars, and the so-called savings over time assume that the electric power for recharging is free. But it isn’t and power costs are rising almost as fast as gas prices.

Factors such as these are consistently ignored by Kerry and other “green” energy activists.

To genuinely evaluate dissimilar energy sources and provide an apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administration uses the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and the Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS). These measures consider the initial costs, the lifespan of generation and storage systems, maintenance and fuel costs, decommissioning expenses, subsidies, etc., and compare that to how much electricity is produced over a power plant’s lifetime.

The numbers don’t lie: “green” energy is a complete waste of resources.

The LCOE and LCOS for solar and on-shore wind farms are four times as expensive as natural gas. But offshore wind takes the cake—it’s six times as expensive as natural gas.

Imagine paying four to six times as much every month for the same electricity! That’s the green paradise world that the Biden administration wants for America.

Yet, it’s even worse than that because electric power costs greatly affect the cost of producing nearly everything else. In the case of producing aluminum, for example, a third of the total production cost is electricity alone.

Imagine what quadrupling electricity prices would do to the prices of all the goods and services that people buy. If you think inflation is bad now, just wait until the nation is dependent on wind and solar—then you’ll see REAL price increases.

And despite official government data contradicting their own claims, the Biden administration—including Kerry—continues spouting simple untruths on wind and solar. They hope that no one will check their fantastic facts.

To the left, wanting it to be true, makes it true.

All the while, the middle class is being crushed by $4-a-gallon gasoline and businesses everywhere are buckling under $5-per-gallon diesel. The Wall Street Journal warns that electric power blackouts could be coming because of overreliance on wind and solar power.

At some point, if this push for green energy continues, the whole nation will start to look like California, where gas is $6 a gallon, the lights go out, and electric cars are stranded because of rolling blackouts.  If that’s our “green” future, then Americans should want nothing to do with it.

Stephen Moore is a distinguished fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, and E.J. Antoni is a research fellow in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis. Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, where Antoni is a senior fellow.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or Zero Hedge.

 

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

By Stephen Moore, The Epoch Times May 25, 2022


Solar Panel Range

Commentary

President Joe Biden keeps claiming that wind and solar energy are going to save money for consumers. But more government subsidies to “renewable energy” is a key feature of the White House anti-inflation strategy recently announced by Biden.

He probably got that idea from John Kerry, the administration’s climate czar, who recently claimed that “solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas.” Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Transportation secretary, makes the same claims about the thousands of dollars that motorists can save if they buy electric cars.

This couldn’t be more wrong.

Proponents of “green” energy boondoggles are often masters at playing with the numbers, because that is the only way that wind and solar electricity generation make any sense. Advocates such as Kerry love to focus on the low operating costs of solar and wind since they don’t require constant purchases of fuel. Ignoring the relatively short lifespan of solar and wind components, as well as the high initial investment, can make it appear as though solar and wind operate at lower costs than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Let’s get the facts straight. The cost isn’t just what you pay at the retail level for gas or power. It also includes the taxes you pay to subsidize the power. A 2017 study by the Department of Energy found that for every dollar of government subsidy per BTU unit of energy produced from fossil fuels, wind and solar get at least $10.

That’s anything but a money saver.

The reason the subsidies are so high is that solar and wind have additional costs compared to their more reliable competition. “Green” energy sources are non-dispatchable, meaning their output can’t be changed to match demand. The wind doesn’t blow harder, and the sun doesn’t shine brighter, just because electricity use is peaking.

Conversely, fossil fuel entities—such as a coal plant—can ramp up generation when we need it most and ramp down when demand falls.

Widespread adoption of solar and wind generation would necessitate expensive batteries on a large scale to ensure that people still have power when the wind stops blowing or when the sun stops shining—like it does every single night.

So, unlike reliable and flexible natural gas, solar and wind require large-scale storage solutions: massive banks of batteries that are hardly environmentally friendly but are also extremely expensive. And since batteries don’t last forever, they add to both the initial expense and maintenance costs during the life of a solar or wind energy generating station.

The same problem exists with electric cars. The sticker price on EVs is considerably higher than for conventional gas-operated cars, and the so-called savings over time assume that the electric power for recharging is free. But it isn’t and power costs are rising almost as fast as gas prices.

