No Savings With ‘Green’ Energy: It’s 4 To 6 Times MORE Expensive

Cheap, alternative energy is the big lie of the century. It’s also a blatant oxymoron. If Biden and his United Nations cronies force us into the “Green New Deal”, we will be facing a minimum of a tripling of energy prices plus serious energy disruptions in the national energy grid. ⁃ TN Editor

By: Stephen Moore and E.J. Antoni via The Epoch Times May 20, 2022

President Joe Biden keeps claiming that wind and solar energy are going to save money for consumers. But more government subsidies to “renewable energy” is a key feature of the White House anti-inflation strategy recently announced by Biden.

He probably got that idea from John Kerry, the administration’s climate czar, who recently claimed that “solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas.” Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Transportation secretary, makes the same claims about the thousands of dollars that motorists can save if they buy electric cars.

This couldn’t be more wrong.

Proponents of “green” energy boondoggles are often masters at playing with the numbers, because that is the only way that wind and solar electricity generation make any sense. Advocates such as Kerry love to focus on the low operating costs of solar and wind since they don’t require constant purchases of fuel. Ignoring the relatively short lifespan of solar and wind components, as well as the high initial investment, can make it appear as though solar and wind operate at lower costs than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Let’s get the facts straight. The cost isn’t just what you pay at the retail level for gas or power. It also includes the taxes you pay to subsidize the power. A 2017 study by the Department of Energy found that for every dollar of government subsidy per BTU unit of energy produced from fossil fuels, wind and solar get at least $10.

That’s anything but a money saver.

The reason the subsidies are so high is that solar and wind have additional costs compared to their more reliable competition. “Green” energy sources are non-dispatchable, meaning their output can’t be changed to match demand. The wind doesn’t blow harder, and the sun doesn’t shine brighter, just because electricity use is peaking.

Conversely, fossil fuel entities—such as a coal plant—can ramp up generation when we need it most and ramp down when demand falls.

Widespread adoption of solar and wind generation would necessitate expensive batteries on a large scale to ensure that people still have power when the wind stops blowing or when the sun stops shining—like it does every single night.

So, unlike reliable and flexible natural gas, solar and wind require large-scale storage solutions: massive banks of batteries that are hardly environmentally friendly but are also extremely expensive. And since batteries don’t last forever, they add to both the initial expense and maintenance costs during the life of a solar or wind energy generating station.

The same problem exists with electric cars. The sticker price on EVs is considerably higher than for conventional gas-operated cars, and the so-called savings over time assume that the electric power for recharging is free. But it isn’t and power costs are rising almost as fast as gas prices.

Factors such as these are consistently ignored by Kerry and other “green” energy activists.

To genuinely evaluate dissimilar energy sources and provide an apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administration uses the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and the Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS). These measures consider the initial costs, the lifespan of generation and storage systems, maintenance and fuel costs, decommissioning expenses, subsidies, etc., and compare that to how much electricity is produced over a power plant’s lifetime.

The numbers don’t lie: “green” energy is a complete waste of resources.

The LCOE and LCOS for solar and on-shore wind farms are four times as expensive as natural gas. But offshore wind takes the cake—it’s six times as expensive as natural gas.

Imagine paying four to six times as much every month for the same electricity! That’s the green paradise world that the Biden administration wants for America.

Yet, it’s even worse than that because electric power costs greatly affect the cost of producing nearly everything else. In the case of producing aluminum, for example, a third of the total production cost is electricity alone.

Imagine what quadrupling electricity prices would do to the prices of all the goods and services that people buy. If you think inflation is bad now, just wait until the nation is dependent on wind and solar—then you’ll see REAL price increases.

And despite official government data contradicting its own claims, the Biden administration—including Kerry—continues spouting simple untruths on wind and solar. They hope no one will check their fantastic facts.

To the left, wanting it to be true makes it true.

All the while, the middle class is being crushed by $4-a-gallon gasoline, and businesses everywhere are buckling under $5-per-gallon diesel. The Wall Street Journal warns that electric power blackouts could be coming because of overreliance on wind and solar power.

