Charter School Sabotage

 Here is an editorial from the Wall Street Journal.

As Thomas Sowell has shown in endless detail, Charter schools have a record of offering less well off and minority children an opportunity to receive a superior education. So, a simple test of whether someone really is for improving the education of these children is to ask them if restrictions preventing Charter schools from providing their superior education to those who want it should be removed.

If you want to be informed about this issue, I recommend Charter Schools and Their Enemies by Thomas Sowell.

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The Biden Administration is deep in the tank for the teachers unions, and it is proving it again by imposing new rules to sabotage a modest $440 million grant program for charter schools.

The 28-year-old federal Charter Schools Program helps pay for charter start-up expenses such as technology and staff. The funds go chiefly to state agencies, which award the money to charters, and to nonprofit charter management organizations. The federal Department of Education recently proposed new rules that would discourage charters from even applying for grants—which may be the goal.

Applicants will now have to describe “unmet demand for the charter school.” Having hundreds or thousands of children on charter waiting lists won’t suffice. The Administration wants evidence of “over-enrollment of existing public schools,” as well as proof that the new charter “does not exceed the number of public schools needed to accommodate the demand in the community.”

This means that charter applicants in school districts with shrinking enrollment, which includes many big cities, would almost certainly be rejected. “Demand for charter schools isn’t just about demand for the availability of any seat but the demand for a high-quality seat,” says Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. That’s why charters have waiting lists in cities with empty public-school buildings.

The Administration also plans to require applicants to “collaborate” with a traditional public school or school district on an “activity” such as transportation or curriculum. In other words, charter operators will be obliged to give the teachers unions that dominate traditional school systems a say in how their charters are run.

Charters would also have to show “plans to establish and maintain racially and socio-economically diverse student and staff populations.” Many charter schools serve chiefly black and Hispanic students in cities. Charter advocates worry this needless diversity rule could discourage schools that don’t prioritize racial diversity in their enrollment models. The rule could also deter schools from opening in suburban areas, or from hiring white teachers even if they are willing, able and qualified.

States and local school districts are the main regulators and funders of charters, which are public schools. But the Administration is trying to leverage federal dollars to limit school choice and prop up failing union-run schools that received an incredible $200 billion in Covid relief since 2020.

After unions spent two pandemic years keeping public schools closed, while many charters and most private schools stayed open, this is an educational and moral disgrace.

A possible future for the Left

 Victor Davis Hanson gets it right at Jewish World Review.

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President Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a "new world order." In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a "great reset."

Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies.

When former President Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news.

There is a common theme here.

In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems.

We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws.

These "new orders" and "resets" always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes.

So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.

Hunter Biden’s lost laptop will be declared, by fiat, not news. In contrast, the fake Alfa Bank "collusion" narrative will be national headline news for weeks.

Middle class lifestyles will be curbed as we are instructed to strive for sustainability and transition to apartment living and mass transit. But the Obamas will still keep their three mansions, and Silicon Valley futurists will insist on exemptions for their yachts.

In truth, we are about to see a radical reset — of the current reset. It will be a different sort of transformation than the elites are expecting and one that they should greatly fear.

The world and the United States are furious over hyperinflation that may soon exceed 10% per year. We will be lucky if it ends only in recession or stagflation, rather than a global depression.

The mess was created by the same apparat who bought into "modern monetary theory." That silly university idea claimed prosperity would follow vastly expanding the money supply, keeping interest rates at de facto zero levels, running huge annual deficits, piling up unsustainable national debt, and subsidizing workers to stay home.

Natural gas and oil costs are now soaring to unsustainable levels — and to the point where the middle class simply will not be able to travel, keep warm in winter, or cool in summer.

Both in Europe and the United States left-wing governments deliberately curbed drilling and non-Russian pipelines. They shut down nuclear power plants and subsidized costly, inefficient solar and wind projects. They ended up not with utopia, but with fuel shortages, high prices, and energy dependency on the world’s most repressive regimes.

The woke revolution in the West was supposed to teach us that the "white male"-dominated Western world is toxic. Its origins, ascendence, and current leisure and affluence were supposedly due only to systemic exploitation, racism, and sexism.

Elites introduced cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, and social ostracism to shame these supposed exploiters and to destroy their lives and careers.

Few asked how a supposedly noxious West of some 2,500 years duration became the number one destination of millions of global non-Western migrants and offered the greatest degree of global prosperity and freedom for its citizens.

