Dec. 18: Obamaism From the Right

Ben Rhodes speaks; More Dems embrace Hasan Piker; The JCPOA never went away

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The Big Story

We’ve dedicated a few Big Stories over the past two weeks to the situation in Syria, but it occurs to us that we might have overlooked something important: namely, that the fall of Bashar al-Assad, a friendly ophthalmologist persecuted (much like Jesus Christ) for the “crime” of wanting to protect Christians, represents the culmination of a decades-long effort by neocons in the Obama and Biden administrations to remake the Middle East on behalf of Israel.

Sure, the Biden administration and its puppet masters have concealed their intentions with ruses, such as the imposition of a soft arms embargo on Israel and their attempts to topple Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to prevent an invasion of Rafah. But those were just sideshows to distract the goyim. How do we know? Well, on Sunday, President Joe Biden bragged that Assad’s downfall—and the weakening of Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia that made it possible—was a result of the “blows that Ukraine and Israel have delivered” with the “unflagging support of the United States.” Straight from the horse’s mouth!

Just kidding. But celebrated Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs was apparently not kidding when he delivered this “news” to Tucker Carlson in an interview that aired Sunday and has since been boosted by X owner Elon Musk. And yes, the ophthalmologist line is real:

There’s also a lot about World War III with China, World War III with Russia, World War III with Iran, impending nuclear war, and how the director of national intelligence nominee, Tulsi Gabbard—who repeatedly denounced Trump as a neocon warmonger during her time as a Democrat before slightly changing her tune over the past year—is the Trump cabinet pick closest to the president-elect’s “stated objectives on foreign policy” (the quote is from Carlson, but Sachs immediately agreed). So we’ll spare you a point-by-point rebuttal.

Instead, we’ll simply observe that what Sachs is doing here is recognizable as a genre of Obama-faction messaging that Tablet’s Tony Badran dubbed the “striptease” nearly a decade ago. To put it as simply as possible: The administration adopts a policy, such as guaranteeing Assad’s survival to the Iranians in order to buy goodwill for nuclear diplomacy, that it doesn’t think the American public (or U.S. allies) is ready for. In its public statements, it pretends to be doing something else (such as attempting to topple Assad). Then, handpicked experts launder a description of the real, current policy as a “critique” of the pretend policy (the “fan” that obscures the naked truth, in the striptease analogy).

Prior to the election, one saw this dynamic often with Biden’s Israel policy. In reality, as Scroll readers will be aware, the Biden administration was exerting whatever leverage it had to oust Netanyahu and press-gang the Israelis into a cease-fire deal. Yet the Biden administration, no doubt aware that Americans and U.S. allies would respond poorly to this policy, pretended it was offering “iron-clad support” to Israel, to use one of the administration’s signature phrases. Surrogates outside the government then pretended the rhetoric was reality and recommended that the administration “change” to a policy of … ousting Netanyahu and press-ganging the Israelis into a cease-fire. In an essay published earlier this month in Foreign Affairs, for instance, Obama’s top foreign-policy guru Ben Rhodes wrote that “Biden’s most prominent foreign policy initiative during his final year in office was unconditional support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and his military escalation in Lebanon.” What’s more, he wrote it with a straight face.

Thus, we get Sachs’ offering: essentially a point-by-point description of the Obama-Biden foreign policy—détente with Iran, decoupling from Israel, dovish but transactional relations with Moscow and Beijing, all rationalized by hyperbolic threats of “all-out war” if the United States dares to assert its interests against its rivals—as a critique of a fictional “neocon” Obama-Biden policy, which in reality better describes the “Peace Through Strength” position of Donald Trump. To defeat the Obama-Biden “neocons” and avoid “World War III,” Sachs counsels, Trump must reject Trumpism and embrace Obamaism—now rebranded, with Carlson’s assistance, as “America First.” As The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, the Carlson-Obama faction has exerted at least some influence over personnel, via Donald Trump Jr. According to the report, Carlson and Don Jr. successfully blocked former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from a job after outlining “what they said were the dangers of bringing neoconservatives into the administration.”