At some point, if this push for green energy continues, the whole nation will start to look like California, where gas is $6 a gallon, the lights go out, and electric cars are stranded because of rolling blackouts. If that’s our “green” future, then Americans should want nothing to do with it.

 

The fall of Chile is a warning to America

Stephen Moore notes once-free nation has arrived at 'equality': 'Nearly everyone is suffering'

By Stephen Moore March 25, 2021

 

Back in the 1970s, the nation of Chile embarked on one of the boldest sets of free market economic reforms in history. The government called in the Chicago Boys, as they were called, led by Milton Friedman and other University of Chicago free market economists.

They were given a free hand to redesign the Chilean economic system with property rights, a low flat tax, privatization of the Social Security system and industry deregulation. In 1991, Friedman wrote that Chile now "has all three things: political freedom, human freedom and economic freedom. Chile will continue to be an interesting experiment to watch to see whether it can keep all three."

For four decades, the experiment worked better than anyone could have imagined. According to a study by economist Axel Kaiser for the Cato Institute: 

"Between 1975 and 2015 per capita income in Chile quadrupled to $23,000, the highest rate in Latin America. As a result, from the early 1980s to 2014 poverty fell from 45 percent to 8 percent." 

Chile became one of the wealthiest nations in South America. And it happened in three decades, an eye blink of history.  The Marxists and intellectual class of Latin America always hated the free market reforms. They disparaged the Chicago Boys as "fascists." They spent decades attacking the policies (with the stooges in the American media echoing their protests), even as Chile became the jewel of South America.  The Marxists invented a narrative of "inequality":

 "The rich were getting richer, and the poor were getting poorer, and capitalism is evil."  

They infiltrated all of Chile's cultural institutions: the media, the schools, the universities, the Catholic Church, the arts, the unions and even the corporate boardrooms. They spread their poisonous creed of collectivism to the populace.

Is any of this sounding familiar to our situation today?

Eventually, the leftists pulled off a political coup. In 2013, the left won the Chilean presidency. The free market reforms were systematically replaced with "spread the wealth" platitudes. In October 2020, voters approved a rewrite of the constitution, and now property rights and the rule of law are in danger.  Chile is now in economic free fall. The poor are getting crushed. The rich are pulling their money out of the country. They have arrived at "equality": 

Nearly everyone is suffering.

Meanwhile, back in America, we have an economic transformation of our own going on. The Biden administration promises to help the middle class by handing out trillions of dollars of free money to citizens and paying people more money for not working than working. We will borrow trillions of dollars and pray that the Chinese continue to buy up our bonds and that our currency holds up.

Many of our constitutional protections and congressional rules of behavior, such as the filibuster, which protects the rights of the minority, may be headed to the shredder. The election laws are getting rewritten to benefit, significantly, the party now in power – the Democrats. The House has passed a bill requiring millions of working-class people to join unions and pay dues. The left is saying, don't worry, this compulsion is going to help the working class. Sure.

A sock-it-to-the-rich tax increase is coming that will make the productive class and the job creators pay their "fair share" with tax rates of 50%, 60% and 70%.

Will this story have a happy ending?

The answer to that question might be contained in the frightening example of what happened in Chile. It is what our children and college students should be learning in the classrooms – fat chance. The left runs our schools now, too.

Stephen Moore: Bad News for Progressives: It's Still a Conservative Country

 By Stephen Moore | December 1, 2020 @ CNSNews

It's not exactly clear how it happened. No one expected it, least of all the media and pollsters. But that promised big blue wave of Democratic victories across the country turned instead into a red tidal wave from coast to coast. Most progressive ballot issues in the states — from tax increases to racial preferences — also came crashing down.

A big reason for this turnaround in the election was the massive turnout for President Donald Trump on Election Day. The irony is that Trump's coattails pulled hundreds of Republicans over the goal line — but they didn't save him from an apparent razor-tight defeat.

So, how deep were the losses for the Democrats? In the U.S. House, Nancy Pelosi thought her troops would gain 10 to 12 seats. Instead, they lost, at last count, nine.