So a reset reckoning is coming — in reaction to the "new orders" championed by Biden and the Davos set.

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic "No!" to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility — as well as arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies.

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked.

Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the "color our skin."

The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre "mainstream" media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.

The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.

How Government produced our woke and wary culture.

 George Will gets it right at the Washington Post: "How America became a nation of the woke and the wary, walking on eggshells".

Once again, Government's "solution" makes the problem worse.

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Today’s festival of offended sensitivities was prefigured in 1991 at a Penn State University branch, when a female English instructor demanded that a reproduction of Goya’s “Naked Maja” (the original is in Madrid’s Prado), which had been hanging there for years, be removed from her classroom. Her alternative demand was — think about this — that a male nude be placed beside it. To balance the affront?

A campus executive ordered the picture removed because it could contribute to a “chilly” classroom climate, thus violating sexual harassment law. This harbinger of the era of “microaggressions” occurred while Congress was enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1991, adding to existing law a provision for compensatory and punitive damages — not for lost wages because of harassment, but for emotional distress.

Law shapes as well as reflects culture, and Gail L. Heriot of the University of San Diego School of Law argues in her essay “The Roots of Wokeness” that those new Title VII damage remedies propelled the nation’s downward spiral into identity politics, speech regulation and an epidemic of irritability. After the change, Heriot reports, there was “a dramatic increase in the number of harassment charges filed” and in the monetary stakes. In the final quarter of 1991, the number of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) harassment charges increased 71 percent over the same period in 1990.

The change discouraged racial and sexual harassment. At the considerable cost, Heriot argues, of “strengthen[ing] identity politics while weakening support for free expression” concerning race or sex. Because employers could be liable for a “hostile environment” created by employees, the change regarding remedial measures “made it pay for employers to start vigilantly policing their employees’ speech.” Because there were now “generous remedies for a vaguely defined wrong” — a “hostile environment” could be the cumulative effect of small annoyances — employers tended toward “zero tolerance” policies.

So, a multibillion-dollar training (“consciousness-raising,” updated) industry was born to supplement the programs of corporations’ burgeoning human resources bureaucracies. Heriot says trainers and administrators wished to justify not just their basic services but also the expansion of them: “The level of sensitivity they promoted grew ever more exacting, as exemplified by the popularization of the concepts of micro-aggressions and white privilege.”

For the sensitivity industry, the concepts of microaggressions and zero tolerance have become gifts that can never stop giving. Mostly invisible, the aggressions can be identified only by the sensitivity industry’s experts. Everyone else cannot be too careful.

It has become legally fraught for employees to say “the most qualified person should get the job,” or “America is the land of opportunity,” or “America is a melting pot,” or “All lives matter.” America has become the land of wary people walking on eggshells. Vague, shifting definitions of “harassment” inhibit the exercise of First Amendment speech rights.

In 1986, the Supreme Court held that the EEOC had correctly decided that employees have a right (herewith the court’s language) “to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult.” Heriot correctly calls this “a somewhat unusual statement” because “no one has a general ‘right’ to be free from ridicule or insult, and the federal government cannot, consistently with the First Amendment, create such a right” for “the context of employment.”

The evolving law of “harassment” and “hostile environment” prompted attitudinal changes congruent with three emerging cultural ideas: That it is wholesome to define one’s identity with reference to race, sex or ethnicity. That this should make one acutely alert to affronts, even if micro. And that there is an entitlement to pass through life without emotional distress occasioned by abraded sensitivities.

Time was, America’s aspiration was for preoccupations with racial, sexual and ethnic differences to lose political saliency, and to recede as relations between the sexes and races became more relaxed. Instead, those preoccupations have intensified as government policy has encouraged them, and embraced discrimination on the basis of them.

The Penn State instructor who objected to “Naked Maja” felt “embarrassment”: “I identified with her as a woman. I felt as though I were standing there naked, exposed and vulnerable ... I have always felt that when one woman is portrayed naked and ridiculed, we all are.” One wonders: Do people viewing the original in the Prado see ridicule?

Never mind. For America’s cultural sensitivity industry, all that matters is the response of the “victim.” The day Penn State ordered the removal of the reproduction was the day Congress passed the expanded remedies for “harassment.”

10 Realities of Ukraine

 From Victor Davis Hanson.

VDH is on target.

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One — Reassuring an enemy what one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more. Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolster deterrence. But President Joe Biden’s predictable reassurance to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will show restraint means Putin likely will not.

