By Craig Rucker via CFACT |September 27th, 2024
Nikita Khrushchev once said, “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.”
While such words seem strange coming from a former leader of the USSR, they do have a ring of truth – especially regarding the climate and energy promises being made by the nation’s leading Democrats.
In recent weeks, the Harris-Walz campaign website claimed that it would build on the “historic work” and “international climate leadership” of the Biden-Harris Administration. By doing so, it maintains it will provide “a pathway to the middle class,” increase our “resilience to climate disasters,” create “millions of new jobs,” advance “environmental justice,” and “unite Americans” in tackling the “climate crisis.”
Bold sounding words, to be sure. But are they believable?
Setting aside the fact that most Americans don’t rank tackling climate change as a high priority, there don’t appear to be any real-world examples of how the current Administration’s climate and energy policies are leading to a Green nirvana anywhere in the world.
Even more to the point, what our lives would likely be under a promised Green New Deal can be predicted by simply examining the states and countries Harris-Walz most look toward for inspiration and guidance.
Three of them come to mind right off the bat: California, Great Britain and Germany.
California. There are few places in the world more committed to creating Ecotopia than California. Thirty years ago, in fact, Harris’s home state actually tried to impose a mandate that 2% of all cars be electric by 1995. Of course that failed miserably.
Not that the state has learned anything.
Governor Newsom’s recent executive order says all new cars and light trucks sold in California by 2035 must be zero-emission (electric) vehicles; existing fossil-fuel vehicles can continue operating (until replacement parts are unavailable or illegal). This too is likely to fail.
The state taxes and regulates oil production and refining to oblivion, driving up gasoline prices in California and Arizona and Nevada. Berkeley’s gas stove tax has replaced its gas stove ban.
As it drives up electricity demand, California slashes generation – so it imports more electricity than any other state. It has America’s highest gasoline and third-highest electricity prices, highest home purchase and rental prices, and largest welfare rolls.
Great Britain is also all-in on fighting global warming, and the results are no better. Its climate policies have made energy prices so high that Tata Steel is closing two of its last remaining blast furnaces. Britain will become history’s first major industrialized nation unable to produce virgin steel for defense and high-grade industrial purposes.
Its ceramics industry has pink-slipped 30,000 workers since 1979 for the same reason, while 30,000 North Sea oil and gas workers “are on a jobs cliff edge,” waiting to learn whether their careers will fall into the climate abyss, says GMB Union leader Gary Smith.
The country faces a massive “hollowing out” of working-class communities, Smith worries, as it heads toward green deindustrialization. Unaffected political classes, however, still flaunt their climate credentials.
Germany’s fabled energy transition (EnergieWende) has become its energy catastrophe. With twice the population of California, the country has spent well over $220 billion on renewable energy since 2013, and wind and solar power now generate 31% of its energy, when nature cooperates. It shuttered its coal and nuclear power plants.
Former powerhouse Germany now imports natural gas and electricity, while its electricity rates have skyrocketed. It’s even dismantling a wind farm to extract lignite coal for new coal-fired generators, so that families and businesses can keep their lights and heat on.
Meanwhile, across the European Union, the obsession with climate change and Net Zero energy is forcing families to pay exorbitant rates for electricity: 47¢ per kilowatt-hour in Ireland; 45¢ in Italy; and 40¢ in Germany and Britain.
The average US household price is 16¢ per kWh, although Nebraska and North Dakota families pay just 10¢ – while those in green-energy-obsessed states like California and Massachusetts must already fork over three times that.
American families, hospitals, businesses, schools and industries would be battered by European or California prices – and would be even more so when sporadic wind and solar electricity must be backed up by grid-scale batteries that cost trillions, provide only a few hours of power, and send electricity prices ever higher.
Bottom Line: While the Harris-Walz website promises lofty goals and dreams, the harsh reality of going all-Green is not likely to fare any better now than it has in previous decades or anywhere else.
It’s actually rather surprising the Harris-Walz ticket is championing the so-called “achievements” of the Biden-Harris Administration. We’re clearly not better off today than four years ago.
Will we be better off four years from now? Time will tell.
Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president. Widely heralded as a leader in the free market environmental, think tank community in Washington, D.C., Rucker is a frequent guest on radio talk shows, has written extensively in numerous publications, and has appeared in such media outlets as Fox News, OANN, Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill, among many others.
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