The real reason The West needs AI
So dumb that the reds profit, while the greens impoverish..
MGH: The sheer ‘collective stupidity’ of The West in the past 15 years has been absolutely staggering. Bring on the artificial intelligence if for no other reason! The list is so long — complacent disarmament, artificial Quantitive Easing when instead there should have been natural Creative Destruction, discretionary monetary policy, the derogation of capitalist animal spirits with the de-incentivising of self-reliance by means of welfare entitlements and the micro-engineering of complex breaks and credits from public taxation, the toppling of all the finest secular monuments of Western civilisation, the revival of pre-Darwinian pre-scientific religiosity in the mistaken belief that this will unite the flock in defence of sensible conservative ideology, changing genders, unselective uncontrolled migration, turning asylum seeking into systematic rent seeking, etc. But perhaps nothing has been quite so stupid as the zero-emissions crusade at a time when the priority should have been to blend modern science and technological intelligence with the natural evolutionary adaptive instincts that served humans so tremendously well through two or three million years of previous and far worse climate change. Here’s the punchline: the world’s largest emitter of fossil carbon dioxide is the world’s largest anti-capitalist central planner, the world’s second biggest economy, the greatest threat to world peace, and the world’s largest profiteer and rent seeker feeding off the self-destructive industries of back-to-neolithic greenery that would starve AI and my lightbulbs of needed energy. A really quite brilliant strategy for the final victory of communism.
Who can save us from this madness?
To find out the answer, read the ever-insightful Walter Russell Mead —
Trump Outsmarts China on Green Energy. By dismantling the net-zero agenda, he ramps up economic pressure on Beijing.
So much is happening so quickly in Washington these days that Donald Trump’s war on the green climate agenda has passed almost unnoticed. Steps like pulling out of the Paris Agreement, dropping electric-vehicle mandates, ending offshore leasing for wind projects, and fast-tracking fossil-fuel infrastructure would have dominated the news in quieter times. …
… Call it brilliant Chinese planning or gross Western incompetence, but the only real winner from the green agenda that Western governments have done so much to impose on the world is Beijing. Solar power cells, wind turbines, electric vehicles and the batteries that keep them moving: China has swiftly established dominance in one critical industry and supply chain after another.
This was eminently foreseeable. The Chinese Communist Party’s economic planners in Beijing are the most effective technocrats the world has ever known, eclipsing the fumbling Soviet planners of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Give them a set of targets, a timetable and a list of technologies to promote, and they will coordinate state policy, banking subsidies and market forces to produce world-beating industries in record time. The European and American architects of the green transition were unintentionally creating a playing field ideally suited to China’s core strengths, and Beijing took full advantage. …
MGH: And now I reposition my ‘Development Economist’ hat to bring you more good news scepticism about the rather-redder-than-greener Foreign Aid debacles.
TIP FOR TRUMP
The following article is written by Diana Furchtgott-Roth and do please note that she also supports the Taylor Rule Utility which was invented by John Taylor who is one of our most esteemed loyal readers of Social Science Files. I noticed a few days ago that Kenneth Rogoff said in passing that “the Taylor Rule has played a pivotal role in shaping modern monetary policy” … but has the current Fed really been listening?
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth
Diana is the author or coauthor of six books and hundreds of articles on economic policy, including Regulating to Disaster: How Green Jobs Policies are Destroying America's Economy (Encounter Books, 2012). Her most recent book is United States Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2021). She received degrees in Economics from Swarthmore College and Oxford University.
It’s now in America’s power to drastically cut illegal migration to Europe. By rolling back the ban on loans for fossil fuel projects in poorer countries, Trump would give them a real chance to grow.
President Donald Trump is coming under fire for closing down the US Agency for International Development, potentially ending billions in foreign aid. But to really help emerging economies, and stem migration pressures as part of the bargain, president Trump could, at no cost, roll back the ban on loans to poor countries for fossil fuel power projects.
