Month: November 2024

Authored by Robin Gaster via RealClearEnergy,

Solar and wind are rolling out rapidly in the U.S. They account for about 19 percent of energy generation today, and could reach more than 40% by 2030. This clean energy will rapidly replace coal, and many expect it will simply replace natural gas as well. But that’s a mistake: In fact, solar and wind will depend on gas for decades to come.

Today, solar and wind are relatively low cost, and prices will likely fall further. But they are not like fossil fuels—they are what’s known as variable renewable energy (VRE)—meaning they only produce electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows.

Sometimes this variation is predictable. For example, solar doesn’t generate power at night, and generates less power in the winter. But some variation is unpredictable; cloud cover or wind droughts can last weeks at a time. These “VRE deficits” are not a problem as long as wind and solar are a small percentage of electricity generation. But as they become dominant, how do we fill the gaps when VRE supply is low?

Electric utilities are currently adding lots of short duration (4-hour) lithium-ion batteries to address daily and hourly variation, providing enough power in the evening when demand is high. DOE expects that trend to accelerate, but while these batteries are reliable and can be turned on with the flip of a switch, they only solve VRE deficits for a few hours at a time.

Longer duration VRE deficits are another matter. What happens when deficits last for weeks or months? How do we keep the lights on? Detailed studies—for example, from the Royal Society in the UK—show that that there can be sustained periods of poor weather, leading to annual shortfalls as high as 20% of total grid production (in a completely decarbonized grid).

Right now, when demand spikes or supply is disrupted, we turn mainly to “peaker plants”—gas plants that run on a single cycle to power turbines for electricity. These plants are less efficient than combined cycle gas turbine plants (CCGTs), and their energy is more expensive, so they are kept in reserve and are paid to provide spare capacity, ensuring that sufficient emergency power is always available. Typically, grid operators pay for about 15% of peak energy demand as spare capacity. Any less, and there might be blackouts. Any more, and money is wasted. While VRE use is relatively modest, peaker plants can cover VRE deficits.

But as VRE becomes a larger and larger share of the overall grid, the impact of adverse weather events will become more pressing, and supply will become more variable. A grid with 40% VRE will need much more insurance to guarantee the lights stay on.

There are alternatives to gas-fired energy, technologies that can store energy for very long periods and provide it on demand at massive scale—notably hydrogen, hydropower, and compressed air. Hydropower is cheap to run, a mature and well-established technology, and its generators last for decades. But we are removing more dams than we build, and there is no U.S. appetite for the dozens of huge new dams that would be needed. Conversely, green hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency—it takes 100KWh of green electricity to provide 40KWh of stored dispatchable electricity—and it is very expensive to make and store, while transportation is also expensive and can cause serious emissions. Moreover, hydrogen will not suddenly become cheaper quickly, like wind and solar. Compressed air currently operates at about 50% efficiency. Substantially improvement will require cooling and then re-heating air, which is costly when the air is stored for long durations. And the electro-chemical batteries now being added to the grid won’t provide the combination of long duration, huge scalability, and low costs that are needed.

This leaves us with gas.

To make a VRE-dominated grid possible, natural gas must be used as insurance against VRE deficits. That’s why DOE projects that peaker plant capacity will actually grow during the clean energy transition, and why it projects no significant decline in CCGT capacity either.

However, the function of gas power will change. Today, CCGT plants are used primarily as firm baseload power, an energy source used 100% of the time, with additional capacity available through peaker plants. As the green energy transition gets fully underway, CCGT plants will shift from producing baseload power to providing insurance against supply disruption, just like peaker plants do today.

Eventually, we can hope to build a green grid with no emissions. In that world, gas emissions will eventually be phased out altogether. Perhas gas will be replaced with new fuel sources like geothermal or even fusion, carbon capture might eliminate emissions from gas power plants, or scalable storage technologies could finally mature so they can become the energy insurance of tomorrow. Overall though, it’s clear that we don’t have all the technology we need, and that we need to push much harder to improve those critical technologies, many of which are still not ready for full commercial deployment. 

In the meantime, we have to understand that in the United States, gas will be a critical enabler of wind and solar, providing the reliability for the grid that wind and solar alone cannot.  If we are serious about decarbonization, that’s what’s needed: a realist view of the near and medium term, a massive financial commitment to develop the critical technologies that will provide cheap and reliable energy, and a realistic understanding of the changing but still critical role of gas in a decarbonizing grid, where it will still be needed for decades to come.

Robin Gaster is Director of Research with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics,

Donald John Trump, the 45th U.S. president, will soon become the 47th president, after he was projected to win not just the 270 electoral college votes needed to return to the White House but also the national popular vote. His humiliation of the political elite is now complete.

The conservative Fox News channel was first to call the race for Trump while the Associated Press and the legacy television networks held off early Wednesday morning. After Pennsylvania turned red, however, even liberal MSNBC News conceded that the Republican’s lead over Vice President Kamala Harris had become mathematically insurmountable. The AP finally called the race at 5:45 a.m.

Trump is on track to become the first Republican to win a majority of the vote since George W. Bush in 2004, and he will become the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892. His triumph represents a wholesale repudiation of the establishment. Big business, Hollywood, the media, and both major political parties treated him as an unwelcome interloper. He delivered his rebuttal on Election Day.

A celebrity known for his starring role on a reality television show, a career in New York real estate, and a knack for showing up in the tabloids, Trump wasn’t even a “citizen politician” when he arrived on the political scene in 2015. He wasn’t a politician at all and had never run for office or been involved in party politics. Dismissed by the commentariat as unserious, he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, and was impeached (but not convicted) for his troubles. Four years later, he was again declared politically unviable after he refused to accept the results of his loss to Joe Biden and his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell condemned him as “practically and morally responsible” for the Jan. 6 riot, but efforts by an increasingly obsolete cohort of GOP were singularly unsuccessful in sidelining the man.

Trump declared his candidacy immediately after the 2022 midterms, marched almost effortlessly through a crowded field of primary challengers, and secured a third consecutive presidential nomination. He did not regain his grasp on the GOP so much as he tightened his grip on that party.

 “I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America,” Trump running mate J.D. Vance said after Tuesday’s election returns rolled in. There was no exaggeration in his words.

The first time Trump won the White House, he did so as the leader of a white working-class coalition, promising those he would call in his inaugural address “the forgotten men and women” to reverse the “American carnage” brought on by deindustrialization, globalization, and unchecked immigration. The former, and now future, president did not moderate. Opponents condemned his calls for mass deportations as “racist” and his vow to root out the ill-defined “enemy within” as “fascist.”

Those denunciations ultimately had little effect. Not only did Trump maintain his support with the white working class, but he also made significant gains with both Hispanic and black voters according to early exit polls. A multi-class, multi-ethnic coalition returned him to power. One demographic at the center of that electorate: young men.

Tuesday’s results amount to a repudiation, not only of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, but also the old breed of Republicans who made common cause with corporations and harbored a neoconservative foreign policy. The most visible among them, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, threw her support behind the Democrat. Trump’s second victory heralds a shifting political landscape that will continue sorting itself out during the presidential transition and in the four-year term to follow.

Reflecting on the breadth of his support, Trump told a crowded victory party that his winning coalition was drawn “from all quarters – union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American.” Surrounded by his family and campaign staff on stage, he added, “We had everybody, and it was beautiful.”

“It was,” Trump added, “a historic realignment.”

