Joe Biden declares war on American jobs with far-left climate plan
By Post Editorial Board
January 27, 2021 | 5:18pm |
Updated
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President Joe Biden recently delivered remarks on climate change from the White House.AP
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Further dashing hopes that he’d govern as any kind of moderate, President Biden on Wednesday
announced plans for what amounts to the Green New Deal by another name, at a cost of roughly $2 trillion and millions of jobs.
The left pretends its dreams will boost employment, but the reality is already on display. Biden’s Day One
canceling of the Keystone XL pipeline put thousands out of work immediately; longer-term, it aborted some 11,000 jobs, mostly for union workers.
Also in his first day, the new prez ordered
a 60-day suspension of new drilling permits for US lands and water, supposedly to allow for review of the impact. But on Wednesday he made much of that ban permanent, so plainly the science doesn’t really matter.
Then again, science isn’t mattering a lot to Joe: In the absence of Keystone, Canada will still export its oil — transporting it by less-environmentally friendly rail. What’s green about that?
Economics is out the window, too. The American Petroleum Institute
estimates 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 of moderating his green agenda while the nation recovers from the pandemic’s economic damage.
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The special envoy on climate issues, John Kerry, sniffs at the costs of “what needs to be done” — even as he admits that taking the US to zero carbon emissions tomorrow (rather than by 2050 as the president vows) wouldn’t remotely stop climate change.
To do that, someone has to persuade China, India and other still-developing nations to go zero-carbon, too. Kerry may get them to offer rhetorical promises in exchange for massive US concessions (that’s his specialty, after all), but there’s no way they’ll damage their own economies just to please nattering Western buffoons.
Not that climate change is the Armageddon threat that Biden & Co. pretend: If current trends continue, the harm from global warming etc. would only slice a fraction off global economic growth through century’s end.
Adding to the unfairness: Because the moratorium only bans new leases, large companies that stockpiled approvals in Trump’s last months will have some time to catch up, but smaller businesses will be left in the dust.
As for the politics: Some pretend only Trump states will suffer. But in
New Mexico alone the oil and gas industry supports 100,000 jobs, with half its production on federal land.
Better if the prez had stuck to basically symbolic actions, like honoring the
spirit of the Paris climate accord rather than
rejoining it. Paris’ fine print requires
exponentially rising energy costs and lunatic subsidies;
economists estimate it will cost the US millions of jobs over the next decade.
Yet because it demands little of China etc., the deal will only decrease average global temperatures by 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Lots of Western pain; trivial world gain.
They told us defeating President Donald Trump would get the crazy out of Washington. Instead, the madness has moved from Twitter to the center of policy-making.
