RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
July 18 to July 24, 2021
Featured Investigation
Smokestack Fighting:
Carbon Capture Promises to Cut Emissions
-- and Greens Hate It
Environmentalists have met the enemy of at least one cleaner, greener energy future and it is ... them. In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski unpacks why greens oppose federal support for carbon capture on coal and gas plants: They call it a cynical scheme by industry to keep using fossil fuels longer and slow the rollout of renewable energy. Bielski also reports:
- The protest against carbon capture is an extension of environmentalists’ long held opposition to most uses of fossil fuels because of their pollution and toxic waste.
- But even as wind and solar power expand, energy experts say, natural gas will remain a mainstay of America’s electrical grid for the foreseeable future because it’s cheap and more reliable than intermittent renewables.
- The irony is that if environmentalists can convince their Democratic allies in Congress to block tax credits for carbon capture tech, U.S. gas plants will continue to be a major polluter for decades to come – accelerating the warming of the planet that they seek to avoid.
- “Pulling carbon capture for energy off the table could lead to a catastrophic failure of our climate goals to slash emissions,” says a former Energy official.
- The size and cost of a carbon-capture industry would be enormous, but it’s nonetheless the most cost-effective pathway to clean power, according to recent studies.
Featured Investigation:
Despite What Biden Says,
Guns Factor in Only a Small Percentage
of Violent Crimes
President Biden's crusade against guns ignores a basic fact: about 92 percent of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms, John R. Lott Jr. reports for RealClearInvestigations.
While firearms were used in about 74 percent of homicides in 2019, they comprise less than 9 percent of violent crimes in America, Lott reports, citing the latest statistics. The vast majority of violent offenses – including robberies, rapes and other sex crimes – almost always involve other weapons or no weapons at all.
- Over 50% of murders take place in just 2% of the nation's counties (making up 27.5% of the population), and even within those counties most murders occur within 10-block areas.
- In Chicago, the number of murders as of July 11 has fallen slightly compared with the same period last year but violent crime is up in part because of a 23 percent increase in sex crimes.
- In New York City, murders through the same period have dropped by 36.4 percent compared to last year. But robberies are up by 18 percent, rapes by 9 percent, and other sex crimes by 35 percent.
- In total, 8.27 percent of violent crime incidents involved firearms in 2019. The percentage has stayed virtually the same for decades.
- Nevertheless, Lott reports, in three major speeches Biden has delivered on crime, he mentioned “gun” or “firearm” 148 times.
- Unmentioned by the President as factors were last year's widespread unrest over the George Floyd murder and the dislocations of the pandemic, including the early release of many convicts from infection-prone prisons.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway
Hunter Biden Arranged Consulting Job for Then-VP Dad Daily Mail
Clinton-Style: VP Biden, Hunter and Private Email Just the News
GOP Quits Jan. 6 Probe After Pelosi Rejects Two Top Adversaries Reuters
Pa. Decertifies County's Voting Machines After Audit Reuters
Zombie Claim That Top 1% Got 83% of the 2017 Tax Cut Washington Post
Pelosis Get Richer Trading Names Nancy Regulates Substack
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Phone Spyware Targets Journalists, Activists Globally
Washington Post, Forbidden Stories, Etc.
Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals has been used to spy on the phones of journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by the Washington Post and 16 media partners. The phone numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents. They included several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials – including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The phone numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list. Among the journalists whose numbers appear on the list, which dates to 2016, are reporters working overseas for several leading news organizations, including a small number from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London and Al Jazeera in Qatar. Some of the countries that may have used the software include Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
China's Long Arm of Oppression Abroad
ProPublica
The Chinese government hunts down people they have identified as fugitives around the world – including in the United States. Emotional blackmail, such as threats to family members back home, is a favorite tactic, this article reports. Launched in 2014, Operation Fox Hunt and a program called Operation Sky Net claim to have caught more than 8,000 international fugitives. The targets are not murderers or drug lords, but Chinese public officials and businesspeople accused — justifiably and not — of financial crimes. The shadowy fugitive-apprehension program is a pillar of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign. China and the United States don’t have an extradition treaty, in part because of well-documented problems in China’s justice system. Quote:
'Nonetheless, over the past seven years Chinese fugitive hunters have stalked hundreds of people, including U.S. citizens and permanent residents, according to U.S. national security officials. Undercover repatriation teams enter the country under false pretenses, enlist U.S.-based accomplices and relentlessly hound their targets. To force them into returning, authorities subject their relatives in China to harassment, jail, torture and other mistreatment, sometimes recording hostage-like videos to send to the United States. In countries like Vietnam and Australia, Chinese agents have simply abducted their prey, whether the targets were dissidents or people accused of corruption. But in the United States, where such kidnappings are more difficult, Fox Hunt teams have relied mainly on coercion.
