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At United Nations climate change talks in Dubai, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, John Kerry, called for a halt to new coal plants worldwide. “There shouldn't be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world,” he said. “That's how you can do something for health. And the reality is that we're not doing it.”

But the main alternative to burning coal is burning wood and dung, which is far worse for human health. Where coal is burned inside of large power plants, wood and dung are burned inside of homes, creating indoor air pollution, which is far more concentrated and deadly than outdoor air pollution.

In 2016, I interviewed people living around an old and dirty coal power plant in India. The plant provided them with free electricity but also sometimes emitted toxic ash, which they said irritated and burned their skin. However much they hated the pollution, none said they would give up the free, dirty electricity for cleaner electricity at a cost.

And coal burning has become dramatically cleaner over the last 200 years. A simple technical fix added to coal plants in developed nations after 1950 reduced dangerous particulate matter by 99%. High-temperature coal plants are nearly as clean as natural gas plants, save for their higher carbon emissions.

As we stop using wood for fuel, we allow grasslands and forests to grow back and wildlife to return. In the late 1700s, the use of wood as fuel for cooking and heating was a leading cause of deforestation in Britain. In the United States, per capita consumption of wood for fuel peaked in the 1840s. It was used at a per capita rate that was fourteen times higher than today.

Fossil fuels were thus key to saving forests in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wood went from being 80% of all primary energy in the United States in the 1860s to 20% in 1900, before reaching 7.5% in 1920.

The environmental and economic benefits of fossil fuels are that they are more energy-dense and abundant. A kilogram of coal has almost twice as much energy as a kilogram of wood, while a kilogram of liquefied petroleum gas has three times the energy as the rice husk biomass she cooked with back on the farm.

While the energy density of coal is twice as high as the energy density of wood, the power density of coal mines is up to twenty-five thousand times greater than forests. Even eighteenth-century coal mines were four thousand times more power-dense than English forests and sixteen thousand times more power-dense than crop residues, like the kind families in places like Indonesia use for cooking fuel.

None of this is to say that burning coal is “good,” only that it is, on most human and environmental measures, better than burning wood. People burn wood, not coal, and coal, not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford, not because those are the fuels they would prefer.

It’s fair to wonder if poor villagers in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa could use natural gas, solar panels, and batteries instead of burning wood or coal. The answer is that many already use solar panels — when the sun is shining. As for batteries, they remain very expensive, and are quickly depleted.

In Uganda, Helen and I stayed at an eco-lodge equipped with solar panels and batteries. But after a single day of cloudy weather, we quickly drained the lodge’s batteries charging our laptops, cameras, cell phones, and other devices. When we told the lodge manager that we needed more electricity, he did what small businesses across sub-Saharan Africa do, and fired up a diesel generator.

And other people use natural gas and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) made from oil, and would like to use more, if only it were more abundant and cheaper

And yet Kerry has been putting pressure on banks and other financial institutions for the last three years to reduce investments in oil and gas. Public records show that Kery flew in his wife’s private jet 48 times during the first 18 months that Biden was in office.

Other than being hypocritical, there’s something else that’s odd about Kerry’s position.

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At last Thursday's Congressional hearing, the lead witness for the Democrats, Olivia Troye, denied that she had called the evidence of government censorship a "conspiracy theory." Rep. Dan Bishop had asked her if she knew about the Missouri v. Biden censorship lawsuit headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And, if she was aware of it, “does it affect your view that all of this is a figment of our imagination?”

Responded Troye, “I am aware of the decision. I also want to clarify I have never said that this was a conspiracy. You’ve not heard that comment from me.”

At the time, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had I misremembered what Troye had said in her testimony? I reached over for a written version of her testimony. I hadn’t been mistaken. It was right there in black and white. Wrote Troye,

Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship, this Committee should instead focus on the very real and dangerous threat posed by the leading Republican candidate.

While I didn’t want to make a scene, I couldn’t help but poke Matt Taibbi, sitting to my right. I pointed to the damning sentence on the page. Writes Matt, “Troye said the verbatim quote like eight seconds before denying it. I didn’t laugh, but when I looked over at the impressive deadpan on Shellenberger’s stone face — Michael can be really funny at times — I almost lost it.”

On its own, Troye’s mistake wasn’t a big deal. All of us can forget things we’ve said. As my wife, children, and coworkers can attest, I sometimes forget things I’ve said. And, though I try hard not to, I like everyone, misspeak, make mistakes with numbers, and say things I regret. Our policy at Public is to correct the mistakes we make publicly and apologize.

So far, Troye hasn’t done that. And that’s fine — that’s her decision. But it’s notable that when Matt misspoke on MSNBC about a trivial detail relating to the Twitter Files, the Ranking Member on the committee that we testified before last Thursday, Rep. Stacey Plasket, wrote a letter to Matt, suggesting he may have broken the law.

Nine months ago, I testified and provided evidence to Congress about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and Big Tech media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.

