Even more so in the hope of governing like any kind of moderate, President Biden on Wednesday announced plans for what amounts to the New Deal Green under another name, at a cost of about $ 2 trillion and millions of jobs.
The left pretends that his dreams will increase employment, but the reality is already showing. The cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline on Biden’s first day immediately put thousands of people out of work; in the long run, it has aborted around 11,000 jobs, mainly for unionized workers.
Also on its first day, the new prez ordered a 60-day suspension of new drilling licenses for US land and water, allegedly to allow for an impact review. But on Wednesday he made that ban permanent, so obviously, science doesn’t really matter.
Then again, science doesn’t matter much to Joe: in the absence of Keystone, Canada will still export its oil – transporting it on less environmentally friendly railways. What’s green about that?
The economy is also outside the window. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that the drilling ban will cost the US economy $ 700 billion and kill nearly a million jobs by the end of next year.
So much for Biden’s talk in the fall campaign to moderate his green agenda as the nation recovers from the economic damage of the pandemic.
Climate Special Envoy John Kerry sniffs the costs of “what needs to be done” – even admitting that getting the US to zero carbon emissions tomorrow (instead of by 2050 as the president promises) would not be remotely stopping the climate change.
To do this, someone needs to persuade China, India and other developing nations to adopt zero carbon as well. Kerry can get them to offer rhetorical promises in exchange for massive US grants (after all, that is his specialty), but there is no way to damage their own economies just to please Western chattering buffoons.
Not that climate change is the threat of Armageddon that Biden & Co. pretend: if current trends continue, the damage from global warming, etc., would cut only a fraction of global economic growth by the end of the century.
Increasing injustice: as the moratorium only bans new leases, the big companies that have accrued approvals in Trump’s last few months will have some time to catch up, but smaller companies will be left in the dust.
As for politics: Some pretend that only Trump states will suffer. But in New Mexico alone, the oil and gas industry supports 100,000 jobs, with half of its production on federal land.
Better if the price was restricted to basically symbolic actions, such as honoring the spirit of the Paris climate agreement, instead of re-joining it. The fine print in Paris requires an exponential increase in energy costs and lunatic subsidies; economists estimate it will cost the United States millions of jobs in the next decade.
However, as it requires little from China, etc., the deal will only lower average global temperatures by 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. A lot of Western pain; trivial worldwide gain.
They told us that defeating President Donald Trump would take the madman out of Washington. Instead, madness moved from Twitter to the center of policymaking.