Robert Tracinski:

Ayn Rand once predicted that we were going to end up with “a fascist system with communist slogans.” This has been going through my mind as I’ve been watching the Democratic party primary contest. No, it’s not quite fascism—not yet. Nor is it quite communism—not yet (except maybe for Bernie). Yet most of the Democratic candidates seem to think that authoritarianism and even nationalism are great, and everything they denounce in the Trump administration they promise to do in their own administration, just so long as it’s dressed up in anti-capitalist slogans and signals their fealty to the Politically Correct side in the culture war.

The one candidate who is not (yet) an example of this is Joe Biden, who recently scolded Democrats who are opposed to any form of cooperation across the aisle by warning that, “if we can’t get a consensus, nothing happens except the abuse of power by the executive.” Democrats seem to have been puzzled by this statement because Biden said it as if it were a bad thing.

Kamala Harris, for instance, has made appeals to unilateral executive authority her specialty:

Kamala Harris has unveiled an ambitious set of policies as part of her presidential campaign that have a common theme: going it alone.

The California senator is proposing action on long-held Democratic values—legalizing undocumented immigrants, combatting gun violence, and ensuring women are paid the same as men for equal work.

But unlike many of her competitors, Harris would tackle those priorities with a novel set of executive actions that would require nothing from Congress.

Specifically, Harris has promised to give Congress 100 days to pass new gun-control legislation. If they don’t do so to her satisfaction, she says she’ll impose her measures by executive order. Harris explains, “The majority of my career I’ve spent in the executive branch, so exercising executive power is something that I do, and I’m used to.”

To complete the flavor of the thing, Harris’s signature moment at the first round of primary debates was when she endorsed forced busing of children to schools chosen by bureaucrats, rather than parents. I don’t think you could dream up an idea better calculated to the make the average person feel helpless before the power of entrenched authorities.

So the basis for Kamala Harris’s campaign is the premise that strongman rule is fine—we just happen to have the wrong strongman in office and need to replace him with a strongwoman who will mouth the correct “Progressive” bromides.

---

Not to be outdone, Eric Swallwell is pushing a plan to confiscate millions of guns from law-abiding owners, which, if he is serious about it, would mean sending the police door-to-door and into people’s homes in search of contraband. The only virtue of this plan is that it will never happen, at least not under Swallwell, because he is a single-issue candidate, and the only people who consistently vote on the single issue of gun control are gun owners.

Speaking of minor candidates, we also have Andrew Yang, a Silicon Valley hanger-on who has no chance of winning the nomination. Yet his candidacy is important for one reason: he is advocating a quasi-totalitarian control of digital communications, and nobody on the left can be bothered to object to it.

Earlier in the year, Yang proposed what amounts to a push for state-owned media, in the form of federally appointed and funded “journalism fellows.” That was paired with the creation of a federal “News and Information Ombudsman” empowered to act as a “fake news” cop. Yang declared, “We must introduce both a means to investigate and punish those who are seeking to misinform the American public.” This would be done under the FCC, which since its founding has had the latent power to abuse its control over broadcasters—a power easily actualized by presidential decree. It’s a wonder nobody has ever thought about it.

Oh, wait, they have.

Yang has since removed that proposal from his website, but now he’s back at it with another proposal to create a “Department of the Attention Economy” to regulate smartphones and social media:

As President, I will . . . [d]irect the Department to investigate the regulation of certain companies and apps. Many of these companies essentially function as public utilities and news sources—we used to regulate broadcast networks and newspapers and phone companies. We need to do the same thing to Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and other companies now that they are the primary ways people both receive information and communicate with each other.

Did anybody else notice that line about how we used to regulate newspapers? When was that, exactly?

I’m beginning to wonder if Andrew Yang’s campaign is just an elaborate Quillettestunt, like the stings that submit nonsense papers to Postmodernist journals, or the fake-woke Twitter feeds that exist only to trick “Progressives” into retweeting passages from Mein Kampf. This time, the idea is to show that you can get Democrats to placidly accept a regime of censorship, if you combine it with loud advocacy of trendy techno-socialist ideas like the Universal Basic Income.