Factors such as these are consistently ignored by Kerry and other “green” energy activists.

To genuinely evaluate dissimilar energy sources and provide an apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administration uses the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and the Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS). These measures consider the initial costs, the lifespan of generation and storage systems, maintenance and fuel costs, decommissioning expenses, subsidies, etc., and compare that to how much electricity is produced over a power plant’s lifetime.

The numbers don’t lie: “green” energy is a complete waste of resources.

The LCOE and LCOS for solar and on-shore wind farms are four times as expensive as natural gas. But offshore wind takes the cake—it’s six times as expensive as natural gas.

Imagine paying four to six times as much every month for the same electricity! That’s the green paradise world that the Biden administration wants for America.

Yet, it’s even worse than that because electric power costs greatly affect the cost of producing nearly everything else. In the case of producing aluminum, for example, a third of the total production cost is electricity alone.

Imagine what quadrupling electricity prices would do to the prices of all the goods and services that people buy. If you think inflation is bad now, just wait until the nation is dependent on wind and solar—then you’ll see REAL price increases.

And despite official government data contradicting their own claims, the Biden administration—including Kerry—continues spouting simple untruths on wind and solar. They hope that no one will check their fantastic facts.

To the left, wanting it to be true, makes it true.

All the while, the middle class is being crushed by $4-a-gallon gasoline and businesses everywhere are buckling under $5-per-gallon diesel. The Wall Street Journal warns that electric power blackouts could be coming because of overreliance on wind and solar power.

At some point, if this push for green energy continues, the whole nation will start to look like California, where gas is $6 a gallon, the lights go out, and electric cars are stranded because of rolling blackouts.  If that’s our “green” future, then Americans should want nothing to do with it.

Stephen Moore is a distinguished fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, and E.J. Antoni is a research fellow in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis. Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, where Antoni is a senior fellow.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or Zero Hedge.

 

MOORE: When the people tasked with protecting our children are the villain

MOORE: When the people tasked with protecting our children are the villains

MOORE: When the people tasked with protecting our children are the villains

By Stephen Moore, The Epoch Times May 24, 2022


Classroom

Commentary

An empty classroom where all his students have been confined due to Coronavirus infection in a public school in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. On Friday Spanish authorities said that nearly 25,000, or 4.3% of the country's teachers were on medical leave and that over 260,000 of 8.2 million students had been told to isolate since classes resumed in the new year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

The evidence shows that school closures during COVID were an epic public policy blunder. The school lockdowns in many states were arguably the most significant episode of government-sponsored child abuse in American history.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Last week, the liberal New York Times came to the same conclusion after an extensive investigation. The New York Times found:

“Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020. In places where schools re-opened that summer and fall, the spread of Covid was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed.”

The New York Times also found that the primary victims were the lowest-income children. Wealthy families found education alternatives for their children either in their homes or private schools. Children from low-income families barely participated in online lessons.

“This will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,” said Thomas Kane, an author of a Harvard study on the disparate impact of the COVID lockdowns.

The study also found that most of these school closures occurred “in major cities, which tend to be run by Democratic officials … Republicans were generally quicker to reopen schools. High-poverty schools are also more likely to have unionized teachers, and some unions lobbied for remote schooling.” And all this time, you probably thought Democrats were the party that cares about children.

But there are other villains as well that need to be exposed. Who did this to our children?

The teachers unions were probably the most shameful player, the worm in the education apple. Even after months of evidence that in-class instruction posed virtually no danger to children or teachers, they wouldn’t teach. They treated COVID as a paid vacation, even as private and Catholic schools down the street were open. In September of last year, nearly 90% of the Chicago teachers even voted to go on strike after not teaching for six months.

They weren’t the only ones in on the crime against our nation’s children. Let’s not forget about the inexcusable role of the American Academy of Pediatrics. This group of children’s doctors originally called for entire school openings for the 2020-21 school year. That was based on science.

But then, politics intervened. Two weeks later, the group did a sudden 180-degree reversal and joined in solidarity with the teachers unions calling for closing schools. They even signed joint statements with the unions.

