Review: Apocalypse Never

During the 2020 Presidential election campaign, I wondered why some very, very rich people were not only supporting Democratic candidate Joe Biden but contributing record amounts of money to his campaign. After all, he was threatening to raise taxes especially on those making over $400000 per year.

 

Was there more to his appeal than met the eye? Billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates did not become rich by neglecting to get good returns on their investments or their political contributions. You may remember that after his own campaign tanked, Billionaire Michael Bloomburg, the former mayor of New York City, invested millions to help Biden carry the pivotal state of Florida. Was it just hatred of President Trump? 

 

As the old saying goes. “Follow the Money.” Could it be that these very rich Democrats saw an opportunity to profit even more by supporting Progressive causes? After all, if you can substantially increase your assets by gaining access to government stimulus money, why not pay a little more in Federal income taxes?

 

Michael Schellenberger, a committed environmentalist, described how billionaires have profited from climate change activism in his book, Apocalypse Never.  Subtitled, “Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” the book offers a balanced assessment on climate change and how to deal with it. However, he also details how well connected politicians and venture capitalists have profited from government environmental spending.  

 

Schellenberger quotes John Doerr, a venture capitalist, who found an upside in climate change.“Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet,” Doerr said. “It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”

 

During the administration of President Obama, Shellenberger admits that he was involved in an environmental program that could be regarded as a forerunner of the Green New Deal. But things did not work out as he expected. He writes:

 

Between 2009 and 2015, the U.S. government spent about $150 billion on our Green New Deal, $90 billion of it in stimulus money.

 

Stimulus money wasn’t evenly distributed but rather clustered around donors to President Obama and the Democratic Party. At least ten members of Obama’s finance committee and more than twelve of his fundraising bundlers, who raised a minimum of $100,000 for Obamo, benefitted from $16.4 of the $20.5 billion in stimulus loans.

 

Fisker, which produced some of the world’s first luxury hybrid vehicles, received $529 million in federal loans; Doerr was one of Fisker’s major investors. It eventually went bankrupt, costing taxpayers 132 million. … (217-218)

 

But the loans were just one program among many others that funneled money to well-connected Obama donors without creating many jobs. The most famous of the green investments was when DOE gave $575 million to a solar company called Solyndra, 35 percent of which was owned by a billionaire donor and fundraising bundler for Obama, George Kaiser.

 

Nobody wanted to invest in Solyndra because its panels were too expensive, which independently minded DOE staffers pointed out. They were overruled, however, and the loan was approved.

 

The people who benefitted most from the green stimulus were billionaires, including Musk, Doerr, Kaiser, Khosla, Ted Turner, Pat Stryker, and Paul Tudor Jones. Vinod Khosla led Obama’s “India Policy team” during the 2008 election and was a major financial contributor to Democrats. His companies received more than $399 million.

 

However, few Democratic Party donors outperformed Doerr when it came to receiving federal stimulus loans. More than half of the companies in his Genentech portfolio… received loans or outright grants from the government. “Considering that the acceptance rate in most of the Department of Energy programs was often 10 percent or less, this is a stunning record,” wrote an investigative reporter. (218)

 

Shellenberger’s research led him to conclude that nuclear power is the answer not only to creating a cleaner environment but also to providing for the world’s expanding energy needs. But he documents the efforts of pseudo-scientific activists and self- interested politicians like former Governor Jerry Brown of California to shut down nuclear power in California. Brown and his family were heavily invested in fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.

 

Apocalypse Never does offer solutions to serious environmental problems but it is also a sad story when it details how many have profited by alarming people all over the globe. He cites his own example as typical of many:

 

I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the environment.

 

Nothing is sadder that the plight of now-famous teenager Greta Thunberg who, like many other children, has been traumatized by climate alarmists. She claims that her childhood was taken from her by these fears, and truly believes that the human race will be extinct in 15 years. Who taught her that?

 

In Apocalypse Never Michael Shellenberger concludes that there is much more reason for optimism than pessimism. 

 

Conventional air pollution peaked fifty years ago in developed nations and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others.

 

The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests are growing back and wildlife is returning.

 

There is no reason poor nations can’t develop and adapt to climate change. Deaths from extreme events should keep declining….

 

None of this means there isn’t work to do. There is plenty. But much if not most of it has to do with accelerating those existing, positive trends, not trying to reverse them in a bid to return to low-energy agrarian societies.

 

Now the Biden Administration is pushing Green energy programs and subsidies that far exceed those of the Obama administration. Why is the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not concerned about  massive solar farms that destroy desert environments, or windmill complexes that kill thousands of birds each year, or the disposal problems related to toxic lithium automobile batteries? The people who use the threat of climate change to make fortunes or gain votes should be ashamed of themselves. 

 

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Easter Signs 2022

 

I was born and raised a Catholic and have remained so for 82 years. Frankly, I have to say that I still like being a Catholic. One of the many reasons is the great feast of Easter. At Mass the other day, we heard the story of a woman who was about to be stoned to death for adultery by an angry crowd of accusers who had apparently caught her in the act. They brought her to Jesus to get his opinion before proceeding. His reply still resounds through the ages. "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone." 

Hearing those words, the crowd melted away, and the woman was left alone with Jesus. He said that since no one would condemn her, neither would he. But he just told her to sin no more. He had in effect raised her from the brink of death and then showed her the way to live thereafter. Her resurrection is a sign of his own resurrection that we celebrate on Easter. 

