The Paris Accords and cancelling Keystone is just the beginning of life under the new climate regime.
You would think Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had run for the presidency and won the November election. President Joe Biden’s administration is systematically and swiftly implementing AOC’s radical policies—and none with such a sledgehammer approach as “tackling” climate change. The young congresswoman admitted as much when she tweeted on January 27th, “It’s almost as if we helped shape the platform."
She was responding to the observation of NBC News White House Correspondent Geoff Bennett, who tweeted that same day that, “It’s striking how much of Biden’s climate executive actions reflect major elements of the Green New Deal—tackling climate change while addressing economic/racial injustice—without actually *being the Green New Deal. Some political sleight of hand.”
Is the darling of the latte-left being a little coy in her assessment? Surely President Biden has been more than inspired by the acolytes of the Green New Deal; he has been overpowered by them, and they will never retrocede that control.
Joe Biden did not specifically campaign on the Green New Deal. He knew it was not only monstrously cost-prohibitive, amounting to around $93 trillion, but that it was also a ludicrous and a chimeric vision for the future, even if one just entertains the notion of eliminating air travel over the next decade. But now-President Biden has nevertheless put the United States on that path, putting climate change “at the center” of all domestic and foreign policy decisions. By doing so, President Biden is putting the United States on the road to economic destruction with a plan that will have virtually no effect on reversing climate change—even if you believe anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions are directly responsible for this manufactured crisis.
[caption id="attachment_185313" align="aligncenter" width="1920"]
Factories.[/caption]
PRESENTING JOHN KERRY, THE GLOBAL WARMING GRAND POOBAH
The economic impact of the new administration's "climate-first" policy seems to be a complete afterthought. Speaking from his newly inaugurated seat as Climate Czar (i.e., U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate), John Kerry suggested as much when he said that all this talk of job loss was just mendacious blather. Last Tuesday, at a press conference that preceded a fresh round of climate-related executive orders, Kerry was asked what his message was to workers in the industries jeopardized by the administration's climate agenda. “Unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, over the last few years, they’ve been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense, no it’s not," Kerry said. "What’s happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.”
“The same people can do those jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice."
Kerry insisted that these workers should seek work elsewhere, in the “clean energy” sector: “You look at the consequences of black lung for a miner, for instance, and measure that against the fastest-growing job in the United States before COVID was solar power technician. The same people can do those jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice."
There was more: “The President of the United States has expressed in every comment he has made about climate the need to grow the new jobs that pay better, that are cleaner,” Kerry added, stressing that President Biden intends to “do what needs to be done to deal with this crisis.” “What President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels.”
Kerry’s comments were hideously malign, and yet, at the same time, quite emblematic of the climate change scam that’s in the making, with John Kerry presiding as the Global Warming Grand Poobah. After all, here is a man of considerable means (acquired through marriage), who continues to be a titanic hypocrite when it comes to managing his own carbon footprint—Kerry maintains a private jet like anyone with a lifestyle of the rich and famous. Last year alone, that Gulfstream GIV-SP jet produced 116 metric tons of carbon. (Doesn’t this remind you of all of those coronavirus lockdowns where the hardship was to be endured by the masses, but not by the liberal elites dining at the tony French Laundry restaurant?)
During the press conference, Kerry was quick to hype some numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as he invited all those pipeline welders and oil patch workers to just find another job—such as that of wind turbine technician, a sector which, according to Kerry, the BLS has pegged as the fasting-growing job between 2019 and 2029.
But a good liberal like Kerry should know he’s in trouble when a fact check by the Washington Post blew his fictional job fair out of the water. In the next decade, the Washington Post reports, “Wind turbine jobs are projected to go up by 4,300, from 7,000 to 11,300 in 10 years. The solar installer jobs are projected to go up 6,100, from 12,000 to 18,100. That’s a total increase of just 10,400 jobs—leaving 20,000 coal workers still toiling in the mines.”
“In the mines.” It’s telling that Kerry picked the weakest straw man he could find when outlining the glorious economic futures of green energy, pointing to all those miners who could look forward to ascending from the bowels of the earth and breathing the fresh air of the green economy. But the evidence just isn’t on his side here; these coveted green sector jobs don’t exist. The Post noted that BLS report offers a list of the 30 occupations that can expect the most job growth over the next decade. Health care jobs dominate the top ten, but there is no mention of a lucrative future in the wind or solar industry.
John Kerry's green job boom is a fiction. But, just like the math of the ever-growing climate crisis that's inspiring Washington policy right now, it's a fiction that's far more convenient than the reality and hardship facing jobless Americans in the energy sector.
