Members of the World Economic Forum (WEF) are often referred to as “Davos Men” because they convene their annual huddle-ups in Davos, Switzerland. But Davos Man is a misnomer because Davos is not the only place where they get together each year to figure out how to save the world from itself. During the warm months, they also meet in China. Apparently, it’s a Summer/Winter Olympics sort of thing.
This year from June 27–29, WEF gathered in Tianjin under the auspices of what it calls the Annual Meeting of New Champions (AMNC). This was not a minor event — it saw over 100 talks in three days — but the media failed to cover it, because we are not supposed to know how deeply China is entrenched in WEF.
The language used in virtually all of the talks was technocratic bafflegab. The purpose of such language is to create fog. We are not supposed to notice that the speaker has nothing to say or that if he or she does have something to say, it is either stupid or evil or both.
Pursuing ‘Green Energy’ at All Costs
Simon O’Connell, the CEO of SNV, which brands itself as a “global development partner,” was a representative presenter this year. In a talk entitled “Why cooperation is the key for the energy transition,” he informed his audience that “[t]o come up with the right kind of solutions we need the right kind of partnerships, including NGOs, development actors, civil society organizations. But it is vitally important to also have the private sector and governments at all sorts of institutional levels.” This catalog is meant to sound like it is promoting diversity of thought and opinion, but it’s anything but. If you looked closely at all of these groups, you would find that they are all composed of climate activists. Conspicuously absent were engineers, scientists, and economists — the folks who know what can and cannot be done with present and foreseeable technology and what it will cost. Money is seldom a subject in these discussions. These ideological technocrats masquerading as experts act as though, by banding together, they will be able to talk our way into a net-zero future.
They are not entirely oblivious to costs, however. Donning their other caps — social justice warriors — they are very concerned about cost but only in terms of what they call “energy equity.” Even though renewable energy supply is constantly being ramped up and is said to be the cheapest on the planet, it turns out that, as the world is being frog-marched to net zero, the cost of energy is going up everywhere. This, supposedly, is not a problem for the wealthy nations.
Countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada can and are doing a juggling act; as prices rise, they give rebates to their poorest voters to shield them from the impact. It turns out that the have-not countries cannot afford to do this. Another presenter noted, without irony, that 75 million people in the poorer nations who have recently gotten electrification in their homes cannot afford to pay for it. That’s not fair, is it? The solution: “This will require large-scale international financial support to low-income countries and such a ramp-up is crucial to ensure an inclusive transition that benefits all nations, regardless of their economic status.”
Because money is no object.
Prioritizing Efficiency and Productivity in Energy Sectors Leaves Us With Fossil Fuels
The conference boasted that the world is now spending more money on developing green energy than on fossil fuels. Implicit in this is the notion that if more money is being spent on something, it must be a more worthy enterprise. The quiet part left out of this proclamation is that we are getting much less for the money that is being spent on renewable energy for than what is being invested in fossil fuel production.
In 2019, the economist John Phelan at Minnesota think-tank American Experiment published an analysis that explains in part why so much money is being spent on renewables. “In 2017, each of Minnesota’s 3,800 solar-energy workers produced an average of just 157 megawatt hours [each],” he wrote. “This was just 1.2 percent of the energy produced by a coal worker and only one percent of that which a natural-gas worker produced.” (READ MORE: Green Elites Are Attacking American Lifestyle)
It turns out that those “high-paying green jobs” always being peddled by politicians already exist, and they produce a tiny fraction of what jobs produce in the fossil fuel sector. Phelan concluded, “Mast and Clean Energy Minnesota need to remember that the point of an energy industry is to generate energy, not to generate jobs.” Since these jobs are always subsidized, one may as well call them government jobs.
It must be remembered that efficiency and productivity are key to prosperity and growth. Imagine if those dismal per-worker productivity numbers were to exist today in the agriculture industry. We would be back in the 18th century, when the vast majority of the population were agricultural laborers, and our standard of living would be what it was back then.
John Kerry, Biden’s energy czar, doesn’t care about this inconvenient fact. Last May, he gave a speech in which he put a target on the back of the agriculture industry, chiding it for creating 33 percent of carbon emissions. It appears that he wants to follow in the footsteps of Justin Trudeau in Canada and Mark Rutte in the Netherlands, both of whom want to shut down or at least roll back a great deal of farming activity in their countries, oblivious to the fact that this would create mass starvation.
Elites Want to Solve World Problems With ‘Partnership’ and ‘Cooperation’
The Davos/Beijing Man is oblivious to inconvenient facts. Instead, what emanated from that recent circle-jerk in China was an effort to solve the world’s problems through “partnerships” and “cooperation.” In the opening address, Li Qiang, premier of the People’s Republic of China, explained how this works in public health:
In the past three-plus years, we have all fought hard against the pandemic, showing the powerful strength of humanity pulling together and looking out for each other in hard times. COVID-19 will not be the last public health crisis humanity faces. Global public health governance needs to be enhanced…. We must act on the vision of a community with a shared future for mankind put forward by President Xi Jinping…. As a responsible major country, China has all along stood firmly on the right side of history and on the side of human progress.
These words were spoken with the calm self-assurance of someone who truly knows his audience. The Davos/Beijing men and women are not dumb. They know how to get around in a world of charlatans and grifters. But in their hearts and souls, they are dead. In the long run, if we continue to allow them to push their agendas on the rest of us, they will continue to make a huge difference in the lives of ordinary people, which is to say that, eventually, most of us will end up cold and hungry and dying of concocted illnesses.
Max Dublin is a writer living in Toronto. He is the author of Futurehype: The Tyranny of Prophecy.