Can you remember as far back as the 2020 campaign for President? If you can, you will surely recall candidate Joe Biden carefully positioning himself as the moderate relative to the other candidates from his party. This principle applied particularly to issues of energy and “climate.” For example, candidate Biden repeatedly denied on the debate stage that he had any plans to ban “fracking” for oil and gas.
During the presidential debate of October 22, 2020, President Trump directly challenged candidate Biden, on the subject: “Would you close down the oil industry?” Biden responded that he “would transition away from the oil industry, yes.” But he and/or his staffers then immediately decided that that position would not play too well in Peoria, so the next day they released a statement saying that “Mr Biden planned to phase out taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuel companies, not the industry altogether.” On that same day, Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was quoted to the same effect, repeating herself for emphasis:
“Let’s be really clear about this,” said the California senator, “Joe Biden is not going to ban fracking. He is going to deal with the oil subsidies. . . . But let’s be clear, what Joe was talking about was banning subsidies, but he will not ban fracking in America.”
Well, that was then, and this is now. So what’s the real story? You’ll never find out where this administration is going from trying to listen to Biden himself, since he doesn’t say much, rarely takes a question, and in the few things he does say generally borders on incoherence. But there’s another place you can look. As President, Biden gets to appoint all kinds of advisory councils and committees. The members of these things are not subject to confirmation. He (and his handlers) can put on them anyone they want, without asking anyone’s permission. Essentially, the whole “advisory council” thing therefore is a well-understood charade, where members can be chosen based on their already-known positions, and the “advice” consists of recommending to the powers that be that they should do what they already wanted to do.
With that context, you really need to take a look at the “Interim Final Recommendations” just released on May 13 from something called the “White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.” You haven’t heard of this Council? It’s a new Biden administration thing. Biden called for its creation in his January 27 Executive Order titled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” and then announced the members of the new Council on March 29. I don’t actually recognize any of the names of the members, but their affiliations are listed, consisting of one after another of far-left environmental advocacy groups. It looks like the members then got right to work.
The so-called “Interim Final Recommendations” document is some 91 pages long, and every page contains something more extreme, more preposterous, and more destructive than even the page before. The short version is that all compromise positions and half-way measures are to be rejected. Only wind and solar power are acceptable, and the only route to get there is direct government order and/or spending. And then don’t forget the most important part: it has to be done this way because any other alternatives are racist.
The bulk of the document deals with what they call the “Justice40 Initiative,” by which the Executive Order seeks “recommendations on how certain Federal investments might be made toward a goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits flow to disadvantaged communities.” If there is any concern that existing federal law prohibits discrimination in federal grants on the basis of race or gender, nothing here suggests it. (You may know that just yesterday a federal judge in Texas granted a preliminary injunction against a Biden Administration initiative awarding priorities based on race and gender in handing out Small Business Administration grants.)
Anyway, they identify the “[k]ey components that require further development for effective implementation of Justice40,” of which the first one is:
Identifying the programs and policies federal (investments) in that can be included in Justice40.
I’ve tried reading that ten times, but can’t make any sense of it. Can you? But after reading through a few dozen pages of bureaucratese, we finally come on pages 55-59 to lists of types of projects that are acceptable and unacceptable, or in their words, projects that “may benefit a community,” and projects that “will not benefit a community.” The second list would exclude all fossil fuel projects, but that is only the very beginning.
1. Fossil fuel procurement, development, infrastructure repair that would in any way extend lifespan or production capacity, transmission system investments to facilitate fossil-fired generation or any related subsidy.
So everything even remotely related to fossil fuel energy generation is completely out, even maintaining the facilities we already have. OK, but how about if we can figure out how to use fossil fuels in a way to add no CO2 to the atmosphere, such as by carbon capture or other technology. Nope, not allowed. Here are the next two that “will not benefit a community”:
2. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS)
3. Direct air capture
Nuclear? That’s completely free of carbon emissions. Sorry, but no:
4. The procurement of nuclear power
They give no explanation for why nuclear is unacceptable. Hey, it “will not benefit a community.”
You may be getting the impression that all the most extreme positions of the environmental left are getting accepted without question, without any real consideration of actual impacts on either the climate or “disadvantaged communities.” The farther you read, the more that becomes clear. Here are a few more items that are not to be allowed:
- Research and development
- The establishment or advancement of carbon markets, including cap and trade
- Geoengineering and techno fixes
- Highway expansion
- Road improvements or automobile infra-structure, other than electric vehicle charging stations
- Industrial scale bioenergy
- Incentives for investor-owned utilities
- Projects that promote gentrification without any housing policy crafted by a community to prevent displacement
And then of course we need to weave “anti-racism” and critical race theory through the whole enterprise:
Overall Goals and/or Requirements for Investment Benefits:
Addressing institutional racism. . . . Reparations to address past harm and disproportionate burdens. . . . Be Actively Anti-Racist – We pursue policies and strategic investments to reverse racial inequities and strive to repair the environmental injustice of more than 500 years of institutional policies and practices. . . .
