Chris White Tech Reporter
February 12, 2020 5:48 PM ET
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a nationwide fracking ban Wednesday as Democratic presidential candidates work to paint themselves as moderates ahead of the 2020 election.
The Democratic New York congresswoman’s bill is a companion to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s legislation seeking to ban fracking across the country by 2025. If passed, the laws would prohibit natural gas production within 2,500 feet of homes and schools by 2021 and help transition energy workers away from the industry.
“Fracking is destroying our land and our water,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “It is wreaking havoc on our communities’ health. We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the fracking industry.” Sanders announced his bill in February.
Democratic Rep. Darren Soto of Florida is co-sponsoring the bill. (RELATED: Here Are The Democratic Lawmakers Who Are Trying To Distance Themselves From Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal)
“If we want to transition from fossil fuel emissions as we work towards building a 100 percent clean economy, pulling back from fracking is a critical first step,” he said in a statement. “Failure to act will only make the crisis at hand even more detrimental for future generations of Americans.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Soto’s bill comes less than a year after Ocasio-Cortez introduced the so-called Green New Deal, which, among other things, calls for “10-year national mobilizations” toward addressing climate change.
The Green New Deal would reportedly phase out fossil fuels within 12 years, but could cost trillions of dollars, reports show. Americans could be forced to pay up to $93 trillion to implement the proposal over 10 years, conservative-leaning American Action Forum (AAF) noted in a study in February 2019.
Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren signed on as Senate co-sponsors of the proposal before it met its demise in the Senate in March 2019. She is running for president and is one of the progressive candidates who is demanding radical change on energy production.
Other presidential candidates are angling to paint themselves as moderates who are shunning such bans. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for instance, joined Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar as one of a handful of presidential candidates who prefer to regulate fracking rather than ban it outright.
When confronted with unassailable arguments that the Green New Deal’s goals are unattainable, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez just says that making efforts to reach the unattainable goals is inherently beneficial, even if those goals can never be reached. Which actually has a certain logic. If you set out to lose thirty pounds because you are overweight, and are able to lose only ten, you’ve still created a benefit.
So probably what she is doing in advocating for a ban on fracking is setting up the more reasonable and attainable goal of regulating it. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to understand that, if you keep pressing for measures that are aspirational rather than attainable, you end up destroying your credibility.
…her method would kill the patient, so a 130-lb loss is best!
On to other fiction…
She is advocating for throwing away one’s refrigerator and clothes before even one pound has been lost.
Not to many seem to have pointed out that her talking points are decade old myths and internet rumors.
Like that fracking is polluting our water and out lands, and are wrecking communities, and that ending it will be a benefit.
All false.
Fracking is putting a lot of money in a lot of people’s pockets, including landowners in some formerly not so well of areas of the country, workers who now have high paying jobs, people who run motels, hotels, apartments, restaurants, and all manner of other ancillary businesses that cater to the workforces of these booming industries.
And the real stinker in her BS is that fracking has let the US become the one single country on the entire planet which has reduced CO2 emissions the most! All while saving us money, not costing us, and all while not adding new taxes, chopping up birds en masse, or blighting our landscapes with gigantic noisy behemoths.
They hate it because it provides abundant and inexpensive energy, and does not add massive payers of government bloat which she and her ilk gain power from.
Fracking proves that we do not need any NGD…if the rest of the world did what the US has done over the past ten years, CO2 emissions will fall dramatically without costing anyone anything, and without empowering warmista jackasses.
Which makes it the worst possible thing that could happen to these ridiculous hypocrites!
AOC is doing Putin’s bidding. Someone ought to tell her that the Constitution has something to say about that. In the section about high treason.
While she usually sounds like and idiot and I am convinced there was an “oral section” to obtaining her university degree, AOC is very dangerous because she is a TRUE BELIEVER! Whatever Progressive mantra is fed to her she will accept and parrot to the world with all of her might. She is also very popular with the younger, misinformed generation who believe that Socialism is somehow kinder and gentler than free markets. They have mostly never worked a real job and so have not realized that Socialism only squanders the wealth that Capitalism has created. That and it allows sociopaths to acquire power over every single facet of your life once it is implemented; what could go wrong?
True believers can never be trusted because their feelings and beliefs are paramount to anything else in the world including your life, wealth and happiness. Whenever they walk behind you you need to be very watchful for knives and cudgels!
What the hell did she read for her degree? It certainly was not a STEM subject.
I assume she is dishonest and not ignorant because she is reported to have a college degree. An alternative is that college degrees are not what they used to be.