I regret to inform the Subcommittee that the scope, power, and law-breaking of the Censorship Industrial Complex are even worse than we had realized back in March.

Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from “The Cyber Threat Intelligence League,” which show US and UK military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics, developed abroad, against the American people.

Many insist that all we identified in the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and the CTIL Files were legal activities by social media platforms to take down content that violated their terms of service. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other Big Tech companies are privately owned and free to censor content. And government officials are free to point out wrong information, they argue.

But the First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish,” and there is now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that.

What’s more, the whistleblower who delivered the CTIL Files to us says that its leader, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a "repeat of 2016."

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role.

Emails from CISA’s NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and other US government contractors. EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike.

In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA violated the First Amendment and interfered in the election, while in 2021, CISA and the White House violated the First Amendment and undermined America’s response to the Covid pandemic by demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor content that Facebook said was “often-true,” including about vaccine side effects.

But the abuses of power my colleagues and I have documented go well beyond censorship. They also include what appears to be an effort by government officials and contractors, including the FBI, to frame certain individuals as posing a threat of domestic terrorism for their political beliefs. 

All of this is profoundly unAmerica. One’s commitment to free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your political enemies.

In his essential new book, Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation, Jeff Kosseff, a law professor at the United States Naval Academy, shows that the widespread view that the government can censor false speech and/or speech that “causes harm” is mostly wrong. The Supreme Court has allowed very few constraints on speech. For example, the test of incitement to violence remains its immediacy.

In the face of human fallibility, and the complexity of reality, America’s founders and others worldwide long ago decided that it was best to let people speak their minds almost all the time, particularly about controversial social and political issues.

I encourage Congress to defund and dismantle the governmental organizations involved in censorship. That includes phasing out funding for the  National Science Foundation’s Track F, “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems,” and its “Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC)” track. I would also encourage Congress to abolish CISA in DHS. Short of taking those steps, I would encourage significant guard rails and oversight to prevent such censorship from happening again.

Finally, I would encourage Congress to consider making Section 230 liability protections contingent upon social media platforms, known in the law as “interactive computer services,” to allow adult users to moderate their own legal content, through filters they choose, and whose algorithms are transparent to users.

I would also encourage Congress to prohibit government officials from asking the platforms from removing content, which the Supreme Court may or may not rule unconsitutional next year when it decides on the Missouri v. Biden case. Should the Court somehow decide that government requests for censorship are constitutional, then I urge Congress to require such requests be reported publicly and instantaneously so that such censorship demands occur in plain sight.

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During the summer of riots that followed the death of George Floyd, a particular political belief among anti-police activists became a religious dictate among liberals: that the only possible explanation for racial disparities among the victims of police violence was racism.

If you lived in a big metropolitan area in the United States, any other explanation was regarded as heresy. It wasn’t safe to ask whether the reason that so many more suspects killed by the police were black may be that so many more criminals themselves were black. It wasn’t prudent to wonder whether there were aspects of black culture that were driving criminality among black Americans — factors that may be distantly connected to America’s long history of racism, but that were not racism itself.

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Toddlers unsnapping their onesies or pulling barrettes out of their hair are sending gender messages and could be transgender, says one expert in the field of gender medicine. Likewise, an adolescent with a long history of mental illness who suddenly announces a transgender identity is to be believed and immediately affirmed, according to the prevailing wisdom in gender clinics.

Reflecting these beliefs, in 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2018 produced a policy statement on gender-affirming care for minors that recommended affirming young people in their opposite-sex identities, stated that adolescents should have access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and bilateral mastectomies as a remedy for their gender distress, and called the traditional approach of watchful waiting “outdated” and unsupported by science.

Since the publication of this statement five years ago, thousands of American minors have received “gender-affirming” hormonal and/or surgical treatment for their self-declared transgender identities.

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We’ve all experienced it. You get in an argument with someone who knows little about the subject they’re talking about, but who is absolutely confident they’re right. Maybe it’s police violence, maybe it’s climate change, or school closures during the pandemic. They’re reciting tired progressive talking points that have been debunked a dozen times over. You’re presenting them with counterarguments that are hardly original, but your interlocutor seems to have never considered them before. Pretty soon they’re backed into a corner.

So they pull out the card you knew was coming from the very beginning: “Oh, so you’re just content to let them die???”

The argument has now pivoted from a dispute over facts and reason to an unwinnable contest over who has the purer heart. And the assumption is, quite clearly, that you’re the monster for having your awful opinions. You can keep arguing if you want, but at this point there’s no more persuasion to be had, if there ever was any. You’ve been condemned for your thought crimes and there’s no appeals process. The person you just wasted ten minutes arguing with will walk away with their position utterly unchanged, but their opinion of you diminished. According to terms you never agreed to, you’ve lost the debate.

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For a person suffering from gender dysphoria, the prospect of medical transition can offer the tantalizing promise of a pathway to inner peace. The anticipation and excitement about starting cross-sex hormones or undergoing a mastectomy or genital surgery often become a focal point for the distressed mind, with individuals pinning their hopes on these medical procedures to resolve all their pain and suffering.