It’s not hard to understand why the pediatricians pulled the rug out from beneath our children. Every study has shown that pediatricians are politically liberal and more so than any other medical group.

Pediatricians were regularly on TV or elsewhere in the news, falsely spooking parents about the dangers of sending children to school. It was propaganda — the big lie.

What is so chilling and unforgivable about this tale is that teachers and pediatricians are the people entrusted by parents and society at large to care for and educate children. They are supposed to have our sons’ and daughters’ best interests at stake regarding their health and well-being. But they selfishly put politics and paychecks ahead of child welfare.

So Democratic politicians, teachers unions and pediatricians formed an alliance to deny our children schooling. These are the people who sanctimoniously lecture us about the necessity of “following the science.” Yet they ignored it. They peddled fear, not facts, and perhaps Biden’s new ministry of “misinformation” might want to investigate them.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: “Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”

Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Think Public Schools Are Headed in the Wrong Direction—and for Good Reason

Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Think Public Schools Are Headed in the Wrong Direction—and for Good Reason

By Charlotte Allen, The Epoch Times April 12, 2022 Updated: April 14, 2022


Commentary

In late March, the polling firm Selzer & Co. released the astonishing results of a nationwide survey of U.S. adults: Nearly two-thirds of them said they believed that U.S. public schools are headed in the wrong direction in what they teach children. Only 24 percent said they thought public schools are headed in the right direction.Classroom

The 64 percent negative majority held across sex, race, economic, and educational lines. Two-thirds of men, nearly two-thirds of women, 64 percent of whites, and 63 percent of nonwhites thought public schools were on the wrong track. Some 67 percent of people sharing homes with children younger than age 18 agreed. The only serious disparity fell along party lines: 83 percent of Republicans polled responded that they thought public schools were headed in the wrong direction, compared with 44 percent of Democrats (still a plurality).

This is a serious crisis of confidence in the public school system. As The Hill magazine pointed out, for years “teachers held political sway and successfully campaigned for raises even in deep-red states.” Whether teachers had actually been underpaid was arguable, but the fact remains that just four or five years ago, they were securing substantial boosts in salaries seemingly based on their perceived contributions to society.

Furthermore, polls consistently showed that majorities of parents had rated their children’s teachers as “excellent” or “good,” even though those ratings had been trending downward since the 1970s. Now educators are in the doghouse as far as the public is concerned.

What happened? I’m going to offer some suggestions. On March 8, the Florida Senate passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, which forbids classroom “instruction” or “discussion” about sexual orientation and gender identities in grades K–3 and applies age-appropriate restrictions in higher grades. A few weeks later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the measure into law. The legislation, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” and similar measures pending in other states set off a nationwide furor among progressive politicians, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream media pundits, and, especially, public-school teachers in Florida and elsewhere.

The teachers began voicing their opinions in media interviews and in TikTok videos—and what the videos revealed was that a significant number of teachers wanted to talk about their own sexual identities to the youngsters that they were supposed to be teaching.

The most shocking of the media presentations featured Florida kindergarten teacher Cory Bernaert in an MSNBC interview on March 29. The openly gay Bernaert was distressed that he wouldn’t be able to “build relationships” with the 5-year-olds in his classroom by talking about his “home life” and off-hours recreational activities.

“I don’t want to have to hide that my partner and I went paddleboarding this weekend,” Bernaert said.

Watching the MSNBC video, I thought: What? When my peers and I were in kindergarten—and right up through high school—we never spent a single minute wondering about our teachers’ home lives and much less did we want to hear about them. As far as we were concerned, teachers, love them or hate them, were abstract authority figures who had no connection with our own personal lives. We never thought about what they did outside school, and we certainly had no desire to “build relationships” with them, much less share stories about how we spent our weekends.

Another Florida teacher used TikTok to reveal her “really sneaky” strategy for getting around the “specifically Christian” parents of her students who might object: Paste a pink triangle, the Nazi concentration-camp badge for homosexuals, somewhere in your classroom, and the students will get the message, she said. A fourth-grade teacher disclosed his own nonverbal approach to communicating LGBTQ identity: Wearing rainbow socks and slapping a pink-and-blue transgender flag onto his laptop. Another teacher vowed to defy the Florida law and dared school officials to fire her.

