Paul Driessen Sep 14, 2024
Kamala Harris desperately wants to be “unburdened by what has been” – the Biden-Harris policies she helped develop and implement. She wants voters to focus on the “joy” and “freedom” she insists would be America’s future if voters elect her, Tim Walz and their Biden-Harris-Obama “advisors.”
However, she was the “last person in the room” with President Biden for major decisions and is super-glued to what she says are “still my values” about energy, climate, immigration, rioters and police.
She cannot run away from the horrendous Biden-Harris record on energy and food price inflation; letting illegal immigrants, criminals, spies, terrorists, child, sex and drug traffickers stream into our country; weaponizing federal agencies against political opponents and private citizens; and the Afghanistan departure debacle that killed thirteen US service members and left 90% of our Afghan allies behind.
As a 2019 presidential candidate she supported taxpayer-funded “gender-transitions” for illegal migrants. In 2020, Senator Harris was ranked to the left of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Vice President Harris proudly cast the deciding “yea” vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, the massive $4-trillion spending spree on “Green New Deal” wind, solar and battery projects. The list goes on and on.
That’s why she’s dodging interviews and presenting platitudes instead of policies. All with the happy collusion of legacy and social media and ABC debate moderators. All while anonymous campaign staffers assert that she no longer plans to ban fracking, offshore drilling, gasoline cars, gas stoves, plastic straws – or free speech by anyone who might question or criticize her policies.
Perhaps her nameless staffers are correct. Harris-Walz might not ban fossil fuel production and use. They might not ban misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation” from experts and citizens who disagree with administration assertions and policies.
But Harris-Walz and its Deep State bureaucrats don’t have to outright ban anything. They could just tax, regulate, delay, denounce, disincentivize, coerce, threaten and penalize our energy, freedoms and living standards into oblivion.
They could continue the Biden-Harris practice of using the FBI, IRS and Justice Department to harass, intimidate, prosecute and jail political opponents. They could continue colluding with the media and Big Tech to amplify Democrat viewpoints and marginalize opposing views.
Ms. Harris insists that her “values” and “concerns” haven’t changed. But even her official website says nothing about what her policies would be. It says only that she would create an “opportunity economy,” provide a pathway to the middle class, end price gouging (she called it “price gauging”), champion other progressive causes, and ensure Israel’s right and ability to “defend itself” (but “it matters how” Israel does so, and she will dictate those terms), while helping the Palestinian people “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”
Nowhere does her website or recent debate performance explain how she would make any of this happen.
Ms. Harris’s proclamations about lowering energy costs and tackling the climate crisis are equally vacuous and specifics-free. We learn only that Harris-Walz would build on the “historic work” and “international climate leadership” launched by Biden-Harris, to “unite Americans” in tackling the global climate crisis, lower skyrocketing Biden-Harris-era energy costs, “advance environmental justice,” hold polluters accountable, create millions of new jobs, and increase resilience to climate disasters.
How she would actually convert that pablum into her promised utopia remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a word salad. Equally unclear is why the sitting Vice President has made little or no effort to change the Administration’s disastrous energy, economic, immigration and foreign policies. There’s still time for policy reversals and executive orders; Ms. Harris simply has no interest in seeking them.
What is clear is that she doesn’t want to talk about what she would actually do as president – and that the mush posted on her website was mostly copied and pasted from the Biden-for-President 2024 website. However, the posts clearly show Harris-Walz would inflict more economic, domestic and global chaos.
President Trump should have driven all these points home during the debate. He failed to do so. Now his interviews, campaign ads, rally speeches, and JD Vance speeches and interviews must do so – and show how they will fix our energy, economic, immigration, and Middle East, Russia and China problems.
A closer look at the Harris climate and energy record provides valuable information for voters.
Senator Harris co-sponsored the 2019 Green New Deal legislation, which would have “fundamentally transformed” America’s entire economy, in the name of fighting “dangerous climate change.” During her 2020 presidential run, she advocated a total transition to electric vehicles (personal, commercial and transport) by 2035. She supports mandating electric stoves and home and water heating.
Her all-electric economy would require tripling electricity generation – while her plans to replace coal and gas power plants with massive wind and solar installations would cause reliable, affordable electricity to plummet. Soaring prices for unpredictable, weather-dependent home, hospital, business and factory electricity would be paired with repeated blackouts, chaos, and heatwave and frigid-weather deaths.
Eliminating coal and gas power plants would also mean replacing their reliable, affordable baseload and backup electricity with enormous grid-backup battery installations costing tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars – and posing constant risks of chemical-fueled infernos.
Ms. Harris remains enthralled by “climate equity” and “environmental justice” – to address the disparate impacts the “climate crisis” allegedly has on women and people of color.
She would ban plastic straws but is committed to wind and solar technologies that create millions of times more plastic and fiberglass-epoxy trash that cannot be recycled and ends up in enormous landfills.
A single 350-feet-long offshore wind turbine blade weighs 140,000 pounds. The Biden-Harris green energy plan calls for 30,000 megawatts of offshore turbines – 2,500 turbines with 7,500 blades. The US Department of Energy says generating 20% of America’s electricity from wind would require 54,000 MW of offshore turbines; that’s 4,500 turbines with 13,500 blades weighing a combined 1.9 billion pounds!
Has she calculated how many plastic straws (or plastic bags) the United States and world would have to banish to equal that offshore wind trash – much less the entirety of Green New Deal trash?
VP candidate Tim Walz is equally radical on these and other issues. He opposes fracking, supports banning gasoline vehicles, and signed a law requiring that Minnesota generate only “carbon-free” electricity by 2040. Even without including the exorbitant price of grid-backup batteries for windless-sunless periods, that law will likely cost his state nearly $350 billion.”
The Harris-Walz “New Way Forward” on energy, climate and the economy has no connection to reality. It is devoid of any mathematical, engineering or even ecological analysis. It is a disaster waiting for ill-informed voters to inaugurate next January.
Joy and Freedom? Harris-Walz is a highway to Misery and Tyranny.
The Trump-Vance campaign team, candidates for other political offices and each of us individually must do all we can to ensure America’s voters learn the truth before they cast their ballots.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
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