The Harris campaign had already headed to bed at that point. “Let’s finish up what we have in front of us tonight, get some sleep,” campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote to her team in an email obtained by RealClearPolitics, “and get ready to close out strong tomorrow.”

The vice president had yet to concede by mid-morning Wednesday. Famous for chiding Republican men when they talked over her – “I’m speaking” – Harris sent her campaign chairman, Cedric Richmond, on stage to tell her supporters at Howard University late Tuesday that they would not hear from her. Many left in tears. Trump World was just beginning to party.

A crowd noticeably younger than the ones Trump attracted in his two previous elections had packed into the Palm Beach Convention Center hours earlier. As their champion monitored data from nearby Mar-a-Lago, they pulled up to any of the six cash bars in the main hall. The most popular beer for the thirsty America First voter: Modelo, a lager from Mexico.

The MAGA faithful were prepared for a long night. News networks warned that the results might not be known on Election Day or even the morning after, a message amplified by Democrats. And there was good reason to believe the race might come down to the wire: Trump and Harris were locked in a dead heat for much of the contest as a divided nation evaluated its options. But just as he used social media to sidestep gatekeepers eight years ago, Trump targeted new, younger voters, with a new medium: the Bro Podcast.

He talked about everything from aliens to artificial intelligence with Joe Rogan, host of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” He chopped it up on the Barstool Sports podcast “Bussin’ With the Boys,” hosted by former NFL football players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan. He asked Theo Von if he still uses cocaine (the comedian told the teetotaling president that the white powder “will turn you into a damn owl, homie”). The conversations did not resemble anything like Frost v. Nixon. Podcasts are certainly much cheaper and less serious. They were instrumental, all the same, in turning out young men who are famously low-propensity voters.

Harris sought to make the race a referendum on Trump. She described him as a threat to democracy generally and an opponent of abortion rights specifically. For his part, he called illegal immigration “the biggest issue” and an inflation-addled economy “the second.” A senior Trump advisor told RCP it was “more like ‘Issue 1A and 1B,’ but immigration is one of them.” Either way, the economic frustrations and security fears were enough to deliver Trump a majority despite the criminal indictments and felony convictions that Democrats had hoped would throttle his candidacy.

Those legal challenges made Trump the symbol of conservative martyrdom. It became visceral at the fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania, this summer when an assassin’s bullet clipped his ear. The photo of the bloody Republican pumping his fist in defiance instantly became an image for the ages.

“This is what happens when the machine comes after you,” bellowed Ultimate Fight Championship president Dana White from the main stage here Tuesday night. “He keeps going forward. He doesn’t quit. He’s the most resilient, hardworking man that I’ve ever met in my life.” Referring to Trump’s victory in the face of the challenges, White said, “This is karma.”

Whatever cosmic forces were at play, victory was not guaranteed. While Trump seemed poised to handle Biden, Harris promised to be a tougher challenge after she delivered a shot of adrenaline straight into progressive hearts. She brought in more fundraising dollars, campaigned alongside celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé Knowles, and turned the race into the definition of a dead heat. Doubt crept into Republican hearts in the final days, especially after The Atlantic magazine reported that morale inside the Republican campaign was cratering. A senior Trump aide texted RCP to say the opposite: “Morale is decidedly very high at this current moment.”

According to longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, Democrats have only themselves to blame for what happened in this election.

“If you want to make somebody iconic, try to throw them in jail, try to bankrupt them,” said the infamous political operative. “If you want to make somebody iconic, cook up a fake hoax to justify their removal from the presidency,” he added in reference to once-en-vogue allegations that Trump was a Russian asset. “And if you really want to make somebody iconic, try to kill them.”

Stone was not alone in viewing the political attacks – and the attempts on Trump’s life, which Democrats condemned – in the same category: “All those things failed,” he said. “They just made him bigger and more powerful.”

Trump has now dispensed with three Democratic Party opponents – Clinton in 2016 and both Biden and Harris in 2024. Each opponent had the money advantage and what was billed as a much more sophisticated political apparatus. He was able to do this, some Republicans like to say, because he was on a mission from the Almighty. But despite the personal invectives against enemies and frequent calls for retribution that defined his campaign, in his victory speech the president-elect made little mention of his opponent. He was philosophical the morning of his win.

“Many people have told me God spared my life for a reason,” Trump said, “and that reason was to save our country, and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together.”

Congressional majorities are a handy thing to have in that kind of endeavor.

The GOP picked up three Senate seats to secure the upper chamber, while control of the House of Representatives was still too close to call but within reach. The highest-ranking Republican currently in office, House Speaker Mike Johnson, joined Trump on stage. Perhaps signaling that he didn’t have patience for more intramural infighting, he thanked Johnson by name and told the crowd, “I think he’s doing a terrific job.” More work will follow.

Trump has already remade the Republican Party in his own image, greatly diminishing the interventionist and libertarian wings of the GOP in the process. He now promises sweeping tariffs, a strategic retreat from global conflicts such as the land war in Ukraine, and an incessant focus on domestic challenges – the southern border chief among them. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he insisted. The country only needs to follow his prescription to achieve “a golden age.”

Running against him in a third election, Democrats felt they finally knew what to make of Trump. Clinton made light of his many flaws the first time. Biden defeated him during the second election by painting him as a threat to democracy. For her part, Harris attempted to split the difference.

“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she told her fellow Democrats at their Chicago convention to hearty laughter. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious,” added the vice president – who is slated to soon preside over the certification of his election.

Some of the Republicans who came out to cheer Trump early Wednesday morning saw things similarly, especially the younger ones. They laughed at his unserious moments and listened earnestly to his serious warnings. One example was Caden Caouette, a Florida State University freshman who repurposed a Trump-Pence shirt by covering the name of the former vice president with a piece of masking tape with Vance written in Sharpie letters.

“These last couple of years really speak to it,” he said. “The economy has been bad, and then everybody crossing the border. A lot of work needs to get done, and Trump’s the man to do it.”

A first-time voter, Caouette stood outside the convention center just hours before his morning classes for a chance to cheer on the champion who had once again upended American politics. The podcasts, particularly the one with Rogan last month, he said, served as “a reminder” to vote because it was “not just something I could skip.”

A now certain return to the Oval Office, even for a larger-than-life figure like Trump, once seemed a stretch. In the end, it wasn’t.

Among the capital cities of 134 countries and regions analyzed in the 2023 World Air Quality Report published by air purification equipment manufacturer IQAir, New Delhi ranked first with an average annual PM2.5 concentration of 92.7 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

As Statista’s Florian Zandt reports, this number exceeds the most recent World Health Organization goal 17 times, and only one other capital city comes close in IQAir’s ranking.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, exhibited an annual average PM2.5 concentration of 80.2 micrograms per cubic meter of air, followed by Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Dushanbe (Tajikistan) and Baghdad (Iraq) with 46.6, 46.0 and 45.8 micrograms, respectively.

The first capital city not located in Asia or Africa on the list is Sarajevo with 28.6 micrograms.

IQAir’s World Air Quality Report analyzed data from 7,812 air quality monitor stations and sensors, adding seven new African and four new Latin American countries to its covered area compared to its 2022 edition.

The biggest share of PM2.5, which stands for ambient particular matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 microns, stems from human activity, according to a 2021 paper published in nature communications.