But the real carnage was in the state houses. Hold on to your hats; here is the latest from our allies at the American Legislative Exchange Council. The GOP gained a total of 192 House and 40 Senate seats. Republicans flipped control of three chambers.

As a result of these big and improbable wins, Republicans now have majority control in both House and Senate chambers in 31 of 50 states. Democrats have control in only 18 states. That's a map of the USA that looks awfully red throughout middle America, with only the rusting Northeast and the West Coast colored blue.

What is truly stunning about this story is that Democrats and liberal/progressive donors (Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, et al.) poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the states to take over legislatures with unprecedented spending in Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The American Legislative Exchange Council president, Lisa Nelson, estimates that Democrats outspent Republicans "at least 3-to-1 in the states." And all they got was a lousy T-shirt.

Money just doesn't buy you love with voters.

Speaking of money, voters don't want politicians taking more of it from them. In Illinois, Colorado, and California, major tax hikes lost, and tax cuts were approved by voters. Racial preferences, rent control, and pro-union measures went down in flames in California — the cradle of progressive wacko ideas.

Even Democrats admit that their party's embrace of socialism was a major turnoff to voters. Rep. Abigail Spanberger from Virginia won her race, but she isn't a happy camper.

"We need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again," she says. Democrats, she angrily continued, "lost good members because of that."

Of course, Republicans seemingly lost by a razor's edge the prize of the White House, which is a stinging defeat for conservatism. But no one in modern times has turned out voters like Donald J. Trump. Even USA Today admits that it was the big "Trump turnout" that swung state and local elections in a conservative direction.

If the Democrats govern as the party of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they can expect even deeper losses in 2022. They may even suffer their ultimate nightmare, a return to the White House by Trump in 2024. Trumpism and putting America first are still alive and well.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy."

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The Internet Under Siege

Stephen Moore May 08, 2018 @ Townhall

What is it about the internet that makes it so the government just can't seem to keep its greedy paws off of it?

Every few years Congress makes a play to regulate and tax the internet, and free marketeers need to be ever vigilant in swatting them down.

First, we have the threat of a new tax on internet sales even when the company in question has no physical presence in the state. Forcing companies to pay for state and local services they don't use: This is simply a revenue grab by states, to the tune of as much as $100 billion. This will make online shopping more expensive.

Now we have Congress trying to reimpose a complex regulatory structure on wireless internet service providers. This will effectively treat the folks who bring the internet into your home or office like public utilities.

This so-called "net neutrality" regulation is intended to provide broad access to the internet for homeowners and businesses, and to ensure "fair" pricing. These rules were first imposed by the Obama administration's anti-business hyper-regulators in 2015.

The Trump administration's Federal Communications Commission wisely overturned the regulations. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai argued that without the rule, consumers are more likely to get whatever content they want whenever they want it at prices that are likely to continue to fall. Congress will vote soon on whether to bring the heavy-handed regulatory structure back.

Let's start with the basics here. For the last 25 years, the internet has been the Wild West of entrepreneurship, investment, creativity and economic expansion. It was a spontaneous combustion of information age activity that continues to add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of wealth.

Most importantly, it all happened outside the realm of government edicts, taxes and subsidies. The benefits of the internet spread at quicksilver speed. More than 80 percent of households had internet access within a decade.

As the technology expands into broadband and wireless services, access widens and prices fall every day. This is arguably the greatest laissez faire triumph in world history.

Net neutrality rules don't broaden access to new powerful and high-speed internet services. When these regulations were in force, they reduced investment. A Morgan Stanley research report noted that wireless service providers stalled under the Obama-era rules.

CTIA, which is the industry group representing the wireless providers, has released the investment numbers from its members. Annual wireless capital investment grew from $25 billion in 2010 to $33 billion in 2013, an increase of $8 billion, or 33 percent.

Then in the three years the FCC was threatening to impose "net neutrality" -- 2014, 2015, 2016 -- annual wireless capital investment was basically flat. It fell by $5.6 billion the first full year of the Obama FCC's new rules.

Verizon and AT&T have pledged billions of dollars of new investment now that the net neutrality rules are gone. This also means the creation of tens of thousands of new high-paying jobs. Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute estimated that app-economy jobs have grown at a compound annual rate of 30 percent per year in the last five years, while overall U.S. job growth was less than 3 percent.

