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Ruth King

Climate Policy Meets Cold Reality in Europe The rush to renewables causes severe energy price spikes and shortages. Biden’s policies would do the same in the U.S. by Allysia Finley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-policy-reality-europe-energy-costs-gas-coal-11632754849?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

European leaders at the United Nations last week applauded themselves as they doubled down on their pledges to slash CO2 emissions. And Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the U.K. “will lead by example, keeping the environment on the global agenda and serving as a launch pad for a global green industrial revolution.” Such vows of carbon chastity are, to say the least, ironic as Europe grapples with a severe energy shortage and surging prices wrought by its green industrial revolution.

In the past decade the U.K. and Europe have shut down hundreds of coal plants, and Britain has only two remaining. Spain shut down half of its coal plants last summer. European countries have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing renewables, which last year for the first time exceeded fossil fuels as a share of electricity production.

But renewables don’t provide reliable power around the clock, and wind power this summer has waned across Europe and in the U.K., forcing them to turn to gas and coal for backup power. Yet demand for these fossil fuels is also surging across Asia and South America, where drought has crimped hydropower. Manufacturers there are also consuming more energy to supply Western countries with goods.

Japan has become especially dependent on liquefied natural gas imports since it shut down most of its nuclear power plants after Fukushima in 2011. Even China has been forced to ration electricity to energy-hungry aluminum smelters because of a coal power shortfall. This has sent global aluminum prices soaring.

Increased global demand has caused the price of coal to triple and the price of natural gas to increase fivefold over the past year. Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme has pushed prices even higher. Under the program, manufacturers and power suppliers must buy carbon credits on an open trading market to offset their emissions. The price of credits has spiked this year as demand for them from coal plants and other manufacturers has increased while government regulators have tightened supply.

Russia is exploiting Europe’s energy difficulties by reducing gas deliveries, perhaps to pressure Germany to complete certification of its Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine. Russia’s Gazprom has booked only a third of the available transportation capacity through its Yamal pipeline for October and no additional deliveries via its Ukraine pipeline. Europe has become ever more dependent on Russia—the world’s second largest gas producer, after the U.S.—for energy because the U.K. and Germany have banned hydraulic fracturing, letting their rich gas shale resources go to waste. Meantime, the Netherlands is shutting down Europe’s biggest gas field.

In short, all of Europe’s green chickens are coming home to roost. Several U.K. retail electricity providers have collapsed in recent weeks because of the surging price of gas. Energy experts warn that some German power suppliers are in danger of going insolvent. Germany’s electricity prices, which were already the highest in Europe because of heavy reliance on renewables, have more than doubled since February.

Joe Biden’s Forever Diplomacy Tehran violates another international deal for nuclear inspections.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-forever-diplomacy-iran-nuclear-inspections-iaea-ebrahim-raisi-11632772480?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

That was quick. Two weeks ago Iranian officials reached a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that allowed limited entry to nuclear sites, and, wouldn’t you know, Tehran hasn’t held up its end of the bargain.

“Iran’s decision not to allow agency access to the TESA Karaj centrifuge component manufacturing workshop is contrary to the agreed terms of the joint statement issued on 12 September,” the United Nations nuclear watchdog said in a Sunday statement. It was clear at the time that the agreement wasn’t really an achievement, as it merely allowed international inspectors to service surveillance equipment without accessing data. But this makes Iran’s refusal even more embarrassing.

“Any decision taken by Iran on monitoring equipment is only based on political rather than legal considerations and the Agency cannot and should not consider it as one of its entitlements,” an Iranian official tweeted. He claimed that the site—which was sabotaged in June, likely by Israel—was never part of the agreement. Yet the IAEA has said otherwise since the deal was reached. This saga follows news this month that Iranian guards harassed female nuclear inspectors on multiple occasions this year.

Iran’s initial agreement was meant to avert a censure during the IAEA Board of Governors meeting this month, and Tehran achieved its goal. No one should be surprised that its shenanigans continued after avoiding punishment. “We call on Iran to provide the IAEA with needed access without further delay,” the U.S. said in a statement Monday. “If Iran fails to do so, we will be closely consulting with other board members in the coming days on an appropriate response.”