That’s the bad news. The good news, as Badran observed in an excellent thread on Trump’s Monday comments praising Turkey’s “unfriendly takeover” of a hostile state in Syria, is that Trump does not appear to be fooled by the striptease—or by the fools in his own camp:

IN THE BACK PAGES: Down with Al Gore! Michael Lind offers a roadmap for a more rational energy policy

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The Rest

→Shot:

One simple proposition for the Democratic Party is to align its approach to foreign policy with the views of its own constituencies rather than the Washington interest groups or hawkish pundits who often seem to be the intended audience for leading Democratic politicians and national security practitioners. There is no reason to support unconditional military assistance to Israel against the will of the party’s voters.

That’s Ben Rhodes (White House nickname: “Hamas”) in the aforementioned Foreign Affairs essay, explaining how the Democrats can begin to harness the “populist” energies exploited by right-wing “oligarchs” like Donald Trump in the last election cycle. Rhodes also suggests that the party needs to “position itself in opposition to self-interested power structures that are not responsive to the vast majority of the world’s people” and to speak in a “manner that makes sense to people,” just like Trump and, we suspect, Joe Rogan.

→Chaser:

“We need a whole thriving ecosystem. It’s not just Pod Save America, though I think we should have more of them. It’s not just Hasan Piker. We should have more Hasan Pikers. It’s also the cultural creators, the folks who are one rung out who influence the nonpartisan audience. Those things all need to happen together,” he said. “And the reality is, it’s not going to be big media organizations. It’s going to be a network and a constellation of individual personalities, because that’s how people get their information now.”

That’s Kamala Harris’ digital director and deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, speaking to Semafor on Sunday about how Democrats “need to invest in boosting independent partisan friends online.” As we noted in “The Rest” section of our Dec. 12 edition, Obamaworld appears to have settled on Hasan Piker—the 33-year-old, far-left Twitch streamer who has declared that the United States deserved 9/11 and that the United States and Israel are the biggest terrorists in the world—as the designated Democrat Rogan in the wake of the election. In November, Piker was invited to guest-host Obamaworld’s principal media outlet, Pod Save America, on which he presumably bonded with his cohosts about their shared love of Qatari state media:

→Pornhub, the world’s most popular pornography website, is threatening to block access in Florida over a state law requiring users to submit photo ID to verify their age, a measure that the company claims will put user privacy at risk. The law, which was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April and is set to go into effect Jan. 1, requires websites hosting a “substantial portion of material harmful to minors”—including not only porn but also online gambling—to verify their users’ age, though it provides the option for “anonymous age verification,” i.e., “verification by a third party that cannot retain identifying information after the task is complete,” according to The Verge. The law also requires parental consent for children aged 14-15 to create social media accounts, and bans accounts for children under 14.

→Post of the Day:

That’s Senate staffer Omri Ceren responding to a post from TankerTrackers.com noting that Iran had exported an average of 1.2 million barrels of crude oil per day during the first 15 months of December.

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Zohara, by Ayelet Tsabari

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Beyond Green

Down with Al Gore once and for all! The case for a rational energy policy.

By Michael Lind

If progressives are to be believed, the world is facing a “climate emergency” that requires the rapid elimination of fossil fuels and massive, never-ending taxpayer subsidies for wind, solar, and related infrastructure. But despite being ceaselessly propagandized by alarmist climate change messaging, a majority of Americans do not believe that global warming will pose serious threats in their own lifetimes, by a ratio of 54-to-45.

If progressive energy policies remain so unpopular with most voters, why do Democrats persist in promoting them? The answer is that they provide material benefits for both Democratic donors and progressive nonprofits. It’s an alliance of green and greed.

None of the analysis that follows is grounded in what is often attacked as “climate change denial.” Let it be stipulated that greenhouse gas emissions by modern industrial civilization are indeed causing the atmosphere to grow warmer, with some regions suffering and others benefiting as a result. Let it be stipulated that reducing the effects of those changes as quickly as possible should be a priority of U.S. energy policy. A rational case can therefore be made for a combination of mitigation—reducing greenhouse gas emissions—and adaptation—taking measures to deal with the consequences, including hotter average temperatures and slightly higher sea levels caused by melting ice.

A rational strategy to mitigate global warming (the honest term, not “climate change”) would be something like the energy expert Robert Bryce’s N2N strategy (natural gas to nuclear). In the long run, there would be a global build-out of zero-carbon nuclear power plants, with government subsidies provided as necessary. In the short run, high-emission coal in electricity generation would be phased out worldwide in favor of natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide.