Like the lady said, fascism with communist slogans.

---

Speaking of techno-censorship, we also have Elizabeth Warren openly calling on tech companies to suppress unsavory political speech.

Warren is the one who most specifically brings to the Democratic race the actual underlying political structure of fascism. The New York Times sums up Warren’s platform as “economic patriotism”:

Her proposals would tip power from executives and investors to workers and allow the federal government to more aggressively steer the development of industries. She has called for splintering technology companies, like Amazon, that millions of consumers rely on in their daily lives. She would reduce the rewards for entrepreneurs to build billionaire fortunes and for companies to create global supply chains, scrambling the incentives for work, investment, and economic growth. . . .

Her ideas resonate with a growing group of liberal economists who see evidence that free markets need more forceful government intervention in order to function properly and not just deliver spoils to the very wealthy.

All that guff about wanting markets to function properly is cover for the fact that this is not about markets at all. It’s about “allow[ing] the federal government to more aggressively steer the development of industries.” You can also ignore the part about not delivering spoils to the very wealthy, because the central theme of her proposals is massive cronyism.

As Kevin Williamson points out:

She argues that the Export-Import Bank—the premier corporate-welfare program in the United States, sometimes known as the “Bank of Boeing”—does not spend enough money subsidizing American businesses. How much more should it spend? Senator Warren does not say, but she does note that the Chinese version of the Export-Import Bank spends about 100 times what its American counterpart does.

Pointing out how Warren’s previous proposal for so-called “Accountable Capitalism” would force big companies to go hat in hand to Commerce Department bureaucrats for special government charters, I described this as a throwback to feudalism, when “all economic activity takes place only with the permission of the sovereign.”

But the most recent name for this economic system is national socialism—better known as fascism. Under national socialism, the government doesn’t bother to nationalize corporations. It just makes sure that they are creatures of the state who answer to the dictates of a strongman. It is an authoritarian approach to economic regulation, and that is the running theme behind Warren’s proposals.

The best proof of this is that the rising illiberal wing of the right absolutely loves Warren’s agenda. Here is Tucker Carlson, who has become the most popular voice of right-wing anti-capitalism.

Yesterday, Warren released what she’s calling her “plan for economic patriotism.” Amazingly, that’s pretty much exactly what it is: economic patriotism. . . . Many of Warren’s policy prescriptions make obvious sense: She says the U.S. government should buy American products when it can. Of course it should. She says we need more workplace apprenticeship programs, because 4-year degrees aren’t right for everyone. That’s true. She says taxpayers ought to benefit from the research and development they fund. And yet, she writes, “we often see American companies take that research and use it to manufacture products overseas, like Apple did with the iPhone. The companies get rich, and American taxpayers have subsidized the creation of low-wage foreign jobs.” And so on. She sounds like Donald Trump at his best.

Carlson calls for a political faction that would be “nationalist on economics, fairly traditional on the social issues.” What he is calling for is an authoritarian synthesis in which the government will tell us what to do in the boardroom and in the bedroom. Fortunately, I don’t think there is (yet) a broad market for this synthesis, though a number of conservatives are trying to talk themselves into the idea.

But the interesting thing is that a lot of Democrats already seem quite comfortable signing up for an authoritarian economics indistinguishable from Trump’s “economic nationalism.”

They just want it to be presented in the guise of leftist economic populism instead of right-wing traditionalism.

---

Right now some smartypants readers are probably objecting that there never was all that much difference between fascism and communism in the first place, that the differences were mainly stylistic. They’re right. That’s the point that is being underscored here: Big government always entails authoritarianism, no matter what rhetoric you use to sell it or which side of the culture war you try to couple it with.

The recent “Antifa” attack on Andy Ngo is a good reminder: a group of literal modern-day Blackshirts going out into the streets to beat up people who disagree with them. But somehow this time it’s different because they borrow their imagery and slogans from the communists.

It’s tempting here to fall back on the old observation that the far right and the far left bend back on each other and meet. But I think Ronald Reagan had a much more clarifying perspective on it back in 1964: “There is no such thing as a left or right, there’s only an up or down—up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

And when you’re taking us on the way down, it doesn’t really matter which slogans you use.