[caption id="attachment_185315" align="aligncenter" width="1920"]
Wind energy.[/caption]
THE UNDEMOCRATIC ENVIRONMENTAL ENABLING ACT GIVES THE PRESIDENT UNTOLD POWER TO ENACT HIS CLIMATE REGIME
None of this reality has apparently reached the eyes or ears of President Biden, because he adopted an equally optimistic tone on January 27th. “Today is climate day at the White House, which means today is jobs day at the White House," the President said, suggesting that all this activity was about the "health of our families, cleaner water and cleaner air”—none of which, of course, are contaminated by carbon dioxide emissions.
[H]e canceled 10,000 jobs in the U.S., along with another 3,000 in Canada.
"In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis and we can’t wait any longer. It is time to act," Biden said, as he took literary license to compare the imagined crisis to an actual one. “Just like we need a unified national response to COVID-19, we desperately need a unified national response to the climate crisis, because there is a climate crisis.”
President Biden’s vision is to “lead a clean energy revolution” that will free the United States from the “pollution” of carbon dioxide by 2035 and have “net-zero emissions” by 2050.
Of course, the President himself will likely not be around to see if the United States achieves either target, even if his insane plan survives successive administration. Instead, he sits in his chair like a languorous old man assiduously reading his speaking notes from his desk, looking like he is under house arrest. Still, he is governing—or at least, appearing to do so—by executive order, and the sheer mass of those dictates is not just staggering but terrifying.
The new President had barely warmed his Oval Office seat when he announced that the U.S. would return to the Paris climate accord—a job-destroying bit of global authoritarianism that is not worth the diplomatic paper it is printed on, let alone the lavish parties staged while it was being negotiated. Then, he quickly produced an executive order to cancel the XL pipeline. With the flash of another one of those pens that Biden runs through on a daily basis, he canceled 10,000 jobs in the U.S., along with another 3,000 in Canada. And this in the midst of a pandemic that even Biden has called our “dark winter!” Even uber-environmentalist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau supports the XL pipeline, and promptly said so.
Has President Biden discovered the miracle fuel that is going to make petroleum obsolescent and put the oil industry out of business—even before his administration decides to do it for them? Is that what he was up to during all those months when he cowered in his basement instead of campaigning for the presidency? Clearly, the Biden administration has not thought this through beyond the talking points.
Whether the President chooses to acknowledge it or not, oil will continue to be the principal source of energy for American consumers for quite some time to come—at least until perpetual motion is discovered. That oil that the XL pipeline was supposed to transport from America’s closest ally—Canada—will now have to be brought in by rail, a potentially more dangerous and far less environmentally friendly method than a pipeline.
Biden is destroying the American economy and naively trusting that brutal dictatorships like China will surrender before a bourgeois fetish like a greenhouse gas reduction target.
Fossil fuels remain the overwhelming source of all of America’s energy needs: petroleum and natural gas account for 69% of energy usage, coal 11%, and nuclear power 8%. Renewable energy accounts for 11%, and that includes the wood you burn in the fireplace or woodstove every winter. Solar and wind power account for only a fraction of that 11%.
So clearly, with all his activist policy around climate change, President Biden has America on track for a return trip to the Middle Ages.
And like they did in the Middle Ages, the President expects Americans to have blind faith in the climate change priests who will be integral to his administration. If you don’t think the climate change movement is a religion or at least a passable cult, just listen to how its adherents talk about environmental policy. When Democrats were trying to convince us that the California wildfires were somehow the result of climate change, and not just bad forestry management, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sounding more like a pagan devotee than the good Catholic she claims to be, exploded: “Mother earth is angry, she is telling us. Whether she’s telling us with hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is, the climate crisis is real.”
So if climate change is the culprit for every Act of God, will President Biden’s plan for Americans to live in caves and shut off the heat actually work? Not without China’s cooperation, where 29% of greenhouse gasses are emitted. Without addressing that reality, we’ll continue to spend untold trillions, lose the energy independence that we gained under former President Donald Trump, and sit in the dark, while China continues to play by its own rules—just as it has throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
What is so undemocratic about President Biden’s climate change plan is that it has been served up as an executive order, without debate, and without Congressional approval. What is so ominous about it is not its specificity—which sounds relatively harmless—but its vagueness and political potential. It’s a veritable environmental Enabling Act that can be used to justify any economic dictate, any security violation, or any foreign policy entanglement. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) publicity advised Biden to “call a climate emergency … He can do many, many things under the emergency powers... that he could do without legislation.”
Even the President’s promise to replace the federal government’s gas-operating vehicles with electrical-powered versions is contained in another executive order to “buy American.”
The Biden administration is lying about the economic opportunities embedded in green energy, and its decision to “tackle” climate change is a blatant attempt to appease the left-wing Democrats who see Biden as their puppet. In the process, as he is doing with so many of these executive orders, President Biden is destroying the American economy and naively trusting that brutal dictatorships like China will surrender before a bourgeois fetish like a greenhouse gas reduction target.
So much will be lost for nothing except America’s further prostration to China.
