Team Biden should just get out of the way, but they won't

[dan_s]

The Secret Democrats Refuse To Acknowledge: America’s Emissions Are Dropping Faster Than Paris Targets
By LAWRENCE KUDLOW, Special to the Sun | November 1, 2021

One of the most interesting climate change points to me that is never mentioned by President Biden and all the existential threat crowd is just how well the United States has done in cutting carbon emissions in the last 20 years. They never talk about it. Don’t you think that’s odd?

While they’ve been blaming America — as they always do — our emissions have dropped from the 2005 baseline some 20%, or even slightly more, through the end of 2020. The Paris climate accord target was 25% by 2025. So we nearly hit it 5 years early. You know why? Two words. Natural gas.

Plus, there’s a third word: Fracking. American free enterprise, private sector ingenuity, and technology adapted an old process and retooled it to generate a revolution in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. There was no government plan. It came out of private enterprise. Natural gas, of course, is a clean burning fuel, which has partly replaced both oil and coal.

In the last 20 years, natural gas use in America has more than doubled. < Actually it has more than tripled.
That’s because It’s cheap, clean, and accessible through the new technology. The demand for liquefied natural gas is growing exponentially all around the world.

That is, American LNG. It’s a fabulous export — that is, if the Biden’s would just leave it alone. And acknowledge how much good the natural gas fracking revolution has done for typical families all around the globe. They won’t acknowledge that, though, because they are fact-free ideologues.

What we should be doing is expanding our power base. Not contracting it. The United States and everywhere else in the world should seek a growthier and more prosperous economy. This requires more energy, not less, and the portfolio mix should be diversified. Hence, all of the above.

Renewables and carbons and nuclear, wind, solar, oil, gas, coal, hydro, and — trumpets blaring, all saddle bags in the wind — nuclear. Everybody wants clean air and clean water. Everybody. All sensible people know that we have remaining issues and we can do better. Yet we’ve already done a lot — and not through socialist government central planning.

Rather, through private entrepreneurial innovation and invention. Gales of Schumpeter’s creative destruction at work, with incentives, in a free economy. The far left greenies are in complete denial about the potential successes of nuclear power. That's a pity, because the nuclear track record, even with some bad mistakes, is still outstanding in the long run — and the technology is ever improving.

Right now, though, some 80% of the world's energy is carbon-based — 80%. That is not going to change dramatically in the next 10 years and beyond. Attempts to force radical change by ending fossil fuels will create enormous economic damage to the entire world. Face it. Wind and solar are not nearly as reliable as natural gas and nuclear.

The existential threat is a Bidenesque attempt to kill fossil fuel. It will destroy the American economy and totally impoverish the middle class, and the poor who need cheap and plentiful power. This climate change idiocy is a laughing stock. President Putin and General Secretary Xi are not even going to Scotland.

The G20 couldn’t make a deal. China’s biggest power source is coal. Russia is oil and gas. India’s a huge polluter. The African subcontinent is not going to rely on wind and solar when they have plenty of oil and gas and coal available.

Nor should America’s own leaders allow less developed countries to shake down the large economies for hundreds of billions of dollars of government-to-government foreign aid in the name of climate change, which would be completely abused.

Count on it. The G20 and other leaders should be emphasizing growth and prosperity. That means more power. Lower taxes. Fewer regulations. Yet in recent days, these meetings in Rome and Glasgow are doing the reverse. It is total insanity. We indeed to stop the G20’s assault on growth and prosperity.

Meantime, I just want to endorse Senator Manchin’s superb statement on the budget. “I, for one,” he said, “also won’t support a multi-trillion-dollar-bill without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on our economy and existing government programs.”

He speaks about shell games and gimmicks to the budget scoring, whereby a so-called $1.75 trillion bill will wind up being at least twice as high when temporary social welfare programs are made permanent. My only quibble with Senator Manchin is that the sum will be three times as large, not nearly twice.

I want to echo what my friend, Professor Casey Mulligan, writes in today’s Wall Street Journal, where he cogently argues that the spending bill is an attack on work and working families. Mr. Manchin has many times argued for work requirements that the far-left progressives refuse to include.

Undermining work will be the death of this great country. Is that what the left wants? And there’s more. Efforts to end Senator Sinema’s pledge of no hike of income taxes would be extremely damaging to our economy.

If your inflation rate is higher than your growth rate, which was the case in the third quarter ended September 30, you don’t want another inflationary spending spree that would boost prices for the middle class and everyone else.

Nor do you want to jack up tax rates on investors and businesses. That would result in large job and wage losses. This stuff is ideologically crazy. No common sense business person would sign onto it. That’s why Mr. Biden’s polls are plunging.

The whole problem here is that government economic policies designed to deal with the pandemic emergency should now be terminated, because the emergency is over. We needed a spending and money creation boost last year. We don’t need it anymore. So stop. Put the brakes on. Mr. Manchin is correct. Save America. Kill the bill.