If the price control rules are brought back and the return on investment is lower, wireless companies are less likely to make the multibillion-dollar infrastructure investments in the first place. So in that case, no one benefits.

In this age of broadband cables, wireless and other technologies for internet services, the best way to ensure affordable prices is free market competition. Net neutrality means slower, clunkier and less reliable internet services.

This is the biggest danger of all from net neutrality regulations. We need tens of billions of dollars of added investment to ensure against internet traffic jams in the future. In 2013, America's wireless networks carried 3.2 trillion megabytes of data traffic. Today, that traffic is four times larger. And the demand will likely continue to multiply at these paces over the next decade at least.

How is all that digital information and video streaming going to get transported without profit incentives to invest?

Washington loves to talk about the "infrastructure crisis." Vital internet infrastructure investment won't cost a dime of taxpayer money.

It will provide our schools, families and businesses almost unlimited access to volumes of information, entertainment and data that all of the supercomputers of the world in the 1970s couldn't offer even at a cost of billions of dollars. Now it will be available to Americans for pennies.

All we need for this information-rich future is to have the government get out of the way. Is that really so hard?

Get Ready for a Congressional Budget Blowout

Stephen Moore Posted: Jan 23, 2018 @ Townhall

No one is paying much attention, but Congress is preparing a two-year budget that would blow past bipartisan spending caps to the tune of $216 billion through 2019.

That might be a best-case scenario. The budget watchers at FreedomWorks estimate that when hurricane disaster relief, funding for the border wall, added Obamacare money for the bankrupt insurance markets, and other last-minute spending "emergencies" are thrown in the mix, the two-year spending blitz could exceed $300 billion.

President Donald Trump had better get his veto pen handy.

All of this is happening because Republicans have fallen into the Democrats' fiscal trap. To secure more money for national defense, Democrats are demanding an equal amount of extra funding for domestic social welfare programs. So to get an additional $108 billion for the Pentagon, the Republicans may agree to another $108 billion-plus in ransom money for domestic agencies. But when all the emergency funding is included, the ratio could be closer to $2 of additional domestic spending for every $1 of increased military funding. What a deal.

If this deal were to get cut, any pretense of fiscal discipline and debt control would be officially and irrevocably washed away. "Almost no one here on either side of the aisle wants to control spending," Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky tells me. "It's sad, but it's the new reality."

This is happening when the $4 trillion federal budget is expected to exceed $5 trillion within eight years. The $20.6 trillion debt is already headed to $30 trillion over the next decade -- even without this new spending spree.

This would also be a nail in the coffin of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which instituted spending caps and sequester cuts if those caps are exceeded. The BCA caps have worked remarkably well as a deterrent to the very kind of spending blowout that Congress is considering.

 

After the BCA was installed, during Barack Obama's first term as president (and after Republicans seized control of Congress), federal spending fell for three years in a row -- from $3.6 trillion in 2011 to $3.51 trillion in 2014. That was the first time that had happened since the 1950s. The caps have shaved more than $1 trillion from the spending that was supposed to happen without them.
Given that the caps are a success, why scrap them now?

The answer is that the caps have worked too well. The pro-spending lobby in both parties has come to despise the fiscal handcuffs of budget caps and the threat of across-the-board sequester cuts.

This fiscal retreat has exposed fiscal hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. Republicans purport to be the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government, but they are all too eager to be removed from the BCA cage. Meanwhile, Democrats, who unanimously moaned that the Trump tax cuts would blow a hole in the deficit (ignoring the impact on the economy), are willing accomplices in this fiscal jailbreak, which would cost the Treasury much more in the long term.

But it wouldn't be Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi who would get blamed for the financial mess left behind. Voters would surely wonder why Republicans, who are in charge, let this surge in spending and debt happen on their watch.

A $300 billion spending spree would be no way to drain the swamp. But it would be a good way for the GOP to find itself back in the minority after this year's midterm elections. President Trump may want to use his veto pen to save Republicans from themselves.

 

Now Hear This!

