“In any bureaucracy, there’s a natural tendency to let the system become an excuse for inaction.” – Chris Fussell, leader of McChrystal Group Leadership Institute.

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”  – Franz Kafka, German novelist and short-story writer.

“A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.” – Aldous Leonard Huxley, English writer and philosopher.

Joe Biden’s campaign slogan was “Build Back Better.” Since his inauguration his policies, actions and administration has set its agenda to Build Back Bureaucracy.

While the U.S. Supreme Court struck down OSAHA’s vaccine mandate for business with over 100 employees, it left in place this bureaucracy’s ability to impact the lives of doctor, nurses and other healthcare professionals.

But Biden and his administration are not the only ones Building Back Bureaucracy. Democrat controlled states like Washington are doing the same.

In a January 8th, 2022 Gateway Pundit article titled “Washington Bill Authorizes ‘Strike Force’ To ‘Involuntarily Detain’ Unvaccinated Families” Alicia Powe reported:

WAC 246-100-040, a proposed revision to include Covid protocol under the state’s Communicable and Certain Other Diseases act, outlines “Procedures for isolation or quarantine.” The measure would allow local health officers “at his or her sole discretion” to “issue an emergency detention order causing a person or group of persons to be immediately detained for purposes of isolation or quarantine.”

Health officers are required to provide documentation proving unvaccinated residents subject to detention have denied “requests for medical examination, testing, treatment, counseling, vaccination, decontamination of persons or animals, isolation, quarantine and inspection and closure of facilities” prior to involuntarily confinement in quarantine facilities, the resolution states.

The amended law would also allow health officers to deploy law enforcement officials to assist with the arrest of uncompliant Washington residents. [Emphasis added]

But this isn’t all. Now Biden has created a new bureaucrat in the “federal environmental justice representative.”

The U.S. Energy Department is now recruiting 1,000 workers for the “Clean Energy Corps” to fight climate change in largest expansion  of this federal government bureaucracy since 1977.

We now have yet another bureaucrat who is enforcing the myth of environmental justice via a Clean Energy Corps, whatever that is.

The Federal “Environmental Justice Representative”

On December 8th,  2021 Biden signed “Executive Order Catalyzing America’s Clean Energy Economy Through Federal Sustainability.”

The order adds a new level of bureaucracy in a federal environment justice representative:

Advance equity and environmental justice. The federal government will advance the goals of the Administration’s Justice40 Initiative by ensuring that economic equity and environmental justice are key considerations in operations planning and decision making. A federal environmental justice representative will serve on the newly established Chief Sustainability Officer Council. To incorporate equity, agencies will implement this executive order consistent with the President’s Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, which helps ensure that government contracting and procurement opportunities are available on an equal basis. [Emphasis added]

The Executive Order directs the federal government to “use its scale and procurement power” to achieve five goals:

• 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity (CFE) by 2030, at least half of which will be locally supplied clean energy to meet 24/7 demand;
• 100 percent zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) acquisitions by 2035, including 100 percent zero-emission light-duty vehicle acquisitions by 2027;
• Net-zero emissions from federal procurement no later than 2050, including a Buy Clean policy to promote use of construction materials with lower embodied emissions;
• A net-zero emissions building portfolio by 2045, including a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2032; and
• Net-zero emissions from overall federal operations by 2050, including a 65 percent emissions reduction by 2030.

The Executive Order requires federal government [bureaucracy] “to orient its procurement and operations efforts in line with the following principles and goals”:

• Achieving climate resilient infrastructure and operations;
• Building a climate- and sustainability-focused workforce;
• Advancing environmental justice and equity;
• Prioritizing the purchase of sustainable products, such as products without added perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS); and
• Accelerating progress through domestic and international partnerships.

The Myth of an Environmental Justice Bureaucracy

In a January 14th column titled “41 Inconvenient Truths on the ‘New Energy Economy’” Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote:

Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.” He’s right.