Emissions from road transport and the energy sector are the biggest contributors to a higher concentration of PM2.5, while smaller-scale sources like agricultural waste burning can also be a factor, especially in so-called developing countries.

Via The Cradle

Hezbollah’s new leader Naim Qassem said during his second speech as secretary-general that the resistance group is in a “defensive state” and will thwart Israeli plans for Lebanon, vowing that nowhere in Israel is safe from missile and drone attacks.

“We have now reached an Israeli aggressive war on Lebanon that has been going on for a month and ten days. It is no longer important how the war started or what pretexts caused it. What is important is that we are facing an Israeli aggression,” Qassem said. The Lebanese group is “now in a defensive state” and is confronting “this aggression and its expansionist goals,” he added. 

These goals include “ending Hezbollah’s presence,” while “the second step is to occupy Lebanon, even if from a distance – from the air, and by threatening, and making Lebanon similar to the West Bank,” referring to Tel Aviv’s ambition for unrestricted access to Lebanese territory and airspace. “The third is to [redraw] the map of the [region].”

“Netanyahu wanted these steps, and he started his war on Lebanon to accomplish the first step.”

Qassem praised his fighters on the ground, confronting Israeli army incursions into south Lebanon, which began at the very start of last month and have since completely failed to achieve Tel Aviv’s goal of pushing away Hezbollah from the border and securing the return of settlers to its north. 

He said Israel thought the pager terror attacks and the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah would “make it easier for him to invade Lebanon.”

“They brought five divisions to the border, consisting of 65,000 soldiers and officers … the Israeli army wanted to reach the Litani River but faced a firm resistance,” Qassem said, noting the failure of the ground operations. “We believe that only one thing can stop this aggressive war, which is the battlefield – both on the border and against the Israeli depth,” referring to daily rocket, missile, and drone attacks. 

“There is no place in the Israeli entity that is off-limits to Hezbollah planes or missiles,” he warned. He added that Hezbollah’s capabilities are in good shape. “Our only choice is to prevent Israel from achieving its goals,” he added, noting that Hezbollah “cannot be defeated” as long as “justice” and “God” are on its side. 

The Hezbollah chief also commented on the US election. He clarified that Hezbollah does not depend on regional or international politics, elections, or who will end up as president in the US, but rather depends only on the battlefield.

“We are not waiting on the American elections; whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump succeeds, they have no value to us… we do not rely on general political movements, and we do not rely on Netanyahu being satisfied with some gains, no, we will rely on the field, and we will make Netanyahu fully realize that he is a loser in the field and not a winner,” he said. 

“We have tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants [who are ready to fight],” he affirmed, revealing that Hezbollah has not yet employed the entirety of its ground force.

He reiterated that any ceasefire talks must be based on stopping the war and respecting Lebanon’s sovereignty – something that Netanyahu has publicly stood against. He praised the “political resistance” of Lebanon’s Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, who has rejected Israeli terms presented to Beirut by White House envoy Amos Hochstein. 

“We will not beg for halting the aggression, and we will make the enemy ask for it … we are ready for a war of attrition no matter how long it lasts … Let [Israel] take its time.”

Hezbollah claimed responsibility for launching a salvo of advanced missiles at the Tzrifin Israeli military base, near Ben Gurion Airport. The attack coincides with the appointment of a new Israeli defense minister, the election of a new U.S. president, and 40 days since the… pic.twitter.com/ZozIAdSJFK

— Ali Hashem علي هاشم (@alihashem_tv) November 6, 2024

Qassem also commented on the recent Israeli landing operation and kidnapping in north Lebanon’s Batroun, in which commandos snatched Lebanese naval officer Imad Amhaz while he was attending a maritime training course. 

“I demand that the Lebanese army, which is responsible for protecting the waters, issue a statement explaining the reason behind the Batroun operation.” The army must immediately “inform us of its stance on the incident,” he said, questioning the potential role of the UNIFIL force in Lebanon and its German naval contingent. 

Qassem praised Nasrallah as the “pioneer” of Hezbollah’s “era of victories,” saying he “built a resistance … that unites all segments of society.” Nasrallah will “continue with us and we will continue with him, and the resistance will remain and grow and grow.”

The speech came hours after Hezbollah targeted a military base near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport with a barrage of missiles, causing damage in its vicinity and a temporary halt in air traffic.

It’s not a good day for the establishment. Just hours after Kamala Harris – and the Democrats – staggering loss which ushered in Trump as president for the third time and gave Republicans a sweep of Congress, Germany’s three-party ruling coalition which had been on the verge of collapse for months, imploded on Wednesday evening after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced he will fire Finance Minister Christian Lindner over persistent rifts on spending and economic reforms, a move that paves the way for a snap election at the end of March.

The firing ejects Lindner’s fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party  (FDP) from the troubled coalition, forcing Scholz to call for a confidence vote that he said would take place on January 15. If Scholz loses that vote, which is virtually certain, a snap election is set to take place by March.

The collapse of Germany’s government came just hours after Donald Trump’s clear win in the U.S. election, a result that stunned German political leaders, who depend on American military might for their country’s defense and fear Trump’s tariff policies will hobble German industry.

“Dear fellow citizens, I would have liked to have spared you this difficult decision, especially in times like these, when uncertainty is growing,” said Scholz – viewed as the weakest German chancellor in decades – in a statement at the chancellery.

But the rifts inside the coalition proved too great to overcome. Caught in the middle of an impossible battle, Lindner and his conservative FDP insisted that the German government stick to strict spending rules and cut taxes, even as his left-wing coalition partners wanted to maintain social spending and boost German industry through economic stimulus.

“All too often, Minister Lindner has blocked laws in an inappropriate manner,” said Scholz in a statement. “Too often he has engaged in petty party-political tactics. Too often he has broken my trust.”

Scholz said he had offered Lindner a deal to create an emergency fund to aid Ukraine that would exist outside Germany’s regular budget, but Lindner refused to participate in such fiscal gimmicks that saw the UK recently redefine the nature of “debt.”

“Olaf Scholz has long failed to recognize the need for a new economic awakening in our country,” said Lindner. “He has long played down the economic concerns of our citizens.”

As Politico reports, the FDP is the smallest party in the coalition and is now polling at only four percent — below the threshold needed to make it into the German parliament — meaning its leaders have been mulling a coalition break in order to save their political futures.

Crisis talks in the coalition of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and Lindner’s Free Democratic Party had come to a head after the FDP issued a paper with demands for liberal economic reforms that were difficult for the other two parties to accept.

Lindner’s recent policy paper, leaked to the media last week, called for tax cuts and a scaling back of climate policies in order to stimulate economic growth — both positions that put the party at odds with his coalition partners.

Central to the coalition disagreements was the adoption of the 2025 budget by parliament in which a gap of at least €2.4 billion, and potentially far more, needs to be filled, as well as an agreement on measures to revamp the country’s ailing economy.

The government crisis comes at the worst possible time: Trump’s victory, which anticipates imposing significant tariffs on German exports, is expected to put heavy pressure on Europe’s largest economy. An analysis from the German Economic Institute (IW) estimates that a new trade war could cost Germany €180 billion over Trump’s four years in office.

Many in Germany had hoped that the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. election earlier in the day would force the coalition to hold together over fears that the incoming president would give Europe’s biggest economy a hard ride, targeting its all-important car industry in a trade war.

Ultimately, however, not even the looming threat of Trump proved enough for the fractious parties to put aside their differences.