There are many other signs that remind us of Easter. Some have become secularized and commercialized but I still like them. The Easter egg is a symbol that refers to the tomb from which Jesus arose on Easter Sunday. The Easter bunny itself is a a sign of the risen Christ seen by believers in the Eucharistic host. The great Renaissance artist Titian featured it in a painting that is usually called the Madonna of the Rabbit.

More often the risen Christ is depicted as the Lamb of God from the Book of Revelation. More than 500 years ago, Jan van Eyck painted the most famous version of the Mystical Lamb in the Ghent altarpiece. In my own parish church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Fairfield, Connecticut, the Lamb is shown in the center of a beautiful Rose window at the back of the Church. The Lamb reclines on the Book of the Seven Seals with a triumphal cross and banner.

 The word "Easter" comes from a Germanic goddess of spring. Latin peoples use the word pasqua from the Jewish pasch or passover. When the Germanic peoples were converted the Church wisely associated the word for Springtime with the feast of the Risen Lord. All around us new life is springing from the dead of winter. 

One of the many traditions associated with Easter was the famous Easter Parade, especially on New York's 5th Avenue. Here is a link to the ending of the film Easter Parade that featured Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. He was a little old but she was never lovelier than when she sings the title song. Or view the brief video below.

Happy Easter.

Gender Pay Gap 2022

 

 

This year, Equal Pay Day arrived for women on March 15. According to gender rights advocates, the average woman must add to her 2021 income two and a half months of work in 2022 to make as much as the average white man made in 2021. In other words, a woman only makes 83% of what a man makes in income. Black and Latina women are even more disadvantaged compared to white men. Oddly, the wages of black and Hispanic men are usually excluded from the calculations for black and Hispanic women. 

 

Usually, Equal Pay Day occurs in early April and in the past news sources have headlined the terrible injustice of the gender pay gap. But this year’s date, even though it was the earliest on record and should have been good news for equal rights advocates, was hardly reported despite the fact that it was marked by a Presidential Proclamation dutifully signed by President Joe Biden.  The news sources I follow never mentioned it. Why? Was it the fact that good news is no news? It seems more likely that in the past gender pay disparity was useful as a tool by left wing advocacy groups to smear their opponents. Why broadcast pay inequity now when they have a friendly Democratic administration in Washington. Whatever the reason, it was always a bogus story. Here’s why.

 

Gender gap ratios do not actually compare salaries of full-time employees working the same job. Such reports just use averages based on the salaries of men and women across companies, industries, and job titles. How this information is gathered is a mystery to me. I suspect Census data or IRS compilations are used but these figures often show great variation. 

 

Interestingly, it is difficult for those calling for new laws to deal with wage discrimination to find actual instances of wage discrimination. After all, both Federal and Connecticut law forbids wage discrimination. A few years ago, a spokesperson for the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities reported, “the number of women who complain about not getting as much as their male counterparts is small.” 

 

All government employees, for example, work on gender-neutral pay scales. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, mail carriers, all get the same pay for the same work. Even high-income occupations are no longer the exclusive male bastions of the past. The medical and financial professions have become increasingly open to women and will become more so since the majority of college graduates today are women. No modern corporation would dare to have differing wage scales for men and women. Nevertheless, most engineering students are still men and over 90% of art history students are women, a factor that obviously contributes to disparity in income.

 

I would venture to guess that the disparity in gender income is largely based on decisions that people choose to make. A few years ago, a statistical survey came to the comical conclusion that it was better for a woman to live in Bridgeport, CT where the gender gap was narrow, than in Darien or New Canaan where it was the widest despite the fact that the average income of women in those towns is twice the income of women living in Bridgeport. Obviously, talented well-educated women choose to live in towns like New Canaan and Darien because of the beautiful homes, excellent school systems, and crime free streets. 

 

One of the statistics noted that in both New Canaan and Darien the number of married women in the work force is only about 40% compared to a national average of about 60%. While one of the “experts” quoted in the article referred to the “nostalgic idea of what the family is supposed to look like,” and called it a “romantic notion,” it still seems to be working very well in New Canaan and Darien. Compare that romantic notion with the one espoused years ago by Murphy Brown and see the devastation that single motherhood has brought to the lives of so many single mothers and their children in cities like Bridgeport.

 

It is a sad fact that the low income of single, unwed mothers does statistically drag down average median income for women. Poverty is practically an inevitable result when women have children before they have jobs or marry. The obvious success of Asian immigrants in this country is basically due to what one researcher called a traditional “success sequence” of education, work, marriage, and children in that order. In China, where she grew up, illegitimacy was unthinkable. Even in modern China, the out of wedlock birth rate is only 4%. 

 

The same figures used by gender rights advocates show that women of Asian descent make substantially more that black or Hispanic women. Politicians in New York City are trying to change the admission standards for the City’s elite public high schools. Candidates for admission must take a competitive entrance exam to get into one of these schools. Currently, students of Asian immigrants gain 50% of the places even though Asian-Americans make up only 16% of the city’s population. I suspect that Asian women do as well if not better than white men on these tests.

 

Politicians and commentators who think that legal measures like minimum wage laws and paid family leave will close the gender gap are sadly mistaken. Using their own figures, it appears as if the gender-equity gap has disappeared in cities like Bridgeport. What has been the result? Has Bridgeport become utopia? It used to be said that if you were not part of the solution, you were part of the problem. But if you don’t understand the problem, you can’t be part of the solution. 

 

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