'
Who Wants to Be a Cop Post-Floyd? (Parts 1-8)
Tampa Bay Times
After covering protesters who demanded, “Defund the police!” Tampa Bay Times reporter Lane DeGregory and photographer John Pendygraft wondered, “who would still want to be a cop?” This nine-part series follows a group of 30 recruits at St. Petersburg College’s Law Enforcement Academy. “Over the next five months, the recruits will learn how to clear buildings and carry their partners out of harm’s way, how to respond to suicide attempts and school shootings, how to speed through slick U-turns, disarm suspects, revive overdose victims. They will have to pass 18 written tests and six ‘high-liability’ proficiency exams, prove that they can master 28 defensive moves and spend 80 hours on the firing range. They will be indoctrinated to see threats everywhere. And they will be told – every day – that they might die in this job.” The first part gives a sense of why they want to become police officers during this fraught time. Quote:
'A former Marine wants to be a hero. A blonde woman wants to help strangers. A fair-haired man grew up with a rough family, lost both parents young. “Police were called to my house a lot. They really helped me,” he said. “I want to help people like me.”
One recruit wants to take bad people off the streets. Another misses the camaraderie he’d had in the military. Someone else wants to save juveniles from sex trafficking.
“My uncle and family friend are in law enforcement. And they’re great men,” says a muscular Black man. “There’s a lot of good people out there who want to do the right thing.” … Brittany Moody, 31, [explained], “As the mother of a [7-year-old] Black son, I want to help make a change in policing — from the inside,” Moody says. If she had been one of the officers on the George Floyd or Breonna Taylor call, she says, she might have been able to save them.
'
Flint Water Scandal: 'Wiped' Phones
The Intercept/Detroit Metro Times
In October 2015, then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder publicly announced that Flint’s water was contaminated with dangerous lead levels. Investigators trying to determine what health officials knew before then have been stymied by a curious lack of messages on the phones of state health officials. The phone belonging to Dr. Eden Wells, who became Michigan’s chief medical executive in May 2015, has no messages before dated before Snyder’s admission. The article reports:
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'The phone of Tim Becker, chief deputy director of the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, had no messages on it prior to April 14, 2016.'
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'Patricia McKane, an epidemiologist with MDHHS was found to have only had four text messages on her phone from 2015 and seven total messages.'
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'Fellow MDHHS epidemiologist Sarah Lyon-Callo, director of the state Bureau of Epidemiology and Population Health, had no messages prior to June 2016.'
Canadian Who Says He's Gone 2 Decades Without Money
Capital Daily
David Arthur Johnson says he made his last purchases – beer, cigarettes, pot – 18 years ago, on his 31st birthday. The Canadian man claims he hasn’t spent any money since. His friends, this article reports, back up his claim that he hasn’t spent a penny since. Johnson is so committed to a money-free life that he throws found change into gutters and garbage bins and cuts out serial numbers on bills. Johnson says he first decided to live a right and true life as a “responsible monk” while tripping on acid in 1997. Six years later, after much meditation, he spent the $50 his father had sent him for his birthday and quit money for good. Now he usually sleeps in boxes on the street or at local shelters. How does he get by? Quote:
'You would think that if someone has disavowed money – has completely stopped using it – that life for that person would become a non-stop scramble to survive. But Johnston doesn’t scramble. If he’s meant to eat on any given day, he will cross paths with something edible. People offer him food, or they don’t. He finds it in dumpsters, or he doesn’t. Under no circumstances would he buy groceries for himself, he says. And though he will accept gifts, he doesn’t beg. Good karma has enabled him to survive, he says. But survival isn’t what’s most important to him. … Smoking is “the one addiction that’s maintainable when you don’t use money,” he says, because tossed-out butts usually contain usable tobacco. Shell them like a peanut and soon you’ll have enough to roll a whole cigarette, as long as you have rolling paper, which he usually does because he has friends who are both generous and who smoke.
'
Johnson says his lifestyle has a downside: He hasn’t seen his two children in about a decade.