A Dose Of Dissidence And A Pinch Of Living In Truth: Remedy For Troubling Times

Today the West struggles under the Left’s tightening grip on the economy, education, individual rights, and nearly all facets of society. Voices from the past who warned of the perils of the threat resonate more than ever; Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman saw it coming.

Yet there is another leading voice who didn’t just see the Left coming, but who also devised a means to escape it. A voice that doesn’t receive near enough attention.

Vaclav Havel.

You may have just read that name and said: Vaclav who? Understandable, because despite his greatness, Havel is largely unknown in America. But lamentable, especially in times like these, with numerous contributions to explore, learn from, and emulate.

Evolving Excellence in Tumultuous Times

Havel was born in Czechoslovakia just prior to World War II, in 1936. He lived an exceptional life.

He was many things: author, poet, playwright, dissident. And ultimately a statesman and leader of his nation(s).1  You might remember him as the poet who rose to the presidency of Czechoslovakia around the time the Berlin Wall came down.

Havel served as the first and last president of Czechoslovakia up to its dissolution. He then became the first president of the Czech Republic, serving for a decade.

But Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. He utilized an absurdist style of writing to criticize the communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring in 1968, he got blacklisted when the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and forcibly put down the movement.

Havel became more politically active, and he spent years under government pressure and as a political prisoner; he spent nearly four years in prison during the late 1970s into the early 1980s.

Havel played a key role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled the communists in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. He assumed the presidency shortly after. Havel led the charge to undo the Warsaw Pact and grow NATO eastward.

Czechoslovakian citizens flood the streets of Prague during the Velvet Revolution in 1989
Credit: Velvet Revolution Street Museum

Many of his stances ended up controversial domestically; by the end of his political life, he had greater popularity abroad than at home. Havel continued life as a public intellectual after serving in office and until his death in 2011.

The Big Picture

Havel’s views have been labeled many things over the years. Anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activism, and direct democracy activism.

But one Havel theme reigns supreme over all others: the implications of the individual dissident who decides to live within the truth in a post-totalitarian system.

Let’s unpack that.

Havel feared a future where society’s attention would be diverted by consumerism and television (today add reality TV and social media). The distraction would draw individual citizens’ attention away from the substance of public policy and governance. He foresaw today’s crisis of culture and technology: individuals enslaving themselves because they don’t ask who they truly are and what they should be doing. A form of modern dis- or un-freedom.2  

Havel applied first-hand experience to develop his philosophy and construct his plays.

A key example of this dynamic was a friend of Havel’s who worked at a brewery. The employee-friend was smart, knew of ways to improve the brewing process, took pride in his job, and he cared about the product.

But the employee also knew he should keep quiet and his head down in a socialist and communist system. And defer to his superiors at the beer plant. Yet the employee could not help himself. He spoke up with his ideas for improving brewing efficiency and the quality of the beer. That exposed him to the likelihood of negative consequences.

Havel used that experience to illustrate the key concept of ‘living in truth.’

Even though a single, lowly employee within a giant bureaucracy of an organization or collective had little direct connection to the output (beer), the individual fundamentally cared about the quality of the beer and the efficiency of the process. It connected to the essence of who the individual was, even though the employee didn’t own the brewery and wasn’t responsible for the product. He cared because it was core to who he was.

Havel referenced this employee who speaks up as an individual who chooses to live within the truth. And Havel introduced the idea that the employee brewer, or anyone else trapped in a controlling society who chose to live in truth, were dissidents of the system.3  

Enter The Power of the Powerless

In the late 1970s, Havel penned the essay The Power of the Powerless. It is genius, inspiring, thought provoking, and timely.

He used a character in the essay, a greengrocer shopkeeper, to illustrate how one living within a lie might choose instead to live in truth. Making such a transition means becoming a dissident in a post totalitarian system or society.

Havel’s referencing of ‘post-totalitarian’ does not mean that the system is no longer totalitarian. Quite the contrary. He defined a post-totalitarian system as one where every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state’s governing instruments made legitimate by a comprehensive ideology.4   The post-totalitarian system is a secularized religion of coerced decision-making, repression, fear, and self-censorship.

Havel applied his themes using a communist system as backdrop. But the learnings and lessons apply to the West today with the ongoing stifling of individual freedoms by the Left.

The nameless greengrocer hangs a sign in his shop window that says: “Workers of the world, unite!” Yet the greengrocer cared nothing about that famous line from Karl Marx. It was a stock phrase that everyone came to blindly accept and adhere to. It was not unifying or inspiring to the individual in Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s, whether it be the greengrocer in the essay, Havel’s friend who worked in the brewery, or any other typical individual.

By placing the sign in the window, the greengrocer was telling society that he was compliant, that he fit in, and that he was willing to live in the environment defined to him by the post-totalitarian system.

Note the greengrocer used a common, popular phrase to say this instead of stating something more direct, like “I am a sheep and I blindly and obediently follow what the system (i.e., shepherd) tells me to.” The sign explicitly states one thing but implicitly informs of something very different. Yet the greengrocer was able to communicate the implied meaning through his sign without having to explicitly state it.