It’s impossible to think that watching these classroom exhibitionists display their interest in sending secret signals about sexuality to children hasn’t had an effect on parents. On April 7, the Alabama legislature voted overwhelmingly to make it a felony for doctors to prescribe puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones or to perform gender-transition surgery for people younger than age 19. And at least a dozen states have legislation pending that mimics Florida’s.

A March 11–14 poll of registered voters conducted by Politico/Morning Consult found majorities supporting both a ban on classroom teaching about sexual and gender identity through grade three and age-appropriate limitations after that. This despite nonstop propaganda opposing such restrictions from the media, the educational establishment, and the progressive elite, from President Joe Biden on down.

All this comes on top of the educational establishment taking a similar anti-parent stance on teaching the tenets of critical race theory (CRT)—the idea that white people are racist by nature and that “systemic racism” and “white privilege” permeate every aspect of American life. Nonetheless, parental revulsion against the promotion of this ideology in public schools has led to a nationwide grassroots rebellion against CRT-promoting school boards—and the election of Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor of Virginia in November 2021 after he ran on a promise that parents, not self-proclaimed educational experts, would have ultimate control over their children’s education. Meanwhile, 36 states have passed or introduced legislation banning the promotion of CRT in schools.

Adding to that are alarming statistics about setbacks in student progress brought about by most public schools’ insistence—at the behest of teachers unions—on shutting down classrooms and subjecting students to remote learning for months on end during the COVID-19 crisis. U.S. children fell at least four months behind in their academic progress, according to a McKinsey & Co. report released on April 4, and the gap was undoubtedly higher for lower-income kids.

Another survey released by Politico in conjunction with Harvard University on March 25 indicated that roughly 40 percent of parents believe that masking school-age children, another priority item for teachers unions, has harmed their offspring’s scholastic process.

Not surprisingly, private-school enrollment is spiking across America, as is homeschooling by parents themselves. At least 10 states have experienced an erosion in public school enrollment from 2019 to 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic is obviously partly to blame. But the Selzer poll in March indicates that more than 60 percent of Americans believe that something is seriously wrong with the way the public school system itself is heading.

That should give pause to the media and the educational establishment that are so eager to dismiss parents and their concerns.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Approve Our Permits: US Oil Industry Responds After Biden Cuts Imports From Russia White House blames Russia, faults oil industry, for record high gas prices

‘Approve Our Permits’

By Nathan Worcester March 8, 2022 Updated: March 8, 2022

“Cut the crap and approve our permits.”

On March 8, while President Joe Biden announced a ban on Russian oil and gas imports, regular gasoline at one BP gas station on Chicago’s South Side was nearly $5 a gallon.

“$25 is only giving you half a tank,” Dacia, a customer who was buying a few dollars of fuel, told The Epoch Times. “I probably have to go to Indiana to find somewhere else cheaper. People don’t really have that much money.”

On March 7, average national gas prices had shattered the record set in 2008, reaching a new high of $4.104, according to GasBuddy. That number surged even higher on March 8, reaching $4.173, according to AAA.

“Gas is now officially more expensive than the movie ‘I Am Legend’ imagined it would be during the apocalypse,” PragerU’s Taylor Trandahl wrote on Twitter.

Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, said, “It’s a dire situation and won’t improve any time soon. GasBuddy now expects the yearly national average to rise to its highest ever recorded.”

The Energy Information Administration’s (EIA’s) latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) also reflects the costly new normal.

While EIA’s February STEO projected Brent crude, a key international benchmark, would average $83 per barrel in 2022 before falling to $68 per barrel in 2023, its March 8 STEO revised those estimates upward to $105.22 in 2022 and $88.98 in 2023.

Brent crude hit $139 per barrel on March 7. Some traders are betting that oil will reach $200 per barrel during March.

The most recent uptick in prices has to do with the Russia–Ukraine war, according to De Haan and other experts. Yet experts who spoke with The Epoch Times said prices had been increasing long before that conflict began.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine has added a premium to the price of crude on the global market of $15 to $20 per barrel, and promises to add more if the conflict is extended. But the oil price was $37 per barrel when Biden was elected and had already risen by $60 before Russia’s invasion due to supply and demand factors,” David Blackmon, editor of SHALE Magazine and co-host of the radio show In The Oil Patch, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“The fact is the market has been under-supplied for months now, and Biden has contributed to that greatly by his efforts to hamstring the U.S. oil industry. That’s the truth.”