It is true that methane can be a potent greenhouse gas if it leaks into the atmosphere. But according to Tim Gould and Christophe McGlade, chief energy economist and head of the energy supply unit of the International Energy Agency (IEA), respectively, writing in “The environmental case for natural gas,” even when adverse effects of methane are taken into account the case for replacing coal with natural gas remains clear: “Despite these issues, taking into account our estimates of methane emissions from both gas and coal, on average, gas generates far fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than coal when generating heat or electricity, regardless of the timeframe considered.”

Natural gas and nuclear energy, then, would be central to a rational energy policy aimed at mitigating global warming without inflicting energy poverty on developed and developing nations alike. Fracking can cause minor earthquakes and strain water supplies, and nuclear waste disposal is a genuine issue. But if action really is needed to head off disastrous climate change now, the collateral costs of natural gas and nuclear would seem to be minor when compared to the benefits.

And yet the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the global green social movement seek to ban natural gas and shut down all nuclear energy plants. The Greens insist that energy for a global population of 8 billion people and rising must come entirely from renewable energy sources like solar, wind, hydropower, and biomass—not millennia from now, not centuries from now, but within the space of a mere few decades, if that.

But the math doesn’t work. In 2023, renewable energy sources amounted to only 14.6% of primary energy from all sources. Thanks to massive government subsidies, renewable energy made up a larger but still minority share of global electricity generation at 30%. But about half of this comes from hydropower dams, and this kind of renewable energy is unlikely to increase much in the future. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel share of global primary energy consumption in 2023 was 81.5%.

What is the chance that renewable energy will go from being less than a fifth of global primary energy to 100% in the lifetime of anyone reading these words, if ever? Answer: net zero.

And yet even mainstream Democrats have bought into the fantasy that greenhouse gas emissions can be eliminated by 2030 or 2050 or 2100, even while banning nuclear energy and all fossil fuels including lower-carbon natural gas. When I say fantasy, I don’t mean that these goals are overly ambitious or would require greater sacrifices than we might be comfortable with. I mean that they have zero connection to any version of physical reality. Even optimistic projections by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) under the lime-green Biden administration have renewable energy accounting for no more than 44% of U.S. electricity generation in 2050, with natural gas generating 34% of electricity within that time frame. And this is electricity alone, not all primary energy, of which renewables of all kinds make up a smaller share.

What explains the disconnect between Democratic energy policies and reality?

That question has a two-word answer: Al Gore.

Al Gore never became president, having lost the Electoral College vote count to George W. Bush in 2000, despite winning a plurality of 48.4% of the popular vote (a plurality, not a majority—most Americans voted for a candidate other than Gore). But no recent Democratic president, not even Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, has had more influence on the Democratic Party’s energy policy and on its larger cosmology (and connection to reality). It was Gore who made fighting anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change central to 21st-century progressivism. And it was Gore who wrecked any chance of rational debate and bipartisan collaboration, by imparting his personal mix of apocalyptic climate alarmism and strident moralism to the Democratic Party at large.

And it was Gore who, by his example, taught American investors that they could profit from his lectures by adopting policies whose ostensible purpose is to "save the planet" from global warming but would nevertheless prove remarkably profitable for devout adherents to the gospel. In addition to winning an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for his crusade against fossil fuels, Gore co-founded a Wall Street investment firm, Generation Investment, with his friend David Blood, who just happened to be the former head of asset management at Goldman Sachs. It was Gore’s freshly minted blood money that caught the attention of the party’s donor class.

In 2017, the late Charlie Munger, the longtime business partner of billionaire Warren Buffett, shared with a group of investors his understanding of how Gore had become fabulously rich in only a few years:

Al Gore has come into you fellas business … He has made $3 or $400 million in your business. And he’s not very smart. He had one obsessive idea that global warming was a terrible thing … So he found some partner to go into investment counseling with and says we’re not going to have any (carbon dioxide). But this partner is a value investor and a good one. So what they did is, is Gore hired staff to find people who didn’t put CO2 in the air. Of course that put him into services. Microsoft and all these service companies were just ideally located. And this value investor picked the best service companies. So all of a sudden the clients are making hundreds of millions of dollars and they are paying part of it to Al Gore. Al Gore has hundreds of millions [sic] dollars in your profession. And he’s an idiot. It’s an interesting story. And a true one.

In the past several decades, many rich investors have learned that green can be gold. Investing in a new nuclear plant is risky, given regulatory obstacles, upfront costs, and well-organized left-wing opposition. And it is hard for investors who hope to get rich quick to break into the oil and gas business, dominated as it is by existing firms.