Sensing that the economy is about to go from bad to much worse, last Tuesday – amid mounting concern about the imminent collapse of the EU’s largest manufacturing economy – Germany’s giant trade union IG Metall launched strikes in the nation’s metal and electrical industries in an attempt to win higher wages. According to the tabloid Bild, employees began walking off the job during the night shift, including at Volkswagen’s plant in the city of Osnabruck, where workers worry the plant may be closed.

Elsewhere, around 200 employees of the battery manufacturer Clarios went on strike in Hanover, Lower Saxony, carrying torches and union flags, the outlet wrote.

Meanwhile, in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, around 400 employees, including those at Jensen GmbH, KSM Castings Group, Robert Bosch, Waggonbau Graaff and ZF CV Systems Hannover, have reportedly halted operations.

Protests are also expected at BMW and Audi plants in Bavaria. Work is to be stopped nationwide during the course of the day, the tabloid wrote.

”The fact that production lines are now at a standstill and offices are empty is the responsibility of the employers,” IG Metall’s negotiator and district manager Thorsten Groger stated, as quoted by Deutsche Welle.

IG Metall is demanding a 7% pay raise compared to the 3.6% raise over a period of 27 months offered by employers’ associations, due to soaring inflation. The companies call such demands unrealistic.

The mass strikes come as Volkswagen announced on Monday it would close “at least” three of its ten plants in Germany, lay off tens of thousands of staff and downsize remaining plants in the country. The measures are part of a cost-cutting drive, the conglomerate said earlier. Oliver Blume, chief executive of the VW Group, has cited a “difficult economic environment” and “failing competitiveness of the German economy” as factors behind the decision.

The German Association of the Automotive Industry warned last year that the country was “dramatically losing its international competitiveness” due to soaring energy costs.

A recent survey by the VDA auto industry association suggested that the reshuffling of the German car industry could lead to 186,000 job losses by 2035, roughly a quarter of which have already occurred.

Authored by Rachel Ann T. Melegrito via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A low-sugar diet in utero and within the first two years of life can meaningfully reduce the risk of chronic diseases in adulthood, a new study finds.

Researchers determined that a low-sugar diet during the first 1,000 days after conception lowered the child’s risk of diabetes and hypertension in adulthood by 35 percent and 20 percent, respectively, and delayed disease onset by four and two years. Eating sugar in the first two years of one’s life directly shapes a person’s long-term health risks, the findings suggest.

“We all want to improve our health and give our children the best start in life, and reducing added sugar early is a powerful step in that direction,” Tadeja Gracner, corresponding author and senior economist at the University of Southern California (USC) Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, told The Epoch Times.

Dietary Experiences From Rationing: A Natural Scientific Experiment

Researchers from USC, McGill University, and the University of California–Berkeley studied how early-life sugar restrictions affect the risk of diabetes and hypertension later in life by comparing people conceived before and after the United Kingdom’s WWII food rationing program, which limited sugar intake from 1942 to 1953. The rationing program controlled the distribution of essential goods to ensure fair access for everyone during wartime shortages.

Those conceived shortly before rationing ended had mothers and early-life diets with low sugar intake, while those conceived after had more sugar in their early environment.

During the rationing period, people only consumed about 8 teaspoons (40 grams) of sugar daily, which falls within today’s dietary guidelines.

However, as soon as rationing ended, people’s sugar and sweets intake immediately shot up to almost 16 teaspoons (80 grams) per day. This increase is partly attributed to a rise in canned and dried fruit intake and a surge in sugar and sweets sales during the post-rationing period.

Early Life Nutrition Affects Adult Health

The study found that children exposed to rationing, both after conception and in early life, had a one-third reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and hypertension when compared to those with little or no exposure to rationing.

Previous research has shown that the first 1,000 days from conception, including pregnancy (270 days) and the first two years of life, represent a critical window for fetal development.

“This period has been extensively studied and been shown as one of the most important developmental periods for several long-term outcomes,” said Gracner in an email.

The study references the “fetal origins hypothesis,” which suggests that a person’s risk of disease later in life is influenced by their experience inside the womb. When a fetus detects cues from the mother’s health—like poor nutrition—it makes adjustments to help it survive, such as changing how it uses energy and responds to hormones.

These adaptations can form “set points” that continue into adulthood. For example, if a fetus adapts to poor nutrition by slowing its metabolism, this slower metabolic rate can become a lasting set point, influencing how efficiently the body uses energy throughout life.

Additionally, infancy and toddlerhood are identified as “crucial periods for developing a taste for sweets (or even addiction) that can elevate sugar consumption throughout life,” the authors wrote.

“While humans generally like sweet taste, significant sugar exposure in early life can strengthen this preference,” Gracner said.

In their current work, her team finds supporting evidence of this pattern. “We found that adults who experienced sugar rationing consume less added sugar into their midlife compared to those who never experienced rationing,” she added.

While a mother’s low-sugar diet offered some protection, the reduced risk of development and delayed onset of chronic diseases were most pronounced when babies continued to experience a low-sugar environment beyond six months, typically when solid foods are introduced.

While maternal nutrition during pregnancy contributed one-third of the risk reduction, adding postnatal exposure to sugar rationing (up to one year) led to significantly greater reductions in disease risk. This effect was even more pronounced when rationing continued for over a year, especially for females. This may be because, as animal studies suggest, females are more likely to develop sugar addiction and poor glucose control in high-sugar environments, both of which increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

For those whose sugar exposure was restricted only in utero, Type 2 diabetes onset in older adulthood was delayed by about 1.5 years, and hypertension by half a year. However, people restricted both in utero and beyond one year postnatally had much longer delays: around four years for Type 2 diabetes and two years for hypertension.

This suggests that an infant’s early solid-food diet may have an even more significant impact on health outcomes than maternal nutrition during pregnancy. However, this hypothesis could not be thoroughly tested due to insufficient data regarding early-life and maternal diets in the UK Biobank, Gracner noted.

Read the rest here…

Authored by Samantha Flom via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A fierce battle over the legality of abortion in Florida came to a head on Nov. 5, when the state’s voters became the first in the nation to reject a push to enshrine abortion in the state’s constitution since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

After overcoming multiple legal challenges to secure its spot on Florida’s general election ballot, Amendment 4 failed to clear the final obstacle to its passage: the voters.

A 60 percent majority was required for the measure’s adoption. At 9 p.m. on election night with 91 percent of the vote in, the measure had received 57 percent of the vote.

The amendment sought to establish a right to abortion until fetal viability—the point at which a baby can survive outside the womb—or at any time if deemed necessary to protect the mother’s health by a “healthcare provider.”

Its adoption would have nullified the state’s six-week abortion law, which took effect in May. That law states that abortion is illegal once a pregnancy passes the six-week mark. The law includes limited exceptions for situations involving rape, incest, human trafficking, or a serious threat to the mother’s physical health.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser celebrated the voters’ decision in a statement.

“The demise of pro-abortion Amendment 4 is a momentous victory for life in Florida and for our entire country,” Dannenfelser said. “Thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis, when we wake up tomorrow, babies with beating hearts will still be protected in the free state of Florida.”

DeSantis fought hard against the ballot amendment, arguing that its broad language failed to define the specific conditions under which an abortion could be performed, and by whom.

He also held that the law would undo existing parental consent requirements for minors seeking abortions, bar the state from enacting regulations to protect pregnant women, and effectively allow for abortion up until the moment of birth.

