Essay by Eric Worrall
If only President Biden was a dictator? According to Yahoo, the USA’s “chokepoint filled federal system” is threatening to derail Biden’s radical climate change agenda.
Biden’s on the verge of losing on climate change
Ben Adler
Senior Editor
Sat, 11 June 2022, 5:30 am…
Despite assuming office with what activists describe as the most ambitious climate change agenda in history, Biden has experienced a series of setbacks that threaten to leave him with little progress on the issue, showing just how hard contending with climate change can be in a chokepoint-filled federal system, such as that of the United States.
The president is facing backsliding on almost every front in his fight against climate change: His clean energy proposals are stuck in the Senate, surging oil and gas prices have even Democratic state governments cutting gasoline taxes, and the need to wean America’s European allies off Russian fossil fuels has led the administration to propose boosting gas exports. Also, a bill passed by the House of Representatives could get in the way of offshore wind energy expansion.
Meanwhile, the president’s broad power to regulate under existing laws is being constricted: One federal court ruling forced him to sell new fossil fuel leases on federal lands and waters; and the Supreme Court is on the verge of limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas causing global warming.
…
Climate policy wonks are hopeful that Congress will pass climate legislation before Republicans likely gain control of the body in the midterm elections, but they admit that failure would be devastating.
…
“Give Sen. Manchin credit for trying the bipartisan route, which is always his preference, and we’re going to hold hope that in the face of those talks petering out, that the place to go is back to the framework that’s centered on a big old package of climate and justice,” Pierce added. “I can’t imagine that Democrats are gonna go into the fall without having passed a package of significant investments on climate.”
If a climate bill doesn’t pass the Senate this year, Pierce said it would constitute “a monster failure.”
…
Read more: https://au.news.yahoo.com/biden-losing-climate-change-193010788.html
The one thing which is missing from this big green lament is an effort to meaningfully respond to people’s objections – not one ounce of compassion for all the people their climate push is hurting.
Why are “Democratic state governments cutting gasoline taxes”? The reason is people can’t afford gasoline. Greens would love people to switch to electric vehicles, but most people can’t afford electric vehicles either. Even if people could afford EVs, EVs have serious limitations, like a massive drop in range in cold or hot weather, when power is diverted to heating or cooling. And you better leave your EV on charge if you park it in the frost.
Yet instead of pausing to reflect, to ask whether there is anything which can be done to alleviate these problems, greens treat objections as obstructions, and pin their hopes to ramming through their agenda before ordinary people have an opportunity to express their policy direction preferences at the midterms.
Even mild alleviation efforts, such as some less committed “Democratic state governments cutting gasoline taxes”, are seen as backsliding.
The sad part is there are ways greens could meet us halfway, and make real progress towards their goal of reducing CO2 emissions. If greens ditched their insistence on useless renewables, left gasoline vehicles alone for now, and focussed on replacing coal and gas with zero carbon nuclear power, like France did in the 1970s, I would write positive stories about how reasonable greens were being lately, and the massive CO2 emissions reductions they had achieved without messing up anyone’s life. But I think an outbreak of green sanity like that is as unlikely as me witnessing a flock of flying pigs pass my window.
The inability of deep greens to compromise even slightly is their undoing. The total inability of greens to empathise with and try to help the people they hurt is their downfall. That is the real reason “Biden’s on the verge of losing on climate change”.
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“and the need to wean America’s European allies off Russian fossil fuels has led the administration to propose boosting gas exports.”
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/uk-sends-billions-of-liters-of-petrol-to-us-where-it-s-cheaper-1.1776643
“Once you take off the taxes and the costs associated with delivery to gas stations, the relative economics of selling petrol the UK and the US start to look very different — different enough to make it attractive to ship the fuel across the Atlantic to a market that appears to offer far lower prices.”
Just saying.
This needs highlighting and shoved in the face of the green activists:
The one thing which is missing from this big green lament is an effort to meaningfully respond to people’s objections – not one ounce of compassion for all the people their climate push is hurting.
Build back better actually is code for: “eliminate fossil fuels and start new with diffuse, unreliable, anti environmental, anti economic growth, inflationary and impossible/fairy tale projections violating the principles of energy and common sense”
“The sad part is there are ways greens could meet us halfway, and make real progress towards their goal of reducing CO2 emissions.”
No! there is no point meeting these dogmatic, petulent, ideologues ‘halfway’, and trying to is both futile and destructive.
For a start there is no need at all to reduce CO2 emissions, so making compromises serves no other reason than getting some peace and quiet from the greentard’s incessant bleeting. And if ‘meeting them halfway’ meant only eschewing coal in favour of gas, afflicted grids will still suffer increased energy prices.
Worse though is that for dogmatic ideologues, more is never enough; so compromising by needlessly switching thermal power generation from cheap coal to more expensive (and versatile) gas is simply letting in the thin end of the wedge and before long, you’ll still find yourself facing demands for whirly gigs and dodgem cars or not eating meat or ventilating your clothes instead of washing them, or who knows, maybe holding your breath outdoors. Just ask any oil company how ‘meeting them halfway’ worked out when attempting to greenwash their operations with a few whirlygigs or extolling the virtues of gas a ‘bridging fuel’ (hint, greentards still want all oil companies to go broke and disappear)
The best approach to ideolgues is an assertive offense right from the beginning of hostilities. In the case of climastrologists and their save-the-planet useful idiots, the only course of action is to ceaselessly hammer the point that the gullible warming religion is bovine excrement refuted by physical evidence and what few ‘solutions’ they offer are even less credible.
There can be no compromise with totalitarians, it would be like meeting a serial rapist halfway by agreeing to let him only put the end of it in.
Exactly right. Republicans have been attempting to meet Democrats halfway for decades, and where’s it gotten us? There is no compromising with fanatics.
Nowhere in Mr Adler’s lamentation is the concept of free markets. These people have completely abandoned the entire concept of freedom. Democrats don’t even bother to pay lip service anymore.
Conservatives need to point this out. Moreover, most Americans know that all this pain at the pumps is unnecessary. They know America was an net exporter of energy and that gasoline was $2 when Trump left office. No amount of blaming it on Putin is to be accepted. Biden did that. Most also know that reducing FF use will not do jack $&*! toward “saving the planet.” They know that CC as an existential crisis is bunch of bull.
The Greens don’t compromise because their goal isn’t “climate control” or energy availability, it is global tyranny.
An item I haven’t seen in these EV discussion is the need to provide transportation to the people in the midwest. I live on the outskirts of a small mid-west town. If I cannot have my ic car then how am I going to get groceries? The first thing that the greenies need to show me is how will I get around. Show me the plans for a bus routes that serves all of these small and diverse areas. This would be a massive undertaking. Show me the cost of this system. Rather than shove this down my throat show me the option.
Much of the population can’t charge a BEV at home, making owning one expensive and inconvenient.
Did Yahoo itself write that, or was it an op ed?