Sanders and AOC are energy Luddites

Washington Examiner Editorial:

Bernie Sanders wants to be president, and many believe him to be the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. This should scare the dickens out of all workers and everyone investing for retirement.

Here’s one more reason: The socialist senator has declared war on the single industry that nearly everyone, including President Barack Obama, has recognized as essential to the nation’s economic growth and which remains at the heart of its current boom in employment and wages.

Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have each introduced a bill in their respective chambers of Congress that would ban hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

Fracking is the method that has revolutionized oil and gas exploration in the United States, suddenly trebling the amount of recoverable oil and gas and making the nation energy-independent overnight. The Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez campaign to ban fracking is based on discredited, insulting, false, and ignorant claims. Were they to succeed, it would be devastating for the entire nation.

If Democrats nominate Sanders, proposals such as this one will have immediate political consequences. As Dave Wasserman noted this week, Democrats still have a lot of votes to lose below Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance in fracking-friendly areas such as Western Pennsylvania. There are parts of the U.S., some of them in key swing states, where direct and indirect economic benefits of fracking have brought entire dead towns back to life.

And if a fracking ban were actually to go into effect, the economic destruction would result in an even greater political backlash. The U.S. is booming right now in part because of the wealth, jobs, and lower energy prices that fracking has produced while making the U.S. a net energy exporter for the first time in about 80 years.

But politics aside, the Sanders plan, like the plans of all other Democrats who want to limit or abolish fracking, would result in a large increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, you read that correctly. A ban on fracking means we keep using more coal for electricity. Ocasio-Cortez claims to believe that the world is doomed if we don’t stop emitting carbon in 10 years, yet she simultaneously supports a bill that will raise total carbon emissions over the next 10 years.

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The fracking phobia is nonsensical.  Fracking has actually reduced the CO2 emissions in the US to a lower level than that in countries that are still in the flawed Paris Agreement on Climate Change.  It will also help reduce emissions in China and India as those companies switch to LNG shipments from the US.