Anyway, if you have thought that the right approach for a Republican to take is to try to reach some kind of compromise on emissions reductions, maybe through a carbon tax, or carbon pricing, or promoting nuclear power, or something else like that, think again. We are dealing here with completely crazed zealots, bent on a moral crusade to save the world. With a complete absence of adult supervision in the Biden Administration, these people have taken over and are running the show.
Read the complete article here.
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You should say sex, not gender. Gender is a grammatical term, e.g., “La plume de ma tante,” adopted by Democrats to spread homosexuality on the basis that one’s gender, i.e., sexual identity, is societally or self-determined, not biologically.
When one talks about a gender-changer for a cable, are they not referring to the physical configuration of the pins and sockets? “Sex” can be both an activity and a state of being. I’d prefer to use “gender” as a descriptor of the hardware. It is not the first time that a special interest group has preempted a perfectly good word such as “gay.”
As with other things, a descriptor of just the hardware is incomplete at best. Who we are is the combining of both hardware and software – any adequate descriptor will have to cover both.
Zhou BaiDen lied?
I am shocked.
And the blame for this goes to the college educated, middle & upper middle class, suburban voters who chose a senile man with unknown handlers over the “orange man”.
And let us be clear, the government can do much of this without additional legislation, through rule promulgation. One of Trumps biggest mistakes was not withdrawing the Greenhouse Gas Finding of Endangerment under the authorization of which much Green New Deal damage may be done.
Thomas Gasloli: “And let us be clear, the government can do much of this without additional legislation, through rule promulgation. One of Trump’s biggest mistakes was not withdrawing the Greenhouse Gas Finding of Endangerment under the authorization of which much Green New Deal damage may be done.”
Had Trump pulled the greenhouse gas finding while he was president, Biden would simply have reinstated it with an executive order, as he has done in systematically reversing every policy decision the Trump administration ever made while it was in office.
Using the Clean Air Act to its fullest possible effectiveness in quickly reducing America’s GHG emissions has been a topic of discussion in the environmental law community for more than a decade.
If Biden were to go one step further and combine the authorities already granted to the president in the Clean Air Act with authorities already granted to him in national security law, the Executive Branch could unilaterally dictate that America must reduce its GHG emissions 50% by 2030 by formally declaring a carbon pollution emergency.
The details of how this might be done are described in a comment I posted on May 3rd 2021 describing the Supply Side Carbon Emission Control Plan (SSCECP).
The SSCECP is a highly effective but also highly coercive means of reaching 50% by 2030. The plan imposes an artificial shortage of carbon fuels on the American economy while also greatly increasing the price of all forms of energy for all of America’s energy consumers, thus encouraging energy conservation as the primary means of achieving Biden’s 2030 GHG reduction target.
So far, Biden has shown no sign that either he, or the people behind the scenes who actually make his decisions for him, will be using the full authority of the Chief Executive to reach his announced 2030 target. One can draw one’s own conclusions if the Biden administration never does use the full authority of the president in pushing GHG reductions as far and as fast as the law allows it to do.
If he had done so, probably one of the first Executive Orders signed by Biden would have been to rescind the withdrawal. That is one of the weaknesses of EOs. They can be undone easily by the next administration. On the other hand, it is so much more difficult to rescind legislation passed by Congress that it is relatively safe from changes in administration.
In other words communism. Total central planning of the economy.
#6 Industrial scale bioenergy. That was what powered The Matrix. Hmmm.
From the article: “Anyway, if you have thought that the right approach for a Republican to take is to try to reach some kind of compromise on emissions reductions, maybe through a carbon tax, or carbon pricing, or promoting nuclear power, or something else like that, think again. We are dealing here with completely crazed zealots, bent on a moral crusade to save the world. With a complete absence of adult supervision in the Biden Administration, these people have taken over and are running the show.”
That sums it up perfectly.
The leftwing lunatics have about 18 months to try to shove this down our throats, then the American people will get to have a say in it all. Let’s hope the American people see the insanity on the Left, and all indications are that the American people are not going to go along with the Climate Change maniacs. We can only hope.
They kept saying “a community” as if that would be a valid work-around to laws that prohibit favoritism by race, when we all know that’s exactly what they want. What a bunch of arrogant pandering fools.
The way for Republicans to stop this insanity is for all 50 Republican senators to vote against all climate-change proposals, and make friends with Senator Joe Manchin from coal-rich West Virginia.
“Interim Final Recommendations”
Reminds me of the final solution.