Proponents of sex-trait modification treatments, known euphemistically as “gender-affirming care,” argue that any attempt to reconcile a transgender person with their birth sex, thereby averting the need for hormonal and surgical interventions, amounts to conversion therapy and is therefore unethical.

But the rising rate of detransition and the sharply increasing number of young people telling their stories of regret paint a very different picture. The existence of detransitioners proves that, at least for some, gender identity is not innate and fixed but instead subject to change as a young person grows and matures. 

Many detransitioners say they wish someone had sat them down and thoroughly explained the possibility of regret. They lament not being warned of the serious complications that could arise from the surgeries they chose to undergo, and many feel they were unprepared for the reality of life post-transition. 

But more than two decades ago, a British consultant psychiatrist working at the Portman adult gender clinic in London came up with an innovative approach to minimizing transition regret.

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The public debate on how to address America’s street addiction crisis has centered on two competing approaches: the “harm reduction” strategy of keeping addicts safe as they continue to use, and the “recovery” model, which advocates mandated treatment to get addicts off of drugs altogether.

But there’s a dark reality that goes unacknowledged in that debate. With massive volumes of fentanyl and meth flooding into the country, neither approach can ever keep up with the pace at which the addiction crisis is growing.

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The World Economic Forum claims to be an impartial, independent organization dedicated to making corporations around the globe accountable to all sectors of society. In partnership with the United Nations, the WEF is shepherding private-public sector cooperation toward sustainable development goals that will be a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity, now and into the future.” These goals include ending hunger, gender equality, access to education, clean water, and clean energy across the globe.

But for all its utopian promise, the WEF platform is not about liberation – it’s about pathological domination — a “megalomaniacal control scheme,” according to author and academic Michael Rectenwald, who argues as much in his book, “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda.”

This might sound like something a lifelong conservative and conspiracy theorist would say. In fact, Rectenwald is a former Marxist and professor of liberal studies. So why did he leave the Left and become a prominent critic of woke excess? And why did he write a book about the WEF and the threat of the transhumanist agenda?

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We must be kinder and more altruistic, progressives say. The contemporary Left lionizes empathy above all virtues as the basis for a just and equitable society. 

But behind these pleas for selflessness can lie darker motivations of narcissism and authoritarianism, a growing body of psychological research suggests. A Swiss study published in Current Psychology earlier this year found antagonistic narcissism and psychopathic tendencies to be strong predictors of left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression. Individuals displaying these traits are drawn to social justice causes, researchers posit, not through the pull of altruism but to satisfy their own ego-focused, even antisocial needs.

Historically, most scholarly attention has focused on Right Wing Authoritarianism. But a growing body of literature, especially in the past decade or so, is exploring how psychological traits correlate with political ideology — including expressions of authoritarianism on both sides of the political spectrum, where they overlap, and how they differ.

Previous research found that Left Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and participation in political violence. Others found a strong correlation between Dark Triad Traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy) and virtuous victim signaling, or conspicuously projecting victimhood as a moral value, which researchers say individuals use as a means of non-reciprocal resource extraction.

The research does not suggest all progressives are narcissists nor that conservatives never are. Most psychologists will likely tell you narcissism knows no bounds, political or otherwise. A 2018 study published in the American Journal of Political Science found people on the left and right to be equally narcissistic but with varying expressions, e.g., conservatives’ penchant for feelings of entitlement and superiority when it comes to issues like immigration, and liberal tendencies toward exhibitionism in the case of climate activism.

Entitlement and self-importance, the need to be great and be recognized for it, whether expressed in the tirades of a grandiose narcissist or the quieter machinations of a vulnerable narcissist, form a core of narcissism. But as the authors of the 2018 study point out, narcissism is “not simply a hyper-concern with one’s self; it is a distinct construct that groups an interrelated set of dispositions containing views of the self and others, cognitive styles, and motivations that guide behaviors, and it is a normal part of one’s identity.”

Increasingly, research showing how specific personality traits at the individual level correlate with behavior in political movements and at the macrosocial level can help us understand some of the chaos of the tumultuous times through which we’re living.

Given the current dominance of progressive liberalism, ostensibly driven by compassion, empathy, and the pursuit of social justice, researchers have taken an interest in how bad actors can infiltrate and leverage altruistic movements for nefarious ends — and where, in more subtle ways, well-intentioned activism can veer into authoritarianism.

Some progressives are genuinely altruistic in non-narcissistic ways. However, the major role that narcissism plays in today’s progressive movements is well-documented and interrogates the self-perception among many on the Left that they simply care more than conservatives.

If you, like me, are from the Left and consider yourself a highly empathetic person who values compassion, the events of the past several years and the current state of progressive politics can seem nonsensical — even absurdist. Compassion can’t begin to account for the precipitous rise of authoritarianism on the Left. So what’s going on?

Narcissism, Not Compassion