Two — No-fly zones don’t work in a big-power, symmetrical standoff. In a cost-benefit analysis, they are not worth the risk of shooting down the planes of a nuclear power. They usually do little to stop planes outside of such zones shooting missiles into them. Sending long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft batteries to Ukraine to deny Russian air superiority is a far better way of regaining air parity.

Three — Europe, NATO members, and Germany in particular have de facto admitted that their past decades of shutting down nuclear plants, coal mines, and oil and gas fields have left Europe at the mercy of Russia. They are promising to rearm and meet their promised military contributions. By their actions, they are admitting that their critics, the United States in particular, were right, and they were dangerously wrong in empowering Putin.

Four — China is now pro-Russian. Beijing wants Russian natural resources at a discount. Russia will pay for overpriced access to Chinese finance, commerce, and markets. Yet if Russia loses the Ukraine war, goes broke, and as an international pariah is ostracized, then China will likely cut the smelly Russian albatross from its neck — in fear of new Western financial, cultural, and commercial clout.

Five — Americans are finally digesting just how destructive the humiliating flight from Afghanistan was. The catastrophe signaled to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that Western deterrence had died.

No surprise that Russia sent missiles into a Ukrainian base near the Polish-NATO border. North Korea in January launched more missiles than in any month in its history. Iran sent missiles into Kurdistan. China announces daily it is just a matter of time until it absorbs Taiwan. The tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry sent to Ukraine by the West are still far less than what the U.S. military handed over to the terrorist Taliban.

Six — The Ukraine war did not cause inflation and record gas prices. Both were already spiking by early February 2022.

The cause was the Biden Administration’s year-long radical expansion of the money supply at a time of post-COVID, pent-up consumer demand. It foolishly continued de facto zero-interest rates. Its generous COVID subsidies for the unemployed discouraged a return to work, while slashing U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines.

Prior to Putin’s invasion, Biden was quite publicly blaming greedy corporations, oil companies, COVID, and former President Donald Trump for the inflation he had birthed in 2021. And he was claiming undeniable high prices were only temporary or mostly an obsession of the elite.

Seven — Putin did not invade during the Trump tenure, although he had been more aggressive under previous American leadership with his prior attacks on Georgia, Ukraine, and Crimea. Russia stayed still when oil prices were low, fuel supplies in the West were plentiful, and the United States was confident. When the U.S. was neither bogged down in optional military interventions nor led by a president predictably accommodating to Russian aggressions, Russia stayed quiet.

Putin took note of increased NATO and U.S. defense spending. He feared low global oil prices and record American oil and gas production. He was wary after unpredictable American strikes against enemies like ISIS, Abu al-Baghdadi, and the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Eight — It is not “escalation” to send arms to Ukraine. The Russians far more aggressively supplied the North Koreans and North Vietnamese in their wars against America, without spreading the war globally. Pakistan, Syria, and Iran sent deadly weapons — many in turn supplied to them by Russia, North Korea, and China — to kill thousands of Americans during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Nine — Putin may never fully absorb Ukraine as long as it can easily be supplied across its borders by four NATO countries. The U.S. deadlocked in the Korean War, lost the Vietnam War, was stalled in Iraq, and fled Afghanistan in part because its enemies were easily supplied by nearby border friends on the assumption the U.S. could not strike such abettors.

Ten — It is not “un-American” to point out that prior American appeasement under the Obama and the Biden Administrations explains not why Putin wished to go into Ukraine, but why he felt he could. It is not “treasonous” to say Ukraine and the United States previously should have stayed out of each other’s domestic affairs and politics — but still do not excuse Putin’s savage aggression. It is not traitorous to admit that Russia for centuries relied on buffer states between Europe — lost when its Warsaw Pact satellite members joined NATO after its defeat in the Cold War. But that reality also does not justify Putin’s savage attack.

We should not rehash the past but learn from it — and thereby ensure Putin is defeated now and deterred in the future.

Biden bans oil imports from Russia - does that hurt Russia? The US?

 OK, so here is one scenario. I think most other likely scenarios have similar outcomes.

Suppose oil is at $120 a barrel and we stop importing one million barrels of oil from Russia. Biden calls Maduro in Venezuela and says he wants to buy one million barrels of oil. Maduro calls Putin and negotiates a purchase of one million barrels of oil at $125 per barrel. That price reflects Putin's guess that it is going to the US. Maduro then calls Biden and negotiates a sale of one million barrels of oil at $130 per barrel. Putin gains, Maduro gains, the US loses.