“This Amendment 4, this is an intentional deception on the public,” DeSantis said at an Oct. 30 press conference in Clearwater, surrounded by a group of doctors who opposed the amendment.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody made the same arguments in challenging the amendment’s validity before the state’s Supreme Court. The court found those arguments unconvincing and approved the measure for the ballot.

Floridians Protecting Freedom, the yes campaign for the amendment, sued the Florida Health Department over its attempts to stop TV stations from airing ads supporting the measure that state officials said misrepresented the state’s current law.

A ruling has yet to be issued in the case.

Yes on 4 Campaign Director Lauren Brenzel criticized the state’s opposition to Amendment 4 in an Oct. 16 statement.

“The State cannot coerce television stations into removing political speech from the airwaves in an attempt to keep their abortion ban in place,” Brenzel said.

The amendment faced another obstacle in the final weeks of the election: allegations of fraud.

The state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security alleged that the petition’s circulators forged signatures to secure the amendment’s placement on the ballot. Law enforcement is reportedly investigating 60 individuals in connection with the case.

Authored by Robert Malone via The Brownstone Institute,

Highlights

• Political disinformation was positively associated with respiratory infection incidence.

• Government-sponsored disinformation was positively associated with the incidence of Covid-19.

• Internet censorship led to underreporting of the incidence of respiratory infections.

• Governments must stop sponsoring disinformation to avoid blame or gain a political advantage.

The recent report from the US House Energy and Commerce Committee titled “We Can Do This: An Assessment of the Department of Health and Human Services’ COVID-19 Public Health Campaign” provides detailed, documented information concerning the public Covid-19 PsyWar/Propaganda disinformation campaign delivered by the “Fors Marsh Group” corporation for the US Department of Health and Human Services. This was previously discussed in this Substack essay. 

According to the documentation provided, the principal HHS partner cooperating with Fors Marsh to provide content and messaging guidance regarding approved Covid-19 interventions was the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The report conclusions and appendix include data summaries implying that this nearly one billion dollar campaign ($911,174,285) contributed to the development of widespread US citizen resistance to Covid-19 “vaccine” uptake, and was associated with deterioration in confidence concerning the CDC, the public health enterprise, and vaccines. 

The Fors Marsh campaign specifically and intentionally deployed fear-based messaging to influence public behavior to comply with CDC and other USG recommendations. The intentional promotion of fear of death from an infectious disease disproportionate to actual risk of death is psychological bioterrorism and is associated with significantly greater social, political, and economic damage than that associated with known actual bioterror events such as the US Anthrax spore letter distribution campaign.

The weaponization of fear of death from an infectious disease as a component of an intentional propaganda campaign designed to modify human behavior is morally abhorrent, and is associated with a wide range of direct economic and mental health harms. These harms were never considered during the development and deployment of this HHS-sponsored psychological warfare technology-based propaganda campaign. This type of messaging and propaganda meets the criteria of State-sponsored disinformation.

In contrast to misinformation, which refers to simply false information, disinformation refers to false information that is spread deliberately to deceive people. Unsurprisingly, political leaders, especially those who have undermined democratic institutions, adopt disinformation as an instrument for gaining support and reducing resistance, especially during crucial political moments such as elections and wars (Guriev and Treisman, 2019).

From the Energy and Commerce Committee report page 42:

The CDC’s disregard for emerging evidence that contradicted its own preferred policy outcomes demonstrates an insular culture unable—and unwilling—to change course with evolving science. By November 10, 2021, in line with ACIP’s recommendation, the Campaign began airing ads targeting parents of children aged 5-11 years. These ads inaccurately suggested children were at high risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19. Many ads were emotionally manipulative and sought to incite fear by exaggerating the risk of severe illness and death among low-risk populations, such as children. This was especially true of ads that targeted parents. At the same time, the ads played down vaccine associated risks. 

From pages 45-46:

Nine months later, faced with a surge driven by the Delta variant, the Biden-Harris administration reneged on its pledge and announced, in a nationwide primetime address, that it would impose Covid-19 vaccine mandates. President Biden stated that “in total, the vaccine requirements in my plan will affect about 100 million Americans.” He ominously warned unvaccinated Americans or those who had only received a single dose, that “[w]e’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.” The mandates were presented as a way to protect higher-risk vaccinated workers and those too young to be vaccinated from catching Covid-19 spread by unvaccinated individuals.

At the time of the announcement, over 175 million Americans were vaccinated with about 80 million Americans remaining unvaccinated. The vast majority of unvaccinated individuals were under the age of 50 and at comparatively low risk of severe illness and death. More importantly, at that time, over 85 percent of people over 65 years old had received one dose, and around 78 percent had completed the two-shot primary series. Similarly, over 75 percent of people 50-64 years old had received at least one dose. Thus, the age groups at highest risk of severe illness or death were largely already vaccinated by the time the mandates were announced.

From page 62:

The fact that HHS’s COVID-19 pandemic policies, guidance, and recommendations, including Campaign messaging, were grounded in incorrect data generated by a faulty algorithm that had inflated the number of COVID-19 deaths shattered HHS’s remaining credibility. The CDC’s admission to overcounting deaths undermined the Campaign’s promotional materials. The Campaign’s messaging pressured parents to believe their children were facing life-or-death scenarios. By using artificially inflated child mortality rates, the Campaign greatly overstated the threat facing children and struck unnecessary fear into households everywhere. Parents felt betrayed, and those who resisted or tuned out the warnings felt vindicated. 

Quoting for the report appendix:

Over and over, the Campaign’s survey findings showed little to no change in vaccine uptake or readiness among the public. In spite of heavy promotion, findings reveal vaccine uptake remained unchanged for nearly a year between August 2021 and June 2022. 

By April 2022, 76 percent of unvaccinated adults said they would never get a COVID vaccine. 

Among unvaccinated adults, nearly half of all those surveyed remained unvaccinated due to concerns about the long-term side effects of the vaccines. Others remained concerned about the speed with which the vaccines were developed, their efficacy in preventing COVID infection and transmission, as well as mistrust of government motives in widely encouraging vaccines. 

Survey findings between January and June 2022 also reveal no significant change in booster uptake among fully vaccinated adults. Notably, survey findings also reveal that while the Campaign was ongoing, booster uptake peaked at 27 percent in November 2021 and gradually declined to 3 percent in March 2022.

The Campaign closely monitored vaccine hesitancy among the public, including among parents of children under 18 years. A CET survey finding from March 2022 showed between 60 and 76 percent of parents with unvaccinated children under 18 years were concerned about potential vaccine side effects. At the same time, 53 percent of adults agreed that parents should be able to make their own choices about getting their children vaccinated, and as the COVID pandemic lagged, Campaign findings indicated a 20 percent drop in the number of adults who supported mask mandates in schools over a seven-month period. Interestingly, school mask and vaccination mandates for teachers, staff, visitors, and students were most strongly supported by liberal, vaccinated adults, non-parents and those dwelling in urban areas. In contrast, parents were more likely to agree that COVID vaccines for young children, especially those under 5, were unnecessary. 