Stephen MooreJune 12, 2017

Good news for the hard of hearing — if the FDA is kept in check. I’m technically disabled‎ — but not mentally disabled the way some of my foes on CNN seem to believe. No, my disability is hearing loss (in one ear I’m nearly deaf).

I have to turn the TV up so loud the neighbors say they can hear it in the house next door. My friends complain that watching TV with me is like watching the Saturday Night Live version of Garrett Morris shouting into the camera to provide news for the hard of hearing.

There are some 30 million Americans like me suffering from severe to moderate hearing loss. Not being able to hear precisely what people are saying is an occupational handicap for sure.

I also lose my prescription hearing aid at least 3 or 4 times a year. These little gizmos are expensive, costing as much as $3,000 (I can’t get insurance anymore because of my pre-existing condition of carelessness), and so having access to cheaper over-the-counter hearing devices is an attractive option.

Granted, the non-prescription aids don’t work aswell, but in a pinch they sure work a lot better than no hearing aid at all. ‎Some of the devices at Walmart are so cheap, they are practically disposable.

Congress will soon vote on a bill called the OTC Hearing Aid Act that would allow much easier access to over the counter hearing aids. And get this. The bill is bipartisan, sponsored by Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Warren (D-MA) and Representatives Blackburn (R-TN) and Kennedy (D-MA). (This may be the first and last time I’ve ever been on the side of Elizabeth Warren!).

Here’s why this bill is important to the health and well-being of millions of Americans like me. According to the NASEM report, Hearing Health Care for Adults, more than two-thirds of the 30 million people in the U.S. with hearing loss may benefit from hearing aids but do not use them.
Why don’t they? Too expensive. A 2014 report by the CTA finds that the high price for prescription aids are a major barrier to consumers. Prescription hearing aids typically cost $1,000 to $6,000, or about10 times more than the cost of OTC aids — typically, $100 to $500.

Current law prohibits over the counter PSAPS (personal sound amplification performance systems) from making any claim to treat hearing loss. The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates hearing aids, places prohibitions on advertising for these cheaper devices, because the regulators say they don’t significantly improve hearing. ‎ I can personally attest that PSAPs do help, especially when standing in a crowded room with a ‎lot of ambient noise or talking on the phone.

Under the new law PSAPS could be marketed and sold as a more affordable hearing aid alternative to people with hearing loss. The highest quality prescription hearing aids that are personalized and fitted for each patient and superior in quality would still be available and regulated by the FDA. 

This would seem to be a no-brainer. It would drive down prices for all hearing devices by increasing choice and competition. ‎ The opponents to the bill are the doctors and the manufacturers of the expensive aids are against competition — of course. It’s the same rent seeking lobbying that taxicab companies use to keep Uber out of cities.

What we have here is a classic case of regulation that is promoted by the industry that is regulated in order to keep prices high and keep out cheaper alternatives — all under the phony guise of “consumer protection.”

We now have over the counter reading glasses and over the counter painkillers and over the counter flu medicines. These options don’t prevent people from getting prescriptions for the heavier drug dosage or more personalized ‎contacts and eye glasses. Thanks to the Internet, consumers are much smarter and cost-conscious about what their range of choices are than 20 years ago.

One worry is that this new law will give the FDA new powers to regulate OTC devices.

Conservatives should be arguing that there is no compelling reason for the FDA to be regulating this industry at all. You’re not going to die if you get snookered and buy a bad hearing aid.

This should be the first step in a conservative pro-consumer crusade to severely limit FDA regulations on the sale of scores of medical devices and drugs — where there is no issue of endangerment.

Why does the FDA have to regulate hearing aids, dental and skin care products, Viagra, wheel chairs, and so on?

Everyone in Washington in both parties keeps saying they are for “affordable care.” Here’s one way they can make that a reality for tens of millions of Americans.

Is anyone listening?

2016’s biggest loser: Big Green

Voters turned thumbs down on the climate change lobby and rightly so

By Stephen Moore Sunday, January 1, 2017 @ The Washington Times

The day after the presidential elections the executive director of the Sierra Club glumly called the Donald Trump victory “deeply disturbing for the nation and the planet.” Well, yes, if you’re a climate change alarmist who hates fossil fuels, you’re in for a bad four and maybe eight years.