We never got to the fascist system with communist slogans that Ayn Rand predicted back in the 1960s, and we’re still not quite there now. The reason we didn’t get there last time is because a lot of people on the right, partly thanks to Rand’s influence, rediscovered and championed individual rights and the principles of liberalism—real liberalism, the advocacy of freedom—as the alternative to both variations of authoritarianism.

That’s what we need to do again.

Mark P. Mills:

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. (See the full report for explanations, documentation, and citations.)

Realities About the Scale of Energy Demand

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. Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33 percent, the economy grew 80 percent and global energy use is up 40 percent.

9. Efficiency increases energy demand: Since 1995, aviation fuel use/passenger-mile is down 70 percent, air traffic rose more than 10-fold, and global aviation fuel use rose over 50 percent.

10. Efficiency increases energy demand: since 1995, energy used per byte is down about 10,000-fold, but global data traffic rose about a million-fold; global electricity used for computing soared.

11. Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50 percent, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.

12. For security and reliability, an average of two months of national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today, barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America.

13. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.

14. 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).

15. 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.

16. 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.

Realities about Energy Economics

17. 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.

18. It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent energy) per hour,the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour.

19. 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.

20. Cost models for wind and solar assume, respectively, 41 percent and 29 percent capacity factors (i.e., how often they produce electricity). Real-world data reveal as much as ten percentage points less for both. That translates into $3 million less energy produced than assumed over a 20-year life of a 2-MW $3 million wind turbine.

21. In order to compensate for episodic wind/solar output, U.S. utilities are using oil- and gas-burning reciprocating engines (big cruise-ship-like diesels); three times as many have been added to the grid since 2000 as in the 50 years prior to that.

22. Wind-farm capacity factors have improved at about 0.7 percent per year; this small gain comes mainly from reducing the number of turbines per acre leading to a 50 percent increase in average land used to produce a wind-kilowatt-hour.

23. Over 90 percent of America’s electricity, and 99 percent of the power used in transportation, comes from sources that can easily supply energy to the economy any time the market demands it.

24. Wind and solar machines produce energy an average of 25 percent–30 percent of the time, and only when nature permits. Conventional power plants can operate nearly continuously and are available when needed.

25. The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas & coal, the two fuels that produce 70 percent of U.S. electricity. But electric rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20 percent since 2008. Direct and indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.

Energy Physics… Inconvenient Realities

26. 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.

27. The common cliché: an energy tech disruption will echo the digital tech disruption. But information-producing machines and energy-producing machines involve profoundly different physics; the cliché is sillier than comparing apples to bowling balls.

28. If solar power scaled like computer-tech, a single postage-stamp-size solar array would power the Empire State Building. That only happens in comic books.

29. If batteries scaled like digital tech, a battery the size of a book, costing three cents, could power a jetliner to Asia. That only happens in comic books.

30. If combustion engines scaled like computers, a car engine would shrink to the size of an ant and produce a thousand-fold more horsepower; actual ant-sized engines produce 100,000 times less power.

31. No digital-like 10x gains exist for solar tech. Physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit) is a max conversion of about 33 percent of photons into electrons; commercial cells today are at 26 percent.

32. No digital-like 10x gains exist for wind tech. Physics limit for wind turbines (the Betz limit) is a max capture of 60 percent of energy in moving air; commercial turbines achieve 45 percent.

33. No digital-like 10x gains exist for batteries: maximum theoretical energy in a pound of oil is 1,500 percent greater than max theoretical energy in the best pound of battery chemicals.

34. About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent of one pound of hydrocarbons.

35. At least 100 pounds of materials are mined, moved and processed for every pound of battery fabricated.

36. Storing the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil, which weighs 300 pounds, requires 20,000 pounds of Tesla batteries ($200,000 worth).

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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. One would no more use helicopters for regular trans-Atlantic travel—doable with elaborately expensive logistics—than employ a nuclear reactor to power a train or photovoltaic systems to power a nation.