By 2022, many Americans had had enough. In April 2022, nearly half of all surveyed adults agreed that vaccination and masking decisions are personal choices and should not be mandated. These statistics reveal how public perception significantly diverged from that of the Biden-Harris administration and the Campaign’s messaging. Demonstratively, when the federal mandate requiring masks in airports and on airplanes, buses, subways, trains, and other forms of public transportation was scheduled to expire on April 18, 2022, the CDC, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chose to extend it another two weeks—until May 3. Although major airlines such as Delta and American Airlines called to an end to the requirement, President Biden “promised to veto any legislation overturning it.”

By April 2022, 58 percent of adults surveyed stated they were tired of worrying about the risk of COVID and 46 percent claimed they tune out COVID related news. Fifty percent stated, “[t]he virus may not be done with us, but we need to be done with it.”

In short, the campaign failed to achieve the intended objectives and instead was associated with the development of widespread citizen distrust and disillusionment with the State, the CDC, the US Public Health Enterprise, the Medical/Industrial complex, and vaccines in general.

Not considered and unaddressed in the Energy and Commerce report was whether these types of State-sponsored infectious disease disinformation campaigns positively or negatively influence infectious disease outbreak outcomes. I used the US National Library of Medicine PubMed search engine to investigate this question to discover whether any high-quality peer-reviewed academic research addressing the issue had been published.

My search revealed a March 2022 study publication by a group of Taiwanese researchers that was published in the Elsevier journal Social Science and Medicine. Is this journal a respected academic publication?

Social Science and Medicine Impact Score (IS) Trend:

• The Impact Score for Social Science and Medicine has been steadily increasing over the years, with a slight decrease in 2023 to 5.38.

• The highest Impact Score recorded in the last 10 years is 5.54 (2022), while the lowest is 3.22 (2018).

• According to SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), Social Science and Medicine is ranked 1.954, indicating a high level of scientific influence.

Clearly “Social Science and Medicine” is a credible peer-reviewed academic journal.

The article is titled “Government-sponsored disinformation and the severity of respiratory infection epidemics including COVID-19: A global analysis, 2001–2020”

This link will take you directly to the publication, which is published as an open source document (no subscription required). But you will need to verify that you are a human. It is not too technical, and I recommend that any readers seeking additional details (such as experimental methods and data) read the primary source.

Both the background summary and the study findings are prophetic, and almost completely aligned with the Energy and Commerce committee report.

Abstract

Internet misinformation and government-sponsored disinformation campaigns have been criticized for their presumed/hypothesized role in worsening the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We hypothesize that these government-sponsored disinformation campaigns have been positively associated with infectious disease epidemics, including COVID-19, over the last two decades. By integrating global surveys from the Digital Society Project, Global Burden of Disease, and other data sources across 149 countries for the period 2001–2019, we examined the association between government-sponsored disinformation and the spread of respiratory infections before the COVID-19 outbreak. Then, building on those results, we applied a negative binomial regression model to estimate the associations between government-sponsored disinformation and the confirmed cases and deaths related to COVID-19 during the first 300 days of the outbreak in each country and before vaccination began.

After controlling for climatic, public health, socioeconomic, and political factors, we found that government-sponsored disinformation was significantly associated with the incidence and prevalence percentages of respiratory infections in susceptible populations during the period 2001–2019. The results also show that disinformation is significantly associated with the incidence rate ratio (IRR) of cases of COVID-19. The findings imply that governments may contain the damage associated with pandemics by ending their sponsorship of disinformation campaigns.

Introduction 

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a worldwide medical crisis that began in 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic has escalated, accurate and inaccurate information has spread on the Internet (Islam et al., 2020). The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned of the risk of an “infodemic” wherein an overwhelming amount of circulating information discredits professional advice and prevents accurate information from reaching its target audience (WHO, 2020). Some studies have found that people’s exposure to misinformation may be associated with their violation of epidemic prevention regulations or resistance to vaccination (Lee et al., 2020; Hornik et al., 2021; Loomba et al., 2021; Prandi and Primiero, 2020), and the sources of this misinformation can be traced back to political leadership in the government. For example, one study found the name of former U.S. president Donald Trump appeared in 37.9% of misinformation conversations about the COVID-19 pandemic (Evanega et al., 2020). These findings imply that attempts to conceal or distort information about the disease may contribute to its spread globally.

Most public health studies on information issues have emphasized only the spread and effects of misinformation (Roozenbeek et al., 2020) and not considered “disinformation.” In contrast to misinformation, which refers to simply false information, disinformation refers to false information that is spread deliberately to deceive people. Unsurprisingly, political leaders, especially those who have undermined democratic institutions, adopt disinformation as an instrument for gaining support and reducing resistance, especially during crucial political moments such as elections and wars (Guriev and Treisman, 2019). In the digital era, recent studies have uncovered that more than two dozen governments have been deeply involved in disinformation campaigns to pursue their own domestic or international purposes (Bennett and Livingston, 2018; Bradshaw and Howard, 2018). 

The relationship between such disinformation campaigns and disease spread warrants investigation particularly in the case of the COVID-19 outbreak. Some governments adopt authoritarian strategies including disinformation and censorship to protect against political accountability and criticism over the spread of epidemics. However, the effects of such activities are unclear (Edgell et al., 2021). In this paper, we hypothesize that political disinformation may lead to worse public health outcomes. By examining comprehensive data on respiratory infections from 149 countries from 2001 to 2020, the present study discovered that government-sponsored disinformation is positively associated with the spread of respiratory infections including COVID-19. The findings imply that governments may contain the damage associated with pandemics by ending their sponsorship of disinformation campaigns. 

Government-Sponsored Disinformation and Epidemics 

Disinformation is widely understood as being misleading content produced to further political goals, generate profits, or maliciously deceive. It may be utilized by politicians to manipulate public perception and reshape the collective decisions of the majority (Stewart et al., 2019). As an effective political tool in the digital era, one of the major origins of disinformation is a variety of agents sponsored by governments (Bradshaw and Howard, 2018). The actors disseminating government-sponsored disinformation include government-based cyber troops working as civil servants to influence public opinion (King et al., 2017), politicians and parties utilizing social media to reach their political intentions, private contractors hired by the government to promote domestic and international propaganda, volunteers that collaborate with governments, and citizens who have prominent influence on the internet and are paid by governments to spread disinformation (Bennett and Livingston, 2020).

Accompanied by the development of the internet, government-sponsored disinformation has become a global issue over the last two decades. Comparative political studies have noted that autocracies create more fake news than democracies, while the public in democracies has also severely suffered from it (Bradshaw and Howard, 2018). In contrast to democratic governments that are elected to provide public goods through majority rule, nondemocratic governments have leaders who remain in office by gaining support from a small group of political elites without checks and balances. Autocratic governments, therefore, face the constant threat of mass protests from large numbers of disenfranchised people (De Mesquita and Smith, 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006). In the digital age, autocracies prefer to use informational instruments such as censorship and disinformation to compromise potential protests, particularly during political crises (Guriev and Treisman, 2019). For example, a recent study revealed that autocracies such as China, Russia, and Iran used internet censorship as a reactive strategy to suppress civil society after the Arab Spring (Chang and Lin, 2020).