A week doesn’t pass without a mayor, governor, policymaker or pundit joining the rush to demand, or predict, an energy future that is entirely based on wind/solar and batteries, freed from the “burden” of the hydrocarbons that have fueled societies for centuries. Regardless of one’s opinion about whether, or why, an energy “transformation” is called for, the physics and economics of energy combined with scale realities make it clear that there is no possibility of anything resembling a radically “new energy economy” in the foreseeable future. Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.”

He’s right. So, in my recent Manhattan Institute report, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,” I did just that.

Herein, then, is a summary of some of the bottom-line realities from the underlying math.

Here are just 20 of Mark Mills’ 41 Inconvenient Truths showing that “Environmental Justice” is not just a joke but a myth used designed to grow the federal bureaucracy.

1. Hydrocarbons supply over 80 percent of world energy: If all that were in the form of oil, the barrels would line up from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and that entire line would grow by the height of the Washington Monument every week.
2. The small two-percentage-point decline in the hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives over that period; solar and wind today supply less than two percent of the global energy.
3. When the world’s four billion poor people increase energy use to just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.
4. A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace five percent of global oil demand.
5. Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum production to expand “only” ten-fold.
6. Replacing U.S. hydrocarbon-based electric generation over the next 30 years would require a construction program building out the grid at a rate 14-fold greater than any time in history.
7. Eliminating hydrocarbons to make U.S. electricity (impossible soon, infeasible for decades) would leave untouched 70 percent of U.S. hydrocarbons use—America uses 16 percent of world energy.
8.  Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50 percent, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.
9. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.
10. To make enough batteries to store two day’s worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).
11. Every $1 billion in aircraft produced leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades to operate them. Global spending on new jets is more than $50 billion a year—and rising.
12. Every $1 billion spent on data centers leads to $7 billion in electricity consumed over two decades. Global spending on data centers is more than $100 billion a year—and rising.
13. Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.
14. It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.
15. Politicians and pundits like to invoke “moonshot” language. But transforming the energy economy is not like putting a few people on the moon a few times. It is like putting all of humanity on the moon—permanently.
16. Storing the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil, which weighs 300 pounds, requires 20,000 pounds of Tesla batteries ($200,000 worth).
17. 37. Carrying the energy equivalent of the aviation fuel used by an aircraft flying to Asia would require $60 million worth of Tesla-type batteries weighing five times more than that aircraft.
18. It takes the energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil.
19. A battery-centric grid and car world means mining gigatons more of the earth to access lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, rare earths, cobalt, etc.—and using millions of tons of oil and coal both in mining and to fabricate metals and concrete.
20. China dominates global battery production with its grid 70 percent coal-fueled: EVs using Chinese batteries will create more carbon-dioxide than saved by replacing oil-burning engines.

The Bottom Line

President John F. Kennedy in a commencement speech at Yale University said,

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

Biden and his administration are furthering the persistent and unrealistic myth of climate change to do one thing and one thing only to control our freedom to choose. Choose what we drive, how we power our homes, what type of fuel we purchase and how we simply live our lives.

I have learned three absolute truths about the climate:

1. The climate changes.
2. These changes in the climate follow natural cycles (e.g. summer, fall, winter, spring).
3. There is nothing mankind can do to change these natural cycles.

In a column titled “Green is the new Red” John Eidson wrote:

The intent of the Green New Deal is not to “save the planet,” but rather to use climate alarmism as an excuse to destroy America’s capitalist economy.

[ … ]

No rational person can fail to see that the Democratic Party is using climate alarmism as a ruse to fundamentally transform the United States of America.  But because the human ego is loathe to admit it’s been duped, many patriotic Democrats will continue allowing themselves to be led like sheep into the closing noose of the hammer and sickle.  By the time they realize what happened, it will be too late.

You see climate change (GREEN) is the new RED. Obey or else.

Biden is creating a new Politburo, аппара́тчик, which was a full-time, professional functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Soviet government apparat (аппарат, apparatus), someone who held any position of bureaucratic or political responsibility.

Biden’s bureaucracy mirrors that of the former Soviet Union. What does that tell you?

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.