Shubham Garg, founder and CEO of White Tundra Investments, told The Epoch Times, “The geopolitical risk and fear in the market does play a role. However, I think the bigger problem is a fundamental problem—we were already in an undersupplied market with a very low inventory.

“American domestic production and Canadian production have been unfairly targeted.”

Karr Ingham, a petroleum economist with the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers (TAEP), told The Epoch Times that a slow recovery from the COVID-19 production downturn partly accounted for the long-range rise in prices—a conclusion similar to that of EIA Administrator Steve Nalley, who testified before the Senate in November 2021 that rising oil prices are driven by global petroleum consumption outpacing production.

“The question is, why weren’t we growing production on the heels of that much faster than we were?” Ingham asked. “I think it’s quite safe to say that the political, legislative, and regulatory environment is openly hostile, or has been, to growing or re-establishing U.S. domestic crude oil production.

“It’s quite disingenuous to simply blame our current price levels on what Russia did, because we had a $90 base of crude oil pricing in place before this happened.”

Yet when the Biden administration has been pressed on rising gasoline prices, which have trended upward since November 2020, it has blamed Russia and exempted its own policies from fault.

At a March 4 press conference, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, “The reason why the price of gas is going up is not because of steps the president has taken. They are President [Vladimir] Putin is invading Ukraine, and that is creating a great deal of instability in the global marketplace.”

At a March 7 press conference, Psaki doubled down. Asked whether post-pandemic supply chain factors were already a driver of increased gas prices before the invasion, she said, “The anticipated continued increase … is a direct result of the invasion of Ukraine.”

“Federal policies are not limiting the supplies of oil and gas,” she later said at the same press conference.

In his Tuesday press conference announcing the Russian energy restrictions, Biden said, “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.”

He cited the fact that almost 90 percent of onshore oil production doesn’t occur on federal land, as well as the fact that oil and gas firms have more than 9,000 unused permits.

In a Fact Check released on March 7, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) pointed out that oil exploration on federal lands rapidly declined under the Obama administration.

“The reality is that federal lands vastly underperform on oil and gas production versus state and private lands because the federal government owns the majority of the mineral estate,” the IER wrote.

“You can hold a lease without deciding to develop or produce it based on the economics of that lease. Companies have always made decisions based on lease economics,” Ingham said of TAEP. “To suggest they’re not going to offer more leases until companies drill what they have now—that’s making decisions on behalf of companies that the administration is neither qualified nor authorized to make.”

Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, had a straightforward response to Biden’s March 8 comments.

“Cut the crap and approve our permits.”

Biden administration officials are making overtures to Venezuela, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in the hopes that those countries will boost production and reduce oil prices.

“Venezuela has probably some of the dirtiest oil in the world,” Garg said. “Even if they remove the sanctions, that industry is in such a collapsed state that it’s going to require hundreds of billions of dollars and expertise from America.”

“Higher oil and gas prices make electric vehicles and renewable energy more price competitive,” Blackmon said. “This is illustrated by the fact that officials like Pete Buttigieg continue to double down on that agenda as the ‘solution’ to our high gasoline price issue. That’s why you see him, Biden, and Kamala Harris advocate for more oil from Venezuela and Iran, but not from our own domestic industry.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Treasury Department to see if Biden’s ban on Russian oil and gas would still allow for energy-related “U-turn transactions,” as described by the U.S. Treasury Department in a March 2 statement on the sanctions on Russia. U-turn transactions would allow the United States to continue purchasing Russian oil and gas through a third-country financial institution.

 

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/approve-our-permits-us-oil-industry-responds-after-biden-cut-russian-gas_4322267.html

Biden’s failures by the numbers – energy costs, poll numbers tell the story

Biden’s failures by the numbers – energy costs, poll numbers tell the story

Politics is inherently a game of numbers. As it sputters into year two, the Biden presidency has been defined by two troubling and related statistics: approval ratings and energy costs.