Greenpeace executive director Annie Leonard was even more apocalyptic saying: 

“I never thought I’d have to write this. The election of Donald Trump as president has been devastating There’s no question, Donald Trump’s climate denial is staggering. He wants to shut down the EPA, cancel the Paris Climate Agreement, stop funding clean energy research and drill baby drill.” 

Ah, but if this is so crazy, why did he win?

The short answer is that Americans went to the polls and rejected environmental extremism among other things. The biggest loser on election night was the Big Green movement in America dedicated to the anti-prosperity proposition that to save the planet from extinction we have deindustrialize the U.S. and throw millions and millions of our fellow citizens out of their jobs. Voters turned thumbs down on the climate change lobby and rightly so.

It may seem an exaggeration to say that the radical leftist green groups want to throw working class Americans out of their jobs — but it isn’t. They openly admit it.

The Sierra Club actually declared “victory” last year when it helped push several of America’s leading coal production companies into bankruptcy. Sierra Club spokeswoman, Lena Moffit, took credit for destroying coal production in America, but she neglected to mention the tens of thousands of miners, truckers, construction workers, and other blue collar workers who lost their jobs due to the Sierra Club campaign. What humanitarians these people are.

Ms. Moffit promised that the Sierra Club will “bring the same expertise that we brought to taking down the coal industry and coal-fired power in this country to taking on gas in the same way to ensure that we’re moving to a 100% clean energy future.”.

Wait a minute. There are an estimated 10 million Americans who are directly or indirectly employed by the oil and gas and coal industries. The left wants to put every one of these people out of a job?

Will they use Stalinistic worker relocation programs to pull this off? And by the way, someone might want to inform these self-proclaimed scientific geniuses that natural gas is clean energy.

Fortunately, we learned on election day that voters aren’t as alarmed as the alarmists are. Almost none of the voters that I met in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, or Michigan had anything but contempt for the climate change fanatics. They view this as another attempt by Washington to run their lives and completely ignore their economic plight in favor of grandiose dreams of the government somehow changing the weather.

In so many ways climate change was one of the primary issues that allowed Donald Trump to crash through the blue wall of the industrial Midwest. The Democrats’ preposterous opposition to building the Keystone XL pipeline which could create as many as 10,000 high-paying construction, welding, pipefitting, electrician jobs is emblematic of how the party that is supposed to represent union workers turned their backs on their own members and their families.

The Paris climate change treaty puts America last and forces us to stop using cheap, reliable and abundant domestic fossil fuels while the rest of the world — particularly China and India — are all in on coal. Nobody in Washington seemed to notice that as The Wall Street Journal reported last month: “China’s government will raise coal production by as much as 20% by 2020, ensuring a continuing strong role for the commodity in the country’s energy future.” That’s more than the entire energy usage of Canada in a year. Um, does this sound like a country that has any interest in cutting its carbon emissions? Amazing that the truck drivers in Indiana, and the coal workers in West Virginia, and the steel producers in Ohio get that the rest of the world is laughing at us, and the president of the United States doesn’t.

The surprise of this election is that Democrats were surprised by the mass voter rejection of the radical climate change agenda. Every poll for the last five years at least has shown that climate change barely registers as a leading concern of American voters. Jobs and the economy were always issues number one and two, and global warming was usually close to last on the list. A 2015 Fox News poll found that only 3 percent of Americans believed that climate change was “the most important issue facing America today.” That means 97 percent disagreed with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernard Sanders and Tom Steyer that global warming was the greatest threat to America. This didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from telling West Virginians that she would put every coal miner out of a job. Then she wonders why she got crushed in this unionized historically reliable Democratic state.

The issue that now confronts Democrats is whether they can reconnect with blue collar union voters by disassociating themselves from the fanatical greens that are trying to destroy union blue collar jobs. It won’t be easy. Environmental groups are said to be raising record hauls of cash from their millionaire and billionaire donors since the election. Ultra-green environmentalists like Tom Steyer may call the party’s tunes, but then don’t be surprised when millions of blue collar middle-class workers flee to the Republicans.

