The Democratic Party’s anti-fossil-fuel program — the Green New Deal — will prevent the world’s poor and developing nations from achieving the standard of living enjoyed by the US and other developed countries. The GND will also weaken the US strategically vis-à-vis China and Russia, thus threatening the independence and survival of all democratic nations.
by Richard Schulman
Of the world’s 7.8 billion people, 3.5 billion lack access to reliable electricity. Since China’s Communist regime set loose the Wuhan virus upon the world, “The coronavirus pandemic has thrown between 88 million and 114 million people into extreme poverty … The reversal is by far the largest increase in extreme poverty going back to 1990 when the data begin,” a Wall Street Journal guest column reports, citing World Bank figures.
Green energy, the program of the Democratic Party and its candidates for president and vice president, hurts the poor the most. The fracking and natural gas boom in the US has kept heating and electricity costs down. Germany, by contrast, has gone heavily green and is immiserating its old and poor through unaffordable energy prices. One article several years ago “described a German senior citizen who couldn’t afford to heat his apartment, so every evening he would turn on a single light bulb and warm his hands over it before going to bed.”
De-industrialization and child labor
India’s reaction is not atypical: “The UN Secretary General António Guterres’s call for India to give up coal immediately and reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 is a call to de-industrialize the country and abandon the population to a permanent low-development trap,” two researchers write in The Hindu, India’s second largest English-language newspaper.
Green energy depends upon child labor in the developing sector under appalling conditions. Yet House Democrats killed a Republican amendment to a $1.5 trillion infrastructure spending bill that the House passed in June. It would have addressed this problem. The amendment
would have required the Commerce Secretary to certify that federally funded electric buses and charging stations do not use minerals mined or processed with child labor…. Electric vehicle batteries include significant amounts of cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, manganese and rare earth elements. According to the amendment, the top producer of cobalt is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which UNICEF and Amnesty International estimate employs 40,000 children in mines for up to 12 hours a day at wages of less than $2 a day. Some minerals are also mined in countries that exploit child labor like Zambia and Zimbabwe. This is one of the dirty little secrets of clean energy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-green-new-deal-in-action-11593645373?mod=itp_wsj&ru=yahoo
Fossil fuel’s strategic value to US
US fossil-fuel plenty is the counterpoint to the Democrats’ child-labor-based green energy dreams. Thanks to US development of fracking and other new fossil fuel extraction technologies, the US is now a net exporter of energy rather than being dangerously dependent on Mideast oil as it was during the 1970s. This frees it from subordination to the vagaries of that region’s politics and the need for a major military presence there. This is of enormous benefit to US national security.
For this reason alone – added to a desire to see the people of the developing sector not be denied a chance to attain the standard of living of the developed world – Democrats should be supporting the fossil fuel industry rather than seeking to drive it to extinction. “The alternative is giving more power to Putin and a deeper U.S. entanglement in the Middle East,” Walter Russell Mead writes.
The Democrats’ war against fossil fuels also benefits Putin’s more consequential ally against the US, Communist China. Presidential candidate Biden is committed to rejoining the Paris Accord, an agreement that harms the US at the same time as it benefits China. As China expert Gordon Chang notes, “The Paris Accord contains incentives for China to increase its carbon emissions for another decade while including requirements that would force the continual contraction of the American economy. It was lunacy for us to have agreed to this.”
Net zero mañana
China is indeed the world’s main polluter:
China… emits the world’s greatest volume of greenhouse gases. The U.S. emits 10 percent less than it did in 2005, but China has more than made up the difference, increasing its emissions from about 5 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2005 to more than 10 billion in the most recent statistical year. China now emits nearly twice as much as the U.S., generating 30 percent of the global total.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/climate-china-paris-agreement-relies-on-beijing-steeply-reducing-emissions/
China’s Communist leader Xi Jinping pledged before the UN that China would cut its net carbon footprint to zero by 2060. But forty years is a long way off. And China doesn’t have a very good record for honesty and keeping its word, witness
- Its attempt to portray its gulags for Uighurs in Xinjiang and Buddhists in Tibet as adult education facilities,
- Xi’s promise to President Obama that China wouldn’t militarize the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and
- China’s betraying the promise China made to Hong Kong and the world that the city would enjoy its autonomy until 2047.
A promise for the gullible
Meanwhile, China has built thousands of new coal plants. The average lifetime of a coal plant is 39 years, but China’s are only an average 14 years old. That’s a lot of CO2 and particulate matter spewing out for 25 more years, especially by comparison with the US’s more efficient, more clean-burning natural gas. Two-thirds of China’s energy comes from burning about half the world’s coal supply.
We don’t begrudge China or India their right to industrialize. But India to its credit — unlike China — doesn’t pretend to be a paragon of green virtue.
A former Wisconsin state senator with energy and environment experience writes that Xi Jinping’s pledge of carbon neutrality by 2060 is
as believable as someone addicted to drugs promising he will be drug free in 10 or 20 years while he builds additions to his opium farms. So why did China knowingly make headlines in America over this meaningless pledge while it continues to build coal plants on its own land and even around the world? The answer is simple: China is trying to undermine America’s energy dominance as well as the job and economic growth that brings. The CCP knows extremists in our nation will use this carbon pledge at every possible opportunity to force the U.S. to adopt the so-called “Green New Deal…
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2020/09/30/dont_fall_for_chinas_net-zero_carbon_trick_579085.html
State subsidies to build another monopoly
While functioning as the world’s major dirty emitter of fumes, state subsidies are seeking to make China the world’s monopoly producer of solar panels. But in China itself, the solar panels don’t work well, because, as one headline puts it, “China’s pollution is so bad it’s blocking sunlight from solar panels”.
So where does Joe Biden fit in in all this. Well, for one thing, he’s a Sinophile. Senator Tom Cotton writes that
Joe Biden Is China’s Choice for President…. In the critical fight over whether to grant most-favored-nation trade status and World Trade Organization membership to China in the 1990s … Biden carefully shepherded China through the process from his powerful perch as the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wherever a brake might have been applied — by placing human-rights or labor conditions on most-favored-nation status, for example — Biden voted the measures down and lobbied other senators for Beijing…. And when a few weeks ago President Trump acted to impose travel restrictions on China as a consequence of its abysmal handling of the Wuhan coronavirus, Biden was right there and ready to act as Beijing’s lawyer, slamming the policy as ‘hysterical xenophobia.’ Now, even the New York Times concedes that these measures bought the United States valuable time to prepare for an epidemic.
Joe Flip-Flop
Biden is all in for the Green New Deal – except when confronted on the subject, as in the first presidential debate. He has said that he is against building any fossil fuel power plants being built (not just coal). And he’s said he’s against fracking — except when campaigning in Pennsylvania, a critical electoral state with major fracking activity. Joe’s a true man of principle.
Implementing the Biden-Harris 2 trillion dollar Green New Deal and its zero carbon dioxide emissions goal would eventually require a China-like totalitarian government. Meanwhile, that’s a lot of money to waste for a program hatched by bureaucrats in the UN, not exactly a hothouse of US patriots. But it will be music to the worshipers of US decline, such as Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and Portland’s Antifa.
Democrats say this must be done — the poverty, child labor, no more beef, etc. — to save the planet from destruction by plant food, otherwise known as carbon dioxide. We’ll address the pseudo-science behind that hoax in subsequent numbers of this series.
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