In contrast, if you are wealthy enough it is easy to set yourself up as a green investor. All you have to do is use campaign finance contributions to bribe state legislators into adopting “renewable portfolio standards,” requiring that electric utilities purchase a certain amount of “renewable energy” at otherwise non-competitive prices from solar, wind, hydro, and biomass providers—which you happen to own.

Many public electric utilities used to own their own power plants. But a combination of investor interests, libertarian ideologues, and radical environmentalists have successfully pressured many state or city governments to require that their electric utilities give up their own energy production and purchase electricity in arm’s-length transactions from private electricity vendors. Yay, free market! Yay, consumer choice!

So now the stage is set. Having bribed the state legislature into forcing public utilities to buy fixed percentages of electricity from private renewable electricity vendors, you and your fellow investors can now slap together your own solar or wind or biomass plant, and use the laws you wrote as a rule book to start printing money. It’s like owning your own mint to manufacture money. Not only have you arranged to have guaranteed purchases of the renewable electricity your outfit generates, thanks to the renewable portfolio mandate, but you and your fellow capitalists can benefit from the vast amount of subsidies that governments at all levels shower on designated renewable energy sources and technologies. And while raking in money from citizens paying their electric bills and from taxpayers, you and your fellow green capitalists can feel good about yourselves, because you are "saving the planet," practicing the kind of effective altruism made famous by the billionaire Democratic donor and convicted criminal Sam Freedman.

But wait, Democrats—it gets better! Not only Democratic donors but also Democratic nonprofits can pan for green gold in the streams of government money. Under Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for the first time allowed tax-exempt nonprofits to benefit from tax credits and rebates for “investments” in renewable energy. So much money was dispensed to nonprofits via the IRA in the guise of combating climate change that PennEnvironment, part of the Public Interest Network, provided a guide to what nonprofits needed to do to cash in:

With Elective Pay, these organizations are able to receive a payment for building or investing in qualifying clean energy projects. There are 12 clean energy tax credits that are available to nonprofits, including for the production of electricity from renewable sources like putting solar on their roofs and for purchasing commercial clean vehicles …

There are a couple steps to follow in the process of receiving these direct payments:

Design and implement your qualifying clean energy project. You will need to know what credit you are applying for.

Determine your tax year, if you don’t already know, either based upon a calendar or fiscal year.

Complete prefiling registration with the IRS:

Create a Clean Energy Business Account for your organization at www.irs.gov/eptregister. This website also includes a comprehensive user guide and video tutorial.

Select your Registrant Type (i.e., nonprofit organization or local government). This is where you will provide information about your organization.

Select the credits your organization intends to claim. You will provide supporting documentation for the projects or investments.

Review and submit your requests for registration numbers. Don’t worry you can save your work in progress!

After you submit your registration, you can monitor its status online. If everything checks out, you will receive a registration number.

File your tax return and pick the corresponding direct-pay election. This is when you will provide your registration number.

Receive your direct payment after the tax return is processed!

In addition to subsidizing nonprofits from one direction, by exempting them from taxation in general, thanks to the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress, American taxpayers can now be dunned by the IRS for the money needed to send checks to an NGO that lobbies for transgender surgeries or defunding the police, as long as the NGO buys a Tesla to be driven to drag queen story time or slaps a solar panel atop its headquarters. A small price for American taxpayers to pay to "save the planet!"

The mystery, then, is solved. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions while securing affordable and reliable energy by relying on natural gas in the short run and nuclear energy in the long run may make sense, but it doesn’t make cents—and dollars—for Democratic donors and Democratic nonprofits. In contrast, a net zero policy justifies both investor-enriching for-profit scams like renewable portfolio standards and direct as well as indirect government subsidies to progressive nonprofits of all kinds. Net zero—in the U.S. and elsewhere—makes no sense as a rational strategy to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions, but it is fit for purpose as what it is—a massive patronage system of pork-barrel payoffs to political clients and donors.

Just ask Al Gore, whose net worth is an estimated $300 million (from movies, books, prizes, and shares of tech company stock as well as green investments). Asking Al Gore will cost you a pretty penny, though. According to Gotham Artists, which represents him, a speech by Gore will cost you $200,00-$300,000. If that’s beyond your budget, you might consider Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist and former child. She charges only $150,000-$200,000 for a talk.