A Rapidly Closing Window to Secure a Liveable Future

Here is a link to an article by Roger Pielke at substack.com. RP is a professor in Colorado who studies and writes about the messy and complicated places where science meets politics - rogerpielkejr.com.

Here are some excerpts.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an important organization with a primary purpose to assess the scientific literature on climate in order to inform policy. The IPCC spans the physical sciences, impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and economics. I have often stated that the IPCC is so important that if it did not exist we’d need to invent it, because the challenge of climate change presents significant risks. As a consequence, both mitigation and adaptation responses must be a priority. Rigorous scientific assessments are thus needed to inform policy making. Earlier this week the IPCC’s Working Group 2 (WG2) report was released on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability — Working Group 1 on the physical sciences was released last year and Working Group 3 on economics will come later this year.

Regrettably, the IPCC WG2 has strayed far from its purpose to assess and evaluate the scientific literature, and has positioned itself much more as a cheerleader for emissions reductions and produced a report that supports such advocacy. The IPCC exhorts: “impacts will continue to increase if drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are further delayed – affecting the lives of today’s children tomorrow and those of their children much more than ours … Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

The focus on emissions reductions is a major new orientation for WG2, which previously was focused exclusively on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The new focus on mitigation is explicit, with the IPCC WG2 noting (1-31) that its focus “expands significantly from previous reports” and now includes “the benefits of climate change mitigation and emissions reductions.” This new emphasis on mitigation colors the entire report, which in places reads as if adaptation is secondary to mitigation or even impossible.
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Allow me to go into the weeds just briefly (on Twitter I document many such journeys). The WG2 finding about about increasing damages from floods relies on three papers (Hirabayashi et al. 2021, Dottori et al. 2018 and Alfieri et al. 2017) . . .

But when you actually go to these three studies, you find that they are not in fact projecting future damages, as claimed by WG2. They are instead exploring what would happen if climate changes projected for 2100 are imposed upon current society. These studies have in fact eliminated the possibility of adaptation in projecting the future. This is of course ridiculous as projection and of little use in a report about adaptation.

Even worse, each of the three studies utilizes the out-of-date and implausible extreme RCP8.5 scenario to project climate changes for 2100. So not only is society frozen in time, unable to adapt — which is clearly implausible, but future climate change is projected based on an extreme scenario that is also implausible. Implausibility built on implausibility offers no practical insight as to the role of adaptation in reducing vulnerabilities and increasing resilience. We might expect this sort of thing from a passionate advocacy group spinning science for theatrical effect, but not the IPCC.
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Of course, adaptation has long been viewed as problematic in climate policy and politics. The example above indicates why that is so — rather than supporting an apocalyptic view of ever-worsening impacts as a simple function of temperature increases, adaptation opportunities allow for positive human outcomes even as the climate changes. The WG2 misrepresentation of the literature of flooding is repeated throughout the report for other phenomena. Adaptation is often ignored or minimized in favor of presenting impacts as worsening a function of ever-increasing temperatures. In reality, adaptation has great potential to result in positive human futures at a wide range of levels of future emissions and temperature changes. Mitigation and adaptation are both important and the IPCC WG2 did itself and us a huge disservice by adding mitigation to its focus.

And it gets even worse. The RCP8.5 scenario which showed up in the case of flooding above is infused throughout this report. In fact, RCP8.5 plays a greater role in this report than any past IPCC report (the table below shows a count of each scenario explicitly mentioned in the report). This matters because RCP8.5 and similar extreme scenarios are now widely understood to be implausible. The IPCC Working Group 1 even acknowledged last year that such extreme scenarios are viewed as low likelihood with scenarios such as RCP4.5 more likely. Even so, RCP8.5 dominates the WG2 report’s outlook on the future (with RCP4.5 often improperly presented as mitigation success — on current policies the world is presently on track to undershoot RCP4.5 outcomes).
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In fact, it is puzzling why it is that as scientific literature has accumulated indicating that such extreme scenarios are implausible — e.g., a 2017 study concluded, “RCP8.5 should not be a priority for future scientific research” — the IPCC has chosen to increase its reliance on these discredited scenarios.

The West’s’ Green Delusions Empowered Putin

Michael Shellenberger gets it right at substack.com.

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How has Vladimir Putin—a man ruling a country with an economy smaller than that of Texas, with an average life expectancy 10 years lower than that of France—managed to launch an unprovoked full-scale assault on Ukraine?