Let’s break down both. President Biden took office with the support of 55% of Americans. A recent ABC News/Washington Post survey puts that number at 37%.

Meanwhile, the national average for a gallon of gas was $2.42 in January 2021. Today, it’s topping $4 – an increase of 66% – while oil is trading at a 13-year high of $130 a barrel. Both numbers are poised to spike even higher as the war in Ukraine rages on.

Politics is inherently a game of numbers. As it sputters into year two, the Biden presidency has been defined by two troubling and related statistics: approval ratings and energy costs.

Let’s break down both. President Biden took office with the support of 55% of Americans. A recent ABC News/Washington Post survey puts that number at 37%.

Meanwhile, the national average for a gallon of gas was $2.42 in January 2021. Today, it’s topping $4 – an increase of 66% – while oil is trading at a 13-year high of $130 a barrel. Both numbers are poised to spike even higher as the war in Ukraine rages on.

Actions by the Biden administration have unquestionably decreased American energy supply. He has made it more difficult for energy producers to obtain new oil and gas leases and permits on federal lands and in the Gulf of Mexico. He has slowed down the permitting process of pipelines and energy infrastructure, including canceling the-oft-discussed Keystone XL pipeline. Biden has championed the green scheme at an unsustainable pace, pushing for half of all vehicles in this country to go electric by the end of the decade.

But the problem extends beyond just policies. It goes to priorities. Biden and crew have demonized energy producers as untrustworthy villains responsible for the problem.

In November, the President ordered an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into, “anti-consumer behavior by oil and gas companies.” During a farcical Democrat-led House Oversight Committee hearing last fall, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna D-Calif., had the gall to ask, “Are you embarrassed as an American company that your production is going up while European counterparts are going down?”

Khanna is correct on one point. Europeans have moved away from traditional sources of energy in favor of renewables. Germany moved to eliminate its nuclear and coal capabilities altogether. But when these green forms of energy fall short, it’s fossil fuels to the rescue. In fact, the European Union is the largest importer of natural gas in the world, with almost half (41%) coming from Russia.

In November, the President ordered an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into, “anti-consumer behavior by oil and gas companies.” During a farcical Democrat-led House Oversight Committee hearing last fall, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna D-Calif., had the gall to ask, “Are you embarrassed as an American company that your production is going up while European counterparts are going down?”

Khanna is correct on one point. Europeans have moved away from traditional sources of energy in favor of renewables. Germany moved to eliminate its nuclear and coal capabilities altogether. But when these green forms of energy fall short, it’s fossil fuels to the rescue. In fact, the European Union is the largest importer of natural gas in the world, with almost half (41%) coming from Russia.

Because of their ill-advised rush to go green, Putin holds the fate of Europe’s energy in his hands. If Khanna is looking for something to be embarrassed about, he should start there. No wonder the latest sham hearing targeting energy producers has been delayed for a second time.

Ironically, through its actions, the Biden administration demonstrates they know more energy supply is desperately needed. When pressed on consumers’ pain at the pump, they point to releasing barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Last fall, Biden authorized the release of 50 million barrels. This time, it was 30 million.

For context, the U.S. goes through 18 million barrels each day. Talk about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Same with the silly one-time gas tax holidays proposed by vulnerable Democratic senators.

The administration has asked the Saudi Arabia-led OPEC to pump more oil. They are even traveling to Venezuela, a Russian ally with the largest oil reserves in the world, to explore re-starting negotiations. Trading oil with Iran is “on the table.” No word on how oil from the Middle East or brutal dictators is any better for the environment than domestic energy, and therein lies Biden’s true dilemma.

The president made many promises to the environmental left on his road to the White House. In return, the green industry shelled out a record-setting $11.1 million to his campaign. But now the cold hard reality of governing is colliding with pie-in-the-sky ideas.

It was no accident that Biden’s first State of the Union address was conspicuously light on climate talk, and not just because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Green policies have driven energy prices up and Biden’s poll numbers down.

If he doesn’t reverse course soon, there is a third set of concerning numbers coming rapidly into view: the midterm elections. That should be a terrifying thought for every Democrat facing voters this fall.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-failures-energy-poll-numbers-colin-reed