We argued two weeks ago that a rebuke would send an important message, even after Iran’s temporary and limited cooperation. Any nuclear agreement is pointless without a legitimate inspections regime, and an IAEA censure could in theory prompt U.N. sanctions. Supporters of appeasing the Islamic Republic argue that criticizing or pressuring Tehran isn’t productive and could derail nuclear talks. But blame for ending negotiations will lay with Iran for not cooperating with the IAEA—not the West for calling out bad behavior.

North Korea fires short-range missile to sea in latest test Associated Press HYUNG-JIN KIM

https://www.aol.com/north-korea-fires-projectile-sea-230129296-064556810.html

North Korea fired a short-range missile into the sea early Tuesday, its neighboring countries said, in the latest weapon tests by North Korea that has raised questions about the sincerity of its recent offer for talks with South Korea.

In an emergency National Security Council meeting, the South Korean government expressed regret over what it called “a short-range missile launch” by the North. South Korea’s military earlier said the object fired from North Korea’s mountainous northern Jagang province flew toward the waters off the North’s eastern coast.

The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement the launch doesn’t pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies. But it said the missile launch “highlights the destabilizing impact of (North Korea’s) illicit weapons program” and that the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Korea and Japan “remains ironclad.”

Details of the launch were being analyzed by South Korean and U.S. authorities. But Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said North Korea fired “what could be a ballistic missile” and that his government stepped up its vigilance and surveillance.

A ballistic missile launch would violate a U.N. Security Council ban on North Korean ballistic activities, but the council typically doesn’t impose new sanctions on North Korea for launches of short-range weapons.

Tests of ballistic and cruise missiles earlier this month were North Korea’s first such launches in six months and displayed its ability to attack targets in South Korea and Japan, both key U.S. allies where a total of 80,000 American troops are stationed.

Taliban issue no-shave order to barbers in Afghan province

https://www.aol.com/news/taliban-issue-no-shave-order-191041723-204954563.html

The Taliban on Monday banned barbershops in a southern Afghanistan province from shaving or trimming beards, claiming their edict is in line with Shariah, or Islamic, law.

The order in Helmand province was issued by the provincial Taliban government’s vice and virtue department to barbers in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.

“Since I have heard (about the ban on trimming beards) I am heart broken,” said Bilal Ahmad, a Lashkar Gah resident. “This is the city and everyone follows a way of living, so they have to be left alone to do whatever they want.” 

During their previous rule of Afghanistan, the Taliban adhered to a harsh interpretation of Islam. Since overrunning Kabul on Aug. 15 and again taking control of the country, the world has been watching to see whether they will re-create their strict governance of the late 1990s.

Some indication came on Saturday, when Taliban fighters killed four alleged kidnappers and later hung their bodies in the public squares of the western city of Herat.

“If anyone violates the rule (they) will be punished and no one has a right to complain,” said the order issued to the barbers. It wasn’t immediately clear what penalties the barbers could face if they don’t adhere to the no shaving or trimming rule.

Mayorkas: We won’t build a wall because it might work by Byron York,

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-mayorkas-we-wont-build-a-wall-because-it-might-work

In an appearance on Fox News Sunday , Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the Biden administration’s decision to allow thousands of illegal border crossers into the United States recently in Del Rio, Texas. Stopping them with a physical barrier — a wall or fence — is just not something the administration could “agree” with, Mayorkas said.

“Why did you allow them in the country in the first place?” asked host Chris Wallace. “Why didn’t you build — forgive me, a wall or a fence to stop them from walking — this flood of people coming across the dam, it looks like a highway that allows them to cross the Rio Grande.”

“It is the policy of this administration,” Mayorkas answered. “We do not agree with the building of the wall. The law provides that individuals can make a claim for humanitarian relief. That is actually one of our proudest traditions.”

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The subtext of Mayorkas’s answer seemed clear: A wall or fence would stop people from crossing the border illegally, which would interfere with their right to “make a claim for humanitarian relief.” So there shall be no wall or fence.