The political effects of government-sponsored disinformation and internet censorship on disease spread, however, remains understudied. As a tool for maintaining political stability in the government’s favor; however, disinformation may lead to dysfunction in public health systems, as well as more infections from disease. In this paper, we highlight some suspected political, informational, and institutional processes to explain the positive association between government-sponsored disinformation and the exacerbation of infectious diseases—measured by the incidence, prevalence, and death percentages of respiratory infection before the COVID-19 pandemic—and how this disinformation was associated with the number of confirmed cases (henceforth, cases) of and deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political Incentives to Spread Disinformation about Epidemics

As the COVID-19 outbreak has made apparent, some government incumbents accountable for controlling the disease neglected the risk and failed to prevent its spread. The failure of leadership to control the disease stimulated blame avoidance behaviors (Weaver, 1986; Baekkeskov and Rubin, 2017; Zahariadis et al., 2020), which sometimes took the form of internet censorship and government-sponsored disinformation. The Chinese government has been criticized for its alleged ignorance and suppression of information at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic (Petersen et al., 2020), while Chinese diplomats have openly accused the United States of spreading the disease, with the Iranian and Russian governments also supporting this conspiracy theory (Whiskeyman and Berger, 2021). In Iran, the government disseminated contradictory information on national COVID-19 fatalities. On February 10, 2020, the Iranian government falsely claimed that the country had no cases of coronavirus, but a 63-year-old woman died of COVID-19 on the same day. Finally, on February 19, the Iranian regime admitted that coronavirus had spread in Iran, 9 days after the first reported death (Dubowitz and Ghasseminejad, 2020). Under the cloud of poor transparency and disinformation regarding the epidemic in Iran, the country saw severe outcomes, with 55,223 deaths as of December 31, 2020.

Disinformation as blame avoidance behavior by political leaders was exhibited not only in autocratic countries, but also occurred in some democratic countries (Flinders, 2020). For example, during his US presidency, Donald Trump understated the risk of the COVID-19 pandemic by accusing the political opposition of conspiracy and the media of exaggeration (Calvillo et al., 2020). His statements about hydroxychloroquine as a “miracle cure” also misled the public to employ false treatments (Evanega et al., 2020). This misinformation about the disease could directly result in ineffective coping by people and undermine their institutional trust in public health agencies. However, the suspected “disinformation” from democratic leadership, in contrast to autocracies, still encountered effective checks and balances by parliaments, medical professionals, free media, and voters. 

Disinformation and Ineffective Coping 

Some case studies have shown that reliable and transparent government-sponsored epidemic information could have alerted public health institutions and susceptible populations early and led them to take effective preventive behaviors before the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, a key lesson learned from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) experience in Singapore was the importance of rapid and accurate information to support effective decision-making. The innovation of frequent information reviews effectively guided local public health decisions during the H1N1-2009 epidemic (Tan, 2006; Tay et al., 2010).

In contrast, government-sponsored disinformation disrupts the mechanisms of information exchange among public health institutions and other bodies, which can lead to ineffective coping, such as perceptions of low risk and the slow development of preventive behaviors at both the individual level, and preparedness delays and resource misallocation at the institutional level. COVID-19 studies have demonstrated that people’s belief in misinformation reduced the likelihood that they would take preventive measures such as mask wearing, social distancing, and complying with official guidelines (Lee et al., 2020; Hornik et al., 2021; Pickles et al., 2021). Case studies of Iran have revealed that government-sponsored disinformation typically results in ineffective coping by individuals and public health institutions and that the disinformation can elevate disease incidence and prevalence in an epidemic (e.g., Bastani and Bahrami, 2020).

In addition, in contrast to democracies, autocracies such as Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea are likely to refuse information sharing and regulations promoted by the global health system during a pandemic (Burkle, 2020). When governments disseminate disinformation or suppress valid information, therefore, we expect that it is difficult for public health institutions and citizens to protect themselves from the spread of the disease. 

Disinformation and Institutional Distrust 

Misinformation is likely to trigger institutional distrust in public authorities and thus directs citizens’ attention away from professional advice and instead towards skeptics and harmful treatments (Brainard and Hunter, 2019) harmful treatments (Brainard and Hunter, 2019). Disinformation could be associated even more strongly with dire outcomes. Studies conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic have illustrated that distrust of government or the medical profession creates obstacles to preventing epidemics by reducing people’s compliance with official messages related to disease containment and by engendering inadequate medical service utilization. For example, studies investigating Ebola outbreaks discovered that respondents with misinformation and low trust in the government were less likely to comply with social distancing policies or take precautions against the epidemic (Blair et al., 2017; Vinck et al., 2019).

Recent global studies on COVID-19 have reported that trust in public institutions, but not general social trust, has a negative association with the disease incidence ratio and deaths related to the pandemic (Elgar et al., 2020). For example, online survey studies confirmed that trust in government amplified compliance with official health guidelines (Pak et al., 2021); evidence from a geographic information system in European countries revealed the same pattern—the higher the political trust, the lower the regional and national human mobility (Bargain and Aminjonov, 2020). Survey studies conducted in both China and Europe have demonstrated that higher political trust before the outbreak was associated with lower incidence and mortality rates (Ye and Lyu, 2020; Oksanen et al., 2020). In addition, studies conducted in the United States have shown a negative relationship between institutional trust in science and the public health system and belief in misinformation (Dhanani and Franz, 2020; Agley and Xiao, 2021) and that both trust and information sources influence the probability that individuals will perform preventive behaviors (Fridman et al., 2020). International comparative studies have also found that distrusting citizens may not comply with regulations because of their underestimation of the risk of non-compliance (Jennings et al., 2021).

Therefore, government-sponsored disinformation may result in distrust of public health institutions and be positively associated with the incidence and prevalence of disease. In this study, cross-national data on vaccination is not included, although other studies suggest that misinformation could result in the spread of epidemics by reducing the willingness to receive vaccination. Studies before COVID-19 have revealed that vaccination-related information on Twitter is associated with regional vaccination rates in the United States and public confidence in vaccination in Russia (Salath´ e and Khandelwal, 2011; Broniatowski et al., 2018). Based on a global survey, Lunz Trujillo and Motta (2021) found that country-level internet connectivity is associated with individual-level vaccine skepticism. A recent study on the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines also demonstrated that misinformation exposure significantly reduced the willingness of people to accept a vaccine in the UK and USA (Loomba et al., 2021). As these studies implied, government-sponsored disinformation may reduce the acceptance and coverage of vaccination and thus are likely to be positively associated with the incidence and prevalence of epidemics. To sum up, blame avoidance and other interests of politicians may stimulate government-sponsored disinformation and internet censorship efforts during epidemics.

The disinformation might be associated with ineffective coping by people and institutions, and contribute to institutional distrust of governments and public health systems. The ineffective coping, and resistance to official guidelines of preventive behaviors and vaccination because of the distrust, might facilitate the spread of disease in epidemics. Accordingly, we expect government-sponsored disinformation to be positively associated with the incidence and prevalence measures of respiratory infections including COVID-19. 

Conclusion 

This study hypothesized a positive association between political disinformation and its impacts on epidemics in light of political and institutional processes. The findings reveal that government-sponsored disinformation is associated with the incidence and prevalence of respiratory infections during the period 2001–2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Government-sponsored disinformation is also positively associated with the IRR of cases of COVID-19 before vaccination program implementation. In contrast to literature focusing only on the effects of misinformation and preventive behaviors at the individual level during the COVID-19 pandemic, the present study integrated evidence from global surveys and revealed the adverse effects of government-sponsored disinformation on the management of epidemics over the last two decades. We found that disinformation is positively and significantly associated with the incidence and prevalence of respiratory infections including COVID-19, though its positive relationship with mortality of these respiratory infections was not significant. This study has some limitations. First of all, the disinformation index focused on only government sources and not on other disinformation and misinformation sources. Also, the DSP database is expert-rated and inevitably subjective.

