The Democrats believe that climate change can be an election-winning strategy, but the numbers don’t lie. At a price tag of more than $93 trillion dollars, the much-lauded Green New Deal is a phenomenal budget buster. Once voters realize that this legislation is all about the socializing of America – not really climate change at all – this could become a winning issue for savvy conservatives in the 2020 election.
The National Review recently reported that the Green New Deal, which was proposed earlier this year by media darling known as AOC – Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) – is now embraced by all front-running Democrat Presidential hopefuls. This pie-in-the-sky legislation would purportedly transition the U.S. economy completely away from fossil fuels within ten years. How this would happen isn’t stated, because its advocates don’t know. What they do know, but won’t admit, is that the Green New Deal would require technology that doesn’t now exist, and may never exist. However, while this plan would allegedly eliminate airborne carbon, what it would really do is provide federal jobs for everyone who wants one. It would also eliminate ICE and border security, implement a universal healthcare guarantee for everyone, including illegal aliens. It is these other provisions – having nothing to do with global warming – that are the reason behind the Green New Deal’s astronomical cost.
This “climate change” legislation would, according to AOC, also advance “social, economic, racial, regional and gender-based justice and equality and cooperative and public ownership.”
Presented as a plan to eliminate carbon pollution in America, AOC’s her chief of staff recently admitted about the Green New Deal to a Washington Post reporter that “the true motivation behind introducing the Green New Deal is to overhaul the entire economy.” He went on to say, “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
While it isn’t unusual for politicians to use an issue to advance a totally different cause – what isn’t common is for them to admit it, on the record. All told, the Green New Deal proposal will cost America an estimated $93 trillion in new government spending over ten years, according to a recent report by the conservative American Action Forum.
Putting this in perspective, President Obama increased the national debt more than all previous presidents combined, but still, our entire national debt is “only” $21.97 trillion dollars. This Green New Deal would raise the national debt by a whopping – and unsustainable – 423 percent, pushing it to somewhere north of $115 trillion dollars.
And although AOC is, at 29, too young to serve as President until at least the 2024 election, she is nonetheless driving the entire group of more than 20 Democrat Presidential hopefuls to embrace her Green New Deal, or something that’s virtually identical to it. That’s a lot of power for a political novice, but it’s also a great example of the power of the fan-boy liberal news media.
So why is the climate a political hot-button issue?
Many Americans – especially younger Americans who grew up submerged by the horrific message that life as we know it will be over Unless We Do Something Right Now – have been taken in by the unrelenting drumbeat of climate-change horror stories, Apparently, these misinformed Americans do not realize that the shift from “global warming” to “global climate change” during the last decade was nothing more than a tacit recognition that fears over global warming were unsustainable.
Fortunately for conservatives, who weigh the benefits of perhaps reducing the globe’s temperature by a degree or two against the astronomical cost of moving away from a carbon- and petroleum-based fossil fueled economy, the Democrat Party’s candidates seem committed to the most extreme climate-change positions. These radical positions are so far from the mainstream that they are sure to cost them votes, if only conservatives choose to make this a “line in the sand” issue.
After a quarter-century of global warming propaganda, many moderates have come to believe that man-caused climate change is both real, and dangerous. However, while concerned, pollsters point out that they have yet to come to grips with the price tag they would have to pay if the Green New Deal – or one of the other extreme Democrat climate positions – was actually adopted. For example, politically moderate New Englanders may provide knee-jerk support for climate-altering demands, but they have yet to realize that such actions would deprive them of fuel oil to heat their homes in the winter. What applies to New Englanders applies to the desert Southwest in the hot, dry summer. We depend on fossil fuel-created energy to heat and cool our homes and workplaces – as well as to get to and from work.
The law of unintended consequences has not been repealed.
What are these extreme positions that leading Democrat Presidential candidates have embraced – or been forced to embrace in the face of harsh criticism from far-left activists? Let’s take a look.