Currently, international development organisations and private banks are pressured to lend only for green energy. That means no loans for power plants, transmission lines for fossil fuel electricity, or distribution lines and metres to people’s homes.
Refusing to lend for fossil fuel power projects has more harmful economic effects than ending some of USAid’s $40 billion in funding, because this ban keeps emerging economies poor. Lack of fossil fuel energy is impoverishing many African and Latin American countries and placing pressure on residents to migrate to fossil fuel rich areas, particularly Europe and North America, in search of higher standards of living.
Consider that, in 2020, 11 million African-born migrants were living in Europe; five million in Asia; and three million in North America. The same year, about 25 million people from Latin America were living in North America.
Over 140 private banks from 44 countries, including Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, and Sumitomo, joined the United Nation’s Net Zero Banking Alliance and effectively pledged to reduce lending for fossil fuel projects. Some have now withdrawn from the alliance, but the World Bank still discourages lending for fossil fuels and prioritises renewables.
The relationship between economic development and energy use is so strong that, according to my research for the Heritage Foundation, not a single nation has high per capita income and low per capita energy usage. Conversely, no country has high energy use per capita and low per capita income.
Higher energy use allows for better lives from higher productivity, increased agricultural yields, and higher household consumption, which reduces the drudgery of subsistence farming. With energy, farmers either have access to innovative farming technologies, or gain economic mobility to learn other skills to make a livelihood.
Countries that only use around 500 kilowatt hours of energy per person annually often have subsistence-level production and incomes of around $1,000 per year, making migration an attractive prospect. When energy consumption is above 10,000 kWh per person, poverty declines drastically, with a virtual eradication around 100,000 kWh per person.
High-energy-use nations have access to more doctors and safer drinking water, which results in lower maternal and child mortality, as well as investments in pollution-mitigation measures.
The West romanticises nature, but natural disasters inflict disproportionately greater humanitarian damage on poor and developing countries than on wealthy ones, due to disparities in warning systems, resilient shelters, and the means to quickly recover. Access to affordable energy is vital to rectify these inequalities.
For example, Lesotho, Djibouti, and Zimbabwe each consumed less than 4,000 kWh of energy on a per capita basis in 2018. That year, they each had an average of about $4,450 in per capita income and consumed approximately $3,400 (in 2018 dollars). On the other hand, Norway, the United States, and Iceland each consumed more than 80,000 kWh of energy (per capita) and each had almost $45,000 in per capita GDP and more than $22,000 in consumption.
Similarly, countries that consume low amounts of energy suffer from poorer agricultural yields. For example, in 2018, Burundi, Niger, and Rwanda consumed between 200 kWh and 500 kWh of energy per person and were not able to produce more than two tonnes of corn and three tonnes of wheat per hectare, largely due to less automated practices. But New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Denmark each consumed around 30,000 kWh of energy per person and produced more than five tonnes of corn and six tonnes of wheat per hectare. Energy provides mechanised harvesting as well as access to fertilisers.
The same goes for medical care. In 2018, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda each consumed less than 900 kWh of energy per person and had less than one doctor per 1,000 people, life expectancies less than 67 years of age, child mortality rates above 4,000 deaths per 100,000, and maternal mortality rates exceeding 200 per 100,000 live births (2017 figures). In contrast, Japan, Italy, and Greece had more than 30,000 kWh of energy per person, and more than 2.4 doctors per 1,000 people, life expectancies exceeding 80 years of age, child mortality rates less than 500 per 100,000, and maternal mortality rates less than 12 per 100,000 live births.
When low-energy-use countries are prevented from accessing reliable energy, their residents often search abroad for other opportunities. Illegal immigration is imposing substantial economic costs on the United States and Western Europe. Allowing real economic progress in Latin America and Africa would relieve some of the pressure to move.