And the greengrocer is playing into a form of peer pressure, or what within a post-totalitarian system of government or ideology would be considered as indoctrination. He didn’t receive an order by the government to compel him to put that sign in the window. He did it because he saw that others did it too.

Such behavior becomes self-fulfilling and self-determining. The next person who walks past the shop sees the sign, making it more likely that they will then put the same sign up in their home or business. It feeds on itself as a form of auto-indoctrination.

Havel realized some systems are totalitarian not because a single person, a dictator like Hitler or Putin, has total power. Instead, a system or society may be totalitarian because power is shared in a state of collective irresponsibility. Citizens become both supporters and victims of the totalitarian system, individually and collectively deciding to not live in truth. The system or society becomes post-totalitarian.

Havel highlighted freedom may not always be as we think of it, particularly in post-totalitarian societies. In the West freedom is viewed as doing things we are inclined to do. But Havel taught that freedom is contemplating what you should do as an individual and then having the courage to go do that very thing, even though it will risk the ire of the system or society. That’s a deeper, more meaningful, form of freedom.

Comparing Havel’s Eastern Europe in the 1970s and the West of Today

Today’s West is showing symptoms of becoming a post-totalitarian system, one where many individuals refuse to live in truth (and thus live a lie). Worse, those who decide to live in truth are feeling and looking more and more like those dissidents that Havel spoke of.

The first two sentences in The Power of the Powerless read, “A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe. The specter of what in the West is called dissent.” Havel leads with this to set up an explanation of his premise. And indeed, a similar specter is now haunting the West which is increasingly controlled by the Left.

The post-totalitarian system subdues citizens with the drugs of government subsidy and giveaways to the individual. Havel pointed out how government gifts (rent and housing subsidies, etc.) come with a price: surrendering one’s reason, conscience, and responsibility. A core objective of a post-totalitarian ideology is to rip these away from the individual and assign them to a higher authority.

Today the Left in America and Europe provides government handout after handout to individuals. Entitlements, healthcare, student debt forgiveness, corporate subsidy, and so on. In exchange for something quite precious: surrendering the individual’s right to choose for themselves and to live in truth.

Whether it was Havel’s Eastern Europe in the late 1970s or America today, the benefits bestowed upon citizens by a post-totalitarian system are far from free and are the most expensive benefits one might imagine.

That sign in the greengrocer’s shop window, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’, has an eerie analogy today in the West with ‘Climate action now!’ You see those signs everywhere, in large manicured suburban front lawns (ironic), in corporate public relations materials, at over-priced colleges hanging on bulletin boards, and on T-shirts. Are the people who post these signs truly enthusiastic about climate action? Have they given any serious thought as to what the message might mean?

It’s evident that the overwhelming majority are not and have not.

But someone, or something, produced those signs and then distributed them to the greengrocer in Havel’s story or to the suburbanite, corporation, or student in today’s America. The signs go up because everyone is doing it; because that’s the accepted norm within the system. If you don’t sport a sign, there will be consequences. You show the sign to get along in life. It assures you of not being hassled.

Those displaying the sign are telling us something subliminal yet powerful. That the greengrocer then, or the college student today, knows what one must do and how one must behave. And the sign looks to deliver such a message to those in power as well as to fellow citizens.

Such behavior through the signs also implies that the individual is scared, intimidated, and a follower. That’s where the role of the explicit message on the sign comes into play; it provides a salve to the ego of the obedient individual. Because the explicit message demands proactive action: uniting the workers or climate action, both with an exclamation point.

The approach in a post totalitarian system is diabolically genius: it provides an explicit illusion of being moral while the reality underneath makes it easier for the individual to part with his or her morality. And that’s true whether it was for communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1970s with the greengrocer and his workers sign or with the Left running the West today with the student or suburbanite and their climate signs.

Havel illuminated the difference between the objectives of the post-totalitarian system, or government run by the Left, versus the objectives of a meaningful life and the human spirit. There was what he referenced as an abyss between the two.

With the individual’s human spirit, there is a striving and hunger toward variety, choice, individualism, self-determination, and a fulfillment of one’s own potential.

Compare that to the objectives of the post-totalitarian system: forcing individuals into predefined states and a movement toward rigid structure and belief.

That post-totalitarian approach, or the playbook of the Left, forces individualism to be secondary to a blind obedience that drives the system. Individuals are not deemed by the system or the state to be worth much, only inconsequential cogs in the machinery of the post-totalitarian system.

Building and growing the post-totalitarian system generates continual hypocrisy and irony.

  • Government by bureaucracy is called popular government, even though it’s anything but.
  • The middle class becomes enslaved within the system, but that occurs in the name of the middle class.
  • Taking away the freedoms of the individual is in the name of defending the rights of the individual.
  • Denying society information and censoring is labeled as making things transparent, truthful, and accessible.
  • A bureaucrat’s subjective and wide use of power gets labeled as adhering to the law or the Constitution.5
  • Suppressing free speech becomes a way to protect individual rights, including free speech.
  • And punishing scientific thought and the scientific method is to further ‘The Science.’

To propagate the charade in the post-totalitarian system of Havel or with contemporary government run by the Left today in the West, the system must fabricate and contort statistics, data, and history. Climate change is a prime example, with the cherry-picking of statistical datasets for climate models, selectively reporting one set of weather events while ignoring other sets of weather events, and by constantly changing predictions into the future and conveniently ignoring prior predictions that keep proving inaccurate, time and again.

The culmination is the system transforms reality into a ritual of signs and pseudo-reality. Science gets replaced with political science. Objective reality is replaced with religion of the system. Backed by signs and slogans such as ‘climate action now’ and ‘code red.’

It impacts everyone in society, from the lowliest of the working class to the most elite of the educated class. That’s why some of the most educated and successful individuals blindly adhere to ideologies such as extreme environmentalism. The process that the post totalitarian system employs works across all strata of society and all education levels.

There is a psychology at play. People sport the slogans and the signs not looking to persuade others, but instead to conform and contribute to the wider view and objective of reminding people what is expected of them. It’s affirmation of the herd, and subliminally coercing others to comply or face alienation and losing the peaceful lifestyle that comes with obedience. Individuals are conscripted into the system’s effort to assist each other to become obedient; instruments of control and at the same time subjects of control.6

Pivoting to Living in Truth

What happens if the greengrocer decides to pull down the sign in the window or if the homeowner removes the ‘climate action now!’ sign from the suburban yard? What if both start to say what they think, and start following objective truth and what conscience demands?

Perhaps it’s a form of revolt. But Havel defined it as an attempt to live within the truth.

Living within the truth breaks the veneer of the system and exposes it as a manufactured scheme. Living a lie is exposed as just that, living a lie. Like the Wizard of Oz, one finally gets to see what’s behind the optics. Thus, for the post-totalitarian system (or for government run by the Left in the West today), the ultimate fundamental threat to its power will be individuals daring to live in the truth.

Just as there was a cumulative effect that plowed society into living the lie, when an individual chooses to live within the truth, the system runs the risk of teetering and crumbling.

Trust that the post-totalitarian system will react. Today the Left will accuse someone speaking their mind as wanting attention, money, clicks, or notoriety despite none being true. In fact, most individuals who decide to live within the truth have no prior political activity or affinity for politics. They just want to be able to exert their own individual freedoms: to speak, participate, and think.

And freedom to achieve, create value, make decisions for themselves, and utilize energy. Starting to see how climate change and Code Red are foundational tactics of the Left’s post-totalitarian system today?

This is why Havel considered individuals looking to live within the truth in a post-totalitarian system as dissidents. It’s a different connotation than what we typically think of dissident; it’s not so much that the individual proactively acts as a dissident as much as it is the system treats the individual as a dissident.

The media will shun and ignore individuals living in truth. But if the individual speaks freely despite the system looking to suppress them, the views of the dissident living in truth start to stretch beyond immediate circles and start to gain wider traction across society. The individuals in this category start to be known for their thoughts and ideas beyond their respective professions.

That’s how Havel evolved from a renowned poet and playwright into a political leader. He was the ultimate dissident living in truth in a post-totalitarian system.

Individuals living within the truth in a post-totalitarian system are often labelled rebels. But they don’t consider themselves to be. They aren’t rejecting anything. Instead, they are exerting freedom. They are thrown into the situation by a sense of personal responsibility coupled with the times.

And when these individuals say aloud what others are afraid to say or cannot say, dissidents living in the truth become inspiring. Another threat to the system. Especially if the dissident living within the truth jumps from no longer living within the lie and into proactively advocating for the truth, becoming vocal and visible to all.

There is a key difference between the post-totalitarian system of the Left and a dictatorship.

A dictatorship has no need to respect the law. But the post-totalitarian system, or today’s big government of the Left, has great use for the law. It uses the law to create power and to preserve it in the form of control over the individual. Tightly regulating and weaving an intricate web of complexity within the law are useful tactics for the post-totalitarian Left.

What Would Havel Think Today?

Havel, interestingly, considered himself an environmentalist. But environmentalism back then is a far cry from what it is today. No doubt that much of what he exposed of the post-totalitarian system is embedded within today’s extreme environmental movement. One wonders what Havel would think of today’s Code Red and Climate Action Now!

I’d like to believe he would carry the torch of dissidence when it came to the supposed scientific consensus of Climate Action Now!

Let’s follow his lead in the full spirit of living within the truth.

 

(1) How many people can lay claim to leading two nations in a lifetime? And being the first democratically elected leader of both? And being the last president of one?
(2) For related reading on enslaving and distracting individuals, check out the essay, “When a Blinded 1930s Writer Saw the 2022 Future.”
(3) Dissident had a different meaning within Havel’s philosophy compared to what we typically think of in the West. Read on for an explanation.
(4) As summarized by Havel biographer John Keane.
(5) Hello, Chevron precedent.
(6) Using Havel’s words, “They are both victims of the system and its instruments.”

Venice: A City Connected by Canals…and Carbon

Venice is perhaps the world’s most famous island city, cut off from the mainland. Visitors arriving by plane do not land in Venice proper when disembarking at Marco Polo Airport. Instead, they land across the lagoon and must take a water taxi to get to their destination.

That is where on a recent visit we met a water taxi stand manager who struck up a conversation. The inevitable commentary about weather came up; we were lucky to have the prospect of an awesome summer forecast for the next few days.

The manager commented that climate change was altering the weather and ravaging the city. I asked how she thought Marco Polo managed climate change when he left town and traveled the world on behalf of the Republic of Venice. Her response summed up today’s ideological brainwashing of society by environmentalism: “climate change didn’t exist back then.”

The manager pointed out how Venetians have become quite sustainable when it comes to their carbon footprint. She informed me the city reached its peak carbon footprint not long ago and is on the road to zero carbon.[1] Events in the city increasingly tout how they are net-zero carbon confabs.[2] She suggested we might be visiting the planet’s lowest-carbon-footprint major city.

That got my immediate attention.

I decided while waiting for the water taxi that it was game on for our few days in town. While taking in the sights, people, and food I would also be tallying an unofficial carbon footprint audit of this most unique of cities.

As we said goodbye to the water taxi manager, she asked what we did for a living. My response was half-joke, half-serious and made her laugh: “I work in an industry you’ve been told is part of the problem. But the reality is that without my industry, Venice as you know it would cease to exist.” What I respectfully left out of my response was that the manager’s job, tied directly to tourism and carbon utilization, would also cease to exist.

If You’ve Never Been…

A little background for those who have not had the pleasure of visiting Venice (highly recommended, subject to the advice that follows). The place offers an intensely deep history; but today Venice has become a museum to itself. Everything in the town revolves around tourism and the past.

I heard the horror stories from seasoned travelers. About how crowded the city gets in summer, when a plague of tourists descends off cruise ships and planes to assault the city’s famous sites, as if the visitors were spearheading an amphibious invasion. To some extent that proved accurate, especially at and around the postcard sites of Ponte Rialto and Piazza San Marco. Tourists jam both locations, paying more attention to their smart devices to capture what was around them instead of taking in what was around them.

But there is a fabulously attractive aspect of Venice: walking a hundred yards from the most packed of sites transports you to a quiet, less populated, and unique area. A traveler can go from part of the hordes, to alone with only a few resident Venetians around in less than thirty seconds. And 90% of the city lends itself to the latter vibe, meaning if you invest an hour or so hitting the popular locations, you are then free to wander and immerse in the real Venice (or what is left of it).

I mentioned walking. That is the exclusive travel method once within the city. There are no cars in Venice. Or buses or trucks or motorcycles. Which means there are no streetlights or stop signs. Bikes, scooters, and skateboards are forbidden and, frankly, useless. The only mode of transportation other than feet are gondolas and small motorized water taxis and delivery boats. Which means the pedestrian reigns supreme. One only needs to navigate other pedestrians and the city’s hundreds of footbridges across canals when meandering about.

I mentioned meandering. That is the most accurate description of how one navigates through Venice.

There seems to be an infinite number of ways to go from point A to point B in the city. Which makes every walk an adventure and something new. Maps are nearly useless because of the countless alleys, foot bridges, and canals. One learns early that you iterate a path to the final destination through trial and error. It is not uncommon to turn a corner and see your destination close by but get lost as you turn corners trying to maneuver a path to where you’re headed. It might sound frustrating but does make for great fun.

So, at first blush, Venice appears to have one of the lowest carbon footprints of a major city on the planet. No cars and everyone walking or rowing on water. No wonder Venice and Venetians tend to brag about their sustainability credentials.

But a closer look exposes a different reality.

The Carbon of Venice

Venice is awash in two things: water and carbon utilization. The former is obvious while the latter becomes obvious after reflecting how this city attracts and supports tens of millions of people each year.

Feeding Venice consumes massive amounts of carbon.

It doesn’t hit you at first, but after a few days you realize that all the food and drink being consumed across the city in the thousands of bars and bistros is coming from somewhere off the islands. Agriculture is far from carbon free, with fertilizers and machinery utilizing copious amounts of fossil fuels. Packaging adds to the carbon tally. And the transportation of the food requires diesel and gasoline, whether the mode of transport is truck, boat, train, or plane. If Venice required a zero-carbon footprint for its food, the population would necessarily shrink drastically. And the diet would be severely pared back.

Which brings up the subject of the ‘residents’ of Venice.

In the summer, the population is heavily supplemented by tourists.[3] Those travelers got there by plane, train, boat, bus, and auto. All those modes of transport consume carbon-based fuels for power (and their manufacture). Perhaps travelers went carbon-free for transport once inside the Venetian walls, but the journey to get there and return home was hugely carbon intensive.

Venice worked hard to retain its cultural identity, including the preservation of its architecture. The orange terra cotta tiled roofs make for picturesque sight lines, bringing tourism and economic commerce into the city. Solar panels on historic roofs don’t exactly make for nice photos or appealing vistas. Thus, you don’t see solar panels on Venetian roofs despite a somewhat sunny climate and a more than accommodating regulatory regime with EU energy policy. That means much of the air conditioning, electricity, and heat will be derived from carbon-based power generation, whether it be in Venice or supplied from the Italian mainland.

Locals and tourists walk about the city wearing shoes and clothes derived from petroleum-based polymers and fabrics. Everyone drinking from water bottles and snapping photos from smart devices, with both being made from carbon. And the former being chilled and the latter being charged with carbon. The masses across Venice literally wear and hold their carbon footprints on their feet, backs, and hands.

Carbon is present and necessary for the most famous of Venetian products. Murano glass utilizes a process that is quite carbon intensive. Venetian masks, from the paper mache variety, to the paints and pigments that decorate them, require carbon as an input or feedstock. Whether a tourist buys a cheap knockoff, or the finest handmade versions, they are taking home a souvenir that carries a carbon footprint.

The Venetian Experience Relies on Carbon

The kid in The Sixth Sense memorably remarked that he ‘saw dead people.’ Spending a few days visiting Venice had me seeing carbon. Everywhere and with everyone.

Carbon remains the lifeblood of this city with the historic past that today primarily exists as a window to the past. Venice is not on a road to zero carbon emissions unless its leaders seek urban suicide. For Venice to continue to be a global tourist destination, it will likely have more attributable carbon emissions, not less.

Mandate arrivederci to carbon utilization, and the consequences for Venice and its economy will sadly be dire. As well as for its residents and those wishing to visit.

Again, if you have the opportunity to visit Venice, definitely go for the rich history, culture, and one-of-a-kind experience. Just say “no grazie” to the zero carbon claims.

[1] Similar flawed thinking can be found everywhere. Give a read to Onu Ialia’s “Venice Is One of 30 of the World’s Largest and Most Influential Cities to Have Peaked Greenhouse Gas Emissions” to see how baseless, yet feel-good, pronouncements reinforce a false premise.
[2] For a recent example: “Venice Biennale 2022 Gets Eco Accolade, Winning Carbon Neutrality Status” (James Imam, The Art Newspaper, 12/30/22). Unfortunately, as this essay will detail, a legitimate carbon accounting betrays a carbon footprint for any such event as being quite positive.
[3] The numbers don’t lie: historic central Venice has just over 50,000 permanent residents but attracts over 20 million visitors each year.

 

Mis“LEED”ing: Fact Versus Fiction for Green Buildings

How many times have we heard those worn-out taglines of ‘sustainability,’ ‘green is good,’ ‘triple bottom line,’ and ‘doing well by doing good?’  Study after study, report after report, and headline after headline.  All used to help justify products like electric vehicles and solar panels, as well as to defend related policy mandates, market protection, and subsidies.

Many of today’s largest markets and industries rely entirely on the ability of the expert class to continue to hoodwink consumers, taxpayers, and investors on the false need and an altered reality of certain products and standards.

Consider the case of green building design, specifically LEED-certified buildings.

For those unfamiliar with LEED, it stands for ‘leadership in energy and environmental design.’  It’s become all the rage in real estate these days, particularly for commercial and office space.  LEED-certified buildings enjoy an unchallenged reputation for better performance, accretive economics, and societal benefit.

That’s due in large part to an ocean of studies that posit LEED-certified buildings as superior to non-LEED-certified buildings in every imaginable way.

Creating the Need for LEED

A recent example is the October 2022 research report from real estate firm CBRE titled Green Is Good: The Enduring Rent Premium of LEED-Certified U.S. Office Buildings.

The title is an eco-marketing thing of beauty; a rich, concentrated trove of all the gimmicky tricks.  Employ an obligatory worn-out tagline (‘green is good’)?  Check.  Inject an aura of economic legitimacy (‘rent premium’)?  Check.  Infer a longevity that exceeds the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere (‘enduring’)?  Check.

The executive summary doesn’t disappoint. It begins by boldly stating that an analysis of 20,000 office buildings in America found that the average rent of those with LEED certification was 31% higher than those of non-LEED-certified buildings.

The impressive finding indicates that renovating existing or building new spaces that have high energy efficiencies and meet LEED certification standards are well worth the effort and investment.

Except, when digging a little deeper into the study’s details and data, that’s not exactly the case. In fact, that’s not at all the case.

The Devil in the Data

As with many studies, reports, and news articles surrounding the vaunted energy transition, reading beyond the title and executive summary is vital.  Doing so for this study of the economics of LEED-certified buildings betrays a very different set of conclusions than the popular consensus and the report’s title.

The golden rules of real estate, including the ultimate of location-location-location being the three most important factors determining value, apparently still matter today, even with Code Red for humanity and approaching climate doom.

When the study’s data are adjusted under regression analysis for building location, building age, and renovation history, the premium that LEED-certified buildings enjoy shrinks from the advertised 31% down to just under 4% before COVID and only 3% after COVID. 

That’s a massive drop to a paltry, low single-digit premium that may be within the statistical noise and uncertainty of the study.  Meaning when an apples-to-apples comparison is performed, LEED certification doesn’t amount to much of any appreciable rent premium.

Building age is far more impactful than LEED certification.  The regression analysis found that office assets built after 2012 commanded a 14% rent premium over those that were built between 2002 and 2011. Each additional decade in age decreased rent by approximately 5%.

Data prove age affects rent much more than LEED certification.

What’s intriguing is that the complete report disclosed these findings and how they evaporated the trumpeted rent premium for LEED certification.  It’s all in the body of the report, which very few people take the time to read.

By the way, LEED-certified office buildings tend to be larger and higher quality assets concentrated in downtowns of expensive cities, compared to non-LEED-certified buildings. Which means LEED-certified spaces should enjoy higher rent premiums than buildings that are smaller, lower quality, and not located in the most exclusive of zip codes.

The report cites that a third of Manhattan’s office inventory is LEED-certified while only a tenth of Louisville’s office inventory is LEED-certified.  And Manhattan office space is pricier than Louisville’s.  Yet rent premiums of Manhattan offices versus Louisville offices have very little to do with whether the buildings are LEED-certified.  It’s because it’s Manhattan and Louisville!

Voodoo Economics

What you don’t find discussed in the study, which harms its credibility, is recognition that constructing a LEED-certified building is a more expensive proposition in up-front capital investment than constructing or renovating a non-LEED certified building.  If there is only a miniscule, or nonexistent, rent premium for the LEED-certified office, the rate of return will indicate a losing investment proposition, not a winning one. That is the opposite conclusion that the study’s title warrants.

The study also argues green buildings offer lower mortgage default risk for investors.  That may not be the case looking forward into the coming years, when considering LEED-certified buildings are disproportionately concentrated in at-risk real estate bubble markets of Manhattan, San Francisco, and so on.

Further, LEED certified buildings are a favorite of the tech industry. And the tech industry right now is on the verge of a major correction, with job losses piling up and with office buildings, many LEED-certified, being vacant and leases being abandoned.  LEED-certified buildings may post higher default rates than traditional offices as we experience the grips of a recession or slowdown, or certainly if another tech bubble bursts.

Unaddressed in the study and regression analysis is what impact government leasing of LEED-certified buildings has on rent spreads.  One of the largest tenants of metropolitan office space is often government.  If bureaucrats favor LEED-certified space and aren’t afraid to pay up with taxpayer dollars to rent it, rent spreads for LEED-certified buildings are likely to skew.  Without government subsidy, there may be no rent premium for LEED certification.  Perhaps, there might even be a ‘green discount’.

Communal Paradise Lost?

There are other flaws in the study.

It wrongly assumes de facto ‘increased productivity’ associated with LEED-certified buildings.  That’s not obvious or necessarily true for the workers who inhabit them.  Ledger entries of debits and credits by accountants working in a LEED-certified building don’t magically happen quicker or more accurately than they would when the accountant is working in a non-LEED-certified building.

There’s another false premise about LEED-certified buildings, particularly in the era of pandemic: the health and wellness benefits associated with LEED-certified buildings.  Today, there are health risks found in LEED design features.

For example, are low-flow water faucets in restrooms of LEED-certified buildings a health risk when it comes to hygiene and germ spread?  A similar question pertains to HVAC systems in LEED-certified buildings that try to balance energy efficiency targets with fresh air-to-recirculation air ratios.

These days, most office occupants do not relish the thought of breathing air all day that has longer average indoor residence time.  Or using faucets that trickle to wash hands.  The safer office building environment would employ higher water flows in restroom faucets to minimize germ transfer and HVAC systems using as much fresh air feed as practical.

And those celebrated common areas for collaboration, meeting, and eating utilized in LEED-certified buildings? Just another venue for potential disease transmission.

Pandemic necessitated a re-think of all facets of life and business.  Yet LEED-certified design has largely escaped such a re-think.  Why?  Aspects common in, or mandated by, LEED certification need an objective reassessment as to whether they are beneficial in the era of Covid.

Too Much of a Green Thing

A key conclusion buried in the study escaped mention in the executive summary and title.  The regression analysis found no statistically significant rent premium associated with higher levels of LEED certification.

Attaining a higher level of LEED certification requires more investment to achieve the target level of points. If there is not a statistically significant rent premium associated with higher LEED certification, then being greener is not better.  Being greener is a poor investment decision; investors lose money when spending to attain a higher level of LEED certification.

The Echo Chamber at Work

How one stumbles upon this report is emblematic of how the echo chamber works in media, the expert class, and environmentalism today.

A headline on a major business website mentioned the study title, specifically the ‘green is good’ hook.  The website article exclusively highlighted the report’s title and the opening statement of the executive summary that advertised the massive 31% rent premium for LEED-certified buildings. Only until tracking down the study and reading the body of the report will the regression analysis come to light.

That’s how the environmental racket operates these days. The green formula:

  • Perform a study to skew in the desired direction by applying favorable assumptions.
  • Push the desired findings in the executive summary.
  • Come up with a creative and eye-catching title (use those eco-taglines we called out in the beginning), then post or publish the report.
  • Collaborate with major media to rebroadcast and further amplify the desired sound bite or headline.

It’s not greenwashing. It’s worse. Most would consider it misleading and unethical.

reject-mission-creep

Reject the Fed’s Mission Creep

Government, elites, and the Left never let a good crisis go to waste. Often, they will inflate, manipulate, or manufacture crises to justify more power, with the price being paid by the middle class, taxpayers, and future generations. As the missions of government and affiliated institutions expand under the false flag of offering the cure to the convenient crisis, it is almost a certainty that the prescribed cures’ harms to the real economy grows with them.

Few entities epitomize this danger more than the Federal Reserve, with its motivated drive toward imposing ‘climate stress tests’ on banks. And few nominations to this burgeoning bureaucracy have ever highlighted the threat more deeply than that of the now-withdrawn nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin. Ms. Raskin’s nomination put a spotlight on the Fed’s continued leftward drift, mission creep, and manipulation of the private capital markets. Although that nomination battle has concluded, the Fed’s campaign against domestic energy and the real economy is only beginning.

Staffed by thousands of PhD economists who spent careers in government and academia; led by governors and regional presidents who never had to make payroll in the real economy; and, answering to politicians who subscribe to leftist ideology, the Fed has become an Orwellian behemoth. It seeks growth in its powers for growth’s sake, and is more than willing to construct questionable premises while disposing of troubling facts down memory holes.

The power grab of the Fed has reached critical mass.

Our central bank not only moves the market, it is the market.  That is, until the Fed loses credibility, in which case the Fed ends up chasing the market.  We may be in the midst of such a reversal, now that the Fed has clearly misread inflation and continues to move at glacial speed to begin quantitative tightening and raising interest rates.

The Fed’s objectives not long ago were simple and direct: to set monetary policy to promote maximum employment, ensure stable prices, and set moderate long-term interest rates. What happened since the financial crisis is stunning, even in the current era of big government.

The Fed’s balance sheet has exploded from under $1 trillion of assets in 2006 to nearly $9 trillion today.  The Fed now talks about beginning quantitative tightening to reduce the balance sheet toward normal levels, but the talk is already long in the tooth.

Meanwhile, real interest rates have been purposely dialed to negative for years, pummeling savers and retirees and instigating market speculation, asset bubbles, and inflation.  Even if one believes the current consensus that the Fed will raise rates by 0.25% increments nearly a dozen times over the next two years, real interest rates would still be negative if inflation does not decline significantly in the interim.

The Fed’s scoreboard of late is blinking red, and everyone senses it is going to get worse, much worse, before better.  Adding to the wall of worry for Fed watchers is the extensive track record of our central bank’s failures that spans its history going back to its creation in 1913.

Yet elites operating in a cocoon insulated from accountability constantly look for the next excuse to grow the Fed’s dominion over the economy by controlling capital flows.

That’s why recently the Fed has commandeered issues ranging from social justice to climate change as useful instruments to retain and grow power.  The Fed believes it does such a good job on monetary policy and inflation, that it now can solve the vexing problems of racial inequality and lack of economic inclusion, while also controlling future weather and investment decision making.

With the Left being the puppet master of the Biden administration, the Fed’s grip on the economy will tighten.  And it will need leadership within its burgeoning bureaucracy that adheres to the proper ideology:  one that believes institutions like the Fed should be utilized to grossly distort the free market, creating winners and losers, both intended and unintended.

And for Ms. Raskin and like-minded future nominees, they look to push the Fed’s path of value destruction deeper and further than ever.

For example, Ms. Raskin advocated for penalizing or precluding banks’ lending to domestic energy companies, whether they be in natural gas, oil, pipelines, or refining.  All in the name of saving the planet.  She stated, “There is no indication that the value of fossil fuel assets is ever going to return,” and wrote how fossil fuels are a “terrible investment.”  How inept that expert prediction now looks in 2022, proving once again how out of touch the expert class is when it comes to the real world.  Should she had been confirmed, she likely would have pushed to have the Fed restrict capital flows into the never-more-vital domestic energy industry.

The danger has not passed.  Unfortunately, there is a long line of potential nominees that Congress will surely soon consider who share similar, or perhaps more extreme, views to Ms. Raskin.  We need nominees willing to scale back the mission creep of the Fed, not those blindly advancing it beyond its circle of competency.

Not only is controlling future weather not in the Fed’s power alley, many worry that reining in self-inflicted inflation may not be a core competency either.  The more the Fed’s mission veers from its shaky circle of competence, its performance will worsen and its politics will dominate. That’s bad for taxpayers, the middle class, business owners, individual rights, and wide swaths of this great nation including my home of western Pennsylvania.