However, it is the only existing global database regarding the interaction between politics and social media. Second, the pooled category of respiratory infections and the percentages of all disease causes could not be directly compared with the IRRs for a single pandemic. Data on both cases and deaths in the GBD and COVID-19 databases might not only present the impacts of the respiratory infections but also reflect differing levels of capacity among various public health systems and transparency among governments. The data on respiratory infections may be censored deliberately or underreported unintentionally by developing countries. For the application of the GBD database, we suggest that adopting the percentages of a specific type of epidemic from all causes might be a relatively more reliable choice than the rates or numbers. However, the database of epidemics might consider some adjustments to address the variation from the different capacity of public health systems.

Despite these limitations, this study may be the first to present cross-national evidence of the association between political disinformation and the spread of epidemics including COVID-19. Our study also implies that the quality of data during the COVID-19 pandemic is an endogenous factor of informational politics. The internet censorship of autocracies tends to systematically underreport the morbidity and mortality of the pandemic. Iran is a vivid example of intentionally underreporting and also disseminating fake news. There is also evidence of deliberate inaccuracies and concealment of COVID-19 infections in lower- or middle-income countries (Richards, 2020). Rocco et al. (2021) revealed that subnational COVID-19 data quality, including mortality, is associated with media independence. Hansen et al. (2021) pointed out that in the United States, counties were more likely to release information about COVID-19 when there was a stronger opposition (Democrats) before the US presidential election. In our analysis, governments that applied censorship and spread fake news as blame avoidance behaviors may also intentionally underreport the numbers of infected and deaths. After all, concealing the numbers of cases and deaths during the pandemic is also a form of political disinformation. Therefore, we may have underestimated the association between disinformation and the severity of pandemics. The real damage of disinformation may be greater than the current findings show.

Based on our findings, we suggest countering disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we would ask that governments immediately stop sponsoring disinformation for blame avoiding or regarding the disease as a strategy for gaining political advantage in domestic and international conflicts. Also, we would propose that the international community and global civil society act to prevent governments from sponsoring disinformation campaigns and internet censorship. In practice, fact-checking authorities managed by civil associations may be established to efficiently refute fake news. 

Eliminating fake news in civil society may help curb the spread of infections. In sum, to control the pandemic, fighting disinformation can play a key role. 

Republished from the author’s Substack

When it comes to the price of oil, geopolitical volatility is usually a tailwind. However, when it comes to what big oil CEOs worry about the most, these conflicts – including the ongoing ones in the Middle East – are top of the list, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

Oil executives are meeting at the region’s largest energy conference amid high market volatility, the report says. Rising tensions between Israel and Iran, an OPEC member, have traders wary of possible supply disruptions, while China’s weak economy is slowing oil demand growth.

Meanwhile, U.S.-China relations remain uncertain, since President-elect Donald Trump has pledged significant tariff hikes on China if elected.

BP Chief Executive Officer Murray Auchincloss commented: “The conflict in the Middle East is probably the top risk of all right now. We operate across five or six countries in the region — we are worried obviously about the security of our people and the security of energy supplies.”

Shell CEO Wael Sawan added that “what happens on the US-China axis” is also a concern. He added: “We fundamentally believe the world will need more energy and we fundamentally believe it will need different forms of energy.”

Executives on Monday expressed confidence that oil demand will keep growing, despite Asia’s economic slowdown, necessitating continued investment to meet supply needs even as the world shifts toward cleaner energy.

Bloomberg reports that CEOs voiced mixed views on demand, with some anticipating strong growth despite a cooling Chinese economy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects demand to peak before 2030, while OPEC and Saudi Aramco remain optimistic, especially with recent Chinese stimulus.

Petronas CEO Muhammad Taufik believes demand will continue beyond 2030, though price volatility hinders investment, potentially pushing futures higher, noted Eni’s CEO Claudio Descalzi. 

Commentary by Mark Bauerlein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A survey by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University reported findings that won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. Among Millennials and members of Generation Z, fully one-in-three individuals suffer from some kind of mental disorder. Anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts afflict them, and the mental problems frequently manifest in physical symptoms.

That’s not the evidence of the Research Center study, though. The mental health numbers above come from federal government agencies, which the Center cites in order to set up its attachment of these emotional pains to another factor, a cause rarely considered by public officials in charge of data collection and population surveys. Here is how the Center and its staff led by George Barna put it:

“… Barna and his colleagues suggest that addressing those conditions may not require counseling, hospitalization, drugs, or other common remedies.

“The research instead indicates that those are often symptoms of an unhealthy worldview …”

That’s the assumption, a close relationship between a person’s general worldview and a person’s emotional state. A 20-year-old who thinks the world is a cruel habitat, that the world doesn’t care about individual human beings, that people are selfish and life is hard… that 20-year-old will feel the effects of that pessimism. He embraces a nihilism about the world that will recoil upon him and bring him down, that will include him in the negative judgment. If he thinks that climate change will bring devastation to the earth in the next 30 years, he loses hope and wonders what to do with his life. If he doesn’t trust other people, he can’t form solid and affirming relationships. Emotional agonies are inevitable.

Data that the Center has gathered add support to the assumption. Consider these results:

• Seven out of ten individuals under 40 years of age who responded to Center questionnaires stated that they “lack a sense of purpose and meaning in life.”
• Only 13 percent of Generation Z and 22 percent of Millennials believe that “absolute moral truth exists and is an objective reality.”

Given those dispiriting beliefs, we shouldn’t shake our heads at the malaise and panic of the young. In former times, thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger described such regrettable attitudes in terms that combined the philosophical and the psychological, for instance, “ontological insecurity” and “metaphysical discomfort,” which they understood as peculiarly modern diseases. Those traits are still with us, Barna et al. insist, and they run in two directions, outward and inward. That life has no purpose slides smoothly into “I have no purpose.” To think that moral truth is a relative or subjective thing only is to deny oneself a reliable foundation of judgment and conviction. Young Americans are fractious and fragile, and who can avoid that condition in a world so utterly careless and capricious.

The daily experience of average 16-year-olds only reinforces the negative worldview they bear. The videos they watch, the music they hear, the texts and photos that flood their phones, the movies and TV shows they favor—it’s a wave of entertainment that shows people behaving badly with no moral accounting. These media allow for no transcendence and no organized worship, no prayer or devotion. They are the bricks of youth culture, which doesn’t revere the past or envision a happy future. No deep meanings and profound truths. The producers of it purvey shallow ideas and emotional chaos. We have handed the rising generations an environment hostile to their souls.

The mental problems of 21st-century youth are real. Our methods of treating them are pharmacological and therapeutic, wholly individualized. These procedures are often incomplete.

We should add to the mix the exploration of a wayward youth’s worldview, and the modification of it should that worldview prove discouraging and depressing.

What a teen assumes about human existence at large affects daily mood and will, the head and the heart. It’s a warning to parents. Give your children a stable moral habitat. Teach them a meaningful past and a hopeful future. If they rebel against your vision, so be it, but you will make that rebellion itself meaningful by presenting to them something meaningful to oppose.

The depression and anxiety, in some cases at least (a not insignificant portion, I believe), are a sane response to bad influences and cynical perceptions. Youth culture is itself unhealthy, and Americans coming-of-age need to be cured of it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.