Background:
Here you go @JoeBiden! pic.twitter.com/UBqPJT85Pt
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2020
August 2020
Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden continues to fly in private jets and be transported in oversized SUV’s despite his call in 2019 to put fossil fuel executives “in jail” for failing to address climate change.
When Biden’s revised climate policy was unveiled, it was celebrated by many progressives as a real shift. Noam Chomsky declared Biden on climate as “farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in memory,” because, he said, the agenda was “largely written by the Sunrise Movement and strongly endorsed by the leading activists on climate change.”
EIA data 2018: Wind & solar met 3% of U.S. energy after $50 billion in subsidies – Fossil Fuels 81%
More solar jobs is a curse, not a blessing – ‘Underscores how wasteful, inefficient & unproductive solar power is’
(This tally does not include electricity generated by nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal power plants.)
* 398,000 natural gas workers = 33.8% of all electricity generated in the United States in 2016
* 160,000 coal employees = 30.4 % of total electricity
* 100,000 wind employees = 5.6% of total electricity
* 374,000 solar workers = 0.9% of total electricity
It’s even more glaring when you look at the amount of electricity generated per worker. Coal generated an incredible 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per worker; natural gas 3,812 MWH per worker; wind a measly 836 MWH for every employee; and solar an abysmal 98 MWH per worker.
In other words, producing the same amount of electricity requires one coal worker, two natural gas workers – 12 wind industry employees or 79 solar workers.
Shellenberger: “I came to understand the environmental implications of the physics of energy. In order to produce significant amounts of electricity from weak energy flows, you just have to spread them over enormous areas. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural. Dealing with energy sources that are inherently unreliable, and require large amounts of land, comes at a high economic cost.”
Bird Blenders: “As for house cats, they don’t kill big, rare, threatened birds. What house cats kill are small, common birds, like sparrows, robins and jays. What kills big, threatened, and endangered birds—birds that could go extinct—like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors, are wind turbines. In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with.”
“In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.”
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Green New Deal Could Cost $93 Trillion, Group Says
The so-called Green New Deal may tally between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over 10-years, concludes American Action Forum, which is run by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who directed the non-partisan CBO from from 2003 to 2005. That includes between $8.3 trillion and $12.3 trillion to meet the plan’s call to eliminate carbon emissions from the power and transportation sectors and between $42.8 trillion and $80.6 trillion for its economic agenda including providing jobs and health care for all.
Climate Tipping Points date back to at least 1864
“As early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh, sometimes said to be the father of American ecology, warned that the earth was ‘fast becoming an unfit home for its “noblest inhabitant,”’ and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.’” —MIT professor Leo Marx
Biden’s Climate Hustle? No Thanks, Joe!
Marc Morano, publisher of the influential Washington DC-based Climatedepot.com, responds, “Joe Biden’s version of the Green New Deal will include a redux from the Obama Administration of ‘investing’ in ‘green’ energy. This will once again sink billions of taxpayers’ dollars into picking winners and losers in the energy industry. We can expect a new round of boondoggles like the failed Solyndra ‘investments’. More money pumped into a future attempt to alter the climate. The only thing we can be certain of is that the climate will not be impacted.” …
“Having wealthy nations ‘pay’ poor nations not to develop their natural resources as the countries see fit is not something to brag about being a ‘champion’ of. In many cases, paying off countries not to develop their natural resources also leads to enriching politicians while the citizens continue to suffer from lack of development and economic growth.”
Steve Milloy: “The only hope the oil-and-gas industry would have in a Biden administration is that there is no substitute for fracking. Power plants could switch out of coal and into natural gas during the 2010s, but they won’t be able to switch out of natural gas and back into coal during the 2020s. On the other hand, American politics are more irrational now than they were during the Obama years. And it isn’t clear that Biden administration regulators would care about relevant realities. A fracking ban? No. Death by a thousand cuts? Bank on it.”
Bloomberg News: Biden’s green energy plan seeks to end natural gas use within 15 years
“During a town hall meeting Thursday, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden again assured shale producers that he wouldn’t ban fracking if elected. Then, in virtually the same breath, he touted his $2 trillion clean-energy plan, which aims to edge natural gas out of the power mix within 15 years…Biden has been careful not to make an enemy of the industry, especially in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, home to the largest U.S. shale-gas field. His policies may even, in the short-term, support the gas market.”
“Biden’s goal of a carbon-neutral grid would severely curb, if not destroy, gas’s share of the pie in favor of cheaper, cleaner renewables.”
Bjorn Lomborg: Trump gutting EPA climate regs show UN Paris treaty is ‘a paper tiger’
