Your life, living standards, country and planet will take a big hit under the Green New Deal
Paul Driessen
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC, the Democrat Party and US
environmentalists are committed to making climate change, the Green New
Deal, and replacement of fossil fuels with wind, solar, battery and
biofuel power the centerpiece of their foreign and domestic policies.
They claim the transition would be easy, affordable, ecological,
sustainable and painless. That’s ideology and fantasy, not reality.
Wind and sunshine are certainly clean and renewable. Harnessing them to power America is not.
The GND would hit American families, jobs, living standards and
environmental quality hard. Western states would feel the brunt, because
their fossil fuel rents, royalties, jobs and tax receipts would
disappear, as drilling, fracking and coal mining on federal lands are
closed down. Their open spaces, scenic vistas, wildlife habitats and
wildlife would be desecrated by wind turbines, solar panels and
transmission lines to serve distant urban voting blocs that dictate
energy and land use decisions far beyond city lines.
Coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids still provide 80% of US
energy. In 2018, they generated 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of
electricity – which would have to be replaced under an all-encompassing
Green New Deal costing tens of trillions of dollars.
Another 2.7 billion MWh worth of natural gas powered factories,
emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water
heaters in restaurants, homes and other buildings. Cars, trucks, buses,
semi-trailers, tractors and other vehicles consumed the equivalent of
yet another 2 billion MWh.
Altogether, that’s 7.4 billion megawatt-hours per year that the GND
would have to replace! On top of that we’d need at least another 150
million MWh of wind and solar generating capacity to charge batteries
over and over to maintain just one week of nationwide backup power, to
avoid blackouts.
The more we try to do so, the more we’d have to put turbines and panels
in low quality wind and solar sites, where they’d generate electricity
only 15-20% of the year, 80-85% below “nameplate capacity.”
Of course, we could replace all this fossil fuel energy with nuclear
power. But radical greens inside and outside the soon-to-be Biden
Administration detest and oppose nuclear as much as they do fossil
fuels.
That means this transformation to an all-electric nation would require
millions of onshore wind turbines, thousands of offshore turbines,
billions of solar panels, millions of vehicle battery modules, billions
of backup energy storage battery modules, thousands of miles of new
transmission lines, millions of charging stations, tens of billions of
tons of concrete, steel, copper, plastic, cobalt, rare earth elements
and countless other materials – and digging up hundreds of billions of
tons of overburden and ores!
If the United States and world could summon the will to mine, process
and smelt enough metals and minerals – and manufacture, transport and
install all those turbines, panels, batteries and transmission lines –
the GND would require the greatest expansion of mining and manufacturing
in human history.
But radical greens inside and outside of the Biden Administration detest
and oppose US mining and manufacturing almost as much as they despise
fossil fuels. That means we would have to go overseas for these
essential metals and minerals – primarily to China and Russia, which
have them within their boundaries or under their control in various
African, Asian and Latin American nations.
They also have no reservation or hesitation about digging them up and
processing them – without regard for child, slave or forced labor,
workplace safety, air and water pollution, mined land reclamation or any
other standards that we insist on in America. And it’s highly unlikely
that Team Biden would demand that those countries implement such
standards – or that it would refuse to import the metals, minerals and
finished “green” technologies unless China, Russia and their foreign
subsidiaries abide by our rules and regulations. The entire GND (and
much more) would collapse without those unethical raw materials.
Moreover, nearly all this mining, processing and manufacturing would
require gasoline, diesel, natural gas and coal in those foreign
countries, because those operations cannot be conducted with wind, solar
and battery power. The fossil fuel use and emissions would take place
outside the United States, but would not go away. Indeed they would
likely double or triple. The carbon dioxide emissions would increase
global atmospheric levels and, Team Biden insists, worsen climate chaos
and extreme weather.
In fact, most wind, solar and battery mining, processing and
manufacturing already take place overseas, under few or nonexistent
workplace safety, fair wage, child labor and environmental laws. Some
40,000 Congolese children labor alongside their parents, for a couple
dollars a day, while exposed constantly to toxic, radioactive mud, dust,
water and air, to meet today’s cobalt needs. Imagine the GND toll.
Replacing oil and gas for petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and plastics
would require importing those feed stocks, as well – or planting
millions of acres in canola, soybean and other biofuel crops. The water,
fertilizer, pesticide, tractor, harvester, processing and
transportation requirements would be astronomical.
All that work, and all those industrial facilities, would impact
hundreds of millions of acres of scenic areas, food crop lands and
wildlife habitats. Raptors, other birds, bats, and forest, grassland and
desert dwellers would suffer substantial losses or be driven into
extinction.
Most of those impacts would also occur in Midwestern and Western
America, far from the voting centers and suspicious voting patterns that
put Team Biden in office. But as they say, out of sight, out of mind –
in someone else’s backyards.
The GND would also mean ripping out perfectly good natural gas
appliances, replacing them with electric models, installing rapid
charging systems for vehicles, and upgrading household, neighborhood and
national electrical systems to handle the extra loads – costing more
trillions of dollars.
Families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses accustomed to
paying 7-11¢ per kilowatt-hour for electricity would pay 14-22¢ per kWh,
as they already do in “green” US states – or even the 35¢ that families
now pay in Germany. Once they use more than some arbitrary “maximum
baseline” amount of electricity per month, they will pay closer to 45¢
per kWh, as families already do in California.
How companies will survive, how many jobs will disappear, how many
families will join the ranks of those who must choose between heating
and eating – is anyone’s guess.
GND technologies are nearly 100% dependent on metals and minerals from
China, Russia, Ukraine, and Chinese companies in Africa and Latin
America. Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop underscore concerns that
America’s foreign, defense and domestic policies would be held hostage,
while certain well-connected politicians, families and wind, solar,
battery and biofuel companies get rich.
All these issues require open, robust debate – which too many schools
and universities, news and social media outlets, corporate and political
leaders, and Antifa thugs and arsonists continue to censor and cancel.
That censorship and silencing must end before any votes or other actions
are taken on any Green New Deal. Unfortunately, the opposite is
happening.
Big Media and Big Tech are conspiring with Democrats, Greens and other
authoritarian elements to shut down any and all discussion by anyone who
does not support their agendas. Others are moving to persecute and
prosecute President Trump and anyone associated with his administration
and policies.
As anger and frustration build among the increasingly disenfranchised,
America and the world could be heading into a frightening future indeed.
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