The Biden administration made two virtue-signaling proclamations at last week’s COP28 conference in Dubai it says will help save the planet from climate change.
The policies aren’t likely to change the planet’s temperature by even one-tenth of a degree, but they might just destroy the 21st-century American industrial economy as we know it.
First, Team Biden announced it will stop production of all new coal plants in the United States.
This comes on the heels of President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency saying this year it would impose new power-plant emission regulations that are virtually impossible for coal plants to comply with.
The bottom line: no more coal. Period.
But the White House was just getting started.
Vice President Kamala Harris trumpeted the next day new rules to “sharply reduce methane from the oil and natural gas industry.”
The administration calls methane a “super-pollutant” it wants to eliminate because it’s “many times more potent than carbon dioxide.”
But methane is effectively a hydrocarbon that comes from natural gas.
Eliminating methane is a de facto ban on natural-gas power plants.
Here is the most sinister part of this story no one in the Biden administration is telling you: Eradicating coal and natural-gas plants will ravage America’s electric-power capacity.
These regulations will cause rolling blackouts and brownouts across the country, much like we’ve already seen in California — America’s forerunner of radical anti-fossil fuel policies.
The lights will go out intermittently, and home heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer will have to be turned off or rationed.
Without gas and coal plants, hospitals, schools, the Internet, construction projects and factories will be routinely shut down when unreliable alternative-energy sources like wind and solar power aren’t delivering enough juice.
Upward of 60% of America’s electric-power generation will go away — and soon.
Coal still provides roughly 20% of our electric power; natural gas supplies around 40%.
What will make up for this lost power, especially given that our demands on the power grid are only going to multiply over the coming years as the greens want the entire network of cars, trucks and vans to be powered by charging up on the electric grid?
The Biden administration, in other words, wants to nearly double the demands on the electric-grid network at the same time it wants to shut down more than half of the nation’s power generation — and the most reliable sources at that.
Something must give.
The climate-change groups that crammed into Dubai last week, echoed by head-in-the-sand politicians like John Kerry, piously advise that Americans will have to stop taking so many plane trips — especially overseas — and become less reliant on cars, switching to mass transit or bicycles instead.
Some people may believe these mandatory sacrifices and rationing of modern-age conveniences are justified to stave off “catastrophic climate change.”
Except the shutdown of our coal and natural-gas power plants won’t move the needle a millimeter on greenhouse-gas emissions — and may make global CO2 emissions worse, not better.
That’s because by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse-gas emissions — China — isn’t playing in this climate-change sandbox.
(President Xi Jinping didn’t even attend the conference, and the Chinese who did were adamant that climate-change concerns aren’t going to interfere with Beijing’s grandiose economic-expansion plans.)
The coal plants and mines we shut down in places like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming are being replaced two or three times over by newly built coal-fired plants in India and China.
We shut down one plant; they bring on line two or three new ones.
This math doesn’t add up — especially since we have cleaner coal plants than China does.
Biden is playing a dangerous game of unilateral energy disarmament.
If he has his way, we will jump off the cliff first in the naïve hope that China, India, Russia and Europe are right behind us.
Whether intentional or not, this radical green agenda will cripple our global economic leadership, cost our economy millions of jobs and make Americans colder in their homes in the winter and hotter in the summer.
Does that seem like a smart way to protect ourselves from the dangers of a changing climate — real or imagined?
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and chief economist with FreedomWorks.