…it definitely isn’t something that enhances her resume`!
Assume the oral was a large part of that ” degree”…,.
She reportedly has an economics degree from Boston U.
But she is as incredibly uninformed on economic issues as on anything else she mouths off about.
It is worth mentioning again that she got her opportunity to run for congress by answering and winning an actual casting call!
That’s right…a casting call, like for actors. In fact that is exactly what she is…hired to play a part by demonstrating she can remember her lines and say them with conviction.
He most noteworthy accomplishment to date is single handedly causing Amazon to abandon it’s decision to build their new headquarters in her district, after hundreds (at least 238) of states and cities had been in a long and expensive competition to induce Amazon to choose to come to their city and their state.
New York state and New York city had spent a lot of money on the effort, and had been selected for what would have been one of the largest economic jackpots in history…one of the four largest corporations in the country, if not the world, building a headquarters right near the people who had elected her, and many of whom lack significant economic opportunities.
Amazon promised to invest at least $5 billion annually, and to created 25, 000 new jobs immediately, with an average annual pay of over $140,000/year…with the possibility of as many as an additional 15, 000-25, 000!
As many as 50,000 jobs each paying as much as $150,000 dollars per year.
They had chosen her area, and she drove them away!
Single handedly. Amazon said so.
And she was proud of doing it, and bragged about it…because she thought that a tax break meant that New York would GIVE Amazon money!
She thought, and said, that now that Amazon has been defeated from giving her voters high paying jobs, that New York now had $5 billion it could spend on something else.
She is so economically illiterate, she did not have any idea that there was no $5 billion to spend.
Amazon would have increased the taxes that New York city and state collected by several times that amount. The $5 billion was an inducement in the form of a lower tax rate for a certain amount of time, something that cities and states and towns all over the country have been doing for years to attract new businesses…including New York! They have done it for many many years.
These are the the sorts of programs that were set up in the wake of the Great Recession to improve the economy and incomes of rust belt towns and states by shoring up the tax base on an ongoing basis.
She is such an idiot, she got literally the whole story backwards…exactly backwards, and drove away a jobs windfall that the Mayor and Governor of New York had been working hard to grab for many years.
And that is in the subject in which she has her degree!
Here she is being proud of herself for being a clueless ignoramus for driving away 25,000+ high paying jobs from her district:
https://youtu.be/L8Oel5lVQAE
Par for the course for her.
She had, prior to even being elected, criticize Israel with BS talking points, then admitting on a TV interview she had no idea what she was actually talking about.
https://youtu.be/4TJK1a8OHyw
“The wind industry is destroying our land and our water,” Ocasio-Cortez should have written Wednesday on Twitter. “It is wreaking havoc on our communities’ health. We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the wind industry.”
There, fixed it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/08/11/turns-out-wind-and-solar-have-a-secret-friend-natural-gas/
Isn’t there a direct connection between industrial scale wind and solar and natural gas?
Hopefully the corruption exposed in Ukraine between the Biden’s and Burisma will open the doors to expose backroom deals made in the large scale renewables in other countries as well.
So drilling for oil and gas is OK but hydraulically fracturing the surrounding rock is not? Great, with less productive wells the producers will just drill more. Talk about unintended consequences!!!
2,500 feet is a little less than half a mile. Most fracking wells are not in cities or suburbs, and in rural areas it’s common for a farmer to own more than a square mile of land, where the farmer can invite a developer to drill a fracking well in the middle of his own land, more than 2,500 feet away from anyone else’s home or school. If the royalties are rich enough, the farmer won’t report the drilling company to the government.
But to Ocrazio-Cortez, it feels good to protect all those school kiddies from fracking chemicals less than half a mile away. Too bad they will all die in 12 years from climate change, according to AOC’s own prediction.
In other news, AOC recently told a crowd of Bernie [Sanders] bros that she doesn’t think Bernie could get a Medicare for All plan passed by Congress. Maybe she’s starting to realize that it’s hard to get 218 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate for trillion-dollar plans, when most of the members don’t represent The Bronx.
In the meantime, everybody keep on frackin’!
I’m selling BrainForce to any of you who actually read this. It will help you recover some of the IQ points you lost doing that.
What is it about religious cult leaders and there ultimate ambition to commit their followers to mass suicide, and or extinction.
How else can you explain AOCs call to remove all energy from the economy in a way that will kill the bulk of the population and most certainly all those who live in large towns and cities?
Note what she says is “the critical first step”.
Not deciding on and bringing on line an alternative source for the energy we need.
No.
First step…stop producing energy.
That tells anyone sane all they need to know about AOC.
Several years ago I had mineral rights to a small acreage. A horizontal well was drilled approximately 1.5 miles away. The horizontal part of the drill hole was a mile long before it reached the section of land (640 acres) that I was on. The common practice in the area was to drill 4 horizontal wells on a 3 acre site and access 4 sections of land from one well site.
Why are all the fools panicking about a less than 0.2 degree Celsius mean temperature rise since the start of the Industrial Revolution. I know the IPPC says 0.59 degree Celsius but their start point is in the middle of a 0.41 degree Celsius drop in mean temperature. Is the real problem the total lack of science education among politicians and media critters. Means that the people with their hands on the levers of power have not been immunized against the bovine waste product spouted by the Climate Alarmists including the Swedish Glove Puppet.
For the answer to all such questions, take a careful look at the 5th word you write.
The people we really need to be angry about though, are the ones profiting, not the ones panicking.
I’ve basically lost my humor for the current progressive madness infecting western society. We are in a very precarious time.
Mike Bloomberg is right there with AOC and Bernie when it comes to all things Green. He is the wolf in sheep’s clothing as they say. Better to have a clean contest between Bernie and The President
She needs to go Frack herself!
AOC isn’t the problem. The idiots that voter her in are the problem.
Many posters here are making the mistake many smart people make, and that is, they assume that everybody else is smart too. Get out into the world and get to know people with average intelligence, and then understand that you can’t convince that many people with facts and theories. Most of them just go with the most attractive and impressive authority. That’s why Greta Thunberg is such a hit. Her credibility is based on her (rather odd) personal charm. She has no rational arguments, and she doesn’t need them.
There’s a UK website called Independence Daily which has a very commonsense view of most things. There’s a post on there, Do Not Be Afraid: No Crisis No Catastrophe, which I wrote after going to a climate revivalist meeting chaired by Lord Deben. Deben is chairman of the UK Climate Change Committee and has been accused of having connections with Big Wind which, if true, explains a lot.
My contention is that the climate change panic is not a scientific problem, it is a political problem, exacerbated by the hysterics having no compunction while opposing scientists tell the truth. As an example, look at the testimonies given by Curry and Mann to… was it a Congress Committee? Curry, while right, was unable to match the slipperiness of her political opponent — a proper scientist is always sceptical, a political advocate has no such limitations.
Addressing the politics first is difficult. I’m not sure we’re even close in the UK. The US seems to be doing better.
JF
If Leftists ever gained enough power to actually end the use of all fossil fuels and try to replace them with wind and solar, the world economy would completely collapse and billions of people would die horribly by starvation, genocide, exposure, food riots, etc….
The logical end of Communism is that unelected tyrants eventually kill the non-compliant, and under Democratic Socialism, you elect the tyrants who eventually kill the non-compliant…
So the only real difference between the two is either death by genocide or death by suicide..
It’s a distinction without a difference…
Those who don’t want fossil fuels should be forced to live without the benefits of same.
YES – this. Especially those who claim to be trying to regulate energy for the “benefit” of others.
I actually have more respect for those who want to ban fracking than those who want to regulate it. Regulation just means “I’m gonna virtue signal this issue into a big payday for the state.”
I read that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is about to be stopped in her tracks.The reason is that her constituency is about to be abolished due to a lack of constituents.
If you know nothing, say something.
Where’s the pushback from FF companies?
The reality – as opposed to AOC’s fantasy hysterics, is fracking is a *genius* civil engineering achievement. Well past time the FF took their gloves off and defended their industry from these lunatics.
I suggest somebody sponsor a bill banning any elected official, or anyone appointed as a judge, from using anything whose existence requires the use of any fossil fuel, if they “sponsor,” “support,” “vote for,” render “decisions,” or in any other way advance legislation or legal decisions which seek to limit, ban, discourage, or “price” (for the purposes of artificially driving up the cost) any CO2 “emissions” or the exploration for, drilling for, mining, refining, transport, distribution or use of any fossil fuel.
We’ll start slowly, so just for starters:
No electricity
No HVAC
No transport except walking
No cell phones
No computers
No food you didn’t hunt yourself (on foot) and kill with your bare hands or a rock
No clothing
AOC et al, A canadian jounalist, George Jonas who is unfortunately passed away coined a phrase to describe these people.
“Educated beyond their intellectual means”.
Our current Prime Minister fulfills this devastating but well deserved put down