The Collapse of Biden’s World By Richard Fernandez

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/09/27/the-collapse-of-bidens-world-n1481335

Despite his vow to “build back better,” China is forcing all of Joe Biden’s moves. The Asian giant’s decision to pursue its own climate policy, consisting largely of more industrialization with green trimmings, effectively kills the Paris accords, so long a part of the progressive platform.  How could it not? Beijing produces more emissions than the EU and U.S. combined.

“In 2019, China’s emissions not only eclipsed that of the US — the world’s second-largest emitter at 11% of the global total — but also, for the first time, surpassed the emissions of all developed countries combined … When added together, GHG emissions from all members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as all 27 EU member states, reached 14,057 MMt CO2e in 2019, about 36 MMt CO2e short of China’s total.”

Not only is climate change DOA, but the post-WW2 alliance structure is in the ICU. China’s naval expansion pushed Washington to undercut the planned Australian purchase of French conventional submarines in favor of U.K.-U.S. nuclear designs. “For Mr. Macron, the [AUKUS] submarine debacle demonstrates that the NATO alliance is debilitated to the point of dysfunction through lack of trust. The glue has gone. Without transparency — and in the submarine deal there was none — alliance, in the French view, becomes an empty word.”

The “glue” that held NATO together was fear of the Soviet bear. But that once formidable bruin is mangy and supplanted by the much more formidable CCP dragon. The decline of European alliances reflects the strategic primacy of Asia. The irony was that up until Kevin Rudd became PM, Australia actually wanted to become part of Asia. But Chinese expansionism changed all that and stirred in the Aussie breast the old but not wholly forgotten memories of alliances with the English-speaking world.

But the ultimate blow to Biden’s Global World has been to its economic underpinnings. China had been going broke gradually, then all of a sudden. “The roots of the crisis date to [Chinese] tax reforms in 1994 which bolstered central government coffers but left local governments reliant on land financing for revenue.” By China’s own reckoning, the country’s vaunted economic growth rested on three huge bubbles that, once exploded, could threaten the Party’s own legitimacy. “This year, Xi has set out to reform the ‘three huge mountains’ of housing, education and healthcare to rein in soaring costs for city dwellers as a way to shore up legitimacy as the ‘people’s leader’, analysts said.”

The Communist Party encouraged the bubbles in order to tax them. But now, with the stream of new business finally exhausted and the entire edifice threatening to collapse like a house of cards, Chairman Xi has suddenly rediscovered Maoism.

New York Times Blames Powerful “Rabbis” for Crushing AOC’s Principles

Last week, the New York Times was the subject of uncomfortable attention for its coverage of a House of Representatives vote in favor of helping Israel procure more interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system.

In a piece that spent nearly as much time promoting the anti-Israeli arguments of the eight Democrats who voted against the bill as it did sharing the views of their 210 party colleagues who supported it during the September 23 vote, reporter Catie Edmonson also focused on one Member of Congress who voted “present.”

Along with most other members of the so-called “Squad” of like-minded legislators, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had initially voted against funding for the Iron Dome, which was put into heavy use last May to combat barrages of indiscriminate rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel. A short while later, though, she changed her vote from the House floor.

Edmondson had ideas about why the vote was changed:

Minutes before the vote closed, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez tearfully huddled with her allies before switching her vote to “present.” The tableau underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.

Yet again, the Times has published a blatantly antisemitic trope. Though they subsequently removed it from the online version, this ugly smear appeared in the print edition — and it has not been corrected.

It is because of coverage like this that CAMERA placed a billboardoutside the New York Times building criticizing the newspaper’s handling of antisemitism, and calling on publisher A.G. Sulzberger to right the ship.

Repulsive: John Kerry Accepts China’s Genocide to Get Climate Deal by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17801/china-climate-deal-genocide

The Beijing regime has, over the course of decades, attacked fundamental U.S. interests by, among other things, inciting violence on American streets, deliberately spreading COVID-19 beyond China’s borders to America and the rest of the world, exporting fentanyl to the U.S. despite agreements to the contrary, stealing U.S. technology and other intellectual property, rejecting the principle of freedom of navigation, threatening to grab territory from American allies, and proliferating nuclear weapons technology.

The critical question now is this: What, in addition to the human rights of China’s minorities, is the Biden administration willing to give up to get a climate deal with Beijing?

