The Dems war against energy

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With the 2022 midterm elections less than four months away, a New York Times/Siena College poll revealed that just 1 percent of registered voters viewed climate change as a “top priority,” let alone the most important issue facing the nation. The poll placed climate change far behind concerns about inflation, the economy, record crime rates, and the humanitarian crisis on America’s southern border. Even among voters younger than 30 -- the demographic that is typically most energized by debates about environmental policy -- the corresponding figure was a mere 3 percent.

The same poll showed that public concern about climate change has actually declined significantly from the already-low levels of concern documented by previous surveys. In the summer of 2020, climate change ranked a lowly eleventh in a Pew Research Center poll. In September 2020, a Gallup poll likewise found that climate change ranked eleventh in a list of registered voters’ top concerns – well behind such items as the economy, terrorism/national security, the COVID-19 pandemic, health care, education, race relations, gun policy, crime, abortion, and immigration.

Notwithstanding the public’s consistent and overwhelming lack of concern about climate change as an urgent problem, the main concern of the Biden administration and the entire agenda of the Democrat Party has been, and continues to be, driven by this issue. In the words of President Joe Biden, “climate change poses an existential threat” – in fact, the chief existential threat to the United States – greater than terrorism, or Chinese expansionism, or the invasion by 2,400,000 unvetted illegal migrants annually across America’s broken southern border.

So obsessive is the focus of Democrat leaders on the alleged “existential threat of climate change,” that a centerpiece of their policies to oppose it is a war on fossil fuels, beginning with the cancelling of the Keystone pipeline, the shutting down of the ANWR oil field in Alaska, and the refusal for more than 17 months to sell oil-and-gas drilling leases on federal lands. An economic consensus which includes such influential voices as former Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, has singled out the war on fossil fuels as the chief driver of rising gas prices and the record inflation in the economy as a whole. Yet, despite the lack of public support, and the immediate destructive consequences of the anti-climate change policies, the radical leadership of the Democrat policy is adamant in pursuing them. According to Bernie Sanders, a lifetime supporter of communist dictators and bankrupt socialist regimes, “the climate crisis is not only the single greatest challenge facing our country,” but “is also our single greatest opportunity to build a more just and equitable future,” by which he means a bankrupt, socialist dictatorship. 

How is it possible that there should be such a disconnect between a democratic government and its constituents? How was such a radical consensus formed over such a controversial and contested issue – a consensus so strong and so anti-democratic that by 2022 it had resulted in the lowest approval ratings ever recorded for a sitting president and his political party? The answer can be found in the vast network of tax-exempt foundations and advocacy groups, unscrutinized and accountable to no one, that developed the analyses and policy recommendations that make up the “Green New Deal” in the decades prior to its official launch in 2019.

When Democrat Senator Ed Markey and former bartender and current congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez first announced the Green New Deal in February 2019, it was already supported by 600 leftist organizations as well as 67 House Members and 11 U.S. Senators -- all Democrats.

What was this Shadow Party’s agenda? The Green New Deal calls for the U.S. economy to achieve “net zero greenhouse gas emissions” by the year 2030 and, in the words of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, to “transition off all nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible.” The Green New Deal would also mandate: (a) trillions of dollars in inflationary public expenditures on government-approved, energy-saving “upgrades” and “retrofits” of all existing homes and businesses in the United States, and (b) zero-carbon standards for all new building construction.

In addition to doing away with nuclear reactors and fossil fuels, the Green New Deal seeks to raise the living standards of “low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, [and] the front-line communities most affected by climate change, pollution, and other environmental harm.” Toward that end, it aims to guarantee that members of those demographics will be preferentially trained and hired to fill federal “green jobs” that will pay them at least $15-per-hour to implement the aforementioned upgrades, retrofits, and construction projects, thereby helping them to enjoy a “just transition” from their previous occupations to the new “green economy.” The premise underlying these training/hiring policies is that some form of economic reparations or wealth transfer program should be put in place to counteract the alleged affects of America’s historical discrimination against nonwhites and the poor. Orchestrating public policy around skin color is unconstitutional and – since the passage of the Civil Rights Act 58 years ago – illegal.

Heartland Institute president Tim Huelskamp summarizes the Green New Deal agendas as “the most radical socialist proposal in modern congressional history…. “[T]heir real desire is to accomplish the Left’s longtime goal of moving the United States toward full adoption of socialism. This isn’t just a theory. Significant provisions of the Green New Deal reveal its true purpose of imposing socialism on an unprecedented scale. The plan would create a ‘basic income program’ and federal jobs guarantee providing a ‘living wage’ to everybody who says they want one. It would impose a federal-government-run, single-payer health care system with bureaucrats and liberal politicians in Washington, D.C. in charge of every American’s health care. It would encourage the Federal Reserve to unleash inflation and create a system of government-owned banks to ‘create’ tens of trillions of dollars needed to fund these immense programs. None of these proposals has anything at all to do with climate change.”

In a July 2019 interview with The Washington Post, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief-of-staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, acknowledged that the Green New Deal had not been devised to protect the environment, but rather, to inject discredited socialist “solutions” into the American economy. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said with great candor, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys [reporters] think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a ‘how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy’ thing.” We don’t say this, but rather conceal it, because if we did we would have to explain why the epic failures of socialist regimes in our lifetimes should not be a red flag against repeating them.

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There is more.

Big Green is a threat to the US economy and American survival.   It should be rejected.  It will impoverish all Americans and endanger the free world.