If America truly wanted to help people in low-income countries and reduce migration, President Trump doesn’t need to spend $40 billion. He could reject current global mandates that deprive people of reliable, affordable energy and encourage banks to lend for fossil fuel and nuclear power.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is the director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at The Heritage Foundation
Here is more on USAID, by Joni Ernst:
Sen. Joni Ernst: USAID Is a Rogue Agency. It dodges congressional questions about money that went to sex traffickers and the Wuhan virus lab.
… The U.S. Agency for International Development, entrusted with disbursing tens of billions of aid dollars to other nations annually, is a rogue bureaucracy. I’ve uncovered that the agency often acts at odds with our nation’s best interests and uses intimidation and shell games to hide where money is going, how it’s being spent and why. …
… When I launched a formal investigation in cooperation with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, USAID relented. Turns out, the agency is allowing grantees to skim significant amounts of money, up to and even beyond half of the total, for themselves.
We need guarantees that U.S. assistance is helping people in need, but a recent review by the agency’s own inspector general found USAID still “does not have proper documentation to support indirect costs charged” by grant recipients.
I shouldn’t have to ask these questions. All federal spending is required to be publicly available on the website USAspending.gov, a searchable database created nearly two decades ago by a bipartisan law. …
… The agency has learned to exploit loopholes in the law, as my investigation into the origins of the pandemic exposed. The watchdog organization White Coat Waste Project was the first to release evidence that both USAID and Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were financing bat studies involving coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Yet no grants to the Chinese lab appeared in USAspending.gov. Audits later uncovered that more than a million dollars from the U.S. government were paying for the dangerous research. The bulk of the money was provided by USAID, not Dr. Fauci.
USAID evaded the obligation to report this transaction to USAspending.gov by using multiple pass-through organizations, including the nefarious EcoHealth Alliance, which is now barred from receiving U.S. government grants.
What was our international development agency developing at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology? If the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are correct that the Covid virus likely originated from a lab leak, USAID may have had a hand in a once-in-a-century pandemic that claimed the lives of millions. …
And, finally, the ever reliable and humorous Douglas Murray.
America has seen sense on aid. When will we?
… On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID – the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.
Like our own Department for International Development, the British Council and others, it is one of those entities which might just justify itself if it actually promoted the values of the donor country. But all these organisations were long ago taken over by insane people who hate the taxpayers that give them their money and think the best way for a nation to act in the 21st century is as a sort of large NGO. …
…It is one thing to actually feed your enemies, or fund their illegal drugs trade, but it might be even worse to go around the world paying people to display the worst woke excesses which took over America and most of the rest of the West in the past decade.
It reminds me of that classic from some years ago, when American ‘educators’ were paid to introduce Afghan women to conceptual art, including Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. …
… If there is an adult around in Whitehall, perhaps they could ask whether the British taxpayer is currently in such a fine financial place that we should be engaging in projects akin to those highlighted by the White House this week. The UK currently doles out £13.3 billion a year in foreign aid. Among the projects that the British taxpayer has spent money on in recent years is a £60 million ‘prosperity fund’ in Mexico whose endeavours include creating a bicycle lane in Mexico City and ‘writing a business case for gender parity in the public transportation workforce’.
There has also been a £200,000 grant to ‘engage new urban audiences’ with all-female traditional Chinese opera in Shanghai, and £162,000 for a ‘space’ for people in Shenzhen to be more involved in their ‘traditional crafts’. …
… But why should British taxpayers be paying for other countries to learn their traditional crafts, or their traditional crafts plus a bit of western gender woo-woo sprinkled on top? …
… Does a know-nothing dolt like me not realise the inestimable advantages to Britain of funding a £33 million research programme on the use of electric cookers vs traditional fires for people in Laos and Uganda? Am I so immune to the obvious advantages of the British taxpayer giving £110,000 to a theatre company in Bolivia to mount an artistic response to the wildfires there, or to the £476,000 we recently gave for a study into the role that the arts can play in ‘challenging racism in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina’?
Alas, I suppose I must confess to being just such a barbarian. …
My thanks to the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator, the Telegraph, and conservative Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller
