Epoch INSIGHT Issue 10 (2022)

‘There is nothing left there’

Leaving all behind, Ukrainian refugees recount fleeing the war

By Ivan Pentchoukov

MARCH 11–17, 2022 | $6.95

NO. 10

Editor’s Note

‘Nothing Left There’ since the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, an estimated 2 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee the country.

One border checkpoint where thousands of refugees have poured in over the past two weeks is in Medyka, Poland.

This is where Anna Gorpenich and her two children arrived from the city of Sumy in Eastern Ukraine. The city saw Russian tanks roll through the streets on the first day of the invasion.

They were able to escape the war-torn city as a result of a safe-evacuation corridor.

“It’s horrible. There is nothing left there.

Nothing,” Gorpenich told Insight reporter Ivan Pentchoukov on the Poland–Ukraine border.

“I’m 32 years old, and I fit all my 32 years in three backpacks. I don’t even have words to describe what is happening.”

While some of the refugees planned to move on beyond Poland to stay with family in other European countries, others just wanted to return home, hoping the war would end soon.

“We’ll wait for the war to be over so we can go back,” said Olena Sayenko, who fled Ukraine with her daughter.

Jasper Fakkert Editor-in-chief

JASPER FAKKERT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CHANNALY PHILIPP LIFE & TRADITION, TRAVEL EDITOR

ON THE COVER Poland’s Medyka border crossing has seen thousands of Ukrainian refugees pour in since the invasion by Russia.

CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON/ THE EPOCH TIMES

CHRISY TRUDEAU MIND & BODY EDITOR CRYSTAL SHI HOME, FOOD EDITOR SHARON KILARSKI ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR BILL LINDSEY LUXURY EDITOR FEI MENG & BIBA KAJEVICH ILLUSTRATORS SHANSHAN HU PRODUCTION CONTACT US THE EPOCH TIMES ASSOCIATION INC. 229 W.28TH ST., FL.7 NEW YORK, NY 10001 ADVERTISING ADVERTISENOW@EPOCHTIMES.COM SUBSCRIPTIONS, GENERAL INQUIRIES, LETTERS TO THE EDITOR HELP.THEEPOCHTIMES.COM (USPS21-800)IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY THE EPOCH MEDIA GROUP, 9550 FLAIR DR. SUITE 411, EL MONTE, CA 91731-2922.

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2 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

vol. 2 | no. 10 | march 11–17, 2022

26 | Pandemic

50 | Cleaning Time

Drivers A new report blames the road fatality spike on risky pandemic behavior.

A refrigerator serves as a teacher of forgotten life lessons.

52 | Bigger Brother

The Chinese Communist Party’s new digital currency tracks every purchase.

28 | Information War Pro-Russia propaganda proliferates in China as Moscow is isolated.

56 | A Malibu Ranch This spectacular 180-acre property exemplifies quiet elegance.

44 | State of

the Union Biden, the ultimate monopolist, claims that he wants competition.

45 | Global

Commodities The Russia–Ukraine war is strengthening China's economic power.

46 | US Economy

The post-lockdown recovery continues, but it's losing momentum.

47 | Green Energy

The U.S. added less new wind power in 2021 than in the previous year.

48 | Russia Sanctions

The impact of a SWIFT ban on Russia and the world.

49 | China’s

Municipalities China’s local governments will face a severe fiscal challenge this year.

Features

12 | Oil and Gas Biden is criticized for turning to adversaries instead of domestic producers to fill the Russian oil void.

THE LEAD 16 | War in Ukraine Refugees from hard-hit areas in Eastern Ukraine describe the anguish of fleeing.

30 | American Students As screen time increases, teachers say today’s children lack motivation and creativity.

38 | Costs of Big Solar Large-scale solar farms can threaten natural landscapes, species, and habitats, especially in desert areas.

A United Airlines Airbus 320-232 parked at Dulles Washington International Airport in Virginia on Aug. 14, 2021. United Airlines plans to let workers who declined to get a COVID-19 vaccine return to their positions on March 28.

58 | Canada’s

West Coast It’s not easy getting to Canada’s Nimmo Bay, but it's well worth it.

60 | Back to Class

Starting or continuing one’s education has never been easier.

63 | Life in the

Fast Lane These supercars are as rare as unicorns, but much faster.

66 | The Pit Master

Whole hog BBQ is a disappearing art. Few do it as well as Pat Martin.

67 | Treat Your

Parents Well Parent–child relationships need tweaking as both age.

DANIEL SLIM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 3

T H G IL T O P S RUSSIA– UKRAINE CONFLICT A RESCUER PUSHES AN ELDERLY woman in a trolley during civilian evacuations from Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 8. More than 2 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, the United Nations said on March 8.

PHOTO BY SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

4 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

T H G IL T O P S BATTLE OF ANTONOV AIRPORT UKRAINIAN SERVICEMEN IN THE NORTH of Kyiv on Feb. 24. Russian and Ukrainian forces are battling for control of the Hostomel airfield, also known as Antonov Airport, on the northern outskirts of Kyiv, a senior Ukrainian officer said. The strategic airport could be critical to the defense of the Ukrainian capital.

PHOTO BY DANIEL LEAL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 5

SHEN YUN SHOP

Great Culture Revived.

Fine Jewelry | Italian Scarves | Home Decor

ShenYunShop.com

6 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

Tel: 1.80 0.208.2384

NAT ION • WOR L D • W H AT H A P P E N E D T H I S W E E K

The Week

No.10

The preliminary construction site of a petrochemical plant near Svobodny, Russia, on Aug. 18, 2020.

PHOTO BY SERGEI SUPINSKY/ AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Biden’s Russian Energy Ban Information War Pro-Russia propaganda proliferates in China as Moscow is isolated. 28

12

The Changing American Student

The Environmental Costs of Large-Scale Solar

Today’s children lack motivation and creativity, teachers say. 30

Large solar farms can threaten natural landscapes, species, and habitats. 38

INSIDE I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 7

The Week in Short US

s i y o v noC s ’elpoeP hT [ “

yr e v a r o f p u g n i d n a t s , m o d e r f o f

$50

t a h t : e l p ic n irp e l p m is d na c isab

BILLION

nois ced ruo y eb o t h guo t i

” .e f i l r u o y e v i l o t w o h — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

“The [Chinese regime] is coming ever closer to being a peer competitor in areas of relevance to national security.”

— Avril Haines, director, National Intelligence

$730

Democrats have unveiled a draft of their 2022 omnibus spending bill that includes $730 billion in non-defense funding, the largest increase in four years.

$14

BILLION

Congress’s aid package for Ukraine and its Eastern European allies now stands at $14 billion, according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

$4.33 PER GALLON

The average price of regular unleaded gas reached the highest average retail price recorded in history, $4.33 per gallon, on March 11, according to data from the American Automobile Association.

$1 MILLION— Major League Baseball has provided $1 million in financial aid for employees affected by the cancellation of games due to a dispute between the league and the Players Association. The two bodies are deadlocked on several issues, including the competitive balance tax, which serves as a salary cap.

8 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

THIS PAGE FROM TOP: TOM WILLIAMS-POOL/GETTY IMAGES, SAUL LOEB-POOL/ GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT PAGE FROM TOP: ROBYN BECK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, LEONARD ZHUKOVSKY/SHUTTERSTOCK

BILLION

Congress has passed a sweeping bipartisan bill designed to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service’s finances and operations, with about $50 billion in financial relief over the span of a decade.

The Week in Short US CYBERSECURITY

Chinese Group Hacked at Least 6 US State Governments: Firm

A HACKER GROUP backed by the

A girl holds her sister’s hand for comfort as she receives a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at Los Angeles Mission College in Los Angeles on Jan. 19.

VACCINES

COVID-19 Vaccine a Risk for Healthy Children: Florida NEW GUIDANCE from Florida’s top health official says parents should be

informed that healthy children could be more at risk from a COVID-19 vaccine than from the disease itself.

The guidance notes that children without comorbidities are at little risk of developing severe COVID-19 and that youth are at a heightened risk of experiencing heart inflammation if they receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

The guidance also points to the number of children across the country who have recovered from COVID-19, which grants them some level of immunity, and that some studies have indicated that people with such immunity are more likely to suffer side effects if they get vaccinated.

Health care practitioners need to “analyze existing data on the COVID-19 vaccine alongside parents when deciding to vaccinate children,” Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said in a statement.

DEFENSE

Navy Refuses to Deploy Warship With Commander Unvaccinated U.S. NAVY OFFICIALS have said a

warship can’t be deployed because its commander has refused the COVID-19 vaccine.

The service said an East Coast guided-missile destroyer is “out of commission” after a Florida federal judge ruled that the Navy and Marine Corps cannot remove its officer for being unvaccinated against COVID-19.

A U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer in The warship now remains docked in New York Harbor on May 21, 2014.

Norfolk, Virginia.

It comes after U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, a George H.W. Bush nominee, ruled to bar Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and all other military officials from taking punitive action against the unnamed Navy officer, who sought a religious exemption to the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Chinese regime has exploited vulnerabilities in the online systems of at least six U.S. state governments in order to compromise and gain access to those networks, cybersecurity firm Mandiant said.

Mandiant’s lengthy report presents the findings of an investigation that began in the spring of 2021, in response to a breach by a hacker group, known as APT41, of an unnamed state government’s system. The investigation continued through last month.

Despite the vulnerabilities, some states in the United States continue to utilize the vulnerable platform ASP.NET for web-facing systems.

ENVIRONMENT

Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Be Released in California, Florida

MILLIONS OF GENETICALLY

modified mosquitoes are set to be released in California and Florida in an effort to reduce the number of real, disease-carrying invasive mosquitoes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved use of the genetically engineered insects in pilot projects in specific districts across both states.

The mosquitoes were made by UK-based biotechnology firm Oxitec, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in an effort to combat insect-borne diseases such as dengue fever, yellow fever, and the Zika virus.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 9

The Week in Short World US–CHINA

Beijing Puts Focus on US Bio Labs in Ukraine THE CHINESE REGIME has

A young woman sits in an underground metro station that's being used as a bomb shelter, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 2.

UKRAINE

World Bank Announces $723 Million Package for Ukraine

THE WORLD BANK has announced a package of emergency loans and grants

for Ukraine worth over $700 million as the country continues to battle the Moscow-led military invasion.

According to the World Bank, the loans and grants will “help the government provide critical services to Ukrainian people, including wages for hospital workers, pensions for the elderly, and social programs for the vulnerable.”

The package includes a $350 million loan supplement to a prior World Bank loan, augmented by about $139 million through guarantees from the Netherlands and Sweden, officials said in a statement.

It also comprises $134 million in grants from the UK, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, and Iceland, as well as $100 million of financing from Japan, resulting in a total of $723 million.

COVID-19

MILD COVID-19 CASES were linked to changes in the brain, in a study pub-

lished in Nature.

Approximately 785 people underwent a brain scan, and about half later tested positive for COVID-19. All the participants got a second brain scan, including those who had survived the disease.

Researchers from the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford analyzed the scans and found that participants infected with COVID-19 had a reduction in the thickness of gray matter—which helps humans perform various functions such as making decisions—and other negative outcomes.

“Despite the infection being mild for 96% of our participants, we saw a greater loss of grey matter volume, and greater tissue damage in the infected participants, on average 4.5 months after infection,” professor Gwenaëlle Douaud, the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

“They also showed greater decline in their mental abilities to perform complex tasks, and this mental worsening was partly related to these brain abnormalities.

All these negative effects were more marked at older ages.”

10 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

MANDATES

Austrian Vaccine Mandate Law Suspended for All Adults THE AUSTRIAN GOVERNMENT

said that it won't enforce a COVID-19 vaccine mandate that would have forced most adults to receive the shot by mid-March or face fines.

The mandate for people aged 18 and older was signed into law in February.

Austria’s minister for the EU, Karoline Edtstadler, announced that the law wouldn’t go into effect and that it represents an “encroachment of fundamental rights” that can no longer be justified.

THIS PAGE: ARIS MESSINIS/STF/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT PAGE FROM TOP: BULENT KILIC/ AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, JASON CONNOLLY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, OLI SCARFF/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Mild Cases of COVID-19 Can Lead to Brain Changes: Study

accused the U.S. military of running “dangerous” biological labs in Ukraine, appearing to echo a Russian disinformation narrative forming part of Moscow’s efforts to justify its invasion of Ukraine.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a regular briefing that Russia had found "U.S. biological labs" in Ukraine and that these facilities were used to conduct "bio-military plans.”

Zhao then went on to claim that U.S. data showed that the Pentagon controlled 26 labs and other facilities in Ukraine.

The comments hark back to the Chinese regime’s disinformation tactics during the pandemic, when it sought to deflect growing scrutiny on the possible role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in starting the outbreak.

Over the past two years, Chinese officials and state media outlets have pushed a range of unfounded conspiracy theories that the United States was the source of the pandemic.

World inWorld Photos in Photos

1.

1. A father cries as he says goodbye to his family in front of an evacuation train at the central train station in Odessa, Ukraine, on March 7. 2. A man riding a horse races down Harrison Avenue as a skier airs out a jump during the 74th annual Leadville Ski Joring weekend competition in Leadville, Colo., on March 5. Skijoring is a winter sport involving a team of one rider and one skier who must navigate jumps, and slalom gates, and spear rings for points. 3. Exiled Tibetan artists perform during the celebrations of the Lhosar Tibetan New Year at the Boudhanath Stupa area in Kathmandu, Nepal, on March 5. 4. Women cross a road with their Komondor dog (C) as they arrive for the Crufts dog show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England, on March 10.

2.

3.

4.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 11

The construction site of Russian petrochemical company Sibur’s ZapSibNefteKhim plant, on the outskirts of Tobolsk, Russia, on Oct. 4, 2018.

PHOTO BY ANDREY BORODULIN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

12 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

In Focus Russia Sanctions

OIL AND GAS

BIDEN’S RUSSIAN ENERGY BAN Cutting off Russian oil raises calls for greater US crude output

P

By Andrew Moran

President Joe Biden said that “the United States is targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy.”

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 13

JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

resident joe biden announced on March 8 that the United States is banning Russian oil imports, stopping about 500,000 barrels per day of new crude shipments from entering American seaports.

“Today I am announcing the United States is targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy. We’re banning all imports of Russian oil and gas and energy,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “That means Russian oil will no longer be acceptable at U.S. ports, and the American people will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine.

“This is a step we’re taking to inflict further pain on Putin.”

The plan consists of prohibiting new purchases of Russian crude, liquefied natural gas, coal, and other petroleum products. It would also wind down deliveries of existing exports. The latest initiative will restrict new U.S. investment and prevent Americans from engaging in foreign investments where funds flow into Moscow’s energy sector.

“In taking this action, we consulted with European allies closely, but we do not expect them

and did not ask them to join us,” a senior administration official revealed during a conference call with reporters on March 8.

The ban goes into effect immediately.

Biden’s decision came soon after the European Union confirmed that it would slash Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of 2022. The European Commission will search for other suppliers, while further requiring the bloc’s 27 states to ensure that gas inventories are 90 percent full

by Oct. 1 every year.

The eurozone currently imports roughly 45 percent of its gas from Moscow, buying an

In Focus Russia Sanctions

A man walks past a damaged silo at the Saudi Aramco oil facility in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Nov. 24, 2020. estimated 2.5 million barrels per day.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to outline a long-term energy strategy that includes prohibiting imports of Russian energy. Although the UK is less dependent on Russian energy than the EU, it still purchases $5.3 billion worth of crude per year.

It’s a lot easier for the United States to switch off the taps from Russia than it would be for Europe, says Rob Thummel, portfolio manager and managing director at Tortoise.

“There will need [to be a] coordinated effort including higher production volumes from Canada and the U.S. to help Europe offset Russian imports,” Thummel told Insight. “Nearing the end of winter will buy some time to rearrange the deck chairs before next winter’s heating season in Europe begins.”

But the Kremlin has warned that “a rejection of Russian oil would lead to catastrophic consequences for the global market,” with Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak predicting that prices could surge to $300.

Soon after the news of Biden’s measure, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude surged to $130 a barrel before easing to around $125 at the midday mark on March 8.

Cheers, Jeers on the Biden Announcement

14 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

administration is in talks with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela as part of its efforts to contain soaring energy prices. In addition, the White House has been in active negotiations to create a nuclear agreement with Iran, something that could result in lifting sanctions and allowing Tehran to inject millions of barrels of oil into global energy markets.

Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, projected that the world needs 2 million barrels per day of spare capacity to absorb oil supply shocks.

Amin Nasser, CEO of oil giant Saudi Aramco, revealed at CERAWeek in Houston that his company plans to deliver 2 million additional barrels to the market to ease upcoming shocks.

Meanwhile, Martin Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, lauded the news and urged greater domestic output.

“We applaud the administration for banning Russian energy imports,” Durbin said in a statement.

“It’s time now for the administration to partner with domestic energy producers to leverage America’s ability to produce more oil and gas and focus on pro-growth policies to benefit our economy and the world’s security.”

The American Petroleum Institute (API) also sup-

FROM L: FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Republican lawmakers celebrated the news, but were cautious about turning to other foreign suppliers.

“Now we have to do part two, which is we should replace it with American oil, not Saudi oil, not Iranian oil, not Venezuelan oil,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a video.

“We don’t need oil from Iran. We don’t need oil from Venezuela. In fact, Venezuela can’t even produce enough oil. At this moment, they’re less than 1 percent of the global production.”

In recent days, it’s been reported that the Biden

Saudi Arabia has projected that the world needs 2 million barrels per day of spare capacity to absorb oil supply shocks.

In Focus Russia Sanctions

500,000 BARRELS

per day of new crude shipments are being stopped from entering American seaports after President Joe Biden’s ban on Russian oil imports.

ports the U.S. government’s decision, confirming that it’s ready to comply with the import ban.

“The industry has already taken significant and meaningful steps to unwind relationships, both with respect to assets in Russia as well as imports of Russian crude oil and refined products,” said Mike Sommers, API’s president and CEO. “We share the goal of reducing reliance on foreign energy sources and urge policymakers to advance American energy leadership and expand domestic production to counter Russia’s influence in global energy markets.”

Biden told the press that “it’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production,” reiterating comments from White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, disagrees with these remarks.

Sgamma said she’s “glad” that Biden is “finally willing to sanction Russia as much as he’s been ‘sanctioning’ American oil and natural gas producers.”

“American producers stand ready to increase production if the administration could back off its misguided climate change policies and remove the red tape and obstacles to American production,”

Pumpjacks in the Belridge oil field near McKittrick, Calif., on Nov. 3, 2021. Republican lawmakers are suggesting that the United States should replace Russian oil with American oil.

she told Insight in an email. “The president is so wedded to policies that hamstring oil and natural gas in America that he can’t bring himself to do the things in his power right now to unleash American production.”

Sgamma said the president could deem all outstanding leases and permits, including pipeline rights of way, as ready to go. She also said he could request financial regulatory bodies to halt preventing credit and capital from flowing to new production. Biden could additionally cease new rulemaking mechanisms that possess the goal of decreasing U.S. output.

“The left screams back that more renewables are needed, but if that were the answer, Germany would not be more vulnerable to Russian energy than before,” she said.

“Germany has done what the left is demanding we do now, having spent two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars on wind and solar. Because Germans need to actually heat their homes and turn on the lights, they’re now more reliant on Russia because wind and solar don’t provide 24/7 electricity and transportation.”

Biden referenced the 9,000 permits that could allow companies to drill now, but this figure has been a source of contention for energy leaders.

In a previous commentary, Sgamma highlighted the myriad of legal, financial, and regulatory challenges that have burdened the industry, making the 9,000 permits statistic misleading.

Many leases face litigation issues by environmental organizations, while a substantial number of other leases still need to wait for additional government approvals amid federal environmental analysis. The other problem is that gathering enough capital for these projects is difficult since activist investors, emboldened by the White House’s regulatory tools, have refrained from pouring funds into the fossil fuel sector, she says.

John Hess, CEO of Hess Corp., told CNBC that he thinks the United States and other countries need to do more to stabilize a market that is “now in the intensive care unit.”

Emel Akan contributed to this report.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 15

Ukrainian refugees Anna Gorpenich (R) and her children wait for a bus after arriving in Poland at the border crossing in Medyka, on March 10.

16 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

Ukrainians Describe Anguish of Fleeing REFUGEE CRISIS

Thousands of refugees, fearful of the war, arrive in neighboring Poland Text by Ivan Pentchoukov and Photos by Charlotte Cuthbertson I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 17

The Lead War in Ukraine

Two million Ukrainians have left their country to escape the war as of March 8, according to the United Nations.

M

e dy k a , p o l a n d —Anna Gorpenich

and her two children left the warstruck city of Sumy in Eastern Ukraine when the first safe-evacuation corridor arranged with Russia was opened.

18 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

The Lead War in Ukraine

FORTY HOUR S LATER , on the afternoon of

March 10, the family arrived alongside thousands of Ukrainians streaming into Poland at the border crossing in Medyka.

Sumy is one of several cities on the frontier of the Russian invasion in Eastern Ukraine. Russian tanks rolled through the streets of Sumy on Feb. 24, the first day of the war in Ukraine. The surrounding areas have seen ongoing fighting since.

Gorpenich said the situation in Trostyanets and Okhtyrka, two smaller cities south of Sumy, is particularly dire. The residents don’t have heat,

water, or electricity.

“They have nothing. Today, they were supposed to open a safety corridor, and the people, including our friends with two children, they were supposed to be able to evacuate, but Russia didn’t let the people go,” Gorpenich told The Epoch Times.

“It’s horrible. There is nothing left there. Nothing,” she said, before breaking into tears and hugging her 10-year-old daughter. “Somebody has got to put a stop to it. They don’t bomb infrastructure, they drop huge bombs on people’s houses.”

(Top) Polish soldiers stand by to help as Ukrainian refugees walk into Poland.

(Above) A young Ukrainian refugee holds his dog in a tent after arriving in Poland.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 19

The Lead War in Ukraine

20 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

The Lead War in Ukraine

“They don’t bomb infrastructure, they drop huge bombs on people’s houses.”

Anna Gorpenich, evacuee

“We’re fleeing from bombs.

Bombs hit three floors of our 16-floor building. We have no lights, no water, no life.”

Lyubov Romanova, evacuee

“We feel safe now, there is not as much fear in general. They gave us food and drink here [in Poland], and now we’re ready to go.”

Olena Sayenko, evacuee

(Far Top Left) Ukrainian refugees walk into Poland at the border crossing in Medyka.

(Far Bottom Left) Ukrainian refugee Anna Gorpenich said she had to fit her life into three backpacks and is devastated by the situation in Ukraine.

(Top Left) A Ukrainian refugee boy looks out a bus window after arriving in Poland.

(Left) Rows of donated shoes are laid out for Ukrainian refugees to take after they cross into Poland. Volunteers crowded nearby, offering the arriving refugees hot food, clothing, personal care items, SIM cards, and directions for transportation further west into Poland.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 21

22 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

The Lead War in Ukraine

Gorpenich plans to live with her mother in Poland until she decides what to do.

“I’m 32 years old, and I fit all my 32 years in three backpacks,” she said. “I don’t even have words to describe what is happening.”

The area beyond the Polish passport control building was crowded with volunteers on March 10, some from as far as the United States and England. They offered the arriving refugees hot food, clothing, personal care items, SIM cards, and directions for transportation further west into Poland.

Polish soldiers helped to carry heavy bags for women and children as they made their way to shuttle buses. Volunteers waded through the crowd with trays of hot chocolate and crates of apples.

“I feel more calm now. We crossed the border, and there are no more bombs,” said Lyubov Romanova, who fled Kharkiv, another city on the front line of the invasion, told The Epoch Times.

“We’re coming from Kharkiv. We’re fleeing from bombs. Bombs hit three floors of our 16-floor building. We have no lights, no water, no life.”

Lena Yegorova and her 13-year-old daughter Polina also left Kharkiv. After five days of traveling by car, Polina said it felt “great” to finally cross into Poland. Her mother was in a more somber mood.

“I feel heavy. I want to be home. We’re on foreign land, after all,” Yegorova told The Epoch Times.

Two million Ukrainians have left their country to flee the war as of March 8, according to U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

Some stay in the countries in which they arrive.

Others travel further. Yegorova intends to join her eldest daughter in Spain. A family from Kharkiv who traveled with her are destined for Italy.

Others just want to return home.

“We’ll wait for the war to be over so we can go back home,” said Olena Sayenko, who traveled with her daughter, Kristina, from Cherkasy in central Ukraine.

“We feel safe now, there is not as much fear in general.

“They gave us food and drink here, and now we’re ready to go.”

Two of the men in her family have joined the military. One is on active duty.

(Top) Ukrainian refugees wait for a bus heading further west after arriving in Poland.

(Far Bottom Left) A Polish soldier helps to direct Ukrainian refugees waiting for a bus after they arrived in Poland.

(Far left) A volunteer makes soup for Ukrainian refugees as they walk into Poland.

(Left) A volunteer offers hot drinks to Ukrainian refugees waiting for a bus after arriving in Poland.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 23

T H G IL T O P S SHOW IN PARIS BYSTANDERS LOOK ON AS A HERD of sheep moves during an urban transhumance near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, on March 6, the last day of the 58th International Agriculture Fair. For the past half-century, the fair has been the annual meeting place for all the key players of the agricultural world.

PHOTO BY SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

24 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 25

TRANSPORT

Risky Pandemic Drivers AAA report blames riskier behavior from drivers during the pandemic for a spike in road fatalities

. s . roa d de at hs increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, though fewer drivers were on the nation’s highways, because of “riskier than average” behavior, according to new research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the country, it led to fewer drivers on the roads and a significant reduction in the number of miles driven.

“And yet, U.S. government data shows traffic fatalities have surged, along with an increase in crashes involving impairment, speeding, red-light running, ag26 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

gressiveness, and non-seatbelt use, to its highest level in over a decade,” the foundation said in a statement.

The survey found that while most drivers had reduced their driving during the pandemic, “a small proportion” actually increased miles behind the wheel.

“Making matters worse, those who increased their driving appeared to be riskier than average, even after accounting for their age, gender, and how much they drove,” according to the foundation’s American Driving Survey, which was released on Feb. 28.

Early in the pandemic, the average daily number of driving trips decreased by

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U

By Allan Stein

an estimated 42 percent in April 2020, the survey found. After a slight rebound, daily travel leveled off in the second half of 2020 at 2.2 daily trips—about 20 percent below the 2.7 daily trips in the second half of 2019.

“Our research finds that higher-risk motorists accounted for a greater share of drivers during the pandemic than before it,” said Dr. David Yang, the foundation’s executive director. “Safety-minded individuals drove less, while many who increased their driving tended to engage in riskier behaviors behind the wheel.”

The survey found that only 4 percent of respondents were driving more during the pandemic, and these were “younger and disproportionately male—a statistically riskier driver group than the average population.”

Moreover, those who increased their driving miles were more likely to speed 10 mph over the posted limit (51 percent), read a text while driving (50 percent), change lanes aggressively (43 percent), drive without a seatbelt (21 percent), or

Nation Driving Report

Very few cars drive along Interstate 280 during the pandemic, in San Francisco on June 11, 2021. operate under the influence of alcohol or cannabis (13 percent).

Of the 1,700 survey respondents, males comprised 64 percent of those who reported driving more during the pandemic, and 44 percent of those who drove less.

The survey concluded, “In contrast, compared with drivers who did not change how much they drove due to the pandemic, those who increased their driving were 27 percent more likely to report having read text messages, 38 recent more likely to have typed text messages, 40 percent more likely to have sped on freeways and on residential streets, 67 percent more likely to have run a red light, 86 percent more likely to have changed lanes aggressively, more than twice as likely to have driven when they believed their blood alcohol concentration might have exceeded the legal limit, and nearly three times as likely to have driven within an hour after using marijuana at least once in the past 30 days.

“In addition, a small segment of the population—approximately 4 percent of drivers—reported that the pandemic led them to increase the amount that they drove. These drivers were predominantly younger than those who reduced their driving and those who did not change how much they drove during the pandemic, and a greater proportion of them was male.

“This suggests, even if only on the basis of demographic patterns, that those who increased their driving were likely higher-risk drivers.”

These drivers were also more likely to engage in risky behavior such as distracted driving, or driving while fatigued, the survey found.

“While the mechanisms responsible for the observed associations are unclear, other research suggests some possibilities,” it stated.

“It is possible that many of the individuals who were willing to travel—and even increased their travel—despite the health risks associated with the pandemic were already more willing than average to take other risks.

“There is some limited evidence that such factors might be at play.”

The survey drew upon the latest data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which reported that 38,680 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020—the largest number of road deaths since 2007.

“This is a national crisis. We cannot and must not accept these deaths as an inevitable part of everyday life,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.

“The good news is we now have a strategy, as well as the resources and programs to deliver it, thanks to the president’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. “The National Roadway Safety Strategy is America’s first-ever national, comprehensive plan to significantly reduce deaths and injuries on our roads.”

Steven Cliff, deputy administrator of NHTSA, said: “We have to change a culture that accepts as inevitable the loss of tens of thousands of people in traffic crashes. This will require a transforma-

A survey found that while most drivers had reduced their driving during the pandemic, ‘a small proportion’ of ‘riskier’ drivers actually increased their miles behind the wheel. tional and collaborative approach to safety on our nation’s roads.”

The association said it supports adopting the Safe System Approach (SSA) to roadway safety, a program that encourages obeying speed limits, driving sober, avoiding smartphone use, using seatbelts, keeping a level head, and staying focused while driving.

“Despite safer roads, safer vehicles, and stronger traffic safety laws on the books, the United States has witnessed more, not less, death on our roadways even at a time when other nations saw dramatic drops,” said Jake Nelson, AAA’s director of traffic safety advocacy and research.

“What is absolutely clear to AAA is that it will take new action to get us closer to zero traffic deaths.”

38,680 PEOPLE DIED

in vehicle crashes in 2020— the largest number of road deaths since 2007.

The New York Police and Fire departments investigate the site of a car collision in which six people were reported injured, in Manhattan on March 5, 2021.

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I N F O R M AT I O N WA R

Pro-Russia Propaganda Proliferates in China as Moscow’s Isolation Grows China’s tightly controlled online space is decidedly pro-Russian

I

By Eva Fu f russia needs to find some support amid the piling Western condemnation for its invasion of Ukraine, all it takes is a browse on the Chinese internet.

In China’s tightly controlled online space, pro-Moscow sentiment dominates. Celebrities are chastised for voicing sympathy for Ukraine. Hawkish Russian remarks are cheered. And some Chinese users describe Russian President Vladimir Putin as a hero standing up to the West.

The enthusiasm has extended to e-commerce. Some Chinese have flocked to a Russian-owned online store that was said to be endorsed by the Russian Embassy in China, clearing shelves of its products, from chocolates to wafers and vodka.

“Every chocolate is a bullet fired at the nazis, ypa!” wrote one buyer in the store’s review section, in an apparent reference to Putin’s claim that he wanted

to “de-Nazify” the country, in justifying the invasion.

The outlet, known as the Russian National Pavilion, saw its online following soar threefold within a day, and has received a total of 50,000 orders since Feb. 28, according to Chinese media reports.

By March 2, a video had popped up from Sergey Batsev, an ambassador to China for the Russian nonprofit Business Russia, thanking “Chinese friends” for supporting his country in such “difficult times.”

“During this complicated and ever-changing international situation, we have seen our old Chinese friends’ camaraderie,” he said. “There’s an old Chinese saying that a goose feather sent from far away conveys profound affections.

We will cherish this deep friendship in our hearts.”

Meanwhile, nationalist voices on social media have cheered a strong Russia–China partnership.

Sergey Batsev, an ambassador to China for Russian nonprofit Business Russia, thanks Chinese buyers for their support for a Russian online store.

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“I said long ago that with China acting as a shield for Russia, whatever Western sanctions will dissolve to nothing,” wrote a nationalist Chinese scholar on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent. The post included photos that appeared to show long lines of shoppers inside a Russian store in northern China. He had visited the website of the Russian National Pavilion twice without finding anything available to buy, he said.

It’s unclear to what extent these viewpoints reflect the broader public sentiment in China, due to Beijing’s heavy censorship that has silenced voices from the other side.

Several Chinese actors have been censured on Weibo after posting proUkraine remarks. Social media posts by

International Geo-Politics

In China’s tightly controlled online space, proMoscow sentiment dominates. People are chastised for voicing sympathy for Ukraine.

A television screen shows Chinese state-backed news coverage on the Russia–Ukraine conflict, at a shopping mall in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, on Feb. 25. prominent Chinese scholars opposing Russia’s invasion were taken offline, as were suggestions of Russia being on the losing side. A video by a Ukrainian vlogger popular in China, entreating her fans in Mandarin to “respect lives” and “not take war as a joke,” was largely erased from the Chinese internet and is only viewable on Twitter, a platform banned in China.

When the English Premier League announced plans to show solidarity with Ukraine this weekend by having club captains wear armbands in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, and displaying on stadium screens the slogan “Football Stands Together” printed on the flag, the league’s Chinese broadcast partner reacted by pulling its scheduled coverage.

Fostering a pro-Russian mood, or at

least the impression of it, appears to be part of Beijing’s designs from the beginning.

Two days before Putin started bombing Ukraine, leaked censorship rules showed that Chinese state media had been told to ensure that their content not appear anti-Russia or pro-Western.

As the Chinese regime has refused to use the word “invasion” to characterize Russia’s attack, the word is taboo in coverage across Chinese media. When a reference is necessary, media outlets have adopted Moscow’s descriptor of “special military operation” or used the vague phrase “the current situation.”

In recent press conferences and public statements, Chinese officials have taken an awkward line of refusing to openly back either side. They have simulta-

neously refused to denounce Russia’s attack, recognized that Russia has legitimate security concerns, maintained that all countries’ sovereignty should be respected, called for a peaceful settlement to the crisis, and blamed the United States for inflaming the prospect of war.

But the Chinese regime’s propaganda machinery has taken on a more fiery tone.

While most media coverage in the country is focused on the Beijing Paralympics, the relatively few Chinese state media reports on the crisis have played down criticism of Russia. The hashtag “multiple countries refuse to sanction Russia,” pushed by nationalist tabloid Global Times, got 120 million views in one day on Weibo.

“Russians, please aim your bullets more accurately,” a reporter from the Chinese Communist Party-owned newspaper Jinhua News wrote in a post upon learning that 70 Japanese had volunteered to join the Ukrainian army.

Crude jokes online about welcoming beautiful Ukrainian women refugees to China and pro-Russia remarks have made lives more difficult for Chinese nationals stuck in Ukraine. Some said they were threatened by angry Ukrainians when going to supermarkets.

Beijing’s stance didn’t go unnoticed

by Russians.

Maria Zakharova, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, on March 3 said that Moscow appreciates Beijing’s “impartial and unbiased vision of the Ukrainian issue.”

China “avoids being misled by Western ploys,” she told a news briefing.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 29

A child looks out from a school bus in Newtown, Conn.

American children today seem to be more disinterested in education, compared to past generations.

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EDUCATION

THE CHANGING AMERICAN STUDENT Today’s children lack motivation and creativity, teachers say

By Jackson Elliott

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32 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

far greater creativity and motivation than the children she now teaches. In her experience, American children give up when challenged.

“Why is it that these kids show up and they are completely disinterested in education? It baffled me,” she said.

About half of the students at Theresa’s current school are homeless, but they lack the drive to escape the poverty that Nigerian children had, she said.

Theresa knows the challenges of poverty. As a child in Nigeria, she and her siblings often had only one daily meal, but they and other children were desperate to get educated and succeed.

“To see people waste their opportunity makes me want to cry,” Theresa said. “Any child in Nigeria would give an arm and a

leg to come to this place. And you guys have everything, and you throw it away.”

Jessica Bonner, a speech pathologist for elementary schoolers in Birmingham, Alabama, also said she sees a difference between children today and in the past.

They don’t usually talk about what they like to do together, she said. Instead, they seem centered on absorbing online videos other people make.

“The thing that changed was the cellphones. Smartphones, though, were the thing that started the change. So now students are looking at and relying on the devices more,” Bonner said.

Recently, she asked a group of children in one of her classes to choose an educational topic for a music video they would create. Instead of debating or making a

FROM L: BRANDON BELL/GETTY IMAGES, COURTESY OF PAGE PARK

REATIVITY AND ENTHUSIASM define childhood, but American children seem to be losing these gifts, teachers say.

American children are less creative and less motivated than past generations. When teachers compare today’s children with their peers from only a few years ago, there’s a clear difference, according to Page Park, an Indiana teacher with 24 years of experience.

“They don’t know how to think for themselves, too. I do have a few kids that are really good at problem-solving, but not as many. They’re not good at problem-solving,” she said.

Park said that since she first started teaching, creativity has declined. Students today don’t look for solutions to simple problems.

For instance, if a student found he didn’t have a pencil, he wouldn’t ask for a spare, Park said.

“I’ve taught most of my career,” Park said. “I’m talking high school students who just don’t think to ask, ‘Hey, can I borrow a pencil?’ And I have them available where they can just take them.”

When Park looks at her classroom, she sees a disconnected generation.

“They talk about games a lot. They never talk about going outside. They talk about staying up late. Their sleep rhythms are awful,” Park said.

“I have one that was telling me last week or the week before that he doesn’t go to bed until three o’clock in the morning. They might be a little more rigid in movement.”

Other teachers in different states have seen a similar change.

Theresa, a teacher in New York and writer for The Developing Mom, also said her students seem to lack creativity and motivation. To protect the privacy of her students, Theresa chose to remain anonymous.

“I thought, all I have to do is just show up every day and do my very best, and I can inspire these kids. I can change your life. Every teacher thinks that,” she said.

“But what I started to see was the students, they were not inspired, no matter what I or my fellow teachers did.”

In the three schools where Theresa has taught, she’s found this same problem.

Theresa, a Nigerian immigrant, said that the children she grew up with had

Nation Children and Youth

Teachers across the United States are seeing a disconnected generation in schools today, and are struggling to engage and inspire students in the classroom.

“There’s a huge disconnect between kids and nature, a huge disconnect between what’s going on with them physically.”

Page Park, school teacher

choice, they looked at her blankly, then started talking with each other about unrelated subjects.

“I honestly believe that elementary school students are so accustomed to having to follow a set curriculum throughout the day with little to no input from them that they unconsciously shelve their ideas,” Bonner said.

In the stories these teachers tell, creativity and the drive for success seem closely connected. Creativity arises from an intense desire for some result. When children feel apathetic, they don’t create.

Trading Dreams for Screens Experts have several theories on why American children are less creative.

But the first and most popular theory is

that living constantly online damages a child’s ability to think and self-motivate.

Teachers who contacted Insight agreed that too much time online is part of the problem, and the statistics back them up.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics suggest that in 2010, something changed mental health for teens.

From 1999 to 2010, only a few years had teen self-harm rates above 300 injuries per 100,000 people or suicide rates above 10 per 100,000 people. But after 2010, suicide and self-harm rates for young people 18 to 24 have never dropped below these numbers, and have generally trended upward.

According to Pew Research Center, one of the biggest changes in society during the same time period was a rise in cell-

phone ownership.

Other surveys suggest that young people spend extremely high amounts of time online.

While correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, in the experience of both teachers and psychologists, excessive time online and mental problems tend to go together.

Psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax said that American children spend much more time online compared to children from other countries.

“In this country, for example, it’s very common for kids to go to bed with their phones, or for boys to have video game consoles in their bedrooms,” Sax said.

“It’s actually unusual in continental Europe.”

As children have started living online more, child mental illness has increased dramatically, Sax said. Somehow, excessive time online seems linked to disengagement, lack of motivation, and a wide variety of other symptoms.

“Over the last three years, American kids have gone off the deep end and are now many, many times more likely to be anxious, depressed, disengaged, unmotivated, and not paying attention I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 33

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compared to kids in Europe, Australia, or New Zealand,” he said.

Growing Up Smart According to teachers, children today tend to spend their whole lives tied to their smartphones.

Even the friendships of today’s children don’t resemble those of children a decade ago, Park said. They revolve around what happens online. For them, it seems like the internet is ‘the real world.’

“I honestly believe that elementary school students are so accustomed to having to follow a set curriculum throughout the day with little to no input from them that they unconsciously shelve their ideas.”

Jessica Bonner, speech pathologist

34 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

Too Easy Theresa said she believes that American children aren’t creative because others solve their problems for them.

With access to the internet and parents who quickly intervene instead of letting kids struggle a little, children approach life as if someone else will always solve their problems, she said.

“Every little problem that they have is immediately solved for them. And if it can’t be solved by their parents, they just find a resource online,” she said.

When children don’t have challenges to overcome, they don’t know what to do when they face a difficult concept in school, Theresa said.

Teachers at her school struggle to find

a solution to this problem, she said. In her teachers’ lounge, how to help kids who won’t face challenges is a common discussion. But there aren’t any good answers.

“We complain about the issue, and then we just accept it. Like, this is just how America is. This is how the kids are,” she said. “You just have to move on.”

CLOCKWISE FROM L: ELISE FERRER PHOTOGRAPHY, COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA–IRVINE, ELZBIETA SEKOWSKA/SHUTTERSTOCK

“It’s all about what he or she did on TikTok,” Park said.

Park, who also teaches yoga, said that children seem separated from their bodies because of their extensive online life.

“If they get frustrated with something, they don’t know how to deal with that within their body. They don’t know how to shut their nervous system down and come back into a rest-and-digest state,” she said. “So they live in this constant state of panic and anxiety.”

Fixation on technology leaves children isolated from nature, too, Park said, and

this separation from nature makes them less creative.

“They don’t go with their toes in the grass,” she said. “There’s a huge disconnect between kids and nature, a huge disconnect between what’s going on with them physically.”

When children live online, they tend to consume the content of others without developing their own thoughts, Bonner said.

“They’re pretty much being influenced by what they’re seeing,” she said. “That definitely contributes heavily to them not being as creative, because they’re being influenced by someone else.”

According to Dr. Patrick Capriola, founder of the education website Strategies for Parents, kids learn creativity in early childhood. To do these activities well, they have to practice without distractions.

When children spend more time looking at screens, they don’t take advantage of this crucial time, he said. Instead of experiencing life, processing it, then engaging with it, they risk being overwhelmed by stimuli.

“The more time children spend in front of a screen, the less time they have to be with their imagination, focus on their thoughts, and experiment with them in creative ways, because the content behind the screen often does it for them,” Capriola said.

“This exposure has the potential to degrade their ability to develop these skills, because the child has less time to conceptualize ideas on their own.”

Nation Children and Youth

When children spend more time looking at screens, they don’t experience life, process it, and engage with it, so they risk being overwhelmed by stimuli.

Psychologists call this sort of dependence on others “learned helplessness.”

When parents help their children too much, children conclude that they don’t have agency.

The problems caused by learned helplessness resemble the problems caused by too much time online. They include depression, underachievement, and anxiety.

Issues at School

(Top) To meet a rising demand, a number of colleges and universities have developed esports programs, including some of the top-rated in the nation, such as the University of California–Irvine.

(Above) Before the advent of social media like TikTok, children’s mental health was generally better than what is seen today.

Another reason why kids don’t create may be the nature of school today. According to Sax, many things about the American education system leave it struggling to capture the interest of children.

Unlike schools in Europe, which focus on teaching kids to enjoy school before teaching them academic skills, American schools often teach kids skills before children are old enough to learn them, Sax wrote in his book “Boys Adrift.”

Because boys develop more slowly than girls, this trend harms them more, he said.

Boys who are too young to succeed at school feel like they’re stupid, Sax said.

They start to hate school because it forces them to fail.

After about 20 years of trying to persuade school leaders to change how they teach, Sax has found that for the most part, they’re unwilling to listen.

“When you approach a principal or school administrator with that kind of concern, you are a nuisance, and you will accomplish nothing. They may or may not say something nice, but it doesn’t really matter,” he said.

Park said that in her experience, schools do a poor job with children that aren’t academically gifted. Although everyone should have some competence with reading and math, not everyone needs to be great at it.

A child could be a creative artist, creative carpenter, or creative builder, but a school that focuses on teaching academic subjects often will let that child

down, she said.

“I feel like those kids who maybe would have been creative in some of those other areas, maybe they would be an amazingly creative welder. They would be able to create a beautiful thing, given the opportunity,” Park said.

But because they struggle in more academic subjects, they aren’t able to go into this program.

College isn’t for everyone, Page said, and there are many other good ways to earn a living.

Times Are Changing It may be that children are more perceptive of what the future will hold than adults are, said Robert Powers, a college counselor.

Although excessive online activity seems tied to mental problems, online life is here to stay, he said. Life in the future will likely be even more online.

Children won’t be creative, relationally connected, and ambitious in the same way they once were, he said. But we’ll use the same words to describe what they do in new settings.

This generation will become esport athletes and online friends, he said.

“The child who was once glued to his screen was really ahead of his time, trying to balance two worlds that really ought to have been combined all along,” Powers said.

A digital or “blended” world is the future, he said.

“And I do think that also means that the kids are all right,” he said.

But to many teachers who knew children before they lived online, creativity, determination, and friendships today seem less than what they could be.

Park said that she has always loved technology. But she has seen that too much time online cuts her students off from the beauty of nature and from human relationships.

“It’s not as good as it could be,” she said.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 35

T H G IL T O P S NATO MILITARY EXERCISE MEMBERS OF THE U.S. ARMY participate in the Crystal Arrow 2022 exercise in Adazi, Latvia, on March 8.

Approximately 2,800 soldiers from Albania, Canada, Czech Republic, Italy, Iceland, Montenegro, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Latvia, and the United States are training for interoperability during tactical military operations.

PHOTO BY PAULIUS PELECKIS/GETTY IMAGES

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ENE

EN V IRONME OF L ARGE-S

Large solar farms can threaten natu

BY NATHAN

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert in California, on Feb. 20, 2014.

PHOTO BY ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

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RGY

N TA L COS T S CALE SOLAR

ral landscapes, species, habitats WORCESTER

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 39

Environment Features

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40 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

He thinks the new standard could also create a precedent for a future administration to reduce the rates or fees for oil and gas exploration—something he also opposes.

While Emmerich’s concern about fossil fuel drilling isn’t uncommon in the environmental movement, Basin & Range frequently stands alone, or almost alone, when opposing solar and wind projects.

Many high-profile environmental groups are willing to see habitat taken up by solar, he said, “because it’s going to be impacted by climate change anyway.”

SOL AR POWER TOWER DESIGNS CAN MELT BIRDS, BUT TERFLIES, AND OTHER LIVING THINGS UNLUCK Y ENOUGH TO STR AY TOO CLOSE. CALIFORNIA’S IVANPAH SOL AR PL ANT HAS BEEN ESTIMATED TO KILL 6,000 BIRDS PER YE AR, AS OF 2016.

Under its “Smart from the Start” framework, the Wilderness Society emphasizes the benefits of placing large solar installations on public lands, in part to realize its goal of “net-zero emissions from public lands and waters.”

The Sierra Club, meanwhile, endorsed BLM’s Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), which could see hundreds of thousands of desert acres set aside for solar and wind energy projects.

BLM officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by Insight for comment. Insight also sought comment on

the BLM’s proposal from multiple environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society.

Low Power Density, High Impact on Habitats Scott Cashen, a field biologist in California who consulted on renewable energy projects, shares Emmerich’s concerns about the conservation of desert land.

“There was this big push to need a lot of big parcels of land, and the easiest place to look was in the desert,” he told Insight. “The desert was just getting destroyed. The first step is to come in with heavy equipment and scrape the site clean of anything living.”

One fundamental issue with solar power, Cashen said, is the need for large swaths of land.

This suggests a much lower power density than natural gas, nuclear, or other conventional power sources.

A 2018 article estimated that utility-scale photovoltaic solar has a power density of roughly 5.7 watts per square meter; natural gas, by contrast, has a power density of 482.1 watts per square meter, almost 85 times higher (though with a wide possible range).

Nuclear power clocked in at a power density of 240.8 watts per square meter, more than 42 times higher than utility-scale photovoltaic solar; while coal power, at 135.1 watts per square meter, had almost 24 times its counterpart’s power density.

In a 2010 primer on power densities, environmental scientist Vaclav Smil arrived at similar estimates.

Smil projected that the conversion to renewable energies would require a staggeringly large power infrastructure, “spread over areas 10 to 1,000 times larger than today’s infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction, combustion, and electricity generation.”

“Higher reliance on renewable energies may be desirable ... but inherently low power densities of these conversions will require a new system of fuel and electricity supply that will be

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

HE SOLAR LAND RUSH, Kevin Emmerich said, first hit the desert under President Barack Obama.

“He really wanted to put a lot of large-scale green energy on public lands,” Emmerich, a former field biologist and National Park Service ranger, told Insight.

He and his wife, field biologist and artist Laura Cunningham, soon realized that arid land in the United States’ southwestern deserts—particularly the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin—was at risk of being taken up by utility-scale solar.

In 2008, they formed a nonprofit, Basin & Range Watch, to resist what they saw as encroachment.

Emmerich says much of the struggle involved pushing back against the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) designations, which often identify the prospective sites of large solar farms as non-scenic. Under BLM’s Visual Resource Management (VRM) classification scheme, such areas are often slotted in the lowest class, Class IV. “In the Mojave Desert, the perception of that is changing,” Emmerich said. “As the population grows, and as people are more mobile and drive out there from the bigger cities, fewer and fewer people actually believe there’s nothing else there.”

Today, the Biden administration is contemplating a rule change reminiscent of moves under the Obama administration.

Under the Energy Act of 2020—the same act that laid the groundwork for redefining fuel minerals such as uranium as noncritical minerals— BLM would lower both capacity fees and rental rates for wind and solar on public lands.

As with its response in 2008, Basin and Range Watch is opposed to this change and what it suggests about the government’s attitude toward the industry.

“We’re giving them a break because they’re the sacred solar developer,” Emmerich said.

Environment Features

An employee with Ipsun Solar installs solar panels on the roof of the Peace Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Va., on May 17, 2021. able to substitute for today’s dominant practices only after decades of gradual development,” Smil wrote.

“With that land area, we’re talking about massive amounts of habitat loss, and habitat fragmentation and degradation in general,” Cashen said.

In addition to the panels themselves, the disruptive new infrastructure for utility-scale solar might include everything from new substations and roads to miles of additional transmission lines, a challenge that’s intensified if the solar installation is relatively far from the communities it serves.

“People still think, ‘Oh, that product is made from 100 percent solar energy, I can feel good about buying this,’” Cashen said. “But that solar energy facility involved destroying thousands of acres of pristine desert environment.

People just don’t know.”

Emmerich echoes Cashen’s comments on power density.

“The impact of a solar project is almost laughable to us, simply because

it’s low-density energy.”

Cashen points out that the additional transmission lines increase the risk of fire, especially in wildfire-prone parts of California.

“California law requires a four-foot clearance around powerlines in areas at high risk of fire. For that reason, the significant new transmission infrastructure required for utility-scale solar can result in significant tree loss.”

Cashen noted that large installations can even influence the surrounding microclimate, potentially elevating the likelihood of a major fire.

The new transmission lines required for utility-scale solar also increase the risk of bird collisions, exacerbating the major threat to avian life posed by solar installations themselves.

Solar power tower designs—a less common type of utility-scale solar design in which mirrors concentrate solar rays on a single point—can melt birds, butterflies, and other living things that are unlucky enough to stray too close.

California’s Ivanpah Solar Plant, located in the Mojave Desert, has been estimated to kill 6,000 birds per year, as of 2016.

While the issues with solar power towers were predictable, Cashen said that bird deaths linked to photovoltaic panels, the more common design in large-scale solar farms, came as a surprise.

“The more people started looking, the more dead birds started showing up at these photovoltaic facilities,” he said. “It’s to the point now that if you look, you’ll find it.”

Sparrow hawks, Western grebes, Virginia rails, American coots, and scores of other species have all been spotted dead or dying at industrial solar facilities in America’s deserts.

The rapid installation of new renewable energy facilities raises another question: Are governments and companies rushing to build new large-scale solar farms doing all they should to protect animals displaced by those projects?

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 41

Environment Features

85 TIMES HIGHER

A 2018 article estimated that utility-scale photovoltaic solar had a power density of roughly 5.7 watts per square meter; natural gas, by contrast, had a power density of 482.1 watts per square meter, almost 85 times higher.

since 1989, expressed skepticism about the BLM’s proposed rule change, which would lower costs for renewable energy companies operating on public land.

“This industry is heavily subsidized and getting tax breaks everywhere,” she said. “We’re just looking at more centralized power.”

Officials from Green Mountain Power and the State of Vermont didn’t respond by press time to a request for comment.

Emmerich is proud of his recent successful effort to halt the enormous Battle Born Solar project, which would have claimed roughly 14 square miles of Nevada desert and been the state’s largest solar farm.

“You can see beautiful mountains, and there’s a lot of history and archaeology up there,” he said.

That success was enabled in part by a local activist group, “Save Our Mesa!”

Arevia Power, which proposed the project, didn’t respond by press time to a request for comment.

Cashen is concerned that the environmental downside of solar power isn’t fully understood. He speculates that, in the not-so-distant future, much of America’s desert land could end up littered with the toxic, abandoned remains of old solar farms.

“All these things are so new,” he said.

Some Resistance Successful Although opponents of utility-scale solar have often faced an uphill battle, they have scored some victories.

In rural Vermont, the removal of hab42 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

The Mojave Desert in California City, Calif., on Oct. 2, 2021. An expert speculates that in the not-so-distant future, much of America’s desert land could be littered with the abandoned, toxic remains of old solar farms.

ROBYN BECK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Last year, after the rapid approval of Nevada’s Yellow Pine Solar Project, wildlife biologists moved more than 130 desert tortoises, a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Thirty of the relocated tortoises were killed, possibly by predators in their new environment after relocation stress made the reptiles vulnerable.

Emmerich said the incident brought his organization welcome attention.

The developer of Yellow Pine, NextEra Energy Resources, didn’t respond by press time to a request for comment.

Cashen and Emmerich note another troubling phenomenon.

In the bone-dry deserts of the American Southwest, where drought is making water scarcer by the year, the installation of industrial-scale solar has involved water trucks that dampen roads to keep dust from rising.

That water, as well as the shade from the solar panels, could attract lizards, snakes, and other animals. Those very features, Cashen says, can make the panels an ecological trap. The lizards are often run over by the water trucks, while bird nests near the panels may be subjected to scorching temperatures that fry the eggs.

Emmerich said the application of water to control dust has often failed to work.

“If you’ve been out here in the summertime, you know how hot it is and how quickly water evaporates,” he said, adding that the disrupted earth can give rise to dust devils.

itat for bobolinks and other grasslands had been a frequent point of contention, according to Annette Smith, executive director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment (VCE).

Yet while many controversial projects have progressed, in 2015, Green Mountain Power failed to secure approval for a proposed 19,000-panel array on a prison property in Windsor, Vermont.

“The site was well known to be excellent grassland bird habitat,” Smith told Insight.

Local reporting from the Valley News described how 60 neighbors showed up at a hearing on the project. According to that story, virtually all of the neighbors voiced opposition to the installation, which would have provided power for 1,200 homes.

Allen Palmer, an official with Vermont’s Division of Property Management, previously wrote in an email to other Vermont officials that whoever represented the state at the hearing on the project should “let the people vent.”

“Unfortunately, it may be too little too late,” Palmer wrote, according to correspondence obtained through a public records request and shared with Insight.

“The project was dropped,” Smith said.

Smith, who said she had been living off the grid using solar and propane

P OL I T IC S • E C ONOM Y • OPI N ION T H AT M AT T E R S

Perspectives

No.10

A cargo ship loaded with containers leaves the Lianyungang Port Container Terminal in Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province, China, on March 24, 2021.

PHOTO BY HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

CHINA IS HOARDING COMMODITIES

WIND POWER HIT BY SUPPLY WOES

THE SWIFT BAN

The Ukraine war is strengthening China’s relative economic power.

Can America’s wind industry stage a rebound in the coming years? 47

Russian banks may turn to alternatives, bypassing the SWIFT system entirely. 48

45

INSIDE I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 43

THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com.

Thomas McArdle

No Friend of Competition

Biden claims his economic policies demand more competition

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here was a great deal of disinformation to comb through—not to mention repeated gaffes and garbled speech—in the 7,900 or so words of President Joe Biden’s hour-long State of the Union Address to Congress on March 1.

Whether it was the far-fetched notion that his administration over a course of months had “prepared extensively and carefully” for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; his giving the false impression that releasing 30 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve will mean sustained relief for consumers from rising gasoline prices; his assertion that his top priority is “getting prices under control” and that a “tax credit to weatherize your home” paired with the subsidizing of solar, wind, and electric cars will be the solution to the worst inflation in four decades; plus lots more—Biden gave media fact-checkers a lot of work to do.

Less noticed, however, was the president’s regurgitation of a shameless claim that his economic policies are “demanding more competition” within America’s private sector. “I’m a capitalist,” Biden said, a protest-toomuch catchphrase he has repeated over many speeches. One labor activist declares that “Biden has been—without question—the most aggressively pro-union president since FDR died in office in 1945.” This reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt is supposedly waging a battle against “capitalism without competition.”

In fact, Biden is at war with competition and is arguably the most committed monopolist ever to occupy the Oval Office—where he replaced George Washington’s image above the fireplace (a bipartisan con-

44 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

stant across countless presidencies) with that of Roosevelt, the president whom Democratic Party icon Al Smith in 1936 accused of being a socialist autocrat who betrayed his own 1932 party platform. It is little known, and never taught in public school history classes covering the New Deal, that that platform called for “immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than 25 per cent in the cost of the Federal Government”— the polar opposite of the revolutionary expansion of government undertaken by FDR.

In fact, Biden is at war with competition and is arguably the most committed monopolist ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Not unlike the FDR bait and switch, Biden was presented to the electorate as a safe, avuncular, middleof-the-road return to normalcy to replace the noise of Donald Trump’s presidency. But upon taking office, Barack Obama’s vice president swiftly put into motion more executive orders than Trump, Obama, or George W. Bush. They included canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline; revoking numerous regulatory relief actions initiated by Trump; directing the Department of Transportation to require that airlines refund baggage costs on delayed flights and make owners of railroad tracks give right of way to passenger trains; and ending the federal government’s contracts with private prisons

(which the left concludes is a failed experiment despite over 90 percent of U.S. prisoners being held in public facilities).

Biden is unleashing federal antitrust regulators on the false assumption that “big is bad,” an idea that is the relic of the pre-high-tech economy of the early 2oth century.

Contrary to his contentions, “big” often means lower prices, as the eager customers of eBay, with its nearly $32 billion capitalization, will attest. Not to mention customers of Amazon, at $1.5 trillion capitalization.

There may be much trepidation today over Amazon purchasing MGM, and the fear of the transaction spawning an unstoppable multi-media leviathan, but the same fears abounded when AOL bought Time Warner more than two decades ago.

Far from a new monopoly smothering competition, AOL was spun off and bought by Verizon a few years later, and AT&T ultimately took over Time Warner.

“Happy warrior” Smith, a lifelong resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and probably the only authentic member of the working class ever to be nominated president by a major party, warned of the danger of “the vast building up of new bureaus of government, draining the resources of our people into a common pool and redistributing them, not by any process of law but by the whim of a bureaucratic autocracy.”

Under the guise of fostering competition, and with the real aim of promoting the interests of organized labor and “the appeal to passion and prejudices that comes from the demagogues that would incite one class of our people against the other”—another danger Smith warned of—Biden is empowering the worst monopoly of all: big, unwieldy, unaccountable government.

ANDERS CORR is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk. He is an expert in political science and government.

Anders Corr

China Is Hoarding Commodities

The Ukraine war is strengthening China’s relative economic power

m e r ic a a n d e u rop e surprised Chinese and Russian bankers. In retaliation against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they froze about $630 billion worth of Russian foreign reserves on Feb. 26.

Moscow suddenly couldn’t utilize the hard currency reserves it thought it possessed. It likely planned to use the billions to defend the ruble on international markets. Instead, the ruble fell about 30 percent against the dollar on Feb. 28.

Beijing is taking notice. Confronted with the potential lack of value of its $3.2 trillion worth of foreign exchange reserves, the regime is quietly offloading dollars by purchasing assets globally, including most recently through an energy and commodities push.

Driven by compounding geopolitical instability from the Russian invasion, sanctions over the Uyghur genocide, pandemic supply chain dislocations, trade disruptions in the Black Sea, the Australia trade spat, and skyrocketing maritime freight costs, Beijing is acquiring critical commodities such as oil, gas, iron ore, wheat, barley, corn, and gold.

Price appears to be of little relative concern to state-owned buyers purchasing materials to prepare for increasing expected commodity scarcities. Many commodities are already jumping in price over the past few days by 3 percent to 8 percent due to the war. Sanctions on potash from Belarus pushed China to pay 139 percent more for the fertilizer ingredient, now sourced from Israel and Canada.

On the other hand, the war sometimes helps China’s competitive position. With Russia’s new pariah status, Beijing has the bargaining power to denominate commodities contracts with Russia in its own currency, the yuan. Dollar and euro-trades with Russia are now increasingly illegal due to international sanctions over the

war, so China’s banks happily comply by shifting to the yuan. Russia has few other places to sell energy, so Beijing enjoys a buyer’s market.

China previously purchased about 1 percent of its coal from Russia (about 30 million tons), for example, but if the Ukraine invasion continues, Russia will be forced by sanctions to attempt to shift 38 percent of its coal exports (about 76 million tons) from Europe and Ukraine to Asian markets.

With Russia’s new pariah status, Beijing has the bargaining power to denominate commodities contracts with Russia in its own currency, the yuan.

But two of China’s largest stateowned banks now limit foreign currency loans for the purchase of Russian commodities. The offshore unit of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., for example, stopped the issuance of U.S. dollar-denominated letters of credit for the purchase of Russian raw materials.

However, yuan-denominated credit is still provided to some clients.

China purchases approximately $60 billion of energy annually from Russia.

Chinese steelmakers and power plants, which normally import extensive quantities of coal from Russia, are looking for alternative suppliers, as their bankers advise halting purchases due to the risk of secondary sanctions against China.

China’s increased purchases of grain and soybeans put upward pressure on world prices, which are now becoming unaffordable to the world’s poor. As reported by Bloomberg on March 3, China imported $34 billion in agricultural products from the United States in 2021.

Since November, in part as a result

of what a December Nikkei report calls the regime’s “hoarding,” the price of soybeans increased almost 50 percent. Grain exports from Russia and Ukraine have ground to a halt because of the war and sanctions, increasing prices even more.

China, which has about 18 percent of the globe’s population, has stockpiled over half of the world’s grains, increasing prices so much that it’s “dropping more countries into famine,” according to Nikkei. While the rest of the world descends into war and chaos, China has wheat stockpiles for a year and a half, an official at China’s National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration told reporters.

China is buying not just foodstuffs, but also entire companies, including a European meat processor in 2021 and a leading dairy in New Zealand in 2019. Between 2020 and 2021, the United Nation’s food price index increased 30 percent.

The Beijing regime is also a gold bug.

It mines much of its own, and purchases more on international markets.

While officially Beijing holds 1,948 tons of the precious yellow metal, most analysts estimate reserves of between 10,000 and 30,000 tons, well above U.S. reserves of 8,133 tons. With so much gold, China could in the future back the yuan with gold, displacing the nonbacked U.S. dollar.

China needs food and commodities for its economy, as do all countries.

Its demand is a pull factor for more supply to emerge, which means more jobs globally. But China’s approach is unscrupulously competitive, deceitful, and authoritarian, including through attempts at stealing natural resources and monopolizing the scarcest commodities, for example.

If the world allows the regime to continue down its unethical path of self-aggrandizement, we do so at our own future peril.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 45

Milton Ezrati

MILTON EZRATI is chief economist for Vested, a contributing editor at The National Interest, and author of "Thirty Tomorrows" and "Bite-Sized Investing.”

The Recovery Slows

Just as sanctions went into effect, the pace of growth slowed

ith economic sanctions against Russia going into place and little precise knowledge of their effect—on Russia or the United States—the U.S. post-lockdown recovery otherwise seems to be losing momentum.

For months, growth in sales and employment were breaking records, as was the pace of new business formation. Now, although the statistical picture is by no means uniform, the economy is signaling something less robust as the country deals with the strains of the unfolding geopolitical situation. Growth will surely continue, and there are no signs of a recession yet. But slower growth is in the cards.

Although the slowing may seem to link to supply chain problems, something more fundamental is also happening. Any snapback from an artificially constrained situation, as the pandemic was, will lose momentum and slow once it recovers the ground lost to those constraints.

Probably the most telling figures come from the Commerce Department’s tally of retail sales. It’s true that January appeared to be strong. Sales rose by 3.8 percent over December 2021. But that gain barely reversed the November 2021 decline. Over the two-month period, retail sales showed almost no net growth.

The 12-month figures still look strong, but that was entirely because of fast growth this past spring and summer. Nor is the recent sluggishness rooted in supply chain interruptions. Automobiles, where supply problems are particularly acute, had a relatively strong two-month sales performance. The evidence of slowdown is more general.

Of course, month-to-month figures can give false signals, especially around the holidays. However, this 46 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

kind of statistical distortion is less of a problem when it comes to tracking industrial production, as the Federal Reserve does. In that area, January did show a smart uptick of 1.4 percent from December 2021, but these figures have been bouncing up and down for months, showing only a relatively modest gain on net. The same slowing picture is evident in the record of new business formation.

The broad picture should create confidence that the economic recovery will continue, albeit at a slowed pace, well into the second half of this year and very probably beyond.

In January, nationwide applications to form new businesses totaled roughly 430,000, up slightly from the December 2021 level, but still not enough to recapture the level set in November 2021. The net decline was even more pronounced in applications to form businesses that plan to hire workers.

Some regions of the country fared better than others, but the lack of strong progress was universal. Were it just a matter of a stall over a couple of months, the softness could be dismissed as an anomaly, but the recent behavior extends into a declining trend with a duration of several months.

Not surprisingly, the worst numbers on applications to start a business came during the lockdowns and quarantines of the spring of 2020.

During that time, only about 250,000 people sought to start a new business.

As these restrictions were lifted in the summer of 2020, new business applications soared to roughly 550,000.

Clearly people saw opportunities in

the failures imposed by the lockdowns and quarantines.

This initial surge then tailed off quickly. Applications picked up again as more people became vaccinated against COVID-19 and people felt more confident that the nation wouldn’t again suffer lockdowns and quarantines. Since the mid-year 2021 high of 500,000, however, reports on these applications have confirmed the picture of slowing recovery momentum, edging down on balance each month.

What’s perhaps more telling is that this gradual slowing appears in every major industry group tracked by the Census Bureau.

It would go too far to describe this moderation as a signal of economic decline. On the contrary, applications for new business formation remain at more than the 300,000 averaged just before the pandemic began. Clearly some catching up is still going on. But as is the case with retail sales, industrial production, hiring, and other measures of economic activity, the once breakneck pace of new business formation is slowing, and war-induced uncertainties can only exacerbate this trend.

The broad picture should create confidence that the economic recovery will continue, albeit at a slowed pace, well into the second half of this year and very probably beyond. After that, continued growth will depend less on the catch-up that has driven the recovery thus far and more on underlying fundamentals. Of course, the economy has always had a growth bias, and that will continue.

These longer-term fundamentals nonetheless lie under the cloud of war and inflation and whatever policies go into place to deal with one and contain the other. However, those potential effects are still a ways away. For the time being, the dominant factor is the continuing but slower post-pandemic recovery.

ANDREW MORAN has been writing about business, economics, and finance for more than a decade. He is the author of "The War on Cash."

Andrew Moran

Wind Power Hit by Supply Woes Can America’s wind industry stage a rebound in the coming years?

WILLIAM EDWARDS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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he united states added about 20 percent less wind power capacity in 2021 than a year earlier, according to a new analysis from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

According to the report, wind developers installed 12.9 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity last year, down from the record 16 GW of wind capacity that was developed in 2020.

Nearly one-third of the new wind projects came online in the fourth quarter. That includes about 80 megawatts in Texas, where renewable energy accounts for about onefifth of its power. NextEra Energy’s Texas-based White Mesa Wind Energy Center was the largest wind power plant project completed in the October-to-December period in the country.

Researchers noted that 11.4 GW of solar, wind, and battery storage projects had to be postponed because of supply chain challenges, logistics issues, and global trade barriers.

Despite the tough hurdles, S&P anticipated in the report that the U.S. wind industry would rebound in coming years, citing the country’s wind project pipeline of 60.7 gigawatts over the next four years.

In addition, President Joe Biden and his administration pledged to create 30 GW of offshore wind energy in the next decade.

“For 2022, there is a 20.1-GW development pipeline. Of that capacity, nearly 1.7 GW, or 8%, is in advanced development and almost 6.8 GW, or 34%, is under construction,” the report stated.

Study authors also note that Wyoming and Texas lead the nation with the most wind energy output.

The renewable energy sector is big business. Rising corporate and consumer demand for green energy, fa-

Renewables are dependent on solar and wind conditions that can fluctuate throughout the day, making it difficult to satisfy electricity demand. vorable public policy proposals, and innovation in the sector are some of the factors for investors pouring billions of dollars into the industry.

The global wind turbine market is forecast to generate $98.4 billion by 2030, a recent Allied Market Research report found.

Companies are bidding billions in offshore wind power auctions, while some European countries are accelerating their renewable installations in response to the Ukraine–Russia military conflict.

But is wind a reliable source of energy?

In 2021, wind provided the UK with 7 to 11 percent of the country’s energy, down from 25 percent the previous year. The issue had been a lack of wind, as calm weather was the norm in Britain heading into the winter season, resulting in higher utility costs for households.

The country is not generating enough renewable production, and this, energy experts argue, contributed to the European energy crisis this winter. Renewables are dependent on solar and wind conditions that can fluctuate throughout the day, making it difficult to satisfy electricity demand. Industry observers purport that the solution is that complex electricity systems need to coalesce fossil fuels and renewables so that a source like natural gas could offset any loss from wind power.

In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri slammed into Texas and triggered widespread blackouts, surprising the energy-rich state. The weather event was so severe that wind turbines were frozen, igniting a debate over the efficacy of renewables.

Another common problem in the green energy industry is that broken-down wind turbine blades can’t be recycled. As a result, they’re discarded at landfills, leading critics to question the sustainable nature of wind power generation.

Biden, however, has called for a massive expansion of offshore wind power to fully decarbonize the power sector by 2035. As part of his broader Build Back Better agenda, the administration aims to develop new wind farms on U.S. coastlines that could power more than 10 million homes.

“The Interior Department is laying out an ambitious road map as we advance the administration’s plans to confront climate change, create good-paying jobs, and accelerate the nation’s transition to a cleaner energy future,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said at a wind power conference in October. “We have big goals to achieve a clean energy economy, and Interior is meeting the moment.”

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 47

DANIEL LACALLE is chief economist at hedge fund Tressis and author of “Freedom or Equality,” “Escape from the Central Bank Trap,” and “Life in the Financial Markets.”

Daniel Lacalle

The SWIFT Ban

Russian banks may bypass the SWIFT system and use alternatives

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48 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

If other countries find that there’s a valid alternative to SWIFT, they might feel compelled to strengthen ties with China. banks. Being banned from SWIFT doesn’t make these claims disappear, but if Russian banks fall into a de-capitalization process, the risk of defaults multiplies.

Without SWIFT, Russian banks and the central bank are effectively blocked from operating on a global scale, which means an added risk of a domino of defaults from issuers and the impossibility to conduct the most basic international operations.

However, Russian banks may bypass the SWIFT system and use other alternatives, mainly through a parallel system in China called CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System), which facilitates transactions in yuan. According to CIPS, at least 25 Russian banks conduct yuan transactions through the system.

Russian banks and the central bank may moderate the financial blow using alternative systems, but the negative impact can’t be underestimated.

There may be a backlash for the United States as well. If other countries find that there’s a valid alternative to SWIFT, they might feel compelled to strengthen ties with China.

Banning Russian banks from SWIFT may cripple many Latin American and Middle East economies that have deep financial connections with Russia, but there’s a risk for the United States that the CIPS alternative, which is marginal at best today, will grow rapidly.

The United States and Europe can’t fully ban SWIFT due to the importance of Russian oil, gas, metals, and wheat exports, and this may create numerous challenges that significantly limit the so-called “nuclear option.” The Russian central bank’s large gold reserves are also a differentiating factor compared to other economies.

There’s no doubt the SWIFT ban is probably the most severe of financial sanctions possible and that there are no easy alternatives, but as time passes, it’s also clear that the widespread negative consequences of the Ukraine war will likely last for many years.

Will this measure accelerate a global financial shift toward China? Probably not in the short term, given the relatively modest use of the yuan compared to the importance of China in the global economy, but the ramifications of this measure in the global financial world are yet to be fully understood.

A global financial transaction system remains as the undisputed leader only if it’s truly global and far-reaching. The negative impact for Russia is unquestionable, but the long-term implications of this measure have yet to be seen.

ROLAND SCHLAGER/APA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

wift is the global financial system that allows immediate and secure transfers of money across borders.

It’s the web that verifies all financial transactions, linking 11,000 banks and institutions in more than 200 countries.

Using SWIFT ensures that transactions happen in seconds in a secure way. Around 1 percent of those messages involve Russian payments, according to the BBC. As part of the West’s sanctions against Russia, some of its banks have been banned from the SWIFT system. Additionally, the United States and the European Union have announced restrictions on the Russian central bank that block access to more than $600 billion in reserves. The Bank of Russia reports that only 22 percent of its international reserves are in U.S. dollars, while gold accounts for 23 percent.

On the one hand, the move aims to block all options of the central bank to defend its currency from plummeting even more against the U.S. dollar or the euro. In recent years, the Russian central bank has been reducing its exposure to U.S. Treasurys and shifting from U.S. dollar reserves to the euro and the yuan, as well as gold. Access to those reserves is more difficult now, and in the case of the euro and yen, probably close to impossible.

For Russian banks, the ban from the SWIFT system increases the risk of a bank run as citizens fear the loss of their deposits and a collapse in daily operations, even if they start to use alternatives.

However, we can’t forget there’s an important impact on European banks as well. According to JPMorgan, European banks have up to $80 billion in claims with Russian

Fan Yu

FAN YU is an expert in finance and economics and has contributed analyses on China’s economy since 2015.

China’s Imperiled Local Governments Property market slump has hit city revenues

GETTY IMAGES

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any of china’s local authorities are staring down a severe fiscal challenge this year.

The typically robust real estate sector has instead been a big disappointment. The country’s ongoing property market slump has hit local government revenues. We’ve previously pointed out land sale revenues as being a major component of local budgets, and China’s contemplated rollout of personal real estate taxes is unlikely to give municipalities a major windfall.

China’s macroeconomic environment has become a huge drag. The central government in Beijing is looking to implement more tax cuts to offset slowing economic growth and promote small business growth. This is another drain on local government resources, but it’s necessary, given that China’s COVID-19 restrictions continue to hold back economic activity across the nation. On top of that, the already high debt burden of many municipalities will prevent them from accessing debt financing.

“The country will intensify tax-deduction efforts and launch targeted support measures,” a February report by state-run media outlet Xinhua reads.

The report claims that the measure will increase innovation and spur growth in private enterprises. On the other hand, more than a third of Chinese provinces are forecasting that the increase in expenditures will exceed the rise in revenues this year.

All of this means that the fiscal health of China’s local governments will pose a significant risk to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) desire for stability heading into this fall’s key National Congress.

Beijing will need to step up its support to regional governments

All of this means that the fiscal health of China’s local governments will pose a significant risk to the CCP’s desire for stability heading into this fall’s key National Congress. in 2022. Liu Kun, China’s finance minister, said in early February that “transfer payments to regional governments will increase by a large margin” in 2022. For context, in 2021, Beijing gave out more than 8 trillion yuan ($1.2 trillion) in transfers to regional governments.

Beijing has also been stepping up support for municipalities having trouble paying their retirees. It’s a big obligation that will deepen, given China’s rapidly aging population and relatively low birth rates.

Funding pensions isn’t a new problem for Chinese municipalities, but it’s getting worse. Beijing has been working to funnel several provincial pension plans into a national one, so that funds from wealthier regions can be routed to subsidize poorer regions.

In 2018, an adjustment fund for pension funds was created by Beijing

to redistribute funding to cover such shortfalls, and the CCP is looking to expand this program further.

Which areas are scheduled to take in transfer payments? The northeastern industrial provinces such as Heilongjiang, and poorer, more rural northwestern provinces such as Gansu are prime candidates.

The indebtedness of local governments has also been a major risk.

In January, Beijing allowed Guizhou, a relatively poor and mountainous province in China’s southwest, to delay interest repayments and enter into restructuring for existing debts.

The CCP is stepping up regulatory oversight into so-called local government funding vehicles (LGFV), which are off-balance-sheet entities used to raise financing for local governments, often for infrastructure projects.

These vehicles were often used to fund projects for political achievements rather than on their economic merits. In 2017, Beijing’s national auditors found that some municipalities and officials went ahead with LGFV-funded projects without the means or intention to repay the debt.

Who are the lenders to such vehicles? China’s commercial banks are the biggest cohort, which means municipalities’ financial difficulties are also threatening the health of the Chinese banking sector.

Being off-balance-sheet, the true magnitude of LGFV financing is often unknown. South China Morning Post estimates that, as of Dec. 31, 2021, more than 3,000 LGFV entities are outstanding. In terms of outstanding balances owed, estimates range from 20 percent to up to 44 percent of China’s gross domestic product—the equivalent of 45 trillion yuan, or more than $7 trillion.

Those are truly shocking figures, suggesting that China’s local government debt woes are just the beginning.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 49

JEFF MINICK lives and writes in Front Royal, Va. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.”

Jeff Minick

Lessons From a Refrigerator Develop a plan before you dive into a project

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usual ly wear gl asses only when reading or typing, but on this particular day, I’d forgotten to leave them at the desk, opened the refrigerator for some lunch fixings, and was appalled.

I was already aware of the bigger blotches and stains, and kept telling myself the fridge needed cleaning.

But the specs brought to life all the crumbs, the smaller smears, splatters, and spots, and those sticky blemishes where the grandkids had spilled a little juice or I’d gotten too enthusiastic pulling out an open bottle of chardonnay.

The time had come to clean this pit that was passing for a fridge, but I had a problem.

This unkempt apparatus belonged to my daughter—I live here alone while keeping an eye on her house— and I had no idea how to turn the thing off without shutting down the freezer compartment as well.

Time for a plan.

After considering the matter, I realized I could clean parts of this beast over a period of days. And so I began. I removed and threw away all the outdated bottles of spices and salad dressing. Then I combined the remaining foodstuffs on a couple of shelves and removed three empty shelves for washing. These shelves didn’t fit in the sink, so I scrubbed them on the kitchen’s island table.

They dried overnight, and it was time to repeat the process with more shelves and the crisper compartments. Once that mission was accomplished, I tackled the six miniature shelves in the doors. I finished up by washing down the outside surfaces.

And voila! By day three, that refrigerator looked brand-new. Now I smile every time I pay it a visit.

After thinking over this experience, 50 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

The time had come to clean this pit that was passing for a fridge, but I had a problem.

I realize this refrigerator had become a teacher reminding me of things I sometimes forget.

First, planning pays off. How many of us jump into a project, big or small, without first thinking, “Is there a better way?” Dale Carnegie once said, “An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.”

I need to affix that wise observation to the door of the refrigerator.

Next, the refrigerator taught me the importance of breaking down a task. By working my way methodically through those shelves and food goods, I learned anew the lesson of the incremental approach. Long ago, when some family members and I were working to turn a dilapidated old tourist home into a refurbished bedand-breakfast, I’d frequently tell the others to ignore the mess and focus on the project at hand.

One step at a time, that was the idea.

Then there’s patience. Though I’ve become better friends with patience as I’ve aged, that’s not a character trait most associate with me. I wanted that refrigerator cleaned, and now, but then realized, What’s the rush?

Who cared whether I took an hour or a week to clean that icebox? As a kid, I’d read Aesop’s tortoise and hare fable and its moral, “Slow and steady wins the race.” For many years, I often forgot that old adage, but that machine provided an excellent reminder.

Finally, those glittering glass shelves and shining interior walls give me, as I said earlier, pleasure every time I see them. Not to pat myself on the back, but this was a job well-done that has left me with an afterglow of satisfaction. Spring-cleaning a closet, washing the car after a winter of slush and road salt, taking a rake and ridding the yard of leaves: When we finish such tasks and look at what we’ve done, we often find ourselves happily basking in the results.

Oh wait, there’s one more lesson.

I should wear glasses only when reading, otherwise I’ll be cleaning this place eight hours a day, five days a week.

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Visit THEEPOCHTIMES.COM I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 51

Nation Profile

THOUGHT LEADERS

Big Brother Is Getting More Invasive Chinese Communist Party rolls out digital currency that will track every purchase

Erik Bethel, former U.S. representative to the World Bank.

T

his is a surveillance tool, and it’s disguised as a payment mechanism,” Erik Bethel said of the Chinese regime’s new digital currency.

In this episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek and Bethel, a global finance analyst, discuss the situation in China, and the threat of the digital yuan to the U.S. economy and to the free world.

JAN JEKIELEK: Erik,

you’re no stranger to China.

You lived there doing finance work.

ERIK BETHEL: After I

52 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

OTABIUS WILLIAMS/THE EPOCH TIMES

joined a private equity fund in China, my wife and I spent seven years living in Shanghai. My three kids were born there. We learned a great deal about Chinese culture, and I grew very fond of the Chinese people.

I’m not as fond of the

Nation Profile

Chinese Communist Party.

MR . JEKIELEK: Let’s talk

about this Chinese digital yuan.

MR . BETHEL: Let’s first de-

fine digital currency. A central bank digital currency, which is what we’re talking about here, isn’t a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. It’s a legal obligation of a central bank. It’s legal tender, but in digital form.

It takes a physical dollar bill and changes it to its digital equivalent. Just like the dollar, it’s an IOU of the central bank.

This technology is inevitable. Someday, we’re going to look back on coins and bills as museum pieces.

Now, back to China.

During the Olympics, [the regime launched] their digital currency. This is a surveillance tool, and it’s disguised as a payment mechanism. It’s going to allow the People’s Bank of China to peer into everyone’s purchasing history.

So what happens if you’re an ethnic or religious minority in China? What if you purchase a Bible? There are millions of Chinese Christians, for example, and there are a lot of ways the Chinese government could use this as an instrument of surveillance, tying it to their social credit score and keeping an authoritarian regime alive forever.

And that’s very frightening.

MR . JEKIELEK: A few peo-

ple may be unfamiliar with China’s social credit system.

Could you explain that?

MR . BETHEL: Imagine

everything in your life, whether it’s jaywalking or paying your taxes on time, is processed, and you’re given a rating. Millions of Chinese over the past several years have been denied travel to visit their relatives because their social credit scores were low.

Now, imagine if you’re a dissident. For all intents and purposes, you don’t exist. That’s the result of the social credit score. Tag on the money element, and you can see how worrisome it could be for people.

Now, imagine the digital Chinese currency being exported to authoritarian regimes around the world.

The Maduro regime in Venezuela, for example, would relish having a digital currency where their government could peer into what the opposition is doing.

To make matters worse, right now, 80 percent of foreign exchange transactions are denominated in U.S. dollars. Venezuela’s oil is sold in dollars. Zambia’s copper is sold in dollars, Saudi Arabian oil is sold in dollars.

Now, what if the Chinese technology for digital currencies could be replicated in Venezuela? What if this technology were seamless such that Venezuela could sell its oil and denominate it in digital Chinese renminbi? It’s not going to happen immediately, but what if it happens in 5 to 10 years? It could be very problematic from an American national security perspective. And only a few people are thinking about that right now.

China has stated that

“Digital currency can be good for humanity and for me, but what if the government is telling me what I should or shouldn’t do with my own life?” privacy will be embedded in its digital currency.

Well, China also said that it wouldn’t interfere in Hong Kong’s domestic issues, that it wouldn’t build islands or militarize the South China Sea. As for ongoing investments in China, at the end of the day, capital untethered from a moral compass is immoral. It just goes wherever there’s money to be made.

So, do we consciously forget there’s human organ harvesting in Xinjiang? Or do we just want to make money in China and don’t really care?

Other people morally equivocate. They say, “We work with other countries that are doing equally bad things.” But I don’t think anything rises to the level of a million people in detention centers, forced organ harvesting, and the sterilization and erasure of an entire ethnic group. I don’t think people realize what’s going on.

What might prevent these kinds of technologies from being deployed in Western society?

MR . JEKIELEK: This is a

possible to create some kind of a central bank digital currency that would

natural place to look back to the Chinese digital yuan.

MR . BETHEL: Digital

currencies could be a tremendous asset to society.

You can eliminate to a great degree corruption, money laundering, and criminal activity. You can also do direct cash transfers to citizens.

But here’s a concern.

Imagine a world where my transactions were open to the government, which is keeping tabs on how much I’m spending on ice cream sundaes or wine or gas for my car.

Digital currency can be good for humanity and for me, but what if the government is telling me what I should or shouldn’t do with my own life? Whether that concern turns out to be real or imagined, time will tell. But citizens need to think carefully about how a digital currency will affect their lives.

MR . JEKIELEK: Is it even

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 53

Nation Profile

“[The digital yuan] is a surveillance tool, and it’s disguised as a payment mechanism.”

settle them in digital yuan.”

This will happen around the world, and U.S. policymakers need to pay attention.

MR . JEKIELEK: What

are other implications of a digital yuan?

MR . BETHEL: Let’s assume

maintain privacy and anonymity?

coerce countries to adopt the digital yuan.

MR . BETHEL: The short

MR . BETHEL: Here’s an ex-

answer is yes. An intelligent future digital dollar project could include a spectrum where you’re fully private and fully anonymous.

Future policymakers might consider that within a band of, let’s say, zero to $10,000, whatever you do in your digital wallet is private.

From $10,000 to whatever, it’s pseudo-anonymous.

And then from that point on, it’s open for the government to look at. These things can be done.

ample. Africa has received enormous amounts of money from China in the form of debt, so much debt that some countries will never be able to pay it off. They’ve taken loan after loan from China, and now they can’t pay their teachers and police officers because they have to pay off the Chinese.

It’s not inconceivable that China might say, “Look, we’ll shave off a couple billion dollars from what you owe us if you let us set up your digital Zambian dollar.

And you don’t have to settle your copper exports in U.S. dollars anymore. You can

MR . JEKIELEK: Let’s go

back to the Chinese regime.

It has all sorts of ways to

that in three years, you have 25 nations using the Chinese digital currency. If these countries are exporters of commodities and the dollar is no longer used for these exports, what does that mean for the reserve currency status of the dollar? How do we afford our current trade deficits?

MR . JEKIELEK: What do

you see as the way for the United States and other free societies to fend off the digital yuan?

MR . BETHEL: We should

get together with countries that believe in freedom and privacy and create a set of standards that promote that freedom and privacy.

We should also educate

ourselves. We can’t stick our head in the sand and say, “We’re the United States, and we have the dollar. All this other stuff is nonsense.” Let’s educate ourselves, particularly our policymakers, on what’s happening.

And we shouldn’t compete with a Chinese digital renminbi by becoming more like China. People are going to say, “If the digital dollar and the Chinese e-yuan are both surveillance tools, what’s the difference?”

We should compete on the grounds of privacy, security, and transaction speed. If we try and mimic China, we lose.

We might even opensource some of that technology. Open source means putting some of the code out there for everyone to see, so that we can dispel any notion that we’re using this as a surveillance tool.

Trust underpins everything we’ve been discussing. Whether it’s trust in our institutions, media, social media, or big tech, it’s a travesty that over the years, the erosion of trust has fallen so low. I hope that as we develop a digital currency, we imbue it with a value system that’s transparent and that currencies are used for good and not for evil.

Signage for the Chinese digital currency, seen near a coffee shop in the New Actuation Fintech Center in Beijing on Feb. 17.

54 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

JADE GAO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

T R AV E L • F O O D • L U X U R Y L I V I N G

Unwind

No.10

Pat Martin is hard at work perfecting the edible art of whole hog barbecue, a rare regional specialty.

PHOTO BY ANDREW THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHY

Keeper of the Flame SOMETIMES THE BEST views are found far from the beaten path, as proven by this exploration of the magnificent wilderness of Canada’s Nimmo Bay. 58

66

AS KIDS, WE COULDN’T WAIT to be done with school, but as adults, it can make sense to go back to achieve a personal goal or to advance our career. 60

THE VEHICLES OF CHOICE of corporate tycoons, professional athletes, and rockstars, supercars are rarely seen, extremely refined, and outrageously expensive. 63

INSIDE I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 55

A Majestic California Ranch Featuring its own vineyard and a splendid hacienda-style main house, this ranch is a short drive from Malibu

By Phil Butler

The dream of renowned real estate developer George Rosenthal, this Malibu hills estate mirrors the Mexican haciendas he admired.

Here, two of the ranch’s swimming pools overlook the avocado orchard.

56 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

Lifestyle Real Estate

T

COURTESY OF SIMON BERLYN PHOTOGRAPHY/JADE MILLS

ucked in the malibu hills, the 180-acre Rosenthal Ranch is a luxurious paradise that’s a world apart. Located just five minutes from the famous Malibu beaches, this estate is a spectacular, secure, and private oasis of tranquility surrounded by vineyards and the Santa Monica Mountains.

On the market for $38 million, the 180-acre estate surrounds a residential compound comprising 12,000 square feet of living space spread over the main hacienda, three guest homes, and staff quarters. For decades the home of renowned real estate developer George Rosenthal, the property reflects his love of Mexican architecture and wine country. The estate has more than 10,000 vines supporting Rosenthal’s eponymous wine label. There’s room for an additional 10,000 vines or more orchards as well.

Sitting at the terminus of a 1,000-foot-long oak-lined private lane, the main hacienda and guest houses embrace a fabulous courtyard.

Inside the hacienda, the exquisite details of the home unfold underneath high wood-beamed ceilings, wonderful columns, fireplaces, and other unique features. Stunning pink walls are

accentuated by hand-carved wooden doors, ornate tiles, and fine carpets. The compound overall sports eight lavish bedrooms spread out over distinctive areas. The main hacienda has living rooms, a professional kitchen, a butler’s pantry, a gym, and a sunroom, many with French doors opening onto fabulous patios.

There are two guest cottages facing the inner courtyard, one with its own swimming pool.

Outside, manicured gardens and idyllic courtyards blend into vibrant vineyards, a mature oak forest, and a vast avocado orchard of more than 600 trees. Adjacent to the hacienda, a wonderful cascading pool is surrounded by a patio with a fireplace that’s perfect for entertaining. From there, multiple nature paths wind through the estate past woods and a pond, leading to a hiking trail through the mountains. The beautiful stables have been converted into a 2,545-squarefoot wine tasting room with a banquet area. This unique property also features a four-car garage and extensive wine storage facilities.

Phil Butler is a publisher, editor, author, and analyst who is a widely cited expert on subjects ranging from digital and social media to travel technology.

ROSENTHAL RANCH MALIBU, CALIFORNIA $38 MILLION • 8 BEDROOMS • 8 FULL BATHS • 12,000 SQUARE FEET • 180 ACRES KEY FEATURES • UNIQUE RANCH DESIGN • FAMOUS VINEYARDS • BREATHTAKING NATURE • IDEAL LOCATION AND PRIVACY AGENT JADE MILLS ESTATES STEPHANIE ZEBIK, MANAGING DIRECTOR 310-285-7508

Above, one of the several dining rooms opens directly onto a marvelous patio and the hacienda’s lush lawns.

One of the hacienda’s living rooms is illuminated by ambient light from a faceted skylight from above, as well as expansive French doors and windows.

Inspired by the wonderful rural haciendas in the countryside surrounding Mexico City, this estate is a transportive enclave of serenity. The term “showplace” is apt, and the owner's love of sharing it with guests is apparent.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 57

Travel British Columbia

The nine cabins at Nimmo Bay Wilderness Resort are often booked well in advance.

Exploring Nimmo Bay Deep wilderness luxury on Canada’s West Coast

By Tim Johnson

L

ike the revelation of a mystery, the fog lifts once we roll away from British Columbia’s Sullivan Bay. With the fog too thick to land right next to the lodge, the pilot put her down further away, the amphibious plane’s big pontoon’s skimming evenly across a saltwater inlet, then taxiing, with a little boatlike sway, to a little cluster of buildings. A shop, café, fuel station, and a few private residences ring a harbor so glassy-calm that their façades are reflected back in it, mirror-perfect.

The pilot makes a call from the coffee shop, and soon enough we’re skimming again, this time in the Raven, the fastest boat in the fleet at Nimmo Bay. With the last wisps of murk now far behind us, we roll up to an unlikely oasis, a strange, wonderful bit of luxury deep in the forest. Passing a series of postcard-perfect

58 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

cabins strung along a stretch of wild Pacific coast, we walk up the dock, are greeted by a friendly dog, then seat ourselves in overstuffed chairs. The Lumineers spin on a record player somewhere nearby. Every window is like a work of art, revealing its own scene of beauty.

I’m at Nimmo Bay Wilderness Resort, in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest. With just nine cabins located both in the forest and the intertidal zone, it’s connected by docks and wooden walkways. Both luxurious and stylish, it’s an uber-comfortable place from which to launch wild adventures.

But first I take a tour of the place with Neepa, the resident mutt, tagging along. The two-bedroom cabins are separated from the main lodge by a waterfall, which provides both fresh water and hydroelectricity to guests and staff. Walking past a series of helipads and over a bridge that traverses a fresh little stream, I settle into

BRITISH COLUMBIA

NIMMO BAY

VICTORIA

Nimmo Bay is located in the southern Great Bear Rainforest.

Travel British Columbia

my waterfront cabin. It’s set on a floating dock, and I’m told it will rise and fall with the tide.

But I only have a moment to pause and sit on a rocking chair on the cabin’s broad front porch, which opens up to ocean and mountains. Because soon I’m back on the Raven, winding through a series of small inlets.

Leaving the British Columbia mainland behind—the Alaskan panhandle way to the north, the city of Vancouver eventually to our south—we roar at 30 knots, across Queen Charlotte Strait, in search of humpback whales.

Our captain, a sunny young woman named Jen, checks an online tracking system, then explores a series of spots—Malcolm Island, Swanson Island—in search of marine mammals. Mindful of the seas, we keep our eyes on the skies, too.

“The local First Nation called seagulls ‘birds of abundance,’” she said, noting that they would simply follow them to where whales were feeding.

In Blackfish Sound, just off Vancouver Island, near the famed Broughton Archipelago Marine Provincial Park, we find the whales—incredibly, some 50 of them, surrounding us. Even Captain Jen and our onboard guide, Karlie, are amazed at the sight, these humpbacks surfacing to lunge feed in every direction, while a thick canopy of birds circles above. In awe, we watch as they swim, spout, and then dive deep, flukes waving high as they leave us behind.

The next day, it’s time for bears. Rolling out

with the same captain-guide pairing, they take us into the dark waters of Mackenzie Sound in search of grizzlies and black bears. As we all scan the shorelines for life, Captain Jen notes that this water is home to a number of marine mammals, including dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, and, occasionally, orca. She adds that we’re looking for areas near the water filled with rocks, which bears like to turn over, looking for mussels and crab.

“They spend a lot of time in the intertidal zone,” she says, which presents these beasts with a sort of wild supermarket of food options every day.

Soon enough we spot one, a big male bear about 5 years old, flipping rocks, browsing for breakfast. Our boat falls silent, and we approach, engine low, trying to get close without disturbing his meal. After a few minutes of searching, he gives up, sauntering back into the nearby woods, gone the second he passes from the rocky shore into the green.

Heading back, we arrive back at the lodge famished, and sit down inside—snug, warm, comfortable—to a huge platter of seafood, primarily super-fresh crab, red and ready to go, as well as a healthy mess of mussels. Like that bear earlier in the morning, we dig into it, hungrily scooping out the mussels and cracking the crab.

The floatplane is waiting, pulled up to the dock and primed to take us back to civilization.

But for the moment, right now, another album spinning on the record player, the sun shining, the rainforest all around, and a hearty feast before us, I can’t quite imagine leaving—at least not until the last leg is gone from the platter.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF NIMMO BAY WILDERNESS RESORT

Tim Johnson is based in Toronto. He has visited 140 countries across all seven continents.

The surrounding wilderness is home to dolphins, porpoises, sea lions, and orca.

The Great Bear Rainforest includes

50,000

SQUARE MILES of coastal wilderness.

If You Go Where to Stay: A member of National Geographic Unique Lodges of the World and the Magnificent 7 Luxury Wilderness Lodges of Canada, Nimmo Bay Resort is accessible only by boat, helicopter, or floatplane. Its nine luxury cabins are often booked well in advance—months, even years—during peak season.

Getting There in Style: VIH Executjet provides an exclusive, private experience aboard its fleet of helicopters, jets, and planes, including the Cessna Caravan Amphibian that shuttles guests from Victoria Harbor up to Nimmo Bay.

Cozy, modern cabins at Nimmo Bay Wilderness Resort offer a pampering setting for those looking to get away and recharge.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 59

GOING BACK TO SCHOOL

Higher Ed. Acquiring knowledge never stops, but going back to school has never been easier

By Bill Lindsey

60 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

Lifestyle Going Back to School Juggling personal, professional, and school commitments is difficult, but the feeling of accomplishment upon graduation makes it all worthwhile.

LEFT PAGE: FRAY BEKELE/UNSPLASH; THIS PAGE: VASILY KOLODA/UNSPLASH

T

RADITIONALLY, OUR ACADEMIC

adventures end when we graduate from high school or college.

We then move on to other phases of life such as starting a career, getting married, and having children. But sometimes there’s either an urge or a need to further our education, which raises questions such as, “Am I too old to go back to school?” or “I want to start a new career, so how do I find a school near me?”

First, there’s no such thing as being too old to go back to school, nor is there a bad reason to do so.

There’s no shortage of educational opportunities, with options ranging from degrees to vocational training. Subject to where you live, there may be schools you can attend in person, but many schools and training centers offer online classes. Your schedule becomes less of an issue when attending an online school, where, other than scheduled teleconferencing classes or meetings, you can complete assignments when it best suits your schedule.

The next question to be answered is, why do you want to go back to school? It may be to finish a degree that was interrupted by work or having children. It could also be to advance at work: Many employers encourage staff to either attend industry-specific courses or work toward a degree.

That brings us to the next question: If you decide to go back to college, will it be to earn an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, or a post-grad master’s or doctoral degree? All are readily available both at in-person and online schools.

How should you choose a school or program?

If you live near a school or university, attending in-person classes may be an option, as long as the class schedule fits your schedule. Some schools offer weekend and evening courses, and many schools offer online courses.

When carefully chosen in terms of the curriculum and accreditation, online courses are every bit as educational as in-person classes. Many prestigious universities offer remote learning, including Harvard, the University of California, Michigan State, and the University of Miami.

SOME EVEN OFFER FREE COURSES. Harvard currently has 600 courses that can be audited at no charge, or you can receive a verified certificate, for a small fee, in topics such as introduction to computer science, contract law, principles of bio-chemistry, and calculus.

The medical field is booming, making it an attractive option for those seeking to make a career change. In addition to traditional courses offered by universities, a growing number of specialized schools, such as DeVry University and Cambridge College of Healthcare and Technology, also offer associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in physical therapy, radiation technology, and various health care management areas. They also offer certificate programs in high-demand areas, such as medical billing, phlebotomy, and computer networking.

Such certificates typically require less prerequisite coursework to qualify.

The hands-on nature of these courses requires in-person attendance, but there are many

There’s no such thing as being too old to go back to school, nor is there a bad reason to do so.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 61

Lifestyle Going Back to School

LIFESTYLE

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

There is no such thing as too much education

Classes can be in the form of in-person lectures or via teleconferences. Both allow you to interact with the teacher and other students. schools with multiple campuses across the country, and several of the courses can be taken at local community colleges. One such unique specialty school is Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which specializes in aerospace engineering or aerospace physiology and other aviation-related programs.

SPECIALIZED PROGRAMS ARE offered at

62 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

1 Why Go Back?

It’s never too late to complete a degree, earn a new one, or learn a new skill or vocation— from radiation tech to aeronautical engineer.

2 What Do You Want to Learn?

Universities and specialized schools offer in-person and online educational opportunities across the full range of subject areas.

3 Does Accreditation Matter?

Be prepared to spend a lot of time in the library, either in person or remotely via the internet.

If you’re receiving employer reimbursement for the cost of a degree or a certificate, there may be accreditation requirements.

THIS PAGE FROM TOP: CLAY BANKS/UNSPLASH, TOMASZ BIDERMANN/SHUTTERSTOCK

some universities as well. The PGA Golf Management University Program, which is available at 18 universities nationwide, offers industry-specific management training, and the program claims a 100 percent employment placement rate for its graduates.

With automotive techs being highly paid and in high demand, several schools across the country, such as Universal Technical Institute, provide specialized training, with many offering placement assistance to graduates. The General Motors Automotive Service Educational Program helps place graduates of the twoyear program at GM dealerships. Similar programs with placement assistance are offered for marine and motorcycle techs.

While there are many options for continued education, regardless of whether you pursue an associate’s, bachelor’s, or post-grad degree or a certificate, the phrase “buyer beware” must be heeded, especially if you need to attend an accredited institution in order to meet employer-reimbursement standards or to use the course credit toward a degree from an accredited school. If you’re taking courses strictly to fulfill personal

desires, accreditation is less critical, but it does ensure some level of academic quality.

If your reason for going back to school isn’t financial, but rather to satisfy a personal desire to finally complete that English degree or to become a motorcycle tech to work on your personal collection, accreditation and other concerns become less important, and your options are greatly expanded.

Undertaking more education pays dividends beyond the skills taught, in terms of new relationships and a broader appreciation of previously unknown topics. Brigham Young perhaps said it best: “Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world’s work, and the power to appreciate life.”

Luxury Living Drive in the Fast Lane

FAST TIMES: A SAMPLING OF THE MOST EXOTIC SUPERCARS This collection of magnificent machines shows what can be done when the challenge is accepted to build the most technologically advanced yet luxurious cars.

By Bill Lindsey

A Practical Supercar!

Hybrid Perfection

PORSCHE 918

KOENIGSEGG GEMERA $1.7 MILLION

$845,000

While few can pronounce the name, all agree this four-seater redefines the term “rapid transit.” A limited run of 300 will be produced, they all go from zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds thanks to three electric motors producing 1,100-hp.

Powered by a 608-hp V8 and two electric motors producing 286 hp, this hybrid set a record by completing a lap of the Nürburgring track in under 7 minutes. It can be run on electric-only power for silent operation.

A Daily Driver Supercar

BUGATTI CHIRON SUPERSPORT

IMAGES COURTESY OF PORSCHE, MCLAREN, LAMBORGHINI, KOENIGSEGG, BUGATTI

$4.3 MILLION

Powered by a snarling 16-cylinder, 1,578-hp engine to a limited top speed of 273 mph, it is surprisingly pleasant to drive in regular traffic, although the ride is a bit bumpy in the very tight cockpit even in comfort mode. The elongated tail, retracting rear wing, and race-tuned suspension provide optimal high-speed handling.

The Other Italian Supercar

LAMBORGHINI HURRACAN STO $327,838

From the picturesque Italian town of Sant’Agata Bolognese comes this barely street-legal 630-hp, V-10 powered supercar. The somewhat menacing looks are offset by engineering that makes it very controllable at high speed.

Let the Sun Shine In

MCCLAREN 765 LT SPIDER $382,500

A retractable roof provides a convertible experience in 11 seconds, allowing you to enjoy the 755-hp V8 howl. Limited to 765 cars, all have a top speed of 205 mph, and will rocket from zero to 60 in 2.7 seconds.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 63

Epoch Booklist

RECOMMENDED READING CLASSICS

‘A Comedy of Errors’

By William Shakespeare

The Funny Side of Shakespeare Often, Shakespeare is remembered primarily, if not solely, for his serious works, such as “Macbeth” and “Hamlet.” But “A Comedy of Errors” is a play about two sets of identical twins who get switched.

Hilarious gaffes and dialogue make this slapstick at its best.

SIGNET CLASSIC, 2002, 256 PAGES

CLASSICS

‘The Bridal Wreath: Kristin Lavransdatter,’ Vol. 1

By Sigrid Undset

Medieval Norway Brought to Life Undset’s trilogy about the fictional Kristin Lavransdatter won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.

Readers who join Kristin in “The Bridal Wreath”

This week’s selections offer readers a hilarious tale of mistaken identity, and an award-winning volume of history detailing the horrors of World War I.

and then follow her as a troubled wife and mother through the next two books may feel as if they’ve been snatched up and transported to the 14th century. Undset brings that age and its people alive, along with their religious fervor, their passions, and their many struggles in life. A brilliant recreation of the past that speaks to our present day.

VINTAGE, 1987, 288 PAGES

HISTORY

‘The Guns of August’

By Barbara Tuchman

A Lesson in War & Geopolitics When President John F. Kennedy Jr. was faced with the Cuban missile crisis, he recalled Tuchman’s book, which had been released that year, and the ramifications that come with hasty decisions and actions. The work, about the opening month of World War I, provides insight into the plans of military leaders and the hubris that followed, the suffering and death of soldiers, and the world caught up in the war’s horrors. Tuchman won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for the book.

MACMILLAN, 1962, 511 PAGES

64 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

Are there books you’d recommend?

We’d love to hear from you. Let us know at features@epochtimes.com

‘The Founders Recipe’

By Dr. Joe Wolverton and Addison Cluff

Who Influenced the Founders?

Discover the most influential voices on America’s most influential people, our Founders.

“The Founders Recipe” breaks down in scholastic form who the Founders quoted the most and why they referenced their work. There is also ample space in the book for notetaking. In a time when civics has been pushed to the wayside, this is a perfect book for middle school and high school kids, as well as a prime source for home-schoolers.

TEACHER OF LIBERTY, 2020, 330 PAGES

FICTION

‘The Bucharest Dossier’

By William Maz

Spy in the Christmas Revolution Set in Romania in December 1989,

Maz’s debut novel “The Bucharest Dossier” takes his readers into the fray of the Christmas Revolution with exceptional detail, memorable characters, and a wonderful and complex plot steeped in Cold War history.

Maz has added a gem to the spy novel genre.

A smart and heartfelt read.

OCEANVIEW, 2022, 386 PAGES

FOR KIDS

‘A Seed is Sleepy’

By Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long

The World of Seeds With intricately detailed watercolor illustrations and contemplative, descriptive verse, this book makes for a fun and educational look at the world of seeds. A delight for the curious child’s mind and a perfect read for springtime.

‘Just Maria’

By Jay Hardwig

CHRONICLE BOOKS, 2014, 40 PAGES

A Pre-Teen Heroine We Can All Enjoy Maria Romer is a blind 12-year-old with a sharp sense of humor and a strong desire to be part of the in-crowd in middle school. Her friend JJ keeps getting her into ridiculous situations and is driving her crazy. This humorous novel teaches lessons in friendship and courage, and also educates readers on what life can be like for the blind. Hardwig has more than 20 years of experience working with the visually impaired, and those credentials plus his acute sense of humor make this book a delightful read for all ages.

FITZROY BOOKS, 2022, 140 PAGES

‘Ben and Me’

By Robert Lawson

Ben Franklin and His Marvelous Mouse This tale introduces young readers to Benjamin Franklin. Amos, the mouse Franklin befriends, shares stories about the Founding Father swimming, printing his newspaper, and studying electricity, as well as his role in the American Revolution.

PAW PRINTS, 2008, 114 PAGES

Ian Kane is a U.S. Army veteran, filmmaker, and author.

He enjoys the great outdoors and volunteering.

MOVIE REVIEWS

Epoch Watchlist

This week, we look at a moving documentary about a Holocaust survivor, as well as a Western showcasing people who must unify to survive.

NEW RELEASE

INDIE PICK

‘Bagdad Cafe’

(1988)

‘I Am Here ’(2022 ) This insightful documentary reflects on the life of 98-year-old Ella Blumenthal, a World War II Holocaust survivor. It deftly interweaves many of the South African’s challenges, as well as her experiences with friends and family.

A truly inspirational figure, Blumenthal recounts being imprisoned in several concentration camps, yet she still maintains a positive mental and spiritual outlook to this day. Expertly shot and directed and with some 2D animation, this film contains enlightening messages that unify rather than divide.

DOCUMENTARY | ANIMATION | BIOGR APHY

Release Date: March 11, 2022 Director: Jordy Sank Starring: Ella Blumenthal Running Time: 1 hour, 13 minutes MPAA Rating: PG-13 Where to Watch: Theaters

Ford, arguably at the peak of his powers.

This film has it all— tense drama, action, and well-drawn characters.

ADVENTURE | DRAMA | WESTERN

(1939)

During a stagecoach journey, a disparate group of people must learn to work together despite their

differences as they navigate unexpected dangers, including a hostile band of Native Americans.

This is one of the greatest Westerns of all time, directed by the legendary John

and strange situations that make for superior entertainment. It also shows our common humanity.

COMEDY | DR AMA

Release Date: April 22, 1988 Director: Percy Adlon Starring: Marianne Sägebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance Running Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes MPAA Rating: PG Where to Watch: Hoopla, Vudu, Tubi

RIVETING COP DRAMA

‘The New Centurions’ (1972)

MAGNIFICENT WESTERN AMONG WESTERNS

‘Stagecoach’

This unique film takes place at an extremely remote motel in the Southwestern United States.

A German woman, Jasmin Münchgstettner (Marianne Sägebrecht), randomly ends up at the motel and at first doesn’t get along with its proprietor, Brenda (CCH Pounder). But they eventually see that they may have some things in common.

Calling the film quirky would do this dramedy an injustice. This zany flick is full of humor, oddball characters,

Release Date: March 3,1939 Director: John Ford Starring: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes Not Rated Where to Watch: TCM, Hoopla, HBO Max

Roy Fehler (Stacy Keach) has just joined the Los Angeles Police Department and is assigned Kilvinski (George C. Scott) as his partner.

As Kilvinski takes Fehler under his wing and teaches the new cop how to be a fair and just policeman, Fehler begins to neglect his family and legal studies.

This is an outstanding cop-crime drama with realistic acting, a great script, and gripping action scenes. It’s also one

of the original films that avoids the “bad cops” cliché and instead shows their humanity.

ACTION | CRIME | DR AMA

Release Date: Aug. 3, 1972 Director: Richard Fleischer Starring: George C. Scott, Stacy Keach, Jane Alexander Running Time: 1 hour, 43 minutes MPAA Rating: R Where to Watch: TCM, DirecTV

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 65

Food Chefs

KEEPING THE FIRE ALIVE: PITMASTER PAT MARTIN IS BUILDING A WHOLE-HOG BARBECUE EMPIRE After becoming obsessed with the West Tennessee specialty, the Nashville-based chef and restaurateur dedicated his life to perfecting—and preserving—this disappearing craft

By Kevin Revolinski

P

66 I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022

Pat Martin is the pitmaster and owner of Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint, which has locations in Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Alabama.

A whole-hog cook needs a feeder fire to provide a steady supply of coals through the process. Martin prefers making a burn barrel.

Martin slowsmokes each 175to 190-pound hog in a brick pit over hickory coals for 24 hours.

The reward: Martin's famed pulled pork sandwich is made with meat pulled straight off the hog, topped with coleslaw.

PAT MARTIN Age: 50 Comfort Food: Purple peas with chow chow and cornbread Favorite Drink: A good biodynamic wine or a Coke Ingredients He Can’t Live Without: Great salt, great citrus, and chile flakes Guilty Pleasure: Pizza (“And pineapple shouldn’t be on a pizza!”)

uated; found work; got married, divorced, and remarried; and went broke. As he went through the challenges of those years, he kept cooking “the other classical ways,” not only barbecue.

“I didn’t think about it as a career until it slapped me in the face in 2006,” Martin said.

That’s when it all came together.

He found a 12-table space in Nolensville, Tennessee, and opened Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint, serving whole-hog pulled pork sandwiches.

Martin had confidence in his food, but he had to learn the restaurant business as he went along. At first, he would run out each day.

“People would get angry, but always come back,” he said.

Months later, the line was out the door. Now, Martin’s has 10 regional locations.

Open-pit barbequing is best, according to Martin.

“When you use a smoker, there is an entry for oxygen and an exhaust,” he said. “With a pit, it’s like a set of gills or a salamander. The entire pit breathes and you don’t have as many hot spots.”

To preserve the tradition, he’s written the book on it: “Life of Fire: Mastering the Arts of PitCooked Barbecue, the Grill, and the Smokehouse.”

“It’s sort of a mentor book,” Martin said.

Pit barbecue is all about the fire, and the procedure and the fire maintenance are the arduous parts.

“Once [you] learn that skill, [you] don’t need barbecue recipes,” he said.

Kevin Revolinski is an avid traveler, craft beer enthusiast, and home-cooking fan. He's based in Madison, Wis.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF ANDREW THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHY

at martin is one of a rare breed: an open-pit barbecue master who uses whole hogs, a West Tennessee tradition that requires a 24-hour cooking time at 200 degrees Fahrenheit—as well as hours of prep.

“The French have their cheese; we as Americans have our barbecue. You drive 50 miles and it changes,” Martin said.

Born in Memphis, he first remembers a trip to Gridley’s BarB-Q when he was 5 years old. His father’s job took them to the East Coast for several years, but then they moved to Mississippi to be near family.

In high school, Martin bought his first cookbook, “The Thrill of the Grill.” A section about whole-hog barbecue “really filed itself away in my brain,” he said.

During his first week at college in 1990, he found Thomas & Webb Barbecue, and it was “an absolute epiphany,” he said. Owner Harold Thomas personally put together his sandwich.

“He pulled it right off the hog, and I thought ‘I have to learn how to do this,’” Martin said.

He became a regular.

On Columbus Day 1991, at a family reunion fish fry, Martin drove an hour to get a couple of hogs from Thomas, who also gave him careful instructions on how to build a brick pit for the occasion. Everyone loved it. That’s when he realized that “I want to make people happy by making something to eat.”

Still, he didn’t see it as a career.

“I was just going to go on making money and retire one day when I was 50 and open up a barbecue joint and kinda live my life out,” Martin said.

But then life happened: He grad-

Be a Great Child As we enter adulthood, we must step up to take care of our parents In order to have a great relationship with our parents, we need to be willing to put their needs above our own.

By Bill Lindsey

4 Take on More Responsibility

1 Listen and Be Patient Listening, fully and completely without distractions, shows respect, but is also a great way to learn new things. As children age, it’s not unusual for them to disregard parental advice, but in most cases, our parents are smarter than we give them credit for. They will treat you as a respected adult with great ideas when you return the favor. This just might encourage them to listen more carefully to you as well.

CSA IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

2 The Gift of Quality Time Being a parent means spending an inordinate amount of time with a child, even if there are other responsibilities looming or things they’d rather be doing. As children grow up, it’s perfectly natural that they will pull away to embark on their own adventures. The biggest gift you can give to parents is the gift of time; spend quality time with them on those occasions when it’s not expected, not just on holidays and birthdays.

Children living at home need to step up and take part in normal household chores, from doing the dishes to taking out the trash— without being asked. Being an active, willing participant in the household not only prepares children for real life, but also helps instill a sense of responsibility and respect. Adult children no longer living at home should step up to make minor repairs or pay for and prepare a holiday meal, without being asked to do so.

3 Forgive Your parents had to learn as they went with you, no doubt doing their best but sometimes making a few unintentional mistakes. As the child, you might have made a few mistakes as well. Now is the time to take a deep breath and learn to let go of resentment, opening the door to making every new moment the best it can be. Forgive yourself as well for actions you may have made that damaged your relationship with your parents.

5 Be Compassionate As parents and children age, the relationship dynamic gradually but inexorably begins to shift, with parents evolving from being the caretaker to being the ones cared for. When their physical and mental abilities eventually begin to decline, be there for them, without being asked and with no need for thanks. This can be a trying time for both sides. As your parents try to hang on to being in charge, you, the child, need to be respectful and understanding.

I N S I G H T March 11–17, 2022 67

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