John Pandol has spoken out on many topics both here at the Pundit and on sister publication, PRODUCE BUSINESS magazine:
John Pandol Speaks Out: ‘Volume Is Vanity. Profit Is Sanity.’
John Pandol And Jim Prevor Conduct
No-Holds-Barred Discussion At Global Trade Symposium
Ugly Produce: The 2.0 of Dumpster Diving
Now our piece — Will Climate-Change Fanaticism Bankrupt The West? — prompted John to send this note:
Thinking about the greener-than-green Germans, who in the 70’s & 80’s sported “Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!” (translation: Nuclear Power? No Thanks!) slogans everywhere, and, more recently, extended that to fossil fuels.
Of course, nowadays the most frequent internet search in Germany is ‘FIREWOOD’
Unbelievably, the technically gifted Germans are now gathering sticks in the forest to keep warm in the winter. This is not 1922… it’s 1822.
I thought about Rewe’s Stephan Weist’s slide that he presented at The Global Grape Summit. It had Putin painted on the side of a building with ‘put in prison’ across his shirt.
Maybe, instead, there should be a line of Germans with wheelbarrows full of Euros marching to Moscow to pay Mr. Putin, hoping he doesn’t turn off their heat this winter.
If electricity starts getting more expensive and the supply gets sketchier, what of chilled and frozen food products, such as produce, that require a temperature-controlled supply chain? Back to canning? Maybe the preppers are on to something.
That Europe is ‘ahead of us’ and to be emulated on all things environmental is a myth.
Will the IFPA and Cathy Burns, with a vision of global thought-leadership, side with the European/International NGO version of climate policies? It is a vision that implies Europeans are forward-thinking and to be emulated and that the Americans are backwards, stubborn and stupid.
We need thought leadership that says, let’s autopsy the disasters that Western Europe and places such as California have created and denounce those environmental policies!
— John Pandol
Director of Special Projects
Pandol Bros.
Delano, California
John O’Sullivan has been editor of National Review, editor of the New York Post editorial page, special advisor to Margaret Thatcher and has held many other positions. He is also the author of “The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World” — a most important book about President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.
He is also the creator of “O’Sullivan’s First Law”:
All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western World.
We wrote a piece titled The Roots of Editorial ‘Independence’ for the Wall Street Journal and wrote about the evolution of the Ford Foundation:
Henry Ford II felt compelled to resign in disgust from the Ford Foundation explaining that: “In effect, the Foundation is a creature of capitalism, a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the Foundation does. It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the Foundation’s grant programs.”
Just before Russia invaded the Ukraine, Reason ran an a piece, Germany’s Failed Bid To Be the Global Climate Leader. The subhead told the story:
Nuclear power wasn’t green enough for German leaders, so now they depend on energy from Russia.
There is a lot of this in the world. We don’t like that some agricultural workers are not paid better, so we impose all kinds of standards that have them lose their jobs and then we import the exact same produce from elsewhere, with the workers there being paid less and treated worse that they would be in the United states.
We doubt we will be doing much of an autopsy on anything. Practically the same week California announced that effective 2035 it will ban new gas engine car sales, it also asked residents to limit their charging of electric vehicles right now.
Even right now the last nuclear power plant in Germany is scheduled to cease operations in December of this year. In 2010, 22.2% of electrical generation was nuclear. Starting in January, it will be zero. Note that there are many plants in Germany that use coal, and they are not eliminated. Closing nuclear plants was a choice:
… Rainer Moormann, who used to be a physical chemist at the Jülich Research Centre, and Anna Veronika Wendland — from the Herder Institute for Historical Research on Eastern Central Europe in Marburg — argued in 2020 that leaving the last six nuclear power stations running would have enabled Germany to shut down all of North Rhine-Westphalia’s lignite plants. By reversing the decision to shut down the last six reactors in 2021 and 2022 and let them run until the end of the decade, Germany’s total CO2 emissions could be reduced by 10 percent, they estimated.
But these debates are not so much scientific discussions as religious ones. In 2022, even under severe stress, such as that caused by the war in the Ukraine, Germany is incapable of saying the obvious: that maintaining a diverse range of energy sources rather than putting all one’s eggs in one basket is prudent.