There is a deep psychological, political and almost civilizational answer to that question: He wants Ukraine to be part of Russia more than the West wants it to be free. He is willing to risk tremendous loss of life and treasure to get it. There are serious limits to how much the U.S. and Europe are willing to do militarily. And Putin knows it.

Missing from that explanation, though, is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe.

Putin knows that Europe produces 3.6 million barrels of oil a day but uses 15 million barrels of oil a day. Putin knows that Europe produces 230 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year but uses 560 billion cubic meters. He knows that Europe uses 950 million tons of coal a year but produces half that.

The former KGB agent knows Russia produces 11 million barrels of oil per day but only uses 3.4 million. He knows Russia now produces over 700 billion cubic meters of gas a year but only uses around 400 billion. Russia mines 800 million tons of coal each year but uses 300.

That’s how Russia ends up supplying about 20 percent of Europe’s oil, 40 percent of its gas, and 20 percent of its coal.

The math is simple. A child could do it.

The reason Europe didn’t have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression—and in fact prevented the U.S. from getting allies to do more—is that it needs Putin’s oil and gas.

The question is why.

How is it possible that European countries, Germany especially, allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War?

Here’s how: These countries are in the grips of a delusional ideology that makes them incapable of understanding the hard realities of energy production. Green ideology insists we don’t need nuclear and that we don’t need fracking. It insists that it’s just a matter of will and money to switch to all-renewables—and fast. It insists that we need “degrowth” of the economy, and that we face looming human “extinction.” (I would know. I myself was once a true believer.)

John Kerry, the United States’ climate envoy, perfectly captured the myopia of this view when he said, in the days before the war, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “could have a profound negative impact on the climate, obviously. You have a war, and obviously you’re going to have massive emissions consequences to the war. But equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus.”

But it was the West’s focus on healing the planet with “soft energy” renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply.

As the West fell into a hypnotic trance about healing its relationship with nature, averting climate apocalypse and worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves.

While he expanded nuclear energy at home so Russia could export its precious oil and gas to Europe, Western governments spent their time and energy obsessing over “carbon footprints,” a term created by an advertising firm working for British Petroleum. They banned plastic straws because of a 9-year-old Canadian child’s science homework. They paid for hours of “climate anxiety” therapy.

While Putin expanded Russia’s oil production, expanded natural gas production, and then doubled nuclear energy production to allow more exports of its precious gas, Europe, led by Germany, shut down its nuclear power plants, closed gas fields, and refused to develop more through advanced methods like fracking.

The numbers tell the story best. In 2016, 30 percent of the natural gas consumed by the European Union came from Russia. In 2018, that figure jumped to 40 percent. By 2020, it was nearly 44 percent, and by early 2021, it was nearly 47 percent.

For all his fawning over Putin, Donald Trump, back in 2018, defied diplomatic protocol to call out Germany publicly for its dependence on Moscow. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump said. This prompted Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who had been widely praised in polite circles for being the last serious leader in the West, to say that her country “can make our own policies and make our own decisions.”

The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured.

Europeans—led by figures like Greta Thunberg and European Green Party leaders, and supported by Americans like John Kerry—believed that a healthy relationship with the Earth requires making energy scarce. By turning to renewables, they would show the world how to live without harming the planet. But this was a pipe dream. You can’t power a whole grid with solar and wind, because the sun and the wind are inconstant, and currently existing batteries aren’t even cheap enough to store large quantities of electricity overnight, much less across whole seasons.

In service to green ideology, they made the perfect the enemy of the good—and of Ukraine.

Take Germany.

Green campaigns have succeeded in destroying German energy independence—they call it Energiewende, or “energy turnaround”—by successfully selling policymakers on a peculiar version of environmentalism. It calls climate change a near-term apocalyptic threat to human survival while turning up its nose at the technologies that can help address climate change most and soonest: nuclear and natural gas.

At the turn of the millennium, Germany’s electricity was around 30 percent nuclear-powered. But Germany has been sacking its reliable, inexpensive nuclear plants. (Thunberg called nuclear power “extremely dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming” despite the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change deeming it necessary and every major scientific review deeming nuclear the safest way to make reliable power.)

By 2020, Germany had reduced its nuclear share from 30 percent to 11 percent. Then, on the last day of 2021, Germany shut down half of its remaining six nuclear reactors. The other three are slated for shutdown at the end of this year. (Compare this to nextdoor France, which fulfills 70 percent of its electricity needs with carbon-free nuclear plants.)