This is not a typical Democrat-Republican issue.  Instead, this is a government-citizen issue and affirming who answers to who.  Congress needs to pass this civics test when it comes to holding the Fed to a reasonable mission and when assessing future Fed nominees.

Nick Deiuliis is the author of Precipice: The Left’s Campaign to Destroy America. For daily insights and commentary from Nick follow him on Twitter at @NickDeiuliis.

Medical Malpractice Claims the Hippocratic Oath: Part One

The most famous section of the Hippocratic Oath, that classic Greek ethical template for the medical profession, pledges to “do no harm or injustice.”[1]  Unfortunately, leaders of the global medical community have committed grave moral failure and brazenly violate the Oath.

The malfeasance does not pertain to subject matter we would hope the medical community is focusing on: researching and improving treatments for cancer, Covid, autism, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, and a host of other maladies that threaten individual health every day.  Instead, the malfeasance is rooted in the world’s leading medical journals calling for drastic treatment of…climate change.

The editors of over 200 global medical journals—including stalwarts like The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and The British Medical Journal—jointly penned an editorial in September 2021 that called for emergency action on climate change.[2]

The editors of over 200 global medical journals jointly penned an editorial in September 2021 that called for emergency action on climate change.

There is much to loathe in the editorial. It drips with a toxic combination of extreme environmentalism and leftist principles.  Ideology bordering on religion steamrolls over science and logic throughout.  That the global medical field thought leaders see climate change predictions and energy policy expertise as core competencies is shocking.

That they place climate change above pandemics and poverty as a larger health crisis is alarming.

That they demand imposing government control and socialist doctrine across economies and societies is disgraceful.

The editorial is a textbook study in creative writing; it should be used as a teaching instrument in college English departments.

If you think this summation an exaggeration, consider the following excerpts from medicine’s Apocalyptic manifesto, which are all debunked with facts:

“Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases”

The authors postulate that carbon-based energy and corresponding higher trace CO2 concentrations affect climate, which then harms humans.  They ignore extensive data across decades and continents that show carbon (and the resulting CO2 emissions increase) allows people to live longer, their babies to suffer lower rates of infant mortality, their kids to be better educated, their economies to be wealthier, and their citizens’ individual rights to be better protected.  If you believe access to reliable and life-sustaining carbon-based energy increases global temperatures, you should be advocating for more of it, not less, when it comes to human health.

“The science is unequivocal”

The medical profession should know better than most that science is never meant to be unequivocal.  Science is not about consensus and the static; it is about challenging the consensus and constant refinement.  That’s why doctors not long ago attached leeches to patients to cure them of ailments, while today a doctor would lose her license and be sued to financial ruin if she performed such an act on an unwitting patient.

“Only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory”

This statement betrays the leftist mentality embraced by much of the medical community.  It’s a familiar playbook of the extreme left and right for over a century: manufacture a crisis that requires drastic action, proffer up squishy but subliminally malignant concepts like ‘equity’ as guides, and then go about remaking society as you see fit.  Marx and his movement (a.k.a. communism) successfully murdered hundreds of millions utilizing the playbook that is appropriated in the editorial.

“Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more”

This quote is the most chilling from an overall frightening document.

The medical profession is calling for a complete overhaul of societies and economies, forcing change by the brutal arms of government.  Let’s surrender to big-city mayors and bureaucracies complete unilateral control of urban America.  Stalin and Mao did such a fine job feeding their people, let’s turn over food production to the state.  The New York City subway system is such a superior experience to ride hailing, so let’s mandate public transport for all. Let the government-run health care—it will surely be a higher level of care to what the private sector now offers (even though our current health care system is the envy of the world).

“No temperature rise is ‘safe’”

Yet extreme cold kills over three times as many people every year as extreme heat (ironically, the medical journal The Lancet reported this recently, which is one of the co-authors of the climate change editorial).   Thus, logic would indicate that a small level of warming will produce a net saving of lives.

“The cost of renewable energy is dropping rapidly”

No, it is not.  Renewable energy, such as wind and solar generation, has proven to be epically unreliable at the worst possible times, as evidenced recently in California, Texas, and the UK.

Renewable costs are increasing, in part because governments across the globe mandate their market share, and the materials required to manufacture components are scarce and sit in faraway hostile lands (i.e., China).

The cost of renewable energy is hidden by a Byzantine maze of state subsidy and regulated industries.

Make no mistake, that cost is high, it must be netted out in the end, it is growing rapidly, and it will be ultimately shouldered as a hidden regressive tax on the working poor and middle classes.

The recent medical journal editorial on climate change shows that the medical profession is rapidly sliding down a slippery slope, jettisoning objective analysis and the scientific method and embracing political science and ideology bordering on religion.  If the slide continues, all of us will suffer life-altering consequences: adoption of harmful government policies and less competent medical care.

Look for part two of “Medical Malpractice Claims the Hippocratic Oath” coming the week of March 7, 2022. 

For related analysis by Nick, see, “A Rational Person’s Guide To Climate Change.”

[1] The Hippocratic Oath, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://www.nlm.nih.gov
[2] Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health, September 6, 2021, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2113200