Something has to give in the Democratic Party. My prediction is that Democrats will only make a comeback in American politics when they throw crazies like Tom Steyer, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace off the bus and start listening to the everyday concerns of working-class Americans again.

The day after the presidential elections the executive director of the Sierra Club glumly called the Donald Trump victory “deeply disturbing for the nation and the planet.” Well, yes, if you’re a climate change alarmist who hates fossil fuels, you’re in for a bad four and maybe eight years.

Greenpeace executive director Annie Leonard was even more apocalyptic saying: “I never thought I’d have to write this. The election of Donald Trump as president has been devastating There’s no question, Donald Trump’s climate denial is staggering. He wants to shut down the EPA, cancel the Paris Climate Agreement, stop funding clean energy research and drill baby drill.” Ah, but if this is so crazy, why did he win?

The short answer is that Americans went to the polls and rejected environmental extremism among other things. The biggest loser on election night was the Big Green movement in America dedicated to the anti-prosperity proposition that to save the planet from extinction we have deindustrialize the U.S. and throw millions and millions of our fellow citizens out of their jobs. Voters turned thumbs down on the climate change lobby and rightly so.

It may seem an exaggeration to say that the radical leftist green groups want to throw working class Americans out of their jobs — but it isn’t. They openly admit it.

The Sierra Club actually declared “victory” last year when it helped push several of America’s leading coal production companies into bankruptcy. Sierra Club spokeswoman, Lena Moffit, took credit for destroying coal production in America, but she neglected to mention the tens of thousands of miners, truckers, construction workers, and other blue collar workers who lost their jobs due to the Sierra Club campaign. What humanitarians these people are.

Ms. Moffit promised that the Sierra Club will “bring the same expertise that we brought to taking down the coal industry and coal-fired power in this country to taking on gas in the same way to ensure that we’re moving to a 100% clean energy future.”.

• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Fox news contributor.

Hillary’s Enablers

Editor's note:  This was published in The American Spectator on October 18, 2016, and now that we know the outcome, I think this is worth repeating. 

Stephen Moore

 

If they’re both no good, why accede to the one who represents everything you disdain?   The Never Trump snobs on the right are a strange lot. They not only predict that Donald Trump will lose the election. They WANT him to lose to Hillary—perhaps because they will feel vindicated. They are more closely aligned with the far left in the Democratic Party than the grassroots conservative activists of the Republican Party.
 

They are the tools and enablers of the left. Many have publicly denounced the Trump-Pence ticket and have embraced Hillary almost joyously.

What I don’t get about the prominent Republican defectors who have declared they are now for Hillary is why they get this weird high off being praised by the leftists in the media. Is it really that important to them to be back on the invite list for the next Press Club Dinner?

Yes, I am offended by many of Trump’s actions and words. Who isn’t? But who isn’t offended and frightened more by every word uttered and action taken by Hillary Clinton? I’d vote for my pet frog over Hillary Clinton, but alas, he’s not running.

How many leftists in the media or in the Democratic Party have renounced their candidate now that Hillary Clinton and her top campaign operatives have exposed themselves in emails as anti-Catholic and anti-Evangelical bigots? The left keeps asking, how can Christians still support Donald Trump for President? Here’s one answer: she’s for our legal form of infanticide and he’s not. She’s an anti-Catholic bigot and he’s not. It will be the day that hell freezes over that the media writes a column asking: how can any Catholic in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton?

Even if you believe that Clinton and Trump are louts (one a womanizer and the other a serial liar), why vote for the lout who will raise taxes, put three more Sotomayors on the Supreme Court, cripple our energy industry, double down on Obamacare, support partial birth abortion, and worship at the green altar of climate change? Why not vote for the lout who will do the opposite?

Why can’t the Republican party leaders attack Hillary every time they are in front of a microphone or camera? It is not as if she isn’t offering a big target on her chest.