Germany has also spent lavishly on weather-dependent renewables—to the tune of $36 billion a year—mainly solar panels and industrial wind turbines. But those have their problems. Solar panels have to go somewhere, and a solar plant in Europe needs 400 to 800 times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants to make the same amount of power. Farmland has to be cut apart to host solar. And solar energy is getting cheaper these days mainly because Europe’s supply of solar panels is produced by slave labor in concentration camps as part of China’s genocide against Uighur Muslims.

The upshot here is that you can’t spend enough on climate initiatives to fix things if you ignore nuclear and gas. Between 2015 and 2025, Germany’s efforts to green its energy production will have cost $580 billion. Yet despite this enormous investment, German electricity still costs 50 percent more than nuclear-friendly France’s, and generating it produces eight times more carbon emissions per unit. Plus, Germany is getting over a third of its energy from Russia.

Germany has trapped itself. It could burn more coal and undermine its commitment to reducing carbon emissions. Or it could use more natural gas, which generates half the carbon emissions of coal, but at the cost of dependence on imported Russian gas. Berlin was faced with a choice between unleashing the wrath of Putin on neighboring countries or inviting the wrath of Greta Thunberg. They chose Putin.

Because of these policy choices, Vladimir Putin could turn off the gas flows to Germany, and quickly threaten Germans’ ability to cook or stay warm. He or his successor will hold this power for every foreseeable winter barring big changes. It’s as if you knew that hackers had stolen your banking details, but you won’t change your password.

This is why Germany successfully begged the incoming Biden administration not to oppose a contentious new gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2. This cut against the priorities of green-minded governance: On day one of Biden’s presidency, one of the new administration’'s first acts was to shut down the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. in service to climate ideology. But Russia’s pipeline was too important to get the same treatment given how dependent Germany is on Russian imports. (Once Russia invaded, Germany was finally dragged into nixing Nord Stream 2, for now.)

Naturally, when American sanctions on Russia’s biggest banks were finally announced in concert with European allies last week, they specifically exempted energy products so Russia and Europe can keep doing that dirty business. A few voices called for what would really hit Russia where it hurts: cutting off energy imports. But what actually happened was that European energy utilities jumped to buy more contracts for the Russian oil and gas that flows through Ukraine. That’s because they have no other good options right now, after green activism’s attacks on nuclear and importing fracked gas from America. There’s no current plan for powering Europe that doesn’t involve buying from Putin.


We should take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a wake-up call. Standing up for Western civilization this time requires cheap, abundant, and reliable energy supplies produced at home or in allied nations. National security, economic growth, and sustainability requires greater reliance on nuclear and natural gas, and less on solar panels and wind turbines, which make electricity too expensive.

The first and most obvious thing that should be done is for President Biden to call on German Chancellor Scholz to restart the three nuclear reactors that Germany closed in December. A key step in the right direction came on Sunday when Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, the economy and climate minister, announced that Germany would at least consider stopping its phaseout of nuclear. If Germany turns these three on and cancels plans to turn off the three others, those six should produce enough electricity to replace 11 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year—an eighth of Germany’s current needs.

Second, we need concerted action led by Biden, Congress, and their Canadian counterparts to significantly expand oil and natural gas output from North America to ensure the energy security of our allies in Europe and Asia. North America is more energy-rich than anyone dreamed. Yes, it will be more expensive than Russian gas sent by pipeline. But it would mean Europe could address Putin’s war on Ukraine, rather than financing it.

Exporting gas by ship requires special terminals at ports to liquify (by cooling) natural gas; environmentalists oppose these terminals because of their ideological objection to any combustible fuel. So it’s a good sign that Chancellor Sholz announced plans on Sunday to build two of these terminals to receive North American gas, along with announcing major new military spending to counter Russia.

Third, the U.S. must stop shutting down nuclear plants and start building them. Every country should invest in next-generation nuclear fuel technology while recognizing that the current generation of light-water reactors are our best tool for creating energy at home, with no emissions, right now. What you’ve heard about waste is mostly pseudoscience. Storing used fuel rods is a trivial problem, already solved around the world by keeping them in steel and concrete cans. The more nuclear power we generate, the less oil and gas we have to burn. And the less the West will have to buy from Russia.

Putin’s relentless focus on energy reality has left him in a stronger position than he should ever have been allowed to find himself. It’s not too late for the rest of the West to save the world from tyrannical regimes that have been empowered by our own energy superstitions.