Biden’s ‘Big Shift’ On Climate Change Is The ‘Great Reset’ By Stealth

From “Pen and Phone” to “Pretty Big Shift” 

Remember back in 2014 when President Barack Obama said that he would conduct his presidency by “pen and phone”? He said that after he had lost control of Congress and was no longer able to pass legislation.

His new idea was that he would continue to advance progressive goals by fiat: by executive order or just by doing things through the murky workings of the Administrative State.

It was this unilateral pen-and-phone approach that launched, for example, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

DACA might sound like a formal thing, like some sort of actual statutory program, and yet it was mere freelancing; it represented the policy preferences of the Obama administration and nothing more. …snip…

Yet now the concept—if not the exact words—is making a comeback under the 46th president. Having lost his mojo in Congress on big legislation, President Joe Biden is increasingly looking to his appointees to carry on the work of progressivism behind the scenes.

A good example is Biden’s quiet reworking of the Federal Reserve System. The Fed is an important body—it’s the central bank of the United States—and yet its actual operations are obscure. (How many Americans can name even one of the Fed’s seven governors?)

And so few beyond the DC Beltway noticed on January 24 when Politico headlined, “‘Big shift’: Biden moves to rewrite the rules on climate threat.”

As the article detailed, Biden has nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to be vice-chair of the Fed. (She’s the spouse, by the way, of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a leading figure on both the House Judiciary Committee and the January 6 investigating committee.)

As the Politico article details, the Biden plan is that the Raskin-ized Fed will join with other mostly obscure agencies, such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, to steer (read: scare) investors away from fossil fuel companies.

Such scaring away would require a reworking of federal regulations, such that companies would have to take “environmental and social goals” (ESG), as defined by bureaucrats and Democratic donors, into account.

ESG is, in other words, a substantial retooling of the venerable concept of fiduciary responsibility—the idea that the first loyalty of companies should be to manage their assets wisely and not put them at risk on government-mandated schemes.

Politico quoted David Arkush, managing director of the climate program at Public Citizen, a group founded by Ralph Nader, saying of the new ESG plan, “I expect it to be a pretty big shift.” Yes, it is a big shift. Politico summed it up:

The nation’s top financial regulators will all soon be headed by progressive regulators who are preparing to push the Biden administration’s climate agenda forward, even as the president has failed to get broader climate-related legislation through Congress.

Sarah Bloom Raskin herself has been quite emphatic about her big-shifting green goals. As she wrote two years ago in the left’s go-to bulletin board, the New York Times, “Climate change poses the next big threat. Ignoring it, particularly to the benefit of fossil fuel interests, is a risk we can’t afford.”

Looking forward to her next job, she added, “The Fed’s unique independence affords it a powerful role”—that is, the power to crush Exxon and all the other oil, gas, and coal companies.

Amusingly, Raskin tried to disguise her green ideology as just hard-nosed thinking about the future. Her carbon-fuel disinvestment plan, she wrote, “forestalls the inevitable decline of an industry that can no longer sustain itself.”

To which we can rejoin: Yes, it’s possible that the greens will kill the carbon-energy industry—they’re trying hard—and yet in the meantime, fossil or carbon-based fuel accounts for 79 percent of America’s energy.

Indeed, carbon fuels are such a good energy source that people keep relying on them even as supplies tighten.

For example, oil prices are currently near $90 a barrel, up from barely more than $50 a year ago. And some projections suggest that oil could hit $100 a barrel. …snip…

In the meantime, of course, the Biden administration’s efforts to make energy scarcer and drive prices higher have hit home. In the words of Rupert Darwall of the RealClearFoundation:

High inflation is now the biggest threat to the economy. Woke central bankers and multi-trillion-dollar institutional investors are peas in a pod when it comes to their culpability for rising prices.

After a bruising 2021, the Biden people have realized that contractionary and inflationary policies are not popular. And yet as the Raskin pick indicates, they’re still hoping that they can achieve their ideological aims behind the scenes without kicking up a storm in Congress, let alone with the public.

We can step back and see that this has always been the method of the Administrative State: To operate through a hidden hand, high above the to-and-fro of politics—so that the voters never know what hit them.

Big Shift, Meet Great Reset 

In fact, the doings of Raskin and her allies aren’t just an updating of the old Obama pen-and-phone strategy, they are also in keeping with the Great Reset.

That, of course, is the favored term of Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, aka, Davos. You know, the folks who disdain national democracy and sovereignty, and seek instead to remake the world according to woke-capitalist wishes.

Call it whatever you want: pen-and-phone, big shift, Great Reset: the common thread is that our betters think they know what’s best for us—and if they have to, they’ll cram it down our throats.

We’ve been warned. Here’s historian and demographer Joel Kotkin, who first describes how the planned financialization of the Great Reset will make the rich richer and then adds:

For the middle and working classes, however, the Great Reset may prove somewhat less promising—if not disastrous.  For most people, notes Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, the rapid “green” transition will mean “a noticeable loss of welfare and jobs.” The conscious policy of degrowth as a means of forcibly reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require getting most people out of their cars, and forcing them to travel far less and to live in tiny apartments.

So that’s the future that the Great Resetters see for the average American. …snip…

Yet Schwab and his fellow Davos Men and Women have a plan to deal with all these uppity populist challenges to their rule. They’re not going to change their ideology or policy, of course, but they are willing to let go of a name. And so the Great Reset is now becoming the Great Narrative. Same globalism, new label.

Yes, that’s always the plan: As soon as people wise up to one shell game, the Davosians start up another. And the globalists can afford plenty of shells.

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