As his poll numbers continue to slip, one-time media-anointed front-runner Beto O’Rourke keeps coming out with ever more radical positions on the climate, gun control/gun confiscation, and while this isn’t helping him in the polls, his continuing media cache gives him the power to drive his fellow candidates to the far left, if only in self defense. On climate change, he said, “Literally. Not to be melodramatic, but literally, the future of the world depends on us right now, here, where we are. Let’s find a way to do this.” At the recent climate televised “Town Hall,” O’Rourke doubled down on his position, said, “Climate change is the greatest threat we face – and we have one last chance to meet this moment before it’s too late.” Typically for O’Rourke, he’s long on rhetoric, but short on answers.
Joe Biden, long thought to be a moderate on climate change, has recently embraced a 22-page plan that would eliminate carbon pollution within thirty years, even though no practical alternative for petroleum fuel and coal power has been offered to replace them. Even at that, he’s being criticized by advocates of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal. They charge Biden with “moderation,” saying 30 years is too long to wait for zero carbon emissions. They want to eliminate carbon fuels within ten years, and do so without offering any viable replacement technology to power our country and our lives.
The other two front-runners in the Democrat Presidential sweepstakes – Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – say “all the right things” about climate change, but they – like AOC – seem more focused on implementing socialist policy changes in areas of healthcare, student debt and “economic justice.” However, whenever they do talk about climate change, they talk about government “solutions” that would help to nationalize the largest industries in the country. Almost as an afterthought, Senator Sanders recently introduced ambitious climate change legislation, which predictably went nowhere. He was grandstanding, not legislating, playing for the cameras.
Warren has taken another approach – instead of offering one plan, she’s stacked the deck with three new ways the government can intrude on the private sector. These include her “Green Apollo Plan” to create a National Institute of Clean Energy, a “Green Industrial Mobilization” plan to support green technologies, but which would also give the government control of major industries, all in the name of climate change. Finally, she advocated a “Green Marshall Plan,” which would promote industrial solutions overseas. Like Sanders, Warren introduced extreme climate legislation that went exactly nowhere.
One candidate, former Obama Administration HUD Secretary Julian Castro, has a track record in trying to impose green energy standards in the inner city. In announcing his candidacy, he called climate change “the biggest threat to our prosperity in the 21st Century.” However, his own plan proposals seem like a much bigger economic threat to America. Castro even went public this past week with a demand that we should abandon air travel. How, as President, he’d be able to visit the 50 states after putting Air Force One up on blocks is unclear.
Even worse, what that would do to the American – and world – economies, he doesn’t say. However, the impact would be profound – the Federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics noted that 77.4 million passengers flew on U.S. airliners in May of this year. Annualized, that means that our 325 million Americans will fly the equivalent of 928.8 million times in 2019. Shutting air travel down would be economically and socially crippling, especially since the alternatives – railroad and highway transportation – also use huge amounts of fossil fuel. There are no apparent alternatives in the pipeline for solar-powered railroad locomotives or wind-powered semi-trailer trucks or over-the-road buses.
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) is one of the climate extremists who seem to be driving all Democrat candidates to the left on this issue. “I don’t even call it climate change,” she says in her stump speech. “It’s a climate crisis.” She also referred to climate change as “an existential threat to us, and confronting it requires bold action.” She makes a point of embracing the Green New Deal in all debates, and in all of her rallies.
So, with this overwhelming Democrat demand for the elimination of greenhouse gas-producing technology within ten, fifteen or thirty years, where does this leave conservatives.
First, they need to emphasize the cost. Do the math. Even at the low end of the scale, this cost is astronomical. Next, they need to debunk the flawed notion that the Green New Deal would create millions of new “green” jobs, when common sense and a number of recent think-tank studies show that it would eliminate tens of millions of other jobs. Finally, they should expose the Green New Deal for what it is: a bait-and-switch Ponzi Scheme, something the plan’s founder’s chief of staff admitted to the Washington Post recently. Instead, it’s a thinly disguised attempt to use a trumped-up “crisis” to nationalize industries in America, moving us one giant step closer to the Sanders/Warren dream of a Socialist America.
Run on the truth about global warming and the Green New Deal – it should be a winner.