Some say that Trump is deranged, even unhinged. You want to hear deranged? Listen to the leftists leading the charge against Trump. USA Today ran a rant last week by a professor at Princeton who wrote tongue-in-cheek about the Orwellian future if Trump wins: “Some continued to resist Trump’s efforts to Make America Great Again. To prevent them from undermining his policies, many African Americans, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Hispanics, and nonconformists were sent to labor camps for re-education and potential deportation.”

This is funny? All that was missing was a reference to gas chambers. USA Today is supposed to be a semi-respectable paper and it’s a sign of the anti-Trump obsession in the media that they print such vile words? There is a lunatic who is unhinged here, but it isn’t Donald Trump. And by the way, we already have re-education camps in America, and they are called the public schools.

What is more troubling to me than the rapid-fire assaults on Trump—many of which, alas, he brought upon himself—is the denigration of his voters. We’re learning that it isn’t just Hillary Clinton who thinks they are a “deplorable” bunch of racists, xenophobes, and homophobes. (Hillary lied when she said in the last debate “I was talking about YOU, not your voters.” Listen to the tape. And listen to the laughter and applause from her millionaire contributors.) As Trump has faltered in recent days, the Never Trumpers on the right have almost triumphantly assailed the voters who have rallied so mightily and hopefully around him.

Trumpism is now ridiculed on left and right as a group of “dumbed down” voters, “white supremacists,” and even “contemptibles.” Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and now a columnist for the Washington Post, argues victoriously that Trump’s “fate is deserved.” He calls Trump voters those who “hold an absurdly simplistic anti-establishment attitude.” Yes, what a strong defense by someone who is of the very establishment that he and so many others marinated in the elite Washington culture defend.

We’d better dare not elect someone with “an outsider persona who lacks actual political skills” or else—what? We might get a president who is asleep at the switch before the biggest financial crisis in 75 years, or a president who runs up trillion dollar deficits, or gives hundreds of billions of dollars away to the banks, throws millions of Americans out of their jobs, puts 40 million people on food stamps, and regulates the light bulbs, toilets, and washing machines in our homes?

Oh wait. That already has happened under Bush and Obama, which is strange because they are so “politically skilled.” If it is an “insider” not an outsider, there is no better candidate in all of America than Hillary Clinton, America’s queen “public servant.” She has nearly $1 billion of special interest money to trash the outsider who wants to toss over the apple cart in Washington. Do the anti-Trump misogynists even get the irony of their calling Donald Trump a misogynist?

When I first met with Donald Trump many months ago, the first thing I told him was: Donald, I don’t know if I love you, but I sure love your voters. I don’t always agree with them—on issues like immigration and trade. But what I’ve come to discover is that it is the Trump movement, more so than Donald Trump himself, that is an existential threat to the establishment elites on the right and left. They are the front-line victims of government in Washington run amok. One Trump voter said it well to me at a recent rally in Colorado Springs: “All we want from government is less of it.”

They understand basic economics in ways the elite in both parties do not. They understand that a great nation cannot continue to borrow $1 trillion year after year; put 40 million people on food stamps, nationalize its health care industry, shut down our mines and our oil wells, raise taxes by $1.5 trillion as a way to make the economy grow faster, or regulate our employers out of business. They understand that for at least half of Americans, the “recovery” has never happened.

Frankly, the people who don’t get that are the ones who are pretty “dumb.”

Win or lose on November 8, we are not going away.

The True Reason Gas Prices are Falling (Hint: It’s Not Because of Green Energy)

Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore, who formerly wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, is chief economist at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research.

American workers and motorists got some badly-needed relief this week when the price of oil plunged to its lowest level in years. The oil price has fallen by about 25 percent since its peak back in June of $105 a barrel. This is translating to lower prices at the pump with many states now below $3 a gallon.m  At present levels, these lower oil and gas prices are the equivalent of a $200 billion cost saving to American consumers and businesses. That’s $200 billion a year we don’t have to send to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other foreign nations. Now that’s an economic stimulus par excellence.

There are many global reasons why gas prices are falling, but the major one isn’t being widely reported. America has become in the last several years an energy-producing powerhouse. And sorry, Mr. President, I’m not talking about the niche “green energy” sources you are so weirdly fixated with......To Read More......