Let’s start the conversation with some assumptions. Global warming is real and it is caused by the habits of humans.
The assertions made by Biden’s climate change envoy, John Kerry, that “if we reduced U.S. carbon emissions to zero, we will not solve the problem of global warming” is true. There is a climate change policy that can actually work.
The Armageddons scare our children and voters into thinking the only way we could avoid catastrophe is by spending enough money to destroy our economy without having any scientific data to prove their expenditures will be effective. Without getting China to participate climate change will not be solved.
Obama wasted $500 million of taxpayer money with the Solyndra bankruptcy. Now Biden wants to spend 1,000 times that amount, $500 billion, to make us feel good that America can go to zero emissions. This money will be spent on a workforce to clean our forests, convert commercial buildings to emit less carbon, railroad, and electronic vehicles infrastructure to lower American carbon emissions. EV infrastructure is a gift to the rich as the average cost of an EV is $56,430.
Workers at the lower end of the income spectrum do not spend $56,000 for a vehicle. Setting up an army of people to clean up our forests to stop forest fires is wasteful spending. It was decades of environmental mismanagement in California that created a tinderbox of dead trees that contributed to these fires.
Biden’s plan has been more subsidies for wind and solar. Wind and solar need to be subsidized because they are expensive sources of energy and they are not reliable when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. In the end, only 17% of our energy needs by the year 2030 will be renewables and most of those renewables will come from more reliable hydroelectricity, as determined by the US Energy Information Administration 2019a report.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014 report has endorsed actions that could positively affect climate change. The IPCC did not report that we would endure a catastrophe if this problem was not solved in 12 years. We can mitigate climate change through innovation. We have been innovating in the energy industry since we were deriving energy in the 1700s and 1800s from whale oil. Fearing that we would run out of whales, we innovated and found alternative reliable and efficient ways to generate electricity through the centuries.
In the 1960s, experts thought that with the number of gas engines in California on the road, the smog would overtake the residents. One solution would have been to tell people to stop driving. That would destroy the livelihoods of many Californians. Instead, with American innovations in the 1970s, we invented a $200 device called the catalytic converter. That innovation has allowed many more citizens to drive more miles with dramatically better air quality. America is the world’s best innovator. Let’s finance that innovation.
The next solution to our global warming problem would be through adaptation. We have adapted to rising sea levels over the years with coastline protection programs. These programs implemented will cost much less than the damage from coastal flooding if we do not act in the area.
This brings us to the issue of research and development. We can employ a small part of our national budget with the National Science Foundation to advance possible solutions to global warming. Once these developments seem like they could actually work, private industry can take over and bring the research to realistic solutions to our problem. These actions can be further explained in the book False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg.
Some environmental extremists want to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at activities that will not solve our climate change problem. Their motive is to severely weaken our free enterprise economy so we will not use fossil fuels. The Armageddon policymakers know that wind and solar energy sources will not be cost-effective for decades. They want to enact policies that make fossil fuels much more expensive compared to wind and solar. This strategy will put a heavy tax on our workers, particularly those at the lower end of the income spectrum.
We have the League of Conservation Voters out with campaign ads promoting the Democratic candidates who support the hundreds of billions of dollars of spending taxpayer money. They show pictures of workers building solar panels, saying that these climate change expenditures will produce millions of good-paying jobs. Those solar panels will be built with slave labor in China. We have millions of good-paying jobs now going begging because our workers do not have the skill set to be employed in these jobs now.
The former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Saikat Chakrabarti, told Washington Gov. Inslee’s climate director that the Green New Deal was about changing our economy, not about climate change. That means destroying our free enterprise system. If you vote for the candidates supported by groups like the League of Conservation Voters, I believe you are voting to destroy our free enterprise system and your job.
(Joseph Mendola lives in Warner.)