While a lot of these newer drugs have tons of upside potential, the commercials often are two-minute long ads, because 45 seconds of them have to include the potential side effects and downsides coming out of the trial phases. Virtually all of these side effects are speed read so as to gloss over such things as the drug could cause cancer, liver disease, brain damage, more depression, thoughts of suicide, and invariably, death. Every new drug has in its increasingly long disclaimer the possibility of death if you take it. Then, magically, the mood of the ad turns bright again with all the possibilities of a happy life ahead.

That’s what Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tried to pull when pressed in an interview about whether the feds were coming for your gas stoves or not. Speaking at the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital in D.C., this is how Granholm answered the gas stove question.

Laugh, laugh, laugh, such a blown up, ridiculous thing, chuckle, chuckle, total overreaction, chortle, chortle, no one’s coming for your gas stoves, snicker snicker. Oh, by the way, we have issued guidelines (rules) and definitely prefer induction stoves, but we have no idea how people get these crazy ideas that we’re coming for their stoves.

Literally, while she’s trying to downplay and laugh off the backlash at the government’s intrusion into your kitchen, she admits a sentence later there actually are new federal guidelines. As the Washington Times reports, these guidelines are stringent enough that only 4% of current gas stoves would comply. Guidelines inevitably lead to rules, which ultimately lead to the stove police.

When one takes a glance at the Biden administration, the President himself is old and sclerotic and looking more feeble by the day. Kamala Harris is just plain stump stupid with the added benefit of being obnoxious and condescending. Pete Buttigieg showed the Peter Principle to be as reliable as the law of gravity when he became mayor of South Bend, let alone Transportation Secretary. Attorney General Merrick Garland with each passing day gives Mitch McConnell reasons to gloat. There’s incompetence, corruption, and fecklessness wherever you look in this administration. But perhaps the most nefarious cabinet member of the bunch is former Michigan Governor and current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

She was a heavy investor and on the board of Proterra, who makes electric buses (yes, the ones Kamala Harris loves to talk about so much in one cringeworthy speech after another), and somehow failed to divest herself from the company and her stock in it before the deadline. Paperwork error, it was alleged. Magically, she benefitted from a boon in value after Joe Biden visited the company and crowed about it by name, along with other members of his administration. So when she talks about all this climate change stuff and where energy will come from in the future, know that she’s got a financial stake in all of it.

What really galls me is what she had to say at SXSW over the weekend. She’s literally begging people to come to watch her speech about the existential threat climate change poses.

She’s like the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, dressed up as a candy man offering ice cream, treacle tarts, and all free today. She’s sounding as upbeat and hip as she knows how to be in order to entice the young’uns to come listen to her propaganda. Here’s the problem. She’s unserious. Also Jennifer Granholm from SXSW.

Let’s analyze that to see if there’s a shred of truth in there about China doing a pretty good job at cutting emissions since we’re all going to die and all.

It took until 2006 for China to surpass the United States as the largest carbon emitter in the world. As of today, the United States has seen an incremental decrease in emissions, and a reduction in the percent of total global emissions every year, while China has tripled its emissions over the past three decades, nearing 12 billion tons of carbon annually. China is responsible for 27% of the world’s carbon footprint, and that percentage of world total carbon emissions increases each year. As it stands right now, if you were to take the emissions of every other industrialized country in the world combined, China is still outpacing it, and increasingly so every year.

Keep in mind that it’s supposedly an existential threat, Granholm says, and yet a country that’s putting three times more of the deadly stuff into the air than we are, and that spread is getting worse every year for the foreseeable future, and you’re saying they’re doing a pretty good job. Don’t talk to me about existential threats.

Coal-fired power plants are being regulated out of existence in the States because of how much carbon it produces when it’s burned. China, while giving lip service saying they’ll hit peak carbon by 2030 and hit net zero by 2060, shows no signs at all of living up to that empty promise. Two new coal-fired power plants are being permitted each week in China. We’d be tickled to death to get a new power plant online – gas, coal, nuclear, solar, twice a week. With today’s Democratic Party, we’d be fortunate to get two new plants permitted and starting up a decade. At two a week, for Granholm to claim they’re doing a pretty good job, it’s just unserious.

If you were the type of person who wishes the world would cull the herd or go through a zero population growth cycle at the very least, unleashing a virus that kills millions of people over a couple year period is one metric where you might claim China has done a good job. But if the perceived climate crisis truly is your thing, and you really believe carbon is something other than plant food and will kill us all if it’s not reduced, no serious person can look at an expansionist China that’s nearly tripling the output that we are and say they’re doing a pretty good job. I don’t need to go listen to a snappy prezzy to know that this is an unserious person who is trying to capitalize personally on an issue that wouldn’t be improved one iota if I became Fred Flintstone tomorrow.