Driving Through Rome in an 85-Car Motorcade?

A U.S. Secret Service agent holds the door as President Joe Biden boards the Presidential motorcade at Brussels-National Airport in Brussels, Sunday, June 13, 2021, en route to the Chief of Mission Residence. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)

Guess what has happened when you weren’t paying attention?

Ruling Class Hectoring the Unenlightened Poor

In the past 50 years, there has been a social revolution in this country and the wider West in which, “by a remarkable inversion, the left—which used to represent the interests of the outsiders, the disadvantaged—is in almost total control of the institutions of the establishment,” writes Gerard Baker in the WSJ.

Our Masters – the Hectoring Cult

And like masters through most of history—from tribal chiefs to Roman patricians, absolutist monarchs and totalitarian tyrants—their superiority is such that the rules they make don’t apply to them. They apply only to you, the unenlightened.

A succession of Democratic leaders have sternly told us to stay home and masked while supping maskless in fancy restaurants, enjoying exclusive privileges in hair salons, or partying with fellow progressives in jazz clubs.

Rich White Progressives Different from White Privilege

White progressives are morally excluded from such judgments because they subscribe to all the right nostrums about diversity, equity and inclusion. When they say “we” they really mean “you,” Mr. Baker contends.

Giant companies run by white chief executives, who live in a luxury and security no colonist oppressor could have dreamed of, feel free to lecture Americans on their loathsome prejudices. Just don’t ask them to make way for any of the oppressed people they profess to champion.

An 85-Car Motorcade and More COP26 Double Talk

Politicians, chief executives (those who are awake) and leaders of environmental groups “will deliver their grave warnings about what sacrifices must be made to save the planet from extinction. Joe Biden met with the Pope for a meeting in which he and Pope Francis solemnly pledged to fight the “climate crisis.”

Biden Nods Approval to Russian Pipeline

Our president shut down natural-gas pipelines in the U.S. shorty after his son, Hunter, talented artist that he is, on the basis of no expertise whatever “collected millions of dollars for attending the occasional board meeting of one of Eastern Europe’s largest natural-gas companies.”

The Biden administration nods approvingly at a Russian pipeline that will supply gas to Europe as it continues its assault on U.S. fossil-fuel production.

Enjoy Being Hungry in the Dark

The ultimate demonstration of the gulf between our leaders’ alarmist prescriptions and the reality of life for the rest of us can be witnessed in an energy crisis that is pushing up fuel bills for hard-pressed working people, thanks in large part to policies that have prematurely reduced gas production, inexplicably killed off nuclear power in countries like Germany, and made our fragile economy dependent on wind power when the wind doesn’t blow and solar power when the sun don’t shine.

The higher costs of energy fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class, for whom it represents a sizable proportion of their total spending. For the laid-off coal miner in Appalachia or the family struggling to meet its heating bills in a freezing Midwestern winter, the climate demands we’ll hear so much about in the next few weeks have a much more immediate impact than for the proliferating crowd of well-heeled “ESG” investors.

Addressing the climate crisis last week, Mr. Biden gave his pitch to the climate “crisis:”

“Folks, we all have that obligation—that obligation to our children and to our grandchildren.”

What President Biden Really Means:

My obligation is to talk at length about moral imperatives, to cite ever more alarmist scenarios about the threat we face and to commit to ever grander projects and spending plans for which I get slapped on the back for my courage over lavish dinners in international hotels and blessed in papal palaces.

Americans’ obligation, according to our Progressive Masters, is to pay for it

John Kerry, our former Secretary of State and now America’s Climate Envoy Master, referred to COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, as “last best hope for the world to get its act together”.

As the Manhattan Contrarian argues on his website, “The idea is that hundreds of global leaders, not a one of whom has much if any idea how the world’s energy systems work, will come together to agree and order that those systems must be completely discarded and replaced.”

Currently, all the world economies run mostly on fossil fuel energy; but these political leaders are oh so much smarter than that, so they will order that use of such energy must be reduced and then ended, and associated carbon emissions will of course decline commensurately.

These people equally have no idea how or whether the newly ordered alternative energy systems might work, or how much the new systems might cost when fully implemented.  Those things, you see, are mere engineering details, too insignificant to warrant the attention of great potentates.

What they do know is, as the magnificent Barack Obama put it in 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. . . .”

A Textbook Example of Hypocrisy

Not Exactly Carbon Friendly

Last Friday, before attending the Glasgow summit on climate change, President Bidden met with Pope Francis in Rome, in an 85-vehicle motorcade. Granted due to COVID restrictions in Italy, the number of passengers in each vehicle was limited. Usually, a motorcade for the president would include a dozen vehicles, plus other cars to block traffic.