California Gov. Jerry Brown rips oil companies for their “highly destructive product,” while President Obama calls the Koch brothers un-American. The left’s war on what keeps our economy running continues.
Obama apparently sees nothing wrong with burning 25,000 gallons of fuel jetting to Las Vegas to attend Sen. Harry Reid’s conference to push uneconomical “green” alternatives to fossil fuels while demonizing those who disagree with him.
Par for the course. Obama has set a goal of slashing CO2 emissions 26% by 2025, proposing that alternative energy sources such as solar and wind will serve as replacements — a key part of his much broader plan to “fundamentally transform” America.
The problem, contrary to Brown’s foolish remarks, is that fossil fuels are anything but “destructive.” They are in fact the very source of our industrial economy — and our high standard of living.
Fossil fuels made our modern world — with its cars, trucks and public transportation networks, jet planes, hospitals, computers, cell phones, big houses, factories, refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, high-tech medical devices and life-saving medicines — possible.
Today, more than 80% of our energy comes from fossil fuels — not because government mandates their use, but because they’re cheaper, more plentiful and far more efficient than any alternative now available.
Alternative energy can’t compete with fossil fuels without enormous subsidies, taxes and restrictions that will devastate poor Americans. “We know that low-income minority communities would be hardest hit (by federal climate regulations),” EPA administrator Gina McCarthy conceded recently.
Nor can alternative energy fill the fossil fuel void that Obama is creating. “The basic problem is that the process for solar and wind to generate reliable electricity requires so many resources that it has never been cheap and plentiful,” writes Center for Industrial Progress founder Alex Epstein in his book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” “In fact, modern solar and wind technology do not produce reliable energy, period.”
Yet, despite tens of billions in subsidies over the years, solar and wind power — the two forms of alternative energy pushed hardest by Obama and other green Democrats — produce only about 3% of our energy.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates renewables, broadly defined, at about 9% of total energy use by 2040, even with massive subsidies for renewables and punishing taxes on carbon-based fuels.
So this isn’t about science and never was. It’s about power — the political kind. The green movement has spawned a generation of “green” crony capitalists who make billions from leveraging political connections and manipulating “green” regulations to their advantage.
The money involved is immense. According to the Climate Change Business Journal, global climate change has become a $1.5 trillion-a-year industry. This has fueled what might be called “green greed” — the kind that made politician-turned-radical-environmentalist Al Gore into a millionaire many times over.
A new report by the free-market-oriented Energy & Environment Legal Institute (EELI) reveals a “vast, coordinated, three-track effort by public officials and private interests to promote EPA’s expansive, overreaching and economically devastating greenhouse gas rules.” These rules include plans “to shut the nation’s fleet of existing coal-fired power plants, as well as the December Paris climate treaty President Obama is expected to sign to replace the Kyoto Protocol.”
This secret effort, the report says, was part of a coordinated, multimillion-dollar White House plan hatched in December 2013 to push Obama’s climate agenda.
The idea was to link green groups, activist governors, the White House and fat-cat, Democrat-friendly donors such as billionaire Tom Steyer to twist the arms of companies and pressure hesitant politicians to go along with Obama’s economically ruinous plans.
So far, so good. As Craig Richardson, EELI’s legal executive director, notes: “One-percenters are using ‘climate’ policies to destroy politically disfavored industries to transfer wealth to the politically preferred.”
It seems Obama promised a carbon-free future but delivered something else: Crony environmentalism.