Democracies tend to deal with each other as Kerry evidently envisions, where cooperation on one issue can lead to warm relations and warm relations can lead to agreement in other areas.

Unfortunately, that is not the way communist states, especially China’s, operate. Kerry’s immediate predecessor as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, found that out the hard way in February 2009…. China did not return Clinton’s gesture of cooperation. On the contrary, Beijing pressed the advantage and went on a bender. The following month, for instance, Chinese craft harassed the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance vessel, in international waters in the South China Sea and even attacked it, trying to sever its towed sonar array.

China puts its brightest diplomats to work on human rights issues precisely because it knows it has no defense, especially now when Beijing is committing not only genocide but also other crimes against humanity. Mass rape, slavery, torture, and killing of minorities are impossible to justify. When the Biden administration does not talk about these crimes, it relieves great pressure on the Chinese regime.

Kerry is reinforcing that dangerous Chinese mindset by not talking about human rights. He is surrendering the most important leverage the United States has over China.

If you want to get Chinese communists to do something, you have to impose great costs. That gives them an incentive to do something to relieve the pain. Offers of cooperation never work for long. Unfortunately, Beijing believes signals of friendship show American weakness.

“Well, life is always full of tough choices in the relationship between nations,” said John Kerry, responding to Bloomberg’s David Weston on September 22. Weston had asked him, “What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?”

Democrats’ hyperbole is an attack on the U.S. language, history, sanity By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/democrats_hyperbole_is_an_attack_on_the_us_language_history_sanity.html

Maxine Waters, bastion of sanity that she is, recently called an image of a U.S. Border Control officer using his horse to try to prevent an illegal Haitian migrant from entering America a “whipping.” She also said it was “worse than what we witnessed in slavery.” Really? Why then are literally millions of non-Caucasian people desperately attempting to enter the country?

During the slavery era, the “Underground Railroad” was employed to bring escaped slaves to the North and out of bondage. Today, countless thousands of non-Caucasians are traveling into supposedly racist America. Are they all stupid? Masochists?

The American South of the mid-1800s didn’t need to build a wall to keep slaves out. It did everything it could to keep them in. Today, the U.S. desperately needs to complete a wall to keep people out. These facts alone prove the lie behind the “America is systemically racist hoax” being perpetrated by the utterly corrupt government-media-big tech-academia complex.   

Democrats now routinely employ unhinged, preposterous language in what should be a laughable attempt to smear all things Republican/Trumpian/traditional. It is as vile as it is ridiculous. Unfortunately, many people have been so dumbed down by government schools and the Democrat-owned corporate media that they can no longer tell the difference between bold-faced lies and the truth…or discern fantasy from reality.

The Little Café That Almost Could By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_little_caf_that_almost_cou

A Kansas City café defies county health authorities with unfortunate results.

A recent story out of Kansas City, the town in which I live, suggests just how eager the Left is to control our lives, right down to the food we eat. The story involves a friendly hole-in-the-wall café whose brave proprietor had had enough.

A little background is in order. In 2008, I somehow emerged as the public face of the opposition to a ballot measure that called for a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Kansas City. What made this unusual, and what made me an effective spokesman, was that I never smoked. Well, not that effective—my side lost the election, narrowly.

My side, as I saw it, was not pro-smoking, but pro-freedom. I argued that no law prevented entrepreneurs from banning smoking in their establishments, and no law forced anyone to eat or drink at a place where others smoked. Indeed, once I saw the election results, I half-regretted not having opened a non-smoking restaurant of my own.

Unfortunately, freedom is a much scarcer commodity today than in 2008. Back then, health officials used their bully pulpit to persuade citizens. These officials had one set of solid facts on their side, namely that smoking is dangerous, and one set of dubious assertions, namely that second-hand smoke is a health hazard. In 2008, citizens were allowed to weigh the evidence.

In 2020, although all the evidence was dubious, we were allowed to weigh nothing. There were no petitions to sign about coronavirus restrictions, no ballots to cast. Even if there had been a vote, a tightly controlled media, local and national, actively censored information that conflicted with an official orthodoxy that changed from week to week.